Everything Will Be All Right by Tessa Hadley Page A

Gilbert’s precision. Gilbert even made a little pilot, with a tiny helmet, and tiny hands on the controls, and a tiny coppery face with a mustache. He said he had learned to do this in hospital. His life seemed to be made up of hobbies and not of real man’s work, as if he were stuck in boyhood.
    He didn’t like Peter playing the violin. Sometimes when Peter played, Gilbert would take Winnie out walking in the fields, or he would sit shaking his head as if he had an insect in his ears; he suggested that Peter should learn “something with a bit more life in it.” Peter, who was touchy about his playing, pretended he couldn’t understand anything Gilbert said. In the evenings Gilbert twiddled the knobs on the wireless to find swing and dance-band music; sometimes he couldn’t tune it properly and sat with his ear close to the wire mesh, frowning with ferocious absorption as he followed after the trailing ends of happy party music that came and went.
    From time to time, letters still came for Vera. One afternoon Joyce saw one of them lying opened on her aunt’s dressing table. She took it out of its envelope and read across the top of the sheet of letter paper inside that it was from Appleton Mental Hospital. The Dr. Gurton that Vera took every opportunity to mention was deputy superintendent there. His letter was very short, thanking her for sending him the latest news of Gilbert’s progress, praising her for her enlightened views on the treatment of mental illness in the “therapeutic community.” Scrawled across the bottom of the sheet he had added, “I am sorry, but I do not know the novel by A. P. Herbert on divorce-law reform which you recommend.” Perhaps Dr. Gurton was trying to discourage Vera from sending him letters. Joyce had seen her aunt writing to him, covering sheet after sheet in her handsome spiky italic hand.
    She didn’t tell the others. She thought that the mental hospital was worse than prison; she felt incensed against Vera for inflicting Gilbert on them. She began to keep out of his way as if whatever he had might be contaminating. It wasn’t Gilbert himself who disgusted her. He had shown her card tricks and blushed with pleasure when she couldn’t guess how they were done. But the idea of his connection to such an unimaginable place, full of an assembly of all the horrors she had ever had a glimpse of in the street, in tow after shamed mothers, or hobbling and gibbering by themselves: that was unbearable; she had to shut it out. Uncle Dick on one of his rare visits to the house said that Vera must be out of her mind, bringing Gilbert to stay where there were growing girls. Vera retorted that it was Dick who shouldn’t be allowed near growing girls. Joyce asked for a bolt to be fixed on the inside of the bathroom door.
    She thought that Gilbert began to avoid contact with her too. This might be because she was going off to college every day; perhaps he thought she was too full of her superior self. Perhaps he was offended by the careful rituals of preparation she went through in the evenings, as if she required more complex maintenance than the rest of them: rinsing her delicates in the sink, mending her stockings, altering clothes, spreading the blanket on the kitchen table to press with a flatiron heated on the stove her outfit for the next day.
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    Ann and Gilbert hung about together, following after the geese and, as Lil called it, “bothering them.” Lil had raised the geese from little gray chicks; she used their eggs for baking and omelets, and they were supposed to be eaten at Christmas, although this year because of Kay no one had been able to contemplate asking Farmer Brookes to take them away and kill them. Joyce quailed at their loud gabblings and honkings and snapping beaks, but Ann was fearless with them; she loved them. They attacked any visitors with their wings open and their necks