Instructions for a Heatwave (34 page)

·  ·  ·

Claire stands over him. Again, he is presented with a view of her feet, fringed now with tidemarks of sand.

“Of course I haven’t slept with someone else,” she is saying, somewhere above him. “What a ridiculous idea. Who on earth would I sleep with?”

“I don’t know. Someone on your course or—”

“Someone on my course?” Claire’s feet turn, walk away, then stop. “You thought I’d slept with someone on my course? But … they’re my friends, Michael. They’re the most interesting friends I’ve had since I went to—” She stops, takes a few more stiff steps away from him, then turns. “I don’t know what to say to you.” Her voice is no longer angry, just puzzled.

“I’m sorry,” he mutters. “I’m sorry. I just barely know where you are half the time. You’re always out and you never tell me anything. I just thought you might want to … I don’t know …”

“Want to what?” Claire says, standing over him again.

He says nothing; his heart is banging on the door of his rib cage, desperate for exit.

“Want to what, Mike?”

He can’t look up: he doesn’t want to see the ghost of Gina Mayhew, which he is sure will be there on the beach with them. He doesn’t want to see it—not here, not now.

“Retaliate,” he manages to say.

She is there, he is sure of it, between them on the beach, in her divided skirts and those cumbersome buckled sandals.

Claire is strangely still above him. It is, he realizes, the first time they have directly referred to Gina since that time he got back from France, when, after they had put the kids to bed, she had turned to him in the kitchen and said, Where were you when I phoned? The most awful of awful times, which went on from that question of hers, all evening and into the night and into the next day. When dawn came, they were still sitting at the kitchen table, him with his head in his hands, much as he is now, unable to look at her face.

“You know what I was going to say?” Claire says and, again, her voice isn’t angry, but quiet, measured. “I was going to say that maybe you should go.”

He looks up. “Go where?”

She looks back at him. She holds his gaze. The wind channels through and around their two figures. The cries of their children spin out across the beach. And he realizes that it isn’t Gina Mayhew on the beach with them, it is the end, their end, standing there with them, like a third person.

“You mean …” He cannot finish his sentence. He cannot believe this has happened, that this has come about. The end has been reached; he has thought about it and dreaded it for so long and now he is meeting it here, on Mannin Bay. It seems peculiarly familiar, as if he has met it before, as if all the things they are saying have been said before. “You mean leave?”

“We can be civilized about it,” she says. “Can’t we? We can manage that. You can see them whenever you want. It’s just that I’m so tired. I’m so tired of trying to keep you. I’m tired of trying to guess what kind of person it is that you want. I’m tired of always feeling in the wrong, that I should be constantly apologizing for you having to give up your PhD, for you having to become a teacher. We live in the house with you but you’re not really there. You’re off living your imaginary life as an American professor. Don’t tell me you aren’t because I know you are. So I want
you to know that you can go. Wherever you want. You can leave. Vita’s at school now. I’m going to get this degree. Then I’ll get a job. You don’t have to stay.” She opens her hands as if releasing a small animal.

“Do you want me to go?”

Claire doesn’t say anything, she doesn’t nod or even acknowledge that he has spoken. Instead, she turns her face to the sea, to the wind, letting the breeze whip back her shorn hair.

Farther up the beach, Monica stands. She consults her watch, she looks out at the sea.

“We should get going,” she says.

“Why?”

Aoife lies on the sand, curled up, her eyes shut.

“Mum said to pick her up in two hours. It’s almost two hours now.”

“It can’t be.”

“And the tide is starting to come in.”

“So?”

“So we want to get over to the island before the tide comes up again.”

Aoife sits up and eyes the sea. It looks just as it always has: green, foaming, restlessly rising up and falling down. “How can you tell it’s coming in?”

Michael Francis stands. He feels, all of a sudden, completely awake, as if he is rising up out of his sleepless night on the ferry, kicking that fatigue aside. Claire’s words seem to circle him, cloud the air around him, like flies.

“Claire,” he says, “look—”

At that moment, Vita comes hurtling up to them. She flings herself at both of her parents at once, crushing them into a sandy embrace. In the knot of limbs and hair and joints and skin, he feels Claire’s fingers slipping from his own. He is about to reach out for them, to snatch them back, but he hears his name being
called. He turns and sees his sisters waving at him, then pointing back towards the car.

·  ·  ·

At the crossroads where they dropped Gretta, they have an argument. Aoife is all for driving up to the convent; Monica says they should wait, as arranged. Michael Francis appears to favor both opinions, depending on who is speaking. Claire keeps quiet.

They are still arguing, Aoife opening the car door, saying she’ll walk up, then, when Gretta appears around the bend.

They fall silent, watching as she approaches, with her signature gait, lurching and uneven ever since that knee operation, her handbag gripped in one hand.

“Is Dad with her?” Aoife whispers.

“Doesn’t look like it,” Michael Francis says.

Gretta yanks open the passenger door and climbs in, with a great heave and exhalation and a rustling rearrangement of clothing.

“I’m dead,” she announces.

There is a pause.

“You don’t look dead,” Aoife says.

“Don’t be so bold, Aoife,” Gretta snaps. “You’ve no idea what I’ve just been through. Not the faintest idea. I’m dead on my feet. The heat! Unbearable. Never seen the like. The sister said she’d get me a glass of water but she didn’t come back. I swear if I don’t get a cup of tea in the next half hour I will simply expire.”

From the backseat, Claire proffers a flask. “There’s still some juice in here, I think, Gretta.”

“Ah, no.” She waves it away, eyes shut. “I wouldn’t take it from the children.”

“They’re fine. You have it.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Go on. It’s OK.”

“I couldn’t take it from them.”

Michael Francis takes the flask, opens it, pours out a cup of juice and hands it to his mother. “Here,” he says. “Drink it.”

“I couldn’t,” Gretta says, gulping it down. “I really couldn’t.” She hands back the cup, rests her head back and shuts her eyes again.

Aoife leans through the gap in the seats. “So what happened?”

Gretta doesn’t answer.

“Did you see Dad? Where is he?” Aoife touches her mother on the shoulder. “Mum? What did you find out?”

“Can a body get no rest at all?” Gretta snaps. “The day I’ve had.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. We just want to know a few things, like did you see Dad, where is he, what’s happening with Frankie, and—”

“The thing is,” Monica says, in a mild voice, as if drawing their attention to something interesting seen from the window, a water tower, perhaps, or a particularly memorable tree, “that we have to get our skates on if we’re to get over the causeway before the tide comes in.”

It is exactly the right thing to say. Aoife marvels at the effect. Gretta’s eyes jerk open and she sits up. How does Monica do it? She’s like a sort of external heart valve for Gretta, responding immediately and precisely to every mood, every demand Gretta could ever make.

“The tide’s coming in?” Gretta is suddenly wide awake, looking around at them all.

“Well,” Monica says, still casual, still detached, “it’s on the turn.”

“Then we have to go!” She taps the dashboard with a flat hand, in the manner of a driving instructor with a particularly sluggish pupil. “Come on!”

Michael Francis puts his hand on the ignition key. “Is Dad … coming … or …?” He stops carefully, not looking at his mother.

She busies herself with readjusting her shoes. “Not here,” she says crisply. “The sister said he comes and goes. They never know where he is.”

·  ·  ·

As the car rounds the last bend at Claddaghduff, they see it—a low-lying, sea-fringed stretch of land.

“Oh!” Gretta exclaims, her hands leaping to her chest. “Look at it now.”

The strand out is a gleaming white path through the waves, which foam and turn on either side.

Hughie had said on the boat that he didn’t remember the island, not one bit. His father said, But you must, you must remember; his mother said, Well, you were only five when we last went. But as the car slides down the concrete ramp and the tires begin to hiss over the sand, he realizes he does remember. He remembers this, exactly: the shock of driving on a beach, the soft expressive feel of wheels over sand, the rows of waves sliding past. He pictures suddenly an overgrown garden lined with a stone wall, a cracked path, an outhouse filled with gray-backed beetles, a bed next to a white-painted wall, a window looking out over grass and sea. He wants to say, I remember, I remember now, but he doesn’t. He keeps the words in his head, shut inside. He crouches nearer to the suitcases, he watches as the island approaches them, its green shape the back of a sleeping sea monster, his father steering the wheel.

There is a flurry of activity when they get to the cottage. Gretta treads from room to room, extolling its merits, lamenting the appearance of certain cracks/marks/carpet stains/squashed insects. She embarks with zeal on a clean of the kitchen, removing all the plates and pans from the cupboards, but loses focus
halfway through and goes into the garden, where she starts pulling up weeds, in the sudden grip of a low mood, saying to anyone who passes that she doesn’t think Robert will come, that he doesn’t want her anymore. Monica fiddles with the boiler switches, then pushes the carpet sweeper around, a handkerchief over her face. Michael Francis carries in boxes and suitcases from the car. Hughie and Vita careen through the front door and out of the back, around and around. Aoife builds a fire in the grate. Claire puts sheets on the beds.

Gretta gives up on the weeding and the lamenting and takes the children down to the beach, telling them they need to find a mermaid’s purse before the day is out. Monica sits on the front step, looking out to sea. Michael Francis chops firewood, finding calm in the regular fall of the ax. Aoife, seized by a sudden hunger, starts frying eggs and bacon, and Claire, smelling the food, comes in to lay the table. She says nothing when Aoife starts eating standing at the stove, cramming eggs and bread into her mouth, as if possessed. She says nothing at all, just passes her a fork and a plate.

When dinner is finished and the oblongs of light in the cottage windows are indigo-blue, the children are put to bed, their hair stiff with seawater, and Michael Francis comes into the room where his mother, his sisters and his wife are sitting, a fire whispering from the grate.

“Come on,” he says, taking Claire by the hand, “let’s go for a walk.”

She rises, without a word, putting down her book, and follows him out of the cottage.

After a moment, Monica and Aoife exchange a look, Monica with her eyebrows raised.

“I don’t know what you two are smirking at,” says Gretta, without looking up from her knitting, “but at least he knows how to fix a problem, that boy. Always has done, always will.”

Aoife pulls a face, exasperated as ever by her mother’s roving
favoritism. She gets up, goes to one window, then another. She pokes the fire, picks up Claire’s book, turns over a page, then puts it down. She has the strange sensation that her body has too much blood in it: she can feel it pumping and pumping around her body, uncomfortably persistent. She needs to decide what to do and when; she needs to get out; she needs to call Gabe or maybe she doesn’t, maybe that’s the last thing she should do; she needs to think, for God’s sake, but how can she do that in this tiny cottage, with her family there, all ready to suck her thoughts out of the air?

“What time is it?” Aoife says and, without waiting for an answer, “Where’s the nearest telephone?”

“Claddaghduff,” Gretta says, “but you can’t go now.”

“Why not?”

“The tide’s up.”

“Shit,” says Aoife, which makes Gretta drop a stitch.

“Aoife Magdalena,” she says, “will you mind your mouth?”

Aoife goes to the door, looks out, confirms that her mother is right, then slams it shut and comes back, flinging herself down into a chair. In a moment, she is out of it again, rifling about in the log basket.

“For the love of God, will you stop it, Aoife?” Gretta says, counting off stitches.

“Stop what?”

“Crashing about like a bull in a china shop.”

“I’m not.”

“You are. Find something to do and—”

“—do it.” Monica finishes the mantra for her.

Aoife sits back on her heels and regards her mother and sister with naked hostility. She doesn’t know what it is about evenings with her family that make her like this—unbearably restless, that cooped-up, pent-up feeling, the sensation that she must escape, no matter what.

“OK,” she says, getting up from the floor. “I’m going out.”

She marches across the room and out of the door, and banging it after her.

Gretta sighs, switching her empty knitting needle from one hand to the other. “That girl,” she says, to the air.

Monica turns a page of her magazine but doesn’t answer. Gretta eyes her middle child over the top of her glasses. Back straight as a schoolmarm’s, face set into a holier-than-thou expression, ankles crossed. Good legs her daughters have; she’s always thought so. They got that from her, although neither of them has ever acknowledged it.

“The children have gone off easily, at least,” Gretta says, needles clicking against each other, wool looping around, almost independently of her hands. “Must have been tired, poor mites.”

Still no answer. Monica lifts her chin slightly.