Heat Wave (13 page)

‘Hi,’ she says. ‘Could you do me a favour and just check that I left my answering machine on?’ And then, ‘Everything OK?’

‘Fine,’ replies Teresa, perplexed. She has caught a whisper of that anxiety. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Perfectly,’ says Pauline. ‘See you tomorrow.’

Pauline looks out of the window – a World’s End window. She is holding Luke, who points – a majestic, whole-hand gesture. ‘Da,’ he observes. There is my father, he is saying. And there indeed is Maurice, standing in the sunshine on the track talking to Carol. Maurice stirs the grass with his foot, and gestures as he speaks. He is presumably in full Maurice spate, engaged on one of those long and often compelling discourses. Carol is idly shucking a head of corn, a green head of Chaundy’s corn which now has soft milky kernels. The sun glints off the neat gold helmet of her hair. She throws back her head and laughs.

An unexceptional scene, one might think. And now here comes James, and after another minute Teresa, and all four stand in the evening sunshine and then move towards the cars. They are going to the pub for a drink. Pauline has volunteered to give Luke his bath and put him to bed, because she will enjoy this and has no desire to join them.

She watches the four of them get into the car. James is driving. Maurice and Carol get into the back. The car moves away down the track. Maurice is still talking, Pauline sees. He has turned sideways towards Carol and his arm lies along the back of the seat behind her.

Pauline takes Luke into the bathroom and sets about the bathing process. She does and says all the things that have to be done and said – the running of the water, the undressing of Luke, the continuous commentary that is necessary to keep Luke happy and cooperative. Luke sits in the bath and bangs small plastic containers around. Pauline kneels on the bath mat with her arms over the side of the bath and demonstrates to Luke the physical properties of
water – the qualities of whoosh and splash and pour – while thinking not of these nor indeed of Luke himself but of another child and another time.

The bath in that house in the cathedral town was made of cast iron, with claw feet. Lion’s feet. Lion. That was one of Teresa’s first words. Lion meant bath. The part became the whole. An antediluvian bath. Pauline has observed that nowadays baths like that are manufactured once again and are displayed in emporia which sell bathroom equipment with very expensive price tags. Back then the possession of such a bath was a stigma. The upwardly mobile young couple aspired to an avocado suite.

Pauline did not aspire to an avocado suite. She had other things to think about in the Victorian house with the lion-footed bath.

She stoops over the high awkward side of the bath and soaps Teresa’s back. She feels the delicate wings of her shoulder blades and then the serration of her ribs. She knows every inch of Teresa’s body – each plane, each groove, each cranny. If something is amiss – a scrape, a bruise, a rash – she feels an instant disquiet. Teresa’s body is somehow more intensely personal than her own. It is as though it were a vulnerable extension of herself that must be protected from the onslaughts that Pauline’s own skin and flesh have come to endure.

She examines a scratch on Teresa’s arm – a pink thread. She sees and registers the scratch and registers also that it is insignificant, but without thought or attention. She cannot think or attend because of what she is feeling, because of the cold void in her stomach, because of the words that run through her head, over and over again.

‘There’s something you ought to know, Pauline,’ says Louise Bennett, who is married to Harry’s colleague Ted Bennett. ‘About Harry. The thing is, apparently – Ted says, everyone in the department is noticing – anyway, the thing is, he’s always with Myra. You know – Myra Sams, from International Relations. She’s always in his office, Ted says. Or they’re in the canteen together. I mean, maybe you already know …’ Louise’s voice trails away.

Pauline likes Louise. At least until that moment Pauline has liked Louise. Now, within three seconds, she no longer likes her. Nor Ted
Bennett. Nor everyone in the department. That is all she can think of at this moment – how much she does not like Louise. The rest will come later. Oh, it will come.

‘Yes,’ she says. Quite calm, quite natural. ‘Yes, I expect she is. She’s helping him with his book. He was telling me – the other day. She knows a lot about French nineteenth-century population studies, so that’s very useful to him.’

‘Oh, I see,’ says Louise. ‘Oh, well …’ She looks away. She starts busily to talk of something else. And Pauline hears not a word she says. Not a single word. She can think only of them. Her and him. Him and her. Talking about the book. Smiling at each other. Laughing. Doing whatever it is that they do.

Myra Sams. The first. That is to say, the first so far as Pauline was concerned – the progenitor, the prototype, the only begetter. She who began it all, whose name was the first to prompt that icy trickle within, that creeping nausea.

And where is Myra Sams today? Vanished, extinguished, quite undone. She is neither here nor there – she exists only in Pauline’s head, as an emotive sound. Myra Sams. And indeed it is not her name which has prompted an echo of that time now, as Pauline leans over the World’s End bath to lift Luke to his feet. An echo, a twinge – like the ghost of a toothache when the real thing has gone.

‘Up you get,’ she says to Luke. ‘Out now. Yes, yes. Up and out.’ She swings him up. She wraps him in the towel. She chats, she sings. No, she is thinking. No, no, no. Not again. Not that again.

She looks across the table at Harry. ‘I’ve been burning your book,’ she says.

‘Why?
Why?
’

‘You know why,’ she says.

Oh, books, books … she tells Luke. Terrible things, books. Cause nothing but trouble. You keep out of the book business, my lad. Commodity dealing for you. Or heart surgery. Or the construction of oil rigs.

She puts Luke into his cot. Luke protests. She fetches his bottle, and he reverts to infancy. He lies there sucking, his eyelids drooping and then jerking open as she backs furtively towards the door. He drops the bottle and wails. Pauline returns to his side, restores the bottle, murmurs reassurances, creeps from the room, reaches the kitchen in time to hear Luke wailing once more.

This process is repeated several times. At last Luke is silent. Pauline plugs in the baby-alarm and settles herself in the sitting-room. She sifts through the pile of books on the table and rejects them all in favour of the newspaper. She reads for a while. Her attention drifts and she looks around the room, which records the presence of its recent occupants. Teresa’s straw hat hangs on the knob of a chair back. Luke’s ball has rolled under the table. On the mantelpiece is an alien pair of sunglasses – reflective with gilt rims – that must belong to Carol. The cream cable-knit sweater slung over the arm of the sofa is presumably James’s – it is far too considered a garment for Maurice. But the rather grubby cotton jacket with a rip in the sleeve does indeed pertain to Maurice.

Pauline waits for them to return. She knows this room intimately. And it is not right tonight. There is a whiff of something feral and disturbing, which is also a reverberation of that continuous elsewhere in the mind. Then and now have become uneasily confused. Simultaneously another Pauline waits in another room, waits for Harry to return from wherever he is and whatever he is doing – from the seminar that he is giving or the counselling of a student or the drink in the bar with a colleague. Or from some other activity which she does not want to think about but must – which she is driven to contemplate in excruciating detail, each image a torment.

She sees them face to face across a table, his hand on hers. She sees them making love, body to body. But most of all she sees them as she did indeed see them last week at a party, on the far side of a room, simply talking. Harry’s back is turned so she cannot see his face, but she sees it through the eyes of Myra Sams and knows precisely what Myra Sams is seeing. She knows the expression that Myra Sams is seeing, the way Harry’s mouth will tilt at one side, that
quizzical look with his eyes slightly screwed up, the head a little on one side. It is the look he gives to those he has singled out for close attention. It is the look which once was directed upon her – over restaurant tables, in that car driving across America, in bed. She sees that look, and her insides run cold.

Pauline, Teresa, Maurice, James and Carol are in the grassy car park of this eighteenth-century mansion. Pauline is helping Teresa to stow Luke in the buggy.

‘So what’s your view, Pauline?’ says Maurice. ‘Come and arbitrate. Why do people visit stately homes? We differ. James says it’s just snobbery.’

‘Not quite,’ says James. ‘I said it panders to a need to fantasize. You know – I too might have lived like this – that sort of thing. Personally I just feel resentful. I know damn well where I’d have been living back then – in a hovel. My great-grandfather was a ploughman.’

Carol puts on the gilt-framed sunglasses, which almost engulf her small face. ‘Was he? You’ve never told me that. I think you’re both being far too ideological. People just like looking at nice things. All that plushy furniture and the walls covered in pictures. They like moseying around saying imagine sleeping in a bed like that and look at that amazing staircase and asking if it’s haunted. It’s not envy – it’s just curiosity.’

‘Up to a point,’ says Maurice. ‘But there’s surely an element of voyeurism and there’s certainly a built-in invitation to make comments and social comparisons. It becomes a very complicated experience. You’re confronted by the past, and by unfamiliar objects, and by suggestions of a distinctly alien way of life. People feel challenged. They can’t just look, they have to react as well. And they know this in advance, because they’ve already been sold the concept of the stately home. So …’ he looks provocatively at Pauline, ‘why are all these people here? Why are we here?’

‘Because it’s Saturday,’ says Pauline. ‘And the weekend has to be filled in somehow.’

James laughs. ‘There you are, Maurice! Perfectly simple.’ Maurice grins.

‘Could we move?’ says Teresa. ‘I’m going to have to find their loo first of all. Luke needs changing.’

They proceed along gravelled paths towards the house, which stands complacent amid carefully arranged trees. They climb the sweep of steps, buy their tickets and sidle away from the sales pitch of the National Trust lady at the door. Maurice has views about the National Trust, which will be given expression in the book. ‘Sufficient unto the day …’ he mutters with relish, aiming a deferential smile at the sales pitcher, who is now directing Teresa to the toilets and asking if she could please leave the buggy by the umbrella rack.

They tour. They move slowly from room to room, inspecting tapestries and china cabinets and elaborate pieces of furniture. Each room is host to a temporary drifting population, which itself becomes a part of the exhibit, so that Pauline finds herself gazing with equal attention at a Japanese couple and at the polished oak fruit and foliage of a carved mantelpiece. The Japanese couple take it in turns to manipulate a camcorder. The mantelpiece juxtaposes pineapples with acorns. Pauline wonders about both. Will she appear on this video, hijacked willy-nilly into some sitting-room on the other side of the world? Did the woodcarver think pineapples grew in the Midlands, or is this an elegant joke of interior decoration? She looks round for the others. Maurice has vanished, having dived off in pursuit of something that has caught his attention, which is what Maurice always does. Carol and James are looking out of the window at the emerald swathe of the lawn. Teresa is trying to interest Luke in a display of Staffordshire dogs.

There are many pictures. Most are concerned in some way with slaughter. In a hunting scene hounds pour decoratively over a hillside; the gay scarlet of the huntsman’s jacket is complemented by the red flash of the fox as it leaps a wall. A still life of dead game birds has pheasants and partridges draped across the gleaming surface of a table, with swags of greenery and some apples strewn around, each detail meticulously rendered, the stippling of a feather, the bony surface of a foot, the smear of blood on a beak.

Pauline cruises these scenes of carnage, and finds Maurice suddenly at her side.

‘I’ve never killed anything more substantial than a wasp,’ he observes. ‘Maybe one should try it sometime. Obviously one’s missing out on a basic human experience.’

‘Plenty of experiences I’d prefer to pass up,’ says Pauline drily. ‘If the people in this room thought about the implications of what they’re looking at they’d be a bit more squeamish. Which includes us. Sanitized violence, this is.’

‘Of course. A necessary ingredient of the heritage industry. The torture chamber cleaned up into a museum display. Colourful anecdotes supplied by tour leaders and guide books. Worth an entire chapter, I’ve decided. Nice remote violence – no more upsetting than something you see on the telly. Most of these people would throw a wobbly if they came across a road accident. Including you and me.’

Teresa has joined them. ‘Luke’s getting a bit fed up with this. I’m going to have to speed up the house part and get him out into the gardens.’

‘Right,’ says Maurice vaguely. ‘You do that.’ He crosses the room to examine a huge dark oil painting in which a young woman in floating garments aims a bow and arrow at a fleeing stag. Next to it a muscular figure struggles with a lion. Diana, thinks Pauline. Hercules. She follows Teresa through the next room, and the next, at a smart pace now. An immense tapestry depicting the birth of Venus. Portraits of eighteenth-century owners of the house dressed as Roman dignitaries. It occurs to Pauline that for those unfamiliar with the codes of classical mythology the reference system of this place must acquire a further dimension of obscurity.

Pauline and Teresa complete their accelerated tour of the house and emerge on to the terrace at the back, where Luke can be released to potter around. They are joined eventually by the others.

‘Which way was the loo, Teresa?’ says James.