Everything Will Be All Right

by Tessa Hadley

  * * *

  Fiona was very willing to be zoe’s friend; the only difficulty was that she was willing to be everybody’s. Zoe was jealous and persistent; she grabbed Fiona by the arm in a quick settling gesture of claim and possession whenever they had to make pairs for games or Music and Movement; she asked Mr. Lloyd if she could move to Fiona’s table, pretending she was sick of Paul Andrews banging down the desk lid on her head. She would have liked to help Fiona with her work; she had done this for other friends. But although Fiona didn’t have the usual outward signs of cleverness—the clumsy mix of awkwardness and smugness—she turned out, to Zoe’s surprise, to be as quick and clever at most things as Zoe herself (only she didn’t get the stars that Zoe got for her stories; Mr. Lloyd was a fan of Zoe’s descriptive passages). She was invited to become part of “grub days,” when Zoe’s gang took turns bringing in something to eat in the playground: sultanas, or salt, or stock cube, wrapped in a twist of paper tissue. Fiona brought in hundreds and thousands; they all wet their fingers and dipped in. At home Zoe pestered her mother until she bought the same tiny candies at the supermarket, which Zoe then licked up alone in ritual imitation.

  There was eventually some understanding in the class that she and Fiona belonged together, though it was never enough for Zoe, because Fiona wouldn’t unbend from her evenhandedness. She was a serious and sympathetic listener, but she didn’t volunteer needs or prejudices of her own. She would gracefully detach from Zoe’s group to join in some game of Please Jack May We Cross the Water? or I Wrote a Letter to My Love that had swollen to fill the whole space of the concrete playground between its high walls. Zoe and her friends kept aloof from these games. Fiona was quietly expert in all the variants, the forfeits, the different dipping-outs; she sang out confidently, “Jack says anyone with blue” or skipped round the outside of the ring, giving no sign when she let fall the handkerchief behind some chosen person’s back.

  She came to Zoe’s house to play. Zoe, who had longed to reveal her whole real life to her friend, was aware of herself in a rush of showing off, talking in a silly artificial voice to Daniel, rolling in the goatskin rug in the lounge that left her covered in hairs, rudely stealing biscuits Joyce would have given to her anyway, playing all her piano pieces over badly and much too fast. She was hardly able to take in that this was the real Fiona, transplanted disconcertingly into the too-familiar spaces. They adored the kitten; Fiona was politely interested in Zoe’s treasures, her inkwell and her white china horses and the beaded pincushion with “BABY” on it. Then they were at a loss for what to do. Zoe simply didn’t know what Fiona liked.

  Shyly she suggested the dressing-up box, offering Fiona the best thing, which she usually took for herself: Nana Deare’s wedding dress, full-length in cream silk with its dry stretchy stickiness under the fingers, sewn across all round the skirt with tiny tucks, buttoning with pearl buttons up the inside arm and down the back. She helped Fiona put it on; they fastened some of the surplus skirt up out of the way with an elastic Brownie belt round the waist. Zoe pinned up Fiona’s hair behind a velvet Alice band and fixed white clip-on earrings on her ears; they went to look in the full-length mirror in Joyce’s room. Even Fiona seemed moved. She stopped very still at the sight of herself and allowed Zoe to powder her face from Joyce’s compact.

  —Pretend you’re a pirate’s moll, said Zoe. (She had watched a series about eighteenth-century criminals on television at Grandma Lil’s and found its glamorous lawlessness very exciting.) The bunk beds are the ship, the top one is the deck and the underneath one is the cabin where we eat and sleep.

  —What’s a moll? agreed Fiona, willingly.

  —You’re his girlfriend, and all the respectable people disapprove of you, but really you’re the one who truly loves him.

  Absorbedly, they played this game for hours and revived it sometimes afterward when Fiona came again to tea. Although its narratives were somewhat repetitious—crisis and injury and nursing back to health, Fiona calm and capable and reassuring, Zoe, when she wasn’t strutting on the upper deck, desperate and terminal with a lot of groaning and fainting and feverish tossing about—its satisfactions never seemed to pall.

  * * *

  Momentously, then, zoe was asked to tea with fiona. they walked quietly to Fiona’s home together after school, oppressed with awareness of the advance in their intimacy. Fiona turned in at the gate of one of the big shabby stuccoed houses fronting onto the heath, a higgledy-piggledy clutch of bells beside the door signifying flats and bedsits. Fiona had her own door key and didn’t seem sure whether her mother would be there or not (there had never been a day when Joyce wasn’t waiting at home for Zoe, with milk and cake or biscuits). Inside, when the front door banged shut on its heavy hinge behind them, Zoe was for a few moments afraid of the strangeness of the cold echoing stairwell, its brown lino and bare bulb and brown-stained old wallpaper, smelling of stale dinners and alien sour toilets.

  —We have to hurry, said Fiona. The light switch goes off by itself.

  Fiona’s mother loomed above them over the banisters before they reached the second floor in their scramble; she pressed the light on again.

  —Greetings, my darlings, she said. I haff put ze kettle on for tea. (She often put on a foreign accent when she was in her playful mood.)

  Zoe thought Fiona looked disappointed to see her, although this might have only been because there wasn’t much space in the tiny two-roomed flat; mother and daughter shared a poky bedroom whose window stared out at the blank side of the next door house. The kitchenette was no more than an alcove behind a curtain printed gaily with wine bottles and bits of leafy trellis and lemons (Fiona’s mother called the flat a maisonette, too, and Zoe a brunette: forever afterward Zoe associated these diminutives with her). The flat was clean, though, and optimistically prettified with plants and ornaments: a china bell in the shape of a lady in a crinoline, a painting of a kitten in a bamboo frame, fluffy nylon rugs in pastel colors. Zoe couldn’t repress her furtive guilty judgment against these choices; she couldn’t help feeling that Fiona must admire the superior good taste in her own home.

  Fiona’s mother looked like her, with a heart-shaped face, bright liquid eyes, and precise features like a neat appealing animal. She had the same black hair and olive skin, except that the hair was permed, not sleek, and her skin was powdered and pouchy. Like Fiona she was daintily decisive in all her gestures, tying on a frilled pinny to get ready their beans on toast (the kind of pinny Joyce, who wore a striped butcher’s apron, said was only good for playing at house); repairing her lipstick with a skeptical glance in the mirror; unclasping her handbag to fish out her cigarettes, which she kept in a metal holder with her name—Jean—engraved on it in flowery letters (“given me by an old boyfriend,” she smiled, squinting through smoke). She reproached herself for smoking—“Horrible habit! Bad girl!”—slapping the back of her own ringed hand.

  —I’m glad, she said, that Fiona’s made a nice friend. Someone to get her into the right crowd at school.

  When Jean squeezed Zoe she sank into sweetish softness spiked with jewelry and hard buttons and long nails, smelling of cigarettes and flowery perfume, and something else fruity and rich and rotten, which Zoe later learned to recognize as drink: gin and vermouth, or brandy. A little bar was installed across one corner of the sitting room, with shelves and a counter made from colored glass, paper cocktail umbrellas, a jar of maraschino cherries, and a chrome cocktail shaker. Jean talked to the girls about her various “boyfriends” (Fiona said some of them were quite nice and some were horrors) and about the staff at Brights Hotel, where she worked. “That barman’s a right little so-and-so. Quel charmer! Now Cook and me, Cook and me don’t get along. She’s a dirty you-know-what and can’t forgive anyone who’s younger and gets out more than she does.” (For a long time Zoe imagined Jean at Brights dressed up smartly and acting in some kind of hostesslike role, receiving guests: she only had a very vague idea of what went on in hotels. But when
once she and Fiona had to ask to speak to Jean at work because Fiona had lost her key, she was wearing a housecoat and rubber gloves and pushing a cleaning trolley between the bedrooms. This was only Zoe’s mistake; there had been no pretense on Jean’s part, nor was there any embarrassment over their finding her there.)

  Fiona showed Zoe her satiny nightdress case, and her Tressie doll, whose hair wound in and out of her head, and a miniature brass lampstand with a glass shade; when you pulled a chain like a light switch it brought down a tray with three tiny bottles of very dark brown scent.

  —My daddy gave it me. They used to be nice. Only I didn’t use them and they’ve got strong.

  —It’s really sweet, said Zoe (which was not a word she used under normal circumstances).

  —If you’re divorced, she said warily, do you see your daddy often?

  —It just depends. Fiona shrugged. He has to travel about a lot, for his work.

  —That’s a shame for you. I suppose he’s nice, is he?

  —He is quite nice, said Fiona. But I’m used to it.

  —Why don’t you girls go outside and run around before it’s dark? said Jean, who was doing her nails in a cloud of nail varnish remover.

  —Shall we? asked Fiona. We could go in the Dumps.

  Zoe was surprised; it looked dark enough already, outside the window. She would not have been allowed to go out at home; she felt a flicker of fear, as if she shared for a moment in an adult’s apprehension of herself not properly taken care of, tumbling about alone, falling into the so-much-warned-about gap left open by adult neglect.

  —Let’s, she said.

  It wasn’t as dark outside as it looked from indoors. The light was only just beginning to drain away out of a sky stacked up with golden clouds, against which the stubby thorn trees of the heath stood in black fairy-tale outline. Opposite the house, only twenty yards back from the edge of the road, there was a long untidy hollow, said to be some kind of bomb crater, although Nana Deare thought she could remember it from before the war. The top surface of the heath was kept mown all summer; when the classes from school came up here at playtime on fine days they built huge child-sized nests out of the heaps of cut grass. But the Dumps were impossibly crooked and steep-sided and so were allowed to grow wild, with long grasses and flowers and clumps of bushes. A meandering little dust path wound through the length of them, about a quarter of a mile at most.

  Zoe and Fiona wandered hand in hand, and Zoe showed Fiona that you could eat the “bread and butter” berries off the hawthorns. They had hopping races up the path, elbowing each other off, holding their spare ankles up in their hands behind; they played at paralyzing each other’s fingers, stroking wrists with a special circular technique. They had the Dumps pretty much to themselves, only meeting a couple of dog-walkers and one of the usual old tramps who haunted the place. A slanting chilly late light glided onto the heath from behind a cloud and smothered the Dumps in shadow. The girls knew it would be dark next. Then there was an eruption of noise some way off: calling, a snapping of branches, scuffling, yelps of laughter.

  —Oh, hell, Fiona said, it’s probably that lot.

  It was the first time Zoe had ever heard her use bad language. (Jean said “sugar” and “scuse my French.”)

  —What lot?

  —You know: Lester and Jackie and that.

  Zoe started to worry; she could imagine how “that lot” might be delighted to find one of the conforming and obedient children from school exposed out here where their power was unchecked.

  —Are they allowed to play out in the Dumps?

  —What do you think? Fiona frowned. No one bothers where they are.

  —Let’s go back to your house then.

  —There’s no time. But there’s a den; we could hide. Probably it’s so dark they won’t see us.

  There must have been nights, Zoe realized, when Fiona came out to play with these others in the Dumps voluntarily and was part of the whooping and yelling and breaking of trees. For now, though, Fiona pulled Zoe after her into a thicket of bushes with a secret space inside, a dusty mud floor littered with a few dirty sweet wrappers. Perhaps she decided to hide partly because Zoe was a liability and it was inconvenient to be found with her. They crouched down on their haunches, holding on to each other for balance, smelling the day’s heat baked into splintery wood, pungent leaves, and dog dirt. They felt each other’s breathing; Zoe was aware of Fiona’s soft skin and her aura of talcum powder and clean washing and found under her fingers the fine gold chain Fiona wore with a cross around her neck. They shook with silent giggling, half nervous, half real fun.

  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 pour
ed 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.