Instructions for a Heatwave (22 page)

So, he had arrived back at his house, wanting to feel again that touch and brush and curled warmth of her fingers: was that so much to ask? It was late and the children were in bed and his mother had cried and cried and he wanted to sit on his sofa, with his wife, for a few minutes, just like they used to. But Claire was
in the kitchen, snipping herbs into a bubbling saucepan. She had an apron on over what he recognized as her best dress, a paisley number he’d always liked, with a fitted bodice. Her lips were stained dark with lipstick and bangles clattered up and down her wrist as she stirred her concoction: it was releasing heavy clouds of beef and wine and garlic into the air. For a heartbreaking moment, he thought she’d done this for him, that she had prepared a dinner for him, that she’d put on her paisley frock for him, and the lipstick and the bangles.

“That smells good,” he’d said.

Claire had looked up and he’d seen it, the fleeting expression of dismay, before she’d said it:
You’re back
.

They had spoken on the phone earlier; he’d wanted to keep her in the loop with what was happening and he’d also wanted to hear her voice, to reassure himself that he had a life outside the family he’d been born into, that the family he’d created for himself was still there, still available. She had been solicitous, concerned about his father, asking lots of questions and listening to his answers and saying, I’m so sorry, Mike. She even said “your poor mother,” which was not a sentiment she often expressed.

But now everything was different. She did not seem like the person he’d spoken to on the phone, the person who’d said, Let me know if you hear anything, who’d said “your poor mother.” This person was all dressed up, the table behind her laid with silver and folded cloth napkins, this person was saying things like she hadn’t realized he’d be back tonight, she was so sorry, and was he intending to stay because her study group were coming round for a discussion over supper?

“Now?” he’d said, slumping sideways in the doorway, knowing that the frame would catch him, would offer him the bodily support he needed. “At this hour?”

Claire licked her lips quickly, brushed the hair off her face. “I’m really sorry, Mike. It never crossed my mind you’d be back.
If I’d known … You see, everyone thought there was more space here and I said you’d be out so everyone thought—”

“Everyone thought, everyone thought, is that all you can fucking say?” he had yelled suddenly, because he’d spent hours holding his mother’s hand while she wept, because his father was gone, which was unbelievable and beyond strange. Because all he’d wanted was to come and sit with Claire on his sofa, in his front room, and he was being told that was impossible, that at any minute people were about to sit themselves down and discuss the First World War, as in some fevered nightmare where the pupils he most dreaded would invade his house and sit around the breakfast table, staring at him, telling him that school had been moved here for the foreseeable future.

“Oh, that’s right,” Claire had shouted back, and he was shocked because Claire never shouted, it wasn’t in her, didn’t come with her DNA. “Abuse me with—with phallocentric language.”

He laughed, a loud explosion from somewhere deep in his chest. “Who are you parroting when you say things like that? What’s happened to you? Why are you even doing this course? I mean, you’re intelligent, you’re educated, you—”

“Only partially!”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You know.”

“No, I don’t. Please tell me.”

“My degree,” she said, and tears sprang into her eyes. She dashed them away angrily. “I never did my degree. And why was that? Whose fault was it?”

He was tempted to shout: Ours. It was both of us. We were both there. But he suddenly saw himself from the perspective of her new, about-to-arrive friends: Claire’s awful, shouty husband—look at the way he yells at her, tells her she can’t have us here. He couldn’t bring himself to discuss that night now, with all those places laid and ready at the dinner table.

“Claire.” He tried to take his wife’s hand—he had the urge to shake it, to try to rouse her in some way, to try to make her see that what was happening here should not be happening, to try to bring her back, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have shouted. It’s just been a terrible day and this … supper party. What about the children? Won’t they be woken up by all this noise?”

At the word “children,” she raised her head and looked at him. Claire loved her children; he was constantly amazed by how much. Constantly aghast at the sight of her getting out of bed at three a.m. to fetch Vita a drink, at her giving Hughie all her lunch, if he wanted it, at the selflessness and sacrifice of it all, at the effort she put into a nativity-play costume, at the patience, the sweet, angelic patience of her, when Vita was raging about having her hair brushed or wanting those socks, not these socks, or just needing her, Claire, to sit by her for hours on end, reading book after book after book. She was a marvel to him and he wondered if there was some way he could communicate this to her, via the touch of their skin.

But she said, “The children will be fine. If they wake up, they wake up. It’s good for them to meet new people. It’s good for them to have a mother who is fulfilled, who is stretched. They’re too cocooned as things are, don’t you think?”

Cocooned, he wanted to say, cocooned? But I want them to be cocooned. I want them to be sheltered, safe, insulated, protected, now and forever. If it were up to him, he would sew his children into eiderdowns so they could never hurt themselves, he would never let them leave the house; he would stop them going to school, even, to avoid the slightest possibility that someone might say something unkind to either of them. Cocooned didn’t even begin to cover what he wanted for them.

“Anyway, it’s not as if,” she said, pulling her hand from his, “they’ve always been your first priority, is it?”

And there she was again, Gina Mayhew, among them. Claire put down her spoon and rubbed at her neck, as if she, too, were
aware of Gina gliding into the room, taking up a place at the dinner table, crossing her legs and looking up at him with the preoccupied gaze that he’d noticed that first day in the staff room, as if she were absorbed by something no one else could see or understand, as if she held some fascinating secret that no one else could even guess at.

He wanted to say, But I never meant it to happen. He wanted to turn to his wife and say, I didn’t mean it and I’m sorry. But could he put his hand on his heart and say that this was entirely true?

·  ·  ·

Gretta is in the bedroom, pulling things off the top of a wardrobe, when she hears Monica coming up the stairs. She can tell, in the careful hesitancy of each step, that it’s Monica in her strappy sandals. Then she hears Aoife, who’s been in the bedroom, burst out onto the landing to accost her. Gretta frowns. She’d been hoping that Aoife was having a nap.

“What did you mean,” she hears Aoife demand, “when you said that thing about Joe—and me?”

A pause. Gretta can imagine Monica doing her cool, interrogative eyebrow-arching thing.

“What thing?”

“That Joe and I were ‘so close.’ What did you mean?”

“Well, you were, weren’t you?”

Another pause. Gretta wants to get down off the stool she’s standing on and tiptoe to the door, but she’s afraid she’ll give herself away, that whatever is taking place on the landing might be interrupted, diverted. She stays exactly where she is, stock-still, her hand on a hatbox that contains, she thinks, old shoes of the children’s. She’d thought perhaps Claire might want them for her two. Might be something in there that fits Hughie. Big feet, that boy has, just like his dad.

“Monica, are you saying you think … something … happened … between me and Joe?”

“Didn’t it?”

“Jesus, Monica. Of course not. What do you take me for? You’re out of your mind if you think—”

“I don’t mean,” Monica says, tightly, “that kind of thing. I mean …” She trails into silence.

“What?” Aoife demands. Always demanding, that one, from the minute she was born. Never taking no for an answer. Couldn’t be more different from her sister, who was a clamshell, just like her dad.

What Monica says next she says so quietly that Gretta isn’t sure she heard her right. It sounds like, “That you told him.”

Aoife doesn’t say, Told him what. She doesn’t say anything at all. Gretta leans forward on her perch, she lets go of the shoe hatbox to be sure of this. And the fact that Aoife doesn’t say, Told him what, sinks down through Gretta like a stone dropped into a pond because something she has always half suspected comes into sudden focus. As if a lens has been twisted on a blurred scene, Gretta suddenly sees everything clearly. She runs her hand down the wood of the wardrobe; she removes a stray mothball from its top.

“I didn’t tell him,” Aoife says in an unsteady voice. “Of course I didn’t. Why would I?”

“Well, somebody did.”

“It wasn’t me.”

Silence, thick as fog, rolls in from the landing. Gretta feels that she could put out her hand and touch its cold form.

“So, that’s why he left,” Aoife whispers. “Because he found out. And you thought I’d—”

“He left because you told him,” Monica spits out and Gretta wants to go to her daughter, to touch her on the shoulder and say, It wasn’t her—it wasn’t your sister, believe me, Aoife wouldn’t do that.

“Monica, I did not tell him,” Aoife says. “I swear.”

Gretta hears Monica turn, go back down the stairs. She hears Aoife stand awhile longer on the landing. Then she moves into the bathroom; Gretta hears her rattling about in there, sipping water from the tap, though, God knows, Gretta has told her to use the mug a thousand times, then rip toilet paper from the roll, muttering to herself inaudibly. Strange she hasn’t lost that habit, even in adulthood. Then Aoife returns to her room, banging the door. Gretta hears the squeal of bedsprings as Aoife hurls herself to the bed and the sounds make her smile, despite herself.

She gets down, then, from the stool. She sits on Robert’s chair, the tweed jacket behind her, the stiffened collar pressing an
n
shape into her back. She registers an urge, at first dull, then sharp and jagged, to see her husband, to share this with him, perhaps not in words, but just to sit by him and know that he was feeling what she was feeling: their girls, their beloved offspring, in terrible disarray and nothing to be done.

She sits there and feels her aloneness and the lack of him, and she looks out at the plane trees, their yellow crinkled-up leaves, motionless in the still, heavy air. Her hands are folded on her chest, her ankles crossed. So, she makes herself think, to block out the awfulness of his baffling absence, there we have it. Monica in the kitchen, clattering about with dishes. Aoife in the bedroom. Michael Francis keeping his head down somewhere, no doubt.

The dry leaves of the trees outside the window could be a photograph, she thinks, the way they are so still.

Aoife came three weeks early. Gretta was walking back from the corner shop with Michael Francis and Monica when her waters broke. She wasn’t put out. It was early February. She had on a thick coat, a pair of woolen stockings: they would soak up the worst of it.

She held out the shopping bag. “Here,” she said to Michael Francis, who was walking ahead of her, as he always did. “Carry this, would you?”

He pretended not to hear, just kept going.

Monica materialized at her side, hair neatly plaited, her parting like a line of chalk bisecting her head. “I’ll take it, Mammy.”

Gretta patted her on the shoulder. “Don’t you worry, it’s too heavy for you, darling.”

Monica looked at her. Gretta could feel the beam of that look, as if it burned her skin. She’d never been able to hide anything from Monica, anything at all. It was useless to try. Even before Monica could talk, Gretta had been aware that this child knew everything about her, and vice versa. She’d got used to the invisible telegraph wire that ran between them: all day long messages passed along it, without anyone else knowing.

“Don’t worry,” she repeated to her daughter.

Monica pulled the shopping bag out of Gretta’s hands. She walked ahead and gave it to her brother, ten months older but a foot taller, then returned to Gretta’s side. She took her hand. “Are you all right, Mammy?” she asked, her face white with anxiety, tipped up to look at her.

“I’m fine, pet.” Gretta spoke through a surge of pain, managing to keep her voice even. “I’m fine.”

At the house, Monica made Gretta a cup of tea (Gretta did not say that the thought of it, at this precise moment, made her want to be sick). She sent Michael Francis next door, where they had a phone, to get the neighbor to call their father: they had had the number written on a pad in the kitchen for weeks.

Gretta was gripping the back of a chair—because the pains were coming fast now, with barely a gap in between; it had never been as fast as this before, not any of the times she’d been through it—when the neighbor appeared through the living-room door. She had four children, three lodgers, a husband killed in
the war, and had lived in Gillerton Road all her life. She and Gretta looked at each other for a long moment and Gretta was aware, as ever, of Monica intercepting that look, drawing it to herself, attempting to read what wasn’t being said.

“I’ll be back,” was all the neighbor said.

Gretta wanted to let go of the chair but found she couldn’t. Her arms were numb, prickling with pins and needles. “Won’t be long now,” she tried to say, noticing that her voice was coming out a little slurred. “Are you looking forward to meeting your—”

“Daddy wasn’t there,” Michael Francis was saying, from what seemed to be a great distance across the room.

“What?” Monica said.

Quiet, Gretta wanted to say. Be quiet, can’t you see I’m trying to concentrate.

“He wasn’t there. We phoned but he wasn’t there.”

“Well, where is he?” Monica said.

“Don’t know. They said they didn’t know where he was.”

“Are you sure …” Gretta said, taking great care with each word, “… you dialed the right number?”