Sunstroke and Other Stories (9 page)

The third time he went after school and there was a plum-coloured old Jaguar parked in the courtyard under the flowering cherry, a few petals scattered on its bonnet. Claudia answered the door. She was dressed in a batik-printed kimono and he could smell the smoke from the cigarette she had just put down.

—Claudia? It’s Graham Cooley.

She was perfectly blank, searched her memory halfheartedly, accepting the hand he put out.

—It’s a long time ago. You came on holiday with us, stayed in our chalet in West Wales.

—Oh: Cooley! A long time ago! Goodness me! I do remember, I think. That family with all the boys. Which one were you? But that was in another lifetime! How extraordinary. And of course you’re grown up.

She still didn’t make that movement from the door which would invite him in: she was stubbornly guarding whatever little ritual of peace and privacy he had interrupted. Close to, he could see where the skin was loosening to hang under her jaw, and the eyes sun-crinkled from too many tans.

He insisted. With obvious misgivings – what ever did he want? – and finding it difficult even to remember anything about his mother and father to make conversation out of, she let him in and made him coffee and sat him in the glass room in a chair made of blond wood and tubular chrome opposite hers. The coffee was good, strong espresso.

—So what have you done with yourself then, Graham? she said. You were an awfully talented family, weren’t you? Terrifying. What about your brothers? Were you the third? Tim, wasn’t it, and Paul?

—Not Paul, he said, Philip. I was the fourth. He reached across – the chrome chair, although it looked awkward, was comfortable and supportive – and put his hand heavily on her leg above the knee. She had put on a lot of weight, was really very solid between bust and hips, but her flesh was compact and warm. —Don’t you remember? Really?

She froze. She looked at him in horror, at first only thinking, whoever is he, how to get him out of here, why ever did I let him in, against my better judgement? But then as he searched her eyes something behind them burst, some containing membrane, and what she remembered spread through her, filling her, making her skin flush deeper and deeper, making her body sag and yield, filling her eyes with water even.—Oh, yes, she said. Oh . . . Oh, so you did know. Oh, God, I’d managed to convince myself afterwards that you wouldn’t have noticed, that it had just been my own fantasy . . . And then, just now, I simply forgot, I’d forgotten all about it, it’s years since I’ve thought about that summer . . .

—You do remember?

—Well, something awful. I really thought, though, you wouldn’t have guessed, that it was all just my own horrible idea.

—But in the boat . . .

—In the boat? In the boat? What did I do in the boat? Oh, don’t tell me, please, I don’t want to know. God – I can’t explain it, there’s no explanation. When my own son got to that age I used to think, that boy . . . It was such a rotten summer, Don and I . . . I remember I used to sit there on the beach just dreaming of lacerating him all over with a kitchen knife. Poor Don. He really wasn’t so
bad. Cooped up all summer together in that awful hut. She looked at him with shock. —You do know that Don and I split up? No, of course, why should you? But that was in another lifetime, really. My husband’s an architect. We had another daughter together, four children altogether . . . She spelled out these things as if she owed him explanations.

—Are the children at school?

—At school? Her eyes were wet again, her loose mouth slipped, smiling, she took his hand off her knee.—I’m a grandmother. I’ve got two grandchildren. The daughter you didn’t know – she’s at art college, final year. You see – I’m an old woman. Hideous, isn’t it? Oh God, this is awful. Let’s have a drink.

She poured them both huge splashes of Scotch.

—But your name’s the same, that’s how I followed you up.

—I didn’t want all that business, taking my husband’s name. I wanted to do things differently, the second time. Whether it worked out so very different, this man–woman thing, it’s so difficult . . . They chinked glasses, she blushed very darkly.—Have you forgiven me? It hasn’t ruined your life or anything? I’m really so ashamed. I was, afterwards; then I began to wonder if I really could have done anything so awful. I thought I might have just dreamed it. But of course I’ve never thought I’d see you, that we’d recognise one another. We lived in the north for years.

—I recognised you. Why food hygiene, by the way?

She was blank again. —Oh! Food hygiene! She ran mentally over a room of faces. —Were you at that conference? Yes – I part own a restauraunt, a French restaurant in Kingsmile.

They drank their whisky quickly and she poured more with shaking hands. She looked appeasingly into his face. —You are nice-looking, she said. —I always had good taste
in men. Oh dear. It is all right, isn’t it? You haven’t come to punish me or anything?

—No, he said. —That’s the last thing.

Nonetheless, when he began kissing her and putting his hands under her clothes, he did it without tentativeness, as if he was claiming something he was owed. And she let him, watched him, said, —Are you really sure? I don’t think of anyone wanting this from me any more. I mean, any stranger.

—I’m not a stranger, he said.

—You are to me. In spite of everything you tell me. I remember it, just. But of course not with you. I remember a boy, you see. I’ve never seen you before.

But she didn’t stop him. Several times, for all his intentness, he caught her look of curiosity at him, curiosity like his own, hard and greedy and tinged with shame.

Carol swung the door open as he put his key in the lock.

—Where have you been? I’ve been out of my mind. I’ve phoned all the hospitals, your dinner’s ruined, the kids –

—Carol, didn’t I tell you? We had a GCSE moderation, it went on for bloody hours. I’m sure I told you. I said I’d get sandwiches.

—But I phoned the college, there was no answer.

—Love, I’m sorry . . . The phone rings in the office, there’s no one there to pick it up. I’m sorry, maybe I did forget to mention it. I was so sure I had. Let me come in and get the kids to bed for you.

She stood staring at him. —It’s so unlike you. You’re usually so organised. But I really don’t remember you telling me about this one. And isn’t it a bit early for a moderation? You haven’t finished marking all the papers yet.

For a moment he was sure she could smell something on him, see something of the dazzle that was clinging to him, dripping off him, flashing round in his veins. But he
saw her deliberately tidy that intimation away, out of consciousness. This was her husband, the man she knew. He was a physics teacher and competition-standard chess player, wasn’t he?

WHEN KEITH HAD
finished up the second bottle of wine he began to yawn, the conversation faltered companionably as it can between old friends, and then he took himself off to bed in Caro’s spare room, where she knew he fell asleep at once between her clean white sheets because she heard him snort or snuffle once or twice as she was carrying dishes past the door. She relished the thought of his rather ravaged fifty-five-year-old and oh-so-male head against her broderie anglaise pillowcases. Caro herself felt awake, wide awake, the kind of awakeness that seizes you in the early hours and brings such ultimate penetration and clarity that you cannot imagine you will ever sleep again. She cleared the table in the living room where they had eaten together, stacked the dishes in the dishwasher ready to turn on in the morning, washed up a few delicate bowls and glasses she didn’t trust in the machine, tidied the kitchen. In her bare feet she prowled around the flat, not able to make up her mind to undress and go to bed. Tomorrow was Sunday, she didn’t have to get up for work.

What was it about Keith, after all this time, that could still make her restless; could make her feel this need to be vigilant while he snored? When they sat eating and drinking together she hadn’t felt it; she had felt fond of him, and that his old power to stir and upset her was diminished. He was nicer than he used to be, no doubt about that. They had talked a lot about his children; the ones he had
had with Penny, Caro’s sister, who were in their twenties now, and then the younger ones he had with his second wife Lynne. She had been amused that he – who had once been going to ‘smash capitalism’ – took a serious and knowledgeable interest in the wine he had brought with him for them to drink (he had come to her straight from France; he and Lynne seemed to spend most of the year at their farmhouse in the Dordogne).

Nonetheless the thought came involuntarily into her head as she prowled, that tonight she had her enemy sleeping under her roof. Of all things: as if instead of a respectable middle-aged PA living in suburban Cardiff she was some kind of Anglo-Saxon thane, sharpening her sword and thinking of blood. Just as the thane might have, she felt divided between an anxious hostility towards her guest and an absolute requirement to protect him and watch over his head.

In May 1968 Caro had turned up for a meeting of the Revolutionary Socialist Student Federation at her university wearing a new trouser suit: green corduroy bell-bottoms with a flower-patterned jacket lining and Sergeant Pepper-style military buttons. The meeting was to organise participation in a revolutionary festival in London the following month, generating support for the Vietnamese struggle for national liberation. The festival was already provoking all kinds of ideological dissent: the Trotskyists thought the whole project was ‘reformist’, and the Communist Party were nervous at the use of the word ‘revolutionary’. The Young Communists were going to appear riding a fleet of white bicycles which they had collected and were donating to the Vietnamese.

Caro had bought the trouser suit because her godmother (whom she had adored as a little girl but had stopped visiting recently because of her views on trade unions and immigration) had sent her twenty-one pounds for her
twenty-first birthday. She could have put it aside to help eke out the end of her grant, but instead, on impulse, she had gone shopping and spent it in a trendy boutique in town that she had never dared to go inside before. It was months since she had had any new clothes; and she had never possessed anything quite so joyous, so up to the minute and striking, as this trouser suit. She knew that it expressed perfectly on the outside the person she wanted to be from within. With her long hair and tall lean figure it made her look sexy, defiant, capable (in skirts she often only looked gawky and mannish).

The meeting was in a basement room in the History Department as usual. As usual, it was mostly men, though there were three or four girls, bright history and politics students, friends of Caro’s, who came regularly. The girls really did get asked to make the tea, and really did make it. They sat at desks arranged in a square under a bleak light bulb with an institutional-type glass shade, surrounded by maps on the walls that were of course nothing to do with them – Europe after the Congress of Vienna, the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1914 – but nonetheless gave the place an air they all rather enjoyed of being a command centre in some essential world-changing operation. By the time Caro arrived the usual thick fug of cigarette smoke was already building up (she smoked too, in those days). She was greeted, because of the trouser suit, with a couple of wolf whistles, and everyone looked up. It was complicated to remember truthfully now just how one had felt about that whistling. A decade later it became obligatory for women to be indignant at it and find it degrading; at the time, however, she would probably have felt without it that her trouser suit had failed of its effect. You met the whistle without making eye contact but with a little warm curl of an acknowledging smile, a gleam of response.

Two men had come from Agit Prop, to talk to the meeting
about the festival (Agit Prop was a loose association of activists and artists named after Trotsky’s propaganda train and dedicated to promoting revolutionary messages through aesthetic means). That was how Caro met Keith Reid for the first time: when she arrived he had already taken his place in a chair at the centre of things, commanding the whole room. Keith was a very attractive man – it was the first thing you needed to know about him, to get any idea of who he was, then. Not handsome, exactly: off-centre quirky features held together by a fluid energy, fragile hooked nose, hollow cheeks, a lean loose strong body, a shoulder-length mess of slightly greasy dark curls. He had a Welsh accent: it was a Valleys accent in fact – he was from Cwmbach near Aberdare – but in those days Caro had never been to Wales and couldn’t tell one accent from another. At a time when Left politics was saturated in the romance of the workers, this accent was in itself enough to melt most of the women (and the men).

He looked at Caro in her trouser suit.

—Don’t you find, he said, —that dressing up like that puts off the working classes?

She thought about this now with stupefaction. Had she really once inhabited a world where such absurdities were a currency? She should have laughed in his face. She should have turned round and walked out of the meeting and never gone back.

—No, she said, calmly taking a place directly in Keith’s line of sight, so that he could get his eyeful of the offending item, —I find it gives them something good to look at.

Of course she wasn’t really calm. She was raging, and humiliated, and struggling with a muddled and not yet confident sense of something fundamentally flawed and unfair to do with men and women in what he had said and all that lay behind it: everything that was going overflow into the flood of feminism in the next couple of
decades. And no doubt at the same time she was scalding with shame at her bourgeois depraved frivolity in the face of decent suffering working-class sobriety, just as Keith meant her to be. And she was thinking how she would make him pay for that.

They had such energy, then, for all the battles.

After the meeting the visitors from Agit Prop had needed a floor to stay on and Caro had taken them back to the disintegrating old mock-Tudor house, its garden overgrown as a jungle, which she shared with a motley collection of students and friends and politicos. (Later she had had trouble with that house; it was rented in her name, and some of the people using it refused to pay their share. She had to hassle them for it, and came home once to find ‘Rachman bitch’ scrawled in red paint on her bedroom wall.) They sat up until late smoking pot and sparring; Caro and Keith arguing not about the trouser suit, which wasn’t mentioned again, but about the dockers’ support for Enoch Powell and its implications for the alliance between left alternative politics and the working-class movement. Caro had been on the anti-racist march to Transport House: Keith thought she was overstating the problem in a way that was typical of bourgeois squeamishness in the face of the realities of working-class culture.