Instructions for a Heatwave (21 page)

The house is full of ghosts for Gretta. If she looks quickly into the garden, she is sure she can see the rib cage of the old
wooden climbing frame that Michael Francis fell off of, breaking his front tooth. She could go downstairs now and see the pegs in the hall full of school satchels, gym bags, Michael Francis’s rugby kit. She could turn a corner and find her son lying on his stomach on the landing, reading a comic, or baby Aoife hauling herself up the stairs, determined to join her siblings, or Monica learning to make scrambled eggs for the first time. The air, for Gretta, still rings with their cries, their squabbles, their triumphs, their small griefs. She cannot believe that time of life is over. For her, it all happened and is still happening and will happen forever. The very bricks, mortar and plaster of this house are saturated with the lives of her three children. She cannot believe they have gone. And that they are back.

As for Robert, Gretta cannot begin to think. His absence is beyond understanding. She is so used to him being here, being around, that she can’t quite accept he has disappeared. She finds herself almost on the verge of speaking to him: this morning, she got two teacups down from the shelf. They have been together for so many years that they are no longer like two people but one strange four-legged creature. For her, so much of their marriage is about talk: she likes to talk, he likes to listen. Without him, she has no one to whom she can address her remarks, her observations, her running commentary about life in general. Her mind, these past days, has been filling up with things like, I saw the oddest-looking baby in the butcher’s today, did you see there’s a new ticket man at the tube station, do you remember that hairdresser’s Bridie went to. Her temples ache with all that is unspoken, unlistened to.

In the bedroom, she stands in front of the chair at his side of the bed. A tweed jacket, far too hot for this weather, hangs off its back. She fingers the collar, warm in the sun, then runs her fingers down its slippery lining into the pocket. A couple of coins, a paper clip, the stub of a tube ticket. Nothing more. The kind of things anyone might find in their husband’s pocket.

Stand in his shoes, the policeman had said to her, and then ask yourself, Where would he go? You need to think yourself into his head. The man had tapped his crown, as if to demonstrate where a head could be found. But the truth is that, although she has lived alongside him for thirty-odd years, although they spend every waking moment of their lives together, these days, Gretta can no more put herself in Robert’s shoes than in those of the Queen of England. Despite his reliance on her, his enduring attachment to her, she still has no idea what goes on behind those glasses, what thoughts simmer beneath that thick, whitening hair.

When she’d first met him, she’d told the other girls at work that he was the quiet type, serious, didn’t say much. Those are the ones you need to watch, a girl from Kerry had said. Gretta had laughed but she’d been sure, she’d been confident that he’d become less quiet as things went on because that was what happened. People got used to each other, people got less shy, more forthcoming; people came out of their shells.

She was working, along with all the other girls at the hostel, at a teahouse in Islington, the Angel Café Restaurant, which was an altogether lovely name. She’d seen the advertisement as she knelt in the farmhouse kitchen, stuffing newspaper into wet boots. “The Angel Café Restaurant, London, requires staff. Accommodation provided, wage and board. Apply by letter.” She’d read it aloud in the kitchen to her mother. Listen to this, Mammy. The Angel Café Restaurant. As if, she’d said, the celestial beings were coming down from on high for a cup of tea. Her mother had said nothing, just hauled the door of the range shut with a clunk and wiped her hands on her apron. She hadn’t wanted Gretta to go. But gone she had, telling her mother she’d be away only a few months, just until she had a bit put by, just until Christmas, just until Easter or perhaps the summer. But then, on one of her evenings off, she’d gone to the pictures with another girl and
the man in front of them in the queue had turned around and lifted his hat and said, was her accent Irish? And she’d said, Who wants to know? He’d said that his mother was from Ireland, that he had been born there but came to England when he was just a little boy, he had changed his name from Ronan to Robert to fit in, and she’d said, fancy that.

He worked as a cashier in a bank, he told her the second time she saw him, he’d always been good with figures. He came to the Angel Café and waited until her shift finished, downing cup after cup of tea, watching her as she wove her way among the tables, holding her tray up high.

He had just come back from the war. He was older than others she’d stepped out with and had the black Irish looks she’d always admired, his hair parted in a straight line. He had a graveness to him, not like the boys she’d gone out with before, always shouting and larking and playing practical jokes. She liked the way his smile took a long time to arrive and just as long to leave.

He took her to Islington Green, where they sat under a tree for a time, before making their way down to the canal. He seemed to know and appreciate that she would have no problem with a long walk like that. She asked him where he’d been stationed in the war—that was always a conversation-starter in those days—but instead of a few lively stories about France, he had looked at the ground and said nothing at all. She’d had to jump in to fill the gap, telling him about the farm, her brothers and sisters and what they were doing now, scattered all over the world. He’d listened carefully, and at the end of the evening, he could recite the names and middle names of her six siblings, in order of birth. His party trick, he’d called it. Then he’d escorted her back to the hostel, all without laying a finger on her. She’d been sure that he’d have a go at the canal and had been ready for him, her rebuttal a practiced art by now, but he hadn’t even tried, just touched the small of her back as they scaled the steps to the street.

He came again the next day and the day after that. He seemed to have decided that she was for him; she liked his certainty over this, his conviction. The subject of his war experiences came up only once more in the entire stretch of their marriage. They were walking along Rosebery Avenue, arm in arm, when they passed a newspaper seller and Gretta stopped to get one because she liked to know what was happening in the world. Robert took it and went to reach into his pocket for the change but then he stopped. Gretta looked at him; she looked at the newspaper in his hand. She saw the terrible stillness of his face. She saw the two men dressed in British infantry uniforms pass them by, oblivious, smoking, chatting as they went. She went into her purse to give the newspaper seller his money; she took Robert by the arm; she steered him to a café nearby, where she ordered him a cup of tea and eased the newspaper from his grasp. She knew that this was not a time for her to talk, to fill the gaps of silence with stories, so she waited, stirring sugar into his tea, her hand over his and, after a while, some words came for him and he told her things he said he’d never told anyone before. About the wait on the ruined docks at Dunkirk, the way German planes had flown over them, dropping leaflets that said they were done for, surrounded, as good as dead. That he was on the last boat that left—the very last—and until he’d felt himself hoicked out of the sea and onto the wet planking, he’d believed he wouldn’t make it, that he’d be left behind, abandoned, stranded, having to find his own way home. Gretta sat and listened, and when he said that he never wanted to speak of it again, she’d said: Of course, we don’t have to.

The “gentleman,” the other girls called him: Here comes Gretta’s gentleman, they’d sing to each other behind the Lyons’ counter when they saw him come in the door, his black coat immaculate, his shoes polished, a spray of flowers in his hand. When he asked her to marry him, on the top floor of a bus heading
along Pentonville Road, she had to hold his hand, her eyes closed, without saying anything, because she didn’t want the moment to be over and gone.

Gretta slides the paper clip and the coins back inside the jacket pocket. She lowers herself to sit on the bed, his side of the bed, and looks out at the street, at the sky, at the ladybirds crawling on the windowpane.

She remembers, after they announced their engagement, being struck by how solitary he was. No parents, no siblings, no cousins or friends: there seemed to be no one for him to tell about their marriage. It was a shock to her because she was the sort who gathered people around her, wherever she was. How was it possible for someone like him to get so far in life and yet be so utterly alone? There had been a brother, he’d told her once, but he’d passed away, and just from the way he said it, Gretta could tell that he’d been mixed up in the Troubles and met his end there. Robert never spoke of the brother again and Gretta never asked him. That was the way of it.

How beautiful Monica had looked the day she’d married Joe. The way she’d come down the stairs, cautious in those ivory satin heels, her dress hitched up around her, as if she were an angel sitting on a cloud. Robert had cried when he saw her, cried and cried. He’d had to clutch the banister; she’d had to go and fetch an extra hankie. She’d hustled him into the downstairs’ toilet and shut the door, the two of them in that tiny space, her in her new suit with the matching hat. What is it, she’d said to him, taking his hand, what ails you, her pulse tearing, tearing at her neck. Robert, you can tell me, she’d said, you know you can. She’d waited a good five minutes in there, him sitting on the toilet seat, her standing over him, and when it became clear he wasn’t going to say anything, she’d said, Pull yourself together now, because the house was full of people, because they had to get to the church sooner or later. But he couldn’t stop and Gretta had felt
she was looking into a fissure that had opened, a fissure that was deep, dark and unnavigable, Monica out there in the hallway, all ready to go, her flowers in her hand, Aoife wriggling in her frock, saying, What’s wrong with Daddy?

·  ·  ·

Michael Francis had said at the gate that he needed to pop to the newsagent’s to buy a paper. But the truth was that he had needed a moment away from them all.

Aoife and Monica had gone into the house together, without looking at each other, and he had hurried off down the road, hardly aware of where he was going but feeling an immense surge of relief that 14 Gillerton Road was behind him and he was moving away from it.

In the newsagent’s, he stares at the paper rack, at the rows of chocolate bars, at the jars of sweets lined up on the shelves. It enters his mind to buy a treat for Hughie and Vita. Because he is going back there tonight to see them. He hesitates for a moment in front of the jars because Claire has an only-on-Saturdays rule with sweets. Dare he violate it?

Bugger it, he thinks, and asks for a quarter-pound of sherbet lemons, Hughie’s favorite, and some pear drops for Vita. Bear drops, she used to call them when she was small, and the recollection of this makes him smile as he searches his pockets for change.

Outside, he dithers for a moment about where to go now, the paper under his arm, his pockets weighed down with sweets for the kids. He slips a pear drop into his mouth, the surface gritty, cratered against his tongue.

He is opposite a bus stop that would take him to Stoke Newington. He could wait there, get on a bus, go to the house, see Claire. But how can he, when he has to get back to Gillerton Road? And how can he, when his wife cannot seem to bear the sight of him?

He feels it again, that precipice, the proximity of the possible end, as he stands outside the newsagent’s. He is aware, again, of the presence of Gina Mayhew sliding by him, like someone in a hurry to get past.

Joe had walked past them on the pavement as the three of them stood there. A new wife, a baby, a whole other life. It seemed the very essence of strangeness to see Joe like that when he had been a part of their lives for so long. He’d been coming to their house for years, taking Monica out when they were all teenagers. Michael used to be proud sometimes, when he was out, to see Joe, who was a couple of years older than him, with a cigarette in his mouth, with his lunch box under his arm, because Joe was working, he was an apprentice, he wasn’t at school anymore, and he’d nod at him and say, All right, Michael Francis. His voice was always more London, more glottally stopped, than when he was in the house. Michael had loved it when he did that, especially if any of the boys from school were near. For him to know someone like Joe: there was nothing as good as that when you were fifteen and bullied a little bit at school for getting good marks. And then Joe had married his sister; Michael Francis had had his first ever drink at their wedding; Aoife had been a flower girl, admittedly not a very good one because she’d talked to herself all the way through the ceremony and lost the flowers. Joe had been with them every Christmas, every Sunday for dinner. He used to play Happy Families with Aoife, teasing her by not saying “please,” then letting her win. He used to help Gretta shell the peas she grew in the flower beds, setting a sieve between his knees on the back step and saying, Now, give us a handful there, Mrs. R. It was unaccountable that he had slipped out of the fabric of their lives, unbelievable that he was now walking about the city with another woman, another family.

Was it possible, he wonders, as he retraces his steps back to Gillerton Road, that this could happen to him and Claire? That they might be parted, torn asunder, separated, divorced? That
he would go and live—where? Some flat. See the kids at weekends, come back alone every night, cooking meals for one, he and Claire speaking strainedly on the phone to make arrangements, times, places.

It was unthinkable. It must never happen.

And yet he doesn’t know where to go from here. The argument had been one from which there seemed no way back.

“You’re back,” was what she’d said, in a tone of surprise, as if she’d received news that he was taking a round-the-world cruise. He’d gone back home from dealing with his mother, from talking to the police, from tracking down Monica and Aoife. He’d gone home to pick up his night things because he knew he should stay over with his mother, keep her company until his sisters got there. He’d gone back to his house and it was late and he had imagined that he might sit for a moment with Claire, with a beer perhaps, on the sofa, her hand in his. They used to do this early in their marriage, before they had a television, in the two-roomed flat off the Holloway Road, Hughie a wrapped bundle in the carry-cot in the corner and him and Claire just sitting together, contemplating the shape of their new lives. One of the things that had surprised him about Claire when they first lived in that flat was her stillness, her quietude. He was used to a house in which people clattered from room to room, shouted down staircases, banged open doors to yell, What time do you call this, where people threw themselves into chairs, slammed down teacups, used more words than perhaps they needed to. Moving in with Claire back then was like stepping from an overcrowded train into a stirring, cool mountain air.