Everything Will Be All Right by Tessa Hadley Read Free Book Online

children weren’t around. This was presumably because she was the oldest and a girl; they thought it was time she began to pick up on such things, just as a year or so ago it had been time for the sanitary pads and belt that Lil had slipped without explanation into her drawer. After the dishes were washed up, the sisters sat at the table and drank milky instant coffee; when the light faded one of them would light the paraffin lamp and pump it up until the mantle glowed. The children would still be calling back and forth outside, their voices resonant and remote in the near-dark. Joyce squeezed herself inconspicuously with her book onto a little stool by the wall, picking at the black rubber flooring Uncle Dick had laid over the cold flagstones (it was made out of machine belts from some factory in the Docks that had closed down).
    â€”It happened with Peter, and then again down here when I fell for Kay, said Vera. Not that you want them near you when you’re off-color. But you expect some consideration: not having the blame for it thrown up in your face.
    â€”Men don’t like it, said Lil. Ivor didn’t want anything to do with it. “Let me know what we’ve had when you’re all tidied up,” he said, when things got started. Though he was always as good as gold afterward; he loved the children.
    â€”Dick hated the sight of me. If I ever came out of the bath in my dressing gown when I was in that way he’d make a face as if I’d shown him something nasty. I knew he didn’t like to touch me, those times, even accidentally. He doesn’t even like to be near me when I’m coming unwell.
    â€”I suppose it’s natural. We get used to it, don’t we? It must seem strange to the men.
    â€”I’m sure he used to talk with her about what would happen, if I died having Kay, said Vera. There was something he said once, he didn’t mean it to come out, something like “if there are any complications.” And when I looked at him I just knew. And he knew I knew.
    â€”You showed them, then.
    â€”Oh, I wasn’t going to remove myself for anybody’s convenience. I’m not now. Whatever she may think.
    It was always difficult for Joyce to take in that only four years ago Aunt Vera must have been pregnant. She tried to imagine her wearing the sort of coyly pretty maternity frocks over discreet bumps that you saw in the magazines or smiling over tiny garments for her layette. But Aunt Vera didn’t seem to have the necessary feminine attributes: she was too tall, too decided, too old; her body had entered into the phase of those lumpy stolidities that didn’t suggest the things that had to do with making babies. The pregnancy had happened after the Trowers moved down from the North. Joyce had heard Lil and the other sisters talk about this baby as Dick’s “little peace offering.”
    Joyce noticed that when Lil and Vera talked about men, even Ivor, they often used this language of mock conflict, as if there had to be a war between men and women. Listening, soaking it up, Joyce thought how differently she would do things. She thought how much better she would handle Uncle Dick, if she were them. “If he were mine,” she thought to herself, her face heating up at the illicit form of words. If she had been Aunt Vera, she would have made an effort to make the place nice when he came home, instead of complaining to him about the children or the smoking stove or the stinking privy the moment he walked through the door. She would have talked about things he might be interested in, rather than going on about “your beloved Churchill” or making sarcastic remarks about the Masons if she knew he was going to a Lodge meeting.
    Even Lil somehow managed better than Vera. You could see she was in awe of Dick’s authority in the wide world, granting him absolute superiority in all the mysteries she was defeated by. She was furious if