Everything Will Be All Right (24 page)

In assembly and at commemoration services, the girls were addressed as if they were part of some ennobling crusade on behalf of enlightenment. Zoe was shocked to find herself bitterly and implacably opposed to the very principle of the place. She wasn't much liked by the teachers or by many of the girls; she could see herself that there was something unattractive in how she cherished her apartness: unresponsive in class, refusing to be charmed when the teachers were funny and courted them, skeptical of the togetherness of the gangs of girls. One of the fiercest of the teachers, Miss Webb, with frozen pale blue eyes and white hair wound in a plait around her head, took passionately against her.

—I see Zoe Deare is wearing her usual charming scowl, she would say, enlisting the rest of the class on her side in a spatter of giggles and exchanged gleams of treacherous amusement. Do you have a pain, Zoe?

Zoe was absentminded, hopeless at remembering all those little details of preparation that could ensure an uneventful life at Amery-James. One day she had been supposed to bring a board and a plastic bag into Miss Webb's geography class, where they were going to make clay models of a shadoof, an ancient Egyptian irrigation system. Miss Webb boiled over into a torrent of righteous chastisement when Zoe turned out to be the only one who had forgotten. She actually took her by the shoulders and backed her across the classroom, shaking her so that her hair bunches flew and berating her in panting breathy bursts. The class drank up the spectacle in hot-faced silence.

—Little sour-faced miss … lazy, sloppy, sulky attitude … your sort of girls don't get anywhere in a school like this. Don't think I don't know your type!

—I don't even want to! shouted Zoe in bewilderment. I don't even like this school!

—And this school doesn't like you very much, either!

After this episode, Ray and Joyce went to see the headmistress, and Zoe was taken out of Miss Webb's class.

Later, much later, Zoe was able to appreciate that the lives of some of these teachers must have been pioneering in their dedication to women's education. Some of them had no doubt sacrificed married life and family in order to keep their independence and pursue their careers; probably some of them, their names in gold up on the honors board in the hall, had been to university at a time when women were not even awarded degrees. Zoe's own Great-aunt Vera, when she was at Amery-James, had been by all accounts (including her own) one of the fierce and arbitrary teachers, and yet Zoe liked her. She never quite found a way to explain to her great-aunt that she and Amery-James had found themselves incompatible. Vera had been so proud when she got her free place and had bought her the black leather briefcase she at first eagerly filled with books. With twinges of guilt, Zoe allowed her to think that she had become one of those girls who romped and cheered and belonged. It was a revelation anyway, when her aunt talked, to hear the teachers referred to by their first names: Jennie Anstruther, Ruth Marsh (the English teacher Zoe liked), Beth Webb. Behind their school shapes they sounded suddenly girlish and tentative and incomplete. She never told Aunt Vera about her quarrel with Miss Webb. At least she could safely report her marks, which were always rather surprisingly good, considering how her teachers despaired of her.

Zoe's family moved again at the end of her first year, this time to a tall Hilltop terraced house that had been a girl students' residence, so that it had gas rings in every room and a rope fire escape wound on a red-painted reel in a bathroom with five sinks. (Joyce dedicated herself energetically, indefatigably, to her vision of its transformation; she made it beautiful.) From the new house it was only a fifteen minute walk to Fiona's; she and Zoe made lingering transitions between their homes, looking together in all the shop windows on Clore Hill at things they planned to save for: felt pens, autograph books, sewing sets (Zoe), those electric lights filled with slowly moving blobs of different-colored oils (Fiona). They bought licorice and Parma Violets in the sweet shop.

Fiona listened to Zoe's tales of Miss Webb.

—I don't know how she'd get on at our school, she said. The boys are terrible for mucking about.

—Are they? asked Zoe, with a voluptuous inner shudder. What do they do? What do they do
exactly?

She longed for mucking about. She even thought tenderly of Paul Andrews and his banging desk lids.

—Nicking pencil cases and chucking them around, said Fiona. Or flicking stuff, chewed-up lumps of paper and things. The latest is trying to set fire to their haversacks. It's pretty boring.

To Zoe, whose lessons mostly passed in a subdued silence, this sounded as exciting as a carnival.

*   *   *

Zoe, who had been such an easy child, became moody and distant at home. Joyce found in her bedroom lugubrious messages she had written to herself for the first day of the holiday. “Appreciate to the full this wonderful day of freedom. How lucky you are. Six whole weeks! Don't waste this precious time.” From Ray's vantage point in his new first floor studio, spacious and full of good light, he could see his green-clad daughter plod into view at half past four every afternoon, weighed down with her briefcase, snuffed under her horrible hat. He mourned the bossy bouncing child she had been, full of schemes and passions. Joyce and he agreed that she didn't have to stay on at the ghastly place. He rather liked the idea of taking his daughter out of the school everyone else was trying to get their daughters into; after all, they were Labour voters and supposed to believe in a state education system.

—Daniel seems perfectly happy at Langham Road, said Joyce. (When he started there Zoe had been two years at Amery-James and showed no signs of coming round to it.) Every evening if it wasn't raining, Daniel was out with his friends in the park, playing football or cricket according to the season.

—He certainly doesn't seem overburdened with homework.

—He's a late developer, Joyce reassured him. You just wait. There are great depths in Daniel.

—I'll take your word for it. They certainly haven't been much plumbed so far. He hasn't spoken a word to me for weeks.

It was true that if Ray passed him on the stairs Daniel actually startled, as if his father were something sinister whose existence he preferred to forget. If Ray addressed any remark to him directly, Daniel mumbled at his shoes. He never brought his friends into the house; Ray suspected this was because he didn't want them to catch sight of his paintings. In the park, Ray knew, he was a different creature: mouthy and caustic, popular, with his mass of fair curls and easy gift for sport. His offside drive was already better than Ray's had ever been.

Zoe brooded gloomily over the possibility of leaving Amery-James.

—But what if I don't fit in at the new school? she asked accusingly. At Langham Road they all wear makeup and go out with boys.

—Wherever you go you will be your same self, Joyce consoled her. Anyway, I don't expect they “all” do.

—They go out dancing at the Locarno.

—That might be nice.

Zoe gave her a dark look.

—What if I'm ruined for either school?

—It's up to you, darling. We don't mind one way or the other.

—How am I supposed to
know?
she wailed.

Ray suffered for his daughter; Joyce was brisk.

—What more can we do? She shrugged. She has to decide for herself.

Joyce was always brisk these days. She was always busy, to begin with. It was she who built the shelf units for the lounge, hair tied up in a scarf, working with a saw and a spirit level, scribbling calculations, hinging the louvered doors. Or she was on her knees, scrubbing off the stripper from the floorboards in the kitchen; or she was tiling and grouting in the new bathroom. Ray was shut out from her confabulations with the builder, Mike, their faces absorbed and rapt with costing and planning. It was awful that she had assigned to Ray the most splendid room of the house as his studio. He wanted to give it back and retreat in relief to the old inadequate space at the college he had complained about for so many years, but he didn't dare. The new studio was so tall and white and absurdly expectant of great things from him that he found himself in reaction painting tinier and tinier pictures, book-sized, postcard-sized (he forbade himself to go any smaller).

Joyce had become beautiful in a way Ray had not calculated for; flamboyant, perming her hair into thick waves, flaunting her backside in tight white trousers and her front in clinging T-shirts or low-cut filmy blouses in psychedelic colors. He prowled after the baffling, arousing woman she had become around a home that seemed to be always full of other people. He would find Joyce closeted clandestinely with her Uncle Dick in his policeman's overcoat and graying film-star war-hero good looks. (Their meetings were clandestine because Dick's new wife—not the woman he'd left Aunt Vera for—wasn't all that much older than Joyce and didn't like him to have anything to do with his previous family.) Ray had no idea why Joyce gave Dick house room, let alone ladling out her homemade flapjacks and perked coffee and all the sweetness of her engaged attention for him as if she were hungry for his approval. When he left he stuffed a five-pound note into her apron or her pocket and she cried over it. Ray kept out of the way in case Dick tried to advise him on tongue-and-groove paneling or the purchase of taps (he didn't seem able to discuss such matters with a woman).

Joyce had to make elaborate arrangements so that Dick wouldn't run into Vera; since she retired from teaching she had also taken to popping round. (“We have to have her,” Joyce assured him. “Why do you think Pete took himself off to the other side of the world?”) Vera was engaged in self-improvement, taking Russian classes, cycling over the heath for exercise. She enrolled at the university Extra-Mural Department for a course on The Nude in Art and hovered in an agony of indecision between being proud of her relationship to a successful painter and appalled at what he painted. “It's not that I'm a prude, Ray,” she said. “It's just that you make it all look so ugly.” Or sometimes the kitchen would be overflowing with women unknown to Ray, frantic as an aviary with their high-pitched chattering. As if she didn't have enough else to do, Joyce had taken it upon herself to organize a craft cooperative, selling goods on a stall in the covered market. The kitchen table would be piled with pots, peg dolls, felt mice, prints, batik tea cosies, greeting cards made of pressed flowers, macramé hangings for plant pots. Joyce worked out the rotas and manned the stall two days a week. She sewed patchwork jackets and waistcoats in the evenings while she watched telly, and was voracious for scraps; she had her scissors into his old shirts and ties sometimes before he'd even worn them out.

From time to time in his flight around the house, Ray stumbled in some quiet spot upon Fiona, Zoe's little friend, and they exchanged complicit glances, as if neither of them had any very good reason to be there. Fiona had had her hair done in what Zoe impatiently informed him was a feather cut: short, with long ends trailing down the nape of her neck. With her head freed and her eyes with their deep steady gaze exposed, she looked like a rough little waif from a Dutch genre painting. She wore blue eye shadow and plucked her eyebrows into a quizzical arch; she had stayed small, while Zoe grew taller and more awkwardly skinny.

—Fiona's such an attractive girl, said Joyce. I'd love to dress her. It's a pity about the dreadful way she does her eyes.

—I like them, said Ray. The eyes are exactly what I like.

—Do you really? You wouldn't let Zoe do it.

—Wouldn't I? Anyway, it wouldn't suit her. But Fiona's a sharp little kid. I like her; I'm glad Zoe's got all sorts of friends. Some of those Amery-James types are pretty ghastly. I see them parading out when I pick her up. How come the private schools get more than their fair share of the ugly ones?

Ray persuaded Fiona to sit for him. She stepped warily the first time into the empty white space of the studio (she couldn't be any warier of it than he was), but she made an excellent model, keeping obediently still for longer than he had thought possible at her age, not self-conscious, not wanting to talk. Zoe visited them suspiciously with coffees and biscuits, explaining to her friend that Ray always made things “look funny,” and she mustn't expect much. He did two paintings (small ones) of Fiona in the buttoned-up Crombie with a triangle of red handkerchief sticking out of its pocket, which apparently was de rigeur for skinheads. He made her face a funny crumpled shape like a little intelligent dog, staring knowingly out of the frame without smiling; in one of the paintings she held a cigarette tight between fingers curled into a fist.

—You're not supposed to know I smoke, she said, when she gave the picture her coolly appraising stare. He thought she liked it.

He took her hand (stubby, not beautiful) and unfurled her yellow fingers to show her how he guessed.

*   *   *

Something crumbled slowly in zoe's fixed idea of things. The yearning that had been for a lost past swung into a different, present, plane; she began responding to the idea of “ordinary people” with the same vibration of romance that had once thrilled at “olden days.” She told girls at school that she was a Communist, although she had only a vague idea of what that might involve. She knew it was defiant; she knew communism, which her father spoke about with a tender but wary excitement, envisaged an order of things that would do away with the game of advantage as played at Amery-James. Ray and Joyce used “anticommunist” as a disparaging critique of certain kinds of things that were said on the news; there was a hopefulness, a moving optimism about human possibilities, in believing that the communist countries were probably much better than some people wanted you to think. When there was a general election in her third year, she was proud of driving up to school in Ray's shabby old Cortina with Labour stickers in the back window.