Heat Wave

  ‘My task is the deconstruction of a myth,’ says Maurice. ‘Not horticultural information.’ He grins back at her.

  ‘And strictly speaking,’ says James, ‘this book is about the tourist industry.’

  ‘Well I know that,’ says Carol. ‘I’ve read lots of it, haven’t I?’

  Teresa gets up. She puts on the draining-board her plate of apple tart, some of it uneaten. ‘How many people want coffee?’

  ‘Not me, thanks,’ says Pauline. ‘I’ll be off now, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Don’t do that,’ says Maurice. ‘James has brought a bottle of Calvados. Where are the small glasses, Teresa?’

  ‘Thank you, but no thanks, James,’ says Pauline. She heads for the door.

  ‘In the dresser cupboard,’ says Teresa. ‘Good-night, Mum.’

  Pauline closes her front door. She puts the kettle on, makes herself a cup of coffee, sits down, picks up the newspaper and then rises again to search for her reading glasses. She has left them next door, she now remembers.

  She goes out of her cottage and heads again for Teresa’s kitchen. In order to reach the front door she must pass the open window and thus she sees for a couple of seconds the lit room that she has so recently left, an inviting warm cavern in the night. Teresa is no longer there – probably she has gone upstairs to check on Luke. James is not there either, but from the garden beyond drifts the smell of the cigarette that he is considerately smoking out of doors. Teresa does not like smoking in rooms inhabited by Luke.

  Maurice and Carol are seated at opposite sides of the table, in the centre of which their four hands are entwined. Pauline sees, as she walks quickly past the window, the look that blazes from Maurice to Carol, from Carol to Maurice.

  Pauline walks into the room. The hands retreat as she does so. She does not look at Carol or at Maurice but crosses over to the dresser and picks up her spectacles.

  ‘Oh,’ says Carol, ‘you forgot your glasses …’

  ‘Correct,’ says Pauline. ‘I forgot my glasses.’

  Maurice stands up. He keeps his face turned from Pauline, takes his glass and walks through the door that leads to the sitting-room. Carol remains where she is. She has seen what is in Pauline’s face and she does not at once look away but stares for an instant – a blue stare which is a bland declaration of hostilities. This is the way it is, says Carol’s stare. This is the way it’s going to be. Sorry, and all that – but this is how things are.

  Pauline walks out of the room. Myra Sams rears again in her head, Myra Sams and her successors.

  Pauline and Teresa are in the garden, entertaining Luke. It is Monday morning. Maurice is at his desk. James and Carol are gone. Teresa has the scoured look of someone who has not slept. And Luke is apparently in a state of acute neurosis, alternating between manic activity and furious tears.

  ‘He’s tired,’ says Pauline. ‘Shall I take him up and see if he’ll go in his cot?’

  ‘I will,’ says Teresa with an effort.

  ‘Stay there,’ says Pauline.

  She takes Luke up to his room, where, after a few petulant minutes, he flakes out. From behind Maurice’s door comes the tap of his keyboard. Pauline makes a couple of mugs of coffee and returns to the garden where Teresa sits staring at the tangled flowerbed. There is a distant rhythmic thumping sound – harvest has begun. Somewhere over the hill the wheat is falling to the combine.

  Pauline hands Teresa a mug of coffee.

  ‘Oh … thanks. Sorry – you ought to be working.’

  ‘I’m only too happy not to,’ says Pauline. ‘The current manuscript is profoundly boring.’

  ‘What happened to the unicorns?’ asks Teresa dully.

  ‘Their creator has domestic problems. His wife walked out on him.’

  ‘Why?’ says Teresa, with a glimmer of interest.

  Pauline explains, and sees Teresa’s interest fade. Teresa is thinking that this woman does not know when she is well off.

  There is a silence – a silence in which a wordless conversation takes place, the product of years of intimacy and of intuitive interpretation of the set of a mouth, of the flavour of a glance – the undertow of all that is unspoken. Look, says Pauline – I know. Don’t think I don’t know because I say nothing. And Teresa tells her – I know you know, and I don’t want you to say anything. If you said anything I would get up and walk away. Because I can’t stand to talk about it, least of all with you.

  ‘What’s that noise?’ says Teresa after a while.

  ‘The combine. They’re starting to harvest.’

  Teresa nods.

  ‘It always reminds me of the place near Marlborough. That was in the middle of a cornfield too.’

  Teresa nods again. Each recalls the cottage rented once for a summer holiday.

  ‘It was the summer I got my first period,’ says Teresa. ‘I wasn’t interested in anything but brands of sanitary towel. I didn’t notice the cornfield.’

  ‘I remember you being preoccupied. I took it for the onset of adolescent gloom.’

  ‘Was Harry there? I can’t see him, somehow.’

  ‘Intermittently,’ says Pauline. It was also the summer of a Canadian Ph.D. student called Cheryl in whose progress Harry had taken an inordinate interest, but Pauline is not going to go into that. The thump-thump-thump of the combine, and Harry’s phone calls saying he’ll be down to join them at the weekend if he can manage it, but he may still be tied up with work.

  Teresa throws her a look. Maybe she has recaptured some vague adolescent apprehension of adult mysteries. ‘I had a postcard from him yesterday. He’s going to be in London the second week of August.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to take Luke up to see him,’ says Pauline briskly.

  ‘I suppose so,’ mutters Teresa without enthusiasm.

  Inside the cottage the phone rings, and then stops almost immediately. Maurice has picked it up. Teresa stares at the grass, chewing her lip.

  ‘It was that summer that gave me the idea I wanted somewhere of my own in the country one day,’ says Pauline. She sees World’s End hanging spectral over the time and the place, implicit from the moment that she first entertained this notion, walking on the downs perhaps, or cooking a meal in the rented kitchen. A vision of solitude and independence, the first determined contemplation of life after Harry. She perceives the tortuous invisible line that leads inexorably from there to here.

  ‘Mmn …’ Teresa is paying only token attention.

  Pauline slides a look at her. She knows exactly how it is. That condition in which there can be no diversions, no departures from the central grinding concern. In which there is no past, but only this consuming present, in which all energies have to be devoted to the pursuit of possibilities and contingent events. What will he do? Will he go to London again? Is he on the phone with her right now?

  The condition in which a life can be laid waste, thinks Pauline. The condition in which whole chunks of my life were devastated.

  ‘Listen …’ she begins – and then pauses. Teresa raises her head from contemplation of the grass.

  ‘Yes?’ says Teresa cautiously – without encouragement.

  Pauline takes a breath. ‘You know what I should have done?’ she says at last, in a rush. ‘I should have cut adrift from Harry years and years before I did. I should have said enough is enough – cut our losses and got out.’

  ‘Oh …’ Teresa is startled.

  ‘Then that summer would never have been and maybe I’d never have got a penchant for country living and none of us would be here now. The thought occurred, that’s all. And incidentally so far as I’m concerned Harry today is neither here nor there. Maybe I should make that clear. It’ll save you being so tactful.’

  ‘I see.’ Teresa is now alert. She is also perplexed. Things are being said which are not for saying. Forbidden ground is suddenly invaded.

  ‘It’s something that happens. You should know, that’s all. What was unendurable becomes … well, as though it happene
d to someone else. Someone you feel sorry for but a bit impatient with.’

  Teresa considers this. She is still thrown by these disclosures. She eyes her mother.

  ‘That’s how it goes,’ says Pauline. ‘But don’t get me wrong. It’s not that it ceases to matter – whatever there was back then – but simply that it moves off into some other dimension. An interesting process. Anyway … I just thought I’d mention it. And you don’t need to pick your way through a minefield where Harry is concerned. There isn’t one.’

  ‘I see,’ says Teresa. ‘Well … I’m glad you told me.’ She is moving this information around, trying it out for size. ‘And … well, I’m glad anyway.’ She seems about to add to this, and then does not. Something else now swarms up in the look she gives Pauline. But it’s not the same, say Teresa’s eyes, it’s not the same at all. Don’t think that. Of course it isn’t.

  Evening. Silence. The combine has gone home, leaving a void that now seems unnatural. The place is in suspension – an airless dusk, in which birds call and the wheat stands absolutely still.

  Pauline goes out to her car in search of a mislaid notebook. She fails to find it, and when she emerges from the car and stands up there is Maurice coming out of the cottage.

  He walks over to her. He does not bother with the circumlocution of greeting or weather commentary. He gives her a half-smile, which would seem to be the white flag of the messenger come in peace. ‘Perhaps we should talk,’ he says.

  Pauline does not reply at once. She considers him. Then she says, ‘What would we talk about, Maurice?’

  Maurice observes her in silence. He gives the slightest of shrugs. So be it, says his look. If that’s the way you want it. He turns away and walks back to the cottage.

  15

  At midnight the phone rings.

  ‘Pauline?’ says Hugh. His voice is disarrayed.

  ‘Are you all right, Hugh?’

  ‘Yes …’ he says. ‘At least … No. Elaine is dead.’

  Pauline knows, at once, what has happened. She is silent for a moment. Then – ‘Oh, Hugh … How?’

  ‘Pills. I don’t know where she got them from. I used to check, from time to time. This has always been on the cards – I’ve realized that.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Pauline. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’ She struggles to think what to say, what to do. ‘Would you like me to come?’

  ‘Not right now. Later, maybe. Now it’s all practical things. I’m best just getting on with it.’ He sounds less disarrayed now, just weary. ‘The funeral’s on Tuesday.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Pauline. Her thoughts are rushing in all directions. That poor bleak woman. Alone with the pills. Hugh. This funeral. Should she … ? Is it appropriate that she attend the funeral?

  ‘No,’ says Hugh, ahead of her, or alongside. ‘Don’t come to it. It’s going to be her brother and his family. There was a brother, you know – not that we saw that much of him. And …’ His voice trails away.

  And no one, thinks Pauline. Elaine had no friends.

  ‘And Margery,’ says Hugh. ‘She’ll be there.’

  No, thinks Pauline, I shouldn’t go. It wouldn’t do. But poor old Hugh … a gust of empathy sweeps through her. ‘I wish I was with you,’ she says.

  ‘Well, maybe if you were thinking of coming to London later in the week, say … When it’s all over. That would perk me up. But not if it’s a nuisance.’

  ‘Oh, Hugh,’ she says. ‘Of course I’ll come. Wednesday?’

  They talk a little more and when she puts the phone down she lies there thinking of that despairing woman, shut away in her inescapable neurosis, and of Hugh, who must be grieving for something that happened long ago rather than for this act of desperation. He has never talked of the woman he first married and whom he lost long since. The disoriented note in his voice now is that of shock and bewilderment. His task will be to acclimatize himself to a life in which he is freed of that millstone which is so familiar that it has become also perhaps a kind of tether. He will be adrift.

  ‘… so I’m going up to see him on Wednesday,’ she explains to Teresa. And also, incidentally, to Maurice. She would have preferred to have this conversation with Teresa alone, but Maurice came into the kitchen half-way through and she has had to accept his muttered expressions of dismay. He has met Hugh only twice and there was no particular accord between them.

  ‘Of course,’ says Teresa. She glances at Maurice.

  ‘Wednesday …’ says Maurice. ‘Right. Well, look, I’ll see if I can switch my appointment and go up on Monday so I can be back by then.’

  Pauline turns to him, sharply.

  ‘I have to see someone at English Heritage, and do a stint in the library, but I’ll try to do it earlier. Teresa had better not be left here on her own and without a car.’

  ‘No,’ says Pauline. ‘She had better not.’

  ‘Exactly,’ says Maurice. He avoids her eye. ‘Right. I’ll get hold of him – the English Heritage man.’ He leaves the room.

  Pauline confronts Teresa. ‘Or you could go with him. Do that, instead. If he has to bounce to and fro. This summer of isolation and application seems to be breaking down.’ She tries to be light, to make it sound like a careless juggling of alternatives.

  ‘No,’ says Teresa. ‘I’ve thought about that. It would be worse.’ She has abandoned pretences.

  ‘Oh …’ Pauline is wrenched now by Teresa’s expression, by her tone. Something more has happened. Something said, something done.

  ‘I still wouldn’t know where he was or what he was doing. And Luke would cry in the car and there’s all his things to take, the cot and the buggy … I’d have to sit there wondering where Maurice was and when he’d be back just the same. I may as well do it here as there.’ She pauses, draws a breath – a little jerky gasp of stress. ‘Give my love to Hugh,’ she says. ‘If you talk to him before you go. Tell him I’m so sorry.’

  Pauline nods. She is carved up by what she sees in Teresa’s eyes, by Teresa’s painfully level tone, by her own familiarity with Teresa’s private darkness.

  Maurice arrives at Pauline’s door. He has come, ostensibly, to borrow some paper. The village shop does not rise to A4 copy paper. Pauline finds him standing at the foot of the stairs with this request on his lips. She climbs the stairs, collects a wad of paper and descends once more.

  ‘I’ll pay you back,’ says Maurice, with a furtive smile.

  ‘No need.’

  He does not go, but continues to stand there.

  ‘Well …’ says Pauline, dismissive now. Go, she thinks, before too much is said.

  ‘I know what you’ve been thinking, Pauline,’ says Maurice.

  ‘In that case there’s no need for me to make any comment.’

  ‘You could perhaps be exaggerating things, you know.’

  ‘Could I?’ says Pauline, starting to smoulder. ‘If that’s what you feel, then that is your problem, not mine.’

  Maurice spreads his hands in a gesture of deprecation. ‘I can see that nothing I say is going to make any difference. But if it’s any help let me tell you that James and Carol won’t be coming down here for weekends any more. It isn’t working out so well that way. It’ll be more convenient if James and I get together in London every now and then.’

  I see, thinks Pauline. Yes, more convenient in every way, no doubt. She does not speak, and Maurice continues to stand there, looking up at her because she is several steps above him on that steeply raked flight of stairs. It is dark inside, the stairwell of the cottage is unlit, and Maurice is framed in the brilliance of the out-of-doors beyond – the blue and gold and green of sky and wheat and hedge, a flare of light and colour. Pauline cannot see his face very well, and would not wish to because whichever approach he has assumed would madden her – propitiation, defiance, conspiracy.

  ‘Just at this moment,’ says Maurice slowly, ‘you’re probably wishing I’d never married Teresa. You shouldn’t do that. Whatever there is right now that may be …’
br />   Pauline cuts him off. ‘Wrong, Maurice. Just at this moment I’m thinking that if I could kill you I probably would. A reaction you won’t understand, but that too is your problem.’

  Maurice stares up at her. ‘I’ve always thought of you as a level-headed woman, Pauline. Don’t disillusion me. Thank you for the paper.’ He turns, and goes.

  The landscape is now being pulverized. On the other side of the hill the invisible combine is thrashing away at the spring wheat, day after day. Tractors roar down the track past World’s End, towing trailer-loads of grain. On the roads, lines of traffic crawl in procession behind an isolated combine or tractor. The monster eyes of agricultural machinery sweep the fields with shafts of light late into the evening. This is the time of year when it is made clear that the countryside is not scenery but an industrial enterprise. The coaches carrying tour parties to Stratford must queue up behind the combine which occupies most of the road, the caravan-towing cars and the hired camper vans must sit panting behind the tractor waiting to turn right into its destined field.

  Pauline meets Chaundy on the track. They halt their cars for the statutory exchange.

  ‘Busy time for you,’ says Pauline.

  ‘Have this lot down next,’ says Chaundy. They gaze at the seething wheat. ‘The weather better bloody well hold another couple of weeks,’ he adds.

  ‘Is it a good harvest?’ Pauline inquires.

  Chaundy shrugs. ‘All burnt up, isn’t it?’ His disgruntled tone implies that this is a deliberate act on someone’s part – the government probably, or the EC, or conceivably Pauline herself has had a hand in it. He slams the Peugeot into gear once more, a fearful grinding sound which indicates that communication is at an end. He eyes Pauline, with the expression of a man who feels he may have forgotten something. It comes to him. ‘Everything OK with you?’ he says, perfunctorily, the car already edging forward.

  ‘Fine,’ says Pauline. ‘Just fine.’

  Honour is satisfied.

  And such ritual dances are perfectly appropriate, thinks Pauline, as she makes her way along the shelves of the Mace Store in the village, trying to remember what it is that she has come here for. Chaundy is nothing to her, and she is even less to Chaundy. All that is required is mutual recognition and an indication of non-hostility. Dogs also do it.