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

elsewhere.
    â€”I’ve got to be back at the docks.
    Lil picked up the knives and forks from the floor when he had left and wiped them on her apron; then she carried the fabrics out of the way of tea into the front room.
    â€”You ought to go to this Ladies’ Night affair, she said.
    Vera’s face was closed.
    â€”Why shouldn’t you go? Why shouldn’t you have something nice to wear? You’re his rightful wife.
    â€”I don’t want to spend my evening listening to that mumbo-jumbo.
    Lil swept her sewing table clear from all the bits left over from Ann’s Mary Queen of Scots costume. Then she shook the satin and velvet out from their folds until they were heaped up in sumptuous excess in the dim light. The curtains in this room were always half drawn across; they didn’t use it much.
    Vera stood passively while Lil draped the brown satin over her gray pleated skirt and cream blouse, her usual things for school.
    â€”It suits you! said Lil. It goes with your dark hair. See how it hangs. It’s such good quality, so heavy. Look how it takes the light. The dress wants a classic line, very fitting; then a velvet bolero with a three-quarter-length sleeve. You could bind the edge of the bolero with the satin. Wear it with those earrings Mam gave you. You could wear it for the pageant, too.
    Vera looked down at herself, hesitating. She leaned forward onto one hip to make the fabric swing and swirl.
    â€”I certainly don’t want anyone else flaunting about in it, she said.
    Lil tucked an end of the velvet around Vera’s shoulders and under her arms; then she and Joyce stood squinting their eyes at her, trying to blur the draped fabrics into looking like the finished outfit. She submitted to their attention with unaccustomed meekness.
    â€”It could look very elegant, said Lil.
    Lil and Joyce both set about persuading her, as if they knew something she didn’t know about what this dress could do for her, something she was incapable of managing for herself. Now that Joyce had seen the blond woman, she was afraid her aunt didn’t know what she was up against.
    *   *   *
    â€”I might go to art school, Joyce said to her art teacher.
    Miss Leonard was tiny, ancient-looking, with a face as lined and vivid as a monkey’s; she walked with an odd sliding motion, lifting her knees and carrying her head very high and far back as if she were keeping her face above the dull muddy water of the rest of school. Girls who wanted to get on with some drawing or painting were allowed to be up in the art room at lunchtime. Joyce was making fussy tiny changes to a drawing of an extravagant tropical shell gorgeously lined with pink, although she was sure that her fussing wasn’t going to make the timorous drawing any better. She didn’t know what art school was, really, anymore than she had a clear idea of university, although she knew her aunt wanted her to go there. She hadn’t thought about going to art school until the very moment she said it.
    Miss Leonard was working in pastels on a still life she had arranged on a table for one of her classes: two jugs glazed in thick yellow against a scrap of oriental rug with a couple of lemons. She gave her a rapid unimpressed bird glance.
    â€”I thought you were one of the brainy ones?
    â€”Oh no, not really. Joyce blushed.
    â€”So why on earth do you want to go to art school? Apart from being too stupid to do anything else?
    â€”Well, I love art, of course.
    One skeptical eyebrow went up: the eyes flickered rapidly, assessingly, between the lemons and her paper.
    â€”Oh, don’t love art. That’s sounds frightfully high-minded. You’ll never make a living at it, you know.
    Joyce was shocked.
    â€”I never dreamed I could make a living!
    â€”You have to teach, or else you do illustrating, if you can get it. Unless of course you’re one of the lucky few. The ones who’ve really got it.