by Tessa Hadley
—Should I go away?
She shook her head in her hands, sobbing.
—It’s nothing.
He sat down on the side of the bed, tried to pat her hair.
—Well, evidently it’s not nothing.
—Lozzy took me out in his car after work.
The words were broken up by the weeping erupting painfully from inside.
His heart clenched, his blood pulsed thickly. She was going to tell him the story he dreaded, that lurked in the lower levels of his imagination: of a violation, an abuse of her tender youth, some obscene thing done to her that she hadn’t wanted.
—Well, it’s not actually his car, it’s his brother’s. But he knew we were borrowing it, he was cool. And it was great to get out, you know, from the city? Lozzy’s good like that, he really appreciates nature, he knows these fantastic places to go, woodland walks and country pubs and things.
So, not a violation. An accident? An arrest? They’d been done for possession of drugs? He was all ready to mobilize his authority, as a middle-class parent, as a member of the university. He would be cleverer than the police, he would rescue her (and even Lozzy if need be).
—Then we saw this dead fox beside the road.
—And?
She renewed her sobbing.
—You see, I knew you were going to say that. That’s all. It was just this little fox. It was only a baby. You couldn’t even see where it was damaged. It was just laid at the side of the road with its snout on its paws and a little frown wrinkling up its nose. It only looked as if it was asleep. Lozzy did get out to see if it was dead, though, and it was; it was cold, although it was still perfect. So we had to leave it there. And now I can’t stop thinking about it.
Simon sat utterly perplexed. What reassurance was he supposed to produce, in response to this crisis? If she’d asked him about the gas chambers, or the massacres in Rwanda, or nine-eleven, he might have had some form of words ready.
He noted, at least, that Lozzy had not been able to console her.
—There are so many of them, he said, in what he hoped was a voice replete with adult confidence in ultimate meanings. There will be plenty more baby foxes.
—But not that one. I just can’t stop thinking. It was alive this morning! And now it’s not. And what about its mother? She must be wondering where it is.
—Coincidentally, Simon said, remembering suddenly, I had a dream just now, just before I got up to see if you were home, that was about hurting an animal.
She grew more quiet.
—Did you? What kind of animal?
—A bizarre little dream creature. Like a tiny bird. I was crushing it. When I woke up I felt disgusted with myself.
She put her hand on his, and squeezed it, and leaned her head against his chest so he couldn’t see her face. He put his arm round her.
Her voice was muffled and reluctant, so he knew that what was coming now was the true core of her confession.
—What I can’t bear, Daddy, is what’s going to happen to the fox now. That it’s going to turn to rot.
—Someone will take it away. Crows will eat it. They’ll pick it clean.
—They don’t always. We saw others. Sometimes they just turn into a bag of brown rot.
Words of explanation ran in his head but they were nothing, he couldn’t speak them.
—It’ll be all right, he could only say to her. Everything will be all right.
—Don’t be stupid, Pearl said crossly. No it won’t.
Ending
They have telephoned from the retirement home. Uncle Dick has died, aged ninety-six.
Joyce spoke to him only a few hours ago. He “went peacefully, in his sleep,” they tell her, although the last few weeks have been far from peaceful. Dick has tried to escape from the home several times; he has grappled with the cook in the kitchen, accusing her of hiding his tin of Epsom salts, and rattling through her cupboards for it with his stick; one of his visitors found him sitting in his bed in soiled pajamas; he has been phoning Joyce at three, four, five in the morning, to beg and plead with her to help get him out from where he is being held prisoner. He seemed to think that he was somewhere in South Africa, and he could see the tall masts of the ships in the harbor from his window. If only he could get on board one of those ships, he confided urgently, he could sail home to his wife and children. Joyce has taken to unplugging the phone before she goes to bed. She and Ann have been dreading that the nice-ish retirement home (at least there is someone playing the piano sometimes; at least the garden is lovely and the doors unlocked) will say they cannot look after him any longer, that he needs to move on to one of the other kind of places, with nursing care. Ann, who is brave about this kind of thing, has looked into those other places.
—You don’t want to know that they exist, she says. Little wizened no-sex creatures batting back and forward in their chairs screaming for Mummy. One crawling on the floor around my feet.
And now instead, thank goodness, release. (Though there’s still Vera.)
Joyce phones Peter. This will mean extra sessions with his therapist. There have been reconciliations of sorts, Peter has visited his father once or twice a year for the last few years; he will have his share of the inheritance. Joyce and Ann get their share too; Dick has said often (he was prone to waxing sentimental in his declining years) that they have been better than daughters to him. (“Bloody right we have,” says Ann.) Even Martin gets something.
Joyce drives round to tell Vera the news. Vera has settled years ago for an air of triumphant righteousness at having outlived Dick’s second and third wives (breast cancer and a car accident). She and Dick have often met at Joyce’s, on Sundays and on all the festivals, where they have been as irritable and familiar with each other as any old married couple.
—I’d spoken to him only a few hours before they rang me, Joyce says. I’d arranged for him to come for lunch on Sunday.
She doesn’t tell Vera that Dick had said he should be able to come, as long as he could clock off in time, and that he would be in plain clothes. This is not so much in order to spare Vera from the details of her once-husband’s deterioration as because Vera suffers herself from lapses of consequence, and if they set each other off a discussion can spiral quickly into dizzy realms of unmeaning. (At Christmas Joyce’s grandchildren were both uncomfortable and giggly when Uncle Dick kept exclaiming “Ah so!” as if he was imitating a Japanese soldier, and Vera loudly protested against his using the word “arsehole.”)
Vera doesn’t seem terribly affected by the news.
She is wearing a new pale pink cashmere cardigan Peter has sent her. Joyce did not think the color was a good idea, because of spills (no doubt she will end up handwashing it); but it does look pretty with Vera’s dark skin and iron-gray hair (Joyce and Ann are whiter now than Vera is). In extreme old age a new kind of prettiness is possible, nothing like the youthful one that Joyce still clings to, yearns after; it has to do with the beauty you can find in old twisted wood and patiently eroded stone.
—What about the gales? Vera says. Did you hear them?
The gales are real. Joyce lay awake last night, unwillingly absorbed in listening to them while Ray snored beside her. She doesn’t mind thunderstorms, and she loves to fall asleep to the sound of rain, but she hates the buffeting of strong wind; it agitates her strangely, makes her body ache, makes her want to cry. Also, she was worrying about the garden wall at the back, which was tottery and needed repointing. If the wind blew it down, they would be able to have it repaired on the insurance. On the other hand, if it fell down while someone was passing in the lane that ran behind and someone was hurt, it would be their fault; she would never be able to forgive herself. So she lay tensely, listening for footsteps in the lane. When she tried to wake Ray up to go down and see if the wall was in danger, see if he could push it over anyway—it would be better if it was just down; then she could sleep—he snapped at her crossly that she was being unreasonable.
&
nbsp; —Some big branches have come down off the trees on the heath, Vera says. They’ve taped a lot of areas off from the public, for safety. You know that crooked Monterey pine that grows over the path, so that they’ve built a wooden support under it? Well, the tree’s fine, but the support’s down; it’s broken in several pieces. Isn’t that an irony? The tree stands, but the support is broken.
—How d’you know all this? Joyce asks suspiciously. Vera hasn’t been up to the heath for months. (Joyce really ought to take her, to see the daffodils.)
—One of the girls told me: Pammy, Polly, one of those. She cycles into work that way.
—Penny. The one with the short dark hair.
—Whichever. I don’t know, I can’t keep track, they come and go so often.
(Actually, Penny has been working there for at least eighteen months.)
—Ann and I will have to arrange the funeral. I suppose we’ll have some sort of do afterward, at our place. Peter can stay with us. I wonder if he’ll want to bring any of the children?
—Typical of Dick to go like that. Vera chuckles.
—Like what? (Peacefully in his sleep: typical to have it easy at the end?)
—With all that banging about, says Vera. All that wind and bother. Making such a to-do. Slamming on the windows, battering at the doors, howling away.
Joyce chooses to interpret this as a metaphorical association of ideas.
—Yes, isn’t it typical? She laughs. Never one to manage things quietly.
Probably, though, Aunt Vera has really got them muddled up, her husband’s passing and last night’s disturbance, as if what happens inside human lives is leaking out in her imagination into the texture of impersonal real things.
* * *
The funeral goes off all right if you approve of that sort of carrying on.
Ray doesn’t.
Partly, he’s thinking that it won’t be long before it’s him up there in the box while everyone snuffles over him (he is seventy-three: Frisch, the only friend whose work he was genuinely jealous of, died recently). Life is so familiar. You get so used to it, you can’t easily be reconciled with the idea that it won’t muddle on forever.
Also, he didn’t like Uncle Dick and never understood why it was that such a significant proportion of his and Joyce’s time was taken up with worrying over and tending to an old man who had after all acted all his life with abominable selfishness. Dick had never, in all the years since he sent Ray an extraordinary letter of so-called “advice” when he and Joyce first got together, been able to resist an opportunity of telling Ray how to manage everything in his life better. (That is, more like the way Dick managed it.) He once even tried to suggest to him, with what he probably imagined to be tactful persuasion, that he should take up painting watercolors of naval battles.
Also, on all these occasions (weddings included: weddings especially), Ray can’t help a sense of outrage at finding himself under the roof of practicing Christians, not only mingling in their company (he’s a tolerant man) but actually participating, however passively, in their rituals. He thinks of religion as a leftover from the Middle Ages; when he was young he fully expected to see an end to all their mumbo jumbo in his lifetime, and the churches turned into museums and art galleries. It was absolutely in character that Dick converted conveniently to a kind of turn-the-other-cheek Christianity as the end drew nigh (marginally worse, Ray thought, than the Masons, who at least don’t sanctimoniously confess to all their sins on social occasions).
Dick had recently had a bitter falling out with the new vicar over a point of church tradition to do with the hymn for those in peril on the sea. Presumably, however, the vicar (a bleached and fastidious little man, with cold eyes) says today all the right appeasing things for the girls to have a weep over. Ray can’t hear him anyway; he has been afflicted for several days now with a sudden deafness, which the doctor assures him unconvincingly is catarrh blocking his inner ear and will only be temporary. He discovered some sort of deaf aid—a little amplifier—in Dick’s drawer while they were going through his things at the home, and he has been using that, but he doesn’t bother to turn it on for the vicar. It only works for a few minutes at a time and then produces shrill feedback, at which point he usually drops it. He doesn’t care what the vicar has to say anyway. And Joyce doesn’t like him using the amplifier, although she thinks he doesn’t know it. She’d rather he were stone deaf than fumbling about with a hearing aid, giving himself away as an old man.
Visually, he admires the element of theater in the proceedings, especially the British Legion chap who follows the coffin up the aisle carrying the standard. And then there’s his granddaughter, Pearl, who turns up unexpectedly from Oxford: to the delight of Joyce, of course, who’s dotty about her, and in whose eyes she can’t do any wrong. Pearl is dressed preposterously in black from head to foot, her hair is dyed black, even her nails are painted black (as far as he knows, she never actually had anything to do with Dick, beyond bestowing on him one or two of her withering glances on occasion, if something he said offended against the implacable received wisdom of the young).
Joyce whispers loudly in his better ear; probably about how marvelous Pearl looks and that he ought to paint her.
He mumbles something noncommittal.
There are other young people here too (including two of Peter’s sons from his second marriage), all of whom make Ray anxious. He suspects them, to begin with, of hypocrisy. They lean forward to pray when the vicar suggests it, they put their heads in their hands, they close their eyes. What can they know about praying? He doesn’t believe in prayer, he doesn’t do it, but at least he was brought up to know how. None of these teenagers have surely ever been in a church, except at weddings and funerals. Are they engaged in a mocking parody of the mores of older folk? Or, more likely, is there such a moral vacancy in them, the product of an era of addiction to quick fixes and instant gratifications, that they will like unconsidering infants join in whatever new game offers itself?
In fact, if he looks around him, they’re all at it, all his family, all the generations, drooping their heads, closing their eyes: even Martin, who only believes in the Periodic Table and his latest invention, even his niece Sophie’s partner Joe, who was surely once in the Socialist Workers’ Party. (Daniel isn’t here; he is in Italy on business, which takes priority of course.) Some of them have even knelt down on those little stuffed square things; what are they, cassocks? hassocks? Joyce kneels. (He is filled with his customary mix of feelings in relation to her public behavior: tender solicitude and exasperation at once. Her knees will hurt. What is she playing at?) Ray knows full well that none of them ever pray, from one year to the next, under ordinary circumstances. What words can possibly be going through all their minds at such a moment? Peter’s droop is of course displayed more conspicuously than anyone else’s; his forehead is pressed against the cuff of his Armani suit as though he struggles with ultimate reckonings.
At least Ray can count on Zoe. She sits bolt upright, like him, with her eyes open. A warmth strikes up in Ray’s chest at the thought of the painting he is doing of Zoe; he is filled with such sudden hopefulness and excitement he forgets where he is. The parts of the painting that have already worked, and the parts that he does not yet know how to resolve, move him to equal enthusiasm. (It is only when he enters the studio and takes up his brushes that the dread of failing and the burdensome labor involved in bringing the thing rightly to its completion will begin to gnaw at him again.) He hasn’t painted Zoe since she was a child. In the new painting she is sitting tensely forward, frowning as if she is seeking out something. He is using a lot of cobalt blue, unusual for him, not a color he has felt much in sympathy with before; he is using it boldly, making marks that are deliberately effortful and dry, painted against the resistance of the canvas. He can’t easily express it in words, but he knows what he means by this. The blue adds in the trace of an aura of effort and dedication that seems to him to surround Zoe. He has her
wrapping one leg around the other, hugging herself tightly with her shoulders hunched. She always looks as if she hasn’t slept enough, as if she’s feeling the cold.
While she sits for him she has been telling him (before he went deaf) about three of her students who are in Israel at the moment, operating as part of the International Solidarity Movement on the West Bank: riding in ambulances through the checkpoints to shame the soldiers into letting through the sick and women in labor; assisting those Palestinians whose trees are out of bounds on the edge of Israeli settlements in harvesting their olives; helping to coordinate a linkup one Saturday between Palestinian protesters from Bethlehem and Israeli protesters from Jerusalem. Others work in community conflict resolution in Kosovo and AIDS clinics in Uganda. It seems to Ray extraordinary, beyond hoping for, that such people exist; that the British students and the Palestinian and Israeli demonstrators and all the others should be willing to sacrifice safety and comfort and private pleasure in the service of some cause they believe in. The thought of it, a few days ago, filled his eyes unexpectedly with tears, which he had to wipe away with the dirty sleeve of the old jacket he wears to paint in. What Zoe does, he knows he is not capable of: sitting through meetings, marching, getting up petitions against war with Iraq, shaking collecting boxes in town. She puts up in her spare room all sorts of stray visitors and contacts from that other world of conflict and deprivation, come to campaign or raise money or give talks. The idea of these small sacrifices fills Ray with ennui even as it pricks at his bad conscience.
He helps Joyce to return to a sitting position; she shoots him an annoyed look, determined to manage by herself. Then the palaver is at an end and the undertakers carry the coffin out; the organ bleats and rambles, there is a shuffling of shoes and hymnbooks in the echoing space, a rumble of throat-clearing and subdued relieved voices as the congregation resume their everyday selves. (Not a bad turnout. And, judging by the things people stop to say to Joyce—Ray gets the amplifier out, twiddles with the knobs—a number of them are under the delusion that Dick was a charming old gentleman with a generous heart.) He and Joyce, Peter and Rose, Ann and Cliff, and Martin and Ingrid will all follow the coffin to the crematorium. Zoe will hurry over to the flat where Joyce has put food and drink out for whoever comes back to drown their sorrows. Sophie will go to pick up Vera, who wouldn’t come to the service (she didn’t want to sit there under false pretenses, she said; they weren’t sure if she meant her relationship to Dick or her irreligion). Joyce always has these occasions so well organized.