Everything Will Be All Right by Tessa Hadley

allow it.
    The children couldn’t always understand him; he mumbled to himself, and his Tyneside accent was broad.
    â€”Gilbert was in hospital, Vera explained busily. He’s been ill a long time, but he’s better now. And a good thing too, that he wasn’t sent to the slaughter. This family gave enough of their young men.
    â€”Our brother Ernest was killed, said Gilbert. And Ivor, your father.
    â€”He remembers! said Lil, as if he’d accomplished something.
    â€”Well, of course he remembers.
    They gave him Kay’s room for his own. Lil had dismantled the cot while Vera was away.
    â€”Shouldn’t there be another child? asked Gilbert. A little girl?
    For an uncomfortable moment they all thought he meant Kay.
    â€”Oh, Ann’s at a friend’s house! Joyce suddenly understood. She’ll be back for tea.
    He nodded.
    â€”I was sure there was two of you.
    â€”Did they cut him? Has he had any operation? Joyce overheard Lil hiss to Vera under cover of a clatter of pans.
    â€”He has not. The doctor said he had an insulin treatment. I can’t speak highly enough of Dr. Gurton. He’s a very dedicated and humane man. He spoke of great changes to come, with new pharmaceutical developments in the field.
    â€”Gilbert doesn’t seem too bad, said Lil cautiously.
    *   *   *
    He wasn’t a nuisance around the place. He mostly sat in his room at first, or at the kitchen table, spelling stubbornly through an old newspaper, or he threw sticks for Winnie the bulldog in the field beyond the house. They were all obscurely weighed down with anxiety for him, however, and relieved if ever he showed signs of being happy with them. A one-sided grin slipped on his face occasionally, like the quick flare of an unexpected light. Something in his movements was not quite right for a man of almost thirty; he was too quick and loose and absorbed in himself; he hadn’t assumed the containment and responsive gravity of a grown-up. Martin imitated his slow shuffling walk and his accent; Gilbert didn’t seem to mind. He listened respectfully while Martin explained his latest science project. (This had to do with the parable about the man who was paid in grains of rice on a chessboard, doubling for each square. Martin and his friend were calculating how many grains there would actually be by the sixty-fourth square, and how many it took to make up a square inch, and whether the rice would really cover India a foot deep.)
    In his suitcase Gilbert had brought a little case of bits of stuff for making flies for fishing, and for a while he and Martin drew close together, fiddling with pliers and cobbler’s wax, tying fantastically intricate creations out of brightly dyed feathers and bits of tinsel and squirrel hair. He showed Martin how to wet his fingers and run them down the feathers so that the fibers separated and stood out at right angles to the quill. But Gilbert didn’t have the patience for the fishing itself; much to Martin’s indignation he wandered off and came home after an hour or so, leaving Martin to pack away the rods. “He’s got no sticking power,” Martin complained. Neither of them really knew how to fly-fish anyway; it seemed Gilbert had only been taught how to make the flies, not use them. The other thing Gilbert could do impressed Martin more. When he found that Martin had a welding torch and a clamp (they had been Ivor’s), he asked for everyone’s spare pennies and halfpennies, and in one of the outhouses he began welding together a model airplane out of the coins, a Hurricane. He had a picture to work from, torn out of a magazine. The model was a complex and beautiful thing: quite large, about eighteen inches from end to end of the fuselage. The coins were welded together like miniature riveted plates, then burnished coppery pink. Martin learned how to heat the coins and shape them, but he could never make them curve with