Heat Wave

  She has been surprised by weather, these last weeks. By its versa tility and by the grandeur of its effects. In cities the weather is incidental. She has been surprised too by time. At World’s End time becomes two-pronged. There is the controlled and measured time of the flashing green digits on appliances, of the display panel of the fax, or the pages of her diary. And there is the time that happens beyond the window which unrolls in terms of leaves and flowers and the green stems of wheat, in terms of climbing temperature – a primitive and elemental form of time untamed by Greenwich or the Gregorian calendar.

  And now suddenly it is the middle of June and she has not been to London for nearly six weeks. She ought to check out her flat. There are business calls to be made. She needs a haircut and would like to see friends. Hugh, in particular. She picks up the phone and makes various arrangements.

  When, later, she tells Teresa that she will be away in London for a couple of days next week Teresa says, ‘Oh, right – Maurice’ll be back before you go then.’

  ‘Maurice is going away?’

  ‘He’s got to go to London too. There are books he needs – and someone at the Tourist Board he wants to interview.’

  ‘Why don’t you go with him?’ says Pauline after a moment.

  ‘It isn’t really worth it. He’d be out all the time, anyway. I might as well stay.’ Evidently Teresa is perfectly happy about this. She shifts Luke to her other hip and goes on. ‘And it’s nicer to be here when the weather’s so good.’

  ‘Well – yes,’ Pauline agrees. And indeed the sun continues to pour down, day after day – hazy sun on some days, sharp brilliant sun on others.

  It shines the next morning, as Pauline watches Maurice depart. He has nothing with him except a battered Gladstone bag which is his briefcase. That Gladstone bag – acquired presumably in an antique shop – is typical of Maurice. It indicates a contemptuous rejection of standard consumerism: no smart briefcase or neat and practical holdall for Maurice. In fact, the Gladstone bag weighs a ton and must be rather inconvenient. Pauline remembers noticing it when first she knew Maurice, when Maurice was a casual and engaging acquaintance. He was about to leave it behind in a wine bar and she had picked it up to hand it to him and said, ‘My God – what have you got in this thing?’ ‘A book,’ Maurice had replied. ‘And possibly a newspaper.’ And had grinned, the grin conceding the impracticality of the bag while quietly flaunting it.

  The Gladstone bag is put into the back of the car. The car is a dark blue Vauxhall Astra. Pauline is conscious of this because she discovered recently that Maurice did not know what make of car he owned – he had had to ask Teresa, while in the process of filling in some form. This dismissal of a universal preoccupation is also typical of Maurice. Most people take a proprietorial interest in their car, therefore Maurice does not.

  Maurice kisses Teresa. He kisses Luke, who stares at him with an expression of blank amazement, as though he has never seen him before. Presumably Luke is away on some mysterious and inconceivable level of perception. Maurice starts the engine, waves, and the car moves slowly away down the track and is eventually swallowed up in the wheat. Teresa stands watching. Pauline watches from her window. She thinks about Maurice, and it comes to her that the Maurice she now knows is irrevocably detached from the Maurice she once knew, who seems in retrospect a weightless figure – just someone she had come across and found agreeable, no more, no less. The new Maurice is loaded with implications – nothing he says or does can be seen in the same way.

  She began to realize this at the wedding. Maurice and Teresa were married in a registry office. Those present were two friends as witnesses, and Pauline. Maurice’s mother, a widow in her late seventies, lived in Carlisle and had felt that the journey would be too much for her. Their small group put up a poor showing in the waiting room at Finsbury Town Hall, as other wedding parties came and went, dressed to kill and attended by droves of bridesmaids in frothy dresses. Maurice was enthralled. He sat there talking about the sociological implications of the occasion. He pointed out that the most flamboyantly and expansively presented groups were Afro-Caribbean or Asian, and that the more middle class the wedding the more sparsely attended it was and the more ill-clad the participants, as though they were embarrassed by the whole procedure. Maurice himself was wearing exactly what he would wear on any other day. Teresa wore a 1920s evening dress from an auction sale and looked like someone who had wandered off the set of a Noël Coward play.

  The reception was thronged. Scores of people filled all three floors of the large Onslow Square house lent by some well-heeled friends of Maurice’s. They spilled out into the garden and stood laughing in the intermittent rain. They sat on the stairs drinking champagne. Pauline was startled, pushing her way through in search of the occasional familiar face. It was as though the whole of Maurice’s previous unknown life was laid out in terms of these strangers and she felt a curious dismay. The small gaggle of Teresa’s friends hung together in a corner, looking very young. At one point Pauline found herself in a group with the mistress of the house, who leaned against her marble mantelpiece tolerantly inspecting the crowd. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘isn’t this amazing! Maurice, of all people – who’d have thought it!’ Someone introduced Pauline and the woman turned her attention upon her with what seemed like amusement. ‘Your daughter? Congratulations! She’s sweet.’ Later, the woman’s husband, rather drunk, said, ‘Of course Maurice is an old flame of Shirley’s – from way back before she married me.’ He laughed indulgently. Pauline looked across the room and saw Maurice as though she had never seen him before – a man she hardly knew with whom she was now inextricably associated. Teresa stood beside him, seeming both happy and bemused. I did this, Pauline thought. I didn’t mean to, but I did.

  Teresa and Luke go back indoors. As they do so, Teresa glances up and catches sight of Pauline. She waves and gestures. ‘Coffee?’ she is saying. Pauline nods.

  There is a letter with the California postmark on Teresa’s kitchen table. ‘You were right,’ she says. ‘Harry wants to meet when he’s over. I suppose I will have to go to London then. But it’s not till August.’ She glances at her mother. Teresa is delicacy itself where Harry is concerned. The delicacy seems touched with guilt, almost as though she were indirectly responsible for Harry – or rather, for what Harry implies.

  ‘Of course you must,’ says Pauline sternly. ‘He definitely ought to see Luke.’

  In fact it is clear that Harry is queasy about being a grandfather. It is a label he evidently finds disconcerting – he had not realized he had got so far in life and his pleasure in Luke’s existence is qualified by a certain dismay. This makes Pauline ghoulishly keen to insist on the relationship.

  Harry had expressed a wish to attend Teresa’s wedding. It was Teresa who vetoed this, for which Pauline was grateful. And in the event Harry has only once met Maurice, over a lunch described by Teresa as uneasy. When Pauline pressed her on this she became evasive. No, it wasn’t that they hadn’t taken to each other, it was more that in a way they had but somehow didn’t feel they wanted to. ‘I can’t explain,’ she said, ending the matter. ‘But I wouldn’t want to do it again, and I don’t think Maurice would either.’ And Pauline had understood. She had seen it all as though in a shaft of light – the three of them at a table, Teresa between the two men who eye one another and see an uncomfortable reflection.

  Harry is twelve years older than Maurice, but he has worn well, by all accounts. Maurice would have seen in him an unwelcome reminder that he, Maurice, is no longer to be counted among the young, that he has crossed the divide, that he is of Harry’s generation rather than of Teresa’s. He would have felt one of those surges of panic. Would have wanted to distance himself from Harry, to push the disagreeable raw fact to one side. Pauline does not have the same effect on him because although standing in the same relation to Teresa she is a woman, and also a person previously known. Pauline’s age is somehow less relevant. Maurice would have talked copiously to
suppress his dismay.

  And Harry, looking across the table at Maurice, would have seen a reflection of the self he is leaving behind, the Harry who still had a foothold in youth, who was still – just – something of an enfant terrible, a gadfly to his elders, a subversive element. He would have been reminded that within a short while he could become a grandfather, for Christ’s sake. He too would have talked effusively, and no doubt in the process the two of them struck up some sort of accord, for they are both clever and responsive men. They would have responded to one another, recognized a potential affinity, and recoiled from the idea of it.

  ‘It’s two months away,’ says Teresa serenely. ‘August. I can’t start thinking about something that’s going to happen in August. There’s the whole summer ahead.’

  Two days later, Pauline observes the return of Maurice: the smiling emergence from the car, the kiss for Teresa who has come out to greet him, the lugging into the cottage of the Gladstone bag – now evidently even heavier. And two days after that Pauline herself gets into her car and heads up the track.

  The drive from World’s End to central London takes about two hours. Pauline has done it so many times that she has ceased to find this abrupt transition strange. Indeed, like any other late-twentieth-century traveller she is indignant about delays – the tiresome incursion of roadworks, the irritating crawl in a traffic jam. The World’s End track takes her to the main road which sweeps her round Hadbury on the girdle of ring roads and roundabouts, and eventually shoots her off on the sliproad which leads on to the motorway, on which she cruises until the landscape starts to thicken with roads and buildings, the traffic slows again and she is digested by the city’s sprawl. Once, browsing in Hugh’s office, she picked up an edition of Ogilby and saw the same journey translated into the emotive draughtsmanship of a seventeenth-century gazetteer – the road snaking onwards strip by strip, fringed by the neat insignia of church towers that would act as landmarks, the schematic trees and hills to indicate woodland or high ground, the rivers and bridges. Here were implications of time and space. Behind the stylized representations of a village or a range of hills lurked potholed roads, barren dangerous heaths, dust, mud and rain.

  It is not raining today – indeed the sun is making the car uncomfortably hot. Pauline adjusts the air flow and opens the sun roof. She flips through radio channels, rejects them all and puts on a tape. The car is filled with Mozart. Thus cocooned, she skims past the village, around Hadbury, past the fields of wheat and hay, the distant cows and sheep like farmyard toys, the petrol stations swagged with plastic bunting, the thickets of road signs. Soon she is on the motorway and quite detached from the scenery which streams past at either side. She is a part of another element, the endlessly moving belt of traffic into which she is now slotted, locked into negotiation with this car or with that lorry, overtaking, slowing up, speeding on. The green and blue distances beyond and behind are irrelevant – her dealings are with the road and its occupants.

  Thus she moves imperceptibly from the country to the city, exercised only by the behaviour of other drivers and the shift from the Mozart oboe concerto to a Ravel quartet. She tunnels her way into London and steps out of the car outside the late Victorian house of which the top half is her flat. This is the city – they do things differently here, though this is not always apparent.

  Ten years ago, when the renovation of World’s End was complete, Pauline hired a van with driver and associate to move down there the various pieces of furniture she had assembled. The driver got lost and had stopped off in the village to seek directions. When eventually the van arrived both men were in fits of laughter. They sat in the kitchen on packing cases drinking mugs of tea and spluttering with mirth because, it seemed, their Cockney inflection had been found incomprehensible in the village shop. They had had to repeat themselves several times before the query got through. Pauline found this tale somewhat incredible, but it seemed churlish to spoil their enjoyment of what was evidently perceived as rural insularity. They sat there in grubby vests, brimming with self-confidence and well-being, and laughed benignly. Outside, Chaundy’s tractor driver, who looked much like they did, roared up and down the field, apparently poles apart.

  Pauline unlocks the front door and climbs the stairs, adjusting herself as she does so, assuming the city like a change of skin. The flat greets her with a tide of garish slippery flyers on the doormat, shouting of pizza deliveries and Indian take-aways. It is hot. Dust boils in a shaft of sunlight. She opens windows, sweeps dead insects from the kitchen table, tips the flyers into the rubbish bin, moving briskly from room to room, checking her watch. She has switched to a different mode, without effort and almost without realizing that she has done so. She is on a new course, powered by lists and diary entries. World’s End is relegated, shunted aside, suspended somewhere down the motorway out of sight and mind.

  The restaurant is one to which they have been before, but not so often as to make it tediously predictable. Hugh likes to circulate between various favoured eating places. Pauline looks fondly at him across the table, thinking that to be with him is like putting on some loved and familiar garment which induces instant ease and comfort. There is not the faintest tingle of sex about this feeling, but it does have some eerie connection with the fact that Hugh is a man. She cannot much remember sex with Hugh now – there is just an impression of genial intimacy rather than of eroticism. The experience bore no relation whatsoever to sex with Harry, which is presumably why she is able to sit here with Hugh today in perfect amity. What there is between them has not been sharpened by sexual tension, and thus cannot corrode.

  ‘What do you think about the idea of romantic love?’ she says. ‘Unquenchable, irresistible love.’

  Hugh is busy with the menu. He glances at her over the top of it. ‘Hang on a minute.’ He completes his inspection, takes his glasses off and lays the menu beside his plate. ‘As in Héloïse and Abelard? Romeo and Juliet? Dido? That sort of thing?’

  ‘That sort of thing.’

  ‘I hope you’re not suffering from it,’ says Hugh. ‘I’m told it’s very debilitating. You’re not, are you?’

  ‘I’m editing a novel about it.’

  ‘Thank goodness for that. I’d have felt obliged to seek professional advice for you. Don’t people just go to a therapist or something nowadays?’

  ‘Don’t be flippant,’ says Pauline. ‘It’s a serious matter, and always has been. It happens. Which is why people go on writing about it, like this guy of mine.’

  Hugh sighs. ‘I’m sure you’re right. I’ve been told before that I have a low emotional temperature. That’s probably why I’m so fond of food. Talking of which – shall we order? The salmon sounds interesting. Or there’s a pigeon breast concoction I haven’t come across before. I think I’ll give that a whirl.’

  They order. Hugh is now in a state of warm complacency. He puts his glasses on again and studies Pauline. ‘I must say you’re looking extremely well. You’ve gone a sort of pale coffee colour, like a foxed book. It’s most becoming.’

  ‘Thank you. So you don’t accept the idea of romantic love?’

  ‘I never said that. I don’t subscribe to any set of religious beliefs, but that doesn’t mean I reject the concept of religion. It’s got far too strong a track record. Is this a good novel?’

  ‘I’m not sure. The setting’s medieval – period unspecific. There’s a Lady and a Knight, but he betrays her – he abandons her and she searches for him and in the end kills herself. And there are dragons and unicorns and werewolves.’

  ‘I don’t think this is my kind of book,’ says Hugh.

  ‘It isn’t mine, entirely. But fortunately I’m not hired to pronounce on that. I just correct the spelling. But it grows on you. It’s very sad. I actually cried. You don’t often cry over a typescript. You’re too busy creeping through it word by word.’

  Hugh considers this point. One of Hugh’s attractive qualities is that he is basically a serious man and he lis
tens to what other people say – especially to what Pauline says. He considers the point while also considering the seafood salad which he is now eating. Eventually he observes that he cannot comment on that since typescripts do not come his way, but that the assumption must be that if words have validity then they will have it regardless of the medium. There is no reason why type should not have the impact of print. He asks if Pauline’s crab terrine is all right.

  ‘Delicious. But print is more persuasive. It has authority. It’s because you know type can still be tampered with. And it’s my job to tamper.’

  ‘I suppose so. Can I try a bit? The terrine, I mean.’

  Pauline offers her plate. Hugh helps himself to a forkful of terrine. ‘Mmn. Very nice. I should have had that – the seafood is a touch boring. So … how’s Teresa?’

  ‘Teresa’s fine,’ says Pauline.

  Hugh looks closely at her, as though the reply was not quite satisfactory. ‘Nothing wrong, is there?’

  ‘Nothing at all. The weather’s gorgeous. At weekends we go and look at tourist attractions in the interests of scholarship. Maurice’s scholarship.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ says Hugh. ‘I really do think you should come back to London.’

  Pauline shakes her head. No – she will stay put. For various reasons. And this seems to be one of those few famous fine summers.

  ‘Definitely something has got into you,’ says Hugh. ‘Never before have I known you talk about the weather.’