Heat Wave (21 page)

Pauline sits in her study and thinks about these things. Most of all she thinks about Maurice.

‘It’s me,’ says Chris Rogers. ‘I just wanted to say I think I may have made a breakthrough.’

‘Ah,’ says Pauline. ‘That chapter?’

‘No, no. With my wife.’

‘Of course,’ says Pauline. ‘Forgive me. She’s coming back?’

‘Well, let’s say she’s beginning to make some very promising noises. And one of the children has got a temperature, which helps. She’s a bit fazed about that.’

‘Yes – she would be, I imagine.’

‘I’ve got that in hand myself,’ says Chris defensively. ‘I’m giving him Calpol and I’m taking him down to the surgery tomorrow.’

‘Good,’ says Pauline. ‘All credit to you.’

‘Anyway … With things looking up a bit I just felt I wanted to spread the good news. So with any luck I can get stuck into that chapter again before too long.’

‘I shall look forward to it,’ says Pauline.

Pauline glances out of her window and sees Teresa and Maurice in the garden. Within a few seconds she has turned away again but in those moments she has absorbed an entire scene, and the messages implicit within it. Luke is presumably asleep upstairs, for Teresa is reading the newspaper. Except that she is not. She is sitting there, visibly tense, holding the newspaper and occasionally looking over it at Maurice. Maurice is reading a book and taking notes, and he is doing precisely that. He is absorbed in what he is doing, at ease with himself and with the world, it would seem.

Pauline is shopping in Hadbury when James and Carol arrive. She does not usually shop on a Saturday morning so this is perhaps a deliberate move – suffice it that as she ate her breakfast and stared out at the sunny morning it had seemed suddenly urgent that she restock the fridge and freezer. And so when she returns there is that other car drawn up alongside Maurice’s.

She has not been able to find any way of avoiding the communal evening meal. ‘You’ll come over tomorrow night, won’t you?’ said Teresa yesterday, in level tones. It is not possible to plead a headache twenty-four hours in advance, nor is an alternative engagement plausible at World’s End. So that is an unavoidable obligation, towards which Pauline occasionally throws a queasy glance as the day progresses.

She remains within her own four walls, and tries not to think of the group next door. This is difficult. It is a natural process to look out of a window from time to time, and whenever she does she is liable to catch a glimpse of them – separately, collectively. She sees Maurice and James sitting together on the seat, mugs of coffee in hand, evidently
taking a break from the rigours of editorial discussion. She sees Teresa wander alone with Luke up the track and back again. She sees Carol stretched out on a rug on the grass, wearing a pair of shorts and a halter top, slapping sun cream on her arms and legs.

She sees Maurice come out of the cottage and stand looking down at Carol. She cannot hear what is said, and Maurice’s back is turned to her. Carol does not move. She simply gazes up at Maurice, smiling, her eyes masked by sunglasses. And then, within a few moments, Maurice turns and goes back inside.

In the late afternoon she sees Teresa and Luke again on the track, joined presently by James, who stands chatting to Teresa. Where is Carol? Ah … James’s voice rises up to Pauline’s open window. Carol is having a bath, it seems. Maurice is rewriting a passage and has released James, so James is proposing a stroll up to the top of the hill.

Pauline cannot quite hear what Teresa says but she can see from Teresa’s stance, from her movements, from the way she moves her head, that she is resisting these suggestions. And Pauline knows why. She knows what Teresa is thinking and what Teresa is feeling. She knows this in the pit of her stomach, and would rather not, but the knowledge is inescapable. It is the inexorable product of experience and of empathy.

For animals, the protection and preservation of their young is a simple imperative. Attack and if feasible kill anything that looks like harming them. An enviable system, thinks Pauline. Straightforward, uncomplicated, perfectly understood by all concerned.

‘So …’ says Maurice. ‘How about the rural fayre tomorrow? Steam rally, parade of vintage tractors … How about it?’

‘There’s cream in the fridge, Mum,’ says Teresa, serving apple tart. ‘Could you get it out?’

‘Actually,’ says James, ‘I think we’ll have to get back in the morning.’

‘Must we?’ says Carol.

‘My aunt,’ says James reprovingly.

‘Do you want it in a jug?’ inquires Pauline.

‘The carton will do,’ replies Teresa.

‘James has this aunt coming up from Bournemouth,’ Carol
explains. ‘We’ve got to give her tea. What a bore. Couldn’t we have got flu?’

‘No,’ says James. ‘This is an aunt I like.’

Carol pulls a face at Maurice across the table, a mock spoiled-child face.

‘Never mind,’ says Maurice. ‘We’ll find another rural fayre next time. And Pauline is delighted to be let off, aren’t you, Pauline?’

‘If you say so,’ says Pauline. ‘Cream, James?’

‘Gorgeous apple tart,’ says Carol. ‘Apples out of the garden?’

‘Of course,’ says Maurice. ‘Dew-picked at dawn.’

‘You don’t pick apples in July,’ says Teresa. ‘Sainsbury’s.’

‘Whoops!’ says Carol. She points a finger at Maurice. ‘You did that on purpose – leading me on.’

‘On the contrary,’ says Maurice. ‘I’ve no idea when you pick apples.’

‘And here you are writing an enormous book on country life,’ she continues, beaming. ‘Shame on you!’

‘My task is the deconstruction of a myth,’ says Maurice. ‘Not horticultural information.’ He grins back at her.

‘And strictly speaking,’ says James, ‘this book is about the tourist industry.’

‘Well I know
that
,’ says Carol. ‘I’ve read lots of it, haven’t I?’

Teresa gets up. She puts on the draining-board her plate of apple tart, some of it uneaten. ‘How many people want coffee?’

‘Not me, thanks,’ says Pauline. ‘I’ll be off now, if you don’t mind.’

‘Don’t do that,’ says Maurice. ‘James has brought a bottle of Calvados. Where are the small glasses, Teresa?’

‘Thank you, but no thanks, James,’ says Pauline. She heads for the door.

‘In the dresser cupboard,’ says Teresa. ‘Good-night, Mum.’

Pauline closes her front door. She puts the kettle on, makes herself a cup of coffee, sits down, picks up the newspaper and then rises again to search for her reading glasses. She has left them next door, she now remembers.

She goes out of her cottage and heads again for Teresa’s kitchen.
In order to reach the front door she must pass the open window and thus she sees for a couple of seconds the lit room that she has so recently left, an inviting warm cavern in the night. Teresa is no longer there – probably she has gone upstairs to check on Luke. James is not there either, but from the garden beyond drifts the smell of the cigarette that he is considerately smoking out of doors. Teresa does not like smoking in rooms inhabited by Luke.

Maurice and Carol are seated at opposite sides of the table, in the centre of which their four hands are entwined. Pauline sees, as she walks quickly past the window, the look that blazes from Maurice to Carol, from Carol to Maurice.

Pauline walks into the room. The hands retreat as she does so. She does not look at Carol or at Maurice but crosses over to the dresser and picks up her spectacles.

‘Oh,’ says Carol, ‘you forgot your glasses …’

‘Correct,’ says Pauline. ‘I forgot my glasses.’

Maurice stands up. He keeps his face turned from Pauline, takes his glass and walks through the door that leads to the sitting-room. Carol remains where she is. She has seen what is in Pauline’s face and she does not at once look away but stares for an instant – a blue stare which is a bland declaration of hostilities. This is the way it is, says Carol’s stare. This is the way it’s going to be. Sorry, and all that – but this is how things are.

Pauline walks out of the room. Myra Sams rears again in her head, Myra Sams and her successors.

Pauline and Teresa are in the garden, entertaining Luke. It is Monday morning. Maurice is at his desk. James and Carol are gone. Teresa has the scoured look of someone who has not slept. And Luke is apparently in a state of acute neurosis, alternating between manic activity and furious tears.

‘He’s tired,’ says Pauline. ‘Shall I take him up and see if he’ll go in his cot?’

‘I will,’ says Teresa with an effort.

‘Stay there,’ says Pauline.

She takes Luke up to his room, where, after a few petulant
minutes, he flakes out. From behind Maurice’s door comes the tap of his keyboard. Pauline makes a couple of mugs of coffee and returns to the garden where Teresa sits staring at the tangled flowerbed. There is a distant rhythmic thumping sound – harvest has begun. Somewhere over the hill the wheat is falling to the combine.

Pauline hands Teresa a mug of coffee.

‘Oh … thanks. Sorry – you ought to be working.’

‘I’m only too happy not to,’ says Pauline. ‘The current manuscript is profoundly boring.’

‘What happened to the unicorns?’ asks Teresa dully.

‘Their creator has domestic problems. His wife walked out on him.’

‘Why?’ says Teresa, with a glimmer of interest.

Pauline explains, and sees Teresa’s interest fade. Teresa is thinking that this woman does not know when she is well off.

There is a silence – a silence in which a wordless conversation takes place, the product of years of intimacy and of intuitive interpretation of the set of a mouth, of the flavour of a glance – the undertow of all that is unspoken. Look, says Pauline – I know. Don’t think I don’t know because I say nothing. And Teresa tells her – I know you know, and I don’t want you to say anything. If you said anything I would get up and walk away. Because I can’t stand to talk about it, least of all with you.

‘What’s that noise?’ says Teresa after a while.

‘The combine. They’re starting to harvest.’

Teresa nods.

‘It always reminds me of the place near Marlborough. That was in the middle of a cornfield too.’

Teresa nods again. Each recalls the cottage rented once for a summer holiday.

‘It was the summer I got my first period,’ says Teresa. ‘I wasn’t interested in anything but brands of sanitary towel. I didn’t notice the cornfield.’

‘I remember you being preoccupied. I took it for the onset of adolescent gloom.’

‘Was Harry there? I can’t see him, somehow.’

‘Intermittently,’ says Pauline. It was also the summer of a Canadian Ph.D. student called Cheryl in whose progress Harry had taken an inordinate interest, but Pauline is not going to go into that. The thump-thump-thump of the combine, and Harry’s phone calls saying he’ll be down to join them at the weekend if he can manage it, but he may still be tied up with work.

Teresa throws her a look. Maybe she has recaptured some vague adolescent apprehension of adult mysteries. ‘I had a postcard from him yesterday. He’s going to be in London the second week of August.’

‘Then you’ll have to take Luke up to see him,’ says Pauline briskly.

‘I suppose so,’ mutters Teresa without enthusiasm.

Inside the cottage the phone rings, and then stops almost immediately. Maurice has picked it up. Teresa stares at the grass, chewing her lip.

‘It was that summer that gave me the idea I wanted somewhere of my own in the country one day,’ says Pauline. She sees World’s End hanging spectral over the time and the place, implicit from the moment that she first entertained this notion, walking on the downs perhaps, or cooking a meal in the rented kitchen. A vision of solitude and independence, the first determined contemplation of life after Harry. She perceives the tortuous invisible line that leads inexorably from there to here.

‘Mmn …’ Teresa is paying only token attention.

Pauline slides a look at her. She knows exactly how it is. That condition in which there can be no diversions, no departures from the central grinding concern. In which there is no past, but only this consuming present, in which all energies have to be devoted to the pursuit of possibilities and contingent events. What will he do? Will he go to London again? Is he on the phone with her right now?

The condition in which a life can be laid waste, thinks Pauline. The condition in which whole chunks of my life were devastated.

‘Listen …’ she begins – and then pauses. Teresa raises her head from contemplation of the grass.

‘Yes?’ says Teresa cautiously – without encouragement.

Pauline takes a breath. ‘You know what I should have done?’ she says at last, in a rush. ‘I should have cut adrift from Harry years and years before I did. I should have said enough is enough – cut our losses and got out.’

‘Oh …’ Teresa is startled.

‘Then that summer would never have been and maybe I’d never have got a penchant for country living and none of us would be here now. The thought occurred, that’s all. And incidentally so far as I’m concerned Harry today is neither here nor there. Maybe I should make that clear. It’ll save you being so tactful.’

‘I see.’ Teresa is now alert. She is also perplexed. Things are being said which are not for saying. Forbidden ground is suddenly invaded.

‘It’s something that happens. You should know, that’s all. What was unendurable becomes … well, as though it happened to someone else. Someone you feel sorry for but a bit impatient with.’

Teresa considers this. She is still thrown by these disclosures. She eyes her mother.

‘That’s how it goes,’ says Pauline. ‘But don’t get me wrong. It’s not that it ceases to matter – whatever there was back then – but simply that it moves off into some other dimension. An interesting process. Anyway … I just thought I’d mention it. And you don’t need to pick your way through a minefield where Harry is concerned. There isn’t one.’

‘I see,’ says Teresa. ‘Well … I’m glad you told me.’ She is moving this information around, trying it out for size. ‘And … well, I’m glad anyway.’ She seems about to add to this, and then does not. Something else now swarms up in the look she gives Pauline. But it’s not the same, say Teresa’s eyes, it’s not the same at all. Don’t think that. Of course it isn’t.