Everything Will Be All Right (2 page)

Then she will go back to her book.

Zoe is used to this sensation of consciousness stretched between two opposed poles, the intensity of immediate personal life on the one hand and the intensity of impersonal intellectual thought on the other. The tension between them seems to her to be the very material of awareness. The only time she lost her gift for balancing the two possibilities was in the first months of motherhood, when she foundered under the sheer weight of material necessities: feeding, washing, cleaning, shopping, walking up and down at night with a baby when she might have been reading a book.

She used to think that women were better at managing the reconciliation between these kinds of awareness because of cultural conditioning: they'd simply never been allowed the privilege of the untrammeled pursuit of thought behind closed study doors. Now she thinks it probably has something to do with evolutionary biology too; it's probably hardwired. And anyway she doesn't envy the solitudes of the study anymore. She's got too used to the unsettling stimulating astringency of the interactions of life and thought. When she sits back down to read about American foreign policy after her fight with Pearl, her heart will be pounding and her pulse racing with her sense of the precariousness of things and her own imperfect capacity in the face of them.

*   *   *

Zoe's mother, Joyce, has spent the day with her Aunt Vera. Now they are sitting together, drinking tea in Vera's room in the retirement home, watching
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
on the television. Vera was a teacher at a girls' school for most of her working life and watches the program regularly, but in a kind of torment. She disapproves of everything about it: the ignorance of most of the contestants, the fact that it's on ITV, the fact that the contestants compete for money, the tackily dramatic music, the questions about soap operas and film stars. Really, Joyce supposes, Vera would like the format to be more like a school examination, severe and unsmiling and impersonal, conducted in a kind of religious hush, without commentary. This was the context in which Vera shone, all her life. Among all the pale scribbling girls in an examination room, she would be the one who knew with subdued nervous excitement that she was earning an
A.
So now she can't resist being tested. Which South American country has both a Pacific and an Atlantic coast? Tomas Masaryk was president of which Central European country before the Second World War: Hungary, Poland, Romania, or Czechoslovakia? She very often knows the answers to these kinds of questions, even though she is ninety-four and has trouble remembering the names of the girls who look after her every day in the home or the news Joyce has told her about the children and grandchildren.

Vera is tall and craggy with age-spotted hanging jowls and iron-gray hair that in its heaviness escapes in wild-looking strands from where she sticks it up with hairpins behind a sort of velvet Alice band. In honor of their day out, a defiant silver and diamond brooch is pinned onto her bosom, which has so lost shape over the years that now it is simply a fat cushion held in place by her belt. The trip was probably a mistake, Joyce thinks ruefully. They haven't enjoyed themselves. They went to look for the house they had lived in together more than fifty years ago when Joyce was a child: Vera with her two children and Joyce's mother, Lil, with her three. The old gray square house was only a few miles outside the city, on the flatlands of the estuary near the bridge (fifty years ago there was no bridge, only a pair of ferries that chugged backward and forward across the water, or a long detour by road, for those who were traveling on westward). At Vera's ninety-fourth birthday party, after a couple of glasses of fizzy wine, pressing her aunt's hand with its old cold skin loosened from the bones and improbable arthritis-knobbled knuckles, Joyce had decided it would be wonderful to take her out and go see whether the old house was still standing.

She would never learn.

Her husband refused to take part in the quixotic expedition.

—Didn't we try and find it once before, years ago, he said, and there was just some big sprawling kind of industrial plant?

—I don't think so, Joyce said. I don't think we were ever sure we'd found the right place. The roads had all changed.

—You can be sure, he said, that whatever goes wrong will be held against you. You know what she's like.

—Why should anything go wrong? she protested.

And they did find the house: although it was true that Joyce cut her hand folding up Vera's recalcitrant wheelchair into the back of the car and that, about fifteen minutes into the journey while she was still sucking the blood off her knuckles, rain began to spit out of the slate-gray sky. Vera stared forward through the windscreen with the fixed expression of stoically suppressed anxiety she always wore when Joyce was driving her anywhere, and which always managed to make Joyce drive badly; she shot one amber light with uncalled-for recklessness and then stopped pointlessly at a green one.

There was no sign of the carbon-black factory they had found the last time they looked for the house (Joyce remembers this trip better than she let on to her husband). She felt at least a little lift of triumph at that: the plant with its blight of pipes and machine innards had been so desolatingly and conclusively ugly that she had stifled the idea of it in her thoughts, and now it seemed to have been wiped off the landscape as if it had never existed. But the pattern of roads still didn't seem to correspond with the pattern in her memory, and after a succession of fairly random turns she had just made up her mind she was lost when Vera saw something and Joyce pulled over to the side of the road.

—Isn't that it? said Vera.

Joyce didn't see how she could know. They stared through the rain at some piles of stone across a field. Joyce's vision was blurry: she really needed glasses now but was too vain to wear them. There was a fuzz of bright green everywhere in her blur, signifying that spring had come; but this was a messy kind of countryside, too flat and too near the city and the motorway and the power station to be anything but scruffy and disconsolate these days, crisscrossed with pylons, the field overgrown with some kind of low scrubby bushes, a solitary cow—no, shaggy pony—lifting its head to look at them. In front of the piles of stone lay something on its side in zigzag folds like the pleats of a concertina.

—We're looking at it from the back, said Vera. It was on a little hill like that. It's reclaimed land all around. One of the drainage ditches ran east–west across behind; do you see that line of trees?

Nothing she could see suggested any connection to the past to Joyce.

—Do you want to get out and have a look? she suggested doubtfully. Perhaps if I drive round to the front, there'll be a track.

—What would I want to do that for? Vera was irritated. She had been excited for a moment, identifying the place, but really it was such a ruin there wasn't much for them to do except stare at it glumly from the car. Joyce admitted to herself that she had hoped there might at least be the shell of a house they could get close to, or even that it might still be whole and inhabited and that nice people might be living there who might invite them inside to walk around the rooms. She had imagined finding herself in the little stone apple room above the kitchen and all her childhood flooding back. She wouldn't have admitted this hope of hers to her husband.

—The orchard's gone, Vera said, and that's the staircase, lying on its side.

Joyce could see then with a lurch of her heart that the zigzag thing must be a staircase. It was disconcerting, if this really was the place, to think of them climbing up and down it for all those years: it was so pointless now, lying along the ground. And she felt a surge of anger against her aunt, not just for the usual things, the melodramatic intakes of breath when she moved and the dampening remarks and the looming problems of lunch and toilets (they ended up having lunch at the dismal service station just off the motorway before the bridge, where it was easy to manage the wheelchair), but also for ever having spotted the place. If Joyce had come by herself she could have driven round and round and never been certain she hadn't just missed it or remembered the roads wrongly.

After lunch she drove Vera across the bridge, sightseeing, and then took her back to her own house for supper. Now, in the relief of having Vera safely back in her room in the home and of her own imminent departure, she is saying nice things about their expedition, turning the story of it into a funny and perky one (no doubt the same story she'll tell her husband later).

—I'd never have seen the house without you, you know. How ever did you pick it out? I'm so envious of your sharp eyes. I don't think your sight's deteriorated one bit from what it's always been. And then your memory's so good. But it was so strange, to actually see the place. We were so happy there.

—Speak for yourself, Vera says; I wasn't happy.

Joyce knows she overdoes this determined cheerfulness sometimes. Vera can't help responding to the flattery, but they are both rather ashamed of it, knowing it's not the whole truth, knowing it's compensation. In that room Joyce wants to heap encouragements and admiration on Vera's head to make up for leaving her here. There's nothing wrong with the room as such, although it is small. It has a bathroom en suite. The tea that the girls bring is all right; it is made with teabags, but at least they bring milk in a jug. There are wall-to-wall raspberry-pink carpets everywhere in the home and a great emphasis on a hotel-type kind of luxury, with reproduction antique furniture and big vases of silk flowers on tables in the hall. Vera was adamant that she didn't want a council-run home, and the furniture is the kind of thing she aspired to herself in her middle age, when she had a bit of money to spend. But no amount of pretense that this is just another hotel can quite smother Joyce's horrible impression of how the ones who live here wait among the remnant of their possessions as if already in transit from their real lives.

When Joyce says she is leaving, Vera has one of her momentary funny turns and reaches round in a panic for her handbag, thinking she's coming home too; Joyce has to explain. Making her way out, Joyce is swift and free without the wheelchair. She notices that there are no mirrors where you might expect them—in the turns of the corridors, above the little pseudo-Regency occasional tables with their vases piled high with alstroemeria and peonies and lilies—and although she supposes this is not a kindness for the visitors she is quite glad not to come upon herself in here. Two girls are laughing, squealing, making up a bed in a room she passes, the sheets flying and crackling, their voices rising and hushing with that pressured importance which means they are talking about sex. With a rush of the desperate longing that most of the time she's so good at keeping at bay, Joyce yearns to be identified with them and with all the sap and throbbing promise of the spring evening pouring in through the window beyond them, thrown open high. She's so glad to leave the home behind and reach the street with ordinary people walking past and get into her car alone and put on a tape, something she scrabbles out of the glove box, a Taj Mahal album Zoe bought her for Christmas.

She leans across the passenger seat to pull out Vera's crocheted cushion from where it's slipped down the side of the seat and throw it out of sight into the back: in passing she throws a fugitive, perfunctory glance at herself in the rearview mirror. Like most of the glimpses she has of herself nowadays, it's not conclusively satisfactory either way. She at least doesn't catch herself looking like one of those old collapsed ones who have given up. But she isn't confident either that what she sees—white hair cut in a short bob, tanned crinkled heart-shaped face, distinctive deep-lidded blue eyes, neat late-middle-aged prettiness—isn't a mere hopeful habit of perception superimposed upon a reality that is in truth slipping away farther and faster than she knows.

*   *   *

The doorbell rings and Pearl's friends arrive. The girls are nice to Zoe; they ask polite, interested questions about her work. Pearl appears at the top of the stairs, wrapped in Zoe's bathrobe with her hair wet; laughing, as if things have already started being funny, she calls to them to come on up. They aren't dressed to go out yet; they've brought carrier bags full of clothes, and they will spend the next couple of hours trying on and borrowing and pluming in front of one another.

Zoe is going out too, to see a late film at the Arts Centre with a friend, but she doesn't want Pearl to know this. If Pearl realizes the house is empty she will invite a whole gang of people back to her room, and then Zoe will either have to row with them to get them out or lie awake all night listening to their music and laughter and stoned noisy visits to the toilet to pee all over the floor (the boys) or throw up (one of the girls is bulimic).

As they pile upstairs chattering and Zoe is about to close the front door behind them, she sees that the clouds have broken up. The drab working-class terrace (built for the working class, that is, a century ago, and now shared by a whole mix of types and races in these socially more complicated times) is full of a rich thick yellow light. Above the roofs, baroque dramas are being acted out in the sky: dark clouds part, and effulgent pink and orange beams break through like revelations. Windowpanes blaze. A blackbird is singing improbably in the street's one tree, a little skimpy one planted at a corner and almost defeated by the successive brutal scalpings of local gangs of kids. The blackbird is rather absurdly disproportionate to the amount of tree there is to sit in, like a bird in a child's picture book. There's a perfume of garlic and ginger in the air from the Bengali restaurant on the corner.

Zoe is infected by the girls' Friday-night mood, or the change in the light, or the heedlessness of the kids careering along the pavements on their bikes.