Everything Will Be All Right Read Free Page B

the spring evening pouring in through the window beyond them, thrown open high. She’s so glad to leave the home behind and reach the street with ordinary people walking past and get into her car alone and put on a tape, something she scrabbles out of the glove box, a Taj Mahal album Zoe bought her for Christmas.
    She leans across the passenger seat to pull out Vera’s crocheted cushion from where it’s slipped down the side of the seat and throw it out of sight into the back: in passing she throws a fugitive, perfunctory glance at herself in the rearview mirror. Like most of the glimpses she has of herself nowadays, it’s not conclusively satisfactory either way. She at least doesn’t catch herself looking like one of those old collapsed ones who have given up. But she isn’t confident either that what she sees—white hair cut in a short bob, tanned crinkled heart-shaped face, distinctive deep-lidded blue eyes, neat late-middle-aged prettiness—isn’t a mere hopeful habit of perception superimposed upon a reality that is in truth slipping away farther and faster than she knows.
    *   *   *
    The doorbell rings and Pearl’s friends arrive. The girls are nice to Zoe; they ask polite, interested questions about her work. Pearl appears at the top of the stairs, wrapped in Zoe’s bathrobe with her hair wet; laughing, as if things have already started being funny, she calls to them to come on up. They aren’t dressed to go out yet; they’ve brought carrier bags full of clothes, and they will spend the next couple of hours trying on and borrowing and pluming in front of one another.
    Zoe is going out too, to see a late film at the Arts Centre with a friend, but she doesn’t want Pearl to know this. If Pearl realizes the house is empty she will invite a whole gang of people back to her room, and then Zoe will either have to row with them to get them out or lie awake all night listening to their music and laughter and stoned noisy visits to the toilet to pee all over the floor (the boys) or throw up (one of the girls is bulimic).
    As they pile upstairs chattering and Zoe is about to close the front door behind them, she sees that the clouds have broken up. The drab working-class terrace (built for the working class, that is, a century ago, and now shared by a whole mix of types and races in these socially more complicated times) is full of a rich thick yellow light. Above the roofs, baroque dramas are being acted out in the sky: dark clouds part, and effulgent pink and orange beams break through like revelations. Windowpanes blaze. A blackbird is singing improbably in the street’s one tree, a little skimpy one planted at a corner and almost defeated by the successive brutal scalpings of local gangs of kids. The blackbird is rather absurdly disproportionate to the amount of tree there is to sit in, like a bird in a child’s picture book. There’s a perfume of garlic and ginger in the air from the Bengali restaurant on the corner.
    Zoe is infected by the girls’ Friday-night mood, or the change in the light, or the heedlessness of the kids careering along the pavements on their bikes.
    She thinks excitedly that anything could happen.

One
    After the end of the war, when she turned eleven, Joyce Stevenson won a scholarship to Gateshead Grammar; she was one of the top forty children in her year. Two years later, when they moved south to live with her Aunt Vera, her Uncle Dick arranged to have her scholarship transferred to Amery-James High School for Girls, which was in an elegant eighteenth-century house in the city. New classrooms and laboratories and a gym had been added to the old building. The girls and the life there were subtly, complicatedly different from the children and the life Joyce and her sister Ann had known before; this had to do, they quickly understood, with a whole deep mystery of difference between the South and the North, in