Heat Wave (22 page)

Evening. Silence. The combine has gone home, leaving a void that now seems unnatural. The place is in suspension – an airless dusk, in which birds call and the wheat stands absolutely still.

Pauline goes out to her car in search of a mislaid notebook. She fails to find it, and when she emerges from the car and stands up there is Maurice coming out of the cottage.

He walks over to her. He does not bother with the circumlocution of greeting or weather commentary. He gives her a half-smile, which would seem to be the white flag of the messenger come in peace. ‘Perhaps we should talk,’ he says.

Pauline does not reply at once. She considers him. Then she says, ‘What would we talk about, Maurice?’

Maurice observes her in silence. He gives the slightest of shrugs. So be it, says his look. If that’s the way you want it. He turns away and walks back to the cottage.

At midnight the phone rings.

‘Pauline?’ says Hugh. His voice is disarrayed.

‘Are you all right, Hugh?’

‘Yes …’ he says. ‘At least … No. Elaine is dead.’

Pauline knows, at once, what has happened. She is silent for a moment. Then – ‘Oh, Hugh … How?’

‘Pills. I don’t know where she got them from. I used to check, from time to time. This has always been on the cards – I’ve realized that.’

‘Yes,’ says Pauline. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’ She struggles to think what to say, what to do. ‘Would you like me to come?’

‘Not right now. Later, maybe. Now it’s all practical things. I’m best just getting on with it.’ He sounds less disarrayed now, just weary. ‘The funeral’s on Tuesday.’

‘Oh,’ says Pauline. Her thoughts are rushing in all directions. That poor bleak woman. Alone with the pills. Hugh. This funeral. Should she … ? Is it appropriate that she attend the funeral?

‘No,’ says Hugh, ahead of her, or alongside. ‘Don’t come to it. It’s going to be her brother and his family. There was a brother, you know – not that we saw that much of him. And …’ His voice trails away.

And no one, thinks Pauline. Elaine had no friends.

‘And Margery,’ says Hugh. ‘She’ll be there.’

No, thinks Pauline, I shouldn’t go. It wouldn’t do. But poor old Hugh … a gust of empathy sweeps through her. ‘I wish I was with you,’ she says.

‘Well, maybe if you were thinking of coming to London later in
the week, say … When it’s all over. That would perk me up. But not if it’s a nuisance.’

‘Oh, Hugh,’ she says. ‘Of course I’ll come. Wednesday?’

They talk a little more and when she puts the phone down she lies there thinking of that despairing woman, shut away in her inescapable neurosis, and of Hugh, who must be grieving for something that happened long ago rather than for this act of desperation. He has never talked of the woman he first married and whom he lost long since. The disoriented note in his voice now is that of shock and bewilderment. His task will be to acclimatize himself to a life in which he is freed of that millstone which is so familiar that it has become also perhaps a kind of tether. He will be adrift.

‘… so I’m going up to see him on Wednesday,’ she explains to Teresa. And also, incidentally, to Maurice. She would have preferred to have this conversation with Teresa alone, but Maurice came into the kitchen half-way through and she has had to accept his muttered expressions of dismay. He has met Hugh only twice and there was no particular accord between them.

‘Of course,’ says Teresa. She glances at Maurice.

‘Wednesday …’ says Maurice. ‘Right. Well, look, I’ll see if I can switch my appointment and go up on Monday so I can be back by then.’

Pauline turns to him, sharply.

‘I have to see someone at English Heritage, and do a stint in the library, but I’ll try to do it earlier. Teresa had better not be left here on her own and without a car.’

‘No,’ says Pauline. ‘She had better not.’

‘Exactly,’ says Maurice. He avoids her eye. ‘Right. I’ll get hold of him – the English Heritage man.’ He leaves the room.

Pauline confronts Teresa. ‘Or you could go with him. Do that, instead. If he has to bounce to and fro. This summer of isolation and application seems to be breaking down.’ She tries to be light, to make it sound like a careless juggling of alternatives.

‘No,’ says Teresa. ‘I’ve thought about that. It would be worse.’ She has abandoned pretences.

‘Oh …’ Pauline is wrenched now by Teresa’s expression, by her tone. Something more has happened. Something said, something done.

‘I still wouldn’t know where he was or what he was doing. And Luke would cry in the car and there’s all his things to take, the cot and the buggy … I’d have to sit there wondering where Maurice was and when he’d be back just the same. I may as well do it here as there.’ She pauses, draws a breath – a little jerky gasp of stress. ‘Give my love to Hugh,’ she says. ‘If you talk to him before you go. Tell him I’m so sorry.’

Pauline nods. She is carved up by what she sees in Teresa’s eyes, by Teresa’s painfully level tone, by her own familiarity with Teresa’s private darkness.

Maurice arrives at Pauline’s door. He has come, ostensibly, to borrow some paper. The village shop does not rise to A4 copy paper. Pauline finds him standing at the foot of the stairs with this request on his lips. She climbs the stairs, collects a wad of paper and descends once more.

‘I’ll pay you back,’ says Maurice, with a furtive smile.

‘No need.’

He does not go, but continues to stand there.

‘Well …’ says Pauline, dismissive now. Go, she thinks, before too much is said.

‘I know what you’ve been thinking, Pauline,’ says Maurice.

‘In that case there’s no need for me to make any comment.’

‘You could perhaps be exaggerating things, you know.’

‘Could I?’ says Pauline, starting to smoulder. ‘If that’s what you feel, then that is your problem, not mine.’

Maurice spreads his hands in a gesture of deprecation. ‘I can see that nothing I say is going to make any difference. But if it’s any help let me tell you that James and Carol won’t be coming down here for weekends any more. It isn’t working out so well that way. It’ll be more convenient if James and I get together in London every now and then.’

I see, thinks Pauline. Yes, more convenient in every way, no doubt. She does not speak, and Maurice continues to stand there, looking
up at her because she is several steps above him on that steeply raked flight of stairs. It is dark inside, the stairwell of the cottage is unlit, and Maurice is framed in the brilliance of the out-of-doors beyond – the blue and gold and green of sky and wheat and hedge, a flare of light and colour. Pauline cannot see his face very well, and would not wish to because whichever approach he has assumed would madden her – propitiation, defiance, conspiracy.

‘Just at this moment,’ says Maurice slowly, ‘you’re probably wishing I’d never married Teresa. You shouldn’t do that. Whatever there is right now that may be …’

Pauline cuts him off. ‘Wrong, Maurice. Just at this moment I’m thinking that if I could kill you I probably would. A reaction you won’t understand, but that too is your problem.’

Maurice stares up at her. ‘I’ve always thought of you as a level-headed woman, Pauline. Don’t disillusion me. Thank you for the paper.’ He turns, and goes.

The landscape is now being pulverized. On the other side of the hill the invisible combine is thrashing away at the spring wheat, day after day. Tractors roar down the track past World’s End, towing trailer-loads of grain. On the roads, lines of traffic crawl in procession behind an isolated combine or tractor. The monster eyes of agricultural machinery sweep the fields with shafts of light late into the evening. This is the time of year when it is made clear that the countryside is not scenery but an industrial enterprise. The coaches carrying tour parties to Stratford must queue up behind the combine which occupies most of the road, the caravan-towing cars and the hired camper vans must sit panting behind the tractor waiting to turn right into its destined field.

Pauline meets Chaundy on the track. They halt their cars for the statutory exchange.

‘Busy time for you,’ says Pauline.

‘Have this lot down next,’ says Chaundy. They gaze at the seething wheat. ‘The weather better bloody well hold another couple of weeks,’ he adds.

‘Is it a good harvest?’ Pauline inquires.

Chaundy shrugs. ‘All burnt up, isn’t it?’ His disgruntled tone implies that this is a deliberate act on someone’s part – the government probably, or the EC, or conceivably Pauline herself has had a hand in it. He slams the Peugeot into gear once more, a fearful grinding sound which indicates that communication is at an end. He eyes Pauline, with the expression of a man who feels he may have forgotten something. It comes to him. ‘Everything OK with you?’ he says, perfunctorily, the car already edging forward.

‘Fine,’ says Pauline. ‘Just fine.’

Honour is satisfied.

And such ritual dances are perfectly appropriate, thinks Pauline, as she makes her way along the shelves of the Mace Store in the village, trying to remember what it is that she has come here for. Chaundy is nothing to her, and she is even less to Chaundy. All that is required is mutual recognition and an indication of non-hostility. Dogs also do it.

Fine, you declare, whatever your state of mind, whatever your physical condition. The decencies require this, not that you come clean and mention that you are bankrupt, on bail for assault or terminally ill.

Well, as it happens, Mr Chaundy, I am in profound distress because I believe that my daughter is about to suffer her husband’s serial infidelity. A man to whom, incidentally, she was introduced by myself. And my own husband was similarly inclined, so I am something of a connoisseur of the emotions aroused.

No, no … Fine, just fine.

Tomato purée, that was it. And fruit. And milk.

She phones Hugh, but encounters only the answering machine. He is not at the shop, either. Margery greets her with conspiratorial warmth. ‘He should be back soon, Mrs Carter. I’ll tell him you rang. He’s … well, he’s not really himself, between you and me. He’s all at sixes and sevens. It’s been a blow, this. Though one can’t but feel …’ She leaves something delicately unspoken. ‘He’s going to need his friends, Mrs Carter.’ A further implication is there, giving Pauline pause for uneasy thought.

And in an hour or so Hugh calls back. ‘Do you know any hymns?’

‘Mmn …’ says Pauline. Fight the good fight, she thinks. No, that’s the one for marriage services. ‘I’m not very strong in that area. Do you really need a hymn? Why don’t you just have some organ music?’

‘That’s a good idea.’ Hugh perks up. ‘Bach. Organ music is always Bach, isn’t it? I’ll tell them to do that. But there’s this address.’ His voice falls again. ‘Someone has to talk about Elaine. I suppose her brother might. The priest usually does, apparently. But …’

But in this instance what is he to say? What, indeed, is anyone to say? Pauline remembers the bright platitudes mouthed by clerics at the funerals of her parents, dutiful, well-meaning men who had never met the people in question and were concerned merely to provide a smoothly gift-wrapped occasion. ‘Don’t,’ she says. ‘Tell them you don’t want that either. Read something, instead. Read a poem. Did Elaine like poetry, ever?’

There is a silence. She feels Hugh rummaging in some unthinkable past, when Elaine was a whole woman. ‘Actually,’ he says, ‘we once went on holiday in France, and I remember walking on the beach one evening and she was reciting Keats. Something she’d learnt by heart at school. “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”.’

‘There you are, then,’ says Pauline. ‘Read that.’

‘I could, couldn’t I?’ Hugh sounds encouraged. ‘And you’ll come on Wednesday?’ he goes on.

‘Of course.’

The days seem now to inch one into another. There is Saturday. There is Sunday. On Sunday evening the sky clouded over and the air thickened. Rumours of rain. But now it is Monday and the sun is out again, as ever.

This is the day on which Maurice will go to London, to return on Wednesday before Pauline herself leaves. Pauline had intended to stay clear of him until after his departure, but at breakfast time she is forced to visit when she finds that the postman has included with
the mail that he has pushed through her door an envelope addressed to Maurice, which may or may not be of importance but decency requires that she hand it over before he leaves.

When Pauline enters the room she knows that they have had a row. They are silent now, but the air is loaded. It carries still the freight of whatever has been said and felt in here. The remains of breakfast are on the table, and Luke is clutching a piece of toast and making Luke-noises which seem to float free of the turbulence, the shock waves of anger and accusation and defiance. Teresa is ramrod stiff, her mouth a knot of distress. Maurice is tense, his face set in ill-temper.

Pauline hands him the letter. ‘This got put through my door by mistake.’

Maurice adjusts his expression, but not much. ‘Thank you, Pauline.’ He sees Teresa shoot a glance at the letter. ‘This is from a woman at the National Trust, supplying some figures for which I have asked. Do please read it if you would like to.’

Teresa freezes, and turns away.

Pauline goes. Shortly afterwards, from the tranquillity of her cottage, where the air is uncharged and the radio is quietly telling a short story, she hears Maurice’s car start up and then recede along the track.

Three hours later Teresa is composed, or nearly so. She comes over to ask if she might take Pauline’s car to go to the village shop. Luke is asleep. Could Pauline check up on him from time to time? Pauline replies that she will take some work over to Teresa’s sitting-room.

And thus she is going over a page of the North Sea oil manuscript when the phone rings.

‘Hello?’ says a male voice. Harry’s voice, as it happens.

‘Hello,’ says Pauline.

‘Teresa?’ says Harry tentatively.

‘No. It’s me – Pauline.’

‘Oh. Hello.’ This hello is different – it is a deft combination of greeting and a cautious testing of the waters. I should like to talk to you, it says – but will you talk to me? ‘I was just calling to fix up
something with Teresa in London the week after next, when I’m over.’