Heat Wave (25 page)

At World’s End, the harvest is a question of scenery and background noise. World’s End has its own preoccupation.

Pauline and Maurice avoid one another, on the whole. That is, Pauline sometimes finds herself in the garden with Teresa and Maurice, or in Teresa’s kitchen when Maurice is there, but she tries to avoid being alone with him. She has nothing further to say to
Maurice, now or quite possibly at any point, though this is a prospect hard to contemplate. Maurice is scrupulously polite to Pauline in Teresa’s presence and does not appear to be keeping out of her way, but just to be pursuing his own daily course. If this brings him into Pauline’s orbit, so be it. He makes a remark – some anodyne, inconsequential remark – or simply gives her that quirky smile. Look, he seems to be saying, this bout of ill will is on your side only. Let’s behave like reasonable people.

And thus the days unfurl. Tight, tense days. Blue and gold days in which the sun pours down.

Pauline notes that Maurice’s car has departed on one of those forays to Hadbury or wherever, so she goes next door to visit. She entertains Luke while Teresa washes her hair, upstairs. The phone rings. ‘Could you get it, Mum?’ calls Teresa.

‘Hello?’

‘Teresa?’ says the voice of James Saltash, doubtfully.

‘No, it’s Pauline.’

‘I thought it might be. Hi …’ James hesitates. ‘Is Maurice there?’

‘He’s out just now, in fact. Shall I ask Teresa to tell him to call you back?’

‘No need,’ says James. A little chill, his voice – a little taut. But the stiffness is not for her, Pauline senses. ‘Just … if someone could say to him that the indexer who did his last book isn’t going to be available so we’re making inquiries about someone else. I only need to hear from him if he isn’t happy about that.’

‘Right,’ says Pauline.

‘Everything OK with you? It’s sweltering here – you’re lucky to be out of it.’ They chat for a minute before Pauline puts down the phone.

So he knows. Or if he doesn’t know then he has got a whiff of it, a whiff pungent enough to have derailed him. Poor guy. Though of course so far as he is concerned, if he did but know it, this is a merciful dispensation which will probably in the fullness of time detach him from that girl, if he has any sense of self-preservation, and make him available for someone more his weight. But right now he is unhinged, which is apparent simply from his voice – from the way in
which he utters Maurice’s name, from a reserve that is not natural to him. Remarkable thing, the human voice, thinks Pauline. Amazingly expressive, willy-nilly. No wonder the acting profession can do what it does. She reflects upon the versatility of speech. It helps, these days, to turn the mind to these interesting abstract matters.

‘A career on the stage, maybe?’ she says to Luke. ‘Say Daddy. No – don’t. Say Mummy. Mum-mum-mum …’

Luke gazes at her. He beams. He smacks his lips together. ‘Mmmmm …’ he says. Perhaps.

The combine has arrived. It crawls back and forth all day. A yellow thrashing monster that consumes the wheat. A day, two days, then it is gone. The straw is baled and the field is a new, stripped landscape, a rolling golden expanse of stubble brushed this way and that by wheel tracks. All over it stand the drums of baled straw, packed and perfect spirals. By day they look like giant cotton reels, but at night they change. They become strange monolithic presences, a sculptural army gathered upon the slope of the hill, staring down at World’s End with blank faces.

Pauline has forgotten that Harry will have arrived in London by now. She is taken aback when Teresa says that she will be off early the next morning. Her bemusement is apparent. ‘London,’ says Teresa. ‘Harry. Remember?’

‘Of course.’

‘We’ll take Luke to the zoo or somewhere.’

Pauline cannot quite envisage Harry at the zoo, now or ever. ‘Well, that should be fun,’ she says. ‘For Luke, anyway.’

‘Maurice isn’t coming. There’s no point, really. It’s only for me to show Luke to Harry. Plus, Maurice isn’t keen on car journeys with Luke.’ Teresa gives a dry little laugh. Pauline is shaken by this laugh – which is more a snort, a stifled explosion. It is an indication of how far Teresa has travelled in the last few weeks. Once it would have been impossible for her to imply criticism of Maurice, to suggest inadequacy. Pauline glimpses for an instant the person whom Teresa may become, in the climate of Maurice – bitter, shrewish, trapped.

‘Maybe I should drive you up,’ Pauline suggests.

‘I’ll be fine.’ Teresa is edgy now. She does not want solicitude. She wants to get this duty done, that is all. Pauline feels again a glimmer of compunction for Harry, who is reduced to an obligation. Thus are the mighty fallen.

‘And I’ll get back by lunchtime on Friday,’ says Teresa.

Hugh phones. ‘Listen,’ he says, ‘have you got a moment?’

‘Well, of course I have,’ says Pauline. ‘You don’t have pressing engagements down here at half-past ten at night.’

‘I’ve been sitting in the office for the last couple of hours all on my own drinking a bottle of Hungarian red, otherwise I’d probably never have got up a sufficient head of steam to say this. Would you … conceivably … think of marrying me?’

‘Oh …’ Pauline is thrown, entirely. ‘Oh, Hugh, are you sure you … look, I think we should both think very carefully about this. I mean … well, just – let’s both of us think about it.’

They both know, at once, that she is saying no.

‘Just a thought,’ says Hugh. ‘Possibly a misplaced one. Anyway, turn the idea over.’ He starts to talk about a book auction he has been to, and an eccentric Danish client, and an exhibition that Pauline must not miss. He is amiable, in good spirits, a trifle blurred by wine. Pauline knows that he will never raise the question of marriage again, unless invited to do so. And her own spontaneous resistance makes her cringe. But I’m right, she thinks, I know I am. It wouldn’t do, not now. Not ever.

Teresa goes to London. Pauline comes out to say goodbye but does not linger. From her window she sees Teresa stow Luke into his car-seat. She sees Maurice carry a bag out for Teresa. Then Teresa drives off and Maurice does not wave or watch the departing car but goes straight back into the cottage. Where he will presumably be bound to stay until her return. No restless excursion for you today, thinks Pauline. Have to sit down and buckle to. Nothing but the fax and the phone. Unless you choose to come begging for the use of my car.

It is hotter still. Pauline finds her study stifling, even with the window
wide open. She drifts about the cottage half the morning, fixing herself cold drinks. Hugh is in her head – his voice on the phone last night, his words. Has she offended him? Can they return to the status quo? Surely, she thinks, surely what they have is sturdy enough to withstand a precarious moment. She considers calling him, and decides against it. Best to let this pass, let it subside – allow Hugh to attribute his rush of blood to the Hungarian red, and bury the episode.

She thinks of Teresa and Luke on the motorway, with a twinge of anxiety, and would like to check their arrival. A further phone call that it would be wiser not to make.

At lunchtime she takes a drink into the garden and sits for a while in the shade of the apple tree. Maurice does not emerge and indeed she barely thinks of him. It is very quiet now at World’s End – without Luke’s shrieks and babbling, without the clatter of the combine. Just birds, and the occasional distant roar of an aircraft.

Pauline achieves some work during the afternoon. The sun is off her study now, so it is cooler, and indeed when at five or so she decides to stop, and looks out of the window, it seems that the sun has disappeared altogether. The sky is dull – not so much clouded as curiously opaque. The air is thick and heavy, and from somewhere far away there comes a long shuddering sound. The radio talked this morning of scattered thunderstorms. But scattering elsewhere, evidently, thinks Pauline. She goes down, makes a cup of tea and sits reading as she drinks it. Then she climbs the stairs to have a bath. She lies in the water for a long time, half dozing. And when eventually she gets out the small room is almost dark and she has to switch on the light. Looking out, she sees that a grey mass has tipped up from behind the hill. The sky growls again, nearer.

For the next couple of hours the storm circles the valley. Once it retreats altogether, the sky clears and there is thin sunshine. The birds sing tumultuously. Pauline cooks herself some supper and eats it while watching the long shadows cast by the straw bales, dark fingers pointing across the stubble. And then the shadows melt away, the sky darkens once more – darkens so that it seems dusk has fallen, but it is only seven o’clock on a summer evening. It is very still and the birdsong is now quite maniacal, ringing out in the silence. The
air has thickened again – it becomes so dense that there is a feeling of pressure, as though everything were being compacted. A flare of sheet lightning, more thunder. This, thinks Pauline, is going to be the father and mother of all storms. She goes round the house closing windows, because she has met up with this before at World’s End and knows what is to come. The valley seems in some way to trap storms. They sit on top of it and generate a great deal of water, all of it trying to find vulnerable points of entry. She puts some wads of newspaper under the back door.

The sky splits, right overhead. Brilliant white light and then a massive clap of thunder which rolls away into a silence in which Pauline hears the first rain smash against the window. She stands watching, interested in this elemental process. Within minutes the rain is so heavy that she can barely pick out the shapes of the straw bales in the field and presently they are wiped out entirely behind a thick grey screen of rain, which turns soon to hail, a curtain of obliterating white. Sheet lightning, fork lightning, cracks of thunder. The kitchen light flickers.

Pauline goes to the dresser and takes out the candlesticks and candles. This is the next stage, familiar also. Rural electricity supplies, she has learnt, are pathetically susceptible to bad weather.

The wads of newspaper against the back door are soaked. She replaces them and goes round the cottage mopping window sills. There is so much noise now that she cannot hear her own footsteps. She returns to the kitchen at the moment when the lights flicker again and then go out. She lights candles, puts one on the table and another on the dresser. The room becomes a cavern of light and darkness – softer, older. Pauline sits down in the basket chair by the dresser and admires the effect. The green eye on the fridge is extinguished, and the glimmering green and red digital figures on the cooker and the microwave. The place is brown and sepia now, like an old oil painting, with gold pools of light around the candles. The window becomes a square of vivid white as lightning flares. Hail is bouncing up from the sill. Thunder cracks again. Pauline is unperturbed. Others have sat out storms in this room, she thinks, looking at much the same things.

A cup of coffee might be nice. She starts to get up and then remembers that this is not possible. Something else occurs. She picks up the phone. Dead. Of course – that too. Another familiar thunderstorm ritual.

She has a glass of wine instead of the coffee and settles down with it beside the candle. She peers at the newspaper, watches the unearthly glare of the lightning, waits for the next peal of thunder. She tours the room again, mopping, and takes a suspicious look at her bedroom ceiling, known to be a frail spot. So far, so good. And now the lightning is a little less intense, the thunder is more remote. The rain is not thrashing down so hard. The storm is on the way out. But there is small hope that the electricity will be restored before morning – she knows this from experience.

By half-past nine the rain has stopped and the thunder is miles away. Pauline opens the front door to look out briefly at the sodden landscape, almost dark by now. Then she tidies the kitchen, groping rather in the dusky light, and climbs the stairs again for another inspection of the bedroom ceiling, carrying one of the candlesticks.

From the bedroom she hears the sound of a car on the track. It goes past with glaring lights and she is puzzled for a moment until she remembers the chicken houses. Of course – emergency measures necessary in the event of a power failure.

She is in the bathroom, checking out another ceiling which has also been known to let in rain, when she hears a sound downstairs. Someone has come into the cottage through the unlocked front door. For a moment her stomach lurches – and then she thinks of Maurice, almost forgotten until now. And indeed when she comes out on to the landing there he is, already half-way up the stairs.

‘You could have knocked,’ says Pauline. ‘I thought you were some marauder.’

Maurice stumbles and puts out a hand to steady himself. When he speaks Pauline realizes that he is rather drunk. ‘Someone’s just gone past in a car. What d’you think they’re up to?’

‘Nothing. They have to do something about the chicken houses when the electricity goes off.’

‘Why hasn’t it come on again?’

‘It usually doesn’t, for hours. Have you got candles?’ she adds perfunctorily. She knows that Teresa has a supply but conceivably Maurice does not know where they are.

Maurice waves a hand dismissively. He has joined her on the landing now and stands with his back to the stairs, while she is at the door of the bathroom. ‘Come over and have a drink. I’m in the middle of a very good bottle of claret.’

‘I’m going to bed,’ says Pauline. ‘And you’d do well to check out your upstairs ceilings. This roof can leak.’

‘Pauline,’ says Maurice, ‘why are you giving me the cold shoulder?’

They stand facing each other on the landing. Behind Maurice is the black drop of the narrow staircase. Only his face is lit by her candle – bony, shadowed, grinning.

‘You know why,’ she says.

‘Oh, come on,’ says Maurice. ‘You’re a grown woman. These things happen – you must know that.’

She stares at him.

‘Freezing me out won’t help. There’s nothing I can do about it. Or you. I’m sorry, but there it is.’

Later, much later, when she tries to recover each moment, she knows that she moved towards him, powered by anger. She has never felt such rage – it came roaring up from somewhere deep within. The whole scene is distorted by its ferocity. She moves. She may have spoken, she may have raised her hand. Maurice lurches. He is unsteadied – perhaps by the drink, perhaps by something else. He puts his weight on his weak leg and then takes a step back to regain his balance.