Instructions for a Heatwave (15 page)

“Wait, let me see you.” He pushes her to arm’s length. “My God,” is all he can say.

“What kind of a greeting is that?”

“You look …” He doesn’t know how to finish his sentence, doesn’t know what he wants to say. “Completely different” isn’t right because she is still unmistakably her. But she’s also unrecognizable. He might, he sees, have walked past her in the street. She has more hair, but that’s not it. Her face is thinner, perhaps, but that’s not it. She looks older, but that’s not it. Her clothes are different: none of that homemade, hippie-looking stuff she used to wear, but narrow trousers with zips coiling around the ankles and a T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

He and his mother look her up and down.

“Look at her,” he says.

“I know,” says Gretta.

“What?” Aoife frowns and smiles at the same time.

“All grown up,” Gretta says and dabs at her eyes with her sleeve.

“Oh, stop it, I’ve been grown up for years. You lot just never noticed.” She turns on her heel and heads to the kitchen. “Who wants tea?”

Aoife holds the kettle under the tap but flinches when the jet of water shoots sideways, soaking her wrist. Something is not right. This house, which she has known all her life, is playing tricks on her. Doorways she has passed through ten thousand times seem suddenly narrower, catching her elbow on their sharp edges. Rugs she lay on as a baby, toddled over as a child, are conspiring to trip her, to catch in her shoes. Shelves are lower, able to land a blow on her temple. Light switches have moved from one side of a window to the other. Something is going on.

She dabs at her arm with a tea towel. The row of tea caddies over the oven is mesmeric in its familiarity. She hasn’t thought about them once in all her years away and yet she knows their every detail. The slightly dented lid of the red one, the rust patch on the green. “Bewley’s,” they shout, in a thick, gold cursive script. Is it the jet lag, the being back, the absence of her father? She feels half crazed, isn’t sure what she will do or say.

Gretta comes into the kitchen to find the kettle lying on its side on the draining board, minus its lid. The cups are apparently still in the press. Aoife is staring at the shelf, a tea towel wrapped around her arm.

She’ll say nothing. Gretta seizes the kettle, fills it, places it on the hob. She reaches out and unwinds the cloth from Aoife’s arm.

“You’ve moved the breakfast tin,” Aoife says.

“What?”

“The breakfast blend.” Aoife points at the tea shelf. “It always used to be to the right of the afternoon blend.”

“Did it?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. Well, move it back if you want.”

Michael Francis follows them into the kitchen. He doesn’t seem to want to leave Aoife for long, he realizes, as if he’s afraid she’ll fly out of an open window, like those children in
Peter Pan
.

“Would you like the loan of a hairbrush?” his mother is asking.

Aoife spins around. “What do you mean?”

“I just thought …” Gretta shrugs as she sits down at the kitchen table.

“You just thought what?”

“That you might need one.”

“Are you saying there’s something wrong with my hair?”

And they’re off, he thinks. Why is it Aoife and Gretta can’t spend more than twenty minutes in each other’s company without falling into a conversation like this one? Gretta calmly handing out remarks like sweets, but with a subtle lacing of poison, and Aoife hurling them back at her. Aoife is now saying she never brushes her hair, never ever, and Gretta is saying she can well believe it and aren’t there such things as hairdressers in New York? He wants to say, Aoife, let her off, just this once, think of what she’s going through.

He strains his voice to speak over them: “So, listen, what’s the plan for today?”

His mother and sister turn to look at him and he sees, in the widening of their remarkably similar eyes, that they are both afraid, that they are just killing time, filling in airspace, that their hairbrush wrangle is just their way of putting things off.

·  ·  ·

Eighty miles or so northwest of the kitchen, Monica is lifting the nineteenth-century lace of the bathroom curtain and peering through the blurry glass into the garden. She thinks of how she
once read somewhere that gradually, after years and years, panes of glass become thicker at the bottom, that glass, while appearing solid and dependable, is subject to a slow, invisible downward creep.

She puts her palm to the glass, as if she might feel a treacle-like dropping. But there’s nothing. Just an inanimate cool.

Out in the garden, Peter is digging a hole near the apple trees. She’d whispered, “Make it deep,” to him, before realizing that she’d heard those words before, in similar circumstances. Always strange, to catch yourself echoing your parents’ words, to find experiences coming around again. The same, yet different. Two wailing children this time. Neither of them hers.

Peter’s put on his work overalls for the job. Peter, her husband. She would never tell anyone this but she still finds it strange to call him that, even after three years. The word
husband
is, for her, irrevocably linked with another man. Will it always be like that? A woman in a shop recently asked her if that was her husband waiting outside and Monica had turned and was searching the window for Joe’s face, Joe’s figure, Joe’s waiting pose—slouched, hands in pockets—before her eye lit upon Peter. It took her a moment to compose herself, to wave back. Stupid, really, because what on earth would Joe be doing in a village in Gloucestershire?

People told her, again and again, how lucky she was to be leaving London, to be moving to the country. Bit of fresh air, they said. Out of all this hustle and bustle, they said. She’d love it, they said.

The truth is, she doesn’t. The truth is, the countryside scares her. The truth is, she hates this house, hates its uneven floorboards, its historical bloody integrity, its cast-iron range, its rickety doorways, its eternal signs of Jenny, the wronged martyr. She hates her weekends as a stepmother, hates the constant weekly reminder that she has failed, hates the way they twine themselves around their father, the way the three of them sit interlocked
on the sofa to watch TV while she must take the chair opposite, all the while pretending she doesn’t mind. She hates the garden, full of slugs and flies and wasps and parched flowers and apples that have fallen off the trees too soon and plants whose tendrils hook into her tights. She hates the dark that descends every night, the awful silence, fretted by the yaps and twitches and hootings of creatures out there, beyond the garden’s fences. She hates the terrible green screen of trees that press close to the house, their leaves turning and trembling. She hates that there is nowhere to go, no café around the corner, no shops to wander among, to soak up an hour or two, that the bus passes the end of the lane only twice a day. She hates that she can’t go anywhere except the twenty-five-minute walk through fields and over stiles to the village where Jenny lives, where she might bump into her, where people look at her, then away, where no one smiles at her, where the woman in the post office takes her money, then slams down the change on the counter, where she is made to feel like a bad person, an interloper, a husband-snatcher. Peter says it’s all in her head, that they don’t think like that around here, but she knows that they do. I’m not a husband-snatcher, she wanted to say the last time she was there. How can I be when they weren’t even married? But she didn’t. If she wants to go anywhere these days, she waits for the bus to Chipping Norton, where there is a row of nice shops and a tearoom, where no one knows her or, if they do, no one cares.

She misses London. She misses it the way she missed Joe. A strange, cramped pain that leaves her almost unable to speak. She has never lived anywhere else until now. She hadn’t really known that people lived anywhere else, or would want to. There are days when she can hardly bear it, when she walks across the landing of the house, again and again, her arms crossed over her middle, her mind overfilled with images of descending an escalator into the Piccadilly Line on a wet, darkened evening, everyone’s umbrellas
slicked with rain, of the ten-minute walk between her old flat and her mother’s house, of Highbury Fields on a misty day, of the view over the city from Primrose Hill. Homesick: she’s found that it really does make you feel sick, ill, maddened by longing. But by evening, she is always ready, her grief behind her, hidden, like a deformity she must cover up. Hair up. Makeup on. Supper on the range. She will make this work; she will not go back; she will not let on to anyone; she will not show them that she’s been beaten again. Monica, with her failed nursing degree, her childlessness, her husband who left her: she won’t be that person. She will live here in this house with its shaky roof, its skirting-boards that scuttle at night, its moth-eaten furniture, its hostile neighbors. She will live here and she will say nothing.

·  ·  ·

Gretta is sitting at the table with her tea, and she is saying, in a barely audible voice, that she doesn’t know where he could have gone, that she’s been racking her brains, why would he do such a thing? What kind of a person just walks out on his wife on a summer morning and doesn’t tell her where he’s going? She’s asked the neighbors and no one saw him, no one at all, which is decidedly odd, wouldn’t they say?

To Aoife, this is a sight almost beyond bearing: her mother, seeming so small and shrunken there at the kitchen table, brought so low. How strange it is when she’s always made such a fuss and a scene about minor things. Melodrama is her speciality, like the time Aoife returned home from school to discover her mother had been to visit a funeral parlor after finding a lump in her throat. She knew she was dying, she knew this was it, she could feel it in her bones, and she wanted a “good send-off” at the “right sort” of funeral home, with plenty of early-afternoon slots, so that there was time for a Mass to be said beforehand and time for the wake back at the house afterwards. It was the least she
could do for them all. Aoife requested to see the lump, examined the place beside her mother’s collarbone and told her it was an insect bite. Nothing more. Odd, Aoife thinks, that the first time Gretta has a proper crisis to grapple with, she seems to shrink in the face of it, to abandon all of her usual tricks.

Michael Francis is thinking how Gretta has said these things to him, in these exact words, yesterday—“decidedly odd,” “his wife on a summer morning,” “racking her brains.” Every time she speaks these lines, she gives the impression that she’s never spoken them before, that the words are coming to her spontaneously, as if she’s just thought of them. “Never in a million years expected this of him,” she is saying, and there’s another one. She’s either a good actress or extremely forgetful. But what a strangely selective memory—to be able to remember the exact words but forget that you’ve said them before. If she says the thing about him being so much happier since he retired, he may have to throw something at the wall.

“The thing is,” Gretta says, putting down her teacup and fixing her eyes on Aoife, “he’s been so much happier since he retired.”

Aoife isn’t sure what to say to this because she has been away, she missed the whole retirement thing, but she opens her mouth, hoping that something apt will come out. Beside her, Michael Francis is shoving back his chair and leaving the room.

“Where are you going?” Gretta calls after him.

“For a slash.”

“I wish he wouldn’t say things like that,” Gretta complains. “The whole world doesn’t need to know.”

“You did ask.”

Gretta makes a small noise of disgust and gestures as if wafting away a bad smell. “Oh, you two.”

“You two what?”

“It’s always the same, isn’t it?”

“What’s always the same?”

“Always taking the other one’s side. No matter if they’re in the wrong.”

“He isn’t in the wrong! He’s going for a slash. That’s allowed, isn’t it?”

Gretta shakes her head as if she’s suddenly decided the quarrel is beneath her. “Always taking each other’s side,” she mutters to the air.

“Well, somebody has to,” Aoife retorts.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Michael Francis looks at a sliver of his face in the tiny, plastic-rimmed mirror over the toilet. His father stands here, on this very spot, every day to shave. He fills a bowl at the kitchen sink then carries it in here, to the toilet under the stairs. “Away from all the bother” is what he said when Michael Francis once asked him why he didn’t use the bathroom upstairs. The shaving things are still there: his razor, his badger-bristle brush, his dish of shaving soap, worn hollow in the middle, a tan-colored stain on the cistern to mark where the enamel bowl stands.

He stares at this stain. Odd to find it here. He can see how the rim of the absent bowl would fit it exactly; it’s like a ghost of the thing. Did his father shave on the morning he left or not? He touches his finger to the bristles of the brush. Was it used or did his father walk out with a day’s growth on his face?

His mother’s and sister’s voices seesaw back and forth beyond the wall.

It occurs to him that his father must have taught him to shave, must have guided him through the ritual he performs every morning of his life, but Michael Francis has no memory of this. It would have been upstairs: there isn’t enough room for both of them in here. Did his father stand behind him as he picked up the razor? Did he instruct him to dip it into the water, to stretch his skin tight? Did their faces appear in the mirror together as he
took his first, rasping stroke? He grew tall, taller than his father at around the age of fourteen; Robert had told him once, in an unguarded moment, that Michael Francis got his height from his uncle, the one who had died in the Troubles. It was never mentioned again but afterwards Michael Francis always had the sense that his height made his father uncomfortable in ways he could never understand. But they must have stood upstairs, on a day in his early teens, together, at the washbasin. He strains for a recollection, an image, anything, but nothing comes. One day, he supposes, he will have to teach Hughie. What a thought.