Everything Will Be All Right (29 page)

—I suppose Simon will find us all awfully loud and boisterous, Joyce said, if he isn't used to our sort of family occasion. We do tend to let our hair down. His family's probably much more respectable.

Simon smiled his fending-off smile.

—We're so respectable I don't think we even do family occasions. So I won't be able to tell whether you're more loud and boisterous than the average.

—We're very rude. But I don't care. God knows what the bride's relatives are making of it all. They seem a bit squaresville, and they're probably shocked.

—Mum, all right, we'll come inside.

They stood at the back of the orangery and Simon drank down his champagne before the toasts were made and squinted through his smoke at the guests on the top table who stood up to make speeches, smiling privately to himself but not laughing at the jokes. These jokes were mostly about sex and produced loud shouting laughter and heckling from Peter's side of the family; the bride's relatives and the more elderly guests were more subdued. Zoe decided not to even smile.

Peter had put on weight in the last few years. His head, which had been clumsily heavy when he was younger, seemed in proportion now; his thick shoulder-length black hair was speckled with gray and he wore big tinted glasses and a patterned tie. The bride in her youthfulness was insubstantial beside him: pretty enough, blond with blue eyes and an anxious pink rash on her throat and arms. In an accent tinged with Americanisms, Peter made a witty and emotional speech, saying how happy he was at coming home at last to live close to his “beloved mother” (there was a flashed exchange of glances between Joyce and Ann). Zoe had always liked Peter's extravagant openness, his clowning confessions (she and her family had spent two happy summers at his place in Vermont). Now she prickled uneasily as if he exposed too much. When the speeches were over and everyone was mingling, he embarrassed her by reminiscing nostalgically to Simon about his days at Peterhouse.

The American children of Peter's first marriage sat gloomily apart: one leggy sixteen-year-old girl and two younger plump pasty sons in bow ties (“They look,” said Joyce disapprovingly, “as if they haven't been brought up on home-cooked food”). Vera tried to fuss over them, magisterial in a white blouse with a tie neck and a dark skirt whose waistband rode up on her round high stomach, but they looked at her as if she were an eccentric stranger. Although she had talked endlessly about her grandchildren across the Atlantic—how clever they were, what opportunities they had, what a lovely home—in truth she hardly knew them. She gave herself up instead to basking in the attentions of her son. She forgave any number of missed birthdays, scrawled postcards from exotic holidays, and expensive gifts sent as substitutes for visits, when he walked with her around his guests, his arm around her shoulder, almost as if she were his bride. (Meanwhile the actual bride took her uncomfortable turn with her recalcitrant stepchildren.) There had been some talk of inviting Dick to the wedding. His second wife had died of breast cancer and now he was married again to a nurse he had met at the hospital; they were both retired and lived in the country. Peter and his mother were adamant, though, that he was not to be forgiven, even though Joyce and Ann pointed out that the thing he was not to be forgiven for was more or less what Peter was doing to his first wife now.

Ann said she wanted to talk to Simon about John Donne.

—I knew his poems by heart once. I used to recite them in the street.

—Really?

—Sweetest love, I do not go, for weariness of thee
.… The lying toad. He is, of course, almost certainly weary of her. But then you're young so you don't know about that.

Her cream crèpe-de-chine dress was made up to look like something Edwardian, with leg-of-mutton sleeves and rows of tiny buttons up to the elbow and up the side of the high neck. Although she had a round belly and a waddle when she walked, her dainty hands and feet and small sharp face were still pretty as a quick-eyed little creature, a marmoset. Her dark hair was permed into a mass of curls.

—Haven't you two got anything stronger than tobacco? My kids are driving me berserk. Sophie wanted to be a bridesmaid, can you believe, and is still sulking. I was hoping we could escape to the grotto for a secret smoke. Did you know there was a grotto? It's supposed to be divine. Now I'm forty, the only chance I get to carry on with beautiful young men is likely to be by stealing them from my niece.

Simon smiled warily.

—A grotto sounds interesting, he said.

Zoe, going in search of more drink, bumped into Ray, looking huntedly around him.

—Is your mother anywhere in sight? D'you think I can get away with a quick cigar? Just one of these little ones?

—She's with the caterers. You're probably OK. Why don't you come and talk to me and Simon?

—Oh, he's much too stringently intellectual for me.

—Dad, I wish the two of you would get on. He hates this kind of phony occasion just like you do.

—Who says I hate it? I'm having a wonderful time. Our transatlantic cousin is one of my favorite people. Not only that but I'm hoping he's going to be one of my customers, now he's moving home. He buys contemporary art, you know. Of course this is hardly the New York market, but at least we're cheaper. He'll buy Frisch; he'll certainly buy Frisch, he'll love it. Anyway, what's your friend got to complain about? Free booze, free grub, good music? Why the hell isn't he enjoying himself?

—Don't call him that: “my friend.” His name's Simon.

—It would be. How sure I was that he couldn't be a Wayne or a Terry. You've let me down, Zo. I was counting on you to bring home someone vulgar and unsuitable, just to see the look on your mother's face. We'll have to see what Daniel can do. I'm quite hopeful, actually, in that respect. I think the purple hair is a promising sign.

By the time Zoe found a half-f bottle she had lost Simon, and then she spotted him making his way down between two tall hedges in search of the grotto. She had been drinking champagne on an empty stomach and felt dizzy and desperate.

—Do you hate them all? she asked, when she caught up with him.

—Don't be silly, he said. Don't exaggerate.

—I know what you think. They all put on such an act. They make such a display of enjoying themselves. It's all so false and so materialistic.

—You don't, actually, have any idea what I think.

—My dad's different. He's serious about what he does. You do like his paintings? (She had shown him that morning around the ones hung on the walls at home; he hadn't commented.)

He shrugged.

—No, not much.

This was a hard blow; she had counted on his admiring them, taking them to stand for what was deep and true as everybody else always had. She struggled to smile and keep her composure, but her face was stinging and her eyes were watering as if he'd actually struck her. She was caught out in her own unexamined enthusiasm, exposed and curling up.

—Oh, don't you? she said, trying to sound blithe and mildly surprised. I'm very fond of them. Perhaps you need to get to know them better.

—I doubt it. I can see exactly what they are. I just think figurative painting's bankrupt. A dead language. There's nothing left for it to say. The visual arts—whatever mess they're in—have left behind that kind of simplistic confidence in representing the real.

For one electrifying split second, Zoe could imagine how it might be to hate Simon. It was like a white fizz, a surge of light from the back of her mind in which everything looked different: his absorbed frown, deciding at a fork in the path which way to take; his slouching step in his sloppy espadrilles; his rudeness to her family; his immovable calm certainty that she was wrong. She pierced through, just for that second, into a deep dark reservoir of protest, agitated and incoherent. Then she pulled herself back from the brink of it, remembering how she needed him for her happiness. She trotted penitently after him down the path, reminding herself of how much she wanted to be part of the purity and consistency in his way of looking at things. The changes that hurt her most were the ones that made her strong. If need be she would unlearn her taste for her father's paintings too; she knew she could do that, do it easily.

But the moment's shock left a little tender place, a chill of hurt.

*   *   *

Peter and rose were staying, and all the close family came back to the house for tea or more drinks except Vera, who had been dropped off at her flat to rest, and the stepchildren, who had escaped, to everyone's relief, to “check the place out for a bit.” Zoe and Simon disappeared upstairs to her room, which was also a relief. Joyce felt tense under the reproach of Simon's coolly scrutinizing look; as if there weren't enough things for her to be worrying over! (She hadn't even had time yet to think, How dare he disapprove? What does he know about us?)

—He's very gorgeous, Zoe's chap, Ann said. Very sexy. And terrifyingly intelligent. But not much sense of humor.

While Joyce organized tea, Peter brought the wedding presents in from the car and heaped them on the big pine kitchen table.

—Open, open, open up, chanted Ann. We want to see what you got.

—Isn't this supposed to be a decorous occasion, when Rose makes a list of who we need to thank for what?

—Spoilsport!

—OK then, I capitulate! Get ripping!

Rose did in fact make a list.

—Jesus God, what are we supposed to do with these? They look like instruments to procure an abortion.

—Oh, look, multicolored tumblers in little wicker baskets! Aren't they just frightful?

—Frightful as fuck. Who were they from?

—Pasta maker, pasta maker. You've got two pasta makers.

—His and hers! So we can each make our own spaghetti.

—I'll bet on a minimum thirty-six crystal goblets. People always give crystal goblets. There were definitely some crystal goblet givers there today.

—But we hate crystal goblets.

—Well, you're going to have to find some way to learn to live with them. Lots and lots of them.

—I told you you should have had a wedding list.

—Oh, but Joycey, wedding lists are so infra dig.

—Open ours, open ours, clamored Ann. If you don't appreciate it I'm going to have it back.

Ray and Joyce gave them a painting. Peter and Rose got genuinely very excited about this. It was a smallish dark painting of a man slumped in a chair with his back turned, leaning his head on his hand, his elbow propped on his knee.

—I did suggest, said Joyce, that it wasn't exactly a weddingy subject.

—But it's just how Ray feels about weddings, isn't it! Say the word “wedding” to Ray, and that's precisely the posture of his inner man.

—I don't know if I was thinking about weddings in particular, said Ray, giving the painting a careless wary glance. It's just the usual kind of existential angst. I thought you might enjoy it.

—It's fantastic! Absolutely fantastic. I love it. I'm going to love to live with this guy.

—Me too, said Rose.

Joyce felt hollowed out with hospitality. Peter insisted that she lie down. He put his arm round her to escort her to her bedroom and called her “sweet coz” and thanked her for organizing everything so wonderfully, whispering in her ear so that his hot breath tickled her. She couldn't forgive him, though, for refusing to invite his father. She knew how much Dick had wanted to come. Peter was obstinate; there was something self-preening in how he cultivated and clung to his childhood hurt.

Joyce put her dress on a hanger and lay down on the bed in her silk dressing gown embroidered with poppies. It was early evening; the thin white cheesecloth curtains drawn across the open windows swelled and lifted in the breeze, making squares of reflected light swim on the wall. Dick often came to see Joyce; she had visited him and Ruth in their cottage. Whenever he came he brought presents: his homemade wine (which Joyce had to save for parties because Ray wouldn't touch it), bundles of old silver teaspoons bought at a sale, newspaper parcels of runner beans or sweet peas from his garden. Joyce couldn't help basking in his rusty old charm. If he took her out for lunch he pulled out her chair and helped her off with her coat, so that she felt taken care of. No doubt there was a great deal of delusion in it. No doubt the women who had lived most intimately with him had reason to resent the lightness and sweetness he could make when he chose. Joyce knew for herself how the thirst for lightness and sweetness could lead you into twisted snarled-up ways.

She almost slept; at least her thoughts floated some little way above the bed, although she couldn't let go of the busy responsibility that had stretched her thin all day, the worry over all the ones who needed to be placated and appeased and looked out for. Fran, Ray's sister, was a widow of six months and, although she was a hearty sensible creature, was bound to be stricken and sorry at a wedding. Martin and Ingrid still weren't pregnant. Frisch had come with a new girl, and Joyce had had to judge delicately the degree of friendliness to show toward her, considering how very recently she had been friendly to the one displaced. A good friend of Joyce's from the days of the craft cooperative (her brother had been at school with Peter) told her over lunch that her breast cancer had come back; hard to believe when she looked so radiantly well. And even as Joyce dozed she couldn't help her high-strung nerves tuning in to any possibility of raised voices, in case it was Ray and Daniel picking another fight over nothing. It had been a mistake, Daniel's coming back to live with them after his band split up and his flat fell through and Joyce had had to nurse him through a bad night when he'd mixed his drugs. Ray couldn't bear it that Daniel didn't know what he wanted to do next.

Joyce opened her eyes and came wide awake and thought with clarity while she followed the line of a crack across the ceiling how much she would have liked to talk about all this with Zoe. Wasn't that what mothers and daughters were supposed to do? Wouldn't she have loved more than anything to tell Lil? She had been so busy—today, yesterday, this month, last year—she had probably let slip precious opportunities for making contact with her now-grown-up child. Zoe and Simon had missed out earlier on their tea. If she took up to Zoe's room a tray with three cups and slices of Ann's cake (full of brandy), perhaps they would let her in and she could tell them funny stories from the day, confide in them about her difficulties. Simon's silence might turn out to be only the insecurity of youth.