Heat Wave (7 page)

Once, in another time, she drove across the United States with Harry. The trip seemed to go on for weeks. Now, it is reduced in her head to conflicting impressions of space and intimacy. The infinite horizons and that endless road vanishing beneath the bonnet of the car, sliding up once more in the rear-view mirror. The car itself, bulbous and finned, an exotic monster. The blanket of trees in New England, wheat fields the size of an English county, canyons, mountains. The faces and voices of people in motels and petrol stations. The car radio was their lifeline, their access to this astounding and mysterious place through which they crept. Its voices sang and babbled hour after hour, seeming outrageous, sophisticated, absurd and unreachable. They felt as though they had arrived on another planet. Pauline was twenty-two. Harry was a year older, working on his
doctorate, heady with achievement and ambition. Each night they fell on to the bed in sleazy motel rooms and made ferocious love. Pauline would wake to stifling dawns on mangled sheets that reeked of sex, hearing bizarre bird sounds from beyond the window. At three o’clock one morning, somewhere in Colorado, Harry said, ‘We’ll get married in the autumn, shall we?’ He lay smoking a post-orgasmic cigarette, his hand resting friendly on her crotch. ‘I’m crazy about this country,’ he said. ‘One day I’m going to fetch up here, for keeps.’

Pauline switches off the Radio Four news and extinguishes the world. Now she is alone again with the sounds of the night – the distant rumble of an aircraft, the wind in the apple trees. She consigns Harry to another night in Colorado, more than thirty years ago. She hears a window open next door – someone else is awake, restless.

‘The Robin Hood Experience was really stupid,’ says Teresa. ‘You walked through this wood and people in fancy dress kept bobbing up among the trees and shooting arrows at each other.’

‘Do they hit?’

‘Oh, no. And anyway they weren’t proper arrows. James picked one up and it had a rubber tip. There were horses, too. Luke enjoyed that. Maurice loved it, of course.’

‘From a scholarly point of view, presumably?’

‘Oh yes. He’s doing a whole section on these over-the-top tourist places.’

Pauline and Teresa are driving to Hadbury. Teresa needs a sun hat for Luke and some household things. Pauline must stock up on fax paper. She wants also to replace a cracked glass shelf in her bathroom cabinet and to buy a new toaster. Hadbury will supply all these requirements. Luke has fallen conveniently asleep in his car seat as they move from the World’s End track to the main road and thence past the cornfields and the sprout fields and the oilseed rape and the ochre stretches of set-aside, the villages and the petrol stations and the Happy Eaters until at last they reach the maze of roads and road signs that indicate that they have arrived at the market town.

Hadbury is held in a vice of ring roads, bypasses and industrial estates. In the centre of this expansive layout – roundabouts, dual carriageways and an acreage of tarmac – crouches the town itself, with its market cross, its two churches and its high street of prosperous eighteenth-century houses, most of them now doing duty as banks or building societies. This nucleus is quite eclipsed by a satellite empire, tidily signposted at each outlying roundabout: Willow
Way Industrial Estate, Oxpens Hypermarket, Meadowlands Trading Estate. Plenty of room out here – a glittering savannah of car parks, encircled by ranch-emporia. Tesco, Allied Carpets, Comet, Homecare. It is as though the original town were now protectively encased within this
cordon sanitaire
of commerce, preserved as a curiosity though patently long past its sell-by date.

It is for this discredited centre that Pauline heads, ignoring the allure of the tarmac savannahs. She achieves a parking space. Luke is decanted from the car, put into his buggy, and they set off for Businesslines and Mothercare, both of which are slotted into the redevelopment of the Buttermarket. Hadbury is active, even on this Monday morning. The pedestrian precinct at its heart is busy with people – most of them women, most of them young, many of them pushing a buggy. Pauline and Teresa fit nicely; there are similar groups all around – mother, daughter and small child out shopping. Babies and toddlers on all sides – lolling asleep under sun canopies, gazing regal from frilled pillows, lurching along the pavement or carried in slings.

‘I thought there was supposed to be a fertility problem these days,’ says Pauline.

Teresa agrees that this is not evident in Hadbury. ‘Maybe the country’s different.’

‘Ah,’ says Pauline. ‘Urban blight again.’

For something has happened to reproduction, it seems. The sperm count of the European male has significantly declined. Young women no longer conceive as a result of one kind look. Or some young women don’t. Teresa’s friends sail childless through their twenties and then fly into a panic as they hit thirty. Their child-bearing years are ebbing away and now that they are good and ready nothing happens. They fail to get pregnant, month by month. It is all the fault of the pill, apparently. The great good pill, which has bared its teeth and turned nasty on the women it once saved.

Listen, Pauline says to Teresa and her friends, you think you’ve got problems? What do you imagine it was like for us? Always in a stew about getting pregnant. Checking your pants every half hour if your period was a day overdue. And then the pill came along and straight away they start muttering that it’ll give you blood clots and
you’ll die at forty. So you’ve got to choose between babies or an early death. Some of us have
never
taken the pill.

And they look at her blankly. The climate of anxiety is as fickle as sartorial fashion, she sees. They cannot know about the freight that word once carried. Pregnant. To be spoken fearfully to a girlfriend. Confessed to a parent. Owned up to at clinics and doctors’ surgeries. If these young women are pregnant they say so, loud and clear. It is a physical condition, not a state of mind.

She says to Harry, ‘I’m pregnant.’

He looks at her. She cannot tell from his expression what he thinks or feels. She could have been announcing that she was off out to the corner shop.

‘You’re pregnant?’ he says. ‘Well, well, well. What happened?’

They have been married for eleven months.

‘What
happened
! What on earth do you mean?’

‘You’ve been using a diaphragm, haven’t you?’

She stares at him. She realizes that she is talking about one thing and he about another.

‘They sometimes fail, don’t they?’ she says. ‘Eighty per cent reliable, that’s all.’

‘So …’ says Harry. ‘Surprise, surprise.’ He reaches for the coffee pot, fills his cup, waves the pot questioningly over hers.

After a moment she says, ‘I’m having a baby, Harry. A child.’

Teresa is manoeuvring the buggy through the open doors of Mothercare. They move amid a forest of tiny garments – Babygros striped like rugby shirts, miniature boiler suits, doll-size anoraks and parkas. Infancy is a serious matter, today. Beyond are thickets of equipment – cots and buggies and high chairs and playpens.

‘And another thing,’ says Pauline. ‘What’s become of abortionists? There’s a whole profession been wiped out. They were everywhere, time was.’

Teresa has paused to inspect a display of sun hats. She shoots Pauline a reproving glance. A Hadbury granny is observing them through a rack of minute trainers.

Pauline lowers her voice a notch. ‘There were two kinds. There were cheapo ones who hung out in flats south of the river or semis in Enfield or Hackney. Cheap and nasty, you took your life in your hands. Anyone who possibly could – who could scrape together a hundred pounds or more – went to one of the bent doctors. Brass plate and a West End address. A hundred pounds was a hell of a lot of money, then. The world was full of people running around desperately trying to raise a hundred quid. Cash, on the spot, in pound notes in a plain envelope. Hand it to the receptionist when you arrive.’

Teresa looks up from the small dome of navy denim that she is examining. ‘God …’ Then, ‘How d’you know all this, Mum?’

‘Oh, everyone knew,’ says Pauline. ‘And you can’t put that thing on Luke. It’s more suitable for a baseball player than a baby.’

They find an acceptable sun hat. And a couple of T-shirts untarnished by either teddy bears or the logo of sports equipment. They pay, and move out again into the Buttermarket.

They go into Businesslines, where Pauline stocks up. Luke is by now complaining, and is plugged into a bottle of juice while they sit for a while on the bench in the centre of the shopping precinct.

‘I forgot to tell you,’ says Pauline. ‘I had a letter from Harry.’

They have referred to him thus for many a year. ‘Your father’ seems either accusatory or inappropriately formal. And Teresa abandoned ‘Dad’ long ago.

Teresa busies herself with Luke, whose nose needs wiping. Her expression is guarded. ‘Oh?’

‘He’s coming over this summer,’ says Pauline. ‘He’ll be in London for a couple of weeks. He hopes to see you. He’ll give you a ring when he’s got his dates fixed, he says.’

Teresa frowns slightly. ‘We’re going to be down here, really. Not in London.’

What Pauline does not mention is that Harry was putting out a feeler in her direction also. A delicate and cautious feeler. Could you maybe manage a lunch or a dinner while I’m over? She will of course ignore this feeler, will allow it to wither as she has allowed other similar approaches to wither. He never learns, does Harry. Or maybe he still believes in his infallible persuasive powers.

‘This summer is crucial for Maurice,’ Teresa tells her mother. ‘If he can get all his rewriting done, and check his references, and then work on the introduction and the bibliography, then they may be able to get it to the printers this autumn. So the summer’s vital, really.’

‘Hmn …’ says Pauline. And then, ‘It’s only a book.’

Teresa is shocked. ‘Well,’ she begins, ‘I should have thought you, of all people …’

‘On the contrary,’ says Pauline. ‘I have
no
respect for print. I know where it comes from.’

Teresa looks sceptical and Pauline laughs. ‘Don’t worry, love – I’ll keep my heretical opinions to myself. Are those two coming down again this weekend?’

‘I’m not sure. I think probably not till the one after.’

‘Just as well,’ says Pauline. ‘You’re not going to want them round your neck
all
the time.’

Teresa is defensive. ‘I don’t mind. I like them. And otherwise Maurice would keep having to go up to London. This is much more cost-effective, time-wise.’

‘You’re picking up the most appalling language,’ grumbles Pauline.

The voice of James, she suspects – amiable James. Maurice would never stoop to that. He is much too fastidious. Maurice avoids all that is modish, and thus achieves an idiosyncratic personal stylishness that is somehow outside the expectations of contemporary manners.

‘You’d better not let Maurice hear you talking like that,’ she adds.

But Teresa has had enough of this conversation. She straps Luke into the buggy once more and proposes that they should get on with what they have to do.

Teresa never talks to Pauline about Maurice, except in the most practical sense – to report decisions, opinions, actions. And very proper too, thinks Pauline – who wants that dire traditional feminine conspiracy? No doubt right now all over Hadbury young women are complaining to older ones about their menfolk, and listening to
competing accusations in return. She thinks momentarily of her own mother, to whom she never spoke of Harry. Except once, just once.

And Teresa is in love, of course. Each time Pauline is reminded of this she shivers. It is as though she herself stood on some safe shore and watched Teresa struggling in the surf. She observes Teresa’s state with awful recognition. She knows what Teresa is feeling and knows that Teresa would not for one instant wish to feel otherwise. Teresa is happy, gloriously happy. Of course she cannot talk about Maurice. Maurice is not a person but a climate. He is beyond comment or criticism.

‘… frozen yoghurt?’ says Teresa.

‘Sorry?’

They are in Marks and Spencer, surveying a food cabinet.

‘I said have you ever tried frozen yoghurt? Instead of ice-cream.’

They discuss frozen yoghurt, briefly. Luke is now in a condition of continuous protest. He has had enough of this expedition. He writhes and roars and weeps. He is a soul in torment, you would think, not someone who is merely bored and tired. And Pauline thinks with wonder of that forgotten turmoil of the emotions. There he is – he shares their days but lives elsewhere, in a place of flaring sensibility, in which anguish supplants ecstasy minute by minute. How can it be endured, survived – this switchback of feeling? Or is it perhaps a violent training for what is to come? A brutal education – a frenetic, accelerated version of what lies ahead.

Pauline realizes that she has not cried for years. Well … the occasional tear of sentiment, perhaps. But not real, raw, bleeding tears of pain. She has not sobbed herself into exhaustion, seen her face red and swollen, tasted the salt of misery. Not for years. And does this mean that she has been unremittingly content? That she has coasted along in a state of emotional neutrality? Of course not. Nor does it mean that the fires are banked. It means simply that you weep less frequently as you get older.

And now Luke is suddenly asleep. He has slipped from passion to oblivion, slumped there in the buggy. Pauline and Teresa are able to complete their shopping in relative tranquillity and head for home.

Maurice is outside the cottage when they arrive. They can see him from afar, standing there holding the portable phone. There is tall grass on the track now which brushes the underside of the car with the sound of rushing water. The car surges through the young wheat and arrives at this island, this haven above which hangs a lark, bubbling invisible in the blue morning. Pauline switches off the car engine, and then there is just the lark.

And Maurice, who says, ‘Had a good time, girls?’

He is in high good humour, they see, and this is said to tease. Neither Teresa nor Pauline rise to the bait. Teresa eyes the phone. ‘Did someone ring?’