Instructions for a Heatwave (25 page)

Either way, she gave him her hand.

And it seemed to him, as he felt the hand of Gina Mayhew in his, a surprisingly small hand, smaller than—he permitted this thought but no more—Claire’s, that he was reaching through a space that was as vast and limitless as the universe, and that space was stacked with assumptions that he held about himself. Himself as a family man, as a father, as a husband, as a teacher, who never, unlike some colleagues he could mention, eyed the long legs of sixth-form girls in hot exam halls, never responded to the smitten gazes of certain students, never indulged in those staff-room confidences and allegiances and dalliances, a man who had never looked at another woman since his marriage, a man who had wed the girl he knocked up at university at the start of his PhD, who had given up his dreams of being an academic, of escaping to America, of leaving everything behind, a man who did his share of all the washing and lifting and coaxing and feeding and tidying of family life, a man who very frequently drove his mother to Mass, a man who sent birthday cards and purchased presents and carved the turkey at Christmas. He was a good man. He knew that to be true. But still he reached through it all, all that goodness and duty and assiduousness and care, until he got to something else on the other side.

When he woke, it was just after dawn. The window was still open and the outside was nothing again—gray-lit, damp, birds squawking, insects clouding the air. He stumbled from the narrow bunk, unwinding himself from the sheet. His mind was sprinting ahead of the situation in which he had found himself. He had to get out of there, down the corridor, to his own room, without anyone seeing him. What had he done, what had he done, what, in God’s name, had he done? He snatched up his clothes from the floor. It would be OK, he told himself, as he forced one leg then the other into his discarded pajamas, which seemed suddenly to be invested with so much static that they would not admit a human limb; it would be OK. He knew that to panic meant to
die; he had learned that in Scouts. Keep calm, keep a clear head, above all don’t panic. It would be fine, he would deal with this, he would get himself out of here and everything would be OK. Claire would not find out, he would not tell her, he would never tell her; it was just the once, it would never happen again. Claire would never know and nothing would change; he would talk to Gina and she would understand. She knew he was married, after all. She’d known that from the start—she’d known it last night when she’d slid herself beneath him in the bed, when she’d lifted her pajama top over her head. Claire would never know what had happened here. It was a moment of madness but it was over.

He turned the door handle; he poked out his head. Nothing. No one. The corridor was empty. This seemed to him an extraordinary piece of luck, a sign, if you like, that from now on everything would go his way. He would return home; he would put this behind him; he would be a model husband, a perfect father, from now on. Claire would never know.

Impossible, though, to legislate for chance. Who could have predicted that, at the moment he was lifting the frog from Gina Mayhew’s sheets, Hughie, on his way to the toilet in the dark, would trip over a truck left on the landing (and hadn’t Claire warned them, again and again, not to leave toys lying around at the top of the stairs?) and fall against the banisters and need to be taken to hospital in the middle of the night for eight stitches across his brow? Who would have thought that Claire would ever have cause to use the emergency telephone number he’d been leaving stuck to the fridge for the nine years he’d been coming on this trip? And who could guess what went through Claire’s mind as she stood in Casualty, with two wailing children, in the middle of the night, listening to a cross-sounding French youth-hostel worker telling her that her husband was not in his room, that they didn’t know where he was and did she want them to try a different room?

·  ·  ·

He rolls over onto his back and looks at Aoife. She is sitting with her legs drawn up, her back to the wall. “Don’t hate me,” he says.

“Of course I don’t hate you.”

“I hate me.”

“Well, I don’t see how that’s going to help.” She twists a hank of her hair around and around her index finger. “If you look at it one way, you could say it was all the frog’s fault.”

“That’s not funny.”

“OK.”

“It wasn’t the bloody frog’s fault.”

“All right. Sorry. Bad joke.”

“Very bad joke. It was my fault. Mine and mine alone.”

“Well, whatsherface—Gina—was there as well, wasn’t she?”

“Yes … but …”

“But what?”

“It was all my fault.”

His sister rolls her eyes. “I don’t think you can appropriate all the …” She shakes her head, as if trying to order her thoughts. “So how long did it go on?”

“Well, she joined the school at the start of the year, in September, and I spoke to her for the first time in, well, probably October, or was it November? And then I remember at the Christmas concert, which would have been December. Mid- to late December—”

Aoife cuts across him with a sigh. “How long was the actual affair?”

“I was trying to tell you. She joined the school in September and at Christmas there was a concert at which all the teachers had to—”

“Are you being deliberately annoying?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why are you droning on about Christmas concerts? Just tell me how long you and she were fucking.”

He sits up, outraged. “I really don’t think you need to use that—”

“What?”

He lies down again. “It was just the once.”

“Just the once?”

“Yes.”

“And you got caught?”

“Yes.”

“That was bad luck.”

“That’s not the point, Aoife. The point is I did a terrible thing. If you’re married you don’t just go around sleeping with colleagues. You’re supposed to—”

“Do you still see her?”

He sighs. He covers his face with his hands. “She left. The following week. Went back to Australia.”

“Hmm.” She grinds out her cigarette and flicks the butt out of the window. “You want to know what I think? I think it’s not as bad as you think it is. Of all the shitty things people do to each other, all the awful, dire, cruel things that happen in a marriage, this isn’t one of them. You shouldn’t have slept with her, sure, but it was only the once. You didn’t repeat your mistake. And you didn’t leave. You didn’t abandon your kids. Claire should be glad that she’s got a good one, she should realize—”

“Well, she’s not. And she’s right. You shouldn’t go around sleeping with other people when you’re—”

“Jesus, Michael Francis, you’re only human. It happens. People fall for other people. So you got a crush on someone. You had a one-night stand. We’ve all been there. But you realized you’d made a huge mistake. You put Claire first, you put the kids first.”

“No, I didn’t,” he moans, his face in his hands. “Not at all.”

“Oh, spare us the drama and the guilt. You did. You had a crush, you slipped up, you dealt with it, you got out. End of story.”

“It wasn’t a crush,” he mutters.

“Whatever you want to call it.”

“I loved her.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“I did.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did.”

“Didn’t.”

“Did.”

“You can’t tell until you’ve slept with someone at least three times.”

He pulls his hands away from his face. “Who says?”

“Me.”

“That’s shit.”

She leans forward on the bed. “Michael Francis, how many people have you slept with?”

“None of your business.”

“Two. Right? Maybe three, at a push?”

“I’m not telling,” he says, but starts to laugh.

“Well, then. You’re going to have to take my word for it. Sex is the great decider. The only decider. And you can never tell on the first time—that’s just the equivalent of a throat-clearing.”

“How many people have you slept with?”

“I’m not telling you.”

“Go on.”

“No.”

“Please?”

“No. You’d be shocked. You’re a different generation from me, remember.”

“Give us a hint. Is it more than five?”

“Oh, God.”

“More? More than ten?”

“Enough. I’m not playing this game. Tell me about Claire’s new friends.”

“More than twenty?”

·  ·  ·

Monica hovers on the landing; she turns her foot one way, then the other, observing how the instep of her shoe has acquired a scuff. She’ll have to deal with that today; always better to treat scuffs as soon as they happen. But will her mother have burgundy polish? She doubts it very much.

Beyond the door, in the room that was once hers, then hers and Aoife’s, then just Aoife’s, she can hear her brother and sister talking. More than ten, Michael Francis is demanding, more than twenty, and there is the sound of Aoife laughing, and she wants to say: How can you be laughing at a time like this? And also: More than twenty what? Tell me the joke.

Monica feels herself to be once more on the verge of tears. She tips her head back to stop them coming and finds herself looking up at the light fitting. An inverted bowl of swirled glass. Venetian, her mother said it was, but Monica found this hard to believe. It dates from the time their mother had a thing for the junk shops of Holloway Road. One of Gretta’s longer obsessions. Every week she’d come back with something—a picture made entirely of shells, an ashtray in the shape of the Isle of Man, an elephant’s-foot umbrella stand.
Gorgeous
, she’d call her purchases,
an absolute bargain
. How those shopkeepers must have rubbed their hands when they saw her coming. Her mother believed anything they told her, caught in the grip of an urge to buy, thinking she could transform her life, her home, with just one more purchase, just one more thing.

She has had just about enough of this day, Monica decides. It’s been a horrible day, the worst day, and its events turn and twist inside her, like a meal she can’t digest: the burying of the cat, the journey here on, first, a bus, then a sweltering train, seeing Joe,
of all people, and the baby, and the phone call to Gloucestershire and the search of her father’s desk, and then there was Aoife saying, It wasn’t me, I didn’t tell him. She wishes it were over. She wishes it had never happened. She wishes she could walk out of this house and never come back.

It can’t be more than thirty, Michael Francis is saying, beyond the door, you’re joking me, and Aoife is still laughing and saying, I’m not discussing this.

Monica steps up to the door and pushes it open. The laughter and talk stop, swallowed by silence, just as she had known they would. It is, she reflects, as she surveys her siblings, the downside of being the favorite. You are regarded as one of them, a spy from the parents’ camp; when they are together, you are tolerated but never included.

How to play it? Monica considers her options as she stands there. Michael Francis is sitting up, combing back his hair with his fingers, a chastened look on his face. He knows he shouldn’t have been chatting and laughing on a day like this. Aoife, however, shoots her a baleful look, extracts a cigarette from a pack at her side and places a book on her lap. The stolen library book, Monica sees.

Should she attempt to join in, to ask them, More than thirty what? Or should she produce the check stubs, shame them into focusing on the problem in hand?

The latter comes to the fore, without her even having decided upon it.

“What,” she demands grandly, “are you two doing up here? I’ve been working away downstairs, going through Dad’s things. You might think about helping, rather than just sitting about chatting, rather than just leaving it all to me, as usual.”

She continues to talk. Michael Francis stands, as if ready to help in whatever way she suggests; it’s always been the easiest thing in the world to make him feel guilty. Fish in a barrel. Aoife, though, rolls her eyes and slumps back against the wall. How can
it be, Monica finds herself thinking, that she didn’t tell Joe? The fact of Aoife telling him has sat for so long inside her head, has eaten away at her thoughts for years now. Her sister destroyed her marriage: this has been Monica’s internal drama, her defining injury. How can it be that she didn’t? And if she didn’t, then how did he find out? Did a nurse tell him, at the hospital? Or did he just work it out for himself?

Then there was that time in Michael Francis’s kitchen. She doesn’t like to think about that, can’t think about it, can’t even recall it clearly. It came in the midst of such a confusing, ruptured time. Did she really say those things to her sister? Did she really let them out into the space between them? She can’t have done. And yet she has the distinct feeling that she did. She had told Aoife about what had happened to Gretta after she was born. How can that be?

The sensation of wanting to speak to Aoife surges up in Monica—what exactly she might say is unclear—but there it is, the urge, unfamiliar, unaccountable, to express something, to communicate something to her sister.

Instead, she finds she is saying, “Have you seen these?” to Michael Francis and pressing the check stubs into his hands.

Her brother has to grab at them so as not to drop them. “No,” he says. “What are they?”

Monica is glaring at him. “Check stubs,” she enunciates.

“Well, I can see that, but what—”

“He”—Monica steps with a flourish towards the window and affects to be looking out at the garden, before turning around again—“makes a monthly payment of twenty pounds to someone he marks down as ‘Assumpta.’ ”

Her brother and her sister stare at her, eyes wide. She feels triumphant but isn’t sure why.

“It goes back”—she seizes a check stub at random from Michael Francis’s cupped hands—“as far as I can find. Every month, on the first, he makes out a check for ‘Assumpta.’ Look.”
She brandishes an entry, first at Michael Francis, then at Aoife. “Twenty pounds, first of the month.”

“Christ,” Michael Francis murmurs. He sits down on the bed opposite Aoife. He places the check stubs in a little pile next to him and starts flicking through them.

“Do we know anyone called Assumpta?” Monica asks.