Instructions for a Heatwave (8 page)

Towel-wrapped, Monica padded carefully over the bare wooden boards into the bedroom. The number of times she’d spiked a splinter into the flesh of her feet, but if Peter even heard mention of the words “fitted carpet,” he jammed his hands over his ears. So she had to put up with it.

Monica flicked through the hangers in the wardrobe (tripledoored, walnut-veneered, late-Victorian, procured from a probate sale in Gloucester). Dressing was a particular difficulty in this weather. What to wear that was decent yet cool enough? Monica considered a shirtwaister in a crimped fabric, a halter-necked top in orange seersucker, a striped all-in-one with a zip up the middle, before settling on a frilled dress in lawn cotton. One of Peter’s favorites. He said it made her look like a milkmaid. Apparently this was a good thing. They had gone together to a boutique in Oxford to buy these clothes. Shopping with a man was not something Monica was used to. She had always gone with her mother or her sister; she wasn’t one for shopping alone, found it hard to make up her mind, could never decide if something suited her or not. So she had taken Gretta or, in later years, Aoife, who, despite dressing like a tramp, was surprisingly good at knowing what looked right on people. Monica wasn’t at all used to the idea of coming out through the curtained door to display yourself to a man waiting in a chair, to elicit his approval before you even knew yourself whether you liked it. Joe had hated shopping, would never have gone with her, even if she’d asked.

Monica pushed the tiny pearl buttons through the frills and into their holes. So many of them and all so small. She’d forgotten that. She faced herself in the dressing-table mirror (Art Deco, oak, with a rosewood inlay) and pushed her earrings into place (marcasite and ruby, flower design, 1930s). She hadn’t wanted
children. She’d known that. She’d told Joe so. Right from the start. But it seemed that he hadn’t believed her, that he’d thought she’d come around, that she’d change her mind. She’d told Peter, too, and he had said, Fine, don’t fancy doing it all again anyway. Peter came with a ready-made family, with spare children; she’d hoped she might slot into their lives almost as if they were her own. It had seemed perfect, really, when she’d thought about it: children without having to give birth to them.

She hadn’t ever wanted children and yet she had. She had and she did.

She pulled the brush (enamel-backed, silver-handled, initialed
H
, another probate sale) through her hair, again and again. A hundred strokes a day, her mother had always decreed. Keeps it healthy.

Careful
was the word she used. Monica was careful with herself. She had learned to blank out what she didn’t like to see; there was a trick she had perfected, a slight narrowing of the eyes so that the lashes rendered the scene soft, furred at the edges, an ability to slide her pupils sideways should anything untoward come her way. She had a problem, she’d realized recently, with children of about three or four.

It wasn’t a baby Monica wanted. It was a child. She had no desire for those cocooned beings in blankets, terrifying in their fragility, insistent in their demands, so new as to be still redolent of bodily fluids, of milk and blood, all the gore and effort and violence of birth. No. She couldn’t have done it, couldn’t have gone through what her mother had with Aoife.

Monica liked Michael Francis’s youngest, Vita. Not the boy, who looked too much like his mother—that rather moony forehead. Vita was a real Riordan; Gretta was always saying how she was the spit of Aoife at the same age. “But mercifully without all the weirdness,” Monica had once added, and her mother had laughed and said, “True enough.” The last time Monica had seen
her, Vita had taken her hand and shown her a doll’s house. Tiny rooms, precisely arranged, books with real pages lined up on the shelves, a cook preparing a painted ham in the kitchen, a dog curled up on a minuscule hearth rug before a crackling polyethylene fire. Monica had thought then, as she pressed her eye to the window with its own flowered curtains, that she would have liked a little girl with a doll’s house, a girl with hair slides and red T-bar shoes, like Vita’s. Monica had seen a charming miniature sideboard in the window of a toy shop and had gone in and bought it and sent it to Vita and she’d received a crayoned card by return. Claire was good about that sort of thing; Monica appreciated a thank-you letter. Who wouldn’t?

It did no good dwelling on these things. There would be no children. It had been her decision and it was the right one, ultimately. Monica was sure of that. Earrings in, hair done, lipstick applied, but not too much, as Peter didn’t like the taste of it, Monica stood up from her dressing stool, ready to face the evening.

By the time Peter came in—in a pair of filthy overalls, reeking to high heaven of turpentine—she had the table laid with a white linen cloth, candles lit, the silver salver filled with shelled almonds, just as he liked.

“Darling,” she murmured, as he came through the kitchen door and almost went to kiss him but remembered her frock in time, “what have you been doing?”

“I had a brilliant idea.” Peter tossed a handful of nuts into his mouth. “Remember that pine table I told you I’d got hold of last week? Well, I suddenly thought in the night …” Peter continued to talk. Monica watched his mouth moving, eyed the oil stains on his overalls, wondered whether they’d got through to the clothes underneath, asked herself how soon she could request that he take off the overalls so that she could check, noticed his black-rimmed fingernails sifting through her nuts. He was still talking
about how he and his helper had set about the table with some metal chains to give it “that worn-in patina” that people were starting to go crazy for. Monica thought that she had to say about the cat soon, otherwise it would seem strange. She had to tell him. She had to get it out.

“Peter,” she interrupted.

“… don’t know why I’d never thought of it before. Buy new stuff or recent stuff and then just duff it up a bit. No one will know the difference. It’s genius.” He seized her around the waist, his overalls pressing up against her tiny pearl buttons, like rows of frozen tears. “Your husband is a genius.”

“Darling—”

From the hall, the phone rang again. Peter released her and made as if to go and answer it.

“Leave it,” she said, and she was, inexplicably and suddenly, crying, the tears coming from nowhere, spilling down her cheeks, dripping onto the high collar of her dress. “Peter,” she sobbed. “Peter, listen—”

He was there right away, cupping her face in his palms. “What’s the matter? What happened?”

The phone was still ringing. Who on earth was plaguing her like this? Why wouldn’t they go away and why couldn’t she stop crying today?

“What’s the matter?” Peter said again.

Monica found she was about to say: Aoife came, Aoife saw. The words were ready in her mouth: It would have been almost three.

But she managed not to. She managed to stop them, to swallow them down, she managed to change them into: “The cat died.” She got these words out instead; she managed to say them to her husband, to the father of the children who had loved the cat.

•  •  •

The phone rang again while they were having dinner: a rather successful casserole Monica had made. She’d got a new recipe from a magazine, which said to add dried apricots. She didn’t normally like sweet things in savory dishes but this had come off quite well.

Peter went to answer the phone. She poured herself a touch more wine, the red liquid glugging throatily from the bottle. She tore a crust off the bread and ate a mouthful of the soft innards. She had that washed, tremulous feeling you get after a bout of crying. Like a London street after the cleaners had been down it; dark, wetted, cleansed.

Suddenly Peter was back in the room, standing beside her chair. She turned in her seat to look up at him.

“Monica …” he began, laying a hand on her shoulder.

She didn’t like that voice; she didn’t like his grave face. “What?” she said, flinching away from his touch. “What is it?”

“It’s your brother on the phone.”

She continued to stare at her husband. “What’s happened?”

“You’d better talk to him.”

Monica sat for a moment, then darted out of her seat. Halfway across the room, she was aware of the floorboards rippling and undulating beneath her shoes, felt herself to be on the verge of collapse. She had suddenly realized why the day had been odd, why she’d been on the brink of tears, why the air around her had felt charged, frayed. She knew. She knew what Michael Francis was about to say. She knew what it was but she didn’t want to hear it. Something had happened to Aoife. A car accident, a drowning, an overdose, a murder, a horrible illness. Her brother was ringing to tell her that their sister was dead.

She couldn’t get her legs to work; she couldn’t make it through the door. She wanted to stay here, with the wine and the casserole. She did not want to hear this.

It was a new sister for her, the nurse said, as she stood with Monica at the nursery window, where babies were laid out like
buns in a baker’s shop. A little baby girl. It was hard to tell because she was wrapped in so many blankets and swaddles and bits of cloth. She had a red face and tiny fists, squeezed shut. She was called Aoife. Aoife Magdalena Riordan. A long name for such a small person.

And then, it seemed to Monica, the baby opened her mouth and started to scream and that she did not stop screaming for a long time. She screamed to feed, she screamed while she was feeding, she screamed after she’d fed, so much so that she brought up all the milk she’d taken, in surprising yellow-white jets that hit the walls, the fabric of the sofa. She screamed if laid flat, even for a moment, on a bed or in the pram. She beat the air with those fists of hers, filled the room with sound; she clawed at Gretta’s hair and neck, gripped by her own private agony, she wept tears that ran over her face and into the collars of her matinée jackets. Her legs would work up and down, as if she were a toy with a winding mechanism, her face would crumple in on itself and the room would fill with jagged sounds that could have cut you, if you’d stood too close. Gretta would sink her head into her hands and Monica would rise from her homework and take the baby, and together, she and Aoife would go on a grief-filled tour of the kitchen.

Her mother took the baby to the doctor, who glanced into the squalling pram and said, give her a bottle. So they trailed, Monica and Michael Francis and their mother and the pram, to the chemist and bought gleaming bottles with orange lids and a tin of powdered milk. But Aoife took one suck on the bottle and turned her head away and howled.

Monica stood in the hallway, which Jenny had painted a dark brown that resembled melting chocolate. She’d meant to get around to redecorating it—it made her feel queasy every time she passed through it. But she couldn’t decide what color. Shell pink or cheerful orange? A dusky yellow? A springlike green?

She picked up the phone receiver and held it in her hand. Her brother, she knew, was going to tell her about their sister’s death. He would give details, times, dates. And then what would she say? There would be arrangements to make. Aoife, she knew, was in New York. Their parents were in London. How to get them all in one place? And which place? Would they all go to New York? Or London? Or Ireland? Where would be the place for this?

She lifted the receiver to her ear and listened for a moment to the noise of her brother’s house; a voyeur, she was, ear at a keyhole. A child was wailing in the background—a blaring, rising note. Another child’s voice was clear over it, saying something about Mummy and a bedtime story. She could hear her brother saying, “… going to count to five and by the time I get to four, I want you down off that windowsill, do you hear me?”

“Michael Francis?” Monica said, sending her voice down the line to reach him, all the way in London. She didn’t want to hear what he was about to say, she didn’t want to accept the words, to take them from him and fold them into herself, where they would stay for the rest of her life.

“Jesus Christ, Monica,” Michael Francis spat down the phone, and Monica instantly knew that no one was dead, that this was something else and the newness of the situation frightened her, “where in God’s name have you been?”

“Here,” said Monica, pulling herself upright. How dare he speak to her like that? “I’ve been here.”

“I’ve been calling and calling. Why haven’t you answered the phone?”

“I’ve been busy. As I am now. What do you want?”

“Dad’s gone.”

“What?”

“He’s missing.”

“Missing? He can’t be missing. He’s probably just …” Monica trailed off. That their father might do anything even remotely
unexpected or unplanned was a ridiculous idea. He was a man who thought carefully about a trip to the supermarket, weighing up the pros and cons. “He can’t be missing,” she said again. “He’ll just be …” She had to stop, to take a few breaths. Her mind, she found, was still running on the tracks of Aoife’s demise and the problem of where they would hold her funeral. This thing—whatever it was—was so unlikely, so unaccountable that she couldn’t divert herself towards considering it. “Has Mum looked … I don’t know … around the house?”

“They’ve looked everywhere and—”

“Who’s they?”

“The police,” Michael Francis said impatiently, making it clear that she wasn’t in on the seriousness of the situation, that she’d missed several stages in the drama. “Mum hasn’t seen him since this morning and they—”

“This morning?” Monica demanded. “But that’s ages!”

“I know that.”

“But have they checked with—I don’t know. Did he go out somewhere? Or—”

“Mon,” he said, and his voice was gentler now. “He took money out of their account.”

“Oh.”

“He’s not had an accident, as far as we know. He’s … taken off.”

“Well, where’s he gone?”

“We don’t know.”

“What do the police say? What are they going to do?”

“They say they can’t do anything.”

“Why not?”

“They say it’s not a disappearance. We think he’s taken his passport, too. He went to the bank first thing but after that we don’t know. He’s just gone.”