Free Everything Will Be All Right by Tessa Hadley

a lugubrious cult grew up around her bereavement. Joyce was disgusted when she discovered that Ann had taken a photograph of Kay into school to pass around. Some girls had actually shed tears over it.
    When Joyce was rummaging in Lil’s drawer one morning, wanting to borrow her pair of black kid gloves, she found Kay’s scrap of sucky blanket.
    â€”Shouldn’t you give this to Auntie Vera? she said.
    â€”She’s never asked me for it. She’s never thought about it.
    It hadn’t been washed and still had its grubby salty smell.
    â€”Don’t tell her I’ve got it, Lil said. I don’t see why I shouldn’t keep something. It’s nothing anybody else could want. But no doubt she’d find some way of putting me in the wrong over it.
    She was sitting at her dressing table but not combing her hair or patting Nivea into her cheeks. Joyce put the bit of blanket away where she had found it, under the pretty perfectly pressed blouses, satin or with lace collars or embroidery, that were never worn. She wondered what her mother did all day at home without Kay to look after. When they all drove off to the city in the Austin in the mornings (Martin had after all got his place at the Cathedral School and was already stealing chemicals from the science labs to make explosives at home), there was a bend in the lane where they used to look back and wave to Lil and Kay. Now Lil didn’t even come out to see them off.
    To Joyce’s dismay, when she talked about the possibility of renting a flat in the city for her second year at college, Lil said she thought it was a good idea and she would bring Ann and Martin and come and live with her.
    â€”I could get a little job to help us all out: with that and the pension we could manage fine.
    â€”Is Aunt Vera’s new house ready for her then?
    â€”I hope she isn’t building any hopes on that. Vera’ll never see the inside of that house. It’s time she faced up to certain things.
    It was true that they hadn’t seen much of Uncle Dick since Kay died, after the first few days. When Vera was in her worst state, staying in bed all day and refusing to eat, he came once and went into the bedroom and brought out all his suits and ties. He didn’t speak to any of them. Peter hated him. Joyce had witnessed a queer sort of fight between them: Peter planting himself with his arms and legs straddled across the kitchen doorway to block his father, saying he wanted to know “what was going on.” He had a long bony face that had somehow never looked right on a child’s body; it was better now he was growing taller and bigger to fit it, but he still couldn’t stop himself from weeping with vexation whenever he was angry. One of the hens scuttled past him into the room, and he kicked at it, missing and raising a flurry of squawks. Uncle Dick tried to push him out of the way and Peter clung to him with his arms and legs, sobbing that he wouldn’t let him go until he told him where he was going.
    Uncle Dick had looked at him dully and with disgust.
    â€”Think of your little sister, he said. You should be ashamed of yourself, making a scene like a girl.
    *   *   *
    It seemed as though once the doors were opened in that house, any kind of crazy desperate thing could fly inside. In the spring after Kay died, Vera was hatching a plan.
    â€”Your aunt’s got some daft idea, said Lil.
    â€”It’s not an idea, said Vera, it’s my duty.
    Joyce stood blinking in the lamplight, in her taffeta striped skirt and her Wellingtons; she was carrying her coat over her arm and her high-heeled brown suede sling-back shoes hooked by their straps over one finger. She had stayed for a party in town and caught the last bus home, which took her as far as Hallam: there she had fished out her Wellingtons from under the hedge where she had hidden them in the morning and walked the last two miles in the moonlight. An