Instructions for a Heatwave (7 page)

She didn’t say this, though, to Peter, in the Holborn pub. She gathered up her bag and made to leave but he put his hand on her arm and said simply, “I understand.” Just like that: I understand. Such a lovely thing to say and uttered with such profundity, looking deep into her eyes. She straightaway forgot why he’d said it and it became just a beautiful general statement. He understood. Everything. Every last thing about her. It was as if great soft blankets had been folded about her. He looked into her eyes and told her he understood.

She’d sat down again, of course, and listened to what he said about how he and Jenny weren’t married and they didn’t believe that people could own each other and that Peter had been feeling
lately that perhaps he and Jenny had come to the end of their story, and Monica asked about his children. Peter’s face had softened into an expression she hadn’t seen before and he described to her his two daughters, Florence and Jessica, and how he had been making them a tree house in the oak in the meadow, and Monica’s mind became filled with the idea of herself in a green place, grass beneath her feet, leaves above her head, a man at her side. In this image, she was loading a basket with cakes and squash and sandwiches so that two little girls high up in a tree could winch up the basket. The girls wore sandals and print smocks and had delighted, open faces, so much so that when Peter asked if she’d like to take a walk to the river so they could watch the sunset from Waterloo Bridge, she’d said: Yes. Yes, I would.

Monica scrubbed vigorously at her feet with a pumice stone. Aggravating how, the older you got, the harder your feet became. This heat was making the skin on her heels crack and blister, her shoes feel constantly tight. No, she wasn’t doing too badly in the aging department yet. The few gray hairs she had, she was plucking out. When the time came, she would dye them away. She was still, more or less, the same dress size she’d been when she’d got married. The first time she’d got married, that was, aged eighteen. Which was not something most women could say. She would never say this to anyone, of course, but having a husband considerably older than you made you feel younger and look younger to others, by comparison. And having had no children, of course, was an advantage. In terms of keeping your figure and so forth. In those situations where women gathered in states of undress—in changing rooms, the few times in her life she’d ever been to a public swimming pool—Monica was seized with a horrified fascination at the devastation childbearing wreaked. The slack pleating of stomach flesh, the silvered scars that found their way over dimpled legs, the deflated sacs of breasts.

She shuddered as she rose out of the water, tossing back her wet-ended hair. No, the whole childbirth thing was not for her. She knew that. She’d always known that.

·  ·  ·

The summer Monica turned nine, something happened to her mother. Her mother had always been a large presence. She made noise when she moved, when she ate, when she breathed. She couldn’t put on her shoes without holding a conversation with herself, with the air around her, with the chair she sat on, with the shoes themselves: “Get on there now, you two,” she would address the brown leather lace-ups. “I don’t want a moment’s trouble out of you.”

Her mother, you could say, made her presence known. Monica could tell when she returned home from school whether her mother was in or not just by the quality of the air, the thickness of the atmosphere. If she was out, the house had an odd, suspended feel to it. Like a stage set before the lights go up, before the actors emerge from the wings, the house felt to Monica unreal, as if the furniture and vases and plates and crockery were only props, as if the walls and doors were nothing more than painted scenery that could topple if leaned against.

But if Gretta was in, there was a sense of bustle, of urgency about things. The radio would be on or the record player would be churning out ballads by that tenor with the trembly voice. Monica might find her emptying a cupboard, jam jars, teacups, soup tureens, candle stumps strewn around the floor. Her mother might be cradling a tarnished silver spoon in her lap, muttering to herself or the spoon, and, on seeing her daughter, her face would break into a smile. “Come here now,” she’d say, “till I tell you about the old woman who gave me this.” Gretta might be energetically scissoring up one of her dresses to alter it for Monica. Or Monica might find her passionately engaged in one of her
short-lived hobbies: crocheting milk-jug covers, varnishing plant pots, threading beads onto twine to make a “gorgeous” necklace, edging hankies with chains of daisies, pansies and forget-me-nots. These projects would be found, abandoned, half finished, a few weeks later, stuffed into a drawer. Gretta’s hobbies burned brightly and for a short time. Years later, Monica’s first husband, Joe, after watching Gretta balance her checkbook in about five minutes, would remark that maybe all her mother’s craziness was caused by never finding an outlet for her intelligence. “I mean,” he said, “she never even went to school, did she?”

But that summer, it seemed at first that Monica had lost her instinct when it came to her mother. She remembered very clearly the day she came through the front door, felt the flat, dampened air of the house and assumed her mother was out. Doing the altar flowers, perhaps, lighting a candle for somebody, visiting one of the neighbors down the street. Monica let her satchel slide to the floor, chewing the end of her plait, and walked into the sitting room, where she was confronted by the sight of her mother stretched out on the good sofa, in the middle of the day, asleep, with her hands crossed over her, her feet on the upholstery. Monica could not have been more astonished if she’d come in and found her serving tea and scones to the Pope himself.

She waited in the doorway a moment longer. She stared at her mother’s sleeping form, as if to be sure that this was her mother, that she was really sleeping, that this wasn’t one of her elaborate jokes, that she wasn’t going to spring up in a moment, shouting, “Fooled you, didn’t I?”

Her mother was asleep. At four o’clock in the afternoon. The paper was folded next to her. Her chest rose and fell and her mouth was slightly open, taking small sips of air. When Michael Francis crashed in through the back door a few minutes later, Monica was still standing there. She hushed her brother frantically and they both stood and stared at the unbelievable sight of their mother napping in the middle of the day.

“Is she dead?” Michael Francis whispered.

“ ’Course not,” Monica snapped in fear. “She’s breathing. Look.”

“Will I go and fetch Mrs. Davis?”

They had been told to call on the next-door neighbor if there was ever an emergency. Monica considered this option, her head on one side. Although Michael Francis was ten months older than her, it was generally left to her to make all the decisions. They were in the same class at school; people took them for twins. He was older but she was more responsible. She and her brother had forged this arrangement between themselves and never questioned it.

“No.” She shook her head. “Mammy wouldn’t want us to.”

“Who’ll make our tea, then?”

Monica scratched her head. “I will.”

Michael Francis stood at the sink to scrub the potatoes and Monica did her best to peel and slice them. Michael Francis fidgeted and fretted as he rubbed at the tight, muddied skins.

“What will we do if she doesn’t wake up?” he said, his voice low and scared.

“She will,” Monica said, pushing her hair out of her eyes.

“Will we make tea for her as well or just for us?”

“For her as well.”

“What will we have with the potatoes?”

Monica had to think. “Fried eggs,” she said decisively, because she knew they had eggs: she’d seen them that morning in the covered dish, and she knew how to make fried eggs. She was sure. She’d seen her mother do it often enough.

“Fried eggs,” Michael Francis repeated to himself, under his breath, in a satisfied way. All was right in his world if he knew what he’d be having for tea. He set to scrubbing the potatoes with a renewed vigor but his elbow made contact with the waiting saucepan and it fell to the lino with a clang.

“Michael Francis!” Monica hissed.

“Sorry.” His eyes, she knew, would be filling with tears. He had, their mother always said, a thin skin. You couldn’t shout at him or he got too upset. Something like a dead bird or a pony with a limp could set him off. A sissy, their father called him sometimes and said that he needed toughening up. Monica had been obliged, several times, to give what their mother called a piece of her mind to some of the boys in their class; they could be very hard on Michael Francis, who was bookish and, although big for his age, useless at fighting. She sighed and gave him a nudge. “It’s all right. I don’t think Mammy—”

From the sitting room they heard a voice. A faint, soft voice. Nothing like their mother’s booming tones. “Is that my darlings in there getting the tea on?”

They looked at each other. Michael Francis wiped his face on his jersey sleeve. Then they ran through to the sitting room. Their mother was still lying as she had been but her eyes were open and she was holding out her arms to them. “You’re a pet and you’re a pet,” she said to them. “Fancy the two of you making the tea for me. I’d say you’ll need ice cream after this. Will one of you run to the shop and get a block?”

Everything seemed back to normal. They finished making the tea; they ate it; they had their ice cream, cutting slices off the striped block, yellow-brown-pink; their father came back and had his tea. But the next day, after school, she was asleep again. At the weekend their father took them—alone—to the park so that their mother could “rest.” Monica scuffed her toe against the ground as she sat on the swing. She eyed her father as he sat on the bench, hidden behind a screen of newspaper. She looked over at Michael Francis, who was flinging a ball into the air and catching it against his chest. She wanted to get up off the swing, cross the grass and say to her father, What’s wrong with Mammy, what’s happening? But her legs wouldn’t carry her, she couldn’t form the words, and even if she could, she wouldn’t have been
able to say them to her father, wouldn’t have been able to listen to his answers.

It was her father who told them a few weeks later that their mother was “expecting.” She and Michael Francis looked up at him from the rug in front of the fire grate. He seemed taller than ever, waiting there at the edge of the room, his hair standing upright from his head, like the flame on a match. Expecting. Her head was filled with a vision of a railway station, full of people looking down a track to see if their train was arriving yet. An animal, alert, eyes wide, on its hind legs. A person crouched next to a letter box, waiting for the post. Expecting.

“You’ll need to help her a great deal in the next few months. Understand?”

They nodded from habit. They knew this was the correct response to being asked if they understood.

“She’s not to lift a thing. Shopping bags. Buckets of water. Nothing. You must do all that for her. Understand?”

They nodded again, in unison.

“She’s to rest every day and you mustn’t disturb her.”

“Yes, Daddy,” Monica said.

She watched her mother every minute she was with her. She became scared to go to school, not wanting to leave her mother for a moment. If her mother lifted a plate, a cup of tea, her knitting, Monica shut her eyes. She would not see it occur. Something terrible could happen to her mother at any moment. She’d gathered this from eavesdropping on the hushed conversation her mother had with other women over the back wall, outside church. It was dangerous, she’d learned. After all those other times. The doctor had told her never again; it wasn’t worth the risk.

Monica stopped sleeping. She lay awake, threading her fingers into the blanket edge, then out. In, then out, in, then out, until the blanket edge was rucked up around her knuckles. She listened for the sounds of her parents going to bed. She listened
out for them scrubbing their teeth in the bathroom, for her mother to climb into bed, for her father to lock the front door. She lay awake after she heard her father start to snore, like an engine struggling uphill. She listened for whatever else she might hear: a late cyclist in the street, the milk van in the early gray dawn, a neighboring cat yowling at a back door. Whatever it was they were expecting, she wanted to be ready.

She found out what it was by listening in on a conversation between her mother and her aunt Bridie. They were visiting Bridie on a Saturday afternoon; Monica was meant to be minding her cousins in the back garden while her mother and Bridie caught up over a pot of tea. But the cousins were whiny and dull and she found it more interesting to sit beside the kitchen door, in the small space beneath the mangle, hidden from all eyes. Her mother and Bridie had had a long chat about one of their other siblings, who was, apparently, “in with a bad lot”; they discussed the shocking price of shoes for the children; there was a lot of sighing over something Monica’s mother referred to as “one of Robert’s black days”; Bridie told a long story involving a bus to Brighton—Monica wasn’t concentrating at the beginning so couldn’t ascertain the story’s significance. Then Bridie said, in a cozy sort of voice, “Now, when’s this baby due again?”

Monica picked at the green paint on Bridie’s skirting-board. She pushed her fingers as far as they would go into the mangle’s rollers until it began to hurt too much. And she listened, she stilled herself with the act of listening. She learned that her mother had lost babies, many babies. Monica imagined her mother carelessly dropping these infants from a shopping basket, or from her coat pocket, like stray pennies or a loose hairpin. There were murmurs about a baby buried somewhere, without a baptism, but Monica had been unable to hear whether it was a baby of her mother’s or some other woman’s.

She held her mother’s hand very tightly on the way home. She examined her mother’s familiar form carefully, right from her
good Sunday-and-visiting shoes, all the way up to the hat on her head. Expecting.

·  ·  ·