Everything Will Be All Right (18 page)

Not with the kind of experience her mother's generation had, pressed down like a dark burden upon their shoulders. This new generation wore it lightly and playfully, like a boy, simplified: free of all the old creaking corset-boned apparatus of women's troubles.

She left to catch the bus home with the plait wrapped up in tissue, nestled in the dark at the bottom of her bag, weighing it down, even while her new head floated weightlessly on her new bare neck.

*   *   *

Minkie was late. dud mason and his wife penny and john Lenier were already there when she rang the bell, and they had opened the first bottle of Mateus Rosé wine.

The front door to the flat was down some steps off the drive; it opened onto a long passage floored with linoleum where they kept all their coats and Wellingtons and Ray's bicycle and the push chair. The lavatory was at the far end of the passage, although everyone was supposed to keep the door shut so you couldn't see straight in there from the entrance. Joyce had done her best with it, but the passage always made you feel drafty and rather dismal until you went through the glass door to one side and into the carpeted hall. When Joyce opened the front door, there really was a moment's pause while she expected Minkie to hand her something: that present, soap or sweets or something, that she ought to have been buying when she was out with Ray. Ray hadn't said anything yet about having seen Minkie earlier, although Joyce had made several opportunities for him to do so. It was dark outside, but the electric lantern above the door was switched on so she could see Minkie peering out palely from where she was swathed in some sort of man's greatcoat several sizes too big for her. It had begun to rain; from the garden above there came an intimate pattering, drops burying themselves in the thick shrubs.

—I'm so sorry, pleaded Minkie in her baby voice, I'm late and I haven't brought anything. I'm unforgivable. I really don't deserve to be let in.

Joyce laughed. She had a suddenly illuminated vision of how dreadful it must have been for Minkie to be asked to dinner tonight, under the circumstances. She could imagine how she must have struggled, trying to make up her mind whether to come or cry off, pretending she had a cold or something. She could imagine, too, how little help Ray had been. “What am I supposed to do about it?” he would have said tetchily. “Just tell her you're busy or something.” Joyce really couldn't have done any better if she had contrived the whole thing devilishly.

—Come on in, she said gaily. We don't care how unforgivable you are. We're already tipsy.

This was true. She was borne up by the wine swimming in her head; she wasn't taking her usual care not to drink too much in case of spoiling the cooking. In the warm hall she helped Minkie out of the heavy wet coat; the dark curls were wet all over with tiny droplets of rain. Under the greatcoat she was wearing a sort of green embroidered sarong thing, wrapped tight and flat round her breasts, leaving her shoulders bare. It didn't really work. Joyce could guess how at home in front of the mirror it had looked like a posture that Minkie could strike: extravagant and original and defiant. But actually it depended on that still posture in the mirror; once she had to move around in it she clearly felt self-conscious and foolish, as if she had dressed up for a part in the wrong play. Joyce in her understated gray dress had the advantage of her.

—I love your hair! cried Minkie. It really suits you.

—Do you? Yes, it was high time. I'd had enough of that silly old look. Come and get a drink.

The guests looked up hopefully toward them as they came into the lounge. Ray was holding forth to Dud about the Summerson Council, which had been set up the year before to report on and validate all the art education courses in the country. This subject touched a painful nerve, Joyce knew. He overreacted ferociously to the modernization the council was encouraging precisely because it galled him to be caught out on the other side, suddenly seeming to stand for traditional values in the face of the new art. He still thought of himself as the new art.

—So what do you think the latest is? he declaimed dramatically, stabbing with his pipe, standing with his legs apart and his back to the oil fire (keeping the warmth off everybody else). I go into the life room at the beginning of the new term, after the Christmas break, and all those beautiful old casts, all those exquisite Greek and Roman and Renaissance forms, are gone. Just gone. All at once after three thousand years they're not in fashion. We've got nothing to learn from them anymore. I try to find out where they are, what's happened to them. Nobody seems to know. It's like a murder. I feel as if a murder's taken place and everyone's ashamed and nobody will talk about it. The bodies have been got rid of somehow. Did they break them up? I mean, did they actually stand there and hack them to pieces with a hammer? Or did they get poor old Bassett to do it? It would have broken his heart, that's for sure.

—Minkie hasn't brought any wine! Joyce announced. Shall we let her have a drink?

She thought she saw him falter for one instant, when he saw Minkie. He screwed up his face in an even more terrible frown.

—I'd like to say we're in the hands of the barbarians, he shouted, but it's worse than that. The barbarians at least have a beauty of their own. These people—these idiots, these absolute cretins—they don't know what beauty is, even to hate it. They don't know the difference between art and advertising.

—Ssh, said Joyce. Remember the Underwoods. (The Reverend sometimes banged on the floor with his stick if there was jazz or shouting.)

—It's the beginning of the end of drawing, said Dud, who was easily made gloomy.

As if overcome, Ray went to change the music on the gramophone, making a show of the delicate care with which he handled the records in and out of their paper sleeves. Predictably, he put on something that Joyce didn't like, something squeaky and fast and frantic, Mingus probably. This was obviously the part he was going to play tonight: the tormented artist unable because of the scale and purity of his feelings to put on a social show as other people could. There had been a time when Joyce was in awe of him in that vein. He had the same focused glow as when he was working; it gave an edge of concentration to his shambling looks: untidy soft hair he wouldn't get cut often enough and fleshy pouchy face, like an angel gone to seed. (He was thickening around the waist too; he would have to watch that. With his short legs it wouldn't suit him.)

She thought their guests already sensed something was wrong. Penny, who was very pregnant, sat guiltily at the edge of her seat as if she felt herself accused of breaking up plaster casts. John Lenier looked as if he was hoping for an opportunity to come in with something funny, to make them all laugh and defuse the gloomily denunciatory mood. He'd probably never even heard of the Summerson Council and couldn't care less.

—Of course Minkie can have a drink. John leapt to his feet. I'll pour it for her. What would she like?

Joyce decided that John would be her ally for the night. She liked him anyway. He was tall and lean and took life lightly. With his silky gray hair (prematurely gray; he was only in his twenties, like her) he made Joyce think of a graceful poplar turning up its leaves in the breeze. His cream-colored polo neck was just the sort of thing she wished Ray would wear. He told her what a lovely room this was, what subtle colors she had chosen, and admired her dress and her hair. When he handed Minkie her glass of Mateus he said she looked in her green sarong as if she might dance for them later. Minkie was grateful, but Joyce was pleased that he had felt the need to be kind and rescue the silly sarong and give it a reason for existence.

*   *   *

Joyce burnt the toast that was supposed to go with the terrine. Also, the creamed potatoes had lumps because she couldn't be bothered to mash them vigorously enough, and the beef olives were overcooked, and some of the sauce had burned on the bottom of the frying pan. She was completely indifferent to the food, slopping it out carelessly on the plates, eating it without tasting it. She had promised herself for days, in return for starving herself, a portion of chocolate cream pudding, but when it came out of the fridge she didn't even want any. Only Dud and Minkie ate it.

They had all got riotously drunk somehow. They weren't used to drinking much these days, and John Lenier had brought a bottle of vodka as well as two bottles of Black Tower. Penny slipped away from the table quite early on and fell asleep on the sofa in the lounge. It wasn't quite clear whether they were having a fantastic time or whether it was a dreadful disaster. At certain points they were all screaming with laughter, as if everything anyone said was exceptionally miraculously funny, although Joyce could never remember afterward any of their jokes that night, only Dud coming back from the lavatory wearing one of the children's balaclavas he had picked up from a coat hook in the passage. After that everyone who went came back wearing something until the kitchen floor was cluttered with sou'westers and gloves and umbrellas and Zoe's scooter (the children were mystified and delighted to find these things in the morning).

At other points, on the contrary, Joyce was suddenly given a vision of their party as a hellhole, a Bosch-like slithering charnel nastiness, where she and Ray exchanged in naked moments a look like a rictus of loathing, seeing down to the very bottom of each other's obscenely motivated souls. Then it seemed as if what was happening was something so awful and so utterly unlike anything that had ever happened before that in the morning when they were sober they would no longer be able to live together ever again.

Dud told Joyce in low tones (once he was sure Penny was asleep) how he had loved her at art school.

—You remember those little folded cards we had with our timetables on? Every time I knew you were going to be in a lesson, I wrote JS in tiny letters in the corner, on that square.

This was gratifying but familiar territory, and Joyce knew where it led: Dud with his arm around her, or pressing his bear bulk against her under the table, mumbling mournfully about how she was a very special person. Then he would be blushing and full of mawkish contrition when he met her next, hoping she wouldn't say anything to Penny. She fended him off; it was John she was intent upon. They seemed to be getting on very well, whispering about the others, exchanging ironic looks, he confiding his hopes for a career in photography while she—the words came in her head—“she took a charming interest.” He was full of praise for the beautiful food, although she noticed he left one of his beef olives and stubbed a cigarette out on the plate. He kissed her hand once and held on to it for a few moments, pretending to guess her perfume; she was shocked by the thudding excitement with which her whole body responded to the little game. When she pulled her hand out of his cool silvery grip, he slid his thumb suggestively along her palm; involuntarily she imagined them kissing lips, playing with tongues.

Ray was explaining to Minkie in belligerently insistent detail how if you were drawing the docks you had to begin drawing at the bottom of the steps when the tide was out and then you could move your drawing farther up as the tide came in.

—I don't understand it, said Minkie miserably, but it doesn't matter.

—But why don't you understand it? It's very simple. An idiot could understand it. You begin at the bottom, when the tide is out.…

Then there was a time when Minkie was lying sobbing on the bed in Ray and Joyce's bedroom, although it wasn't ostensibly about the docks, it was because Dud had been describing to her the diseased eyes he was paid to draw for the medical records at the hospital, and although she had told him this was making her feel sick, he wouldn't stop. Joyce said she was going to check on the children (presumably the children were asleep; perhaps she really did open their door and look in on them, although she had no memory of it), and then she walked into the bedroom, singing a song of her mother's that used to make her cry when she was a little girl. The bedroom light was off but she could see in the light from the hall behind.

All in the merry month of May

When green buds were a-swellin',

Young Jimmy Groves on his deathbed lay

For love of Barbara Allen.

All slowly slowly there she came,

And slowly she came nigh him.

And all she said when there she came:

Young lad, I think you're dyin'.

She had a poor singing voice; she had no idea where the plan came from, with its cardboard-theatrical threat so unlike her usual brisk daytime self. Minkie stopped sobbing and gazed at her with eyes that were swimming in tears and fearful. She lay with one arm flung out across the bedcover; on her wrist was a thick bangle of polished wood. Joyce was convinced all at once that this had been a present to Minkie from Ray, worn tonight for good luck or in defiance.

—I'll take that, I think, she said, and slipped it off the girl's limp unresisting hand. D'you mind?

Minkie dumbly shook her head.

(Did she put the bangle on and wear it back to where the others were still shouting and laughing? The next day she found it among the dirty dishes in the kitchen; she took it with her when she went with Daniel out for a walk on the heath and dropped it into a litter bin among the sweet wrappers and lolly sticks, although it was a lovely thing, a shame to lose it.)

At some other point that evening they were all talking about Mary Anderson. When she was at college with Dud and Joyce she was an odd-looking girl with elderly parents and thick pebble glasses, under which her eyelashes grew long and luxuriant as if in a greenhouse. Now she was making a name for herself as a painter.

—I remember I told her to go to the Dubuffet exhibition in 'fifty-nine, said Ray. That's what you can see in these latest paintings, that sort of inspired graffiti. The Dubuffet set free something in her imagination. That's what they don't understand, these idea men: that you can be free, and yet paint in a tradition.