Sunstroke and Other Stories (3 page)

When he’s gone, a clamour of rooks passes overhead. It’s darker now. Moths come visiting Rachel’s chive flowers and nicotiana in a pale blur of movement. A bat stirs the air with a beat of its leathery wings. There’s a moment’s impulse when she thinks she’ll tell the boys that she’s going to the pub after all, and that they have to listen for the babies. But she doesn’t move, she stays planted there in the still air darting with invisible movement, washed in streams of incense from the balsam poplar.

On the way home from the pub, Janie and Kieran fall behind the others because she stops to listen when he says that he can hear an owl hunting. She is genuinely delighted when she hears it too. These two haven’t spoken together much during the evening. Sam and Kieran were arguing about Iraq (it’s typical of Kieran that he won’t condemn the war, when everybody else does). She and Vince were having one of their talks, about how he’s got to start being home more, to make space for her to get on with her art work. (Vince didn’t point out tonight, not in so many words, that his work brings in money and hers doesn’t.) Janie has never quite trusted Kieran; she’s always thought that he was one of Sam’s Cambridge types, too absorbed in himself, preoccupied with the game of jockeying for intellectual position. She wonders what he’s up to with Rachel.

The stretch of road outside the pub is lit, but when they turn off to climb the hill to the cottage they are plunged into a darkness deep and complete and astonishing to these city folk, who are used to the perpetual urban orange seepage of light. They didn’t think to bring a torch. Walking into that darkness, solid and prohibitive, feels as counter-intuitive as walking into a wall.

Janie falters. —I’ve no idea where I’m going, she says.

—Hold on to me, Kieran says, reaching out. —Though I’ve absolutely no idea, either.

—I suppose at least if we fall into anything we’ll go together.

They can’t see each other; she feels his hand come searching, and she clasps his upper arm, when she finds it, with both her hands. She remembers what he’s wearing – a green shirt patterned with yellow motifs in some kind of slippery material – as if it were suddenly significant, although she’s been looking at it without interest (if anything, with distaste) all evening. The slippery fabric slides under her fingers. His hand blunders against her bare arm under the cardigan she has slung across her shoulders.

They can hear the others’ voices some way ahead. —OK, Janie? Vince calls.

—Fine!

—Fucking dark! Kieran shouts. —Fucking countryside!

—Navigate by the fucking stars! Sam shouts back.

Kieran and Janie have both drunk enough to be unsteady, hanging on to each other in the middle of the road without any visual clues to help them. They stagger and he grabs her and pulls her against him and then begins to kiss her face with a beery smoky garlicky mouth (the garlic was in the pasta, which she and Rachel didn’t eat). He lands kisses randomly at first, on her ear, on the side of her nose. After a moment’s surprise, she kisses him back, putting her hand up into his hair and finding his mouth with hers. It’s a long
time since she’s properly kissed anyone but Vince; she’s pleased that she seems to manage it suavely and skilfully. Then her head swims and they lose their balance and almost fall. He sets his feet apart on the road so he can support her; he puts an arm around behind her shoulders.

—Who are you? he says softly, so close she can taste his breath on her.—It’s so dark it could be anyone.

She can smell the salty sourness of his hair, too, as if he didn’t bother with shampoo.—I’ve no idea, she says. —Who are you? What just happened?

—Don’t stop. Don’t stop, please. His voice is urgent, pleading. He means it.

Janie thinks that this is what he meant, when he looked at Rachel in the afternoon: he was just desperate to lose himself like this. She will do just as well, for his need, as Rachel; and yet that’s not insulting but exhilarating. She feels the same way: he will do for her, just as well. She doesn’t stop. She starts again.

His mouth is hot and liquid. His lips feel swollen and thin-skinned; his beard growth is long enough to be sleek and not stubble-rough against her mouth and her wet cheek. She thinks of the many parties at Sam and Rachel’s where she has stayed dumb while Kieran has spoken out eloquently on some subject; and now that same tongue of his is shyly tentative against hers, and hers is bolder. It’s marvellously simplifying that there’s no time for this to become anything more than a kiss. They have only this moment before they have to follow the others and go back inside the light.

Vince calls again. His voice sounds a long way off.

—We’re listening to the owl, Kieran shouts back.

It makes a space between them. They draw slightly apart.

—Look what you’ve done, Janie says.

She couldn’t have said this to his face, in the light.

—What have I done?

She finds his hand, presses it against her breasts, where
they have leaked soaked circles of milk on to her dress. —I’m still feeding. I’m very full. Ready for the baby when I get home. You made it come.

—I didn’t know that happened, he says, not embarrassed, in a voice of calm scientific interest.

When he says that, Janie intuits a warning; faintly, like a note sounding far off in the hills. She has an instant’s intimation of how she could, in a different life from the one she has had so far, come to need this terribly and not be able to get it: this calm impersonal interest of his, turned on her.

But for the time being it is Kieran who is desperate.

Rachel thinks that she’s going to lie awake, absorbed in the momentousness of her life today. She’s thinking that she’s not going to go through with this thing with Kieran, not now, not this time. But that doesn’t spoil the euphoria that comes from knowing that he wants her, knowing that he has pursued her down here. It makes her feel as if there were a glorious abundant tide of secret possibility flowing around the world, enough for everyone. She feels that she will be able now to dip into this tide and take her share any time she chooses to.

Sam is lying flat, snoring with his mouth open, because he’s been drinking and smoking. She shoves him hard to tell him to turn over, and then when she cuddles up against his broad hot back she falls asleep almost at once.

Janie has brought Lulu into bed to feed her; Vince is reading a computer magazine. Her treachery in relation to him doesn’t seem important yet. (Vaguely, she thinks he owes her this.) If she imagines Rachel finding out what she’s just done with Kieran, after everything they talked about all afternoon, she feels a sickish kind of unease. She doesn’t for one moment, though, believe that she ought to have deflected Kieran’s kiss, which opened this thrilling new
space in the night. A real adventure with a man mustn’t be wasted. Everything is running away so fast; your deepest responsibility is to snatch at all the living you can.

And, anyway, she only kissed him.

Kieran asked if he could call her and she said she didn’t know yet, but as the baby sucks she feels herself hollowed out from her old life, empty and hungry, filled up with an excited wanting as painful and bloating as wind.

Rachel has made up the sofa bed with sheets and a duvet for Kieran. She kept worriedly sniffing it and saying that if it smelled of vomit then he could have their bed and she and Sam would be quite happy down here. He hadn’t been able to smell anything then but now he can. He lies awake wondering how families manage in this awful perpetual twilight of false sleep: the landing lights left on, the rustlings and the snatches of childish sleep talk, the bare feet padding downstairs, the murmured parental admonishments, the baby’s loud cry at some point, Sam’s snoring, the toilet light left on after a child’s visit so that the fan keeps whirring until he goes upstairs himself to switch it off. He hears one of them climb into bed with Sam and Rachel. He hears the bed creak and protest as the adults move over.

He remembers glancing into Sam and Rachel’s bedroom on his way to the toilet this afternoon when he arrived. The king-size bed, its grubby Habitat striped sheets and heaped-up duvet littered with clothes and toys and Rachel’s hairbrush and face cream, looked to him then like the outward embodiment of something he wanted, something he had missed out on. In the thin hours before dawn, the truth seems bleaker. He isn’t a good sleeper at the best of times. The duvet is too hot and then when he pushes it off he is too cold. He finds himself longing for the perfect silence of his own room, which he thought was what he wanted to escape from, coming down here.

SOMEONE TOLD CHRISTINE
that Alan was going to get married again: the new girl apparently was half his age. Christine didn’t think she cared. She hardly ever spoke to Alan these days; there was no need for them to consult together over arrangements for their son, now that Thomas was grown up and made his own arrangements. In fact, after the person told her the news, at a dinner party, Christine forgot it almost at once in the noisy laughter and conversation, and only remembered it again the following afternoon, when she was sitting at home, writing.

She was making notes for a lecture on women novelists and modernism; books by Rhys and Woolf and Bowen were piled all around her, some of them open face down on the table, some of them bristling with torn bits of paper as bookmarks. When she suddenly remembered the news about Alan she lifted her mind from its entanglement in the Paris and Ireland of the twenties and stared around in surprise at her real room in London: tall and white and spacious, with thriving house plants and, filling the wall at one end, a floor-length arched window. The rooms of the flat, where Christine lived alone, were all small – bedroom, bathroom, kitchen – apart from this big one, the centre-piece. Here she worked at a long cherrywood table; when she entertained she pushed all her books and papers to one end and laid places at the other. It was March. Outside the window a bank of dark slate-grey cloud had been piled up
by the wind against a lakelike area of silvery-lemon sky, smooth and translucent; the alterations in the light flowed fast, like changing expressions, across the stone housefronts opposite.

Christine’s flat was on the second floor; the house was one in a row of houses all with the same phenomenal window and cold north light, built as artists’ studios in the 1890s. Some had been renovated and cost the earth, like hers; others were still dilapidated, bohemian, mysterious, the windows draped with rags of patchwork and lace curtains or satin bedspreads. Inside the room, the weather and the light were always intimately present; there were long white curtains at the window but she didn’t close them very often. Instead of shutting the drama out, they suggested too eloquently immense presences on the other side. It had been difficult to choose paintings for the walls; in the end Christine had hung a couple of prints of Mondrian drawings. Nothing else had seemed quite still enough.

The doorbell rang, she padded in her stocking feet to the intercom.

—Mum? It’s Thomas.

She made them both coffee, hasty – measuring out the grounds, taking down the mugs – in her pleasure at his visit, her eagerness to get back to where her son, her only child, was sprawled in the low-slung white armchair in front of the window. She put milk and sugar on the tray, she was glad she had bought expensive chocolate biscuits. She found an ashtray: no one else was allowed to smoke in her flat. Thomas always for some reason chose that armchair, and then leaned his head back against the headrest so that the ridiculous length of him (he was six foot four) stretched out horizontally, almost as if he were lying flat; he crossed his ankles and squinted frowningly at his shoes.

Today he was wearing his disintegrating old trainers, not
the brogues he had for work; his unironed khaki shirt was half in and half out of his trousers. Christine, who hated uniforms, was almost ashamed at how handsome she found him in his obligatory work suit and tie; but she also loved him returned to his crumpled, worn-out old clothes, youth and beauty glowing steadily through them. Thomas was odd-looking, with a crooked nose and a big loose mouth. He hadn’t bothered to get his tawny hair cut; his skin flared sensitively where the raw planes of his face were overgrowing their childish softness. From under his heavy lids, the green eyes flecked with hazel glanced lazily, like Alan’s. If she thought of Alan at all these days (she hadn’t seen him more than five or six times in the last twenty years), it was only when Thomas’s likeness to him took her by surprise.

—So I hear your father’s getting married again?

—Who told you? There was a flicker of solicitousness in his expression, in case she minded.

—Someone who knows Laura. Poor Laura.

Laura had been Alan’s first wife, the one he was married to all through his affair with Christine, those long years ago. Laura had always made Thomas welcome in her home, even after Alan strayed a second time, and then a third, and then stayed away permanently. Thomas was close to his half-brothers and -sisters, and managed gracefully a whole complex of loyalties.

—I think Laura’s OK, Thomas said. —I think she’s pretty indifferent these days to what Dad’s up to.

This wasn’t what the person at the dinner party had told Christine.

—I hear the girl he’s marrying is young enough to be his daughter.

Thomas couldn’t help his grin: spreading, conspiratorial. He was easily entertained. —You know what he’s like.

—Have you met her?

—She’s OK. I reckon she knows what she’s getting into.
But put it this way: I don’t think it was her intellectual qualities he fell for. I thought that you might be in college today, he added. —I only came here on the off chance.

—Thursdays I usually work at home. Why aren’t you in the office?

—I phoned and told them I was ill. I haven’t pulled a sickie for ages. I’ve got a lot of stuff going round in my head and I wanted some time out to really think about it. And I thought I might stop by to have a bit of a chat about something that’s cropped up.

Christine was touched: he rarely came to her to talk about his problems. In fact, there had been almost no problems. He was an affable, sociable boy whose directness was of the easy and not the exacting kind. Thomas heaved himself upright in the chair, so that his knees were jackknifed in front of his face; he stirred two spoons of sugar into his coffee and ate chocolate biscuits.