Heat Wave (18 page)

The museum is in the centre of a small county town that has escaped the commercial and industrial fate of Hadbury and now earns its keep as a display of well-groomed buildings with attendant antique shops, pubs and restaurants. Outside the museum stand the town stocks, also scrupulously maintained and with an explanatory text in gothic script. Maurice pauses to take a photograph, though his subject is not the stocks
per se
but the giggling adolescents who are trying to fit their legs through the holes. No doubt this will furnish some ironic sub-text in the book.

Pauline stalks the rooms with curled lip. She inspects the elegant arrangements of flails and scythes and sickles and shears (shapely artefacts spotlit against a white wall) and the facsimile dairy with its churns and creamers. She stares at the sepia photographs of quaintly clad folk going about their tasks – reaping, mowing, shoeing horses, milking cows. The children assembled for a Sunday School group
portrait, looking out at her from the 1870s, inscrutable, pinned up there now as a museum exhibit. There is a frozen gentility about this entire assemblage. The objects displayed are detached from any function and have become décor, the explanatory text and pictures invite an attitude of scientific observation. This is how this was done; this is the process for doing that. But these are the people who lived at World’s End, thinks Pauline, and it was not thus at all. These are the men and women to whose spirits she occasionally offers guilty apology. As though they should care.

The museum is tactfully instructive, mindful that visitors are here of their own volition and that if they feel unduly hectored they will head for the pub or the craft boutiques immediately instead of later. So it tempers information with appealing displays. Pauline is now in the room devoted to an explanation of agricultural change in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There is a model of a village field system, before and after enclosure – an intriguing miniature layout of ploughed fields, fallow land, meadows, woodland, common land. There are framed copies of Enclosure Acts. There are panels that give accounts of rural discontent in large print and with short sentences accompanied by grainy representations of disaffected peasantry.

Pauline looks round for the others. The museum is a sequence of smallish rooms so that the party tends to become separated, perhaps because people move at different paces, perhaps for other reasons. Sometimes she can see them all, sometimes not. Right now Maurice is at the far side of this room with Carol and James, the three of them inspecting some display of metalware. Teresa has just come in, with Luke asleep in the buggy.

Pauline is aware of Teresa. She is painfully aware of what Teresa is doing. Teresa is watching Maurice. She is working desperately at apparent detachment – moving idly from one item to another – but all the time she is seeing only Maurice.

The metalwork at which they are looking is an exhibit of man-traps.

‘Ouch!’ says Carol.

James peers at some rusty marks on the iron teeth. ‘Blood, do you think?’

‘Undoubtedly,’ says Maurice.

‘Oh, come on …’ says Carol. ‘They’d have cleaned them up before they put them in here.’

James moves away, wanders off into the next room. Carol and Maurice remain where they are, looking now at each other rather than at the display.

‘It’s rust, not blood,’ says Carol. She is smiling, as though they share a joke.

‘Not necessarily,’ says Maurice. ‘There could be an argument for retaining what may or may not be blood. It increases authenticity.’

They continue to look at one another. If they are conscious that they are observed they do not care. Is this innocence or insouciance? Teresa has shot a glance across the room and Pauline knows that this is what she is thinking. Are they? Do they? Is all this in my head alone?

‘Rust,’ says Carol.

‘Well, you may be right,’ says Maurice. ‘We’ll never know, will we?’ And they move on together into the next room, without turning, without looking round for anyone else.

Pauline walks across to examine the man-traps. She sees the jagged teeth, the simple but efficient mechanism. Teresa joins her, stands beside her staring unseeing at the traps. And it seems to Pauline that the room is filled with a silent scream. The scream of some hapless nineteenth-century labourer? Or Teresa’s rigidly controlled distress?

‘This is an appalling place,’ says Pauline. ‘Let’s get out and find some coffee.’

Dinner in Pauline’s kitchen. The five of them, and the disembodied presence of Luke who occasionally sighs or snuffles from the plastic dish of the baby-alarm. Drinks were taken earlier in the garden, they have worked through the smoked mackerel Pauline produced for a starter and are now on the casserole. Maurice is in fine fettle. He has orchestrated the evening, steering the conversation, killing off stale subjects and producing new ones with a flourish. He is entirely evenhanded in his attention – he is casually familiar with both James and
Carol, joshing James in the way that appears to be the distinguishing feature of their relationship. Now and then he treats Teresa to an aside, when a note of intimacy creeps into his voice. He makes much of Pauline, perhaps because she is technically the hostess, perhaps for some more complex reason. Now he is opening a further bottle of the wine he has contributed.

‘Another?’ says Teresa.

‘Another.’ He pats her shoulder, propitiating. ‘We’ve earned it, haven’t we, James? A working weekend.’

James holds out his glass. ‘If you say so. It hardly feels like work – a couple of hours on Chapter Eight and a trundle round a museum.’

‘I loved that museum,’ says Carol. ‘It was like the set for one of those TV adaptations of Hardy. It made you want to go and live there in a long skirt and a shawl, like Tess.’

‘I can’t see you settling for the lifestyle of a milkmaid,’ says James. ‘But you’d look the part, properly got up.’

Carol pulls a face at him. Yes, thinks Pauline – subtract the designer T-shirt in that fetching cornflower blue to set off the eyes, and the white jeans and the trainers, mess up the fifty-quid haircut, add some grime and a few calloused fingers and she fits the stereotype. That pink-and-gold buttery look. Youth, health, sex.

Maurice is grinning. ‘How did it grab you, Pauline? The museum.’

‘It didn’t,’ says Pauline. ‘Voyeurism. Nostalgic tripe. There’s another helping of casserole if anyone wants it.’

‘Goodness!’ says Carol with a little laugh. ‘That’s pretty dismissive.’ She glances at Maurice.

Maurice is watching Pauline. He is delighted, it would seem. ‘Voyeurism? Tell us more, Pauline. I didn’t realize you felt so strongly.’

Pauline looks at him coolly. Carol she ignores. ‘Where are the blood and sweat, I ask? Where are the children with rickets and the dead babies and the chronic illness and the untreated disease and the festering injuries and the aching bones and the cold and the wet and the grinding labour each day and every day?’

Carol grimaces. ‘Surely it wasn’t as dire as all that?’

James holds out his plate. ‘Would it be insensitive to claim the last helping of casserole?’

‘Good point,’ says Maurice to Pauline. ‘The museum as cosmetic exercise.’

Pauline dumps casserole on to James’s plate. ‘No doubt you already have a chapter on that.’

‘I do, as it happens.’

The baby-alarm gives a plaintive cry.

‘Uh-oh …’ says Carol, solicitous, looking at Teresa.

There is a more positive wail. Teresa gets up and leaves the room.

‘The exhibits at the Tower of London are hardly cosmetic,’ says James. ‘Instruments of torture. Dungeons. The scaffold.’

‘Oh, that’s different. People don’t identify in the same way. It’s historical violence so it’s over and done with. Besides, disease and discomfort don’t fit in with what a Museum of Rural Life is seeking to promote. The country is better. The country is healthy. The country is arcadia.’ Maurice looks at Pauline for endorsement but Pauline is now stacking plates, rather violently, and pays him no attention.

‘Interesting,’ says James, ‘I’d never thought of it like that. The museum industry is going to hate this book. But all the better. It will generate controversial reviews and promote lots of interest.’

‘Can I do anything, Pauline?’ inquires Carol.

‘No, thanks. There’s cheese but we’ll wait till Teresa comes back.’

‘In that case where’s your loo?’ says James.

‘Up.’ Pauline turns to the sink and puts the plates into the basin. Behind her Maurice and Carol are talking about an industrial museum in the Potteries which Maurice has visited. Carol is saying she’d like to go. ‘We’ll fix something up,’ says Maurice. ‘I need to check it out again anyway.’ Pauline goes into the larder to fetch the cheese. She unwraps it and puts it on the board and hunts for a packet of biscuits. When she returns Maurice is standing behind Carol’s chair, reaching for the wine on the dresser and Pauline sees for an instant his other hand resting on the nape of Carol’s neck before it slides away and Maurice is busy filling glasses.

James returns. ‘Lethal stairs you’ve got, Pauline.’

‘I know. You learn caution.’

‘A glass of red, Pauline?’ asks Maurice. ‘Or are you staying with the white?’

‘Neither.’

He is brought up short by the edge to her voice. She sees a sudden shock in his eyes, a wariness. And then it is extinguished – he is putting the wine bottle on the dresser, returning to his seat, telling James that they must all go to this museum in the Potteries at some point. And Teresa has come back into the room.

‘OK?’ says Pauline.

Teresa nods. ‘I hope so.’ She sits down. Cheese is passed around, and fruit. The room is littered with the debris of eating and drinking. An inviting scene, you might think. Convivial, relaxed. But Pauline is aware only of a spiderweb of tension, of the force-lines between this person and that, of the shuttered look in Teresa’s eyes, of the way in which people glance at one another, or do not. Only James perhaps is excluded, eating a peach, that wing of black hair flopping on his forehead, talking on, agreeably blurred with wine.

It is Monday, and they have gone, Carol and James. World’s End is embarked upon another working week – Maurice in his study, Pauline in hers, Teresa in attendance upon Luke. Chaundy’s tractor has roared back and forth along the track upon some errand, the wheat is ripening by the hour. Pauline has chatted to the postman, received the weather forecast and learnt that there was a nasty pileup on the main road last night. She has taken their mail in to Maurice and Teresa and seen that Teresa’s mood has changed, that the shuttered look has gone. Again, something has happened – something has been said or done and now Teresa’s state of mind is different. She is doubting her own conjectures. She is in remission. Pauline sees this and shivers for her. She returns to her own cottage, goes up to the study and immerses herself in the North Sea oil industry.

The phone rings. ‘It’s me. Chris.’

‘Hi!’ says Pauline. ‘How’s it going with the revision of that chapter?’

‘Well, it isn’t, I’m afraid.’

‘Perhaps you should climb your mountain again. Or a different one. Get yourself unblocked.’

‘I don’t think that would help,’ says Chris Rogers dourly.

A pause. ‘Is anything wrong?’ Pauline inquires.

‘Yes. My wife’s gone. She’s left me.’

‘Oh.’ A further pause. ‘Oh, dear,’ says Pauline. Then, cautiously, ‘Do you know where she’s gone?’

‘Yes. She’s gone to her mother.’

‘Ah. In that case I think one can safely say she’ll be back. It won’t last.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘I do,’ says Pauline firmly. ‘But it’s a shot across the bows, put it that way. You’ll have to do some thinking. About what the problem may be.’

‘I
am,
’ says Chris. ‘I’m thinking like crazy. When I’m not cooking and feeding the kids and doing the washing.’

‘Perhaps she doesn’t like living half-way up a Welsh mountain.’

‘You could have a point there.’

‘Promise her Swansea,’ says Pauline. ‘Maybe that’ll do the trick. I mean … things have been reasonably OK between you hitherto, have they?’

‘I thought so.’

‘Where does her mother live?’

‘In a small village in Shropshire.’

‘In that case I give her a week,’ says Pauline. ‘She’ll be back. Have the children make piteous phone calls.’

In the late afternoon Pauline, Teresa and Luke take a walk up the track as far as Chaundy’s chicken houses just over the brow of the hill. At first Maurice is going to accompany them. He needs some fresh air, he says. He is all set to come and then the phone rings. Someone from English Heritage is returning a call he made earlier. ‘Go,’ he says, his hand on the mouthpiece. ‘This’ll take a while. Maybe I’ll catch you up.’ ‘OK,’ says Teresa. She is still in remission, Pauline sees. She has persuaded herself that all is well, that she was
mistaken, that she misinterpreted whatever it was she saw or heard to send a spear of ice into her guts. Of course he isn’t, she has told herself. Of course they aren’t. And so she blithely sets off up the track with Pauline, the buggy rattling over the potholes, Luke chanting out some wordless paean of praise to the wheat, to the grass, to the cool blue sky.

Teresa too is exulting. She talks – the unfettered spiel of a mind at ease. She has always been like this – bounding from gloom to animation. And her physical appearance reflects this volatility. In a state of depression, she becomes anonymous – she has a pale, pinched, unmemorable look. When she is elated, she is vibrant – her eyes glisten, her skin glows, her face becomes arresting. She is like this now, as she turns to Pauline in conclusion of an anecdote. And Pauline sees again Maurice’s hand slide from the nape of a neck, and feels some hideous sense of enforced complicity, of deceit, of betrayal.

When Teresa was a child Pauline used to have dreams in which she watched helpless as Teresa went spinning beneath the wheels of a truck, or pitched from the open doors of trains. Sometimes these enactments were not dreams but waking fantasies of horror from which she had to jolt herself free – involuntary contemplations of some awful contingency. But none of it has come about. Pauline has kept Teresa safe from the thundering wheels and the gaping doors, Teresa is a grown woman sound in mind and body, and now Pauline sees that malevolence cannot be detected or anticipated, that it can come stalking out of the sunshine at any moment, that there is nothing you can do and that she has had a hand in this herself. I did this, she thinks, watching Teresa at Maurice’s side after their marriage. I didn’t mean to, but I did.