Sunstroke and Other Stories (2 page)

Janie is solicitous. She is feeding Lulu, the shadows of the tree’s leaves flickering over her bared breast and the baby’s head moving with its rhythmic sucking. —Don’t get hurt, she says.

Rachel throws herself restlessly down on her back on the grass. —I should be so lucky, she says.—As if.

—I’d wait, Janie says,—for him to contact you.

Later in the afternoon, Rachel takes the children for a round on the putting green. They are hopelessly slow because there are so many of them and the little ones take so many shots to get the ball in the hole, even when Joshua and Tom cheat gallantly on their behalf. Melia throws down her iron, sulks, traipses after them, joins in again. By the time they are halfway around the green several groups of players are backed up behind them and Rachel takes a break to let them past. She runs over to where Janie is watching from beside the pushchair. She has had an idea. When they’ve finished on the green, why don’t they buy sausages and chips at the café so they don’t have to cook tonight? This liberation seems of a piece with the lovely day. The drudgery ahead – peeling potatoes, frying, feeding, washing up – lifts from the evening as lightly as a floating cloud. Why not? Life might be easy after all. Rachel phones Sam and Vince on her mobile to tell them to cook themselves something;
she has to walk off a little distance between the trees before she can get a decent signal.

When Rachel switches off the mobile and turns round, Janie thinks for a moment that Sam must have said something vile. Rachel’s face is concentrated with surprise; she walks back across the grass as if she were looking carefully where to put her bare feet.

—You’ll never guess, she says.

—What?

—Kieran’s turned up.

—Oh, Rach.

—But I really never did phone him. I never asked him. He’s been before, a couple of times. Apparently, he just turned up this afternoon. He knew we’d be at the cottage because Sam mentioned it. Sam’s going to make them something with pasta.

—Are you glad?

—It feels like a sign: that this thing I’ve imagined must be real, it must be something.

—I suppose so.

—I truly thought I might just be making it up. But you said to wait for him to contact me and he has. Sort of. It feels serious.

In all the agitations of the putting, Rachel’s hair has come partly out of its pins; long strands coil on her neck. She’s statuesque, with waxy creamy skin, like a Reynolds portrait; she doesn’t have the physical lightness or fluidity that suggests affairs, easy transitions between men, concealments. The boys are shouting from the green; it’s time for them to take their turn again. She picks up her putting iron thoughtfully. Janie can feel excitement radiating out from her like heat.

Kieran’s arrival could have been awkward for the men back at the cottage, because Kieran and Sam have been friends
for years, since they were at Cambridge, whereas Sam only knows Vince because of Janie and thinks of him as a bit of a lightweight. All morning, while Sam was at work on the computer, he was uneasily suppressing an awareness of Vince at a loose end downstairs, strolling around the rooms, reading yesterday’s paper, getting himself something to eat. Sam was irritated that the girls hadn’t taken Vince with them when they went to town; and then that they were staying out so long.

However, Kieran has brought with him a big polythene packet of weed, which, as they set about rolling it up and smoking it, produces an immediate cheerful camaraderie. They sprawl in the plastic garden chairs in the sunshine, smoking and drinking cup after cup of tea. Sam is so relieved he doesn’t have to make conversation with Vince all by himself that he becomes expansively friendly towards him. He always forgets what it is that Vince does for a living (usually he covers this up by talking about the contemporary novel: Sam had one published three years ago and is supposed to be working on the next). Tactfully now, he leads the conversation around to the kind of crossover electronic music he remembers Vince likes, and Vince tells them that he designed the lighting recently for a concert in the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Vince is eager to please. He is lean, with the wedge-narrow face of a well-bred collie, and his hair, bleached-pale silk, is cut to flop into his eyes. He has the kind of good looks that men don’t mind imagining women like. Sam doesn’t hold it against Vince that he himself is bulky-shouldered and putting on weight. His brown curls are thinning on top and he wears little gold-rimmed glasses; he fancies he looks a bit like middle-period Coleridge.

The peace of the afternoon seems deeper because of all the children’s toys lying where they were dropped, the bikes beached on their sides, the swing hanging still. The cottage is tucked into the bottom of a crease worked deep between
the rounded slopes of the hills; sheep are grazing in the field that rises so steeply behind them that you can almost touch their roof from the path that winds along its lower edge. In the wide bowlful of tender light the buzzards sail superbly, mewing and turning their pale undersides to the declining sun. Wrens are pecking the greenfly from Rachel’s sweet-pea plants.

Kieran is telling the others about his grandfather who worked as a salesman for a company selling private telephone systems, mostly to the collieries; he did business in the West Country coalfield that’s not far from the cottage, worked out and half forgotten now. The telephones they used down the mines were made of cast iron, he tells them; they weighed a hundredweight each. Kieran is shorter than the other two; he has a big distinctive head, with deep-hooded eyes whose glance mostly idles downward, and several days’ growth of strong black beard. His body is indefinite, shapeless because it’s wrapped as always in dark loose clothes, more layers than are necessary in this weather.

—He worked in North Wales, too, Kieran says,—putting in systems for the slate mines. Do you know that when the slate miners were dying of silicosis, average life expectancy thirty-five to forty, the local doctors wrote a paper blaming it on the stewed tea they drank?

Kieran always knows things; he trusts facts more than opinions. He talks with his usual concentration and exactitude, but something arouses in Sam the solicitude for his welfare that has been an element of their friendship from the beginning. Kieran’s face is puffy and a nerve is jumping beside his right eye; he hunches over the rolling papers in a tension of fatigue that makes Sam worry that the job in cardiology at Barts is disillusioning, and that Kieran is beginning to brood over this second career, which was supposed to save his life from academic futility. He isn’t telling his stories any more, about medical dilemmas or patients
presenting extraordinary symptoms. In these stories, his work in medicine seemed to open up a whole world of meaning.

Rachel telephones the cottage to tell Sam that she and Janie are going to buy tea for the kids in town. He’s relieved that she doesn’t seem to mind Kieran’s turning up. After another cup of tea and a share of the toke, Sam goes into the kitchen, opens the door of the fridge, and stands frowning perplexedly at what’s inside, then begins with an air of bemusement, as if he’s never done it before, to make the tomato sauce he’s actually been able to cook for at least fifteen years. He rattles around in the kitchen drawers hunting for wooden spoons and the garlic press. Kieran in the garden opens a bottle of wine he brought. Vince turns out to know something about wine. Kieran doesn’t; he just drinks it. He’s the same with food: he only eats to fuel his system.

Vince was uncomfortable at first, alone with these two men who are a few years older than him and whose displays of cleverness he finds both irritating and intimidating. He reads, but he hasn’t read any of the books they’ve read. (He knows that they studied literature, but as far as he can see they mostly talk about philosophy.) This morning, when Janie went out with Rachel and all the kids and Sam was writing upstairs, Vince wondered what point there was in his being here (wasn’t the whole idea of the holiday that he was supposed to spend more time with the kids?), and he even contemplated driving back to London and coming down to pick them up at the weekend. He was just wasting days that he could be putting in at the studio. After a few smokes, though, his sociable nature has reasserted itself and he is enjoying everything. He’s looking forward to the kids coming back; he really does want to spend more time with them.

When Sam goes into the kitchen to cook, Vince finds himself telling Kieran in great detail about the logistics of the lighting set-up he’s arranging for a show at the Albany.
He is gratified by Kieran’s questioning. He tells him about the concern in the industry over the decline in the quality of sound recording in television and documentary work, now that digital technology means that no one bothers to employ the old sound guys any more. The BECTU newsletter is full of laments for past standards. Kieran makes a much better listener than Sam, Vince thinks. Sam always wants to take over the conversation. Vince has tried to read Sam’s novel but can’t get past the second chapter. None of the characters ever have a thought that doesn’t lead into dense thickets of historical and cultural association. There is no room left over for anything actually to happen.

When Janie and Rachel come through the gate into the garden, Kieran stands up at once from where the men (stoned, by the looks of it) are sprawled on garden chairs. There are plates on the table and a saucepan lying nearby on the grass. Both women see quite clearly that the moment they come into view, their arms full of children and shopping, Kieran is looking for Rachel, and that on his face when he sees her there is a moment’s naked flash of feeling: of relief, perhaps, or desperation. He hurries forward to help them. In reaction to this glimpse of emotion, Rachel becomes queenly and remote, retreating into her role as homemaker, unpacking the shopping into the kitchen cupboards and the fridge, running hot water for the dirty pasta plates.

Soon after their arrival home, Sukey begins to droop. This isn’t usual: she is a cheerful little girl with stout strong arms and legs and a mop of straw-textured fair hair. Now she whines and clings to Rachel and says that her head hurts. Her face is flushed and hot, and as soon as Rachel gets her settled on the sofa with her doggie and her blanket she throws up over everything.

—Too much sun. My fault, Rachel says, on her hands
and knees with a cloth and a bucket of disinfectant and water. Sukey lies languidly across Sam’s lap, wrapped in a sheet and hanging on to a plastic bowl. —I should have insisted she wore her hat. I should have made them stay in the shade more.

—We needn’t go to the pub, Sam says.—If you think we oughtn’t.

There has been a plan for all the adults to go to the pub, which is ten minutes’ walk down the road into the village, leaving Joshua and Tom in charge, with mobiles in case of emergency.

—The rest of you go, Rachel says.—I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. But I’m feeling quite tired. I fancy an early night. And I probably should just keep an eye on her.

Kieran drops on his haunches till he’s at Sukey’s level, he speaks to her gravely, sweetly; she yields herself, allows him to feel her forehead, pull back her eyelids and look into her pupils, take her pulse. His fingers, with their bitten yellow nails and curling black hairs, are dark and coarsely male against her pearl-pink skin. Rachel’s eyes are fixed on Kieran’s face, calmly enough.

He says to Sukey, —Mummy knows exactly what the matter is. I would trust her. Mummies usually know best. I don’t think there’s anything to worry about here.

And he smiles into Rachel’s expectant open gaze.

Kieran doesn’t smile very often. When he does, his face becomes quite jolly and ordinary. It’s like a reprieve, as if a daunting problem had unexpectedly turned out to be easy.

—Why don’t you see how she is in half an hour? he says. —If she goes off to sleep peacefully enough I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t leave her. It would probably be good for you to get a break.

—Maybe, Rachel murmurs gratefully.

Sam thinks that if Kieran can get this out of being a doctor – this exchange of authority and submissive trust – then perhaps everything will be all right for him after all.

Upstairs, fifteen minutes later, Janie and Rachel are giving Dom and Melia a bath.

—Rach, why don’t you go to the pub? I really don’t mind staying in. Anyway, I’m worried in case Lulu doesn’t sleep through. I can call you if Sukey’s sick again.

—No, honestly. I’d rather not.

—I just thought, you know, if Kieran’s only here for tonight.

Rachel hides her involuntary smile in Dom’s frog-flannel. —There is something, isn’t there? she whispers.

—God, yes, Janie whispers back. —The way he looked at you when we came in.

—I know.

—Then go to the pub.

—No. I don’t think so. I’m not ready. I’m not ready for it yet.

Sukey doesn’t throw up again; her temperature comes down. Rachel reads to her and then sits beside her bed until she is soundly asleep. All the other children are asleep, too, by this time, except Joshua and Tom, who are watching a DVD in the front room. Rachel goes downstairs and out into the garden. The light is draining imperceptibly out of the sky; the velvety plum colour of the copper beech is drinking up darkness. Yellow light from inside the house glitters on the stone flags of the patio. Through the French windows, the TV flickers behind the silhouetted heads of the boys intently watching.

Vince comes back from the pub for his fags. He stops to smoke one in the garden. She has one, too, although she doesn’t usually, and they experience a rush of mutual
friendliness. Vince thinks Rachel’s a sweet woman, not his type but warm and nurturing. Rachel feels sorry for Vince – she thinks Janie gives him a hard time. He tells her that he’s really enjoying himself (he’s forgotten how he felt in the morning). He says that this place means a lot to him, that he and Janie really ought to try to move out of London. It isn’t fair bringing kids up there; they need wide open spaces and contact with nature. Rachel listens to him indulgently, knowing that nothing will come of it, and that Vince would fade away with boredom in the country.