Heat Wave (8 page)

‘People are always ringing,’ says Maurice. ‘When do they ever not ring?’ He stands there, exuding well-being, until Teresa proposes that he should help carry things in. He moves at once to do so, he is all compliance. He puts the phone down on the garden wall and gives her a smile that displays compunction, apology, affection – a smile that is designed to disarm, and does so. Pauline sees Teresa’s body relax. Teresa’s back is turned towards her so she cannot see her expression but she knows how Teresa is looking, how her face will have softened, how her eyes will seem larger as she absorbs Maurice’s smile, as she basks before it.

Pauline gathers up her shopping from the car and goes into her cottage, closing the door behind her. She puts her bags down on the kitchen table and stands there distracted, as though she were listening to something. She is no longer at World’s End, it would seem. Some long arm has reached out and dragged her elsewhere, and what she sees or hears has made her face taut and pinched.

She stands thus amid the tranquil kitchen sounds and then the moment passes and she is back again, unpacking the new toaster, stowing food in the fridge. The green digits on the front of the cooker have marked up a few seconds, that’s all. Nothing has happened here except the passage of time, and, for Pauline, some echo from elsewhere.

The builder’s men who gutted World’s End turned up various pieces of detritus which they produced for her inspection. The bowl of a clay pipe, shards of Victorian china, metal buttons. These fragments
are now in a bowl on the kitchen dresser, filmed with dust and oddly tenacious. It would be unthinkable to throw them away – and yet someone once did. Discarded, lost, in the midst of busy lives. And hanging on stubbornly today in the little Italian majolica bowl on the middle shelf of Pauline’s pine dresser.

The dresser was bought from a dealer who specialized in touring Ireland in order to purchase outmoded furniture from country folk at knock-down prices. It had been taken to bits, dunked in some aggressive chemical bath, reassembled and tricked out with new brass handles. It is a useful object and pleasing enough to look at but has to Pauline no particular resonance beyond the price she paid for it and the struggle there was to get it into the room. The majolica bowl, on the other hand, is loaded. The majolica bowl has been in her possession for nearly forty years.

When Pauline was eighteen she went with a girlfriend to Italy during the summer before she was due to start at university. Neither she nor her friend had been abroad before without their parents. Pauline was an only child. Her adolescence had been anxiously supervised by her mother, who had little else to do. Pauline did not see much of her father, a busy doctor, and had a restless and often barbed relationship with a mother whose approach to life was one of deep caution and mistrust. All her mother’s energies were devoted to sidestepping the malevolence of fate. You avoided unnecessary car journeys for fear of accidents. You dosed yourself unrelentingly with prophylactics. You were wary in your dealings with others, lest you fall in with those who might make demands or turn out to be undesirable associates. It was a stance that had exasperated Pauline at eight, never mind at eighteen. Why can’t I? she cried, throughout her childhood. Why shouldn’t I? Her own efforts were concentrated upon outflanking her mother, upon finding ways to circumvent the restrictions imposed, upon living instead of holding life at bay.

The trip to Italy took place after interminable arguments and negotiations. Eventually Pauline’s mother capitulated, with the extraction of various promises. No hitch-hiking. Cash and documents to be strapped to the person at all times. Never become separated.

As they moved south the girls felt themselves ripen and expand. By the time they reached Naples they were tanned and exuberant, on the rampage, heady with sun and food and cheap wine, with their own bouncing hormones and the admiring glances of young men. Pauline’s friend, who had been considered rather fast at school, said, ‘I can’t seem to think about anything but sex,’ and Pauline nodded. After that it was unspoken, but understood. They allowed themselves to be picked up – with circumspection at first and then with increasing abandon. They dallied with a couple of German students at Pompeii, but found them insufficiently compelling and dropped them. And then, on a beach, they took up with a pair of Italians. Charming. Attentive. And ultimately irresistible. For two days the four of them flirted and skirmished in and out of the sea, in the local cafés, on the steps of the girls’ cheap hotel. On the third evening, by tacit agreement, they split up into two couples.

Pauline was a virgin. Her school friend thought she probably was, but there was an element of doubt. Afterwards, they did not compare notes but spent the rest of the holiday waiting in terror for their periods. When the friend was reprieved first, bouncing out of the lavatory in the
rapido
to Milan to say, ‘I’m OK! I’m OK!’ Pauline almost hated her. She had found this initial sexual experience as disappointing as tradition demanded, but could see that the process could have definite possibilities. She was torn between the excitement of this perception and the panic about her awaited period. Which arrived at last on her first day back home, just after she had arranged upon her dressing table the majolica bowl bought her as a memento by the Italian youth whose features she could no longer remember.

Thus the majolica bowl, which has somehow clung on all her life, as a repository for paper clips or rubber bands, and now for these archaeological trifles. It would be forever associated not so much with the vibrant young Italian who gave it to her as with her own surge of relief when she knew she had got away with it, she was not pregnant, she did not have to pay the price. She had arrived home in a state of jitters, hardly able to speak to her mother, who hung around her lynx-eyed, knowing something was up. And the next day
she had been aglow with relief, a new woman, life stretching rosy ahead. Had her mother wondered, guessed?

Pauline understands her mother’s feelings now. She understood them long ago, in that moment of astonished insight when she held her own child and realized that there is a further dimension to love. The perception did not bring her any closer to her mother, whose assumptions and expectations were so far removed from her own as to create an unbridgeable chasm. But she was able to see why her mother had behaved as she had, why she lived in a state of perpetual dread. That Italian holiday must have cost her dear. And of course her worst fears had been realized, as she may have suspected. Well – perhaps not quite her worst fears. There are greater catastrophes than lost virginity.

Today at World’s End the majolica bowl is not an echo to halt Pauline in her tracks so much as a continuous low murmur. It has the insistent subliminal hum of a physical object that has survived from then to now and continues quietly to reverberate. Pauline registers this reverberation as she moves the bowl to one side in search of the key to the window lock, which should also be here on the middle shelf … And yes, here it is, lurking behind a postcard of San Francisco, sent by Hugh, off on some book-related expedition earlier in the year. She opens the small window at the side of the room, which has not been opened yet this summer, and the sound of that lark comes flooding in. Along with the banshee wail of a police car on the main road and the throb of an invisible tractor somewhere beyond the brow of the hill. Pauline’s kitchen resounds from within and without, as she moves around preparing herself some lunch – washing a lettuce at the sink, chopping a tomato, thinking of neither the majolica bowl nor the tractor but of the manuscript on her desk, at which she must work this afternoon.

‘Odd to see Maurice as a
père de famille
,’ says James.

‘If that’s what he is,’ says Pauline.

They are driving to Worsham. The party has split up, because there is not room for all of them in one car. Pauline has joined the outing without enthusiasm. She knows Worsham – a tourist honeypot, which is of course why Maurice wants to look it over. But she has not left World’s End for the best part of a week, and it is a fine day, and Maurice is insidiously persuasive. He has this curious need for an entourage. He likes company – the more of it the better. And as they milled around the cars, installing Luke in his car seat, settling who would drive, Maurice elected that Pauline should be James’s passenger, since she knew the way.

‘Well, I suppose one baby doesn’t make a
famille.
’

That was not what Pauline meant, but she lets it pass.

‘Actually, I’m rather beginning to see the point of children myself,’ James tells Pauline. ‘Not right away, maybe – but in due course.’

Oh dear, thinks Pauline. In that case you’d better consider a change of partner. In due course.

She is beginning to warm to James and suspects regretfully that he is an innocent, which means that he may get a bashing in his profession, one which becomes rougher by the year. He works as editorial director of an imprint that is under the umbrella of one of the big conglomerates.

‘No hurry,’ continues James comfortably. ‘Of course it was a bit different for Maurice. He’s forty-four, after all.’

‘As I understand it, the human male is capable of reproduction well into the seventies.’

James shoots her a sideways glance, unsure how to take this. ‘All the same, most of us would prefer not to put it off quite as long as that.’

The roads are busy, on this high summer Sunday, and they have lost sight of Maurice’s car, which is somewhere ahead. Large numbers of people appear to be cruising the landscape in search of diversion. And everywhere there are banners and hoardings by the roadside which announce what is on offer – rural fayre, clay-pigeon shoot, self-pick strawberries. Half the population apparently earns its living providing the other half with something to do. Pauline points this out to James, who leaps upon the point with enthusiasm.

‘Exactly. So Maurice’s book is absolutely right for now. It’ll be one of our lead titles for next autumn. Provided we can get it into production in time. If the TV angle works out this could be an important book. Which is why I’m hanging around Maurice this summer. Make sure he keeps at it. Maurice does rather tend to get distracted – shoot off after some new interest.’

‘I’d noticed,’ says Pauline.

‘It’s part of his fascination, of course. That ability to get hooked on the most unexpected things. And then write a clever book about it. We have a hunch he’s going places, Maurice.’

Pauline asks James how long he has known Maurice. She sees that he is under the Maurice spell.

‘He came to talk to us about the book three years ago, when he was just getting his ideas together, and of course we jumped at it. It’s been one of the best things that’s come my way, working with Maurice.’

‘Go right …’ Pauline interjects. ‘We’re nearly there.’

James turns off on to another road and into another line of traffic. ‘HarperCollins are doing it in the States. They’re really keen. The American section of the book is strong – he’s got some sharp stuff on historic theme parks. Very witty, very Maurice. It’s going to be a strong book – I’m really excited about it.’

Oh, books, books … thinks Pauline. Pernicious things.

‘I once started to burn a book,’ she says. ‘In typescript.’

James glances sideways at her, startled.

‘Don’t ever breathe a word, or I’ll be done for, professionally.’

‘I swear. Why did you only start to burn it?’

‘Deep conditioning got the better of me.’

‘Whose book was it?’

‘My husband’s. Former husband.’

‘Oh,’ James sounds disappointed. ‘I thought it would have been one of your authors.’

‘Better go left here,’ says Pauline. ‘There’s a car park, I think.’ For they have arrived at Worsham, and must confront the problem of how to detach themselves from the car and become people rather than traffic. James will not now hear of the burning of the book. ‘There are the others,’ he says. ‘They’re going that way too.’

It is quite difficult to burn a book. She takes the first page – page one of Chapter One – and crumples it up in her fist. She puts it into the grate of the tiny Victorian fireplace which is a decorative feature in this restored and centrally heated terraced cottage in a small cathedral town. She strikes a match and puts it to the ball of paper. It flares up. Some feathers of charred paper float out on to the rug. She goes to the table and takes page two from the pile of typescript, crumples it, places it in the fireplace, strikes another match.

Each time she revisits this scene it becomes like a Dutch interior. She sees it with interested detachment: the quiet room across which lies a wedge of sunlight from the open door, beyond which can be seen the pram in the garden, in which a baby sleeps, the young woman who stoops before the fireplace, doing something with paper and matches.

The scene that Harry saw, when he walked into the room. Except that by then she was sitting at the table.

He halts, sensing that something is awry. ‘What have you been doing?’

‘I’ve been burning your book,’ she says.

And he goes white. She has never seen anyone do that before. His face changes colour before her eyes – bloodless, drained. He cannot speak. He simply stands there, staring spectral at the fireplace, at the
black mound therein, at the charred feathers on the rug. And then his glance swivels to the table. He sees the pile of typescript jutting from under the newspaper. He puts out a hand.

‘Don’t worry,’ says Pauline. ‘I couldn’t go through with it. I’m too well brought up.’

He is examining the typescript, feverishly. He sees that only the first two pages are missing. The blood comes back into his face.

‘But I made a start,’ says Pauline. ‘The spirit was willing. It was the flesh let me down.’

He looks at her now, instead of at the typescript.

‘Why?
Why –
for Christ’s sake.’

She looks back at him. ‘You know,’ she says.

Worsham is everything that Maurice had hoped for – awash with people. The pavements of the wide central street are teeming, as the crowds move slowly past the antique shops and the picture galleries and the pubs with flowered façades. Maurice has shot off into the Information Centre to pick up some brochures, of which he has a collection that must by now be of national importance. Carol has drifted after him. Teresa is administering juice to Luke.