Read Heat Wave Online

Authors: Penelope Lively

Heat Wave (2 page)

BOOK: Heat Wave
4.09Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

It is because of this book that Maurice and Teresa are at World’s End this spring. Before their marriage, Pauline used to let out the larger of the two cottages while keeping the smaller one for her own use. When Teresa married Maurice, Pauline gave her the larger cottage as a weekend retreat. This year, Maurice has announced that they will spend the whole summer down here so that he can apply himself undisturbed to the book, of which the first draft is complete. He will of course have to make occasional forays to London to check references, and his editor, James Saltash, will be coming down to World’s End sometimes at weekends to go through the manuscript with Maurice. World’s End will become an editorial powerhouse this summer.

Pauline gave up her job five years ago. She now works from home as a freelance copy-editor, in demand because she is widely known and highly competent. She takes on as much or as little work as she wishes, and spends her time rescuing authors from semantic outrages and the carelessness of creative zest. She plods through novels checking that the heroine’s eyes have not turned from blue to grey half-way along, that spring has not suddenly given way to winter, that Sunday does not follow Monday. She queries awkward sentence constructions and tactfully indicates that the colon and the semicolon are not interchangeable. The manuscripts on which she works are peppered with her succinct and neutral comments – questioning
the sense of a tortuous passage, drawing attention to a cliché. The author will of course go his or her own sweet way in any case. Many will accept some or all of Pauline’s amendments, with a varying degree of resistance. The intransigent few will fight to the last comma for the principle of authorial infallibility. Pauline rather enjoys these exchanges – the trading of dictionary references and literary precedent, and of course so far as she is concerned if they so wish they can go down with all solecisms blazing. It’s no skin off her nose. She has done her stuff, and enjoyed the doing of it, working away through long quiet days at her desk in front of the window, lifting her eyes now and then to note the changing light on the field as the sun swings up and over, getting up from her chair to take down a reference book or make a cup of coffee.

Pauline knows this field intimately – its range of mood and colour, its seasonal changes. It is growing wheat – winter wheat which at this May moment is a rich green pelt. It is a large field and will yield sixty tons of wheat in a reasonable harvest. So the emerald quilt which ripples silver in the wind represents around £5,000. Pauline has established these facts from Chaundy, the farmer from whom she bought World’s End. Chaundy is not an overly friendly man and their relationship is one of guarded acquaintance, no more, but from time to time they meet on the track and a desultory conversation takes place. On one of these occasions Pauline solicited this information about the field.

‘Thinking of taking up farming?’ said Chaundy, sardonic.

‘Certainly not. But I look out at that field all the time – I thought I’d like to know more about it.’

Chaundy was not interested in Pauline’s interest. He answered her queries grudgingly, in a throwaway manner. Acreage. Yield. He is not interested in Pauline, come to that. She is simply someone with whom he once did business and who is now a neighbour, but in a peripheral way, since she is not of his community. He is not obliged to deal with her from day to day. She does not work for him, or sell him fertilizer, or buy his grain, or share his concerns. She does not inhabit his world, except in a literal sense.

Chaundy is a big farmer, as they go. He has land here, and also
over in the next valley. He runs a caravan site ten miles away, and a pick-it-yourself fruit farm on the other side of the hill, complete with farm shop and restaurant. He also has a large range of broiler chicken houses. Chaundy probably does not get his hands dirty very much, these days. Mostly he drives from one to another of his concerns in a newish but battered Peugeot, issuing terse instructions. Quite a lot of people work for Chaundy, most of them for rather small amounts of money.

Up at the top left-hand corner of the field, where its neighbour begins, there is a triangle of glaring yellow which tips away over the crown of the hill. Oilseed rape. Pauline is not entirely sure where she stands,
vis-à-vis
oilseed rape. Aesthetic opinion is sharply divided over this issue. There are those who find it cheerful – a nice splash of colour. The purists – who are the most vociferous – deplore it as a discordant and jarring note amid the subtle tones of the English landscape. The stuff is decried as an intrusive blight from across the Channel (EC agricultural policy has made rape a profitable cash crop) and it has therefore achieved sinister political overtones, as well as being a nasty colour. Pauline, looking over at that citron flag on the hillside, has mixed feelings. Sometimes it does indeed strike a note of gaiety – she thinks of the warm south, of fields of sunflowers. At others it appears as an aggressive shout against the skyline. But in any case it will pass. By June it will be extinguished, in line with the ephemeral qualities of this landscape.

Thus, World’s End, on this May afternoon which shades off now into evening, as Pauline tidies her desk, leaves her study and goes down that odd precipitate staircase to see what she has got in the fridge for supper. And thus also Pauline, Teresa, Maurice. Mother, daughter, son-in-law and husband. Neighbours, relatives, poised for this agreeable summer of industry and companionship.

2

It is ten o’clock on the following morning. Pauline, Teresa, Maurice and Luke are gathered together in the open-plan kitchen of Teresa’s cottage.

Teresa is talking to Luke – the murmuring pigeon-talk of a mother to a baby – inconsequential chatter to an adult ear, a luminous revelation to the baby. ‘
There
we are …’ says Teresa. ‘Trousers on now. One leg … Other leg …
Red
trousers today.
There
we go.’ And Luke perceives that the sounds he hears are mysteriously linked to the things he sees. ‘Da,’ he says. ‘Da.’ Or perhaps ba, or doh. His sounds are not yet hitched to anything – to objects nor yet to vowels or consonants. They are simply sounds. The radio talks about an election in Italy, breaks off for a burst of music, talks now of slaughter in Rwanda. Pauline is reading a letter. She looks across at Teresa and says: ‘Jane has this flat in Venice for September. Maybe I’ll go there for a week.’ ‘Oh, right …’ says Teresa. ‘D’you want some banana, Luke? Mmmn … nana?’ Maurice is on the phone: ‘So we’ll see you both this weekend. Excellent. Oh … and could you bring a copy of Defoe’s
Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain,
James, if you can lay hands on one? Thanks.’

There is a blizzard of words in this room – Luke is bombarded with them, they stream through his head like particles through matter. He is battered by sensation – the white noise of language, the brilliance of the visible world. For him the room and the day blaze with novelty and revelation. The kettle whose shining surface dances with the reflection of blue flowers in a vase; the chair whose feet shriek against the floor as his father rises. Knowing nothing, he is astonished by everything. He exists on a different plane from Teresa,
from Pauline, from Maurice – seeing what they cannot see, hearing what they cannot hear. Of the four of them, it is Luke who is in a state of shimmering perception. He sits there on Teresa’s lap, a visitor from a world of lost capacities. ‘Da,’ he says. And Teresa beams, uncomprehending. ‘He’s got that rash again,’ she says to Pauline.

Maurice is standing now at the window, holding a cup of coffee. He turns, lowering his cup. ‘We might go somewhere on Sunday, if this weather holds. James and Carol are coming for the weekend. James wants to go over Chapter Six again.’

‘I’ll do a big shop in Hadbury this morning,’ says Teresa. ‘Maybe we’ll have a leg of lamb.’

Pauline stows her letter in her pocket. ‘Carol?’ she says.

Maurice has picked up the newspaper now, is scanning the front page, abstracted.

‘She lives with James,’ Teresa tells her mother. ‘Carol … oh, what is her other name, Maurice? Anyway … will they come on Friday or Saturday?’

‘Saturday morning,’ says Maurice. He puts down the paper, finishes his coffee, moves towards the door. ‘So … back to the grindstone.’ He looks over at Pauline. He smiles – a propitiating, lop-sided, characteristic smile. ‘How’s your grindstone at the moment, Pauline? Anything interesting?’

‘Not specially,’ says Pauline. There is the faintest edge to her voice, a tiny hardness. Perhaps it is because she has opened another letter and is picking at a staple in the corner of some papers, always an irritating process.

Maurice leaves the room. He goes upstairs. Both women hear the door of his study close. Pauline succeeds in detaching that staple and glances through a torrent of justifications from an author which he, in his fervour, had stapled together out of sequence. She continues to see Maurice’s face superimposed above the text, like the Cheshire Cat, and thinks about faces – those presences in the mind. A face is an image, as insubstantial as a way of moving or the inflexion of a voice. A face cannot be translated into words – or only up to a point.

Maurice’s face is triangular. The forehead is broad and the eyes set wide apart, the nose is thin and quite pronounced. The planes of
his cheeks slope sharply inwards to a pointed chin. His hair springs upwards, thick and wavy and light brown. Words … which give a notion of what Maurice looks like, which might form the basis of an Identikit portrait, but which are a feeble reflection of the particularity of features – that quality which means that those who know him well can conjure up Maurice’s face at will, which means that Luke could pick it out from a dozen others and say, ‘Da!’

Luke’s face is an assemblage of references. Pauline sees Maurice there, in the spacing of his eyes. She sees Teresa’s nose and a suggestion of her high curved eyebrows. She sees also something of herself – a quality of expression that she catches in the mirror and has caught also as Luke turns his head and stares up at her. She sees also a flicker of her mother and a shimmer of her father and once she has caught an echo of an aunt she barely knew but whose distinctive features look out from a photo in a family album. It is as though Luke is in the process of trying out this feature and then that until eventually he arrives at some acceptable synthesis.

Teresa’s face is oval, pale-skinned, dark-eyed. She has thick eyebrows and a high forehead from which her dark hair is pulled back and held by a band at the nape of her neck. When Pauline looks at her she sees all this, and sees also her serious, faintly anxious expression. But she sees something else as well, perceptible only to her, which is that eerie echo of self that a parent sees in a child. Teresa and Pauline are not alike – Pauline’s features are broader, flatter, her mouth is larger, her eyes are greenish, her hair a coppery brown streaked now with grey. Nevertheless, that echo is there, that mirror-glimpse of self – elusive, indefinable, but inescapable. There she is, thinks Pauline – Teresa. And there somehow am I too, she does not think but simply sees. And there also, inescapably, is Harry.

‘More coffee?’ says Teresa.

‘Mmn … Thanks.’

Teresa, Pauline and Luke are alone in the kitchen. Everything is subtly different, as though the wind has shifted direction. There is a change of key as the two women speak. Certain resonances are lost, others have arrived. Only Luke, busy with his own concerns, remains constant.

‘You may as well leave Luke with me while you do the shopping,’ says Pauline.

Teresa demurs. ‘You’re working.’

‘I can stop working and catch up tonight. My time is my own these days.’

‘OK then,’ says Teresa. ‘Thanks. Anything I can get you?’

‘Bread, I could do with. Some fruit. I’ll have a think.’

There is silence, invaded only by Luke’s comings and goings around the room, his commentaries, his exclamations.

‘Nescafé,’ says Pauline. ‘And plain yoghurt. Otherwise I’m fine.’

‘Right.’ Teresa is making a list. She breaks off and stares at the table. She chews her lip. Perhaps she is thinking about groceries. Perhaps not.

Pauline looks at Teresa. ‘Where are they at, on this book? Maurice and James thing?’

‘Saltash. They’re sort of at the beginning of the second draft, I think.’

‘Maurice seems to need a lot of editorial input.’

‘Maurice says James is very constructive. James has been talking to this film guy too and they’ve got to be sure Maurice gets the book right if the TV programme is really going to come off.’

‘Ah.’

‘Luke could have scrambled egg for his lunch,’ continues Teresa. ‘If I’m late back.’

‘What about Maurice? Do I provide him with scrambled egg too?’

‘Maurice won’t mind waiting,’ says Teresa.

A mundane enough exchange. Useful, though – an arrangement has been made, information has been given and received. There are echoes and reverberations, there is a shimmer on the bland surface. Ordinary words are loaded, there are echoes of other events, other exchanges, of different manifestations of Pauline, of Teresa. A cycle of inescapable involvement is manifested in each inflexion of their voices. They are talking not just of shopping lists and lunch, but of a shared history.

And Pauline, seeing Teresa chewing her lip as she stares mutely at the kitchen table, sees her dissolve for an instant into another Teresa,
staring at a different kitchen table in another house – to look up suddenly and say, ‘I’m not going out with Don tonight.’

‘Huh!’ says Pauline. ‘Standing him up, are you?’

Teresa looks awkward now. ‘Not exactly. Just … well, it’s all gone a bit stale, so I said maybe it’s better if we don’t go out together tonight.’

‘It’s called standing a person up,’ Pauline advises. ‘If you’re just sitting there fancy free could you do me a favour and stir that. I have twenty people coming here in three hours’ time.’

Teresa, now, is mortified. She has gone pink in the face. She is a kind girl, that is the problem.

‘He’ll get over it,’ says Pauline. ‘It’ll be water down the drain by the end of next week.’

BOOK: Heat Wave
4.09Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

El hombre de arena by E.T.A. Hoffmann
Kiss of Ice (St. James Family) by Parker, Lavender
The Purple Heart by Vincent Yee
15 Shades Of Pink by Scott, Lisa
Country by Danielle Steel
America’s Army: Knowledge is Power by M. Zachary Sherman, Mike Penick