Everything Will Be All Right (23 page)

It wasn't Jackie and Lester and “that lot” after all; the boys and girls who came racing, pounding, leaping through the Dumps in the long last shadows of the day were strangers. The thudding of their feet and the blare of their yelling hung there for moments after they'd passed through; one boy shouted out the word “fuck” and something worse, and the terrible names used so flauntingly tore a vivid gash in the air. She and Fiona clung together, laughing into each other's shoulders. Zoe was completely happy. Instead of imagining life's possible intensity, she was inside it; it filled her.

As the girls crossed the road on their way back to Fiona's house, Zoe's father drew up in his car. He looked surprised to see her out at that time; and in truth when she looked around her through his eyes she saw that it was effectively by any adult standards dark.

—We've been in the Dumps, she called out ringingly, to forestall any idea of her having been put upon or taken advantage of. We've been having a super time.

Ray peered at them worriedly.

—You should have crossed on the zebra, he said.

—Oh, it's all right, said Fiona. My mum lets me.

—Well, I'm not so sure. The cars come round that corner very fast. And it's dark.

Zoe knew he wouldn't be able to sustain the burden of responsible parental anxiety for very long; her favorite tease of him was for his laziness. After all, nothing had happened, there had been no accident, the girls were safe. He might not even mention to her mother that they had been out on the heath alone at night, because he got irritated with how she fussed and worried over her children. When he was a boy, he said, he came and went as he wanted, as long as he turned up with clean hands for meals. Fiona walked neatly backward up the path away from them, opening and shutting her fingers in a little coded farewell.

—I don't need to go inside to thank the mother, do I? Ray asked Zoe.

She snuggled up against the sweet tobacco smell of the top pocket of his corduroy jacket.

—I told Fiona to say thank you. And her mummy doesn't even have to come to the door. Fiona has her own key, on a string round her neck.

He was safety, and rescue, and she was very glad of him; but she didn't need him to know anything about the dazzle of the places she'd been without him.

*   *   *

Grandma lil died. she had had for years a swollen mole on her temple, which her daughters had urged her to show to the doctor; one afternoon it burst and released a blood clot into her brain. She came home from work at the cake shop with a severe headache; Martin asked the neighbors in the flat upstairs to telephone for an ambulance when she began vomiting and passing out. By the time Joyce and Ann arrived at the hospital, she was in a coma and the nurses sent them home, telling them to call first thing in the morning.

Joyce went out early to the telephone box, which was about a hundred yards down the street, against the long high red-brick wall of a small factory that made brake linings. This was a street of handsome Georgian houses in Kingsmile, but at a time when such streets were only just beginning to be bought up and decorated and made fashionable. Most of the houses were still multifamily, some of them with ancient layers of flaking paint and dirty windows hung with rags of lace curtain. When Joyce had made her call, she came home and sat down at the breakfast table without taking off her mac or untying her scarf. Daniel noisily poured himself cereal. She told them how, while she waited to be put through to the ward, a fire had broken out in a house opposite to the telephone box.

—There were real flames leaping up out of the windows of the first floor, and billowing smoke. And there were people waving for help at the windows of the floor above. I thought that really I should use the telephone to call the fire brigade, but while I was thinking that I got through to the ward and the Sister told me that Mum died this morning. And then two fire engines rolled up and firemen got out and put ladders up to the windows and carried the people down over their shoulders.

She looked with puzzlement at Ray.

—Did I really see that? Or was I just having a hallucination?

He shrugged helplessly.

—Do you want me to go and look?

—No, not really. I don't really care.

All of them felt the painful strangeness of Joyce sitting motionless at the breakfast table in her outdoor things, with her bag on her lap, the familiar smart little bag shaped like a segment of orange, whose leather top fastened over with a clasp. Ordinarily she would be standing in her apron at the cooker or at the sink, busy supplying them with tea and toast and (in Ray's case) bacon and eggs. Grief came over Zoe in the form of a monstrous embarrassment, so inhibiting that her limbs felt wooden and her tongue wouldn't move properly. She had to hold in her mouth a little square of soggy toast that she couldn't swallow.

—Grandma's dead, Grandma's dead, hooray, sang Daniel just under his breath, shoveling in spoonfuls of crispies. (He was only eight.)

—Don't worry about him, said Joyce quickly, before Ray felt obliged to be stern. He's just upset and doesn't know what to say.

This gave Ray his pretext for transferring his irritation to Joyce, angry with her because he was so sorry she was hurt.

—He gets away with his sheer insensitivity and rudeness as usual.

Joyce looked at Ray as if she was seeing him from far off.

The children didn't go to school. They spent the rest of the day at Zoe's Aunt Ann's; she had married a man in import and export and lived in an expensive flat in Hilltop with baby cousins that Zoe loved to play mother to. Cliff looked after them all while Joyce and Ann went to the hospital to get Lil's things. Then they came back and sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and crying and making arrangements, talking on the telephone to Aunt Vera, who called from the school, worrying about Martin, who had refused to get out of bed that morning. Joyce had brought him home from the hospital last night; she hadn't wanted him to go back to the flat on his own.

—There's nothing left for me to do then, is there? he had said when she woke him up to tell him the news.

Since he had failed to finish his doctorate, he had been spending his days inventing things and building remote-controlled toys for the children instead.

Zoe fussed busily over baby Sophie, changing her bootees and woolly coat, filling her pacifier with rose-hip syrup, piling cushions so she could sit tilted crazily but gamely to one side in her playpen heaped with educational toys. (Joyce and Ray made fun of all the fashionable baby paraphernalia Ann had bought.) She worked perhaps even tiresomely (she felt it herself), playing peep-bo and pat-a-cake, to get Sophie to crack into huge toothless smiles for her, as if the smiles might constitute some kind of proof against disaster. When Ann took Sophie to the clinic to be weighed and to pick up her orange juice, Zoe went along. Somehow her aunt's unhappiness seemed more approachable than her own mother's, which she dared not even directly contemplate, because the fabric of the world required her mother to be believing and hopeful.

—At least, she said to Ann (who wheeled the pram rather fast into the wind, so that Zoe had to skip along beside her to keep up), at least you've got it over with now. I mean, you won't have to dread its happening anymore. (Zoe had used this consolation to support herself through visits to the dentist or the breakage of favorite ornaments.)

Ann turned on her a bleak blank face.

—But it's not fair, she said in fury. Just when she was coming up to her retirement. It's so unfair!

Zoe skipped on beside the pram in silence, trying not to come anywhere near the real thought of beloved Grandma Lil lost to her, wrestled somehow obscenely away out of existence. Underneath all the protective wadding of kindness and reassurance that it was the business of adults to surround you with, there lurked this lethal truth, dangerous as a naked wire that you might at any time put your hand on by mistake.

After Grandma Lil's funeral the family went back to Ann's, where the children were waiting for them with Uncle Cliff. Zoe imagined that a cold wind from wherever they had been was clinging to the adults' somber clothes. The women's faces were framed in wet head scarves; a jumble of umbrellas leaked across the black-and-white tiles of the entrance hall. Aunt Vera said loudly to several people that when it was her turn she didn't care if they buried her in a cardboard box. An Auntie Selina had come down from the North, shepherding a man Zoe supposed must be her husband; Selina looked so like Lil—small and stout with rich brown eyes and hair and a tilting nose—that it was obvious every time Joyce caught sight of her she felt the shock of a hopeless hope. Selina wasn't quite like Lil, though; she stared more pointedly around her like a sharp brown bird, she didn't smoke, she didn't spill over with news, she didn't have Lil's way of subsiding comfortably into the corner of a chair, managing glass and fag together in one hand. The man with her sat very upright and still on Ann's beige leather sofa, his feet in giant shoes placed tidily together on the shag carpet, his brown creased skin stretched tight on his long bony head, his white hair so fine and light it wafted in the movements of air when anyone passed. Ann held his hand and called him Gilly and seemed extravagantly moved to see him; Zoe crept close to listen to his voice. She had thought this way of talking was special to her Grandma Lil (Vera sounded something like it); now she was discovering a whole tribe of relatives who made the same warm kind sounds. Uncle Gilly didn't say much; mostly he was shyly refusing the food Ann pressed upon him.

—Go on, Gilbert, you may as well take something, it's all very nice, Selina encouraged, busy with her plate. He's only put off if he thinks it's foreign food. You'd think he'd have got used to it in New Zealand.

Gilbert said softly that he didn't mind if he had a piece of ham.

—Gilbert was Lil's little favorite when he was a baby, Selina said. (So perhaps he was not her husband.) Isn't that right, Vera? He used to call her Nolly. When she was in service and coming home on her day off, Mam would stand him on a chair at the window in the front room to look out for her, and he would start calling out “Nolly, Nolly,” before she even turned the corner of the street. You could put the kettle on when you heard him. She sewed him a little pageboy outfit to wear at her wedding. D'you remember that, Gilbert? D'you remember being a page boy?

—No, said Gilbert, smiling apologetically, shaking his head so that his white hair floated, starting to cut his ham into neat small pieces.

*   *   *

Zoe and fiona went to different secondary schools. zoe, along with Barbara and Pam and Neil Ashley and David Tew and a couple of others, sat the examination for free places to the Direct Grant schools. This little gang of clever ones had been marked apart from the rest of the junior school class almost since anyone could remember, given extra bits of work and spoken to differently. They carried the teachers' aspirations, fulfilled their longings for tests and triumphs. The other children—Gary Lyons, Paul Andrews, June Fitch—were threatened that they would “end up at” Langham Road, which was the local comprehensive school, “if they carried on the way they were” (and they did indeed end up there, probably regardless of whether they had carried on or not).

It was never seriously suggested that Fiona might sit the examination and get a free place too. Everyone knew, Joyce said at home, that even the free places could be expensive enough once you had paid for the uniform, books, hockey boots, and tennis rackets. Children from poor “backgrounds” would find it difficult to “keep up” with the others (“background” was the euphemism then, conjuring an image of the tragic individual spotlighted against murky, indistinct tenements and slums). Fiona smiled and shrugged and said she didn't fancy it, as if she put rather a low value on anything the Direct Grant schools could have to teach her, and saw alternative and more intriguing initiations ahead at Langham Road. Their separation seemed to Zoe a fitting and even a poetic thing; it kept her feelings for Fiona twisting poignantly in her heart. She thought of Amery-James, the all-girls school where she duly got her free place, as somehow belonging in her world of the subtle past, and Langham Road as modern and brash and present. At this threshold she felt as if she were submitting to a sacrificial destiny. Zoe's mother and her Aunt Ann had also been to Amery-James, and her Great-aunt Vera had taught there for half a lifetime (she retired the year before Zoe started). She was taking up a place sanctified by tradition. It helped that the school was in an old eighteenth-century house with an oak staircase and stone-flagged floors, and that they had to buy her uniform in an old-fashioned department store on Clore Hill, where bills and payment and change were whisked around a system of pneumatic pipes to and from a glassed-in counting office. (The store was so expensive they couldn't get everything they had meant to, and Joyce had to buy some of it later from the secondhand cupboard at the school.)

Within a couple of weeks of beginning at Amery-James, Zoe felt differently. The rituals that were soothing to read about in books were irksome and depressing to live inside. Days were beset with pitfalls and anxieties: Had you remembered to hand in your maths homework on the right morning? Had your mother remembered to sew your name tape in your knickers in case there was a spot check? Had you returned your library books and brought in your science overall and your cakes for the cake sale for the Form Charity? Joyce found for Zoe a green mac that was not quite
the
green mac sanctioned by the uniform list. The teachers would pull her humiliatingly out of the crocodile of girls on their way to the sports field to lecture her on how it was unacceptable. She had to visit the secondhand cupboard again and buy a mac of the right kind.

Certain teachers, especially the older ones—Miss Webb, Miss Anstruther, Miss Langley—cultivated a game it was dangerous to become involved with, in which a brutal unsheathed cruelty (personal insults, contempt, a lashing loss of temper, shouting) would alternate with rewards, flashes of comradely inclusiveness, a calculated letting down of guards. The game's brutality was sanctioned by the brutality of intellectual competition in the world outside, which was after all the raison d'être of the school. The physics teacher brought their marked homework into the classroom in three piles: good, acceptable, and unacceptable. The unacceptable pile wasn't only of work done carelessly or incompletely; some of the girls had tried hard but simply not understood. The sheer burden of work seemed crushing. Under the school's discipline Zoe learned French and Latin effectively (which no one seemed to do at Langham Road) and struggled with the most advanced Nuffield science teaching. Even though she liked English and her English teacher, the books she read there (George Eliot, Kipling, Robert Frost, Hopkins) were so contaminated for her by the place that she was not able to touch them again for years afterward. Every evening after school there were two or three hours of homework. In the lunch break, faced with an afternoon of maths and double Latin, Zoe's heart would quail. It could not be endurable; surely something would give way. But of course it was endurable, it was only school and not real torture, and at last the clock would deliver up home time and the walk to the bus, which waited in a somnolent lull for twenty minutes on the suburban corner before it turned around for its return journey into town. Here at last was repose; in the gap before the driver started up the engine and the conductor came selling tickets, she sank into herself, dreaming, alone, hugging her briefcase on her knees, turning her head away if girls in green uniform got on.