Everything Will Be All Right Read Free Page A

imagined finding herself in the little stone apple room above the kitchen and all her childhood flooding back. She wouldn’t have admitted this hope of hers to her husband.
    â€”The orchard’s gone, Vera said, and that’s the staircase, lying on its side.
    Joyce could see then with a lurch of her heart that the zigzag thing must be a staircase. It was disconcerting, if this really was the place, to think of them climbing up and down it for all those years: it was so pointless now, lying along the ground. And she felt a surge of anger against her aunt, not just for the usual things, the melodramatic intakes of breath when she moved and the dampening remarks and the looming problems of lunch and toilets (they ended up having lunch at the dismal service station just off the motorway before the bridge, where it was easy to manage the wheelchair), but also for ever having spotted the place. If Joyce had come by herself she could have driven round and round and never been certain she hadn’t just missed it or remembered the roads wrongly.
    After lunch she drove Vera across the bridge, sightseeing, and then took her back to her own house for supper. Now, in the relief of having Vera safely back in her room in the home and of her own imminent departure, she is saying nice things about their expedition, turning the story of it into a funny and perky one (no doubt the same story she’ll tell her husband later).
    â€”I’d never have seen the house without you, you know. How ever did you pick it out? I’m so envious of your sharp eyes. I don’t think your sight’s deteriorated one bit from what it’s always been. And then your memory’s so good. But it was so strange, to actually see the place. We were so happy there.
    â€”Speak for yourself, Vera says; I wasn’t happy.
    Joyce knows she overdoes this determined cheerfulness sometimes. Vera can’t help responding to the flattery, but they are both rather ashamed of it, knowing it’s not the whole truth, knowing it’s compensation. In that room Joyce wants to heap encouragements and admiration on Vera’s head to make up for leaving her here. There’s nothing wrong with the room as such, although it is small. It has a bathroom en suite. The tea that the girls bring is all right; it is made with teabags, but at least they bring milk in a jug. There are wall-to-wall raspberry-pink carpets everywhere in the home and a great emphasis on a hotel-type kind of luxury, with reproduction antique furniture and big vases of silk flowers on tables in the hall. Vera was adamant that she didn’t want a council-run home, and the furniture is the kind of thing she aspired to herself in her middle age, when she had a bit of money to spend. But no amount of pretense that this is just another hotel can quite smother Joyce’s horrible impression of how the ones who live here wait among the remnant of their possessions as if already in transit from their real lives.
    When Joyce says she is leaving, Vera has one of her momentary funny turns and reaches round in a panic for her handbag, thinking she’s coming home too; Joyce has to explain. Making her way out, Joyce is swift and free without the wheelchair. She notices that there are no mirrors where you might expect them—in the turns of the corridors, above the little pseudo-Regency occasional tables with their vases piled high with alstroemeria and peonies and lilies—and although she supposes this is not a kindness for the visitors she is quite glad not to come upon herself in here. Two girls are laughing, squealing, making up a bed in a room she passes, the sheets flying and crackling, their voices rising and hushing with that pressured importance which means they are talking about sex. With a rush of the desperate longing that most of the time she’s so good at keeping at bay, Joyce yearns to be identified with them and with all the sap and throbbing promise of