Sunstroke and Other Stories (8 page)

By the end of the week Sheila was well enough to go to lectures again, and on the Saturday she came to the bus station to see Hilary off. She insisted on carrying Hilary’s suitcase, which swung in her hand as light as if there was nothing in it, now that their father’s old dictionaries of classical mythology had been unloaded.

—I didn’t feel anything, you know, Sheila said as they walked, as if she was picking up on some discussion they had only broken off a few moments before, although in fact they hadn’t talked once, since it was over, about what had happened to her.—I mean, apart from physically. Just like a tummy upset. That’s all it was: a nuisance.

—All right, if you say so.

For the first time Sheila talked about her studies. She had to write an essay on the
Oresteia
which she said was all about the sex war, female avenging Furies and male reason.

—
The gods are disgusted at you
, she said gleefully.—Apollo to the Furies.
Apoptustoi theosis. Never let your filth touch anything in my sacred shrine.

When Hilary was in her seat in the coach, Sheila stayed hanging around outside the window although Hilary signed to her to go, there was no need to wait. They laughed at one another through the glass, helpless to communicate: for the first time they were in tune together as they used to be. Sheila mouthed something and Hilary mimed elaborately: frowned, shook her head, shrugged her shoulders. She couldn’t understand. Sheila put her face close to the glass and cupped her hands round her mouth, shouting. She was wearing a woollen knitted hat with knitted flowers pulled down over her ears.

—Give my love to everybody!

Hilary saw that all of a sudden her sister didn’t want her to go. She was seized then by an impulse to struggle off the coach, to stay and fight, as if Sheila had after all been abducted by a Bluebeard: she felt focused as a crusader in her opposition to Neil. She even half turned round in her seat, as if to get out. But there was a man in the seat beside her, she would have had to ask him to move, he was settled behind his newspaper. The moment and the possibility passed. The coach reversed, the sisters waved frantically, and then Sheila was gone and Hilary subsided into her solitude, keeping her face averted from the man who had seen too much of her excitement, and whose newspaper anyway would make her sick if she accidentally read any of the headlines.

Above the city buildings the sky was blue and pale with light, drawn across by thin skeins of transparent cloud. Beyond the outskirts of the city everything was bursting with the spring growth which was further on over here than in the east. The tips of the hedgerows and the trees, if they hadn’t yet come into leaf, gave off a red haze where the twigs swelled and shone. It seemed extraordinary to Hilary that her life must at some point soon change as completely and abruptly as Sheila’s had, so that everything
familiar would be left behind. She sat with bubbles of excitement rising in her chest. The scruffy undistinguished countryside outside the coach window seemed to her beautiful. It desolated her to think that when she was dead she wouldn’t be able to see it: cows, green hummocky fields, suburban cottages of weathered brick, a country factory with smashed windows, an excited spatter of birds thrown up from a tree. Then she started to see these things as if she was dead already, and they were persisting after her, and she had been allowed back, and must take in everything hungrily while she had the chance, every least tiny detail.

THE COOLEY BOYS
used to spend all their summers at the cottage in West Wales. They had a boat, so most of the time they were on the water, or playing cricket on the beach, or helping their mother who was restoring the cottage. For whole days that summer when Graham was thirteen she was up on the roof in shorts and T-shirt and old daps, reslating. Their father went off every day alone, to paint landscapes.

That summer, as usual, various friends and family came and went, either staying at the cottage or in the tiny primitive chalet at the other end of the meadow which Graham’s mother had done up for overspill visitors. It was to the chalet that Claudia and her family came: the Cooleys didn’t know them well, her husband was some sort of technician in Graham’s father’s lab at the university. Their children were too small to join in the Cooley boys’ games.

At first Graham took no more notice of Claudia than of any of the others who swam in and out of focus on the far-off adult surface of his world. Then she started to pay him attention in an extraordinary way. Fourth of five brothers, he was surprised enough if any of his parents’ friends even remembered what school he was at and how old he was. Claudia, this grown-up mother of three children, began to make a point of sitting next to him. When they all squeezed into the back of the old Dormobile van, or around the cottage table for lunch, or in the sitting room
in the evening for cards and Monopoly, she simply sat up against him and then let the weight of her leg lie against his. They had bare legs, usually: he was still young enough for shorts even on cool days, and it was at the time when women wore short skirts. She shaved her legs, brown legs (his mother didn’t): he saw the stubble, felt it. Sometimes, after a while, almost imperceptibly, she began to press, just slightly press. It always could just have been accidentally.

Probably she was doing it for a long time before he even noticed: he was thirteen, sex had hardly occurred to him, not as a physical reality he could have in connection with other people. And evenonce he’d noticed, once he’d started excitedly, scaredly, to wait for her to choose her place, even then he couldn’t be sure, not at first, that he wasn’t just crazily making it all up.

And at this point he began to take notice of Claudia all the time, to hardly take notice of anything else. She was plump and blonde, pretty, untidy: he noticed that a button kept slipping undone on a blouse too tight across her bust, and that her clothes bought to be glamorous were crumpled because her children were always clambering over her. Struggling down to the beach with a toddler on one arm and beach bags slung across her shoulder, she kept turning over on a sandal with a leather thong between her toes, and he heard her swear – shit! – in an undertone. Once he heard her snap at her husband, when she was trying to read the paperback book she brought down every day to the beach, and the children interrupted her one after another to pee or for food or quarrels, —If I don’t get to finish this bloody sentence I’ll scream! Graham’s parents never swore, he only knew those words from school and from his brothers.

Claudia was a perfectly competent adult. She brought down to the beach everything her family needed: costumes and towels and picnic and suntan oil and changing stuff for
the baby and rackets and balls. She fed them and soothed them all. One of her little girls stepped on a jellyfish and howled for half an hour before she fell asleep on Claudia’s lap, while Claudia sat stroking her sticky salty hair. But when Graham watched her playing badminton with his brothers – dazzling against the sea, grunting and racing and scooping up the shuttlecock in halter top and John Lennon peaked cap – he saw that she was still young, not his kind of young, but Tim’s and Alex’s. That must be why she was still crazy enough to be doing this thing to him. She couldn’t have done it to Tim or Alex because with them it would have been real, she would have had to acknowledge what was going on, they would have known. With him it was so completely, completely outside possibility. It couldn’t be happening.

On the beach it wasn’t possible to be squeezed side by side. But she found other ways: he’d feel a gritty sandpapery toe just making contact, or when she reached across him to hand out sandwiches, he’d get a scorch of the flesh of her arm against his shoulder. It was so subtle that no one, however scrupulously they watched, could ever have seen: it was a chain of innocent accidents only connected through his burning consciousness of her touch.

On the surface she was particularly nice to him, asking him about school, asking his opinions on things the others talked about, the boat, the weather. She chose him to explain to her the rules of racing demon; he had to play through the first couple of hands with her. When she leaned excitedly forward over the table to see what had been played – she was short-sighted but wouldn’t wear her glasses – she wedged him heavily into the corner, he smelled her sweat. His mother complimented Claudia on how she drew Graham out. He was supposed to be the shy one in the family arrangement: Alex was the brainy one, Phil the sporty one, and so on.

He began to be hardly able to look at his mother. She was like a humming black space where something familiar and unquestioned had previously been: he couldn’t hold her and Claudia in his mind at the same time. Passionately he began to love all the things Claudia did differently to his mother: she yawned when his mother waxed indignant about conservation or bureaucracy, she opened tins for her family’s supper (the chalet kitchen was primitive, but his mother would have done a slow-cooking casserole), she flirted with his father, leaning over him to see how the day’s painting had gone. She smoked cigarettes. She wore lipstick and stuff on her eyes, she smelled of perfume, she confessed carelessly that she wouldn’t know how to change a plug, let alone rewire a house (this was what Graham’s mother had done in the cottage, the previous summer).

One night, the last of Claudia’s family’s stay, there was a very high tide: the whole flat sandy bottom of the valley they usually walked down to reach the beach was flooded with the sea. They made a bonfire, cooked sausages and potatoes, and took it in turns to take a rowing boat out on the water. It was shallow and calm; they had to watch out for the current where the river flowed, but his mother didn’t believe in overprotecting them. The water that night was full of phosphorescence, tiny sea creatures that glowed in the dark: an enzyme-catalysed chemical reaction, their father told them.

Graham took Claudia out in the boat with her daughters: she sat opposite him while he rowed, and the two little girls cuddled on either side of her, hushed and still for once. Every time he lifted the oars out of the water they dripped with liquid light in the darkness, and where the oars dropped into the water they made bright holes and ripples of light went racing out from them. In the dark Claudia took her feet out of her shoes and put them on his. He was rowing in bare feet, he’d left his flip-flops on the sand. He rowed
up and down, his stroke faultless, in a kind of trance, until eventually the others were shouting for them from the shore.

—Come on, you idiot! Don’t hog the boat! Give someone else a go!

And all the time she was rubbing her feet up and down his; he could feel the thick calloused skin on her heels and on the ball of her foot, her splayed brown toes and the hard polish of her nails, the sand she ground against him, that stuck to their ankles and calves in the wet bottom of the boat.

Then the next day she went, and he suffered. For the first time like an adult, secretly.

More than twenty-five years later, when Graham had children of his own, he saw Claudia again. The sixth-form college he taught at was sometimes hired out for functions out of school hours: one Friday when he’d had to stay late for a meeting, he met the delegates for some conference coming in as he left. His glance fell on the board in the foyer: a course on food hygiene. The woman who came up the front steps directly at him, her conference folder hugged across her chest, chatting with assurance to a friend, was stouter, and smarter (her buttons were all done up), and her hair was a shining even grey, cut in a shoulder-length bob. But it was unmistakably her: the pugnacious jaw, the upturned nose, the wide mouth. These things about her he’d forgotten for decades suddenly reconnected themselves into the unmistakable stamp of her.

The moment she had passed, he doubted it. He was hallucinating; some chance feature of a stranger had triggered a memory he hadn’t known he’d kept. He turned and saw her disappearing through the double doors. Then another woman with a folder came running up the steps, looking past him: she’d seen someone she knew. Claudia! she called. And the grey-haired woman turned.

That night when his wife came in from seeing a film with her girlfriends, brash and defensive from her couple of drinks in the arts centre bar, he told her about Claudia. He had been sitting marking a pile of school folders; he saw her take in the mugs with black coffee dregs left on the desk as if they were reproachful reminders of how austerely dutiful he was. Of his puritanism, as she called it.

He wasn’t sure why he told her about Claudia now. Carol had insisted years ago on confessing all her experiences with men, but he hadn’t really wanted to know, not out of jealousy but real indifference: how could these things be shared? But she leaned across him to collect the mugs and he caught the blare of wine on her breath: he imagined that she’d been complaining about him as usual to Rose and Fran, that the only things he ever got excited about were quantum mechanics and quarks. Then he felt as if he had cheated her out of some knowledge of himself without which she was vulnerable.

He told her when they were lying in bed together in the dark. She didn’t like his story. At first she didn’t believe it. —Oh, but Gray! You were just fantasising! Why would a grown-up sensible woman want . . .

Then she got up and put on the light, sat down at the dressing table and creamed her face, briskly and matter-of-factly, as if she’d forgotten to do it before she came to bed, working cream in with her fingertips against the downwards droop, concentrating angrily on her reflection.

—But what would you think if you heard about this . . . If you heard about a man, doing this to a thirteen-year-old girl, to your own daughter, to Hannah, what would you think? It’s
horrible.

He didn’t tell her that he’d seen Claudia again.

He found out her address quite easily, by telephoning the conference organisers. He went to the house twice in his
lunch hour when there was no one there. The house was tucked away down a little mews street, a square Georgian house with a modern glassy extension: when he peered inside he could see Turkish rugs on a stone-flagged floor, abstract paintings on the walls, a huge white paper globe for a lampshade. He checked the address on his piece of paper to be sure it was really hers: everything about the house was quietly wealthy, far beyond the reach of a laboratory technician, or even a university lecturer.