Instructions for a Heatwave (3 page)

That was the way things had been, the way life was in their house: Claire was two people or sometimes three. Presumably she had thought this, too, because in the last while, since Vita had turned four, he had been greeted by the unprecedented sight of her standing alone in the kitchen, one hand resting on the table, or sitting gazing out of the bay window into the street. He could suddenly see all of her, in her astonishing separateness, the children away, gone, living their children lives: upstairs, crashing about in their bedroom, giggling together under a blanket or out in the garden, scaling the walls or digging in the flower beds. You might have thought she’d be feeling relieved at this change, after a decade of intense child-rearing, a break in the clouds. But the look on her face, when he chanced upon her in these moments, was that of someone who’d lost their way, who’d been told to go somewhere but had taken the wrong turning, the look of someone who had been on the verge of doing something important but had forgotten what it was.

He had been thinking about a way to vocalize to her that he mourned its passing, too: the sense of the children’s intense, zealous need of you, their overwhelming urge to be near you, to study
you, to watch you as you peeled an orange, wrote a shopping list, tied your shoes, the feeling that you were their study in how to be human. He was thinking how he might say to her, Yes, it’s gone but life holds other things, when everything changed again. When he got home, she was no longer in the kitchen or the bay window but elsewhere in the house, upstairs, out of sight. There was no dinner simmering on the stove, or roasting behind the oven door. He began to notice strange things lying around. An old exercise book with his wife’s maiden name inscribed on the cover in careful cursive. A much-thumbed, soft-cornered copy of
Madame Bovary
in the original French, with Claire’s grave, adolescent marginalia. A worn old pencil case in red leather, filled with freshly spiked pencils. These things he would pick up, weigh in his hand and put down again. Claire began to need him to babysit because she was suddenly going out in the evenings or at weekends. “You’re around tonight, aren’t you?” she would say, on her way through the door. There was a new look in her eye—one of trepidation mixed with a kind of spark. One night, finding her side of the bed empty, he wandered about the house, searching for her, calling her name into the dark; when she answered, her voice was muffled, disembodied. Several minutes passed before he worked out that she was up in the attic, that she had gone up there in the middle of the night, leaving their bed, pulling the ladder up after her. He had stood in the middle of the landing, hissing at her to let him come up—what, in God’s name, was she doing up there? No, her voice had come down at him, nothing, no, you can’t come up.

From ripping open an official-looking letter addressed to her, one evening when she was yet again mysteriously out, he learned that she was taking an Open University history degree. He flung the piece of paper down on the table between them when she came back. What on earth, he demanded, was this? Why was she doing this course?

“Because I want to,” she’d said defiantly, twisting her bag strap in her hands.

“But why the Open University?” he’d said.

“Why not?” she’d said, twisting her bag tighter, her face pale and tense.

“Because you’re far too good for them and you know it. You got three As at A level, Claire. The OU take anybody and their qualifications aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Why didn’t you tell me about this? We could have discussed it instead of—”

“Why didn’t I tell you?” she’d interrupted him. “Maybe because I knew you’d react exactly like this.”

Soon after this various new friends had appeared in the house, hot on the heels of the sharpened pencils and the Flaubert. They, too, were taking OU degrees and, Claire said, wasn’t it great because most of them lived just around the corner? Claire would be able to get help with her essays from them, and Michael managed not to say, Why don’t you ask me for help, I am a history teacher, after all. I have a history degree and some of a history PhD. All of a sudden, these people rarely seemed to be out of their house, with their course notes and essay sheets and files and their talk of personal expansion. They were nothing like Claire’s other friends—women with young children and houses full of beakers and toys and finger paintings, befriended at the school gates or coffee mornings or Housewives’ Register meetings. The Open University crowd left his house with an edgy, electrical charge hanging in the air. And he, Michael Francis Riordan, was not comfortable with it, not at all.

He takes a moment to collect himself before he climbs the ladder. He smooths his hair, he tucks his shirt back into his waistband.

His wife appears to him as he ascends into the roof space that he created, installing this ladder, hammering chipboard over
the beams, clearing the skylight of dead leaves, from the feet up. Bare toes, narrow ankles, crossed calves, her rear, seated on a stool, her back curved over the trestle table, her thin white arms uncovered, her hand clutching a pen, her head turned away.

He stands before her, offering himself. “Hello,” he says.

“Oh, Mike,” she says, without turning around. “I thought I heard you.”

She continues to write. He reflects, for a moment, on that “Mike.” For years, his wife has mostly called him by his first and middle name, as he is known in his family, as he was called as a child. She picked up the habit from his parents and sisters—and their vast web of cousins, aunts and uncles. Colleagues call him Mike, friends, acquaintances, dentists—not his family, not his beloveds. But how to tell her this? How to say, Please call me by both my names, like you used to?

“What are you doing?” he asks instead.

“I’m”—she scribbles frantically—“just finishing an essay about …” She stops, crosses something out, then writes again. “What time is it?”

“Around five.”

She lifts her head at this piece of information but doesn’t turn around. “Working late, were you?” she murmurs.

The figure of Gina Mayhew seems to pass by them, across the attic, like a poltergeist. She throws a look at him from under that squarish brow of hers, then disappears down through the hatch. He swallows—or tries to. His throat is constricted and dry. When did he last drink anything? He can’t remember. He is, he realizes, thirsty, horrendously, horribly, unbearably thirsty. Glasses of water, rows of standpipes, burnt yellow stretches of grass ripple through his mind.

“No,” he gets out. “Last day of term stuff and … the tube. Delayed … you know … again.”

“The tube?”

“Yes.” He sets up a vigorous nodding, even though she’s not looking at him, and asks in a rush, “So, what’s your essay about?”

“The Industrial Revolution.”

“Ah. Interesting. What aspect of it?” He steps forward to see over her shoulder.

“The Industrial Revolution and its effects on the middle classes,” she says, turning to face him, putting an arm over her page, and he experiences a dissolving feeling in his abdomen. Part lust, part horror at her short hair. He still hasn’t got used to it, still can’t forgive her for it. He’d come home a few weeks ago and opened the front door, as yet innocent of what had occurred behind it that day, as yet full of trust that his wife was still the person she’d always been. The fan of hair he’d thought would still be there; he had no reason to believe otherwise. The hair that rested on her shoulders, the color of honey held up to the light, the hair that spread itself over her pillow and his, the hair he’d gather up in his hand like a silken rope, the hair he’d liked to form a tent around them in the dark as she rose and fell above him. The hair he’d noticed in the first term of his PhD, in a lecture about postwar Europe: the clean, smooth, sun-catching length of it. He’d never seen hair like it; certainly never felt hair like it. The women in his family were dark-haired, red-haired, curly-haired; they had unruly hair, kinked hair, thin hair, hair that required setting and lotions and pins and nets. Hair to be lamented, complained about, wept over. Not hair that was celebrated, like this, left to hang and sway in its full, uncomplicated, Anglo-Saxon glory. But as he’d stood there in the doorway of the upstairs bathroom, keys still in hand, he saw that the hair he loved and had always loved was gone. It was off, scissored, finished. It littered the lino in strange, mammalian drifts. And in place of his wife was a shorn-headed boy-child in a dress. “What do you think?” the changeling said, using his wife’s voice. “Lovely and cool for the summer, isn’t it?” And it laughed, with his wife’s
laugh, but then looked at itself in the mirror with a sudden, nervous twist of the head.

He gazes at her, sitting before him, and feels again this keen, irreversible loss and wants to ask her if she might consider growing it again, for him, and how long it might take and would it look the same?

“What kind of effects?” he asks, instead.

“You know,” she says, moving her arm so that it covers the page. “Various ones.”

He can see that the effect of the shorn hair is meant to be gamine, puckish, like that girl in the film about Paris. But it doesn’t come off, with his wife’s round face, her flat nose. She looks like a Victorian convalescent.

“Make sure you mention the mass migrations from countryside to town,” he hears himself say, “the emergence of big cities, and—”

“Yes, yes, I know,” she says, turning back to the desk, and is it his imagination or do her teeth sound gritted? Let me help you, he wants to say, let me try. But he doesn’t know how to say this without sounding like what Aoife would call “a desperate eejit.” He would just like there to be one thing they were united in, one part of their life in which they stood shoulder to shoulder, as they used to, before—

“And the railways,” he hears himself say, and is it just him or is he employing the deep, authoritative voice he uses in the classroom—why is he doing that here, in the attic of his own house, to his own wife?—“the way they gave ease and speed of transportation, built by the Irish, of course, and—”

She scratches her head with a quick, irritated movement, goes to make a mark on the page in front of her but then pulls back the pen.

“Also, I’d recommend reading—”

“Hadn’t you better answer him?” she interrupts.

“Answer who?”

“Hughie.”

He tunes his hearing beyond the attic, beyond his wife, and becomes aware of his son’s voice, calling, Daddy, Daddeeeeee, are you coming baaaaaaaaack?

·  ·  ·

When he’d first been taken to meet Claire’s parents, the thing he’d been most struck by was how nice they all were to each other. How extraordinarily polite, considerate. The parents called each other “dearest.” At dinner her mother asked him, if she could trouble him, would he mind awfully passing the butter? It had taken him a moment to decode the grammar of this sentence, to grope his way along its abstruse semantic loops. The father fetched a scarf (silk, with a pattern of brass padlocks) for the mother when she mentioned it was chilly. The brother talked voluntarily about the game of rugby he’d played that day at school. The parents asked Claire-Bear, as they called her, about her essays, her lectures, the dates of her exams. The food came in china serving dishes, each with its own lid; they helped each other to portions and then seconds.

It had amazed him. And made him want to laugh. There was no shouting, no swearing, no people flouncing off from the table, no silent brooding, no scramble for your fair share of potatoes. No spoons were thrown, no one picked up the carving knife, held it to their throat and cried, Will I kill myself here and now? He didn’t think anyone in his family would be able to identify the vague area of his PhD, never mind get down the calendar and write the dates and details of his exams, never mind reel off a list of books that might be useful for him, never mind fetch those books from their library.

He found their inquiries as to what he was studying, how much teaching he did, whether he had enough time to devote
to his PhD, induced a feeling of mild panic. He would have preferred them to ignore him so that he could eat as much as possible of the food, to stare around at the oil paintings on the wall, the bay window that opened onto a sweeping lawn, to absorb the revelation that he was sleeping with a girl who still addressed her parents as “Mummy” and “Daddy.”

But they would not give up. How many siblings did he have? What did they do? Where had he grown up? That his father worked in a bank seemed to satisfy them but the disclosure that he was going to Ireland over the summer seemed to cause surprise.

“Michael’s parents are Irish,” Claire said, and was it his imagination or was there a hint of warning in her voice, a slight wrinkle in the atmosphere?

“Really?” Her father turned his eyes on him, as if searching for some physical manifestation of this. He was seized with an urge to recite a Hail Mary, just to see what they would do. I am indeed, he would announce over the artichokes—horrible, inedible, spiked things they were—I’m a Paddy, a Catholic, a Mick, a Fenian, and I deflowered your daughter.

“Yes,” he said instead.

“From Northern Ireland? Or southern Ireland?”

He struggled for a moment with the desire to correct Claire’s father: it’s the Republic of Ireland, he wanted to say, not southern Ireland. “The … er …” He swallowed. “… the south.”

“Ah. But you’re not IRA, are you?”

His hand, carrying food to his mouth, stopped. An artichoke leaf hovered in mid-air. A drop of melted butter fell to the plate. He stared at the man in front of him. “You’re asking me if I’m in the IRA?”

“Daddy,” Claire murmured.

The man smiled, a quick, thin smile. “No. Merely whether you or your family—”

“Whether my family’s in the IRA?”

“Just an inquiry. No offense intended.”

He had Claire that night, at one in the morning, on her flowery bedspread, on the carpet, on the cushions of the window seat. He gathered up the corn-colored silk of her hair and held it to his face. He pumped away, eyes shut, and when he realized he hadn’t used a condom, he was glad, he was angrily glad, and next morning at breakfast he was still glad as she sat there, irreproachable in a sprigged summer dress, on a straight-backed chair, helping herself to scrambled eggs and asking her father if she could pass him anything.