Sunstroke and Other Stories (5 page)

The morning after Thomas’s visit, Christine was climbing the stairs to her office at the university when someone came running up below her.

—Dr Logan?

Christine paused, resting her pile of books and papers on the banister; someone young with a blonde head lifted to look up at her came around the stairwell with a clatter of heels.

—Dr Logan? Do you mind if I just talk to you for a moment?

Because she was expecting a student with a query about an essay, there was a disconcerting lapse of seconds before Christine registered that the blonde head belonged to Anna, Thomas’s girlfriend, whom she’d known for three years. Of course, there was no reason for Anna, who worked in the wardrobe department at English National Opera, to be on campus: she had never been there before. Also, she had never called Christine Dr Logan.

—Anna, darling, how lovely to see you. Whatever are you doing here? How did you find me?

—I want to talk about Tom.

In one smooth movement, feeling in her bag for her office keys, Christine decided that her first loyalty was to Thomas’s confidence. She turned on Anna a look wiped clear of any foreknowledge.

—Is something wrong?

Anna’s face was guilelessly open, sorrow stamped on it like a black bootprint. She could not speakuntil Christine had her door open and they were safely inside. Under the posters and potted plants Christine put the kettle on – Anna nodded an indifferent assent – to make peppermint tea. Anna pressed her palms against her cheeks: her hands were big and pink and sensitive, like her ears, with fingertips reddened from sewing.

—He’s seeing someone else.

At least Christine wouldn’t pretend not to take her seriously.

—Tell me about it.

—I mean, I don’t have any proof. Just the usual silly stuff.
Times he’s late coming home, things he says he’s doing that don’t sound quite right. Just something: like he’s all the time slightly impatient with me, but then he’s sorry for that and covering it up by being extra nice. I just know the way Tom would be if he were doing it.

—It could be nothing. I know he’s the nicest boy in the world, but underneath all that he can be moody.

—I actually thought he might have talked to you. I know he came to see you yesterday. I haven’t spoken to anyone else about this.

Anna had always treated Christine with tender respect. Now she scanned her intently with strained-open blue eyes, careless in her desperation. Love, this destroying kind of love, swelled the girl up, gave her a ferocity and an authority that Christine had never seen in her before.

She shook her head sympathetically.—He talked about work.

—He didn’t say anything about me that struck you?

—He worries about whether he’s doing the right thing, in his job.

—Is that all? Are you sure? I have to know what he’s thinking.

—He’s bored stuffing envelopes for someone he doesn’t believe in.

Anna sighed, frowning impatiently at Christine, or through her: she would know what she was looking for when she found it, and it wasn’t this. She wasn’t convinced that Christine was telling the whole truth. A pressured moment swayed in the air between them: Anna jostling roughly for more, Christine blandly resisting.

—He did mention wanting to travel in Europe. But I don’t know how serious that was.

—You see. I’ve not heard anything about that. Where in Europe exactly? When? Who with?

—He was probably only talking about a holiday.
Budapest, perhaps? He didn’t say anything about who with.

—There. You see?

—I suppose I simply took it that he meant alone.

Anna stood up from the swivel office chair and turned to stare out of the window at nothing, below: a nowhere space between the Humanities block and Social Sciences, furnished with a few benches and young trees. She was tall, the same height as Christine, but with a figure that Christine had never had: high full round breasts, a narrow graspable waist, long slender haunches that suggested some graceful running creature, a gazelle. Between her short cut-off top and the absurdly low waistband of her trousers was a long expanse of flawless goosefleshed golden skin, curving into a sweet round rump. The clothes seemed incidental; Anna’s young nakedness was in the room between them. With a sharpness almost like longing, Christine was aware of Anna’s piercings, even now that her back was turned: in her nose and her belly button, gold rings with little ruby-coloured beads. These young women didn’t know what they had. They suffered because they couldn’t have Thomas to keep, but they had the struggle over him, the game of pursuit and being pursued, and the sometime possession of him in the flesh. For as long as the thought lasted, that snatched possession felt to Christine like the only thing worth living for: a possibility of joy that was no longer available to the mothers of these children.

Anna turned from the window. Her face was blotched an ugly red with tears.

—What would you do?

—Well, I’d ask him, Christine said at once.—Don’t you think that he’ll tell you the truth?

—Yes, Anna said bleakly. —I expect he will.

At home Christine prepared an omelette for her supper. She washed lettuce hearts and vine tomatoes; she sliced
cucumber and made a vinaigrette. She mashed parsley into a lump of butter with lemon juice, and sautéed a little tinned tuna in a pan with finely chopped shallots. When all this was ready she broke the eggs into a bowl, to beat them. The second egg had gone bad. It felt strange to the touch, the shell weak and scabbed, but even as she registered this it was too late – she had cracked the egg against the side of the bowl and a foul greenish liquid poured out between her fingers, the thin texture of water, not albumen. A stink of putrefaction thrust wildly, rudely, into the kitchen.

She didn’t know what to do; she pressed her mouth and nose against her sleeve, not pulling the shell apart any further, not wanting to see inside. The mess was too awful, too violently offensive, to pour down the drain; it would surely come back at her, and perhaps at her neighbours, for hours afterwards. She found an empty peanut-butter jar with a lid, saved for recycling, tipped the whole lot into that, and screwed the lid on, only half allowing herself to look at it. Then she ran downstairs out of her flat to the bins outside, where she buried the jar deep among the rubbish bags.

Upstairs she opened all the windows, even though it was raining, ran water for long minutes down the sink. She bleached the egg bowl and the dishcloth she had used to wipe up the few drops of egg that had spattered on the counter; she washed her hands in the bathroom over and over. Still, every time she put her fingers to her nose she was haunted by the smell. The thought of the rest of her supper nauseated her; she tipped the salad and the tuna into the bin. She knew she was being irrational; she ought to phone a friend and make a joke out of her small disaster, and perhaps go out for a drink and something to eat. Instead she abandoned herself to sulking, lying on her side on the sofa, her hands clasped between her knees. The idea came to her out of nowhere that there would be a last time that
she brought anyone home to make love in her bed. It was not yet, it might not be for years, but it would come, even though she might not recognise it until long afterwards.

How could Christine envy Thomas’s two girls? Who could want to be one of the two foolish Anns, desperate for him? Or to be Alan, with his beard shaven and his silvery hair clipped close to his skull, hoping to start out on the adventure of passion all over again? How much happier she was, how much less time and energy it took to be Thomas’s mother: a relationship founded on one fixed and unalterable truth. Outside her spectacular arched window the wind threw rain in long ragged gusts across the housefronts and tore at the estate agents’ signs, setting them flapping in crazy ecstasy. Christine told herself that she was glad she was on this side of the glass, but she lay still on her sofa for a long time, and after a while she turned her back on the view.

THE COACH JOURNEY
from Cambridge to Bristol took six hours. Hilary Culvert was wearing a new purple skirt, a drawstring crêpe blouse and navy school cardigan, and over them her school mac, because it was the only coat she had. The year was 1972. In the toilets at Oxford bus station where they were allowed to get out she had sprayed on some perfume and unplaited her hair. She worried that she smelled of home. She didn’t know quite what home smelled like, as she still lived there and was used to it; but when her sister Sheila had come back from university for Christmas she had complained about it.

—You’d think with all these children, Sheila had said, —that at least the place would smell of something freshly nasty. Feet or sweat or babies or something. But it smells like old people. Mothballs and Germolene: who still uses mothballs apart from here?

Hilary had been putting Germolene on her spots; this was the family orthodoxy. She put the little tube aside in horror. Sheila had looked so different, even after only one term away. She had always been braver about putting on a public show than Hilary was: now she wore gypsy clothes, scrumpled silky skirts and patchwork tops with flashing pieces of mirror sewn in. Her red-brown hair was fluffed out in a mass. She had insisted on washing her hair almost every day, even though this wasn’t easy in the vicarage: the old Ascot gas heater only dribbled out hot water, and there
were all the younger children taking turns each night for baths. Their father had remonstrated with Sheila.

—There’s no one here to admire you in your glory, he said. —You’ll only frighten the local boys. Save your efforts until you return to the fleshpots.

—I’m not doing it for anyone to admire, said Sheila. —I’m doing it for myself.

He was a tall narrow man, features oversized for the fine bones of his face, eyes elusive behind thick-lensed glasses; he smiled as if he was squinting into a brash light. His children hadn’t been brought up to flaunt doing things for themselves, although the truth was that in a family of nine a certain surreptitious selfishness was essential for survival.

Now Hilary in her half-term week was going to visit Sheila in the fleshpots, or at Bristol University, where she was reading Classics. A lady with permed blue-white hair in the seat next to her was knitting baby clothes in lemon-yellow nylon wool which squeaked on her needles; Hilary had to keep her head turned to stare out of the window because she suffered terribly from travel sickness. She wouldn’t ever dream of reading on a coach, and even the flickering of the knitting needles could bring it on. The lady had tried to open up a conversation about her grandchildren and probably thought Hilary was rude and unfriendly. And that was true too, that was what the Culverts were like: crucified by their shyness and at the same time contemptuous of the world of ordinary people they couldn’t talk to. Outside the window there was nothing to justify her fixed attention. The sky seemed never to have lifted higher all day than a few feet above the ground; rolls of mist hung above the sodden grass like dirty wool. The signs of spring coming seemed suspended in a spasm of unforgiving frozen cold. It should have been a relief to leave the flatlands of East Anglia behind and cross into the hills and valleys of the west, but everywhere today seemed equally
colourless. Hilary didn’t care. Her anticipation burned up brightly enough by itself. Little flames of it licked up inside her. This was the first time she had been away from home alone. Sheila was ahead of her in their joint project: to get as far away from home as possible, and not to become anything like their mother.

At about the same time that Sheila and Hilary had confided to each other that they didn’t any longer believe in God, they had also given up believing that the pattern of domestic life they had been brought up inside was the only one, or was even remotely desirable. Somewhere else people lived differently; didn’t have to poke their feet into clammy hand-me-down wellingtons and sandals marked by size inside with felt-tip pen; didn’t have to do their homework in bed with hot-water bottles because the storage heaters in the draughty vicarage gave out such paltry warmth. Other people didn’t have to have locked money boxes for keeping safe anything precious, or have to sleep with the keys on string around their necks; sometimes anyway they came home from school to find those locks picked or smashed. (The children didn’t tell on one another; that was their morality. But they hurt one another pretty badly, physically, in pursuit of justice. It was an honour code rather than anything resembling Christian empathy or charity.) Other people’s mothers didn’t stoop their heads down in the broken way that theirs did, hadn’t given up on completed sentences or consecutive dialogue, didn’t address elliptical ironical asides to their soup spoons as they ate.

Their mother sometimes looked less like a vicar’s wife than a wild woman. She was as tall as their father but if the two of them were ever accidentally seen standing side by side it looked as if she had been in some terrible momentous fight for her life and he hadn’t. Her grey-black hair stood out in a stiff ruff around her head; Sheila said she must
cut it with the kitchen scissors in the dark. She had some kind of palsy so that her left eye drooped; there were bruise-coloured wrinkled shadows under her eyes and beside her hooked nose. Her huge deflated stomach and bosom were slapped like insults on to a girl’s bony frame. She was fearless in the mornings about stalking round the house in her ancient baggy underwear, big pants and maternity bra, chasing the little ones to get them dressed: her older children fled the sight of her. They must have all counted, without confessing it to one another: she was forty-nine, Patricia was four. At least there couldn’t be any more pregnancies, so humiliating to their suffering adolescence.

As girls, Sheila and Hilary had to be especially careful to make their escape from home. Their older brother Andrew had got away, to do social policy at York and join the Young Socialists, which he told them was a Trotskyite entrist group. He was never coming back, they were sure of it. He hadn’t come back this Christmas. But their sister Sylvia had married an RE teacher at the local secondary modern school who was active in their father’s church and in the local youth clubs. Sylvia already had two babies, and Sheila and Hilary had heard her muttering things to herself. They remembered that she used to be a jolly sprightly girl even if they hadn’t liked her much: competitive at beach rounders when they went on day trips to the coast, sentimentally devoted to the doomed stray dogs she tried to smuggle into their bedroom. Now, when they visited her rented flat in Haverhill, her twin-tub washing machine was always pulled out from the wall, filling the kitchen with urine-pungent steam. Sylvia would be standing uncommunicatively, heaving masses of boiling nappies with wooden tongs out of the washer into the spin tub, while the babies bawled in the battered wooden playpen that had been handed on from the vicarage.