Heat Wave (17 page)

‘They’ll think he’s reassuringly conventional,’ said Pauline. Her mother looked at her with scepticism.

Teresa was a source of interest to her grandparents, but not an emotional focus. On each visit Pauline’s mother would comment favourably (or otherwise) on the child’s growth and appearance, and then leave it at that. She was without the capacity to revel in what was demonstrably a standard procedure. ‘Well, she’s coming along quite normally, that’s the thing,’ she would say. Pauline realized that her own childhood too had been without that dimension of exaltation.

At the darkest point of the Harry years she felt impelled, on one occasion, to correct her mother’s complacent vision of her circumstances. Honesty had driven her to try this once or twice before, but her oblique attempts to counter her mother’s construction of a marriage that mirrored her own had been brushed aside.

‘Harry well?’ her mother inquired.

‘Harry is well, so far as I know. I don’t see a great deal of him.’

Her mother ignored this invitation to a more intimate exchange, for such it was. ‘He’ll have a lot on his plate, now he’s in this new job.’

And when Pauline stepped further yet into disclosure her mother backed off like a nervous cat.

‘Harry well?’

‘I wouldn’t know. Harry is in America.’

Her mother looked away, sensing danger. ‘It’s nice that he’s in demand like this.’

‘Is it?’ said Pauline. ‘Yes and no. The trouble is that the more he is in demand with others the less my demands are taken into account.’

Her mother looked disapproving, but not of Harry. ‘Men have to put their work first, that’s reasonable. Harry’s doing well, that’s the main thing, isn’t it?’

‘Mother,’ said Pauline, ‘I’m not talking about Harry’s work.’

At which point her mother glimpsed the truth, and took cover.
‘I wonder what Teresa’s up to in the garden – I’ll just pop out and see.’

Pauline never raised the subject again, and when shortly afterwards she announced that she was leaving Harry, and for what reason, her mother’s response came in the form of conventional expressions of pained regret that carried the implication that Pauline herself must be found wanting in some way. Pauline perceived that the concept of marital infidelity was not one with which her mother was familiar. She knew of it as a theme of fiction and of drama (she read library books and went occasionally to a film) but did not see it as applicable to real life and least of all to her immediate world. The notion of her own husband consorting with another woman was inconceivable. His infidelities were with the golf club, the Sunday newspapers and the test match on the radio.

Teresa returns from her swim. She sits on the grass with her wet hair sleeked back and a towel over her shoulders, watching the children in the pool. There is a pinched look on her face, a look which Pauline knows intimately, has seen time and time again since Teresa was six, nine, twelve and washed up on some malign reef of guilt, chagrin, disappointment, betrayal.

Pauline talks. She talks about the fact that Luke’s hair will soon need cutting, about Hugh who called yesterday and sent fond messages to Teresa, about a news item that caught her attention over breakfast. She talks about Chaundy with whom she had a chat yesterday. The wheat, she tells Teresa, is burning up, it seems – you’d think the stuff would revel in all this sun, but no, it’s frying and Chaundy is losing money by the day, unless we have rain. ‘My heart does not bleed – he’s a rapacious so-and-so …’ Teresa makes perfunctory responses. ‘Mmn …’ she says. ‘Did he?’ ‘Really? I didn’t know that.’ She is elsewhere, plunged in private malaise.

Something has happened. There has been some hint – something amiss, something awry.

Pauline takes a breath. Then she reaches again for the unicorns. ‘… So I’m quite sorry to be finished with this book,’ she tells Teresa. ‘It’s a change to find yourself so involved with a story that you start arguing with it. In a way I think it’s because it reminded me of a
woman I once knew to whom that sort of thing happened – minus of course the unicorn or the dragon or the werewolves but the same damn business of obsessive, inescapable passion for a guy who was not similarly obsessed and who was having it off with wood sprites or the equivalent right, left and centre.’

Teresa blinks. She removes a discarded ice-cream spoon from Luke’s grasp and delves in her holdall for a toy.

‘It’s odd – at the time I could see exactly why she went on the way she did. It seemed as though there was no alternative. Now I’d want to take her in hand.’

‘What happened to her?’ asks Teresa. She does not sound much interested.

‘Oh, she came to her senses in the end and turned her back on it all. I’ve rather lost touch with her. I don’t feel we’d have much in common now. You know how you grow out of people? Though … actually I did run into her not so long ago and she talked a bit about him, her ex, because … well, um, because I’d come across him at one point … and she said that what she felt about him now was something like what you’d feel about a housebreaker. He was someone who had walked in and hijacked a large chunk of her life and she resented that because life is life, after all.’

Teresa says nothing. Either she is still uninterested or this notion does not appeal to her.

Pauline shrugs. ‘And at the time she was besotted. I know, because I was around and took note. Should we make tracks before Luke succeeds in throwing himself into the pool?’

They drive back to World’s End. Luke sleeps. Pauline puts on a tape. Teresa stares out at the shimmering landscape, at the cloudless sky, at passing traffic – coaches from France and Germany, a container lorry from Poland, car transporters, tractors, battered pick-up trucks, cars towing caravans. This is the deep of summer, and this is the depths of the English countryside.

Pauline carries Luke, still sleeping, into the cottage. Teresa follows with the holdall, the towels and swimming costumes. The red eye is blinking on the answering machine. Teresa walks straight to it, presses the button. Maurice speaks: ‘It’s me. Just to say I’ll be back in
the evening on Wednesday, not morning – a couple more things have cropped up. OK? Oh – and James and Carol will be down for the weekend.’

Teresa turns. She takes Luke from Pauline. Her face is neutral, blank. Luke wakes up and starts to cry.

Pauline stands with Harry on a street corner. They have had lunch together in a restaurant – a rare treat. Harry got back from the States yesterday, fell jet-lagged into deep sleep, woke and said, ‘I’ll have to rush – I’m teaching at ten. Tell you what – let’s meet for lunch. I’ll take you to that Italian place.’ And so they have lunched, with Harry on a high – elated, exuberant, affectionate. And now they are parting on this street corner because Harry has a seminar at three and must rush again.

He seems abstracted now – abstracted and incandescent all at once. And suddenly he squeezes Pauline’s arm – companionable, high-spirited, slightly tipsy. ‘Isn’t life wonderful!’ he exclaims.

She understands that he has a new woman.

Harry reaches for her in the early morning. She drifts up from sleep to find him making love to her, that familiar warm invasion, and to begin with she is responding in her sleep – naturally, comfortably. And then she opens her eyes and looks up into his and sees that she is not there. It is not to her that Harry is making love, but to someone else. She sees this and goes cold. The act has become an obscenity.

Pauline realizes that she is an expert, a connoisseur. She has a subject, the special subject on which she is the leading authority. She is the authority on jealousy. She knows everything that there is to be known about jealousy. She could write a treatise on jealousy, a disquisition, a learned paper with footnotes and appendices. She could give seminars on jealousy, she could run a symposium, she could devise a degree course on the evolution and manifestations of jealousy. She could instruct the uninitiated upon the way in which jealousy combines physical with mental effects. If jealousy is a disease, she would argue, then we have to determine if its origins
are biological or if they are in the mind. She would publish the definitive description of the symptoms of jealousy – the perpetual churning of the guts, the nausea that surges each morning as the sufferer awakes to a fresh realization of what is happening, the hollow plunge that succeeds each new uncertainty, each new suspicion. It would appear that jealousy is sited in the stomach, she would say, but the mental symptoms displayed must also be taken into account: the obsessive concentration upon a single issue, the feverish pursuit of evidence, the awful heightened awareness. And then there are the periods of remission, when the belief arises that nothing is going on after all, that it is a mistake, that all is well – bouts of false security that serve only to intensify the disease when it comes roaring back.

‘Pauline, why don’t you leave Harry?’ says her friend Linda. ‘He’ll go on doing it, you know. If it’s not this Julia person it’ll be someone else.’

And Pauline does not reply. Because she knows that this is what she has to do.

Maurice returns. Pauline hears the car. She is startled, because as it happens she is not at this moment in the cottage at World’s End at all but elsewhere and in another time and expecting someone quite different who will arrive – if he arrives at all – on foot or by taxi, conspicuously, filling the place at once with his presence. And there is something she is going to say, words that have rolled in her head for days, that are honed now to a fine precision, words whose hour has come.

So Pauline is briefly startled. And then she sees the car, and Maurice who unfolds from the driving seat, stumbling as he does so (that slight infirmity in one leg) and reaches into the back for the Gladstone bag. Pauline returns at once from her seething elsewhere, registers Maurice and continues in a different key to chop and slice ingredients for the casserole she is making. Pauline is not a vehement cook. She eats in the spasmodic and opportunistic way of those who live alone and she seldom spends time on the careful preparation of food, but today she has shopped in the village and decided on impulse to make this casserole, which will do for her sup
per and can then be put in the freezer as a hostage to fortune. Even if those two are coming for the weekend it is by rights her turn to act as Saturday-night hostess. The casserole will come in handy. She assembles the different piles – pinkish-white umbrella-shaped slices of mushroom, translucent curves of onion, scarlet sections of pepper – she hears the front door slam next door, Maurice’s voice, the sound of Luke – she sweeps the vegetables into a frying pan and starts to cut a slab of meat into cubes. From time to time she looks out of the window, across the track at the wheat which is changing colour by the day. She remembers the green rash of early spring, which was succeeded by a thick pelt, but cannot now see them in her head and thinks again how odd it is that some things hang there, indestructible – Harry’s face and voice on a street corner, the feel of his hand on her arm – but the ordinary processes of change are so hard to recover. What did that hedge look like in May? Why does language hang there in the mind – a voice, a sequence of words – but she cannot now summon up the cuckoo?

She completes the preparations for the casserole and puts it in the oven. The phone rings.

‘I merely wish to tell you,’ says Hugh, ‘that the Alma-Tadema exhibition is not to be missed. I strongly advise that you emerge however briefly from this self-imposed exile before it comes off. I forgot to mention it the other day.’

‘Mmn … Well, I’ll see. Maybe.’

Hugh expounds further upon this exhibition. Eventually he senses a certain inadequacy in her response. ‘Is all well? You sound a bit … unsettled.’

Pauline hesitates. ‘I suppose all’s well. Maybe I am unsettled. I’ve been thinking a lot lately. I’ve been thinking about Harry.’

‘I hope he hasn’t been bothering you,’ says Hugh sternly. He knows about Harry’s occasional overtures.

‘Oh no – I don’t mean Harry these days. I mean Harry then.’

‘Ah. I see.’ Now Hugh is in retreat. He is not a man for emotional confidences. He has a working knowledge of Pauline’s past and of Harry’s role but does not care to mull over the matter, as Pauline well knows.

‘Don’t worry,’ says Pauline. ‘A tot of whisky and a dose of the telly will calm me down nicely.’

‘Good-night then, my dear. And I urge you to bear the Alma-Tadema in mind. I shall pursue the matter.’

The light soaks away at last and World’s End stands isolated in the summer night. Pauline draws her curtains, eats a helping of the casserole and zaps through the airwaves in search of distraction. She dips into Californian simulated crime, into the wildlife of the Siberian tundra, into the problems of emigrant Albanians. Eventually, quite late, she switches off, tidies up the kitchen, opens the back door to empty rubbish into the bin. She stands then for a moment because it seems that everything is not quite as it should be, and indeed it is not, for a wedge of darkness beyond her suddenly moves.

‘Christ, Maurice!’ she says irritably. ‘You scared the hell out of me.’

‘Sorry.’ He steps forward into the light, and deals her the Maurice smile – confiding, conspiratorial. ‘I was enjoying the night. Teresa’s gone to bed. Have a drink?’

‘No, thanks.’ Maurice has had several, Pauline sees. ‘I’m going to bed too.’

‘All right, then – abandon me.’ He empties his glass. He stretches – sensual, cat-like. He gestures at the sky – the sizzling stars, the sickle moon. ‘Look at that! Life’s pretty good, isn’t it, Pauline?’

She stares at him for an instant, and goes inside.

The Museum of Rural Life is well attended on this Saturday afternoon but not crowded because the day is as usual remorselessly fine and most people have chosen to amuse themselves in the open air. It is Maurice of course who has proposed the visit to the museum, which is an item on his research itinerary, and the others have acquiesced for their own reasons. James and Carol are compliant because they are visitors and visitors should comply. Moreover, so far as James is concerned this expedition is a professional concern, in the service of Maurice’s book. Teresa is there because she is driven to be where Maurice is, and Pauline, who knows this, is there herself because it is conceivable that her presence might be of some help to Teresa.