Free Everything Will Be All Right by Tessa Hadley Page A

owl had swooped over her head and her heart turned over; a car passed and she hid from it in the bushes. And all the time her thoughts had been so entirely absorbed in replaying the confused and intricately significant exchanges of the party she had left behind that now, as the two of them turned on her as she came through the door, she hardly knew where she was. She was afraid they would notice on her breath what she had been drinking: a fruit cup made deadly with pure alcohol stolen from the hospital by someone’s boyfriend who was a medic. Luckily she had walked off the worst of her intoxication, only as she adjusted to the paraffin-smelling warmth she swayed with a twinge of nausea.
    Lil had put a beer set on her hair and it was pinned to her head in flat curls tied around with an old scarf.
    â€”Vera wants to bring our Gilbert to live here.
    â€”Who’s Gilbert?
    â€”Our brother Gilbert.
    â€”I thought he went away?
    â€”He’s been ill. He needs a home to go to.
    â€”You don’t know what he’s like, said Lil. For all you know, he may have had operations; he may be worse.
    â€”Why did he go away in the first place?
    â€”There was trouble. He fought with your grandfather.
    â€”Your grandfather was a real Victorian, said Lil, with pride. He didn’t have the modern ideas about encouraging children. After Ernest went off to the war, he came down very hard on Gilbert, because he was the only one he’d got left—the only son.
    When they lived in the North, Joyce had often visited the tiny terraced house where her mother and aunt and their five brothers and sisters grew up, with its curtains pulled almost across at the parlor window, even in daylight, and a hairy sofa that prickled the backs of bare legs tormentingly. A short walk away from the house down a side street, through a door locked with a key, was her grandfather’s garden, full of brilliant flowers; once he had cut a big red one to put behind her ear, and then later at tea an earwig had crawled out of it and fallen onto her frock. Vera and Lil told fearsome stories of their father, of how he was so strict that when they were children they had to stand up to eat at table, and how once he snatched a book Vera was reading and threw it into the fire. Joyce found it hard to connect these stories with the gentle old man she remembered, scrupulous to protect her frock and shoes from dirt, laying out a bit of clean sack on top of a bucket for her to sit on. His huge hard hands and flat fingers were covered with old seams and scars that were blue like ink from the coal dust that got in (he worked in a mine). Dexterously he twisted off dead flower heads, pulled out weeds, and fastened leaning stems to lengths of cane with raffia, but when he put the flower in her hair his fingers trembled with the effort, as though she were something he was afraid to touch.
    He was dead now, and her grandmother lived with one of her other daughters in Hebburn and couldn’t remember things.
    â€”They were uneducated people, said Vera. That could be forgiven them. But they had a hatred of learning. I used to creep down at night and rake up the coals to read by. Of course I pulled that book back out of the fire, but it was scorched and dirty. It was a library book: Mrs. Cruikshank’s John Halifax, Gentleman. I thought I would never be able to visit the library again, I thought that was an end of everything I cared about. But then I met the librarian in the street, and she was so kind, and I told her all of it, and she came round and talked to Mam and Dad. “You don’t know what a precious thing you’ve got here,” she said. Not that they listened.
    Several of Aunt Vera’s stories featured women like this, enlightened and resilient and independent, intervening on her behalf with the forces of ignorance and superstition. As well as the librarian, there was the teacher at grammar school who’d helped her get into