Heat Wave (3 page)

‘Thanks,’ says Teresa, mildly offended.

‘Because he’s young and healthy. And now here you are footloose on New Year’s Eve. What are you going to do?’

‘I’m coming to your party,’ says Teresa.

‘Oh, you are, are you? All the more reason to get stuck in here, in that case. That has to be spread on those, and we’re going to make some sort of punch.’

‘Who’s coming?’ enquires Teresa.

One echo among many – extinguished already by the onward rush of things as Teresa gathers up her purse, her car keys, her shopping bag, as Luke howls briefly in protest, as Pauline sweeps him up and out into the garden to distract him from the departure of his mother.

The garden at World’s End is a rectangle jutting out into a field. It is the amalgamation of the three long thin strips which were the gardens of the original cottages – the sparse gesture which allowed each labouring family its own small plot on which to grow a few vegetables. And flowers – cottage garden flowers whose descendants tenaciously reappear year after year. At the end of the garden is an orchard of ancient apple trees, way past their prime, which deliver a crop of scabby fruit. These also are presumably relics of the former inhabitants of the place, cherished assets back then which are united now into a neglected place of lush grass which no one ever gets around to cutting.

The surrounding field is planted not with wheat but with young cabbages, rank upon rank of bluish-grey plants which merge into a swathe of delicate colour. This is a smaller field, bounded by a hedgerow. Beyond the hedge the hill rises, another acreage of green wheat. But this field is not the same uninterrupted green sweep as that overlooked by Pauline’s study. Here, the line is broken half-way up the hill by a fence, beyond which a further discordant note is struck – a rim of autumnal gold. This field appears to be a waste of dead grass, now in May when everything else is in vibrant growth. Its colour, though, is the more disturbing because it is not the fawn of winter decay but an unnatural harsh yellow, the raw shade of a verge that has been treated with weedkiller. And that is precisely the case. This field is set-aside. It is a product of the policy whereby the government pays farmers not to farm. Chaundy collects several hundred pounds in return for not growing anything in that field this year. Its random growth has been sprayed so that it can subsequently be ploughed up. The landscape is scarred with similar fields, provocative blotches amid the orderly line-up of wheat, barley, brussels sprouts, leeks, sheep, cows and of course battery chickens, caravan sites and pick-it-yourself fruit farms. A nice irony, thinks Pauline – this land which has ground down generations of labourers is now too productive for its own good. It has outstripped the economic climate and must be laid waste with weedkiller.

Pauline sometimes thinks of the people who have lived at World’s End before her. The real inhabitants – those who lived here seriously, because they had to. She sees stunted people with skins ripened by dirt and weather. Most of these people would have been old at fifty-five – at her age – keeling over, heading for their hole in the turf, worked quite literally into the ground. They would have looked rather differently upon the silver gleam of winter sunshine on ploughlands, upon the billowing gold of an August cornfield. All very fine for us, thinks Pauline – playing at Marie Antoinette, soothing the troubled soul with contemplation of nature. Time was, this place was for real.

Luke is heading for the long grass of the orchard, wet still with dew, in which he will get soaked. It is almost as tall as he is. Pursuing
him, Pauline sees it for an instant through his eyes – an inviting wonderland of sensual possibilities, a cyberspace of light and shade, of things that wave and twitch and bob. She picks him up, redirects him towards the house, and sees Maurice coming out of the french windows towards them.

Maurice has a mug of coffee in his hand. Maurice is fuelled by coffee throughout the day. ‘Hi, you two,’ he says. ‘Where’s Teresa?’

‘Gone shopping. You have guests for the weekend. Remember? Food has to be bought.’

Maurice smiles – the lop-sided Maurice smile. It is a smile that seems designed to side-step difficulties, such as any implications of what Pauline has just said. He looks down at Luke, who is clutching his knees, asking to be picked up. He pats his head. Maurice has not offered to look after Luke while Teresa goes shopping because it would not have occurred to him. Indeed, it seems that he had not taken on board the proposed shopping expedition. ‘How do you spell
gesellschaft
?’ he inquires.

Pauline tells him. ‘I thought this book was about the British tourist trade?’

‘It is indeed. But I need to demonstrate a bit of cultural eclecticism, don’t I?’ He lifts the mug to his lips and looks at Pauline over the top of it with that winning and attentive look that is central to Maurice’s charm. Those on the receiving end feel flattered, and enhanced.

But Pauline, who is familiar with the look, remains impervious. She sees Maurice peering at her above a blue-and-white china mug in the garden at World’s End, and that Maurice gives way to another Maurice, leaning up against the mantelpiece of her flat in London, lifting a wine glass to his lips and staring over it into the crowded room. ‘So that’s the daughter,’ he says. Red wine with the light shining through it, and Maurice’s eyes, intent.

Maurice gives in to Luke’s urgent noises and picks him up. He holds him awkwardly. Maurice is not adroit, physically, which is unexpected in a man of swift and elusive mental processes. He drops things and knocks things over. He is a bad driver. He is hopeless at tasks like putting on an electric plug or changing a tyre. Some of this clumsiness is attributable to a minor limp, the result of an accident
in childhood. He lurches slightly, under certain circumstances. But that does not account for the hamhandedness, in evidence now as he shifts Luke from one arm to the other. And of course fatherhood has come late to Maurice. He is old at forty-four to be the father of an infant. Harder to pick up new skills, when you have tipped forty.

Maurice is terrified of age. He is incredulous that age is stalking him, that the ageing process applies to him also, that he is not somehow exempt. Pauline has seen the sudden onset of panic, has noted the way in which he makes sure to surround himself with younger people, the way that he keeps up a frenetic pace, is always on the move, is always shooting off in pursuit of some new interest, some new acquaintance. And of course men thus affected frequently turn to women much younger than themselves.

Pauline has known Maurice for six years. She knew him in a desultory way for three years before he married Teresa. His books were published by an imprint of the publishing conglomerate for which she worked. She met him at a sales conference and struck up a mild acquaintance. She met him again at a party and experienced Maurice in conversational over-drive. Maurice is a beguiling conversationalist – flattering and stimulating. He phoned her to check on the title of a book she had mentioned. The acquaintance firmed up. Maurice would cross the room to talk to Pauline if he caught sight of her at social gatherings. They had a drink together once or twice. Pauline invited Maurice to a New Year’s Eve party.

Those of Maurice’s circle who knew him well enough to be aware of the usual sequence of events were astonished to learn that he was going to marry Teresa. A period of cohabitation was the normal thing. Why marry her? they wondered. A delightful girl, to be sure. But marriage? Maurice – marrying?

Pauline was of his circle, in that sense.

‘Why?’ she said to Teresa, clenched in disbelief and dismay. ‘Why get
married
?’

‘I’m in love with him,’ said Teresa, incandescent with happiness.

‘Think about it for a bit,’ wailed Pauline.

‘You can’t think when you’re in love,’ said Teresa, reasonably enough.

There is nothing inherently dangerous about marrying a man fifteen years older than yourself. If you fall deeply in love, and find to your delight and amazement that your love is apparently returned, then if marriage is proposed that seems a natural step.

Luke is wriggling now, aware perhaps of Maurice’s uncertain grip. Maurice puts him down and he potters off to investigate a clump of grass. He picks something up and puts it in his mouth. Pauline intervenes, extracts a twig from Luke’s pink maw. Maurice looks on benignly. Maurice loves Luke – in his way. But it has to be said that what Maurice feels for Luke bears little resemblance to what Pauline feels for Teresa, or to what Teresa feels for Luke. Luke is something that has happened to Maurice along the way. Maurice is pleased enough that Luke happened. He finds Luke engaging. He would be much concerned if Luke were seriously ill, or hurt. If Luke died Maurice would be deeply shaken. But on the Richter scale of parental commitment Maurice only gets up to about three points.

Fortunate Maurice, one may think.

‘Have you ever been to Bradley Castle?’ says Maurice.

‘Certainly not,’ Pauline replies. Bradley Castle is a sixteenth-century pile some ten miles away which has been reinvented as a theme park. It offers the Robin Hood Experience, along with jousting matches, falconry displays and medieval banquets on Saturday nights.

‘I thought we might all go there this weekend.’

Pauline raises her eyebrows. ‘I can think of better ways to entertain your visitors.’

‘I’m getting too detached,’ says Maurice. ‘I need to get my sights on a few real tourists.’

‘Ah. I see. The book.’ This expedition, Pauline perceives, is not to do with amusing Maurice’s guests but is in the service of a preoccupation of Maurice’s.

Maurice’s egotism is not overly apparent. He is not conspicuously self-absorbed. He does not talk all that much about himself or his concerns. Indeed, he probes other people about theirs. He will interrogate, with that aloof, amused expression: ‘Why do you think that?’ ‘What made you do that?’ Maurice’s egotism is the more subtle version – that of implacable purpose. Only when you know Maurice well – when
you have had occasion to observe his habits over time – only then do you see that he practises a system of relentless manipulation. All those in his orbit do what Maurice requires that they should do, to the greater convenience of Maurice. It is a brilliant operation.

‘Count me out,’ says Pauline.

Maurice considers her. He looks at her quizzically. ‘We need you, Pauline,’ he says. ‘And you might enjoy it – who can tell?’

‘I’ll see. When the time comes.’

Maurice grins. ‘What a sternly independent woman you are. Have you always been like that?’

His question is not a casual one. He is interested. And Pauline is not going to reply, because the answer would be revealing, and she does not care to reveal herself to Maurice. Instead, she turns to Luke. She shows him how to blow the down from a dandelion clock. Maurice watches for a few moments. He finishes his coffee and goes back into the house.

If asked, Pauline would say that she was happy, generally speaking. As it is, few people would have the temerity to ask. Pauline is seen as self-sufficient, confident, and possessed of a nice balance between good self-esteem and a healthy regard for others. She is the sort of woman who would have a therapist running for cover. Or so it seems.

She is indeed independent. But the independence is hard won, which is why she prefers not to answer Maurice’s question. She is a woman who has lived alone since her daughter grew up and left. Well, not always entirely alone. There have been men now and then, a couple of whom have had, for a while, quasi-resident status. But she has been alone in principle, leading the flexible, slightly opportunistic life of the unattached. She has the habits of those who are solitary, whether by choice or by circumstance – changing plans to indulge the mood of the moment, making and breaking contingency arrangements. She is practised in social duplicity. It is often a good life, occasionally a bad one. A life rich in carefully nurtured minor satisfactions, in the easy gratification of self-indulgences. An unfettered life, a life without the grating irritation of presences that are too present, a life in which anything might happen and in which
it sometimes did. A life also in which a day could suddenly become a treacherous void, in which spectres come swarming round the bed in the small hours.

Unlike Maurice, Pauline is not outraged by the fact that she is getting older. When she considers the matter – when she remembers that she is fifty-five – she is amazed rather than offended. Amazed to be here, thus, at this point, having negotiated so much. The long continuous present of childhood and the helter-skelter of youth and then the ferocious onward rush of events. Here she is – now, today – and it is not too bad, though perhaps in some areas it is not too good either. There are brown blotches on her hands, her teeth look like giving out before the rest of her, and the libido is no longer what it was, which is perhaps just as well. But the world still shines for her, expectation is as rich.

Luke has lost interest in the dandelion clocks. He has found his ball. He throws it, pursues it, falls over, picks himself up again, throws the ball once more – a burgeoning skill. Pauline, watching him, thinks that there is also this phenomenon which is Luke-time, a process of accelerated change whereby Luke seems as though he is not hitched to the ordinary passage of the calendar year but is set on some hectic course of his own which has spawned a dizzying sequence of Lukes – the sloe-eyed baby with waving starfish hands has become the pneumatic crawler and is now this tottering figure weaving in pursuit of a slippery plastic globe. Luke is on a fast-track which is not synchronized with Pauline’s days, nor indeed with those of his parents.

It has clouded over. The weather is playing false once more, capricious as ever – the bright morning giving way to looming skies. A grey pall has come tilting up from behind the hill, intensifying the green of fields and trees and hedges. The landscape is vivid. And the first drops of rain begin to fall.

Pauline carries Luke inside.

Pauline remembers the first time she saw Teresa with Luke. She walks down the hospital ward between a double rank of legs – legs ranged carelessly on beds, sticking out below nighties and dressing-gowns. Brown legs, black legs, pale pink legs. An acreage of female flesh, casually exposed, legs and thighs and whole breasts into which are tucked the furry heads of babies. No one is modest or prudish here, there is a frank acceptance of what is going on. This is all about bodies – the bodies of women. And the place is awash with people. Nurses hurrying up and down, acolytes around each bed – the husbands and the friends and the parents, the brothers and sisters. There are flowers and the occasional bottle of champagne. There is eating and drinking. This is not so much a hospital ward as a municipal park on a Bank Holiday afternoon.