Everything Will Be All Right (20 page)

It had been awhile now since she had modeled for him; he had made some drawings of her pregnant with Daniel, and afterward breast-feeding him, but because of the children there simply wasn't time these days for her to sit for long enough. She had even been glad that it had stopped; there had seemed to be something irreconcilable between her two roles, as the effective manager of his domestic life and as the still mute object of his study, on whom he concentrated, but as if she wasn't there. Sessions with him weren't necessarily calm or good-tempered, either; if he was struggling, scraping off paint or screwing up drawings, she used to feel responsible, drained by the intensity of his effort but helpless to make it work, angry with his anger because it seemed self-indulgent, not directed at real things. Now she was sorry; she wanted that discomfort back. She thought that perhaps Minkie had modeled for one of those searing nudes, exposed and altered by his scrutiny.

How had she imagined that this man might be chastely domesticated, on her terms? She had hung his pictures in her home as if she could gloss over what was inside the frame and use it as a sign of taste merely, to hang among other signs, curtains and lamps and interesting objects from the junk shops.

Joyce cleaned her teeth and washed her face in John's bathroom (lucky that she had brought her toothbrush), surprised and pleased by her reflection in his mirror with its new short hair.

She should go back.

Perhaps if she went now she might even get there before the children woke up.

*   *   *

She let herself into the flat with her key. probably the Underwoods heard her coming back just as they must have heard her leave last night (she always imagined them side by side in a vast mahogany bed, listening from under some sort of overhanging ecclesiastical ornamentation), but she didn't care. All was quiet. She thought Ray would probably be asleep; she would embark on the clearing up and then make breakfast for him and percolate real coffee when he woke up. She slipped off her shoes and crossed quietly to their bedroom in her stocking feet; the door was slightly open, as they always left it, so as to hear the children if they cried out in the night.

Ray was sitting in all his clothes at the window, where it was becoming light, and day outside: a tentative spring day under veiled blue skies, meek after the tantrums of last night, smelling of the soaked earth of gardens (she was exhilaratedly saturated in it as he couldn't yet be, from her walk home through the early streets where she met only the milkman). When he saw her in the doorway he jumped up off the wooden chair where she usually piled her clothes at night.

—Hello. You can't have been very comfortable, she said.

—I wasn't. He hesitated. Did you mean the chair? Or about—things?

She laughed. Both of them were using subdued undertones, so as not to wake Daniel. Zoe was a lie-abed, but Daniel was an early bird, usually first calling to them from his cot around six or half past.

—Both, probably.

—Well, no. No to both.

—What are you doing up? You'll be exhausted.

He looked at her suspiciously.

—Have you been asleep, then?

—After my night of torrid passion.

—Was it? His voice cracked somewhat.

—What do you think?

He was exaggeratedly relieved, flinging his arms up as if he had kept them by his sides in a tension of suspense.

—I was beginning to wonder. I did try to tell you.

—You didn't try all that hard.

—Is it funny?

She smothered her giggles in her hands.

—Probably. When you come to think about it. My crazy fling.
A trip to the moon, on gossamer wings.
Have you been sitting there all night?

—Waiting for you. But not all night. I cleared up.

—Oh, you didn't. Not all on your own? How awful!

—It was awful. Not the clearing up. An awful night.

—I know. Listen.

But she didn't know at first what she had to say. She crossed the room to where he stood and stopped just a few inches in front of him, so that they could feel each other's body warmth rolling off them in the cold morning and taste each other's breath, hers minty, his stale and boozy. His clothes from the night before were crumpled and his hair was disheveled and his face pasty and gray around the jowls with stubble. It seemed a comically appropriate atonement, that he had kept his dismal vigil while she slept those hours away at John's as easefully as an angel.

Ray put his hands up to take her shoulders, but she caught them in hers and held him off.

—I don't want any lying, she said.

He shook his head mutely.

—Not from either of us, I mean. Not from me either, about what I feel. It makes me want to kill you, when I know you've slept with her. It makes me feel desperate and helpless. I don't know what to do.

—It didn't mean anything.

—No, it did, it did. That's just what I don't want you to say. It did mean something.

—OK, it meant something. He shrugged. But not what you think.

—I don't know what I think. What did it mean?

—I suppose it was just sex. How can I put it? However I put it, I'm in the wrong, don't think I don't know that.

—Don't talk about wrong and right. I don't want us to be together because of the old rule book.

—I see.

—And that was a lie already. Coming from you. “Just sex.” That word “just” is a lie, to hide its importance from me.

He searched her face, to see how much he could say.

—All right, that was a lie. I was obsessed with her for a short while. Perhaps a month or so. The idea of her devoured me. Now I can't imagine why, it's so thoroughly over.

Joyce flinched; she was shocked; she felt a rich pulse of blood in her heart.

—“Devoured you.”

—You asked me.

—I almost can't bear that, that the idea of her devoured you.

—It's men, he tried to explain. This is how it takes us sometimes. I'm so sorry. It seems such a cheap trick, now I'm having to put it into words. I can't even believe, myself, that it ever seemed important.

—How many times, exactly, precisely, did you make love to her? Don't lie, whatever you do.

He had to mentally count them, humbled and blushing, and she stared at his eyes as if she might catch in there some flicker of the pictures he summoned up.

—Six? Yes, I think six.

—And was it good? Tell the truth.

—How am I supposed to answer that, to you?

—But answer it.

—At first, it was good. He sighed. Then I got tired of her; she got on my nerves. Don't think I don't feel like a swine.

—I don't want to contain you, Joyce said, after a pause. I don't want to be your lock and key.

—Sometimes it feels to a man, he said, slowly and hesitantly, as if women want to make the world sweet. Are you going to be angry if I say this? But it's not sweet. And it's sometimes a strain, standing on guard, pretending to the woman that everything's going to be all right, everything's nice.

—Is this sex we're talking about here?

—It's partly sex. Yes, I suppose it is. And freedom, not getting all tangled up in sweet things, being able to slip the rope sometimes.

—Well, I might want that too, she said.

—Might you? He was startled.

—I might. Didn't that occur to you?

His face was full of trepidation.

—Are we talking about freedom? I don't know, it's not the same—freedom—for men and women. Just biologically, even. Say I'd been wrong, last night, about John. I don't know whether I could deal with that: you, with another man.

—You would just have to, she said. Maybe. If that's how we're going to manage things.

—I see. I see what you're getting at.

She let him hold her by the shoulders, then, gripping tightly.

There was so much more for them to say and to sort out.

But at that moment, like a bird piping, the baby sang out from behind the bars of his cot.

*   *   *

Needless to say, there was plenty of clearing up left to do. Ray's idea of a tidy room was not the same as hers. He had done his best, but he had no idea where most things went, or how to deal with the dirty pans, or how to wrap up the things that needed to be stored in the fridge. And he hadn't been able to use the vacuum in the middle of the night. (Goodness knows what the Underwoods even made of his running the hot water.) She sent Ray back to bed to sleep (“Daddy's got a bit of a headache”) and set about seeing to all this, as well as preparing the children's breakfast and getting them dressed and making the beds and rinsing Daniel's nappies and putting them on to boil; and all with an exultant lightness, nursing a secret and liberating excitement like a teenager who's been kissed and carries the feel of it around all day on her skin. Every time she had to pass the closed door of the bedroom, she was aware of Ray in there as if he were an adventure that awaited her.

Then the tiredness hit her, like a cosh, at about eleven, when she put Daniel down for his nap and took the chocolate pudding out from the fridge and helped herself to a big bowlful (her diet seemed trivial, compared to what was happening in her marriage). When she had eaten it, she felt sick and thought she might lie down on the sofa to snatch some sleep for half an hour before she began to prepare the Sunday dinner. Zoe would be all right, Nana Deare had taught her to knit, and she was practicing. It was true that she couldn't turn round at the end of a row, so that every ten minutes she had to come to Joyce to put the needles back into her hands facing the other way; but Joyce was sure she would be able to do that in her sleep.

As soon as she closed her eyes she remembered the plait of hair, which had lain forgotten in its tissue paper in the bottom of her handbag ever since she came home from the hairdresser's. It seemed somehow disrespectful to leave it there unregarded any longer; even risky, although she didn't know exactly what was at risk, except that the hair left for too long washing around in the depths of the bag might pick up bits of lint and dirt from the loose coins. So she stood up again, crossed the hall, opened the bedroom door, signing to Zoe to keep quiet, then tiptoed cautiously into the half-dark. The curtains were closed, the room smelled fustily of sleep, the hump of her husband snored from under the blankets pulled up over his head. Her handbag was still where she had put it down when she came in from her failed attempt at adultery early that morning. With an odd sense of enacting something like a ceremony, she pulled open her underwear drawer, lifted the plait from her bag, sinuous and suggestive in its crinkling paper, and buried it at the back of the drawer under all the layers of her things.

The thought came to her unbidden, that the plait would keep its color through all the years while her own hair turned gray.

Five

In Zoe's memory, Fiona first came to their school the day they did air pressure. At junior school they only did science in an occasional desultory way, when their excitable Welsh teacher was in the mood for it. Drawing autumn leaves or testing milk and vinegar with litmus paper was a glamorous respite from the routines of English comprehension and maths.

On this particular day (they were Junior Three, so Zoe was ten years old), he crowded the whole class into the staff room, which was enough of an adventure in itself; this was normally a forbidden sanctum whose threshold they were not allowed to cross. The children were usually allowed in here only if they had fainted or been sick and were waiting, perhaps wrapped in the old blue cellular blanket, to be collected by a parent. It was always consoling to be reminded that this snug refuge was only a step away from the rough struggle of the echoing lofty classrooms, with their gothic windows too high to look out from. The staff room was homey, with a gas fire and armchairs and crocheted cushion covers smelling of mothballs; there was a tray with a teapot and knitted cosy, jars of coffee and sugar, and a biscuit barrel with a wicker handle. The teachers' coats were hung up on hooks in one corner, proving that they really did sometimes go home and have real lives elsewhere. Zoe was prone to a little rush of worship at the thought of her teachers' private lives. She was really very happy at that school.

Beside the fire was a gas ring where the teachers boiled their kettle. Mr. Lloyd had brought in from home an empty metal paraffin can with a screw lid. He impressed upon them, first, that they were not to touch anything—anything—in the staff room; second, that this experiment was much too dangerous for them ever to try for themselves; and, third, that it would have been even more dangerous if he hadn't scrupulously washed out every trace of paraffin before he started. Then he put the empty can with its lid unscrewed onto the gas ring and began to heat it.

It was of course the aura of danger that the children loved with this teacher. This was true even when they weren't doing science, even when they were writing out, say, five sentences with speech marks at the beginning, five sentences with speech marks at the end, and five with speech marks in the middle; or multiplying nineteen pounds, seventeen shillings, and eightpence ha'penny by 7, 9, and 11. He was a short, springy, vital man with a lock of shining black hair that flopped forward and had to be tossed back out of his eyes, a passionate Baptist who explained to them as if it were a truth that brooked no argument the flawed logic of the Roman Catholic celebration of Christ's suffering. He cultivated a volatile and histrionic relationship with his classes, irresistible to certain of the girls and the cleverer boys. It did not occur to Zoe at the time to wonder how those other boys felt about him, the ones whose failures were the necessary grist to his teaching performances, those whose ears he twisted or whose legs he slapped across the back of the knee.

—What's inside this can? he asked them, while it was heating.