Heat Wave (16 page)

‘I’ll ask Maurice to bring one back from London.’

‘Maurice is going to London again?’

‘Yes,’ says Teresa. Her face has taken on a shuttered look. She does not look at Pauline. ‘Just for a couple of days.’

Pauline wanders around the house. This is not the Victorian terrace house but another, larger, house, in another town. For Harry is now a professor and his academic rise has been accompanied by a housing upgrade. Pauline supposes that she should be pleased about this. She walks from room to room while Teresa is at the primary school round the corner and tries to think about furnishings and décor. In fact she thinks about Teresa, who is nervous of a small boy who allegedly pulled her hair and of the threat of mince for school dinner and of some dog in the street. And Pauline thinks of Harry.

The house is full of Harry, though Harry of course is not there. His smell is around – clinging to the scarf which hangs in the hall, spilling from the bedroom wardrobe, a miasma on the sheets of the bed. Harry himself is teaching or writing or reading or arguing or laughing with someone (who?). If Pauline goes into his study she finds the desk
covered with Harry – his handwriting, letters addressed to him, sometimes his diary. She reads the letters, which are almost exclusively concerned with Harry’s professional life, and learns from them the extent to which Harry does not bother to tell her what he is thinking and doing. She had not known that Harry applied for a prestigious job in the States which, as it happens, he did not get. She remembers the American woman historian from Berkeley who was around last year and whom Harry found so stimulating, and wonders. Pauline spends much time wondering, these days. Speculating. Imagining.

Occasionally she looks at Harry’s diary. She would prefer not to do this, but is impelled. The diary is an engagement diary and while some of the entries are clear enough (seminar 2.00, senate meeting 4.00) others are cryptic. Phone D. 18th. P. – 4.30. Or simply a hieroglyphic – a squiggle, a curlicue. Dental appointments? Library-book renewal dates? Consultations with MI5? Or something else entirely? It is this conjectural something else that Pauline ponders.

Confrontation is self-defeating, she has come to realize. Harry is not so much defensive or evasive as perplexed. An invisible observer of such an exchange between them would see Pauline as the flailing accuser, resting her case on inference and conjecture, while Harry is the voice of sweet reason, explaining that he is a busy man, that he knows and sees many people, some of whom are indeed women, that these accusations are not reasonable, not sensible.

And all the time she knows, she knows.

‘I’ve had an idea,’ says Pauline. ‘Maurice is going to London tomorrow …’

‘I am indeed,’ says Maurice. ‘Anything I can get you?’

Pauline addresses Teresa. ‘Why don’t you go with him and leave Luke with me? Have a break. He’d be fine if it’s just for a night or so.’

‘Oh …’ Teresa is taken aback. She hesitates. She looks at Maurice. ‘Well, thanks, but … I don’t know …’

Maurice is considering the proposal. ‘Well, that’s a thought …’ It is beautifully done. His tone is just right. He is in no way put out. He looks at Teresa. ‘What do you think?’

Teresa is in a quandary. Pauline knows precisely what is going through her head. She has never yet left Luke overnight. He is entirely used to Pauline, is frequently alone with her. But each morning of his life he has woken to find Teresa there. If he cries in the night it is she who comforts him.

‘Well …’ she says.

‘Go on,’ Pauline urges.

Teresa havers. At last she says, ‘Thanks, but I don’t think I will. I mean, it’s really nice of you but I think I’d rather not. When he’s bigger maybe …’

Maurice shrugs. ‘OK. If that’s how you feel. Sure there’s nothing I can bring you, Pauline?’

Maurice goes to London. Pauline watches the car move away along the track and vanish into the wheat. As soon as it is out of sight she gets up from her desk, goes down the stairs and outside. Teresa’s front door is open. ‘Hi!’ Pauline calls. She goes into Teresa’s kitchen, where Teresa is standing at the sink looking out of the window with Luke trying to climb up one of her legs. She turns and Pauline sees that she has hastily rearranged her face. She smiles, after a fashion: ‘Hi!’

‘How about this …’ says Pauline briskly. ‘How about we teach Luke to swim today? There’s a swimming pool at Hadbury now. A bit crummy, but it’ll do. I wouldn’t mind a plunge myself.’

‘Oh … Well – yes. Great. Shouldn’t you work, though?’

‘I could do with a day off. I need to adjust. I’ve got unicorns on the brain and I should be thinking North Sea oil.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ says Teresa.

‘I’ll explain later. Go and find your swimming costume.’

Pauline drives – Teresa beside her, Luke stowed into the child container behind them. The landscape is simmering, the fields quivering in a heat haze, mirages of shining liquid on the road ahead. ‘Idiot weather,’ says Pauline. ‘It’ll all end in tears. Cataclysmic thunderstorms and snow in August.’

‘Mmn …’ Teresa is staring out of the window but she is not thinking about the weather. Pauline shoots a look at her.

‘I’ll tell you about these unicorns. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. There was once a Lady. Her name was Talusa. She was beautiful – that goes without saying. Beautiful and reasonably clever and virtuous up to a point. She fell in love with a Knight. The Knight was called Rohan. And the Knight fell in love right back so
everything was fine in that department. The problem was that the Lady’s parents didn’t approve of the Knight. They thought he wasn’t rich enough. This is a traditional story in some ways, you note.’

‘Mum,’ says Teresa, ‘what is all this?’

‘It’s a novel. Written by a young man who lives half-way up a Welsh mountain – also a somewhat traditional figure. Anyway … if her parents wouldn’t let her marry him she would run away with him. So her parents packed her off to a convenient friend of theirs who owned a castle in a distant place of unspeakable desolation, where he was to lock her up and keep her safe. This character was known as the Lord of the Far Land and needless to say he had designs on the Lady himself. So Talusa escaped from him, being a not unresourceful girl and powered as she was by consuming passion. And she began to search for the Knight, who was of course also searching for her.’

‘How had she met the Knight in the first place?’ inquires Teresa. ‘Through a dating agency?’

‘This is a serious story about serious matters. I’ll treat that remark with the contempt it deserves. As a matter of fact Rohan met Talusa because he rescued her from a unicorn. And of course we know what
that’s
all about, and I have to admit that I felt a certain resistance to the scene at first. Oh, come on … I thought. But it’s cleverly done – in one way he’s hamming it up and in another it’s rather beautiful and moving and distinctly erotic. Talusa is picking flowers in this meadow and there’s the unicorn, only she hasn’t seen it. It’s stalking her. And Rohan who is hunting comes out of the wood and sees what’s going on. Luke, stop that racket – I’m telling your mother an interesting tale and she can’t hear a word. Have you brought some juice for him? Right – that’s better. So Talusa looks up and sees the unicorn and Rohan both at once, and it’s simultaneous panic and unquenchable desire. The unicorn is thundering through the flowers towards Talusa now, horn at the ready, and Rohan raises his bow and takes aim …’

‘And bang goes another endangered species,’ says Teresa.

‘This is not a politically correct story. And in any case Rohan’s arrow does not kill the unicorn. The unicorn is merely wounded. It
turns on Rohan, who manages to elude it and to snatch up Talusa, fling her on to his horse and gallop away with her. The unicorn is left bleeding on to the cowslips and will turn up later on in the story because it is now consumed with hatred for the Knight and is out to get him. Or the Lady, as the case may be. And indeed this becomes a recurrent theme. At one point Talusa is surrounded by an entire herd of unicorns. And on another occasion the unicorn turns up fortuitously when the Knight is busy dealing with a dragon, and the dragon’s attention is diverted in the nick of time. There’s a chilling pursuit by werewolves when Talusa is searching for the Knight in an impenetrable forest to which she has been directed by a sorcerer with ambivalent motives … Luke sounds as though he’s dropped his juice.’

Teresa dives over into the back of the car; Luke is once more silenced. ‘It sounds a weird novel. Is this what people read nowadays?’

‘Probably not. I fear for him, this young man. Mercifully his next opus appears to be more like a fictional version of the stuff on those machines in amusement arcades – quite incomprehensible unless you’re into that sort of thing but I dare say there’s a market of enthusiasts and maybe he’ll make his fortune. Personally I rather go for the Lady and the Knight, though of course he’s got it all wrong, my young man up his mountain.’

‘Got what wrong?’ asks Teresa after a moment.

‘Love. Unswerving irresistible romantic love to die for.’

‘So who dies? The Knight, I suppose.’

‘He does not. I told you this story is not politically correct. Talusa searches in vain for the Knight, overcoming insuperable difficulties and fortified by her trust and devotion. And indeed to begin with the Knight too is searching. But he displays an increasing tendency towards distraction, not to say dalliance. He finds frequent consolation with obliging wood sprites and water nymphs and suchlike riff-raff and eventually he drifts into a liaison with an extremely fetching witch.’

‘Definitely incorrect,’ says Teresa. ‘Even children’s books don’t have witches these days. So what about the Lady?’

‘She gets to hear about the Knight and his witch. Naturally. There’s always someone on hand to make sure a person hears about that sort of thing. And her heart is broken. She is drained of all joy, all hope, all expectation. She wants only to die. This is of course where I part company with my author. He lets her kill herself. He allows her – he encourages her. She drowns herself in a lake deep in the forest and sinks to oblivion, clutching armfuls of flowers. It’s the Lady of Shalott and Ophelia rolled into one. Totally unacceptable.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ says Teresa, rather coolly.

‘Huh … Acquiescence. Tantamount to saying to the Knight – I’m terribly terribly hurt but I’ll remove myself from the scene and not bother you any further. Sanctimonious self-sacrifice.’

‘There’s nothing she could do about her feelings. If that’s how she felt, then that’s how she felt.’

‘It’s not feelings I’m talking about – it’s actions.’

‘So what should she have done, then?’ demands Teresa.

‘Oh, there’s a rich choice. She could have done a deal with the unicorn or the werewolves or the Lord of the Far Land and had the pair of them duffed up or written off entirely. We don’t have the constrictions of the rule of law in this story, so it’s each for herself. She could have relieved her feelings by setting the tabloid press on them or by sending them poison-pen letters for the next ten years. Best of all, she could have just walked away from the whole situation and set herself up with a more traditionally reliable Knight if she felt pair-bonding to be so absolutely essential. Or she could have cashed in on her recent experience and contacts to set up a lucrative Adventure Holiday tourism agency and become very rich.’

‘Mum,’ says Teresa, ‘you’ve missed the Hadbury turn, you know.’

‘Never mind, we’ll go the long way round. Is Luke asleep?’

‘Yes. Did you say all this to the author?’

‘Good heavens no. Give me credit for a degree of professional tact. It’s his book. I keep my opinions to myself. Well – up to a point. And it must have something if the reader’s responses are thus aroused. I doubt if I’ll start being opinionated about the history of the North Sea oil industry.’

The Hadbury swimming pool is on the outskirts of the town, a part of the surrounding belt which services the place and the surrounding area – industrial estates, hypermarkets, golf course, arts-and-leisure complex. The countryside cannot now survive without the facilities available to an urban population, and Hadbury supplies these.

Pauline and Teresa get into their swimming costumes in a clammy changing room and instal themselves beside the training pool, which pullulates with small children. Luke is at first silent with amazement. He stands on the battered grass of the play area and stares at this scene of manic leaping figures and of heaving blue water which is backed by continuous noise – a high-pitched clamour as though the chatter of a flock of birds were turned up to an exaggerated volume. Teresa takes him into the water. She jumps him up and down. His amazement turns to apprehension and then to delight. His fickle universe has come up yet again with a new dimension of experience, in which air melts into water, in which dry becomes wet becomes warm becomes cold.

Pauline joins them. ‘You go and have a proper swim in the big pool. I’ll take him for a bit.’

Teresa goes. Pauline walks Luke around in the pool, amid the shrieks and the thrashing limbs. She trails him in his plastic ring on the sparkling, dimpled, chlorine-smelling water. She has forgotten now that turquoise pool in France and is thinking of her own mother, who did not do things like this with Teresa. Her own mother, she realizes, did not much care for children. She saw them simply as an essential accessory if you were to be a fully paid-up member of society. They were a credential, along with the mortgage and the pension. You married, you secured an income and a house, you had children – in her case, one child. And in due course your own child too gave birth, thus conferring upon you genetic respectability in the eyes of the world.

Pauline took Teresa on visits to her grandparents every six months or so. Harry did not accompany them – he was of course always too busy. Pauline’s parents accepted this without comment and perhaps with relief. They did not know how to deal with Harry;
his conversation baffled them and his clothes unsettled Pauline’s mother. ‘I thought you said he had a senior position now in his work? So what will people think if he wears jeans all the time like that?’