Instructions for a Heatwave (32 page)

Gretta stands firm. She gathers her bag, her headscarf, her pills, her hankie; she steps from the car and she sets off down the track. “Come back in two hours,” she says. She pauses briefly to watch Aoife emerge from behind a tree, zipping up her trousers. They look at each other, then Gretta walks on, without speaking, disappearing up the track.

Aoife gets back into the car.

Vita leans forward from her perch on Claire’s knee and looks closely at her aunt, this fascinating, vomiting person, who has appeared from nowhere, in a top printed with flamingos. Vita is overcome by an urge to lick Aoife’s bare arm. She wants to taste
that tanned skin, feel those tiny hairs under her tongue; she has an idea it would be smooth as honey and that the freckles might have a peppery tang. She stretches out quickly, before anyone can stop her, and runs her tongue up her aunt’s arm, near the elbow.

Aoife swivels her gaze to meet her eye. “Did you just lick me?”

“No,” Vita says, still with the tip of her tongue out. “Are you feeling better?”

“I am.” She looks at the child for a moment longer, then whispers, “You know what I think we should do while Granny’s away?”

Vita, quick to catch the confidential tone, whispers back, “What?”

“Go for a swim.”

They park the car at Mannin Bay. As soon as they open the doors, the children are off, greyhounds from traps, haring about in circles and zigzags. Hughie whirls a plume of seaweed above his head and Vita heads in a straight line for the sea, tiny wavelets that turn and crisscross each other on the silver sand.

Monica sits down on a rock, dress tucked beneath her. She sifts handfuls of the beach—broken pieces of whitened coral, smoothed and jointed like the bones of tiny creatures. Touching it gives her a sensation akin to a bell sounding in a belfry, so deep is the familiarity of it. All her childhood summers seem to be distilled into this particular moment, into this particular act, with her fingers digging deeper into the sand, all those days of running on the beach in a swimming costume and an Aran sweater, Michael Francis always ahead of her, his pink feet sugared with sand, all those rides on the back of her grandmother’s donkey, all those trudges through the rain that was only gentle water falling from the sky, warmish and clean, not like the rain in London. The digging for peat with her uncle and her mother, the slicing heft of the spade’s drop, the twisting out the water from washed sheets, hens peck-pecking around their legs.

She looks up and sees silhouettes of people, her people, glowing black against the bright sea, her brother and his wife near the shore and Aoife, like a sprite, pulling off her clothes, the children screaming at the sight.

She looks down. Minuscule fibulas and tibias of coral caught in the creases at her fingers’ base. It is at this scale Monica remembers Ireland best: the minutiae of this bay, the feel of this strange coral sand, the layers of color in the sea, the green, the turquoise, the deep blue, the great swags of bladder wrack that lie on rocks like fat seals.

Aoife is in the water now; Monica can hear her shout. Vita is going in after her, single-mindedly crashing through the waves. Two of a kind, Monica thinks. Does Claire realize there’ll be trouble ahead with that one? Michael Francis is dashing after his daughter before a wave knocks her over. He is lifting her kicking, shrieking form high in the air, swinging her up, and when she comes down onto the sand, she is laughing again, her anger left up in the sky somewhere. Monica thinks she can see it dissipate into the blue beyond.

Hughie sets to work excavating a hole, working his hands like a dog, sand spraying up behind him in an arch. Vita watches for a second, maybe two, then copies him. Michael Francis turns and is surprised to find his wife standing by him. He puts his arms around her, closing the gap between them. It is an act of pure instinct, done without thought, and as he feels her body come into line with his—so familiar is that feeling, so exactly right—he wonders if she will pull away, whether she will accept it, and he wonders, too, why they haven’t stood like this for so long, too long. When was the last time and how can they not have stood like this? Why don’t they do it all the time?

She doesn’t pull away. She goes so far as to put her arms around him. He feels them fasten and lock at his waist and he closes his eyes with the perfection of it all. He feels, he realizes,
jealous of himself, as if he is looking back at the scene from a distance.

“Thank you for coming,” he says to her.

“Don’t be silly,” she says, her head tucked under his chin. “Of course I’d come.”

When he’d got back from taking his mother and Monica home yesterday, he’d had Aoife with him. Monica and Gretta had returned to Gillerton Road in a bad state, the two of them screeching and weeping at each other, Monica beside herself with fury. Monica, their mother’s favorite, their mother’s pet, their mother’s confidante. How could you, she kept sobbing, how could you lie to me like that, how could you pretend to be married when all the time … And Gretta weeping noisily, I’m sorry, darling, I’m so sorry, I wasn’t lying, I just, I didn’t mean to, I just.

When he’d moved into the hall, ready to leave and go back to his own house to pack, Monica was ranting about the time Gretta had made her go to confession because she’d slept with Joe before their wedding and Gretta had said that she’d paved her way to Hell. He’d turned to call goodbye and found Aoife next to him, arms folded.

“Where are you going?” he’d said.

“Wherever you’re going,” she said. “There’s no way I’m staying here with them.”

So it was him and Aoife who had walked back through his front door, to find Hughie and Vita sitting side by side on the stairs, both with a kind of wide-eyed look on their faces. There was a noise of chatting from the sitting room, and cackling and a kind of sliding zither music that he’d never heard before in his house.

“What’s going on?” he’d said to his children.

Hughie looked from him to Aoife to the shut sitting-room door. “A past-papers study group,” he’d said, pronouncing the words with a care that broke Michael Francis’s heart. He could
feel it breaking right there and then as he stood in his hallway, with his children before him on the stairs, breaking and falling in pieces down through his body.

Claire appeared in the doorway, quickly shutting the door behind her.

“Oh,” she said, “it’s you. I didn’t know if you’d be back or—”

“Of course I’d be back,” he said. “Why wouldn’t I be? Why are you talking to me as if I don’t live here anymore?”

Claire held the door shut behind her, the handle between her palms. She looked flushed, disheveled, her hair standing on end, the way she often did after drinking red wine. “I’m not. It’s just that—”

At that moment, a woman Michael Francis didn’t recognize burst through the door. She had her graying hair in bunches, like Vita sometimes did, and she was wearing a long, loose, wraparound skirt.

“Welcome!” she said, throwing her arms into the air.

“Welcome?” Michael Francis said, but the irony was lost on the woman, who was seizing Aoife by the arm.

“Have you come to join us?” she said to Aoife, her eyes alight with evangelical zeal, and Michael Francis didn’t have much to be glad about at that moment—nothing at all, in fact—but he was glad that, of all his family, it was Aoife who was with him. Not Monica, not Gretta. Aoife was the only one who could have coped with this.

“You’ll find us a very friendly crowd,” the woman is saying to Aoife. “I’m Angela and this is Claire. It’s her house and—”

Unperturbed, Aoife stepped away from the woman with bunches and onto the bottom step. “Why don’t you,” she said, taking Vita and Hughie by the hand, “show me your bedroom? I haven’t seen it yet. Come on, let’s go upstairs.”

The woman returned to the sitting room and he was left in the hallway with his wife. He sat down on the bottom step. He
leaned his head against the newel post and was surprised to find a modicum of comfort in the smooth, varnished wood pressing into his temple. He looked not into his wife’s face, but at her feet, her bare feet. She’d always had particularly beautiful feet: slender, high-arched, with curving, pale nails. Not like his—hairy, wide as plates, the toes all broken and crooked from his days playing rugby. He would, he decided, keep things brief. He outlined in three sentences what he was going to do, keeping his eyes only on her feet, on the pearly tips of her nails, on the web of blue veins at the instep: he told her the whole family was going to Ireland, tonight, on the night ferry and they were leaving in half an hour.

“And,” he said, “I’m taking the children. You can do whatever you want. I don’t—”

“I’ll get ready,” the owner of the feet said. “I’m coming, too.”

On Mannin Bay, Hughie is jumping in and out of his hole; Vita is kicking at the shallow water, sending it up into the air, where rainbows flash in and out of the spray.

“Listen,” he says to Claire, who is still pressed to his side.

“Mike,” she says, “I need to say something to you.”

He pulls away. “Oh, God, no.”

“What?”

“Please no.” He puts his hands over his ears. He cannot bear this, he cannot, he doesn’t want to hear it. He is filled with an urge to run, run up the beach, leap into his car and drive away, anything to avoid hearing his wife say what she is about to say.

“What do you mean? What do you think I’m going to say?”

“I … I don’t …” He slumps down onto the sand. “Just don’t say it.”

“Say what?”

“It.”

“What’s ‘it’?”

“That you’ve”—he circles his hand in the air—“slept with someone else. Don’t say it. Not now. I can’t take it.”

Aoife, buoyed to a horizontal position in the sea, the sky above her, the seabed below her, feels her kicking feet hit solid sand. She stands up to the disconcerting discovery that she’s in shallow water: she’s up to her knees, the sea pouring off her, not far out, as she’d thought. She hoicks up her wet knickers and starts to wade out of the waves, her breath coming in sharp jags, her hair plastered to her back and shoulders. She passes Michael Francis, who is sitting on the sand, his head bowed, Claire standing over him, and the children, who are bailing water out of a rapidly refilling hole.

“You’ve got your work cut out there,” she says, as she passes, and they look up at her, their faces distant, transposed, and she realizes she is calling to them across an invisible galaxy, that they are currently inhabiting not Mannin Bay but the realm of their game.

She collects her clothes from the ground, shakes the grit out of them, picks off a few strands of seaweed. Monica is sitting not far off, her knees together, skirt spread about her, as if, Aoife thinks, she is readying herself for a portrait. Aoife rolls her eyes to herself, strips off her sodden bra and pulls her blouse over her head.

“How was the water?” Monica’s voice reaches her through the air between them. The beach and sea shimmer and refract in the heat; seaweed dries to rocks; sand cracks and powders in the sun.

Aoife looks up. Her sister has her hands clasped tight on her lap, her sunglasses obscuring most of her face. “Fine,” Aoife says.

Monica waits for a moment, then nods. She clearly cannot think of anything else to say.

“Are you going in?” Aoife asks.

“Me?” Monica sits straight with the shock of this idea. “Oh, no. I can’t swim.”

Aoife, caught in the act of pulling on her trousers, stops. “You can’t swim? Really?”

Monica shakes her head. “No.”

“Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“Really true?”

Monica bristles at this questioning. “Yes,” she repeats with emphasis. “Ask Michael Francis, if you don’t believe me.”

Aoife comes closer. She sits down on a patch of sand, near but not too near her sister. “How come?”

“I don’t know.” Monica’s voice is just at her shoulder, coming at her from behind. “I just never learned. I never … I could never get in the water. It terrified me. The depth of it.”

“Weren’t you made to go to those swimming lessons at the pool? Those sadistic teachers who stood on the sides and jabbed you with rods if you did it wrong?”

“I went once. But I hated it.”

“Now, why would that be?”

Monica doesn’t reply so Aoife turns to look at her. Her sister’s face is uncertain, perplexed, as if unsure whether Aoife is making fun of her.

“Mon, I’m joking. Sadistic teachers? Rods? It’s called sarcasm. Of course you hated it. Everyone hated it.”

“Oh, I see.” Monica nods, smooths her dress, a tailored checked number that looks—to Aoife—unbearably hot and restrictive. “Well, swimming isn’t really very me.”

“Right.”

They sit on the beach, together but not quite. Aoife stretches out her legs, runs her toes through the sand in geometric arcs. She is looking at them one way, then the other, squinting to plot their imaginary remaining curves, when Monica speaks again.

“What do you reckon?” She indicates the figures of Michael Francis and Claire, who are down by the shoreline, Claire gesturing with expansive pushes of her hands, Michael Francis still slumped on the sand. “Do you think they’ll stay together?”

Aoife twists a strand of her damp, salty hair. “I don’t know.”

·  ·  ·

By the time Gretta reaches the door of the convent, she is hot, out of breath and furious. She hadn’t known the driveway would be that long, hadn’t reckoned for the terrible stony terrain of it, how she’d have to watch each step if she didn’t want to turn her ankle, her with her bad knee.

She is perspiring, panting and all of a sudden livid with her husband as she yanks the bell. How dare he? How dare he come here and tell no one and make her trek all the way out here, with all the kids and the grandchildren in tow? What, in God’s name, did he—

The door opens and the figure of a nun appears and, at the sight of her, Gretta’s outrage deflates, as if pricked by a pin.

“Hello, Sister.” Gretta makes a humble beginning; she has to stop herself genuflecting. “I’m so sorry to bother you but I wonder if you can help me. I’m looking for my—” Gretta comes to a sinkhole. She finds she cannot say the word “husband,” not to this lady, not to her face, lined yet serene, framed in white, beautiful gray eyes she has, her fair eyebrows raised in inquiry. “Well, my … He’s here, you see, Robert … Ronan … Mr. Riordan, visiting … someone. Frankie, um, Francis, Francis …” Gretta cannot recall the surname—whatever was it now?—and then she remembers. “Francis Riordan.”