Heat Wave

  ‘Tell me something,’ says Pauline. ‘Has Margery ever been married?’

  ‘Good heavens, no. She lives in Richmond with another woman.’

  Of course, thinks Pauline. How obtuse of me. She says, ‘I’d been imagining Margery cherishing a secret passion for you over the years, and coming out with it now.’

  ‘Last thing she’d do, frankly. Her friend’s Swiss. Yvette. Makes the most incredible cakes. Margery sometimes brings me one.’

  The waitress takes their orders. ‘This’ll be my first proper meal since … well, since it happened,’ says Hugh. ‘I haven’t felt like eating. I haven’t been to the house much. I’ve been dossing down in my office but I suppose I can’t really go on doing that.’

  ‘Sell it.’

  ‘The office?’ says Hugh, startled.

  ‘No, no – the house. You don’t have to live there any more. Buy a flat in town. It’s what you’d always have preferred.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I could, couldn’t I?’ Hugh ponders this. He seems ambushed by this new freedom of choice. ‘Yes … well … I suppose I shall.’

  ‘When you’re ready. You don’t need to rush into anything.’

  ‘No.’ He frowns, staring down at the bread he is dismembering. ‘Do you know … we’d been married for twenty-seven years. I didn’t quite realize that, till I had to sort out her papers. I always gave her flowers on the anniversaries, but I never counted them. For obvious reasons, I suppose.’

  ‘Hugh … When did it all begin? Elaine’s illness?’

  He looks at her over the top of his glasses. She has entered forbidden territory and for a moment it seems as though he will deflect the question – swerve off into a discussion of the restaurant or an account of some book-buying excursion. Then he gives up.

  ‘Right away, almost. I thought I’d done it, in some way. She was fine, and then within a year or so she was turning into someone else. Couldn’t talk to anyone. Didn’t want to leave the house. She’d never been a bouncing extrovert, exactly, but it was obvious something had gone appallingly wrong. I took her to see people, of course. Specialists.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘Oh, everything. Agoraphobia, it was, at one point. Parental abuse. Something nasty in the woodshed when she was six. Sexual dysfunction.’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘Sex? Well, she wasn’t much interested, put it that way. But I’m not excessively demanding in that area myself.’ Hugh avoids Pauline’s eye. ‘An adequate sufficiency, that’s all I ever asked. All the same, I thought at first it must be my fault.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ says Pauline. ‘It would have happened whatever – I’m sure of that.’

  ‘Yes, I think that now. In a way, I know what it was. Simply … she thought nothing of herself. She thought she had absolutely nothing to offer – that she was dull, plain, unintelligent, incompetent. Other people became a threat. The only thing to do was to hide. Low self-esteem, isn’t that what they call it?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘And so eventually it drove her … well, she stopped being what you might call normal in any sense. I find that the worst thing of all – that a woman can be demolished just by her own opinion of herself.’

  Pauline nods. ‘The opposite happens, too. People who create themselves.’ She thinks of those soaring complacencies that can power a whole career, the confidence that constructs its own image.

  Food has arrived. Hugh starts to talk of the funeral. ‘You were right about the organ music. A hymn would have been pathetic. It was all pretty dire, as it was. There’s that moment when the coffin starts to slide away, and I thought … but really Elaine went long ago, to all intents and purposes. For years she’s hardly spoken to me, you know.’

  ‘It’s over now,’ says Pauline gently. ‘Everything can be different.’

  ‘Yes. I’ve been trying to think about that.’

  ‘Eat your saltimbocca. Isn’t that what it is?’

  Hugh picks up his knife and fork. ‘Mmn. Jolly good, too. Now tell me what you’ve been doing.’

  ‘Nothing,’ says Pauline. ‘Working. Watching this field of wheat.’

  ‘Come back to London.’

  ‘No. Not yet, anyway.’

  He catches something in her tone. ‘I don’t understand what’s keeping you down there like this.’

  ‘The weather,’ Pauline suggests. ‘This is the best summer for fifty years, we’re being told.’

  ‘Nonsense.’ He looks at her narrowly. ‘There’s something else, I can tell.’ He stops eating, arrested by a sudden insight. ‘Oh God … I should have thought of it before. Have you … is there a man?’

  Pauline laughs. ‘I should be so lucky … Of course there’s not a man, Hugh.’

  He sighs. ‘Well, I’m afraid I’m glad to hear it. I would have felt even more disorientated than I already am.’

  Back in her flat, much later, she cannot sleep. She lies listening to the city night – the shrill pulse of a car-alarm down the road, the howl of a police siren. Voices, footsteps, a slammed door. Anonymous and neutral.

  Pauline thinks of World’s End, perched in the silent darkness of its valley. She conjures it up in the mind – the smell of it, the feel of it. But there is nothing neutral there. It is full of voices and faces. Most of all, there is Teresa’s kitchen at breakfast earlier this week, vibrant with ill-feeling.

  ‘Hi!’ says Teresa. ‘How was Hugh?’ She has come out on to the track as Pauline’s car pulls up, and peers through a shroud of mystery, pretending casual pleasure at seeing her mother. ‘How was he?’ she says again, as though unaware that she is repeating herself.

  ‘Hugh seems to be surfacing. We had a nice evening.’

  ‘Well, good.’

  From the open window of Maurice’s study comes the rasp of his printer. Scrape, scrape – back and forth. Shall I tell you what to do? thinks Pauline. Burn his book. It wonderfully concentrates the mind. But Teresa will do no such thing, she will not even burn a tentative page or two. She is not the book-burning type. It is she who will burn.

  Pauline goes inside to attend to the mail and the answering machine. There is a card from the friends who proposed the Venice trip in September. The North Sea oil author has left a message with some queries. It is time for lunch, so she makes herself a salad and reads the paper for a while before going up to her study. She starts to go through the points raised by the North Sea oil author, but cannot concentrate. She sits at her desk, staring at the typescript in front of her.

  I could go away, she thinks. I could turn my back on it all, since there is nothing I can do. I could go to London and work there and ring up my friends and have them in for supper and go to the pictures and jolly Hugh along. In September, apparently, I am in any case to go to Venice.

  But she knows that she will stay. It must be seen out now, this summer, come what may.

  July has slid over into August. And the place is burnt up. The verges are bleached now – buff plumes of grass and the brown candelabra of hogweed. The blue lakes of flax have drained away. Instead there are the poppies – scarlet threads on a field of ripe wheat, or a brilliant flush along the roadside. And much of the wheat is down – there are sweeps of golden stubble dotted with bales of straw.

  At World’s End, the days creep by. Maurice comes and goes a lot. He appears in constant need of newspapers, cans of beer, bottles of wine, paper clips … the car disappears down the track in a cloud of dust and returns half an hour later, an hour later, from the village or from Hadbury or wherever he has been. He is restless, that is clear enough. He patrols the garden in the evenings, tipping back glasses of red wine. Several times he disappears for longer – two hours, an afternoon. He is checking out some local tourist sites, says Teresa. A jaunt, then, justified in the name of research. But Teresa has not joined him on these trips. ‘Luke would get all hot and whingey,’ she explains, preempting Pauline’s comment. ‘Anyway, I’ve already been there.’

  It is quiet t
hese days, at World’s End. The only voice continuously heard is Luke’s. Through the open windows of the cottage Pauline hears Luke. She hears Teresa talking to Luke. She does not hear Teresa talking to Maurice, or Maurice talking to Teresa. At night the television quacks away, or a promenade concert spills into the warm darkness.

  Pauline does not want to think about what is being said or what is not being said next door. Particularly, she does not want to think about what is not being said, because she is obliged to infer this every time she sees Teresa and looks closely at her face – when Teresa is wandering in the garden with Luke, or holding him as he tries to climb the fence beside the track. Teresa’s face is changing, by the day. It is losing its volatility. There are no longer those sudden illuminations – those flights from sobriety, from preoccupation into an instant vibrancy. The sun no longer comes out, in Teresa’s face. Especially, there is no longer that glow each time that she sees Maurice – when he walks into a room, when he turns towards her.

  ‘Me, I’m afraid,’ says Chris Rogers.

  ‘Ah. Everything OK, I hope? Your wife … ?’

  ‘She’s back, yes. Thank God. Things are pretty good in that department. The thing is … I still haven’t been able to get down to that chapter.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ says Pauline.

  ‘What happened is that Tom was very ill. Our three-year-old. Just suddenly, like that – wham! Bright as a button one day, getting in everyone’s hair, the usual … and then twenty-four hours later it was all telephones and ambulances and doctors running along hospital corridors and him unconscious all hung about with tubes. Christ! I never want to go through anything like that again.’

  ‘Is he all right?’

  ‘Yes. He’s going to be fine, they say. Sue’s at the hospital now, but they’re going to let him home next week. It was some devastating form of pneumonia. Anyway … it’s over now. Jesus! I didn’t know you could feel like that. It’s like being thrown into a black pit.’

  Pauline is silenced. ‘Yes,’ she says at last. ‘I can imagine. I’ve never had that experience – but I can imagine.’

  ‘I’ve never asked. Did you have children?’

  ‘Yes. One.’

  ‘Right, then you can. Imagine, that is. I mean, up till now as far as I’m concerned being a parent has been a matter of initial euphoria and amazement and then sleepless incarceration with miniature megalomaniacs whose sole purpose is to do themselves an injury. You’re either spinning with anxiety or homicidal. You’d also kill for them if you had to. I mean, for Christ’s sake, you cease to be human. I look at wildlife programmes and think, yes, that’s right, that’s me, nothing but a vehicle for the genetic drive. Right?’

  ‘Right,’ says Pauline. ‘My sentiments entirely.’

  ‘And then this happens and you realize that you’d seen nothing. You were a screaming innocent, before. Whew! But it comes to an end, I’m told, eventually.’

  ‘What does?’

  ‘Well, they grow up. Yours must have done. Son? Daughter?’

  ‘Daughter. End – did you say?’

  ‘Well, not end, I suppose,’ says Chris. ‘But I mean they acquire some sense of self-preservation and they let you go to sleep at night.’

  ‘Oh – is that what they do?’

  A pause. Chris sounds guarded. ‘I’ve got it wrong, have I?’

  ‘Slightly wrong, I’m afraid. What in fact happens is that instead of getting there in the nick of time before they fall out of the window or pull the kettle over on themselves you have to stand on one side and watch it happen. Or wait for it to happen. Or wonder if it’s going to happen.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Chris. ‘My plan was to say – right, you’re on your own now. Take care, I’m going into emotional retirement.’

  ‘You can say that. Unfortunately you don’t feel that. Would that you did. Still – this isn’t quite what you’re wanting to hear at the moment.’

  ‘I take your point – it’s a life sentence. In that case I’d better tie up this book while there’s a brief respite. I just thought I should explain the delay.’

  ‘Let me have the chapter when you can,’ says Pauline. ‘And I’m really glad Tom’s all right.’

  Maurice goes to London again. Pauline does not know this until late in the afternoon when she becomes aware that the car which left early that morning has never returned. She finds Teresa and Luke in the garden. Luke is throwing his wooden bricks into the flower bed and Teresa is patiently retrieving them.

  ‘Maurice is away?’ says Pauline baldly.

  ‘There was this lecture he wanted to go to in London. And some papers he needed.’ Teresa’s tone is flat. She looks at Pauline, straight. ‘That’s what he said anyway. He’ll be back tomorrow.’

  Pauline feels that icy fist in her guts. As must Teresa. She can find nothing to say, so she gets down on the grass and starts to build a tower for Luke out of his blocks. She builds the tower and Luke knocks it over and then she builds it again and Luke knocks it over once more. Teresa sits on the bench and watches, silent. Luke is ecstatic.

  Pauline dreams. She dreams of Harry.

  Harry walks in through the kitchen door at World’s End. ‘Well, hello!’ he says. ‘And how are you?’ He is not a day older. He is just as he was when last Pauline saw him, many years ago now. He is simply Harry.

  ‘Go away,’ says Pauline irritably. ‘I don’t want you here.’

  Harry shakes his head reprovingly. ‘Not so loud. Teresa will hear.’

  ‘I intend that Teresa should hear.’

  Now Harry is censorious. ‘Then you’re a bad mother, Pauline.’

  ‘Look who’s talking!’ snaps Pauline.

  Harry shakes his head. ‘I always adored Teresa.’

  ‘When you had a spare moment.’

  ‘Pauline,’ says Harry. ‘I had work to do.’

  ‘We’ve all got work to do.’

  ‘Sweetie, I didn’t come here to argue.’

  ‘I didn’t ask you to come here,’ says Pauline. ‘I want you to go.’

  And now Harry starts to cry. He stands there with rivers of tears running down his face. This is a dream, and in dreams belief is suspended, so it does not occur to Pauline that such behaviour is inconceivable and quite out of character. Never does Harry cry – never, never. Nor is she surprised by the presence of Teresa, aged about six, who has arrived now in the World’s End kitchen and stares at her weeping father.

  ‘Don’t take any notice of him,’ says Pauline to Teresa, but Teresa goes on staring.

  And now, because this is a dream, the World’s End kitchen has melted away into the terraced house of long ago. Pauline does not question this either, but she does question the fact that Harry – who is no longer weeping – is now accompanied by a posse of women, some of whom she recognizes and some of whom she does not. Myra Sams, Mrs Gatz, others.

  ‘Don’t think I’m making them lunch,’ says Pauline, ‘because I’m not. There are dozens of them.’

  ‘Pauline, you’ve always had this tendency to exaggerate,’ says Harry. The women, who lurk behind him, grey, shadowy un-persons like souls in purgatory, say and do nothing. They simply are.

  ‘Get rid of them,’ says Pauline. ‘Now.’

  ‘I can’t,’ says Harry. ‘They’ve happened, that’s all. There’s nothing I can do about it. You know that.’

  17

  The combines are creeping nearer to World’s End. The thump-thump has reached the top of the hill. Soon it will be the turn of the World’s End field. The twenty-acre. This apparently is what the field is called. Pauline established that from Chaundy, once. ‘What do you call this field?’ she asked. ‘It’s the twenty-acre,’ Chaundy replied shortly, staring at her as though she had uttered an imbecility. ‘I thought fields had individual names,’ said Pauline. ‘Things like Perkin’s Piece and Wood Assarts and Long Lea.’ ‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ said Chaundy. ‘This is the twenty-acre, as far as I am concerned.’ Pauline remembered that her information ca
me from a television programme and supposed that these must be the last repositories of such arcane lore.

  The twenty-acre will shortly fall to the combine; the tractors roar along the track, bearing away the grain from the ten-acre over the hill, or the fifteen-acre, or the twenty-five. It is not a good harvest, by all accounts. The local paper carries a photograph of a farmer with accusatory expression demonstrating a shrivelled head of wheat. Even the national news, hitting an August deficit of political scandals or international disaster, mentions the fact, coupled with items on hose-pipe bans and parched reservoirs. The nation is in any case on holiday now, and not interested in industrial economy.

  At World’s End, the harvest is a question of scenery and background noise. World’s End has its own preoccupation.

  Pauline and Maurice avoid one another, on the whole. That is, Pauline sometimes finds herself in the garden with Teresa and Maurice, or in Teresa’s kitchen when Maurice is there, but she tries to avoid being alone with him. She has nothing further to say to Maurice, now or quite possibly at any point, though this is a prospect hard to contemplate. Maurice is scrupulously polite to Pauline in Teresa’s presence and does not appear to be keeping out of her way, but just to be pursuing his own daily course. If this brings him into Pauline’s orbit, so be it. He makes a remark – some anodyne, inconsequential remark – or simply gives her that quirky smile. Look, he seems to be saying, this bout of ill will is on your side only. Let’s behave like reasonable people.

  And thus the days unfurl. Tight, tense days. Blue and gold days in which the sun pours down.

  Pauline notes that Maurice’s car has departed on one of those forays to Hadbury or wherever, so she goes next door to visit. She entertains Luke while Teresa washes her hair, upstairs. The phone rings. ‘Could you get it, Mum?’ calls Teresa.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Teresa?’ says the voice of James Saltash, doubtfully.

  ‘No, it’s Pauline.’