Heat Wave (6 page)

James disappears into the cottage. Pauline applies herself to the bedraggled rose, which is a thicket of dead wood. She forgets the visitors as she snips and tweaks, thinking of Harry, which is unusual, she hardly ever thinks directly of Harry. But of course there was that letter. She has not yet got around to mentioning to Teresa that there was a letter from her father.

When Pauline thinks of Harry it is always the Harry of then, not now. The Harry of today – unthinkable and unreachable – is on another plane of existence, and Pauline is not much interested. Somewhere out there on the west coast of the United States Harry is walking and talking, wowing his California students with his laid-back British style, driving some sleek automobile up the driveway of his sprawling white house, getting into bed at night with his wife Nadia who is thirty-nine and teaches Creative Writing. Pauline cannot conceive of this Harry, nor does she wish to. He does not concern her. Teresa has visited Harry in California – has stepped off into that other plane of existence, has stayed in the sprawling white house and later released to Pauline tactful anodyne nuggets of information: the vibrant flowers that grow in Californian gardens, the ubiquitous swimming pools, Harry’s flowered Bermuda shorts. She treads carefully. Pauline is aware of Teresa’s anxious eyes, trying to assess the effect of what she is saying. She does not want Pauline to be upset. Reminded of what happened. Made jealous.

And Pauline is more moved by Teresa’s anxiety than by any potent whiff of Harry. She would like to be able to say – don’t worry, it isn’t anything to do with me, all this. Him, now. Her, who is neither here nor there so far as I’m concerned. I’m not jealous. And I can’t be reminded of something that has never stopped happening. That happens all over again, at bad times. And I can’t be jealous now – who once was a jealousy expert. Who knew every refinement of jealousy, every nuance, every convoluted ingenious twist of the jealousy business. But she cannot talk thus to Teresa, because she never has done. Instead, she inquires keenly about the beaches, the
shopping malls, the climate, and sees Teresa’s relief that the minefield has been negotiated.

Today Harry’s voice, his writing on an envelope, that California postmark, induce merely irritation. He has no power now – he is defused, unmanned. He is probably aware of this, and is accordingly offended. So he makes contact thus, tries to firm up a line between them. Pauline knows quite well what he would like. He would like a relationship that is subtly clandestine – a late flirtation with melancholy overtones. She has heard the proposition in his voice, has read it between the lines of his letters. And she has been filled with nothing more than mild outrage. Oh no, she has thought, oh dear me no. She sees Harry now as some feckless child whose excesses prompt weary boredom. He has become a shadow Harry – the potent Harry is the one who exists only in her head. This Harry, the forever emotive Harry, is lodged there for ever in some crevice of the mind, to come looming up and stop her in her tracks. He looks at her across a breakfast table. ‘So …’ he says. ‘Surprise, surprise.’ He rears above her in the bed, looking down with eyes that do not see her. He turns from an open window and says, ‘I’m sorry, Pauline. These things happen. There’s nothing you can do.’ Harry has gone, long since, but is forever there.

The rose is now tamed. Pauline straightens up, surveys her garden, satisfied, and goes inside. Later she will dig over Teresa’s bit. Teresa has quite enough on her plate this weekend.

The day tips over into afternoon. Pauline is busy. Once she glances out of her bedroom window and sees Teresa in the garden with Carol. Teresa is occupied with Luke; Carol sits on a rug with a newspaper in her hand and her face tilted towards the sun. Maurice and James are presumably closeted upstairs with Maurice’s manuscript.

That evening, Teresa serves roast lamb, followed by fruit salad. They eat in the kitchen. World’s End blinks and hums around them, its appliances in fine fettle. Outside, there is quiet. Just the sound of the wind in the hedge and, if you listen hard, the distant murmur of traffic on the main road. By the time they reach the cheese course Maurice has opened a third bottle of wine.

Teresa is wearing what she has worn all day (the shoulder of her
shirt is dappled with food stains – evidence of Luke). So do the men. Pauline has put on a different sweater. Carol has changed into cream silk pants with loose apricot tunic top and a pair of hanging silver disc earrings. Her face is tinged with pink. James, looking at her fondly across the table, says, ‘You’ve caught the sun, you know.’

‘I meant to. That’s what you come to the country for, isn’t it?’

‘This is a great place,’ says James to Pauline. ‘How long have you been here?’

Pauline tells how she acquired World’s End, ten years ago. Hitherto, the conversation has centred upon Maurice’s book. Maurice has been entertaining about some of the issues raised. He has been quizzical and provocative about his exhaustive examination of contemporary museum strategy. There has been an animated discussion about what the book should be called –
Profit from the Past
is the putative title right now, apparently.

‘I aspire to somewhere like this,’ says James. ‘You don’t know if it’s summer or winter, stuck in London all the year round.’

‘Ah,’ says Maurice. ‘Interesting.’ He gives James a thoughtful look. ‘You feel better in the country, then?’

‘Well, yes – of course.’

‘Why?’

‘Fresh air,’ says James. ‘Space. All that.’

‘Closer to nature?’

James is wary now. ‘If you want to put it like that. Surely most people feel that way, at some point or another?’

‘Of course,’ says Maurice. ‘We all do. Deep conditioning. Centuries of cunning sales talk, from Chaucer to Wordsworth.’

Carol laughs appreciatively. James looks a trifle put out. He helps himself to another glass of wine and says he’s glad to hear he’s not the only one to have been sold the natural scene, and he’d still fancy a place like this if it came his way.

‘Tedious stuff, nature,’ says Maurice. ‘A process of weary repetition. The ultimate conservatism.’ He is a little drunk, Pauline realizes. Nothing unusual. Maurice drinks a fair amount, fairly often.

Carol laughs again. ‘That’s original.’ She too is perhaps a little tipsy. She is enjoying herself, anyway, that is clear.

‘No,’ says Pauline. ‘It’s been said before. Anti-romanticism, that’s all.’

‘You’re a rotten cynic, Maurice,’ says James amiably. He seems to have recovered his good humour, if it was ever really lost.

Teresa now turns from the sink, where she has been stacking plates. ‘Maurice is showing off, I’ll have you know. He woke me up this morning to tell me to listen to the cuckoo.’ There is an uncharacteristic asperity here, both in tone and content. Only Maurice and Pauline are aware of this. Maurice appears uninterested. Pauline takes note.

‘Ooh … you fraud, Maurice,’ says Carol.

Maurice grins – undismayed, it would seem. He drinks some wine, and looks around the table. ‘Everyone all set for Bradley Castle tomorrow?’

‘Definitely,’ says Carol. ‘It sounds hilarious. Can we go to the Medieval Feast?’

‘Only available on Saturday nights, alas,’ says Maurice. ‘We shall have to make do with the Robin Hood Experience. Ten o’clock start, Pauline?’

‘No thanks,’ says Pauline firmly. She rises. ‘I have other things in mind, I’m afraid – you’ll have to excuse me. And I’m off to bed now. Goodnight, all.’

Outside, she pauses for a moment on the track. It is a fine night, with a quarter moon hanging above the hill – insubstantial, like a scrap of paper. At various points the blue-black sky flames with orange, just above the horizon, marking the nearest centres of population. World’s End itself stands amid the dark mass of the fields, glowing with light, incandescent, inviting. There is no other light to be seen, except the occasional moving beam from the road. Pauline goes inside and locks her door.

When first she began to use the cottage, at weekends and for holidays, she was a little worried about the isolation. So far, the only intrusion has been the theft of a lawnmower from the outside shed when Pauline was absent. The thieves were presumably deterred from having a go at World’s End itself by the prominently displayed burglar alarm which links the cottages to the police station. The
police attributed the theft dismissively to local boys, and the shed is now kept padlocked.

The burglar alarm often surprises visitors, fresh from the perils of the inner city. ‘Here?’ they say, looking round at the placid landscape. There is an assumption that tranquillity of scene must reflect a comparable muting of criminal propensities. Presumably they expect the occasional outbreak of apple scrumping, to be dealt with by a village bobby on a bike. The countryside, for some, is still locked into a time warp, a benign nirvana of eternal summer in which you might come across a party of hikers in shorts having a picnic by a haystack, under the blue skies and puffy clouds of a Shell poster.

Maurice, of course, pounces with glee on such nostalgic misconceptions. His concern though is with the fostering of such mythologies in the interests of commercial exploitation. Pauline is more taken with the gulf between the image of the country and the actuality, perhaps always more startling to those who live there for the wrong reasons, themselves duped by the truth. The countryside is a landscape of mayhem, and always has been – a place in which birds and animals are being shot, strangled, chased or dug up and bashed to bits. The countryside is deeply traditional, as is well known, and these are the deep traditions. One can of course be thankful that nowadays beggars are no longer dying in ditches or foundlings being abandoned in churchyards. Inhumanity flourishes still, but at least there is official mitigation of conspicuous distress. Even the hunted foxes and the battered badgers have their lobby, for what it’s worth.

On Saturday nights the local young go marauding in the agreeable centre of Hadbury – ‘… no. 14 High St (now Barclays Bank) of mid 18c, with handsome portico, the Ship Inn late 17c with mullioned windows and some pargeted plasterwork …’: Pevsner. Mainly they smash car windows and throw beer cans at shop fronts. Last month a posse of youths intent upon destroying the façade of the Co-op with a hammer were interrupted by a sixty-one-year-old man who was unwise enough to remonstrate with them. Affronted, the lads turned the hammer on him instead. He was beaten unconscious and remains in hospital with fractured skull and multiple injuries.

Pauline reads of such things in the local paper, alongside accounts of school fêtes and wrangles about planning permissions. A photo of laughing toddlers in the paddling pool donated by the Rotary Association is lined up beside another of the heap of compacted metal which records the latest pileup on the main road which runs through the valley – the World’s End valley, the valley of the wheat field and the hill crowned by a line of trees. The road is an old road with single lanes, too narrow for the volume of traffic it now carries, traffic heading north for such places as Birmingham and Coventry as well as the vehicles of local residents like Chaundy, making his way from one industrial enterprise to another, or Pauline, heading for Hadbury to do her shopping. Tourist coaches ply the road, going to Stratford. The ranks of heads swivel as the coach passes through the valley, its occupants riding high above the landscape that they observe through tinted glass from their air-conditioned container. And what do they see? A landscape that is beautiful? Or quaint? Or merely alien? Is their attention seized by buildings, or the crops grown, or the names on road signs or the logo of the Happy Eater on the roundabout?

Pauline has lived in many places. She does not consider herself as deriving from anywhere in particular. Her voice does not define her, as it defines many of the people in these parts. She grew up on the south coast, at Worthing, where her father had a medical practice. Subsequently, she has lived where circumstances have taken her. A northern university. A job in Manchester. During the Harry years she was in the south again, living in the cathedral town which found itself host to one of the new universities of the day, at which Harry was a rising star. Harry was in the right trade at the right time. Academia had become fashionable all of a sudden. The academic was no longer a shabby figure, respectable and profoundly tedious, but a bright and brittle fellow beloved of the media, game for television discussion programmes and swingeing pieces in Sunday newspapers. The student was born, as opposed to the undergraduate. And Harry was the man to seize the moment. He revelled in it. He was in demand everywhere. His particular line of popular history struck a fashionable note. The Americans got to hear of him – there was a
sabbatical term at Harvard, jaunts to conferences in California. He played the system, juggled with job offers, and swarmed the promotional ladder. Senior Lecturer, Reader, Professor at thirty-eight.

And thus Pauline has learnt to acclimatize, to live in a leafy suburb or a city street, to up sticks and move on when need arises. She has preferred some homes to others, but is not fettered by bricks and mortar. She now divides her time between her London flat and World’s End, suiting inclination and convenience. She can work from either place, with equal ease.

She thinks about all this, lying in bed waiting for sleep, a little too keyed up by wine and talk. She thinks of the anachronistic shell around her, the accommodating stone which slips imperviously from century to century. She thinks of all those others who must have sought sleep in this room – or fell into it, most likely, clobbered by toil. It is midnight, and she is restless, thinking no longer of the place or the people but stirred by something nameless, some apprehension she could not possibly identify. She switches on her bedside lamp, and the room is filled and warmed by its dusky light. She turns on the radio: the newsreader is talking of events in India, in the United States, in the Philippines. The world is at her fingertips, here at World’s End. She can sense it, reaching away out there, in darkness and in light, empty spaces and seething cities, all of it talking, talking.