by Tessa Hadley
* * *
So what happened instead of their getting a new father was that Aunt Vera got a job and went out to work every morning as if she were the man of the house, and their mother Lil stayed at home like the wife and looked after Kay, Vera’s daughter, who didn’t go to school yet. Lil cleaned the house, washed the clothes, looked after the hens and geese, grew vegetables in the garden, and bought food from the delivery vans. Supper was ready when they all came home; the good table (they had to use the good table, it was the only one big enough for them all) would be laid with a blanket under the oilcloth to protect it; the kitchen would be dense with steam from the pans bubbling on the temperamental old paraffin stove, which sometimes went wrong and gave out clouds of black smoke as well.
Lil didn’t look anything like her sister; she was short and soft and plump, with short dark hair that was always dropping out of its home perm. She knitted whenever her hands weren’t busy with something else, one long needle tucked steady under her arm, the other one flickering in and out of the stitches; when the work dragged on the needles, she rubbed them in her hair to make them slip. She smoked, although Vera said it was common; when she hugged the children the tang of cigarettes and the hard outline of the packet of Woodbines in her apron pocket were part of her safe consoling flavor. Day after day, “out in the back of beyond” as she put it, she didn’t bother to change her shapeless print dress. Sometimes Joyce couldn’t help seeing her mother through Aunt Vera’s eyes. Lil didn’t read books, she wasn’t interested in the news or talk programs on the wireless; she liked the dance bands and sang “O for the Wings of a Dove” while she did the housework. She was quite incapable of that effort of self-transformation by which Vera and the girls pulled themselves up every morning to be smart and knowing and braced for Amery-James.
Sometimes Vera and Lil quarreled. The worst quarrel was something to do with Ivor, Joyce’s father. Lil had had a letter from one of his senior officers describing how he’d died bravely, fired on from a strafing airplane while he was trying to help a wounded comrade in the water. This version of events had become a kind of family piety for the Stevensons, a poignant high truth. Vera was scornful of Lil for believing in that “nonsense.”
—Don’t you think they write the same stuff for every gullible widow? It’s the final insult, sending out these sugar-plum stories nobody in their right mind believes in.
—You always have to know better, don’t you? said Lil passionately. Why can’t you just take someone else’s word for it for once?
—Oh, Lillie! Vera seemed puzzled by the vehemence of her sister’s reaction. I’m not insulting Ivor, I’m honoring his memory. But I won’t swallow that old rubbish about honor and glory.
—Old rubbish! said Lil. You think you can get away with saying anything to me. But there are people you wouldn’t dare say that in front of.
—Do you want a third world war? said Vera. Do you want our sons to die in the next war, because we’ve all swallowed up what we’ve been told like good little children?
Joyce couldn’t stop herself wondering what it had been like for her father to die, if it hadn’t been high-toned and beautifully sad. When she tested out the two possibilities in her mind she knew intuitively that what was hard and ugly was more likely to be true. And although Aunt Vera could be hateful, with her loud superior voice and her bruising definiteness, Joyce thought that in such a contest it would be safer to be bruising than bruised. She wished she were tall and statuesque like her aunt; she began to adopt some of her mannerisms, her lofty absentmindedness, her tone of superior skepticism toward everyday housework, her passionate responsiveness to the idea of philosophy or classical music. There wasn’t actually all that much room for philosophy or classical music in Aunt Vera’s life, but the idea of them was woven into her conversation like a wafted promise of a superior way of being. Joyce worked hard, poring over her schoolbooks, hoping that if she could somehow master these mountains of facts and processes she might at last penetrate through to being adult and powerful.
She did very well at school. Her aunt was proud of her. Her uncle brought her home a four-volume set of American encyclopedias called Worldwide Knowledge. Lil was overcome and admiring.
—You ought to be grateful to your uncle, she said. Imagine him taking the trouble to find these for you.
—Something somebody’s given him off one of the ships, her aunt said skeptically.
* * *
The other serious quarrel the sisters had was not unconnected to the one about the war. One of the few times Lil ever took the trouble to dress up was when she went out to séances with a woman in Farmouth who was a medium. Then she put on her navy suit smelling of mothballs and her navy hat with the duck wing and her white gloves and sat looking unfamiliar and important in the car next to Uncle Dick, who gave her a lift to the house where the medium lived. Joyce and Ann begged to be allowed to go too—they were mad at that time for Ouija boards and levitation at Amery-James—but Lil was dignified and immovable in her refusal.
—It’s not a game, she said. It’s not for children.
Vera’s anger at her was out of all proportion, as Uncle Dick pointed out.
—It’s a bit of harmless excitement, he said. Poor old Lillie, she doesn’t get out much.
—There are so many other worthwhile things she could get involved in. I don’t want her to be stultified out here. There are gardening clubs—she’s supposed to care about that—there’s the choir, the Women’s Cooperative Guild. But to lay yourself open to these charlatans, preying upon the weaknesses of the foolish, pulling muslin out from their stomachs and squeezing jellies in people’s hands and pretending to make contact with people who no longer exist, who have turned back into molecules of carbon!
Vera never failed to mention that during the war Lil had been vaguely involved with something called the Magic Battle of Britain: they put up Cross of Light posters in the London underground and threw “go-away powder” into the sea, where it was supposed to mix with the salt to stop the forces of darkness from invading.
—I don’t know what we even bothered with soldiers for, Vera said. Or artillery, or airplanes. All we needed was some old go-away powder. It was that simple. Just like the Queen of the Zulus believing she could make people proof against the white man’s bullets.
In fact, what Lil reported back from her séances never seemed to involve the kind of dramas with ectoplasm and babies’ hands that Vera feared and the children rather hoped for. Her stories were decorous and poignant; it was possible that she censored them for Vera’s benefit. In the lamplight in the kitchen, once she had eased her feet out of her shoes and unhooked her corset, she told them about the sailor husband who had given his blessing to a second marriage, and the woman who had gone into a trance and imagined her dead father taking her into a lovely garden full of the scents of flowers in the darkness. When the woman said how she wished she could see it in the light, her father replied that if she saw it in the light she’d never want to go back.
Lil never seemed to make any very satisfactory contact with Ivor. Sometimes he came near, the medium said, he was trying to reach through, but he was naturally shy, he gave way to the others, he didn’t like to push himself forward.
—I said, That’s him! Lil told them. That’s Ivor. That’s him all over. Trust him.
And so that was how Joyce came to imagine him losing his life on the beach at Dunkirk: holding back shyly, giving way to others.
* * *
Joyce was the eldest of the children. Peter, her cousin, clever and awkward, had a Choral Scholarship at the Cathedral School; he was the same age as Ann. Martin, her brother, was younger and went to the local Juniors in Farmouth. Martin was brown and wiry, gallant and handsome; Lil said she caused him more trouble than all the rest put together. He came home with his school cap pulled hard down to hide a deep gash in his forehead from when he’d been playing about with the tools in a car mechanic’s workshop near school; Lil had to soak the c
ap where it had stuck to the wound as the blood dried. He didn’t cry. He burned up a pair of trousers in the bedroom grate and told his mother he’d lost them so she wouldn’t see how badly they were ripped; she found the telltale scorched buttons. He made a parachute from his bedsheet and jumped with it out of an upstairs window and somehow only sprained his ankle. His teachers warned that he wouldn’t get a place at a good school. Kay was the baby, who was just growing out of being everyone’s little pet into a silent, stubborn, and stolid child, tall like her mother, with Vera’s large long face, and with a head of startling white-blond hair, which Lil cut in a short bob.
Dick and Vera were waiting for one of the new houses that were being built in Farmouth; in the meantime they were given the old gray house because the Port Authority had bought it up and wasn’t using it. It had long stone mullioned windows with leaded panes; inside the rooms were higgledy-piggledy and unexpected, with low doorways and crooked passages. A narrow spiral staircase behind the kitchen led up to a mysterious tiny room with stone shelves all round where they stored apples; in summer Joyce used to read there. There was a walled kitchen garden, and outside the back door of the house were a walnut tree and a huge William pear tree: fat pears smashed onto the path, and in the autumn mornings when they first opened the back door, Winnie, their brindled bulldog, would push past them and dash out to gobble them up. They found a bat in the living room, its ears as long as its body (Ann put on gloves and carried it outdoors); once a solemn-staring owl was on the sill by an open window in one of the bedrooms. The bathroom was on the ground floor, and the bath had to be filled with buckets of hot water from the stove; outside the window the weeds grew tall and green and were all they needed for a curtain, until Joyce began to imagine she could hear rustlings and made Lil pin up an old blanket when it was her turn.
The house stood on reclaimed estuary land, and wide rhines—drainage ditches—covered with bright green algae crisscrossed the fields all round. Ducks and moorhens swam on them, as did the geese who were Ann’s special friends; she stroked their fat creamy necks and kissed them on their beaks. One particularly severe winter they were cut off by snow from Farmouth for a whole week (Uncle Dick eventually got through to them with food and paraffin). Then in the spring when the snow melted, the rhines flooded and the house stood in a shallow lake of water. The children made a boat out of an old tin tub, the one Lil used to wash Kay in front of the kitchen stove.
When Kay wouldn’t go in the “boat,” all the others became bent upon coaxing her into it, as if she were missing something transforming and essential.
—Cowardy custard! said Peter.
—You’ll love it! Martin pleaded. It isn’t dangerous; see how shallow it is? It’s so easy: look! It’s jolly good fun. You can come in with me.
And he executed some nifty turns and splashed up and down, paddling with the spade. Martin was good at all these sorts of things: paddling a boat, climbing trees, clambering (unbeknownst to his mother) along the rafters in the hayloft at their neighbor’s farm, or steering the old pram, which they used as a go-cart, on the causeway that ran down to the shore. Kay pressed her mouth shut and shook her head and clung to the little scrap of grubby blanket that was her “sucky” to get her to sleep, which she took everywhere with her. (“One of these mornings I’m going to drop that in the stove!” Lil said whenever she saw it, so Kay had learned to keep it out of sight, in her pocket or balled up in her hand.)
Peter was—inevitably—the one who tipped out of the tub into the filthy water. He lost his nerve when he drifted slightly away from the house, which stood on a slight rise; they knew they must be careful not to paddle near the rhines, where the water was deep. He raised himself awkwardly to look behind him and then went in with a big splash and a funny truncated scream and had to wade ignominiously back to the others, pulling his boat behind him. He was a strange mixture of genuine ineptness and deliberate clowning. He and Martin had vicious fights; when Peter lost his temper he would pummel Martin blindly and frantically, rolling his eyes up and crying loudly through clenched teeth. Martin said the sight of Peter made him laugh so much he was too weak to fight back.
Joyce was fifteen that spring, really too old to play at boats. It was only because she was small that she could fit in it, with her knees up to her chin. When she was quite a way from the others and their voices were remote, she stopped paddling and leaned cautiously back with the spade resting across the middle of the tub. She had been working all morning (it was a Saturday), learning the dates of the American Revolution, learning lists of French words for birds and trees, getting Peter to test her. She would have her School Certificate exams in a few months. Her head was full of the sound of herself, reciting, repeating.
The sky when she leaned back and looked up was mostly steadily gray, like a dull wool soaking up the light, but over toward the estuary the gray had begun to break up and there was an opened gash of surprising brilliant blue with scraps of milky cloud floating in it. She imagined copying those clouds in paint, noticing how they had a bright hard edge of light against the blue. Then she thought about the art room at Amery-James, which was up a flight of stairs over the dining hall and always seemed restfully separate from the rest of school. Instead of maps and blackboards and piles of somber textbooks, the art room was filled with a clutter of interesting things to look at: vases of dried grasses and seed heads, printed silks and embroideries, a carved wooden mask, a bright yellow kite, a sheep’s skull, huge pottery dishes with coarse bold colors and patterns unlike anything Joyce had ever eaten off in anyone’s home. The room was high and light and airy and the walls were hung with pictures, some beautiful and some queer and incomprehensible. There were a couple of drawings of naked women, too, which Joyce studied with furtive curiosity and which made some of the girls say there was something funny about Miss Leonard, the art teacher.
Joyce heard the others shouting to her and realized she was drifting toward where the rhine ran along the edge of the invisible field, marked out by a line of shrubs poking out of the floodwater. She let herself drift for a few more moments, wondering what would happen if she didn’t act, if she let herself go, drifting on into the faster current in her ridiculous frail boat, perhaps being tipped out into deep water by a surge of turbulence or perhaps being picked up and carried onward, faster and faster until there was no return, toward the estuary and then the sea. There was no real danger, of course. If she’d wanted to, she could have stepped out of the tub and walked back. When she did pick up the spade she paddled with studied insouciance, making strong elegant strokes and not deigning to look behind over her shoulder. She was coming to know she could summon up this power to do things elegantly: not infallibly but often. It was important to know how to carry things off, under the eyes of others: the family or the girls at school. She wanted never to make a fool of herself like her cousin Peter, who had reappeared buttoned up to the neck in his school blazer and was hovering outside the kitchen for a chance to dry his clothes over the stove without his Auntie Lil noticing.
* * *
That summer Aunt Vera often stayed late at school; she was rehearsing the historical pageant she was putting on to mark the Festival of Britain. Ann had to stay too; she had landed the much-coveted part of Mary Queen of Scots. (There was a craze for Mary, and a poem about her all the girls knew by heart and chanted in the lunch break with real tears in their eyes: “So she lived and so she died,/ Scotland’s pawn and Scotland’s pride./ England’s bane and England’s heir,/ Mary, fairest of the fair.”) The School Cert girls weren’t supposed to be involved in the pageant; they had too much else on their minds. Quite often Joyce had to wait at the mission by herself in the afternoons, hoping Uncle Dick would remember she needed a lift. She would try to absorb herself deeply in her homework behind the windows of the little office, never lifting her head when she sensed the sailors coming and going on the other side of the glass, scaldingly aware of herself, bent over her books in her prissy neat school uniform,
and of the incitement to resentment or violence the sight of her must represent to these strong thwarted shameless men. When at long last it was Uncle Dick’s tall shape in his dark coat and hat that loomed beyond the window, her heart spilled over with relief. The world readjusted itself back inside the shelter of his importance, his air of always being in a hurry, his loud lofty authority with crazy Mrs. Mellor and with the men. “Men,” when he said it, shrank only to mean something about how they were employed, and set Joyce safely above them, condescending to them and beyond their reach.
One afternoon as they set off in the car, Uncle Dick remembered something he wanted to take back for Vera.
—Just making a little detour, he said to Joyce. We won’t be ten minutes.
He turned the car around and they drove through the streets to where the Authority was building several new houses, including the one for his family. The designs for the houses had been taken from the Ideal Home Show in London: some of them were already finished and lived in, two or three were still under construction. It had not been discussed, not properly, whether there would be room for Lil and her children when Vera got her new house. Joyce thought perhaps her uncle had some news for his wife about it; perhaps it was ready and he had been keeping it for a surprise. But he pulled up to a red brick house which already had curtains up and a striped awning over the door, although the garden was still a mess of clay on either side of the path.
—You wait here, he said. Good girl.
He walked up the path, feeling in his pocket for a key, then unlocked the front door and disappeared inside, closing it behind him. He was gone longer than ten minutes. Joyce tried to shrink in her seat so as not to be conspicuous to the children playing in the street. She took off her blazer. She pulled her history book from her satchel and looked at it sightlessly.