Heat Wave (19 page)

And so, together but poles apart, they walk up the track in the soft light of the afternoon. Now it is Teresa who is talkative, and Pauline who falls silent – Teresa who shoots a cautious glance at one point, wondering if anything is amiss. They climb the slope of the hill, pause while Luke is released from the buggy to investigate the belt of long grass alongside the fence. They continue to the top, and dip down into the hollow where the two sheds of the chicken houses stand isolated on an island of concrete.

‘Like prison buildings,’ says Teresa. ‘No wonder they shove them up here out of sight.’

‘It’s not the kind of thing where they’re all in little cages. Have you seen inside? It looks as though one of Chaundy’s men is here now.’

There is a car sitting at the end of the track, one of the beat-up vehicles that ply daily past World’s End. And as they approach the shed the door opens and a man comes out.

Teresa waves. ‘It’s the one who gave Luke a ride in the tractor,’ she says to Pauline. ‘Hello! Can we have a look inside?’

‘If you can stand the smell.’

And indeed the stench comes rolling from the open door, not an agreeable, organic, farmyard smell but something rank and so thick that it ought to be visible – a greenish miasma. ‘Help!’ says Teresa. And then, ‘Gawd … look at that!’ as they peer through the smell into the cavern of the shed. For the entire floor ripples away from them as Chaundy’s man goes back inside, carrying a sack – a tide of baby chicks, a yellow flood that ebbs and flows, that swirls around the feed hoppers, that washes up against the walls, that disintegrates here and there into inert heaps of fluff which Chaundy’s man picks up and slings into a bucket.

‘What do you do with them?’ asks Teresa, eyeing the bucket of corpses.

‘Put them out for the foxes,’ says Chaundy’s man laconically. ‘Come up here at night,’ he goes on, ‘and they’re there waiting – you sees a ring of green eyes out there in the dark …’ He demonstrates the operative system for the sheds – the lighting that dims automatically, the thermostats that control the ventilation, the mechanism whereby a continuous stream of grain is fed into the hoppers. He is proud of the technology. ‘This place can run itself, all but,’ he says.

‘What happens if there’s a power cut?’ enquires Pauline.

‘Ah. Then you’re in a spot of bother. We got to come up here and see to things.’

In the second shed are chicks at a further stage of development, leggy and feathered, a rougher and deeper tide which nearly covers the floor and surges now around the feed hoppers. Chaundy’s man
recites statistics – so much grain per chick, weight gain of so much by the first six weeks, so much more thereafter.

Maurice has arrived. He has come up behind them and stands looking into the shed.

‘And then what?’ says Teresa to Chaundy’s man.

‘Then the slaughterers come. Kill and crate up in a morning. And we get the sheds ready for the next lot.’

‘The contemporary farmyard,’ says Maurice. ‘Chicken salad for supper, is it?’

Teresa has lifted Luke up to see the chickens. ‘And here am I reading him Beatrix Potter.’

‘You carry right on. Otherwise how is he to learn the proper image of rural life?’ Maurice lays a hand on Teresa’s shoulder, and Pauline feels herself go tense.

‘My husband is being snide,’ says Teresa to Chaundy’s man, who is standing by, a sack over his shoulder. ‘I’m sorry – we’re holding you up.’

‘That’s all right. I’ll get one of the birds for the baby to have a look.’

He dumps his sack and dives into the seething mass of chicks. He comes up with a single bug-eyed, quill-covered creature that he holds out in front of Luke.

Luke stares at the bird. Expressions flee across his face – surprise, mistrust and finally rejection as he clutches Teresa’s leg for reassurance.

‘There you are, Luke,’ says Maurice. ‘Chicken tikka masala. Or coq au vin, as the case may be.’ He glances at Pauline for a confirming smile, for approval of the joke, and Pauline looks away.

‘Well,’ says Chaundy’s man. ‘It’s a short life and a merry one. They don’t know anything about it.’ He drops the chicken back into the mass and picks up his sack.

‘Thanks for showing us,’ says Teresa. ‘We’ll stop getting under your feet.’

They move away back down the track. ‘There …’ says Teresa to Luke. ‘Wasn’t that exciting? Sally Henny-Penny will never be the same again.’

‘Nor will Tandoori chicken,’ says Maurice. He looks again at Pauline. ‘Your mother thinks my humour is in poor taste.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of you at all, Maurice, as it happens,’ says Pauline.

Maurice pulls a face – the reprimanded schoolboy – and Teresa looks put out. Why is Pauline so churlishly clouding a pleasant stroll? And then Maurice sweeps it aside, this unwelcome note, this hint of a snub, and starts to talk about farming methods. Farming is the only industry to pretend that it is no such thing, he says. Farming pretends that it is a public benefit and is therefore exempt from controls or criticism. Teresa says, ‘Yes, but …’ and, ‘I would have thought that …’ and, ‘But what about …’ Luke is once more singing to the flowing wheat and Pauline walks three paces behind them noting various things. She notes that Maurice is high with well-being, that he is the cat who has tasted cream, that he brims with private satisfaction. She notes all this because she is the expert on such things and it is indeed true that she is not thinking of Maurice as the three of them go down the hill to World’s End.

Pauline and Harry sit at a kitchen table, eating breakfast. Ostensibly eating breakfast. Harry drinks coffee. Pauline neither eats nor drinks. Silence hangs. Pauline stares at Harry, who does not return her gaze. Teresa erupts into the room, pig-tailed, stick-limbed: ‘Mum, where are my gym shoes?’

‘In the laundry-room.’

Teresa goes.

‘Why?’ says Pauline at last. Not – why her? Not – why anyone? Just – why?

Harry looks at her now. He does not slide an exploratory finger towards her hand. He just looks. Then he shrugs. ‘These things happen, Pauline,’ he says. ‘There isn’t anything I can do about it.’

Pauline is with Luke in the World’s End garden. She is minding Luke while Teresa takes a break. Minding Luke consists of following him in his erratic progress about the place and intervening when he embarks upon something hazardous. Luke weaves across the lawn and falls on his knees at the edge of the orchard prairie, investigating the high waving grass. Pauline tries to see the world through his eyes – unstable as a home movie, rocking and swaying, rising up from time to time to clout you to the ground, furnished with wonders. Anything can happen out there, and does. A woman could turn into a tree, or a man into a beetle. Pigs might fly. Luke’s world is fantasy made manifest, he inhabits a dimension of eternal unpredictability, in which there are no preconceptions and few expectations. And there is no past and no future, just a tumultuous present.

Luke has found something in the long grass, and is putting it into his mouth. Pauline swoops on him and removes a small stone. Luke wails in outrage. Pauline throws his ball into the grass. Luke stops crying and lumbers in pursuit.

Everything matters with desperate intensity, but nothing continues to matter. Is this a good way to live? wonders Pauline. Is this the original Eden of the senses or is it a harsh imprisonment? Is Luke freed or shackled? One thing is for sure – you would not wish to revisit the country in which he lives, knowing what you now know.

Luke is approaching a clump of nettles. Pauline picks him up and takes him to see the big apple tree. She sits him on one of the branches, holds him secure and bounces the branch up and down. Luke shrieks with joy.

Teresa has come out of the house. She wades through the grass towards them. ‘Your phone keeps ringing,’ she says.

‘I know,’ replies Pauline. ‘It will calm down, left to itself.’ And as she speaks she sees in Teresa’s face that the period of remission is over. Now what? she thinks. Now what?

Pauline’s own mother did not read her daughter’s face. Perhaps she did not care for what she saw there. More probably, the language and references were not ones she understood. Pauline’s mother spent her life in desperate evasion of everything that she termed tiresome. Emotional difficulties above all were tiresome. If you structured your life with sufficient caution you could avoid these, and when Pauline’s mother saw that her daughter was not doing so, indeed had apparently laid herself open to tiresomeness with every move, she turned her head away and ignored the problem – presumably lest she herself become infected.

And thus, on a day when Pauline has come because there are things that have to be said, out of expediency and out of despair, her mother puts up a determined defence.

‘I’m leaving Harry,’ Pauline says.

‘If you mean that,’ says her mother, looking out of the window, ‘and I hope you don’t, then I think that’s very wrong of you.’

‘Mother,’ says Pauline, ‘Harry is sleeping with another woman. And before this woman there was a different one, and before that one, another. And another.’

Pauline’s mother flinches. She is on the ropes now. She glances wildly at Pauline. At last: ‘There could be some misunderstanding,’ she ventures.

Pauline stares at her. Her mother glances again and whatever she sees in Pauline’s stare reduces her to silence.

‘Well, your father and I will think it’s a great pity if this happens,’ she remarks eventually.

Pauline has hardly heard her. She is far away in a dark tunnel with no apparent exit. ‘You know something?’ she says. ‘I wish he had died.’

‘You don’t mean that,’ says her mother. ‘That’s a terrible thing to say. You don’t mean it.’

‘Oh, I do. If he were dead, I would be unhappy. Pure and simple – just unhappy. That would be quite straightforward, compared with this.’

Her mother rams herself into the corner of the sofa. There is no escape. Tiresomeness has forced its ugly way into her armoured life. She watches Pauline with alarm, and something close to dislike.

‘And incidentally,’ says Hugh, ‘this is the third time I’ve called. The machine witters on about your unavailability. I thought you were a slave to your desk, down there. I thought that was the point of the exile.’

‘I’ve been in the garden with Luke.’

‘How’s the dragon book?’

‘In abeyance. The author has a domestic crisis. It’s North Sea oil now. How’s business?’

‘Ticking over. I had a nice little find this week. Executors’ sale. Cottage in Suffolk, somebody’s aunt recently deceased, and there in her library was a clutch of Hogarth Press books, mint condition …’

Pauline listens to Hugh and pictures the scene – Hugh in that raincoat, with the battered briefcase, prowling in some room that smells of damp, and of old books.

‘… The niece was cock-a-hoop. Nasty little piece of work, stood there licking her lips as the prices went up, plans a holiday in the Bahamas with her boyfriend on the proceeds – several, I should think.’

‘Well,’ says Pauline, ‘that’s books for you. The knock-on effect. My living, and yours, and someone’s unearned spree in the Caribbean. Deceptive things, books.’

‘How’s friend Maurice getting on with his?’

‘All right, so far as I know.’

Hugh’s ear is more acute than one might think. ‘Is anything wrong? You sound a touch … uptight.’

‘I’m fine,’ says Pauline, adjusting her tone. ‘Fine, fine. Maurice writes his book. I interfere with other people’s books. Teresa and Luke seize the day. The wheat field grows, all five-thousand-pounds’-worth of it.’

‘You don’t sound fine to me,’ says Hugh. ‘You confirm all my worst fears about rural life.’

Chaundy’s car is approaching World’s End as Pauline comes out of her front door. Neither is particularly inclined to an exchange of civilities, but decency requires this. Chaundy slows down, stops, turns his head.

‘No sign of rain,’ says Pauline, who knows the correct language.

‘Too late for rain, anyway,’ Chaundy replies, surly. It is of course the wheat that is under discussion, standing stiff and motionless all around them.

‘What would rain do now?’ inquires Pauline.

‘Knock it down, won’t it?’ says Chaundy. ‘One good thunderstorm and that lot’ll be flattened.’ He revs up, grinds the gears. ‘Well, better be getting on.’ The Peugeot bangs away up the track.

Pauline wraps kitchen rubbish in a sheet of the local paper and observes as she does so the chronicles of mayhem. Her chicken bones and tea bags and potato peelings sprawl across accounts of Saturday-night riots outside pubs, of adolescent joyriders incinerated in car smashes, of Dutch barns set ablaze and of primary schools vandalized. This tranquil landscape apparently heaves with unrest. There is more here than meets the eye. She pushes aside wilted lettuce leaves to read of a knifing in the centre of Hadbury in the small hours of a Sunday morning. A farmer is prosecuted for tipping effluent into a local stream. And the weather continues to break records. Agricultural shows announce unparalleled attendances. A Scandinavian tourist suffered heatstroke while on a cycling trip.

‘There’s a first novel,’ says Pauline’s former colleague. ‘We’d love you to do that, if you can fit it in after the oil book. Psychological drama with a theatrical setting. How does that grab you?’

‘So long as the author has a stable domestic life and doesn’t live on a Welsh mountain. Sorry … Yes, I’ll do it.’

‘Great,’ says the colleague. She turns to more important matters
and relays some professional chat. ‘By the way,’ she adds, ‘I saw Maurice recently. Week or two ago. Having lunch.’ She names a Covent Garden restaurant. ‘I thought he was holed up down there, like you.’

‘He makes forays to London,’ says Pauline. ‘In pursuit of the Tourist Authority or whatever.’

‘Well, it wasn’t the Tourist Authority he was in pursuit of when I saw him. The face rang a bell. In our trade. Short blonde hair.’

Pauline is silent.

‘Anyway,’ says the colleague hastily, ‘as I say, I saw him. He seemed fairly taken up so I didn’t go and have a word. So … Glad you’re having such a productive summer. God, I envy you. We’re frying in London. I’ll get that typescript off to you next week. Bye now.’