Everything Will Be All Right

Four

It had been going to be such a lovely Saturday.

Full, and busy, but Joyce didn’t mind that. In the morning, while Daniel had his nap and Zoe played, she made the chocolate cream pudding from a Len Deighton recipe cut out from the newspaper: cream, eggs, sugar, butter, brandy, chocolate. The family had been eating meanly for a week — beans on toast, tomatoes on toast, plates of cheese and lettuce for her — so that she could splash out on this dinner party. She stuck sponge finger biscuits like a palisade all around the cut glass bowl Lil had given her, then poured the chocolate mixture into the middle and put it in the fridge to set. She impressed herself by resisting the temptation to taste any or scrape out the bowl and as a consequence felt gratifyingly hollowly thin.

When she had washed up the cooking things, she had time to sit down at the table and drink a black instant coffee while Zoe had squash and biscuits. Zoe — a steady shy four-year-old, with light brown hair cut short like a boy’s — was taking advantage of Daniel’s being out of the way to fill in her magic coloring book; you brushed the drawings with plain water and like a miracle colors sprang out from the page. She worked painstakingly and neatly, her tongue stuck out in concentration, on a panting dog with its head cocked winningly sideways, boys playing ball in a suburban garden, a little girl in a maid’s apron and cap. Ray had groaned in real pain when Zoe first brought the coloring book home (his mother had bought it for her); he threatened to throw it out, but Joyce understood the appeal of these happy obedient pictures and had signaled frowningly to him not to make a fuss. Anyway, Ray had soon forgotten about the book’s existence.

Yesterday Joyce had dusted and vacuumed and washed floors until she was sweating and gritty with dirt. Today, for the first time in weeks, the sun shone into their basement flat: a weak sweet early spring sunshine that fingered its exposure into some forgotten corners and found out cobwebs, so that she had to get her duster out again. She didn’t mind the excuse for gazing critically around her. The rooms awaited company like a stage set: centered on the distinction and seriousness of Ray’s paintings, glowing with the careful thought and tending she had put into all that surrounded the paintings, the tasteful and original furniture and ornaments. She was full (it had turned out) of ingenuity and practical resourcefulness: she knew how to make their flat look modern and stylish even on Ray’s meager income (he was only working part-time at the college and hadn’t sold much work this past couple of years). She had rescued some dainty kitchen chairs someone had put out for a Guy Fawkes night bonfire and painted them with black enamel. She had had flat squares of foam cut and covered them in thick colored cottons, orange and olive green and mustard yellow, then piled them up in a block. She spread tall grasses and flower heads out to dry on newspapers above the immersion heater in the airing cupboard and arranged them in two old earthenware tobacco jars she had bought in a junk shop for a shilling. The look she went for was contemporary Scandinavian, earth colors and clean shapes: a black wrought-iron candelabrum, stainless steel cutlery, coarse-woven linen place mats.

The plan was that when Daniel woke up she would take him and Zoe round to her mother’s. Lil still lived at the same flat in Benteaston, along with Martin, who was studying for his doctorate in chemistry and working as a laborer building the new bypass. There Aunt Vera would look after them until Lil finished work at the cake shop. Aunt Vera did have grandchildren of her own, but they were in America, so she yearned for a share in Joyce’s. She was not exactly a natural with small children. Daniel and Zoe preferred Grandma Lil, who would greet them with bags of leftover cakes and arms open wide, shouting, “Who’s my bestest bestest girl (or boy) in all the world, then?” But they tolerated Vera and her shy stiff efforts to be strict with them and to encourage Zoe’s reading and get Daniel to talk. (She reproached Lil for using baby language with him, insisting that this would “hold him up”; Lil took no notice.)

When she had left the children, Joyce had an appointment at the hairdresser’s; after that she would come back to the flat by herself and get on with cooking the fiddly beef olives she was doing for the main course. The little packages of thinly sliced beef spread with mushroom stuffing had to be tied with threads individually before they were sautéed. She had made the chicken liver terrine for the first course the night before. Ray would pick the children up on his way back from the college, and there would be plenty of time to get them into bed and asleep before the guests arrived. Joyce already knew what she was going to wear: she had made herself a new low-cut dress from a piece of gray slubbed silk left over from the days of the dressmaking business she had before the children came along. It had a difficult deep cowl neckline, three-quarter-length sleeves, and a peg skirt: she had bought a narrow black patent belt to wear with it. It was hanging now against the wardrobe in the bedroom, with a piece of tissue paper round the neck to protect it from dust, ready to put on after her quick last-minute bath. She could already imagine herself, moving suavely in the sexy top-heavy way forced by the shape of the skirt, wafting perfume, welcoming the guests into the rooms, enticingly lit by well-placed lamps and rich with the smells of the food cooking. Miles Davis would be weaving his spell from the record player.

Of course it would be up to Ray what record he put on. Sometimes he didn’t choose the kind of thing that Joyce wanted; if he was in a certain mood he might put on very far-out noisy fast jazz that nobody else really liked. But there was no point in worrying now about what his mood would be, at a point when there was nothing she could do about it.

* * *

The first thing that went wrong was that when she had got together a bag with all the things the children might need in the afternoon and was just about to put their coats on and fasten Daniel in the push chair, the front doorbell rang and Ann was standing there with a girlfriend.

Ann hadn’t really settled to anything since she finished at the university (she hadn’t done well in her exams; she had had a wild time instead and been the first person in town — by her own account — to wear black slacks so tight-fitting that they had to be zipped up the inside leg). At twenty-six she had been engaged twice and twice broken it off: one had been unsuitably too nice and one unthinkably too nasty (not that that would have stopped her in itself, but it turned out he had been living, all the time they were engaged, with some woman who even had a child by him). She had worked in a shoe shop, and as a nanny for some “ghastly” children, and currently had a job as a waitress at the cafeteria in the zoo. Her latest boyfriend had made Joyce’s heart stop cold in her chest when he was first introduced: he was a gray-faced ratty little man who wore a Teddy-boy draped suit and worked at a bookie’s. Luckily he didn’t seem to be as keen as Ann, and she made all the running, lurking about waiting to catch him as he came out of work, traipsing round the pubs to find where he might be drinking.

Joyce would have liked to have turned her and her friend away there and then, telling them frankly she had no time to stop, but she didn’t have quite that kind of relationship with her sister, and she knew Ann would take offense if she was blunt. Although Ann’s style at the moment was to appear defiantly and extravagantly ordinary, full of contempt at any pretension to superiority, this did not mean that she was indifferent to criticism. In fact she was particularly touchy and quick to imagine she was being condescended to.

— What a shame, Joyce said, frowning and shaking her head as if with real regret. I’m just on my way out. I’ve got an appointment at the hairdresser’s. (She didn’t want to mention the dinner party in case Ann took it into her head to turn up uninvited; she was quite capable of this.)

— Just let us in for a quick coffee, Ann wheedled. We’re absolutely gasping. We’ve been working like blacks.

Under their drooping macs, worn undone with the belts hanging down, they were in their waitress uniforms, striped like nurses’ dresses. The zoo was only ten minutes’ walk away from Joyce’s flat, but Ann hadn’t ever come round in her breaks before, so no doubt this was supposed to be something of an honor.

Joyce looked at her watch.

— I’ve got to take the children round to Mum’s. Auntie’s looking after them. But I suppose I could stop, if it’s just for ten minutes.

— You’re a brick, sis, said Ann, who never called her that. They piled past her in the narrow entrance passage. Both of them had their hair back-combed into bouffant mounds and their faces elaborately made up with black eyebrow pencil, thick mascara, pink lipstick. The friend, who was tall and skinny with a poor complexion, gave a startled hostile look around at the glowing flat.

Ann hugged the bemused children.

— You poor little things, she said. Mummy’s going to leave you with old Auntie Vera. I’ll bet she makes you do lots of horrible jobs for her. That’s what she used to do with me, when she was my teacher.

Daniel began to cry, not because he understood but because he had only just woken up.

— Mummy, we don’t want to stay with Vera, Zoe whined.

While Joyce put the kettle on to boil, Ann took her friend into the lounge.

— Come and look. D’you want to see some paintings by the great artist?

They were smoking; Joyce was sure they were dropping ash on the clean carpet. She overheard them whispering together and then exploding into giggles. In her extreme irritation she forgot her diet and ate two biscuits.

— We reek of elephants, said Ann. We took a ride. Leslie likes the keeper who does the rides.

— I do not, protested Leslie.

The girls bantered private jokes and opinions of the zoo staff over their coffee as if Joyce weren’t there; or perhaps she was required as witness to their devil-may-care fun. It was hard to believe that Ann with her studied flat hardness was the same girl who had once carried a volume of John Donne poems with her everywhere and insisted on reading aloud from it in the street. By the time they finally left, Joyce was half an hour late; she would have to ask to use the phone in the cake shop to persuade the hairdresser’s to hang on for her.

As Ann and Leslie skittered their way down the drive to the gate in their high heels, lighting up more cigarettes (only in order to shock, Joyce was sure), their voices squealing and screeching unnecessarily loudly, Joyce glanced involuntarily up at the windows of the ground floor flat where the Reverend and Mrs. Underwood lived. It was a huge Victorian house: there were two more flats above the Underwoods, let to old ladies. You didn’t often see the Underwoods themselves at their windows, but set into the glass panes in their front room were those kind of ventilators that looked like empty reels of recording tape; these turned and rattled in the slightest breeze, and to Joyce they always seemed to be taking note on behalf of the Reverend of any inappropriate behavior from herself or her family or visitors. He was an old square bear of a man with ragged gray hair, not feminized in the least by his black cassock, whose skirts flew out ahead of him in pace with his long stride; his wife was pale and fragile and oozed a compensatory sweetness. The Reverend growled and barked whenever he met Joyce, often incomprehensibly, always with imperturbable and disapproving authority. Ray and he had had one or two blazing rows, over music in the evenings or the children playing on the front lawn, but Joyce was sure it was for her that the Reverend reserved his most disgusted disapproval. No matter how abjectly friendly and conciliatory she tried to be, she was sure he could see through this to her essential light worldliness.

* * *

She finally got the children settled down with vera. Vera seemed to have girded herself up in an overall for the occasion, as if looking after them might involve particularly dirty work; there was uncharacteristic trepidation in her face. The children were also subduedly ill at ease. Daniel got out his dinky cars; Zoe tipped her jigsaw out on the dining table and stolidly began to sort out the edge pieces.

— She’s so like Kay, said Vera, as she always did. It’s the same face.

Joyce wouldn’t hear of it.

— Not in the least. She’s like Nana Deare; she’s nothing like my family.

And she touched Zoe lightly with the back of her fingers against her cheek, as if to ward off even the remote chance of harm through analogy. She slipped out while Vera was offering the children orange squash and hardened herself when she heard Daniel wail by thinking ahead to the hairdresser’s and the beef olives and the need to brush the lounge carpet again. In the cake shop her mother in her frilled apron and cap was picking out iced fancies with the tongs for a customer and arranging them in a box. Joyce squeezed round the counter into the little cubbyhole at the back, where the phone was fixed on the wall in the midst of a flurry of pinned-up orders and invoices.

— Madam may be delayed now, said the receptionist at Hair Boutique. We always give priority to the clients who arrive in time for their appointments.

— Blast, blast, breathed Joyce to herself, clenching the receiver with her fist in its tan glove that matched her shoes and bag. She hadn’t wanted to arrive there on that footing, flustered and in the wrong. She knew how important it was to assert in these situations one’s serene sense of superiority, from which, firmly established, one could then condescend as nicely as anything if one wished.

She left a threepenny bit for the call beside the phone. Lil looked up from tying the box of cakes with paper string.

— Mrs. H says I can go at three, she said muffledly out of the side of her mouth. Mr. and Mrs. Harper were good employers — they let the staff use the shop phone, for instance, as long as it wasn’t too often — but of course you were not supposed to carry on conversations about your private life in front of the customers. Lil was happy in this job; she enjoyed the camaraderie with the other “girls” and all the minute variations in the same safe daily routine. (Sometimes if Joyce thought back to the days out on the estuary, when her mother had been left alone all day so far from anywhere and with no transport, she wondered how she had ever endured it.)

— I should think Vera’ll be glad of you by then, she whispered back.

— Don’t you worry about her, pet. You go on and enjoy yourself.

Joyce had never been to this hairdresser’s before; she had hardly ever needed to have her hair done, since she had been wearing it for years in a long plait down her back or pinned up behind. But now she had made up her mind to have it all cut off. She had been nursing for several weeks now, a vision of herself, different: freed of the plait and its vaguely East European peasant overtones, too sincere and poignant and wholesome. Her new look would be more urbane and teasing, grown-up and modern and knowing. She was ready for something new, although her thoughts on this as yet didn’t go beyond the hair and the gray dress.

* * *

Hair boutique was on green street, the steep elegant street with the best shops that led down from Benteaston into the center of town. The name was scrawled diagonally in pink cursive script across a plate glass window thickly draped inside with white nylon. It was expensive — Joyce was going to pay ten shillings and sixpence for her cut and set, when she could have got it for five shillings where Lil went — but she dreaded having her idea for her hair misinterpreted, and it had seemed safest to go to the most fashionable place.

The hairdresser — Jacqueline — gazed skeptically at Joyce’s face in the mirror in the little cubicle, playing with her hair, which she had let down from its pins, scrunching it up and then scraping it back. Jacqueline herself was pretty: blond and fine-boned and thin as a wraith, steely with repressed impatience.

— Madam’s face is quite square in shape. Are you sure you don’t want to go for something softer? If you want it short, how about a bubble cut? That suits an extrovert personality. It’s got more bounce to it than the elfin look.

Joyce stuck to her idea but felt nonetheless exposed and foolish. She imagined that Jacqueline picked up her hair with more disdain and brusqueness, once she knew she was not to be persuaded.

— I suppose we could put a few stand-up pin curls in on the crown, she said, making the best of a bad job. That might give it a bit of body.

One of the juniors brought a portable washbasin into the cubicle; it fastened into some kind of plumbing arrangement in the floor. Joyce needed to spend a penny (another thing she had not had time to think of, in her rush) and asked to be directed to the Ladies. As she crossed to the stairs behind the receptionist, dressed in her pink cape with her hair spread out on her shoulders, she happened to glance outside the window. You could see out through the drapes although you couldn’t see in.

Ray was walking down the street right in front of the salon.

Her first reaction was irritation, if anything at all, because this was not a part of the day when she had planned on having to be thinking about him. But there was no reason why he should not be walking down Green Street, which was only five minutes from the art college where he was working in his studio.

Then he paused, as if waiting for someone to catch up with him, and the someone who joined him and walked on with him — as if she might have stopped to look into a shop window for a moment, say — was Minkie, Minkie Gray, who was not only a girl who sometimes modeled for Ray and his students but was also one of their dinner guests for tonight.

Again, for a moment, nothing; and then the beginning of things.

Joyce carried on past the receptionist and up the stairs to the lavatory, which although perfectly clean was not in the same luxurious style as downstairs. She balanced just above the seat to pee as she always did (she knew Mrs. Mellor in the docks was wrong about catching babies from toilets, but doubtless there were other things you could catch), and was hit there with the first real shock of astonished disbelief, so that her legs trembled violently. She quickly pulled up her knickers and straightened her skirt and sat down hard on the closed lid.

Minkie had probably just been sitting for him and they were having a break and going to buy a cup of tea. Or he had been out on his own, perhaps getting that adapter plug he had promised to buy and kept forgetting, and had just bumped into Minkie. Or perhaps it could even be that Minkie had wanted to buy something for her, Joyce, to give her at the party tonight and had asked Ray to help her choose it. Strangely, though this last was the least likely explanation — apart from the improbability of anyone bringing anything more than flowers or maybe chocolates to a dinner party, Minkie never had any money anyway — it was the one that stuck in Joyce’s mind and soothed her the most. She could imagine as if it had already happened the flood of relief and gratitude she would feel when Minkie gave her whatever it was (a scarf? soap? sugared almonds?) and said in her arch little-girl way something about how she “almost had to drag old Mr. Grumpy Guts out with her to help her choose it, he was so cross at being disturbed.” Ray would frown irritatedly and complain to Joyce about her later. These were supposed to be the categories of emotion he felt about Minkie, if he thought about her at all: irritation and a kind of alarmed surprise at her silliness. Joyce could imagine him incandescent at her thinking fit to break in upon his precious work with such a trivial and typically female distraction. (A present indeed! What did Joyce need a present for?)

However, something in the way they had moved together, paused, and then moved on down Green Street made it seem to Joyce that Ray’s reactions to Minkie might need rethinking. Strangest of all was how they hadn’t spoken; she was sure (although as she played and replayed the scene over in her mind she became less sure) that as Minkie swung into step by his side and they resumed their journey down the hill, they had not done what you would expect acquaintances to do and bolstered their being together with interested and mutually accommodating talk. Even if Ray hadn’t been eager to talk, Minkie should have been. But they had simply swung into step together and moved off at one accord, quietly adjusted to each other without words.

Minkie was an odd-looking creature but certainly attractive. She had a cheeky freckled face with a turned-up nose, and a head of short dark loose curls; she dressed in eccentric art student clothes and played up the fact that she looked as if she ought to be buttoned into a red jacket as a pantomime boy. Joyce thought she had been wearing something like that on her way past the window just now, some kind of short military jacket with brass buttons from a jumble sale, although she couldn’t have sworn to it. Minkie was thin and flat-chested: Ray had said her breasts were “pancakes with cherries,” and that had stupidly made Joyce feel safe. It had been Joyce who suggested inviting Minkie to dinner tonight; she was always short of single women, and she had had some vague idea of pairing her up with the single man who was coming, John Lenier, one of Ray’s jazz friends. Ray had neither encouraged nor discouraged her over Minkie — he hadn’t seemed at all interested in the party — although he said something about her barking up the wrong tree with John Lenier. But then Joyce had only thought that men didn’t see these things the way women did.

Joyce pulled the chain and washed her hands and dried them on the pink roller towel. She checked her reflection in the mirror to reassure herself that no shock showed on her face; no, if anything she looked more remote and less flustered than she had been when she arrived. She waited until her legs had stopped the worst of the trembling and then went back downstairs to her cubicle, where Jacqueline plaited her hair, laid the cold steel of her scissors against the nape of her neck, and took the plait off in a couple of wide-jawed crunching bites. It lay in Joyce’s hands, still warm, known intimately to her and yet suddenly strange in its mix of pink and pale gold and ginger.

— It’s a lovely color, Jacqueline conceded, although it’s a difficult color to match with.

Joyce’s head felt light and free. All the time while the junior shampooed her, while Jacqueline chopped away at her hair with a blade set in something that looked like a Stanley knife, and then while she sat with her pin curls in a net under the dryer with cotton wool in her ears, reading a magazine, she felt this curious lightness. The two things seemed to her only equally important: important that her hair should turn out well, important that Ray should have some explanation for why he was on Green Street with Minkie. She didn’t speculate any further; she felt herself poised, for the moment, upon the brink of speculation. She wondered, almost, who the competent elegant-looking woman was who sat in the mirror opposite her, legs carelessly crossed, absorbed in her magazine. She looked as though she had a rich life, full of drama and fun and interesting friends.

— It does suit you, said Jacqueline, when she was combing out the curls, pushing them up with her fingers. Joyce thought Jacqueline saw her too, the suave cool-eyed woman with the easy elfin hairdo and the interesting life. Ever since she came down from the Ladies, her indifference to what was going on around her showing in her face, Jacqueline had treated her with more respect.

Joyce in her new hairdo looked experienced.

Not with the kind of experience her mother’s generation had, pressed down like a dark burden upon their shoulders. This new generation wore it lightly and playfully, like a boy, simplified: free of all the old creaking corset-boned apparatus of women’s troubles.

She left to catch the bus home with the plait wrapped up in tissue, nestled in the dark at the bottom of her bag, weighing it down, even while her new head floated weightlessly on her new bare neck.

* * *

Minkie was late. dud mason and his wife penny and john Lenier were already there when she rang the bell, and they had opened the first bottle of Mateus Rosé wine.

The front door to the flat was down some steps off the drive; it opened onto a long passage floored with linoleum where they kept all their coats and Wellingtons and Ray’s bicycle and the push chair. The lavatory was at the far end of the passage, although everyone was supposed to keep the door shut so you couldn’t see straight in there from the entrance. Joyce had done her best with it, but the passage always made you feel drafty and rather dismal until you went through the glass door to one side and into the carpeted hall. When Joyce opened the front door, there really was a moment’s pause while she expected Minkie to hand her something: that present, soap or sweets or something, that she ought to have been buying when she was out with Ray. Ray hadn’t said anything yet about having seen Minkie earlier, although Joyce had made several opportunities for him to do so. It was dark outside, but the electric lantern above the door was switched on so she could see Minkie peering out palely from where she was swathed in some sort of man’s greatcoat several sizes too big for her. It had begun to rain; from the garden above there came an intimate pattering, drops burying themselves in the thick shrubs.

— I’m so sorry, pleaded Minkie in her baby voice, I’m late and I haven’t brought anything. I’m unforgivable. I really don’t deserve to be let in.

Joyce laughed. She had a suddenly illuminated vision of how dreadful it must have been for Minkie to be asked to dinner tonight, under the circumstances. She could imagine how she must have struggled, trying to make up her mind whether to come or cry off, pretending she had a cold or something. She could imagine, too, how little help Ray had been. “What am I supposed to do about it?” he would have said tetchily. “Just tell her you’re busy or something.” Joyce really couldn’t have done any better if she had contrived the whole thing devilishly.

— Come on in, she said gaily. We don’t care how unforgivable you are. We’re already tipsy.

This was true. She was borne up by the wine swimming in her head; she wasn’t taking her usual care not to drink too much in case of spoiling the cooking. In the warm hall she helped Minkie out of the heavy wet coat; the dark curls were wet all over with tiny droplets of rain. Under the greatcoat she was wearing a sort of green embroidered sarong thing, wrapped tight and flat round her breasts, leaving her shoulders bare. It didn’t really work. Joyce could guess how at home in front of the mirror it had looked like a posture that Minkie could strike: extravagant and original and defiant. But actually it depended on that still posture in the mirror; once she had to move around in it she clearly felt self-conscious and foolish, as if she had dressed up for a part in the wrong play. Joyce in her understated gray dress had the advantage of her.

— I love your hair! cried Minkie. It really suits you.

— Do you? Yes, it was high time. I’d had enough of that silly old look. Come and get a drink.

The guests looked up hopefully toward them as they came into the lounge. Ray was holding forth to Dud about the Summerson Council, which had been set up the year before to report on and validate all the art education courses in the country. This subject touched a painful nerve, Joyce knew. He overreacted ferociously to the modernization the council was encouraging precisely because it galled him to be caught out on the other side, suddenly seeming to stand for traditional values in the face of the new art. He still thought of himself as the new art.

— So what do you think the latest is? he declaimed dramatically, stabbing with his pipe, standing with his legs apart and his back to the oil fire (keeping the warmth off everybody else). I go into the life room at the beginning of the new term, after the Christmas break, and all those beautiful old casts, all those exquisite Greek and Roman and Renaissance forms, are gone. Just gone. All at once after three thousand years they’re not in fashion. We’ve got nothing to learn from them anymore. I try to find out where they are, what’s happened to them. Nobody seems to know. It’s like a murder. I feel as if a murder’s taken place and everyone’s ashamed and nobody will talk about it. The bodies have been got rid of somehow. Did they break them up? I mean, did they actually stand there and hack them to pieces with a hammer? Or did they get poor old Bassett to do it? It would have broken his heart, that’s for sure.

— Minkie hasn’t brought any wine! Joyce announced. Shall we let her have a drink?

She thought she saw him falter for one instant, when he saw Minkie. He screwed up his face in an even more terrible frown.

— I’d like to say we’re in the hands of the barbarians, he shouted, but it’s worse than that. The barbarians at least have a beauty of their own. These people — these idiots, these absolute cretins — they don’t know what beauty is, even to hate it. They don’t know the difference between art and advertising.

— Ssh, said Joyce. Remember the Underwoods. (The Reverend sometimes banged on the floor with his stick if there was jazz or shouting.)

— It’s the beginning of the end of drawing, said Dud, who was easily made gloomy.

As if overcome, Ray went to change the music on the gramophone, making a show of the delicate care with which he handled the records in and out of their paper sleeves. Predictably, he put on something that Joyce didn’t like, something squeaky and fast and frantic, Mingus probably. This was obviously the part he was going to play tonight: the tormented artist unable because of the scale and purity of his feelings to put on a social show as other people could. There had been a time when Joyce was in awe of him in that vein. He had the same focused glow as when he was working; it gave an edge of concentration to his shambling looks: untidy soft hair he wouldn’t get cut often enough and fleshy pouchy face, like an angel gone to seed. (He was thickening around the waist too; he would have to watch that. With his short legs it wouldn’t suit him.)

She thought their guests already sensed something was wrong. Penny, who was very pregnant, sat guiltily at the edge of her seat as if she felt herself accused of breaking up plaster casts. John Lenier looked as if he was hoping for an opportunity to come in with something funny, to make them all laugh and defuse the gloomily denunciatory mood. He’d probably never even heard of the Summerson Council and couldn’t care less.

— Of course Minkie can have a drink. John leapt to his feet. I’ll pour it for her. What would she like?

Joyce decided that John would be her ally for the night. She liked him anyway. He was tall and lean and took life lightly. With his silky gray hair (prematurely gray; he was only in his twenties, like her) he made Joyce think of a graceful poplar turning up its leaves in the breeze. His cream-colored polo neck was just the sort of thing she wished Ray would wear. He told her what a lovely room this was, what subtle colors she had chosen, and admired her dress and her hair. When he handed Minkie her glass of Mateus he said she looked in her green sarong as if she might dance for them later. Minkie was grateful, but Joyce was pleased that he had felt the need to be kind and rescue the silly sarong and give it a reason for existence.

* * *

Joyce burnt the toast that was supposed to go with the terrine. Also, the creamed potatoes had lumps because she couldn’t be bothered to mash them vigorously enough, and the beef olives were overcooked, and some of the sauce had burned on the bottom of the frying pan. She was completely indifferent to the food, slopping it out carelessly on the plates, eating it without tasting it. She had promised herself for days, in return for starving herself, a portion of chocolate cream pudding, but when it came out of the fridge she didn’t even want any. Only Dud and Minkie ate it.

They had all got riotously drunk somehow. They weren’t used to drinking much these days, and John Lenier had brought a bottle of vodka as well as two bottles of Black Tower. Penny slipped away from the table quite early on and fell asleep on the sofa in the lounge. It wasn’t quite clear whether they were having a fantastic time or whether it was a dreadful disaster. At certain points they were all screaming with laughter, as if everything anyone said was exceptionally miraculously funny, although Joyce could never remember afterward any of their jokes that night, only Dud coming back from the lavatory wearing one of the children’s balaclavas he had picked up from a coat hook in the passage. After that everyone who went came back wearing something until the kitchen floor was cluttered with sou’westers and gloves and umbrellas and Zoe’s scooter (the children were mystified and delighted to find these things in the morning).

At other points, on the contrary, Joyce was suddenly given a vision of their party as a hellhole, a Bosch-like slithering charnel nastiness, where she and Ray exchanged in naked moments a look like a rictus of loathing, seeing down to the very bottom of each other’s obscenely motivated souls. Then it seemed as if what was happening was something so awful and so utterly unlike anything that had ever happened before that in the morning when they were sober they would no longer be able to live together ever again.

Dud told Joyce in low tones (once he was sure Penny was asleep) how he had loved her at art school.

— You remember those little folded cards we had with our timetables on? Every time I knew you were going to be in a lesson, I wrote JS in tiny letters in the corner, on that square.

This was gratifying but familiar territory, and Joyce knew where it led: Dud with his arm around her, or pressing his bear bulk against her under the table, mumbling mournfully about how she was a very special person. Then he would be blushing and full of mawkish contrition when he met her next, hoping she wouldn’t say anything to Penny. She fended him off; it was John she was intent upon. They seemed to be getting on very well, whispering about the others, exchanging ironic looks, he confiding his hopes for a career in photography while she — the words came in her head—“she took a charming interest.” He was full of praise for the beautiful food, although she noticed he left one of his beef olives and stubbed a cigarette out on the plate. He kissed her hand once and held on to it for a few moments, pretending to guess her perfume; she was shocked by the thudding excitement with which her whole body responded to the little game. When she pulled her hand out of his cool silvery grip, he slid his thumb suggestively along her palm; involuntarily she imagined them kissing lips, playing with tongues.

Ray was explaining to Minkie in belligerently insistent detail how if you were drawing the docks you had to begin drawing at the bottom of the steps when the tide was out and then you could move your drawing farther up as the tide came in.

— I don’t understand it, said Minkie miserably, but it doesn’t matter.

— But why don’t you understand it? It’s very simple. An idiot could understand it. You begin at the bottom, when the tide is out.…

Then there was a time when Minkie was lying sobbing on the bed in Ray and Joyce’s bedroom, although it wasn’t ostensibly about the docks, it was because Dud had been describing to her the diseased eyes he was paid to draw for the medical records at the hospital, and although she had told him this was making her feel sick, he wouldn’t stop. Joyce said she was going to check on the children (presumably the children were asleep; perhaps she really did open their door and look in on them, although she had no memory of it), and then she walked into the bedroom, singing a song of her mother’s that used to make her cry when she was a little girl. The bedroom light was off but she could see in the light from the hall behind.

All in the merry month of May

When green buds were a-swellin’,

Young Jimmy Groves on his deathbed lay

For love of Barbara Allen.

All slowly slowly there she came,

And slowly she came nigh him.

And all she said when there she came:

Young lad, I think you’re dyin’.

She had a poor singing voice; she had no idea where the plan came from, with its cardboard-theatrical threat so unlike her usual brisk daytime self. Minkie stopped sobbing and gazed at her with eyes that were swimming in tears and fearful. She lay with one arm flung out across the bedcover; on her wrist was a thick bangle of polished wood. Joyce was convinced all at once that this had been a present to Minkie from Ray, worn tonight for good luck or in defiance.

— I’ll take that, I think, she said, and slipped it off the girl’s limp unresisting hand. D’you mind?

Minkie dumbly shook her head.

(Did she put the bangle on and wear it back to where the others were still shouting and laughing? The next day she found it among the dirty dishes in the kitchen; she took it with her when she went with Daniel out for a walk on the heath and dropped it into a litter bin among the sweet wrappers and lolly sticks, although it was a lovely thing, a shame to lose it.)

At some other point that evening they were all talking about Mary Anderson. When she was at college with Dud and Joyce she was an odd-looking girl with elderly parents and thick pebble glasses, under which her eyelashes grew long and luxuriant as if in a greenhouse. Now she was making a name for herself as a painter.

— I remember I told her to go to the Dubuffet exhibition in ’fifty-nine, said Ray. That’s what you can see in these latest paintings, that sort of inspired graffiti. The Dubuffet set free something in her imagination. That’s what they don’t understand, these idea men: that you can be free, and yet paint in a tradition.

— Because she can draw, said Dud. Even though they aren’t naturalistic forms, it’s there, the truth in the pencil.

Joyce envied Mary, for those minutes, desolatingly.

— But would you want to go to bed with her? she laughed.

She couldn’t believe, the moment she’d said it, that she was capable of anything so stupid. She and Ray stared at each other; she imagined that their pupils were dilated like cats’, gaping blackness.

— I would, said Ray. She’s mysterious.

— Mysterious? What’s mysterious? You didn’t use to think that. That just means ugly. You’re just impressed because she’s somebody now.

— Yes, I suppose I am. It’s something, that she’s somebody.

— You men! she exclaimed, flinging her arm in a grand gesture of disgust, knocking over a glass. Although after all it was she who had said the stupid thing, who had lowered everything to the personal, sexual question.

* * *

Eventually the reverend underwood came thundering at the front door knocker in his pajamas and dressing gown. He and Ray engaged in a shouted argument while the guests, half relieved at being shaken out of the evening’s dark tangle, hurriedly got their things together and made subdued farewells.

— Thanks for a lovely time, whispered Penny, snugly rounded, blinking from her innocent sleep. I’m sorry I’ve missed all the fun. Dudley loves coming here.

Usually after their dinner parties Joyce and Ray cleared up in fatigued companionable silence, moving coordinatedly around each other under her command, piling up plates and emptying ashtrays. Tonight Joyce gave one shuddering look at the mess; her bones ached and her head swam and she was nauseated. She was incapable of restoring order. She didn’t even want to. While the front door was still open and Ray was saying goodbye to John and Minkie, she clambered out of her clothes in the half-dark bedroom, leaving them in a heap on the floor, and lay down on her back in the bed in her baby-doll short nightdress, keeping still as a statue, staring at the ceiling, listening to Ray padding round the rooms, turning the lights off, checking at the children’s door.

She knew that when he came to bed he would want to make love to her; his heart would be pounding from his furious quarrel with the Reverend Underwood and he would want calming down. She waited for him like a stone, promising herself to endure it as unforgivingly as if she were having an examination at the doctor’s. It seemed to her that if she could just keep her mouth closed on this silence she would be punishing him, holding on to what he didn’t know she knew, even though it lay huge and heavy in her head. She was quite sure he hadn’t an idea that she had guessed. He would have to wait for Minkie to tell him (women were so much better at these things), and she imagined that even then, even when he came to her with big dog eyes full of contrition, wanting to explain, she would refuse to speak about it to him.

— Should I put the leftovers in the fridge? he asked, standing in the doorway, aggrieved at having to do her chores; he thought she’d flaked out on him because she was tipsy.

— Put them wherever you want.

For another few minutes she heard him banging things ill-temperedly around in the kitchen; then he came and climbed into bed and, after a bit, reached out and touched her breast, which was their sign. Obediently she got up and put in her cap in the bathroom.

— Only if you’d like to, he said.

— I don’t mind.

She lay as if she were an effigy on a tomb. He labored on top of her, and she pressed her nails into her palm because it was disgusting and thought the words “his hairy rump,” although that wasn’t fair, he wasn’t particularly hairy. Toward the end she pretended, and stirred about a bit, just to get it over. She thought she only wanted him to fall asleep and leave her alone to think. At the same time she felt so sad, and even ashamed, that the thing that had been so transforming and incandescent between them could have become as diminished and miserable as this.

His climax, though, groaning and collapsing on top of her, affected her as unpredictably if he’d released a spring: not of sexuality but of rage. As he rolled off her she pushed away from him and leaped out of the bed.

— I’m off, she said. I’m going.

He propped himself up on his elbows, startled out of postcoital relaxation.

— What do you mean? What’s the matter?

— I’m going. How could you?

— How could I what? You said you didn’t mind.

She went into the bathroom and washed herself in cold water and then dressed, though not in the gray dress; she felt herself trampling that under her feet as she moved backward and forward in the room, choosing slacks and a striped cotton top from her drawers, pulling a comb through her hair, picking up to take with her in her handbag a change of knickers and her toothbrush and makeup bag and perfume.

Ray by this time was standing uselessly beside the bed; he had put on his pajama bottoms for decorum’s sake.

— What’s going on here? What’s all this about?

— I’m going, she said. Where does John Lenier live?

— Jesus Christ, Joyce, what are you talking about? You’re making a terrible mistake.

— I’m talking about M-i-n-k-i-e. Someone who was here tonight. Some nice little cream pancake with cherries on top. But two can play at that game. Don’t bother to tell me where he lives. I’ll take the address book.

* * *

She didn’t know how much it was really about john lenier.

There was no doubt that, as she left the house and hurried through the dark windy night to the telephone box (John’s address wasn’t in the book but his telephone number was), she was full of a sexual excitement focused on him. She wasn’t imagining that she would take much time telling him how she felt about Ray and Minkie; all that was needed was a bare explanation of the need to make up for everything that had been spoiled in her bed just now. Her rage was a license: her mind feverishly threw up fragments of scenes with John — his grateful astonishment, his hesitating and at first elaborately courteous advances, that languorous delicate alertness of his applied to her, bent over her, minutely responsive to her pleasures, taking his own with an exquisiteness she intuited in him. More, too: other things flashed in her mind’s eye, an accelerating daring, initiations into new things (she wasn’t specific as to quite what new things), an open-eyed consent to some definitive crossing into adult territory. It was high time, she thought, that she grew up.

If John had been another man, the night might have had a very different outcome: the things dreamed up in fantasy might have taken on solid form, everything from then on might have turned out differently.

On the other hand, as soon as she knew he wasn’t going to play the part she had imagined for him, his importance fell away as if it had never existed, releasing her into a kind of calm and disclosing her real situation in a new perspective. Perhaps she knew she had made a mistake as soon as she spoke to him in the phone box, her whole body shaking so profoundly in time to her heart’s thumping that it even distorted her voice; the box meanwhile was being buffeted from outside, gusts of wind rattling twigs against the glass.

— It’s Joyce, she said. Something’s happened. I need to talk to you. Can I come round?

At least he didn’t sound as if she’d woken him from sleep; he was sober and careful.

— Joyce? Oh, dear. Well, of course you can. Where’s Ray? Wouldn’t you rather that I came to you? I could easily pop my things on.

— Oh, no. It’s easy now. I’m already out; I don’t want to go back. Just tell me how to get to where you live.

She thought he’d offer to come out and find her; instead, after a moment’s thought he gave her precise directions to his address. (It wasn’t far, a ten-minute walk, a few streets away.) The real man, of course, was never going to be as obediently pliant to her desires as his simulacrum in her fantasy; it was understandable that he responded guardedly to this casual party flirtation returned upon him, rawly exacting. No wonder, even, that he wanted to know about Ray; husbands begin to count when things get serious. Nonetheless, something in his voice cooled her and warned her off, so that by the time he opened his door to her ten minutes later in the red silk paisley dressing gown that somehow suddenly made everything come clear — he might almost have put it on to help explain — she was all ready for her disillusion. The dressing gown gave it away like a piece of crude stage machinery signaling a point; even to her, who had been so obtuse, so sure of her command of the way things were, so oblivious to essential missing pieces of information. This must have been what Ray was trying to tell her while she was busily planning, first, to have John for Minkie, then for herself.

It was simply never mentioned after that between her and John: the possibility that she had come to him in hopes of something rather more than the clean handkerchief and cocoa he considerately provided, or that he might have ever had to deliver up to her the awkward explanation of why he would not be able to play his part in her revenge. Instead, awareness of all this hovered with an effect of high comedy between them and made them get on rather well, as if they had been together through some danger narrowly skirted. Even though she poured out her story to him, crying copiously into his handkerchief, and told him things she had never spoken of to anyone else about the difficulty of living with Ray, and even though John consoled her so tactfully with his calm estimate of the unimportance of what had happened, nothing that they said to each other seemed completely serious. At some point the conversation even turned to her admiration of the way he’d done his flat, which was all black and white with a spatter of bright colors in the cushions and rugs.

— He doesn’t really like her much, said John, thinking back over his impressions from the evening. I’d never have had any idea of anything between them, if you hadn’t told me.

— No, he doesn’t like her much. He thinks she’s silly.

— Well, bless her, she is, rather.

— Don’t bless her. I want to tear her hair and scratch her eyes out.

— No, you don’t. She’s a daft little girl who thinks it’s clever to pout and play baby. She isn’t even worth wasting your anger on. She’s a little shallow pond and you’re a lake, a deep still lake, just a little bit ruffled on the surface for the moment.

— Oh, John, you’re so nice to me. I only wish I believed that Ray thought that.

— He’s not an idiot, is he? Don’t you think he knows it? Look, what you need is to get some beauty sleep, go home, forget about making any ugly scenes. He knows you know; you don’t need to say anything more. Just be your gorgeous self, make yourself look like the sophisticated glamorous woman you are, cook him one of your wonderful meals, put on the lamps and the music, take the time to sit down and talk with him about painting or whatever, and don’t you think he’ll put some important questions to himself about why he’s been playing around? D’you think he wants to sit down and talk about art with Minkie? Maybe it’s been difficult for him, with the children. Maybe things haven’t been everything they used to be, between you. Buy yourself some gorgeous new underwear and some perfume and make him fall for you all over again.

— Oh, I know I could do that, she said, frowning.

— Well, of course you could.

— I don’t know whether it’s what I want to do.

Eventually John brought a pillow and sheets and blankets and made up a bed for her on his sofa, where she fell almost instantly asleep, with no idea what time of day or night it was, except that it was still dark.

* * *

When she woke she could just make out the shapes of objects in the room in a gray dawn light. Her head felt clear, she was perfectly well, she must have worked right through the terrible hangover that surely had been in store for her in all the excitement of the night before: her escape into the dark, her tears, and her pouring out of all her troubles. These had used up all the poison in her.

She woke thinking about Ray: not about Minkie and all the stuff from last night, but about his work. His latest paintings, for the last eighteen months or so, had been something new. He was putting the paint on more smoothly, and if you drew your attention away from the surface details of the brushwork, you could suddenly see revealed a glimpse of likeness, verisimilitude, as if under the necessary play of the paint he had trapped a shadow of the real presence. Joyce knew that this mixture of an expressionistic style with some of the devices of illusionism was an eccentric and original technique, and she knew what a practiced virtuoso handling of the paint was required to produce such a complex effect. The other thing he had changed was the way he arranged the bodies on the canvas, his new cramped picture space with body parts improbably crowded together. Some of the new nudes had startled and unsettled Joyce when she first saw them: he had asked the model to take a contorted position, legs apart, genitalia brutally exposed and foregrounded, the model perhaps looking out from the picture with her head almost upside down, twisted under her knee. The models could only hold these contortions while he made quick sketches. When he worked the sketches up into paintings, he didn’t square the drawings up as he used to do; he copied freehand and exaggerated the distortions and the improbability.

These were beautiful pictures, Joyce was sure of that. She knew she was able to make an objective estimate of his work because she also had an uncanny instinct for when his paintings failed, which came from knowing him so well, recognizing when he was weak or false or trying to cover up something he couldn’t do. These new ones frightened her, but they weren’t ugly. They looked unflinchingly deep into the layered appearances of flesh, seeing things that were true. She trusted him, not personally but objectively, that he was able to see the truth: not in their daily life, when he was often wrong, but beyond it. She could see it when it worked, the translation of the truth of life into pictures, but she couldn’t do it for herself. My love for him rests on that, she thought. Everything rests on that.

It had been awhile now since she had modeled for him; he had made some drawings of her pregnant with Daniel, and afterward breast-feeding him, but because of the children there simply wasn’t time these days for her to sit for long enough. She had even been glad that it had stopped; there had seemed to be something irreconcilable between her two roles, as the effective manager of his domestic life and as the still mute object of his study, on whom he concentrated, but as if she wasn’t there. Sessions with him weren’t necessarily calm or good-tempered, either; if he was struggling, scraping off paint or screwing up drawings, she used to feel responsible, drained by the intensity of his effort but helpless to make it work, angry with his anger because it seemed self-indulgent, not directed at real things. Now she was sorry; she wanted that discomfort back. She thought that perhaps Minkie had modeled for one of those searing nudes, exposed and altered by his scrutiny.

How had she imagined that this man might be chastely domesticated, on her terms? She had hung his pictures in her home as if she could gloss over what was inside the frame and use it as a sign of taste merely, to hang among other signs, curtains and lamps and interesting objects from the junk shops.

Joyce cleaned her teeth and washed her face in John’s bathroom (lucky that she had brought her toothbrush), surprised and pleased by her reflection in his mirror with its new short hair.

She should go back.

Perhaps if she went now she might even get there before the children woke up.

* * *

She let herself into the flat with her key. probably the Underwoods heard her coming back just as they must have heard her leave last night (she always imagined them side by side in a vast mahogany bed, listening from under some sort of overhanging ecclesiastical ornamentation), but she didn’t care. All was quiet. She thought Ray would probably be asleep; she would embark on the clearing up and then make breakfast for him and percolate real coffee when he woke up. She slipped off her shoes and crossed quietly to their bedroom in her stocking feet; the door was slightly open, as they always left it, so as to hear the children if they cried out in the night.

Ray was sitting in all his clothes at the window, where it was becoming light, and day outside: a tentative spring day under veiled blue skies, meek after the tantrums of last night, smelling of the soaked earth of gardens (she was exhilaratedly saturated in it as he couldn’t yet be, from her walk home through the early streets where she met only the milkman). When he saw her in the doorway he jumped up off the wooden chair where she usually piled her clothes at night.

— Hello. You can’t have been very comfortable, she said.

— I wasn’t. He hesitated. Did you mean the chair? Or about — things?

She laughed. Both of them were using subdued undertones, so as not to wake Daniel. Zoe was a lie-abed, but Daniel was an early bird, usually first calling to them from his cot around six or half past.

— Both, probably.

— Well, no. No to both.

— What are you doing up? You’ll be exhausted.

He looked at her suspiciously.

— Have you been asleep, then?

— After my night of torrid passion.

— Was it? His voice cracked somewhat.

— What do you think?

He was exaggeratedly relieved, flinging his arms up as if he had kept them by his sides in a tension of suspense.

— I was beginning to wonder. I did try to tell you.

— You didn’t try all that hard.

— Is it funny?

She smothered her giggles in her hands.

— Probably. When you come to think about it. My crazy fling. A trip to the moon, on gossamer wings. Have you been sitting there all night?

— Waiting for you. But not all night. I cleared up.

— Oh, you didn’t. Not all on your own? How awful!

— It was awful. Not the clearing up. An awful night.

— I know. Listen.

But she didn’t know at first what she had to say. She crossed the room to where he stood and stopped just a few inches in front of him, so that they could feel each other’s body warmth rolling off them in the cold morning and taste each other’s breath, hers minty, his stale and boozy. His clothes from the night before were crumpled and his hair was disheveled and his face pasty and gray around the jowls with stubble. It seemed a comically appropriate atonement, that he had kept his dismal vigil while she slept those hours away at John’s as easefully as an angel.

Ray put his hands up to take her shoulders, but she caught them in hers and held him off.

— I don’t want any lying, she said.

He shook his head mutely.

— Not from either of us, I mean. Not from me either, about what I feel. It makes me want to kill you, when I know you’ve slept with her. It makes me feel desperate and helpless. I don’t know what to do.

— It didn’t mean anything.

— No, it did, it did. That’s just what I don’t want you to say. It did mean something.

— OK, it meant something. He shrugged. But not what you think.

— I don’t know what I think. What did it mean?

— I suppose it was just sex. How can I put it? However I put it, I’m in the wrong, don’t think I don’t know that.

— Don’t talk about wrong and right. I don’t want us to be together because of the old rule book.

— I see.

— And that was a lie already. Coming from you. “Just sex.” That word “just” is a lie, to hide its importance from me.

He searched her face, to see how much he could say.

— All right, that was a lie. I was obsessed with her for a short while. Perhaps a month or so. The idea of her devoured me. Now I can’t imagine why, it’s so thoroughly over.

Joyce flinched; she was shocked; she felt a rich pulse of blood in her heart.

—“Devoured you.”

— You asked me.

— I almost can’t bear that, that the idea of her devoured you.

— It’s men, he tried to explain. This is how it takes us sometimes. I’m so sorry. It seems such a cheap trick, now I’m having to put it into words. I can’t even believe, myself, that it ever seemed important.

— How many times, exactly, precisely, did you make love to her? Don’t lie, whatever you do.

He had to mentally count them, humbled and blushing, and she stared at his eyes as if she might catch in there some flicker of the pictures he summoned up.

— Six? Yes, I think six.

— And was it good? Tell the truth.

— How am I supposed to answer that, to you?

— But answer it.

— At first, it was good. He sighed. Then I got tired of her; she got on my nerves. Don’t think I don’t feel like a swine.

— I don’t want to contain you, Joyce said, after a pause. I don’t want to be your lock and key.

— Sometimes it feels to a man, he said, slowly and hesitantly, as if women want to make the world sweet. Are you going to be angry if I say this? But it’s not sweet. And it’s sometimes a strain, standing on guard, pretending to the woman that everything’s going to be all right, everything’s nice.

— Is this sex we’re talking about here?

— It’s partly sex. Yes, I suppose it is. And freedom, not getting all tangled up in sweet things, being able to slip the rope sometimes.

— Well, I might want that too, she said.

— Might you? He was startled.

— I might. Didn’t that occur to you?

His face was full of trepidation.

— Are we talking about freedom? I don’t know, it’s not the same — freedom — for men and women. Just biologically, even. Say I’d been wrong, last night, about John. I don’t know whether I could deal with that: you, with another man.

— You would just have to, she said. Maybe. If that’s how we’re going to manage things.

— I see. I see what you’re getting at.

She let him hold her by the shoulders, then, gripping tightly.

There was so much more for them to say and to sort out.

But at that moment, like a bird piping, the baby sang out from behind the bars of his cot.

* * *

Needless to say, there was plenty of clearing up left to do. Ray’s idea of a tidy room was not the same as hers. He had done his best, but he had no idea where most things went, or how to deal with the dirty pans, or how to wrap up the things that needed to be stored in the fridge. And he hadn’t been able to use the vacuum in the middle of the night. (Goodness knows what the Underwoods even made of his running the hot water.) She sent Ray back to bed to sleep (“Daddy’s got a bit of a headache”) and set about seeing to all this, as well as preparing the children’s breakfast and getting them dressed and making the beds and rinsing Daniel’s nappies and putting them on to boil; and all with an exultant lightness, nursing a secret and liberating excitement like a teenager who’s been kissed and carries the feel of it around all day on her skin. Every time she had to pass the closed door of the bedroom, she was aware of Ray in there as if he were an adventure that awaited her.

Then the tiredness hit her, like a cosh, at about eleven, when she put Daniel down for his nap and took the chocolate pudding out from the fridge and helped herself to a big bowlful (her diet seemed trivial, compared to what was happening in her marriage). When she had eaten it, she felt sick and thought she might lie down on the sofa to snatch some sleep for half an hour before she began to prepare the Sunday dinner. Zoe would be all right, Nana Deare had taught her to knit, and she was practicing. It was true that she couldn’t turn round at the end of a row, so that every ten minutes she had to come to Joyce to put the needles back into her hands facing the other way; but Joyce was sure she would be able to do that in her sleep.

As soon as she closed her eyes she remembered the plait of hair, which had lain forgotten in its tissue paper in the bottom of her handbag ever since she came home from the hairdresser’s. It seemed somehow disrespectful to leave it there unregarded any longer; even risky, although she didn’t know exactly what was at risk, except that the hair left for too long washing around in the depths of the bag might pick up bits of lint and dirt from the loose coins. So she stood up again, crossed the hall, opened the bedroom door, signing to Zoe to keep quiet, then tiptoed cautiously into the half-dark. The curtains were closed, the room smelled fustily of sleep, the hump of her husband snored from under the blankets pulled up over his head. Her handbag was still where she had put it down when she came in from her failed attempt at adultery early that morning. With an odd sense of enacting something like a ceremony, she pulled open her underwear drawer, lifted the plait from her bag, sinuous and suggestive in its crinkling paper, and buried it at the back of the drawer under all the layers of her things.

The thought came to her unbidden, that the plait would keep its color through all the years while her own hair turned gray.