Free Everything Will Be All Right by Tessa Hadley Page B

college and an older friend at the Girl Guides who’d started her off on her botany and her interest in old churches.
    â€”Uncle Gilbert won’t want to come here, will he? Joyce asked. Hasn’t he got a home of his own?
    Lil looked a heavy warning at her sister.
    â€”I’ve changed, Joyce, said Vera dramatically. I can’t just sit back and watch all the iniquity of the world and not do anything about it.
    Joyce shrugged.
    â€”Just so long as it doesn’t mean I have to share my room with Ann.
    â€”Vera should learn to let well alone, said Lil with foreboding.
    It occurred to Joyce that Gilbert might have been in prison. The idea alarmed her; but she didn’t want to ask them directly. There was something that made Joyce queasy in the conspiratorial way the two sisters sat brooding over things together at the kitchen table, even when they were quarreling. Their talk was as dark and thick and sticky as the malt and cod-liver oil the children were dosed with to keep off colds. She didn’t want to give them the opportunity to hush up and exchange scalding glances and shut her out. She concentrated on her plans to get away and live a new young person’s life with her friends in town.
    *   *   *
    Mysterious letters arrived at the house. Aunt Vera snatched them up and read them when she came in after school, not even waiting to take off her hat and gloves. Lil wrung her tea towel into a wet knot, in anxious resistance. Then in the Easter holidays Vera drove off in the Austin Seven and was gone three days without any explanation. Joyce was drawing in the apple room when she heard the car whining in the lane and looked out of the window to see it nose onto the cobbles in front of the house, Aunt Vera sitting upright and tense in the passenger seat and at the wheel a boy with a long pale face and a tall shock of hair that looked fair through the windscreen glass. In fact, when he stepped out of the car she saw that he was a man, not a boy, and that his hair was silvery, like straw left to leach its color out in the rain. Aunt Vera climbed shakily from her side, and Joyce knew from the stoop of her shoulders and her brave lopsided smile, as she threw her hand in a gesture of welcome around at the house and the outbuildings, that she was already full of doubt at what she had done, bringing her brother home (in spite of herself, Vera could never smother how her posture and movements exposed the truth of her feelings).
    Joyce could not think why Gilbert had come. He was tall and thin, and although he didn’t have a young face he seemed awkward like a teenager, with extravagantly long limbs and ears and nose reddened as if they had stuck out too far into a rough wind. He stood lost in the slight drizzle in the yard and showed no sign of feeling rescued. Vera had to take him by an elbow and coax him inside. The sleeves of his suit were too short above his bony wrists.
    â€”Lillie’s here, Lil’s here, she said. Come in and see Lillie.
    He submitted to her.
    They were all introduced to him in the crowded kitchen (Peter came from his violin practice, Martin from where he was building a rocket in an outhouse). Gilbert’s shirt collar was yellowed and tight over his Adam’s apple; his big shoes were cracked and hard and mottled with white as if they had been put away too long in a cupboard; his deep-set blue eyes were glancing and evasive. He put his arms around Lil, who turned to him from where she had lifted a panful of her special doughnuts out of the stove with a blank reluctant face; she patted his bent back as if she were soothing a child.
    â€”Hallo, Gil, she said warily. After all this time.
    At the kitchen table he ate one doughnut after another, while they were still too hot for the others to touch.
    â€”Did you fight in the war? Martin asked him.
    â€”I did not, he said, licking sugar from his fingers intently. I wanted to, but they wouldn’t