Everything Will Be All Right Read Free

only a pair of ferries that chugged backward and forward across the water, or a long detour by road, for those who were traveling on westward). At Vera’s ninety-fourth birthday party, after a couple of glasses of fizzy wine, pressing her aunt’s hand with its old cold skin loosened from the bones and improbable arthritis-knobbled knuckles, Joyce had decided it would be wonderful to take her out and go see whether the old house was still standing.
    She would never learn.
    Her husband refused to take part in the quixotic expedition.
    â€”Didn’t we try and find it once before, years ago, he said, and there was just some big sprawling kind of industrial plant?
    â€”I don’t think so, Joyce said. I don’t think we were ever sure we’d found the right place. The roads had all changed.
    â€”You can be sure, he said, that whatever goes wrong will be held against you. You know what she’s like.
    â€”Why should anything go wrong? she protested.
    And they did find the house: although it was true that Joyce cut her hand folding up Vera’s recalcitrant wheelchair into the back of the car and that, about fifteen minutes into the journey while she was still sucking the blood off her knuckles, rain began to spit out of the slate-gray sky. Vera stared forward through the windscreen with the fixed expression of stoically suppressed anxiety she always wore when Joyce was driving her anywhere, and which always managed to make Joyce drive badly; she shot one amber light with uncalled-for recklessness and then stopped pointlessly at a green one.
    There was no sign of the carbon-black factory they had found the last time they looked for the house (Joyce remembers this trip better than she let on to her husband). She felt at least a little lift of triumph at that: the plant with its blight of pipes and machine innards had been so desolatingly and conclusively ugly that she had stifled the idea of it in her thoughts, and now it seemed to have been wiped off the landscape as if it had never existed. But the pattern of roads still didn’t seem to correspond with the pattern in her memory, and after a succession of fairly random turns she had just made up her mind she was lost when Vera saw something and Joyce pulled over to the side of the road.
    â€”Isn’t that it? said Vera.
    Joyce didn’t see how she could know. They stared through the rain at some piles of stone across a field. Joyce’s vision was blurry: she really needed glasses now but was too vain to wear them. There was a fuzz of bright green everywhere in her blur, signifying that spring had come; but this was a messy kind of countryside, too flat and too near the city and the motorway and the power station to be anything but scruffy and disconsolate these days, crisscrossed with pylons, the field overgrown with some kind of low scrubby bushes, a solitary cow—no, shaggy pony—lifting its head to look at them. In front of the piles of stone lay something on its side in zigzag folds like the pleats of a concertina.
    â€”We’re looking at it from the back, said Vera. It was on a little hill like that. It’s reclaimed land all around. One of the drainage ditches ran east–west across behind; do you see that line of trees?
    Nothing she could see suggested any connection to the past to Joyce.
    â€”Do you want to get out and have a look? she suggested doubtfully. Perhaps if I drive round to the front, there’ll be a track.
    â€”What would I want to do that for? Vera was irritated. She had been excited for a moment, identifying the place, but really it was such a ruin there wasn’t much for them to do except stare at it glumly from the car. Joyce admitted to herself that she had hoped there might at least be the shell of a house they could get close to, or even that it might still be whole and inhabited and that nice people might be living there who might invite them inside to walk around the rooms. She had