Everything Will Be All Right

Two

One Friday in November, Kay was hot and whining and clung to Lil. In the evening she was worse, and when they telephoned the doctor and described her symptoms he told them to take her straight to the hospital. Uncle Dick drove; Vera sat in the front seat, and the other children saw Lil put Kay into her arms, wrapped in one of the American quilts. They felt the drama of the occasion, but it did not occur to them that Kay would not come back. Just after the car had driven off they found her bit of old sucky blanket lying on the kitchen floor, and Martin ran with it along the lane after the car, but they’d turned onto the road before he could catch up with them. Peter even clowned around after they’d gone, pretending he was ill too, looking up his sleeves and inside his shorts and claiming that each tiny freckle was a rash, squealing and insisting that Lil come to see it, until she rounded on him, asking him if he didn’t have any heart. He then undid his shirt and pretended to look anxiously for it.

Lil got undressed and went to bed eventually, after sitting by the telephone for a couple of hours; this was a kind of endurance in itself, as she feared the thing and hated using it, never knowing which bit she was supposed to speak into (even though Uncle Dick had had it put in for her, so she could place her orders for the delivery vans). It was Joyce who heard the telephone ringing in the deep middle of the night and stumbled downstairs in the dark and then stood with the receiver to her ear in the front room, standing on one leg and then the other because the cold flowing into her bare feet from the stone flags was unendurable.

— We’ve lost her, her aunt said, muffled and different at the other end of the line; and confusedly Joyce thought for a moment she meant it literally, that somehow in the confusion and immensity of the hospital, where Joyce had never been, it might be easy to mislay a little girl, particularly one as stubbornly silent and inconspicuous as Kay.

Lil had heard the telephone too and had followed Joyce down the dark stairs more cautiously. Now she was scratching matches, trying to light a candle.

— Tell your mother we lost her, Aunt Vera was saying angrily.

A match flared up and illuminated Lil’s face just as she heard. Mutely Joyce proffered her the telephone, but Lil waved it off.

— I can’t, I can’t talk to her, she hissed, shaking her head. The match went out.

They stood in a cold dark silence, the sulfur smell livid on the air between them. Joyce understood that this was not just her mother’s usual fear of the phone. Lil was thinking that if she’d been there with Kay, she’d have prevented this, she’d have held it off somehow. It was the way Vera was, so full of opinions, so determined to be different, that brought on catastrophe.

— Is she there? demanded Vera.

— I’ll go and tell her.

— It was meningitis. The doctors gave her antipyretic drugs and antispasmodics. There was nothing they could do to save her. They keep them in the dark, because the light hurts them. I was holding ice to the back of her neck, to help the pain, and then she slipped away. They were bringing the serum from the infirmary to inject her with and the nurse had to tell them she’d gone. About an hour ago. We’ve been sitting with her, your uncle and I.

— All right, I’ll tell her.

Joyce couldn’t begin to find anything appropriate to say to her aunt: she felt herself a strangely neutral quantity, as if she didn’t count, in relation to this disaster. After she hung the receiver back on the telephone, she and Lil went on standing in the dark. Lil gave off an intense heat — she was always opening windows, and she often had to improvise a paper fan to cool herself — and also a special encouraging smell, like sharp dried fruit (this was probably something to do with the cigarettes). Joyce knew both these things intimately, from all the childhood nights she’d slept with her mother, when she was ill or had bad dreams. She would have liked to cling to her now, to be consoled.

— I should have gone with her, Lil wailed softly. I should have been there. They don’t know her like I do. There was nothing wrong with her yesterday. It can’t be right.

Joyce stood awkwardly, not knowing how to help.

Her strongest feeling in the days that followed was embarrassment, and a suspicious jealousy of this grief, dropped down like an extravagant unwanted drama in their lives, spoiling everything. She didn’t even tell anyone about Kay at the College of Art, which she had begun attending that October. When she had to take a day off to go to the funeral, she simply said it was “a relative,” so they all assumed it was someone old and unimportant; and the next morning she was back drinking coffee in a noisy, smoking, joking crowd in the Gardenia Café as if nothing had happened. Pictures of the scene rose in her mind: the small coffin, the stricken adults, Uncle Dick cupping his hand around his eyes to hide his weeping, the dismal Far-mouth cemetery tucked at the end of a raw road that wound past the bonded warehouses from behind the customs offices. She forced them back down again. These two possibilities must be held apart if she was to hang on to this new joyous life where she at last belonged.

* * *

For a week after Kay’s funeral, Vera stayed in her bed. The house was in disarray, the washing wasn’t done, there were no proper meals, the children when they got home from school didn’t change out of their uniforms but sat bickering or pretending to work or play battleships at the table while they listened to the noisy grieving of the two women or the quarreling between Aunt Vera and Uncle Dick. All the doors were left open and nobody tried to hide anything from them; this in itself was frightening. When a confused winter bird got in the house and flew around crashing into the windows, it only seemed like a part of the craziness that had broken in. Guiltily Joyce tried to organize a few things. She brought home potatoes and meat from town and tried to cook stew, only she didn’t know that it took hours for the meat to be tender, so they all sat round the table chewing and then leaving little parcels of pale chewed-up meat around the edges of their plates.

The other children were humbled to discover that Kay, who had been such an ordinary part of their lives and hadn’t ever been much fussed over, could produce such extravagant adult effects. When Vera was crying Peter slammed the door and sat with his fists in his ears (it was a dreadful crying, in a voice of hers they didn’t know, deep and cowlike). One evening Vera came down into the kitchen in her dressing gown with her hair wild and told Lil that she had seen a blue light hovering in her room and had seemed to feel the weight of a child laid in the bed beside her.

— You know about this stuff. I suppose you’ll say it was some sort of sign.

— I wish she would come to me, said Lil dully. I can’t feel anything.

— Is that the next thing? asked Vera. Am I going to go mad? Am I going to start seeing visions and believing in spirits?

Then on the morning she was supposed to return to Amery-James she got up early and washed and dressed in her gray suit absolutely as usual, and pinned up her hair without a word, her brown complexion bleached, her lips pale, her eyes looking swimming and full not because she was weeping but because of how the flesh had fallen away from her face. Ann reported that at school the girls were frightened to do the least thing in lessons to cross her; 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.

— Shouldn’t you give this to Auntie Vera? she said.

— 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.

— 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.

— I could get a little job to help us all out: with that and the pension we could manage fine.

— Is Aunt Vera’s new house ready for her then?

— 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.

— 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.

— Your aunt’s got some daft idea, said Lil.

— 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 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.

— Vera wants to bring our Gilbert to live here.

— Who’s Gilbert?

— Our brother Gilbert.

— I thought he went away?

— He’s been ill. He needs a home to go to.

— You don’t know what he’s like, said Lil. For all you know, he may have had operations; he may be worse.

— Why did he go away in the first place?

— There was trouble. He fought with your grandfather.

— 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.

— 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 college and an older friend at the Girl Guides who’d started her off on her botany and her interest in old churches.

— 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.

— 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.

— Just so long as it doesn’t mean I have to share my room with Ann.

— 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.

— 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.

— 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.

— Did you fight in the war? Martin asked him.

— I did not, he said, licking sugar from his fingers intently. I wanted to, but they wouldn’t allow it.

The children couldn’t always understand him; he mumbled to himself, and his Tyneside accent was broad.

— Gilbert was in hospital, Vera explained busily. He’s been ill a long time, but he’s better now. And a good thing too, that he wasn’t sent to the slaughter. This family gave enough of their young men.

— Our brother Ernest was killed, said Gilbert. And Ivor, your father.

— He remembers! said Lil, as if he’d accomplished something.

— Well, of course he remembers.

They gave him Kay’s room for his own. Lil had dismantled the cot while Vera was away.

— Shouldn’t there be another child? asked Gilbert. A little girl?

For an uncomfortable moment they all thought he meant Kay.

— Oh, Ann’s at a friend’s house! Joyce suddenly understood. She’ll be back for tea.

He nodded.

— I was sure there was two of you.

— Did they cut him? Has he had any operation? Joyce overheard Lil hiss to Vera under cover of a clatter of pans.

— He has not. The doctor said he had an insulin treatment. I can’t speak highly enough of Dr. Gurton. He’s a very dedicated and humane man. He spoke of great changes to come, with new pharmaceutical developments in the field.

— Gilbert doesn’t seem too bad, said Lil cautiously.

* * *

He wasn’t a nuisance around the place. He mostly sat in his room at first, or at the kitchen table, spelling stubbornly through an old newspaper, or he threw sticks for Winnie the bulldog in the field beyond the house. They were all obscurely weighed down with anxiety for him, however, and relieved if ever he showed signs of being happy with them. A one-sided grin slipped on his face occasionally, like the quick flare of an unexpected light. Something in his movements was not quite right for a man of almost thirty; he was too quick and loose and absorbed in himself; he hadn’t assumed the containment and responsive gravity of a grown-up. Martin imitated his slow shuffling walk and his accent; Gilbert didn’t seem to mind. He listened respectfully while Martin explained his latest science project. (This had to do with the parable about the man who was paid in grains of rice on a chessboard, doubling for each square. Martin and his friend were calculating how many grains there would actually be by the sixty-fourth square, and how many it took to make up a square inch, and whether the rice would really cover India a foot deep.)

In his suitcase Gilbert had brought a little case of bits of stuff for making flies for fishing, and for a while he and Martin drew close together, fiddling with pliers and cobbler’s wax, tying fantastically intricate creations out of brightly dyed feathers and bits of tinsel and squirrel hair. He showed Martin how to wet his fingers and run them down the feathers so that the fibers separated and stood out at right angles to the quill. But Gilbert didn’t have the patience for the fishing itself; much to Martin’s indignation he wandered off and came home after an hour or so, leaving Martin to pack away the rods. “He’s got no sticking power,” Martin complained. Neither of them really knew how to fly-fish anyway; it seemed Gilbert had only been taught how to make the flies, not use them. The other thing Gilbert could do impressed Martin more. When he found that Martin had a welding torch and a clamp (they had been Ivor’s), he asked for everyone’s spare pennies and halfpennies, and in one of the outhouses he began welding together a model airplane out of the coins, a Hurricane. He had a picture to work from, torn out of a magazine. The model was a complex and beautiful thing: quite large, about eighteen inches from end to end of the fuselage. The coins were welded together like miniature riveted plates, then burnished coppery pink. Martin learned how to heat the coins and shape them, but he could never make them curve with Gilbert’s precision. Gilbert even made a little pilot, with a tiny helmet, and tiny hands on the controls, and a tiny coppery face with a mustache. He said he had learned to do this in hospital. His life seemed to be made up of hobbies and not of real man’s work, as if he were stuck in boyhood.

He didn’t like Peter playing the violin. Sometimes when Peter played, Gilbert would take Winnie out walking in the fields, or he would sit shaking his head as if he had an insect in his ears; he suggested that Peter should learn “something with a bit more life in it.” Peter, who was touchy about his playing, pretended he couldn’t understand anything Gilbert said. In the evenings Gilbert twiddled the knobs on the wireless to find swing and dance-band music; sometimes he couldn’t tune it properly and sat with his ear close to the wire mesh, frowning with ferocious absorption as he followed after the trailing ends of happy party music that came and went.

From time to time, letters still came for Vera. One afternoon Joyce saw one of them lying opened on her aunt’s dressing table. She took it out of its envelope and read across the top of the sheet of letter paper inside that it was from Appleton Mental Hospital. The Dr. Gurton that Vera took every opportunity to mention was deputy superintendent there. His letter was very short, thanking her for sending him the latest news of Gilbert’s progress, praising her for her enlightened views on the treatment of mental illness in the “therapeutic community.” Scrawled across the bottom of the sheet he had added, “I am sorry, but I do not know the novel by A. P. Herbert on divorce-law reform which you recommend.” Perhaps Dr. Gurton was trying to discourage Vera from sending him letters. Joyce had seen her aunt writing to him, covering sheet after sheet in her handsome spiky italic hand.

She didn’t tell the others. She thought that the mental hospital was worse than prison; she felt incensed against Vera for inflicting Gilbert on them. She began to keep out of his way as if whatever he had might be contaminating. It wasn’t Gilbert himself who disgusted her. He had shown her card tricks and blushed with pleasure when she couldn’t guess how they were done. But the idea of his connection to such an unimaginable place, full of an assembly of all the horrors she had ever had a glimpse of in the street, in tow after shamed mothers, or hobbling and gibbering by themselves: that was unbearable; she had to shut it out. Uncle Dick on one of his rare visits to the house said that Vera must be out of her mind, bringing Gilbert to stay where there were growing girls. Vera retorted that it was Dick who shouldn’t be allowed near growing girls. Joyce asked for a bolt to be fixed on the inside of the bathroom door.

She thought that Gilbert began to avoid contact with her too. This might be because she was going off to college every day; perhaps he thought she was too full of her superior self. Perhaps he was offended by the careful rituals of preparation she went through in the evenings, as if she required more complex maintenance than the rest of them: rinsing her delicates in the sink, mending her stockings, altering clothes, spreading the blanket on the kitchen table to press with a flatiron heated on the stove her outfit for the next day.

* * *

Ann and Gilbert hung about together, following after the geese and, as Lil called it, “bothering them.” Lil had raised the geese from little gray chicks; she used their eggs for baking and omelets, and they were supposed to be eaten at Christmas, although this year because of Kay no one had been able to contemplate asking Farmer Brookes to take them away and kill them. Joyce quailed at their loud gabblings and honkings and snapping beaks, but Ann was fearless with them; she loved them. They attacked any visitors with their wings open and their necks outstretched, hissing; the delivery men wouldn’t leave their vans until Lil had driven the geese off, flapping at them with her apron. Gus, Ann’s favorite, was the ringleader and the most vicious. She crooned to him, smoothing down his creamy fat neck, burying her hands under his wings, kissing his beak; he loved nothing better than to stand pressed dazedly up against her while she tickled him. Gilbert, in a kind of symmetry, made up to Flo. Gus and Flo slept together in the grass in the orchard, a plump heap the color of yellow cream, feathers as satisfactorily intricate as neat knitting. They always slept with one eye open; if two of them slept together, one watched right, one left.

Ann played with Gilbert as if he were another pet. He submitted patiently while she stroked the lines of his face with her fingers, pinched the lobes of his ears, nibbled his hands. They competed in Scissors, Paper, Stone and she always won, because she saw his fist first and changed hers in a fraction of a second. He traipsed round after her in obedience to sharp commands she snapped out in her bossy voice. She didn’t call him Uncle Gilbert as Vera said they should, just Gilly. Once she dressed him up in one of Lil’s dresses over his trousers, tied a bow of ribbon in his hair, and put lipstick and clip earrings on him. When Lil gave her a talking to, Gilbert said she didn’t mean any harm by it.

— You don’t know her, Lil said. She means it, all right.

Ann teased Gus and Flo, offering bits of grass and snatching them out of reach, ruffling their neck feathers the wrong way, picking up their patient pink feet. Flo didn’t mind, but Gus would lose his temper and then Gilbert laughed at him and held his beak closed if he tried to snap at them. Their wings were clipped, but they could fly high enough to then come skidding down along the surface of the rhines with their feet out, sending up a crest of water to either side; they seemed to do it for the sheer pleasure of it. That made Gilbert laugh; he sat watching them for half an hour at a time, crouched down on his haunches with his elbows on his knees. Joyce remembered that in the North she had seen men sitting out in the street like this, the miners outside their houses and on the street corners, smoking and talking with their friends. Another thing that reminded her of those men was the way he smoked Lil’s Woodbines, nursing them down to the last nub between thumb and forefinger, behind the palm of his hand. Vera got exasperated with how he mashed up his potatoes into his gravy and drank his tea out of his saucer, and how he liked to wash stripped down to his trousers at the kitchen sink, lathering and puffing and blowing. Joyce couldn’t see how he was going to last in the South, where none of these ways fitted in with how people did things.

* * *

Lil had packed his bag to go into that place. Her mam had sent the neighbors for her when Gilbert started on his rampage in the afternoon. Not that any of them had thought he was going in for more than a few days. She hadn’t thought at the time that he was sick, just angry. Gilbert had always had a temper; when he was a baby, scarcely toddling, he used to beat his head deliberately against the floor when he was crossed; he’d even crawl off the rug to where he could beat it against the bare tiles because it hurt more. And when he and Ernest fought as boys, Gilbert often came out best even though Ernest was bigger, because Ernest was slow and gentle where Gilbert was wild. He clung on like a vicious dog; she’d seen his big boot stamping down on Ernest’s head where he had him pinned on the floor, cursing him from between his clenched teeth. This fighting used to break Mam’s heart. Gilbert was her favorite, her late last baby, beautiful with his yellow curls. She’d dressed him up when he was small in a plaid tam-o’-shanter set sideways at a jaunty angle; there was a photograph of that somewhere. Not that Gilbert was angry all the time, of course. He could be a charmer, with his quick grin. Girls loved him, all the better it seemed because he was so moody; he was always going with someone, and then the girl would call round asking where he was and Mam had to lie for him, although she’d never tell a lie for anyone but Gilbert. Ivor couldn’t get on with Gilbert. He’d said he was so sharp he’d cut himself.

Something had had to be done, that afternoon. He had thrown furniture down the stairs and fired his air gun out of the window, although the window had been open and he hadn’t hit anything. They couldn’t even remember afterward what the quarrel had been about. It would have been about nothing. It would have been their dad pulling Gilbert up as usual for some little thing, picking up a comb that wasn’t his and putting it in his pocket, or making some disrespectful joke about their grandmother, or even just pushing past Dad in a hurry on the stairs. You could see what it was that made Dad pick on Gilbert. Gilbert went about life in those days with an air as if he knew better than his elders. He didn’t want to work in the mine like his dad and his brother (not that Ernest could get work anyway, before the war). Gilbert was training as an electrician. He said, “Dad, I’ll be earning in a week what you earn in a month.”

Lil remembered packing up his shirts and washcloth and a razor (which of course they’d taken off him), laying it all out with his pen and some writing paper in the little suitcase like you would for a trip to the seaside. She did not see how he would ever be able to forgive her for this. She hadn’t been in her right mind, that winter after Ivor was killed, although she knew she had seemed all right: she hadn’t made a fuss, she’d got on with everyday life. But it should have been her they locked up and gave insulin treatment to, for being mad enough to calmly lay out her brother’s things for him to go to that place. Now she couldn’t look him in the eye.

* * *

It distressed Vera that Gilbert spent so much time asleep. He didn’t get up until late; then often during the day when they looked for him they’d find he’d slipped back into his room and into bed again. She tried to get him to take an interest in things. She got down poetry books from her shelves and read to him, and in the evenings she read from her complete set of Dickens (“my beloved Dickens” she called him). She suggested that they should go out walking and she could teach him to identify the flora and fauna of the area. She brought up topical subjects to discuss with him, collectivization in the Soviet Union, vegetarianism, the atom bomb. Gilbert wrote a beautiful painstaking round copperplate hand (they knew this from the crosswords he did, or when he kept the score at cards), but he didn’t show any interest in the diary Vera encouraged him to keep. She worried about what she called to Lil his “physical needs.” Sometimes unself-consciously he scratched or rubbed his groin, and she quickly knocked his hand away.

— He needs to be doing some hard physical work, she said to Lil. To tire himself out. Perhaps I’ll ask at the farm if they need anyone.

Gilbert began to work for Farmer Brookes. It was a muddy old farm with a dozen cows and small fields growing mangolds and hay and millet. The farmer ran it with his wife; their son worked on the docks. Gilbert helped with the milking — which was still done by hand — and put the churns out on their platform to be picked up by the lorry from the Milk Marketing Board; he fetched the cows home from the fields in the afternoons, and in June he helped with the hay harvest.

— It’s what he needs, said Vera. Outdoor physical work, wholesome and timeless, close to nature, not intellectually demanding.

Gilbert wasn’t terribly reliable. Sometimes he got up late, or wandered home early, or forgot to finish some dirty job. Luckily the farm was run on haphazard lines, and the easygoing old farmer seemed to adapt to Gilbert’s arbitrary comings and goings. Anyway, he was only paying Gilbert a few shillings.

— Don’t you think he’s happy here? Vera wondered in the kitchen, bent over the dirty saucepan she was scrubbing, burdened with worry, shedding hairpins into the dishwater. Don’t you think we did right?

— Search me, said Lil, with a closed face, cleaning eggs at the table with a wet rag.

— With his family round him instead of strangers, Vera went on. Free to come and go as he wants, working out in the fresh air, taking a new interest in life. Dr. Gurton thinks it must be doing him a world of good.

* * *

Lil had only been to visit Gilbert in the hospital once. The idea of this scalded her now, in his presence. How must he account for this? What must he think of her? She had pretended to herself that because he was ill he would not notice whether she went or not, but she was sure now that she had always known this was not true. When Gilbert was born she had just started in service; she came home on her days off and lavished all her love on him, imagining he was a baby of her own, dressing him up in his pretty white dresses, and wheeling him proudly round the streets in the old pram. For her wedding he had been a page boy in a velvet jacket, and he had sung out all by himself with “There is a green hill far away” at the moment she and Ivor were exchanging their vows (she was delighted, but Ivor was put off and muddled his responses).

She had not gone to visit Gilbert in that place again because the one time she saw him there it had been a horror; she had been visited in her dreams afterward by the little twisted man with a brown wizened face and cleft palate who had come in the room while they were waiting for Gilbert to be brought out; he had asked her for cigarettes and sworn at her when she didn’t respond to him because she didn’t understand. Everything she was afraid of in those days she had simply shut out from her thoughts. She had known they were giving Gilbert something to keep him in a stupor, because she could smell it everywhere (Mam thought that the stupor was his illness). He hadn’t said much; he told them he had asked to work in the hospital laundry because you could give yourself a decent shave there at your own pace, and he complained that the pillows were stuffed with straw and they were put to bed at seven-thirty. His voice was slurred as if his tongue were thick, and he had a bruise on his temple. When they got up to go he asked when he could come home with them, and Mam had said, Soon, as soon as he was better.

— I don’t want to miss everything, he said. I know I’ve got some catching up to do.

Mam went up there every week. Even Vera had gone more often than Lil had, though she had never been much interested in Gilbert when he was born. It was Vera who told Lil that the patients weren’t allowed knives, so they had to eat everything with a spoon. But Vera had been off in her own dreams, at that time when Gilbert was put away. With Dick gone in the navy and Peter at school, she had volunteered to work at a book collection point in a church hall where people brought their old books to be pulped and made into paper for the war effort. She said she was sorting and bundling up the books, but she was mostly feverishly reading them. She went home with armfuls more to read before she brought them back again the following week. She sometimes hardly knew who she was when you spoke to her.

Lil had said to her mother that there was nothing wrong with Gilbert. But her mother lived in fear of the doctors and wouldn’t argue with them or make any trouble when they asked her to sign papers. They said he had delusions, and that he was a danger to himself and others. And Lil allowed herself, so long as she didn’t actually have to see him, to pretend to believe all this. She was kept busy anyway thinking about other things: the children and the house and trying to take in a bit of sewing to eke out her war widow’s pension. But she knew all the time he must be wondering why his favorite sister didn’t come.

* * *

Gilbert got lovesick over a girl: Daphne, a niece of farmer Brookes’s wife. She had a job in the smelting works, but she used to cycle up from where she lived in Farmouth and visit her aunt on summer evenings.

Joyce knew Daphne. She had never spoken to her, but she had seen her, before she even knew she was Mrs. Brookes’s niece. One hot summer’s afternoon a couple of years before, she and Ann had decided not to wait at the Seamen’s Mission for their uncle but to walk the two miles home instead. The road ran past the smelting works; the workers must have been on a break, and because it was so hot they were out in the yard, the men in their vests, the girls barelegged, smoking and bantering. Joyce and Ann had put their school hats in their satchels and carried their blazers over their arms, but nonetheless they must have looked unmistakably like the nicely brought-up schoolgirls they were; they toiled past in an agony of conspicuousness, their faces set in masks of indifference to the remarks and jokes that flew after them hard as stones, about French lessons and hot stockings and getting their uniforms dirty in the grass. Daphne was the loudest of the girls in the yard, and the one who broke into the Carmen Miranda impression (“I–I-I–I-I–I-I–I like you ve-ry much”), at the top of her voice, swinging her hips and waving her arms over her head, showing the sprouting thick dark hair under her arms, making everyone laugh at her. She was only about Joyce’s age, but she was tall and big-busted, with a curved red-lipsticked mouth and a luxuriant black perm. Her eyes were small and darting: black, with a slight cast in one of them.

After that, although she avoided walking past the smelting works ever again, Joyce seemed to see Daphne often, around in Farmouth and sometimes on the road up to the farm. And always Daphne seemed to look at her with dangerous, intimate mockery, although they never spoke. The whole gist of the teasing and the danger was that it was exposing and humiliating to be still at school, and superior to be adult and free and working. Yet complicatedly what Joyce felt with a plunge of guilt whenever she saw Daphne was that there was no good reason why she should be still at school, and then at college, and why Daphne should have to be exposed to what Joyce imagined was the horror of the smelting works.

Gilbert borrowed an old bike from the farm, and every evening that Daphne didn’t appear he rode down to Farmouth to be near her. Sometimes she visited the house with some message for Gilbert from her uncle. It wasn’t clear whether she encouraged him or not. If ever anyone saw them together, Daphne would be in the lead, swaying her hips to some dance tune inside her head, and Gilbert would be traipsing after, neck bent, eyes down. She called him Geordie and laughed at the way he spoke. Vera followed the affair with great anxiety and warned Gilbert to be careful; he shook his head as if her words were a distracting buzzing.

Martin and Peter hated Daphne and were terrified of her. She called them little boys and told them how the farmers had to cut off the lambs’ “little winkies” to make them behave. They reacted to her violently, frenziedly; if she touched them they scrubbed the place with soap, and they said she smelled. She did wear a lot of scent — Chypre de Coty, which Gilbert replaced for her out of his wages from Farmer Brookes — and it was true too that if she’d cycled up from Farmouth she would be sweating, with big wet patches showing on her blouse under her arms, her face red, drops of sweat trickling down the sides of her nose. Joyce would have been humiliated and appalled at herself in that condition, but Daphne seemed to relish it, wiping her face with the back of her hand, blowing and gasping comically while she got her breath.

— Hot ride? Joyce said.

— Bloody hot, said Daphne. Want to feel?

And she pulled her sopping shirt away from her wet back as if Joyce seriously might.

Daphne didn’t exactly make conversation; she kept up a stream of jokes and sayings and teasings. When she made a burping noise she said, “Pardon me for being rude; it was not me, it was my food”; she told Peter to stop gawping or the wind would change and he’d be stuck like that; she said, “Every little helps, said the lady as she piddled in the sea,” and, when she leaned across someone, “Scuse me reaching, I’ve just got off the boat.”

When Martin and Peter disappeared sometimes in the evenings, Joyce suspected they were haunting the dunes behind the beach in hope and dread of finding Gilbert and Daphne there together.

— She’s foul, Mum, said Peter. You should tell Uncle Gilbert he’s not allowed to bring her in the house.

— He’s a perfect right to make friends with whoever he likes, Vera said sorrowfully.

* * *

Influenced by Mr. Scofield, his violin teacher, Peter had started listening to classical music. They had a gramophone in the front room that Dick had bought secondhand for Vera in the North: a tall wooden cabinet with a lid that propped open at the top, doors at the front, a wind-up handle on the side. The needles were made of bone and had to be sharpened on a piece of emery paper; new ones were kept in a tiny tin with the His Master’s Voice dog on the front. Peter sorted through the records in their brown card sleeves, mastering the names of the composers, sampling and replacing them, quickly expert in the rituals of placing the record, checking it for dust, lowering the arm. Vera found him adjusting the speed because the turntable was too slow and played everything slightly out of tune. She would never have noticed. She gave way to her son with a new respect and sat mutely while he explained to her.

— Listen to this, Ma, this is a jolly bit. Then it gets all tragic and moody. Especially listen to the horns. Only they ought to be brighter. The Philharmonic do it better; you should hear the recording old Scoffer’s got, it’s splendid.

The front room smelled of damp. The flags were laid directly on the earth, and they hardly ever lit a fire in there except at Christmas. It was overcrowded with big pieces of furniture, chairs and sideboards and occasional tables that no one had tried to arrange properly. Vera’s things were heavy carved oak; she and Dick had bought them along with their first house in Gateshead. Lil’s were cheap utility. They were doubled up in readiness for when their lives might separate again.

Peter was as tall as Vera was now. He started to advise her on her dress, as well as on her reading and her opinions. Her blue scarf was a ghastly clash with her green blouse, and if she didn’t replace her horrible old handbag he wouldn’t be seen out with her. She ought to read Dylan Thomas and George Barker, not stuffy old Masefield and de la Mare. Vera was surprisingly compliant, almost girlish in her willingness to relinquish her command to this authoritative son. She looked at him in quizzical pleased surprise, as though she did not quite know where he had sprung from.

* * *

Gilbert said he was going to Marry Daphne, but no one knew whether he had really asked her. Ann pestered him over it: Was it going to be in church? What would Daphne wear? Had he bought her a ring? Would there be bridesmaids?

— And if you have children, what are you going to call them?

— Now that’s enough, said Lil sternly. Stop that teasing.

— It’s not teasing, Ann said, opening her eyes wide. Isn’t it real? Why can’t I ask him?

One summer afternoon Joyce was packing in her bedroom; she was going to spend a week in Paris with friends from the Art College. Dresses and blouses and underclothes, carefully mended and pressed, were laid out on the bed beside the open suitcase. She had sewed herself a new gray Liberty print dress with a full skirt and a white patent-leather belt; to earn the money for this and for the trip she had been working since the college term ended for a friend of Uncle Dick’s in a marine insurance office in the city. Swallows were swooping dizzily in the big empty blue bowl of sky outside; the wood pigeons were heating up their end-of-tether crooning; the weather was languid and dreamy. Then Gilbert was suddenly in the yard, home from the Brookeses before he should have been, in a flurry of noise and banging.

Joyce looked out from her window; Lil and Ann ran from the kitchen to see what the matter was. Gilbert picked up the tin bucket from where it stood outside the back door and sent it hurtling across the yard. Lil had washed the kitchen floor and the bucket was full of dirty water, which sluiced out in an interesting arc, sending the hens squawking and flattening themselves close to the ground in panic. The bucket bounced off a wall and along the cobbles with a jubilant clanging. Lil and Ann screamed. Gilbert kicked at the hens, and then he picked up the outhouse shovel and hurled that after the bucket.

— Gilly, don’t! cried Ann.

— Stop it, stop that! said Lil, running after him and trying to hold on to him.

He reached around for something else to throw, found the bike he’d just ridden back on, and picked it up in his hands as if it were a toy.

— Whatever’s the matter? Put that down and stop misbehaving. You’ll hurt somebody.

Gilbert didn’t say a word. He lifted the heavy old bike right up above his head and flung it down flat so that it jarred and leaped and skidded on its side across to where Ann dodged quickly back inside the kitchen. The bike lamp crunched and sprinkled glass like sugar; the front wheel buckled. Gilbert shook off Lil and picked up a rusted old rake, which he thrust deliberately through a window with an explosive tinkling; it was only a small filthy old cobwebbed pane in the outhouse where they kept the chicken feed and paraffin. Then, with the rake, Gilbert strode off down the side of the house.

Lil burst into tears and held her apron over her face.

Vera had been making notes from a new book on Victorian social reform at a table in the front room. Now she came blinking into the aftershock of the scene.

— Goodness me, she said, whatever was all that about?

— You see, said Lil, shaking her head behind her apron, he isn’t all right.

— What did he say?

— He didn’t say anything. He’s gone down to the rhine.

Vera took in the damage: it didn’t look much with Gilbert gone, just the bike sprawled down and the yard untidy.

— Well, this is too silly, she said. I suppose I’d better go after him and ask him what’s going on, if nobody else will.

She pushed her hair behind her ears and set off down the path with an impatient schoolmistress’s forbearing frown and authoritative step.

— He’s got the rake! shouted Lil.

— Oh, has he indeed! Vera retorted, undeterred.

Joyce joined the others downstairs, and they waited in the yard for Vera to come back.

— Will he try to drown himself? Lil said suddenly.

Ann and Joyce looked at her in dismay; although the rhines were so dry in the summer months that drowning would have taken some ingenuity.

There was a sudden fracas of agitated honking from the geese down at the rhine. Then they saw Vera: running and leaping up the path in her stocking feet, her shoes kicked off somewhere, her hair flying and her mouth open, yelling to them to get inside. They bundled in and she flew into the house after them, gasping for breath, and slammed and bolted the door, leaning back against it with her chest heaving and her hair drooping out of its pins. She and Lil stared wide-eyed at each other.

— Did he say anything?

Vera shook her head.

— Did he go for you?

She nodded.

— Hell’s bells.

For the rest of the afternoon they stayed bolted in the house in a state of siege, with someone on lookout at the upstairs window for when the boys came back from fishing. Lil thought they should phone Dick, but Vera said to wait and see how Gilbert was when he calmed down. They waited for him to turn up at the house, with or without his rake. By nighttime he still hadn’t come; they went to bed with the back door bolted but left the outhouses open so he would have somewhere warm to sleep.

* * *

In the morning Ann said that Gus was acting funny. Vera went out to see if Gilbert was anywhere around; she even went down to the rhine and back, treading carefully in her slippers in the dew, looking for her shoes beside the path.

— Gone, she said, he’s gone.

The sisters looked at each other in consternation.

— What will he do? said Lil.

— What shall I tell Dr. Gurton? Vera wailed.

They stuffed her shoes with newspaper and put them to dry, while they used the telephone to call the hospital, long distance.

— Look at Gus, said Ann. There’s something wrong with him.

The geese were in the yard, wanting to be fed. Gus stood apart from the others, his wings half open and dragging, his eyes filmed over. He wouldn’t let any of them come near him — he flapped and struggled if they tried — but they could see his neck was twisted, with an ugly lump in it, and he couldn’t hold up his head. Vera sent Martin to call Farmer Brookes, who came round to have a look.

— How’s he gone and done that? the farmer said.

— We don’t know, said Vera and Lil together.

— We just found him like that, when we got up this morning, Lil added.

The farmer persuaded Gus that he meant well, and Gus let him probe gently with his fingers into the creamy neck.

— Looks like it’s broken, I’m afraid, poor old chappie. Got caught, maybe, in a bit of wire or something; although he’s not cut himself. Got any apples left to make sauce? Might as well put him out of his misery, Mrs. Stevenson. Want me to see to it?

Farmer Brookes carried Gus off through the orchard in the morning sunshine, holding him around the middle; Gus opened his wings so that it looked as though the farmer as he walked was wrestling with an angel. Ann wouldn’t watch him go; she sank down on the doorstep with her head buried in her arms in grief. They told the Brookeses to eat the goose themselves.

* * *

When joyce came back from paris, she caught the last bus out of the city to the docks; she had arranged to telephone from the Docks Police Station for Vera to come and pick her up in the car. The bus was crowded. A horrible old sailor with gray stubbly cheeks and breath that reeked of drink fell asleep beside her, and his head rolled onto her shoulder so many times that she gave up trying to push him off. She concentrated all her efforts on keeping Paris intact inside her — coffee and bread and Dior and wine and a little restaurant with red-checked tablecloths on the Boul’ Mich — so as not to lose one precious drop in collision with the ugly things of home. She had felt instantly, intimately, that she belonged to Paris; miraculously, she had seemed to understand what the Parisians said to her, far beyond the reach of her schoolgirl French. When the bus stopped and all the passengers shuffled up to get off, she realized with a shock that Daphne had been sitting all the time only a couple of seats behind her. Joyce had to pull down her heavy suitcase from the rack; she was hotly aware of the other girl watching her struggle, but they didn’t smile or even look at each other.

As Joyce carried her suitcase the fifty yards in the dark to the dock gates, Daphne came up swiftly behind her on her bike, which she must have left locked up somewhere near the bus stop. Joyce heard the whirring of her wheels and smelled Chypre de Coty.

— Bong-jooer. Had a nice time in old gay Paree?

— Yes, thank you, said Joyce.

Daphne was wobbling on the bike, weaving the handlebars to keep pace with Joyce’s walking.

— Where’s Gilbert? she asked.

— I don’t know. He went away, I think.

Daphne described a wide arc, then came alongside Joyce again.

— One sandwich short of a picnic, if you ask me. Something funny about him.

Joyce changed hands on her suitcase.

— Don’t you think?

— I’m afraid I have to go in here, said Joyce, to use the telephone.

Daphne grinned incredulously through the gates at the police station; possibly she thought Joyce was so frightened of her that she was going to take refuge with the law.

— Oh, well, she said, if you see him, tell him au revoyer from me. Tell him he’s a naughty boy, leaving my uncle in the lurch.

She cycled off under the streetlamps, making the bike dance in wide curves from one side of the road to the other, sitting back on the saddle with her hands in the pockets of her short jacket.

* * *

They found out that gilbert had hitched his way up north to see his mother; their sister Selina, whose husband played the clarinet at the Theatre Royal in Newcastle, gave him some money. After that there was no news from him for years. He left the model Hurricane with half a fuselage and one wing; Martin tried to finish it but in the end had to resign himself to building a crash scene around it, using artificial grass from the greengrocer’s and making ruined buildings out of papier-mâché, decorating them with German shop signs and a Nazi flag.

Someone explained to Joyce much later — at a time when all the old methods of treating psychiatric patients were coming into disrepute and everybody was reading R. D. Laing — what the insulin treatment actually consisted of. Patients fasted for fourteen hours and then were put into a rubber sided bed, as a protection against the convulsions produced by the drug; an insulin coma was deliberately induced, and then the patient had to be revived by counteractive injections into the vein. These didn’t always work; sometimes there was an unseemly struggle round the bed, bringing the patient back to consciousness. Joyce told admiringly then the story of her aunt’s rescue; she didn’t confess how fervently at the time she had wished Gilbert back where he came from, and how sometimes even now she looked and didn’t look for him with guilty dread in the faces of the beggars and winos who passed her in the street.

Lil became convinced Gilbert had joined up and fought in Korea and died there. She said she’d seen him once at a séance; she spoke about it in the special voice she used for the transcendent: stubborn and emotionally uplifted.

— He was in uniform. He was all bloody. But he was very calm, and smiling. He came to tell us that he was finally at peace.

This voice particularly irritated Vera.

— It’s enough to make anyone despair, said Vera. How can you be comforted by something that didn’t happen? You don’t seem able to distinguish between dreams and real things.

Vera at that time was clearing out cupboards in the old house, throwing away the accumulated rubbish of their life there with ruthlessness and zeal. She and Peter were going to move into a flat near Amery-James; she was going to start divorce proceedings against Uncle Dick.

— Peace! she exclaimed. What kind of travesty is that? Peace through war. Is that the best solution you can come up with?