Heat Wave (11 page)

One of the girl students once said to Pauline – impertinently, in Pauline’s view – ‘God – you are lucky to be married to Harry.’ Pauline did not care for the implication of this: that out of an array of available women Harry had for some inexplicable reason picked her, Pauline. As it happens, Pauline was not short of suitors. Before she met Harry she had been deeply involved with an American research student: the consequences of this would be always with her. And there were others. When first she met Harry she had been much taken with the mutual friend who introduced them. She had thought Harry brash. And then Harry had made a dead set at her.
The brashness became original and invigorating; the mutual friend began to seem rather colourless. Harry announced that he intended to spend the summer driving across the United States. ‘Come!’ he said. Or commanded. She went.

Thus, that cathedral town, which will be for ever locked into a particular time – so that Pauline was startled to find that the familiar High Street now had branches of Waterstone’s and Ryman’s. There was something vaguely treacherous about its mutation, as though it should have stayed as it was so that she could consign it to the past as she consigns those Harry years. For Pauline sees the Harry years now as a time of traumatic illness, a period of affliction, the long wasted era when she suffered from that now mysterious disease – love for Harry. Love? No, she thinks – balancing what she feels for Teresa, for Luke. Not love. An awful consuming need. Irrational obsession. Enslavement.

When Pauline arrives back at World’s End she finds Teresa and Luke on the track outside the cottages. There is a large muddy puddle here, much loved by Luke. Luke is picking up sticks and dropping them into the puddle. Teresa is both watching him and gazing down the track. She comes to the car window. ‘Maurice has been gone ages. He only went to the village for some stamps.’

‘We met up there and had a cup of coffee. He’s probably on his way back by now.’

Teresa’s face relaxes. She has been imagining a car smash. Pauline knows this because she has gone through the same herself, many times – oh, many, many times. Now Teresa blossoms again, immediately. All is right with the world, and she turns her tranquil face to Pauline and talks at once of other things. She tells Pauline that Chaundy’s tractor driver lifted Luke into the cab of his tractor, evidently a thrilling experience. They discuss a wild flower growing at the edge of the track, for which neither of them can find a name. Vetch, says Pauline – most things are vetch. Toadflax, proposes Teresa.

And Pauline, looking at Teresa, remembers Maurice’s remark and sees that there is a difference in her. Pauline has grown used to this difference and therefore has hardly registered it. There is a new
depth in Teresa, something still and settled. She seems not so much older as riper. She has acquired a bloom, like fruit. Pauline is startled now by this further metamorphosis of which she has scarcely been aware.

They stand talking in the sunshine outside World’s End, as women have probably stood before, taking a breather from the day’s demands. And beside them, in his own detached time capsule, Luke is locked into communion with his puddle of mud, learning about wetness, about softness and hardness, about buoyancy and the force of gravity and reflection and porosity. And eventually about pain, as he stumbles and bangs his knee on a sharp protruding stone. He howls. Startled birds erupt from the hedgerow. Teresa comforts him. She picks him up. ‘Look,’ she says. ‘Look who’s coming.’ And there is Maurice’s car, gleaming again amid the green surf of wheat. Luke stops crying, and manages a watery smile. Teresa glows.

It is June the 15th. Mid-year, mid-week, mid-morning. World’s End sits amid a landscape of exuberance. The verge alongside the track is lush, brimming with red campion, knapweed, foaming drifts of cow parsley. The hedges are studded with creamy plates of elder. There is a feeling of completion – that the surging growth of May has peaked, is suspended now in its abundance. Only the wheat is still growing. The green pelts have become deep seas that billow in the wind. Pauline looks out on all this from her desk with appreciation. The place is different each day, transformed by weather and its own inexorable programme. She appreciates in particular the sky – sometimes stacked with columns of incandescent cloud, sometimes rippling with milky white cirrus, sometimes a primrose arc backlit by the setting sun. The weather is a spectacle, to be observed with interest as she turns the page of a typescript, opens a book or reaches for the telephone.

It occurs to her that she is probably the first person to live here for whom the weather is an aesthetic diversion. For those before her it conditioned the plans for the day, determined whether you were going to be wet, cold, baked or frozen. There may well have been those who managed nevertheless to note the luminosity of a cloud or the bright ripple of the wind across the wheat, but for the most part weather would have been a grim and capricious dictator. For Pauline, rain or sun merely decide whether or not she will be tempted from her desk to walk up the track and down the bridle-path that runs along the crest of the hill, whether she will sit for a while in the garden after lunch or spend all day at work.

She has been surprised by weather, these last weeks. By its versa
tility and by the grandeur of its effects. In cities the weather is incidental. She has been surprised too by time. At World’s End time becomes two-pronged. There is the controlled and measured time of the flashing green digits on appliances, of the display panel of the fax, or the pages of her diary. And there is the time that happens beyond the window which unrolls in terms of leaves and flowers and the green stems of wheat, in terms of climbing temperature – a primitive and elemental form of time untamed by Greenwich or the Gregorian calendar.

And now suddenly it is the middle of June and she has not been to London for nearly six weeks. She ought to check out her flat. There are business calls to be made. She needs a haircut and would like to see friends. Hugh, in particular. She picks up the phone and makes various arrangements.

When, later, she tells Teresa that she will be away in London for a couple of days next week Teresa says, ‘Oh, right – Maurice’ll be back before you go then.’

‘Maurice is going away?’

‘He’s got to go to London too. There are books he needs – and someone at the Tourist Board he wants to interview.’

‘Why don’t you go with him?’ says Pauline after a moment.

‘It isn’t really worth it. He’d be out all the time, anyway. I might as well stay.’ Evidently Teresa is perfectly happy about this. She shifts Luke to her other hip and goes on. ‘And it’s nicer to be here when the weather’s so good.’

‘Well – yes,’ Pauline agrees. And indeed the sun continues to pour down, day after day – hazy sun on some days, sharp brilliant sun on others.

It shines the next morning, as Pauline watches Maurice depart. He has nothing with him except a battered Gladstone bag which is his briefcase. That Gladstone bag – acquired presumably in an antique shop – is typical of Maurice. It indicates a contemptuous rejection of standard consumerism: no smart briefcase or neat and practical holdall for Maurice. In fact, the Gladstone bag weighs a ton and must be rather inconvenient. Pauline remembers noticing it when first she knew Maurice, when Maurice was a casual and
engaging acquaintance. He was about to leave it behind in a wine bar and she had picked it up to hand it to him and said, ‘My God – what have you got in this thing?’ ‘A book,’ Maurice had replied. ‘And possibly a newspaper.’ And had grinned, the grin conceding the impracticality of the bag while quietly flaunting it.

The Gladstone bag is put into the back of the car. The car is a dark blue Vauxhall Astra. Pauline is conscious of this because she discovered recently that Maurice did not know what make of car he owned – he had had to ask Teresa, while in the process of filling in some form. This dismissal of a universal preoccupation is also typical of Maurice. Most people take a proprietorial interest in their car, therefore Maurice does not.

Maurice kisses Teresa. He kisses Luke, who stares at him with an expression of blank amazement, as though he has never seen him before. Presumably Luke is away on some mysterious and inconceivable level of perception. Maurice starts the engine, waves, and the car moves slowly away down the track and is eventually swallowed up in the wheat. Teresa stands watching. Pauline watches from her window. She thinks about Maurice, and it comes to her that the Maurice she now knows is irrevocably detached from the Maurice she once knew, who seems in retrospect a weightless figure – just someone she had come across and found agreeable, no more, no less. The new Maurice is loaded with implications – nothing he says or does can be seen in the same way.

She began to realize this at the wedding. Maurice and Teresa were married in a registry office. Those present were two friends as witnesses, and Pauline. Maurice’s mother, a widow in her late seventies, lived in Carlisle and had felt that the journey would be too much for her. Their small group put up a poor showing in the waiting room at Finsbury Town Hall, as other wedding parties came and went, dressed to kill and attended by droves of bridesmaids in frothy dresses. Maurice was enthralled. He sat there talking about the sociological implications of the occasion. He pointed out that the most flamboyantly and expansively presented groups were Afro-Caribbean or Asian, and that the more middle class the wedding the more sparsely
attended it was and the more ill-clad the participants, as though they were embarrassed by the whole procedure. Maurice himself was wearing exactly what he would wear on any other day. Teresa wore a 1920s evening dress from an auction sale and looked like someone who had wandered off the set of a Noël Coward play.

The reception was thronged. Scores of people filled all three floors of the large Onslow Square house lent by some well-heeled friends of Maurice’s. They spilled out into the garden and stood laughing in the intermittent rain. They sat on the stairs drinking champagne. Pauline was startled, pushing her way through in search of the occasional familiar face. It was as though the whole of Maurice’s previous unknown life was laid out in terms of these strangers and she felt a curious dismay. The small gaggle of Teresa’s friends hung together in a corner, looking very young. At one point Pauline found herself in a group with the mistress of the house, who leaned against her marble mantelpiece tolerantly inspecting the crowd. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘isn’t this amazing! Maurice, of all people – who’d have thought it!’ Someone introduced Pauline and the woman turned her attention upon her with what seemed like amusement. ‘Your daughter? Congratulations! She’s sweet.’ Later, the woman’s husband, rather drunk, said, ‘Of course Maurice is an old flame of Shirley’s – from way back before she married me.’ He laughed indulgently. Pauline looked across the room and saw Maurice as though she had never seen him before – a man she hardly knew with whom she was now inextricably associated. Teresa stood beside him, seeming both happy and bemused. I did this, Pauline thought. I didn’t mean to, but I did.

Teresa and Luke go back indoors. As they do so, Teresa glances up and catches sight of Pauline. She waves and gestures. ‘Coffee?’ she is saying. Pauline nods.

There is a letter with the California postmark on Teresa’s kitchen table. ‘You were right,’ she says. ‘Harry wants to meet when he’s over. I suppose I will have to go to London then. But it’s not till August.’ She glances at her mother. Teresa is delicacy itself where Harry is concerned. The delicacy seems touched with guilt, almost
as though she were indirectly responsible for Harry – or rather, for what Harry implies.

‘Of course you must,’ says Pauline sternly. ‘He definitely ought to see Luke.’

In fact it is clear that Harry is queasy about being a grandfather. It is a label he evidently finds disconcerting – he had not realized he had got so far in life and his pleasure in Luke’s existence is qualified by a certain dismay. This makes Pauline ghoulishly keen to insist on the relationship.

Harry had expressed a wish to attend Teresa’s wedding. It was Teresa who vetoed this, for which Pauline was grateful. And in the event Harry has only once met Maurice, over a lunch described by Teresa as uneasy. When Pauline pressed her on this she became evasive. No, it wasn’t that they hadn’t taken to each other, it was more that in a way they had but somehow didn’t feel they wanted to. ‘I can’t explain,’ she said, ending the matter. ‘But I wouldn’t want to do it again, and I don’t think Maurice would either.’ And Pauline had understood. She had seen it all as though in a shaft of light – the three of them at a table, Teresa between the two men who eye one another and see an uncomfortable reflection.

Harry is twelve years older than Maurice, but he has worn well, by all accounts. Maurice would have seen in him an unwelcome reminder that he, Maurice, is no longer to be counted among the young, that he has crossed the divide, that he is of Harry’s generation rather than of Teresa’s. He would have felt one of those surges of panic. Would have wanted to distance himself from Harry, to push the disagreeable raw fact to one side. Pauline does not have the same effect on him because although standing in the same relation to Teresa she is a woman, and also a person previously known. Pauline’s age is somehow less relevant. Maurice would have talked copiously to suppress his dismay.

And Harry, looking across the table at Maurice, would have seen a reflection of the self he is leaving behind, the Harry who still had a foothold in youth, who was still – just – something of an
enfant terrible
, a gadfly to his elders, a subversive element. He would have been reminded that within a short while he could become a
grandfather, for Christ’s sake. He too would have talked effusively, and no doubt in the process the two of them struck up some sort of accord, for they are both clever and responsive men. They would have responded to one another, recognized a potential affinity, and recoiled from the idea of it.

‘It’s two months away,’ says Teresa serenely. ‘August. I can’t start thinking about something that’s going to happen in August. There’s the whole summer ahead.’