Heat Wave

  If asked, Pauline would say that she was happy, generally speaking. As it is, few people would have the temerity to ask. Pauline is seen as self-sufficient, confident, and possessed of a nice balance between good self-esteem and a healthy regard for others. She is the sort of woman who would have a therapist running for cover. Or so it seems.

  She is indeed independent. But the independence is hard won, which is why she prefers not to answer Maurice’s question. She is a woman who has lived alone since her daughter grew up and left. Well, not always entirely alone. There have been men now and then, a couple of whom have had, for a while, quasi-resident status. But she has been alone in principle, leading the flexible, slightly opportunistic life of the unattached. She has the habits of those who are solitary, whether by choice or by circumstance – changing plans to indulge the mood of the moment, making and breaking contingency arrangements. She is practised in social duplicity. It is often a good life, occasionally a bad one. A life rich in carefully nurtured minor satisfactions, in the easy gratification of self-indulgences. An unfettered life, a life without the grating irritation of presences that are too present, a life in which anything might happen and in which it sometimes did. A life also in which a day could suddenly become a treacherous void, in which spectres come swarming round the bed in the small hours.

  Unlike Maurice, Pauline is not outraged by the fact that she is getting older. When she considers the matter – when she remembers that she is fifty-five – she is amazed rather than offended. Amazed to be here, thus, at this point, having negotiated so much. The long continuous present of childhood and the helter-skelter of youth and then the ferocious onward rush of events. Here she is – now, today – and it is not too bad, though perhaps in some areas it is not too good either. There are brown blotches on her hands, her teeth look like giving out before the rest of her, and the libido is no longer what it was, which is perhaps just as well. But the world still shines for her, expectation is as rich.

  Luke has lost interest in the dandelion clocks. He has found his ball. He throws it, pursues it, falls over, picks himself up again, throws the ball once more – a burgeoning skill. Pauline, watching him, thinks that there is also this phenomenon which is Luke-time, a process of accelerated change whereby Luke seems as though he is not hitched to the ordinary passage of the calendar year but is set on some hectic course of his own which has spawned a dizzying sequence of Lukes – the sloe-eyed baby with waving starfish hands has become the pneumatic crawler and is now this tottering figure weaving in pursuit of a slippery plastic globe. Luke is on a fast-track which is not synchronized with Pauline’s days, nor indeed with those of his parents.

  It has clouded over. The weather is playing false once more, capricious as ever – the bright morning giving way to looming skies. A grey pall has come tilting up from behind the hill, intensifying the green of fields and trees and hedges. The landscape is vivid. And the first drops of rain begin to fall.

  Pauline carries Luke inside.

  3

  Pauline remembers the first time she saw Teresa with Luke. She walks down the hospital ward between a double rank of legs – legs ranged carelessly on beds, sticking out below nighties and dressing-gowns. Brown legs, black legs, pale pink legs. An acreage of female flesh, casually exposed, legs and thighs and whole breasts into which are tucked the furry heads of babies. No one is modest or prudish here, there is a frank acceptance of what is going on. This is all about bodies – the bodies of women. And the place is awash with people. Nurses hurrying up and down, acolytes around each bed – the husbands and the friends and the parents, the brothers and sisters. There are flowers and the occasional bottle of champagne. There is eating and drinking. This is not so much a hospital ward as a municipal park on a Bank Holiday afternoon.

  Fine, thinks Pauline, fine. She makes her way down the alley of sprawling legs, past the families and the eddying toddlers and the partners. ‘Visiting hours from 3 to 6’, said the notice in the lift. ‘Partners may visit at all times.’ So what happened to husbands? thinks Pauline. Obsolete. Defunct. So be it.

  She sees Teresa now. Teresa is alone. She is alone with Luke. Pauline approaches, and then stands for a moment, unseen by Teresa. She sees that Teresa is in every sense alone, away in a bubble of content. The intensity of experience. She is holding Luke in front of her, cradling him so that his face looks into hers. She is seeing nothing but Luke. And Luke presumably sees nothing but her – his first and crucial revelation of the world.

  She knows now, thinks Pauline. Yesterday she didn’t know. Today she knows it all.

  She steps up to the bed. ‘Hi!’ she says. ‘So here he is.’

  They admire Luke. They assess him, inch by inch – eyes, nose, mouth, hair, fingers, toes. They revel in him.

  ‘How was it?’ asks Pauline.

  ‘Ghastly,’ says Teresa. ‘Frightful. And terrific. Both at once. You know.’

  ‘Yup,’ says Pauline briskly. ‘I know.’

  She knows all right. That is the one thing that remains with you, for ever.

  She is grabbed in a vice of pain. She is clenched by a great fist of pain which wrings her till she yells and then releases her. It will come again. And again. She asks the time. Three o’clock. The small hours of this night which is going on for ever.

  She is alone with the midwife in the cramped bedroom of the flat. Harry is in the next room. From time to time he peers round the door, looking worried. The midwife reassures him and shoos him away. The midwife is a year older than Pauline – a fact established earlier when this sort of chat was still possible. Now, it is not. Pauline can see in the midwife’s face that things are not going right. The midwife has phoned for the doctor. For Pauline, fear and pain are compounded into one hideous roaring black event.

  She tells the midwife, ‘I don’t want to die.’

  ‘You’re going to be fine,’ says the midwife, not quite confidently enough.

  What happens next is compacted – both then and now – into a sequence of impression and sensation. Men carrying her on a stretcher. The howling of the ambulance siren. This is for me, she thinks. This is happening to me, not to someone else. She stares up at a white ceiling from which is suspended a harsh white light under a green shade. There are faces looking down at her – dispassionate, assessing faces. People hurry to and fro. Feet tap on a linoleum floor.

  She is washed up on this high table, staring still at the ceiling. The people have gone. She can see the trolley thing in which they have put the baby. She sees its face, and the quiff of its hair. It? Her. She tries to think of this baby, this child, her child, but she is too weak to think. Something is awry. She is so weak that she is floating. She can see the room – the white ceiling, the green-shaded light, the baby in a trolley, the back view of a nurse doing something at a sink, but she can neither think nor speak. She knows that this is not right, that she must tell the nurse what is happening, but she can neither speak nor move. She lies there, floating.

  And then the nurse turns, and comes across, and looks down at her. And there are feet tap-tapping again, and more people, more faces looking down, and voices that boom, that come from far away.

  When Pauline conjures all this up today she is awed. This is herself, but a self so far removed that there is nothing left but these echoes. Echoes of such raw intensity that they are always there, ringing down the years, hitching her to this eerie stranger. Shadows in the mind, far away and deep within.

  The foetus had got stuck. A deep transverse arrest. The midwife could no longer cope. The home delivery that was the standard procedure back then was now not advisable. Hence the ambulance, the hospital doctor brought bustling from his tea break, the scurrying nurses. The forceps. And Pauline – that shadow Pauline – went into shock and had to have a blood transfusion. No great crisis, in the scale of things, and both mother and child came out of it unscathed. But the bald narrative and the technical explanation seem quite unrelated to those messages from the person who was there
. It was like this, says the shadow Pauline, the echo Pauline – the steel-hard pain, the tapping feet, that green lampshade.

  And Harry, who comes and stands looking down at her. ‘Hello,’ he says. He takes her hand. She stares at him. She has nothing to say to him. It is as though she has been on some tremendous journey, has travelled so far and for so long that she no longer speaks his language.

  Now, today, this May morning at World’s End, Pauline receives a letter from Harry. This sometimes happens. Once a year or so. She stands beside the post van on the track outside the cottages and takes the letters from the postman, who sits with engine running and tells her the weather forecast, a speciality of his. Pauline hears that it is going to be a bit dodgy today, Friday, but will clear up for the weekend. She sorts the letters – those for Maurice and Teresa, those for her – and sees the California postmark on the airmail envelope, which means Harry. She shoves her own letters in her pocket and takes the rest next door, where Teresa and Maurice are having breakfast. She relays the weather forecast.

  ‘Excellent,’ says Maurice. ‘All set for Bradley Castle, then?’

  ‘You don’t have to, Mum,’ says Teresa.

  ‘Of course she has to,’ says Maurice. ‘We need her company, and she’ll enjoy it.’

  ‘You’re a bully, Maurice,’ says Pauline. ‘And I’ll do as I think fit, when the time comes.’

  ‘Of course,’ says Maurice, heading for the stairs. ‘Quite right too. But at least join us for dinner on Saturday. We’ll all be fed up with each other by then.’

  It is the custom, at World’s End, for the two households to remain separate, up to a point. There is of course a great deal of coming and going between the cottages, but Pauline spends her evenings alone. There has been tacit agreement that proximity will be successful only with a firm acknowledgement of privacy. But an informal agreement has arrived that everyone should eat together on Saturday evenings. Sometimes Pauline has a cooking spree, sometimes it is she who is the guest.

  ‘OK,’ says Pauline. ‘Thank you kindly.’

  Maurice is now half-way up the stairs. ‘Do you think you could bring me up a coffee in about an hour or so, Teresa?’ Teresa nods. He disappears.

  Maurice never uses endearments. Darling. Sweetie. This, Pauline tells herself, means nothing. Nothing whatsoever. She thinks of Harry, from whose mouth endearments showered. My love, my sweet, my pet.

  ‘We’ve been up since five,’ Teresa explains. ‘Luke wakes with the dawn chorus. Now he’s out cold, of course. I’d forgotten the country is so noisy – it’s ages since I was here at this time of year.’

  ‘It was worse when Chaundy had lambing ewes in the big field,’ says Pauline. ‘He gave them up some time back. The bottom fell out of the lamb market, I suppose.’

  ‘Maurice says he’ll have to go home to Camden for some peace and quiet. He doesn’t really mean it.’

  ‘Given his present trade Maurice should know perfectly well that the cult of rural bliss is a myth,’ says Pauline.

  Tacitly, she concedes that Maurice has a point, if not several. In spring the spasmodic gunfire of crop-scarers wakes Pauline at dawn and keeps her nicely alert while she is working. May and June are relatively peaceful, except for the clamour of birds in the full vigour of reproduction. But come high summer and the real fun begins. The roar of agricultural machinery pervades the landscape – the rhythmic thrash of hay-making, mammoth combines pulverizing a field of wheat, the attendant tractors grinding to and fro. Admittedly the place is no longer ablaze into the bargain – straw-burning is now outlawed so it is possible to breathe fresh air in August and September. But the tranquillity of rural life is an urban legend. And it is of course ludicrous to expect tranquillity. Agriculture is an industry. Industry generates noise and pollution. If you inhabit an industrial area – and by choice at that – you must accept the consequences.

  Teresa yawns. ‘Maybe I’ll have a nap till Luke wakes up.’

  ‘You do that.’ Pauline is already heading for the door, her mind now on her own plans for the day. Phone calls to be made. That manuscript.

  Back in her study, she drops the letters on her desk and leaves them lying there, because she had already seen that there is nothing that requires her urgent attention. She looks out at the field and immediately Teresa’s face is imposed upon the green – yawning, a healthy pink cavern fringed with neat white teeth. Teresa has good teeth, because Pauline took a strong line about diet, way back. Thinking of this, she sees another Teresa, with cropped hair and a ragged fringe, gap-toothed – and further Teresas yet, a procession of them. There is not one Teresa, but a metamorphosis, a succession of which she is always vaguely aware. And when she dreams of Teresa, it is always of a child that she dreams. Teresa is once again four, or six, or nine – and Pauline is unsurprised. Dreaming, she accepts without question this reincarnation, and is carried along by the dream’s narrative of anxiety, or protection, or annoyance. The next day, it is for a moment unsettling to find again the adult and alien Teresa, who is at the same time deeply familiar and in some profound way quite unknown. She is the person Pauline knows best and knows least – and the depth of this unknowing is because of the intensity of the knowing.

  Pauline becomes aware once more of the real world beyond the window. A light wind ruffles the field – shadows course across the young wheat. The whole place is an exercise in colour, as it races into growth. The trees are green flames and the hedges billow brilliantly across the landscape. The old hedgerow at the bottom of the garden has a palette that runs from cream through lemon yellow and all the greens to apricot, russet and a vivid crimson. Each burst of new leaf adds some subtle difference to the range. For a couple of weeks the whole world glows.

  Spring came late this year. It was winter still in April, the landscape clenched with cold. Slowly, reluctantly, a green mist spread over the hedges, a frosting of blackthorn appeared. And then at the end of the month the temperature rocketed. It occurs to Pauline that already she can no longer remember exactly what that stripped wintry landscape looked like. She cannot summon it up in the head as she can summon up the metamorphoses of Teresa. This suggests that the physical world is more insubstantial than a person. And in no way is that the case, thinks Pauline. She thinks of the deceptive tenacious life of World’s End, and of its vanished and extinguished occupants.

  She reaches now for that pile of letters, and abandons them yet again as the phone rings.

  ‘It’s me,’ says Hugh. ‘Am I interrupting?’

  ‘Go right ahead and interrupt. I’m procrastinating as it is.’

  ‘Aren’t you getting sick of it down there yet?’

  ‘It’s spring,’ says Pauline. ‘Cuckoos. Flowers. All that.’

  ‘We’ve got it here too. I went past Green Park this morning in a bus and it was looking very pretty. When are you coming to London?’

  ‘Soon, I dare say. I ought to check out the flat at some point. Don’t tell me you’re missing me.’

  ‘Of course I’m missing you,’ says Hugh crossly. ‘You’ve never skived off down there for the whole summer before.’

  ‘I’m getting through no end of work. Come down for a day or two.’

  ‘Mmn. Well … maybe.’

  ‘Hugh,’ she says. ‘You are the original townsman, you really are. You panic as soon as you haven’t got a pavement underfoot. So … what’s been happening?’

  Hugh Follett is an antiquarian bookseller. He is a large shambling man with a thatch of pepper-and-salt hair, a round amiable pink face and thick glasses that always need a good cleaning. Pauline is probably more fond of him than of anyone she knows.

  Hugh has a shop and a business. He also has a home in Henley, where lives his wife Elaine. Elaine has got something terrible wrong with her, some affliction of the mind which has crippled her and laid waste her life. Her illness has no name. She is unable to cope with social situations, or to receive visitors. She cannot travel. She seldom leaves the house, where she exists holed
up in this cocoon of neurosis. If anyone comes there to see Hugh – and mostly they do not – she retreats to her bedroom until they are gone. She does not answer the phone. If Hugh is out, the answering machine is on.

  When and how all this came about Pauline does not know. Occasionally she speculates about Elaine, wondering what fearful trauma has driven the poor woman into this state of wilful isolation. Surely it cannot be anything Hugh has done? Genial, decent, tolerant Hugh. And Hugh is silent on the subject of Elaine. An absolute, implacable and perhaps eloquent silence. Suffice it that he has stayed with her, that he never complains, that he will see it out. He goes home most nights. If he is away from home he checks in, leaving a message on that stonewall answering machine. Once in a while Elaine will call back, as Pauline has had occasion to note, and there is a brief exchange about some practical matter: the boiler is giving trouble, someone has been trying to reach Hugh.

  For a while, way back, Pauline and Hugh were lovers. There was even a tremulous and now hazy period when things hovered on the brink of becoming more serious yet, when Hugh’s contained and stolid endurance of his marriage was perhaps in doubt. And then that time passed. Both stepped back from something that was probably never a sensible consideration – and eventually they weren’t going to bed together any more either. It had always been a homely, companionable form of sex – rather like married sex, Pauline supposed, or at least what she imagined much married sex to be like. Hugh, she realized, was somewhat take it or leave it where sex was concerned. And so, tacitly, they decided to leave it, without a shred of ill feeling on either side, and settled to a mutually satisfactory friendship with overtones of something else. People who know them both probably assume a carnal relationship. In a fit of compunction Pauline had once asked Hugh what Elaine would feel if she knew of Hugh’s visits to Pauline in London and (more rarely) at World’s End. Hugh’s face had emptied of expression. ‘Elaine wouldn’t be remotely interested,’ he replied. Pauline found this remark unutterably bleak.