Instructions for a Heatwave (2 page)

The last they’d heard from Aoife was a postcard at Christmas.
A postcard
. A picture of the Empire State Building on it. For the love of God, she’d shouted, when Robert handed it to her,
is she not even able to stretch to a Christmas card, now? As if, she’d continued to shout, I’d never given her a proper upbringing. She’d spent the better part of three weeks sewing a communion dress for that child and she’d looked like an angel. Everybody said so. Who’d have thought then, as she’d stood on the church steps in her white dress and white lace ankle socks, veil fluttering in the breeze, that she’d grow up so ungrateful, so thoughtless that she’d send a picture of a
building
to her mother to mark the Christ Child’s birthday?

Gretta sniffs as she dips her knife into the red mouth of the jam pot. Aoife doesn’t bear thinking about. The black sheep, her own sister had called her that time, and Gretta had flown off the handle and told her to mind her bloody tongue, but she has to concede that Bridie had a point.

She crosses herself, says a swift novena for her youngest child under her breath, under the ever-watchful eye of Our Lady, who looks down from the kitchen wall. She cuts another slice of bread, watching the steam vanish into the air. She will not think about Aoife now. There are plenty of good things to focus on instead. Monica might ring tonight—Gretta had told her she’d be near the phone from six. Michael Francis had as good as promised to bring the children over this weekend. She will not think about Aoife, she will not look at the photo of her in the communion outfit that sits on the mantelpiece, no, she will not.

After putting the bread back on the rack to air for Robert, Gretta eats a spoonful of jam, just to keep herself going, then another. She glances up at the clock. Quarter past already. Robert should be back by now. Maybe he bumped into someone and got talking. She wants to ask him will he drive her to the market this afternoon, after the crowds heading to the football stadium have dispersed? She needs a couple of things, some flour, a few eggs wouldn’t go amiss. Where could they go to escape the heat? Maybe a cup of tea at that place with the good scones. They
could walk down the street, arm in arm, take the air. Talk to a few people. It was important to keep him busy: ever since the retirement, he can become brooding and bored if confined to the house for too long. She likes to organize these outings for them.

Gretta goes out through the living room into the hall, opens the front door and walks out onto the path, sidestepping that rusting carcass of a bicycle Robert uses. She looks left, she looks right. She sees next door’s cat arch its back, then walk in mincing, feline steps along the wall, towards the lilac bush, where it proceeds to scratch its claws. The road is empty. No one about. She sees a red car caught mid-maneuver, farther up the road. A magpie keens and moans overhead, wheeling sideways in the sky, wing pointing downwards. In the distance, a bus grinds up the hill, a child trundles on a scooter along the pavement, someone somewhere turns on a radio. Gretta puts her hands on her hips. She calls her husband’s name, once, twice. The flank of the garden wall throws the sound back to her.

Michael has walked from Finsbury Park station. A mad decision in the heat, even at this time of day. But the roads had been choked when he’d emerged aboveground, the buses stranded in traffic, wheels motionless on the softening tarmac, so he’d set off along the pavement, between the houses that seemed to transpire heat from their very bricks, making the streets into sweltering runnels through which he must toil.

He pauses, panting and perspiring, in the shade of the trees that fringe Clissold Park. Removing his tie and freeing his shirt from his trousers, he surveys the damage wreaked by this never-ending heatwave: the park is no longer the undulating green lung he has always loved. He has been coming here since he was a child: his mother would pack a picnic—hard-boiled eggs, bluish under their crumbling shells, water that tasted of Tupperware, a wedge of tea cake each; they would all be handed a bag to carry off the bus, even Aoife. “No shirkers,” his mother would say loudly, as they stood waiting for the door to open, making the rest of the bus look around. He can remember pushing Aoife in her striped buggy along the path by the railings, trying to get her off to sleep; he can remember his mother trying to coax Monica into that paddling pool. He recalls the park as a space of differing shades of green: the full emerald sweeps of grass, the splintering
verdigris of the paddling pool, the lime-yellow of the light through the trees. But now the grass is a scorched ocher, the bare earth showing through, and the trees offer up limp leaves to the unmoving air, as if in reproach.

He draws in a breath through his nose and, realizing that the dry air burns his nostrils, takes a look at his watch. Just after five. He should get home.

It is the last day of term, the start of the long summer holidays. He has made it to the end of another school year. No more marking, no more classes, no more getting up and getting out in the mornings for six whole weeks. His relief is so enormous that it manifests itself physically, as a weightless, almost dizzy sensation at the back of his head; he has the sense he might stumble if he moves too quickly, so unburdened, so untethered does he feel.

He sets off in the most direct route, straight across the burnt-out grass, out into the shadeless open, where the light is level and merciless, past the shut café where he longed to eat as a child but never did. Daylight robbery, his mother called it, unwrapping sandwiches from their grease-proof shrouds.

Sweat breaks out in his hairline, along his spine, his feet move jerkily over the ground and he wonders, not for the first time, how others might see him. A father, returning from his place of work to his home, where his family and his dinner will be waiting. Or a man overheated and sweaty, late, carrying too many books, too many papers, in his briefcase. A person past youth, hair thinning just a little at the crown, wearing shoes that need resoling and socks that require a darn. A man tormented by this heatwave because how is one supposed to dress for work in temperatures such as this, in a shirt and a tie, for God’s sake, in long trousers, and how is one meant to concentrate when the female inhabitants of the city walk about pavements and sit in offices in the briefest of shorts, their legs bare and brown and crossed against him, in narrow-strapped tops with their shoulders exposed, just
the thinnest of fabrics separating their breasts from the unbearably hot air? A man hurrying home to a wife who will no longer look him in the eye, no longer seek his touch, a wife whose cool indifference has provoked in him such a slow-burning, low-level panic that he cannot sleep in his own bed, cannot sit easily in his own house.

The edge of the park is in sight now. He’s almost there. One more stretch of grass in full sun, then a road, then around the corner, then it’s his street. He can make out the roofs of his neighbors and, if he stretches on tiptoe, the slates of his house, the chimney pot, the skylight beneath which, he is sure, his wife will be sitting.

He swats a bead of moisture from his upper lip and switches his briefcase to the opposite hand. At the end of his street, there is a queue at the standpipe. Several of his neighbors, a lady from down the road and a few others he doesn’t recognize, straggle across the pavement and onto the road, empty drums at their feet. Some of them chat to each other, one or two wave or nod to him as he passes. The thought that he ought to offer to help the lady passes through his mind; he ought to stop, fill her drum for her, carry it back to her house. It would be the right thing to do. She is his mother’s age, perhaps older. He should stop, offer help. How will she manage otherwise? But his feet don’t hesitate in their movement. He has to get home, he can’t brook any further delay.

He unlatches his gate and swings it open, feeling as though it has been weeks since he last saw his home, feeling joy surge through him at the thought that he doesn’t have to leave it for six weeks. He loves this place, this house. He loves the black-and-white-tiled front path, the orange-painted front door, with the lion-faced knocker and the blue glass insets. If he could, he would stretch himself skywards until he was big enough to embrace its red-gray bricks. The fact that he has bought it with
his own money—or some of his own money, along with a large mortgage—never ceases to amaze him. That, and the fact it contains at this very moment the three people most precious to him in the world.

He unlocks the door, steps onto the mat, flings his bag to the floor and shouts, “Hello! I’m home!”

He is, for a moment, exactly the person he is meant to be: a man, returning from work, on the threshold of his home, about to greet his family. There is no difference, no schism, between the way the world might see him and the person he privately knows himself to be.

“Hello?” he calls again.

The house makes no answer. He shuts the door behind him and picks his way through the flotsam of bricks, dolls’ clothes and plastic teacups on the hall floor.

In the living room, he comes upon his son, reclining on the sofa, one foot balanced on the magazine rack. He is dressed only in a pair of underpants and his eyes are fixed on the television screen, where a grinning blue square-shaped being perambulates across a yellow vista.

“Hello, Hughie,” he says. “How was the last day of school?”

“Fine,” Hughie says, without taking his thumb from his mouth. With his other hand, he twirls a strand of his hair. Michael Francis finds he is, as ever, pained and moved in equal parts by his son’s resemblance to his wife. The same high brow, the milky skin, the snowstorm of freckles over the nose. Hughie has always been his mother’s creature. All those ideas of sons loyal to their fathers, those invisible male links: it has never been like that for him and this boy. Hughie came out of the womb as Claire’s defender, ally, henchman. As a toddler he would sit at her feet, like a dog. He would follow her about the house, head always cocked, alert to her whereabouts, her conversations, her passing moods. If he heard his father so much as say that he
couldn’t find a clean shirt or where was the shampoo, he would hurl himself at him, tiny fists flailing, so enraged was he by even the slightest implied criticism of his mother. Michael Francis has always hoped it might change, as the boy got older. But there’s no sign of his favoritism ending, even though he’s almost nine.

“Where’s Vita?” he asks.

Hughie pops his thumb free of his mouth for long enough to say, “In the paddling pool.”

He has to lick his lips before asking, “And where’s Mummy?”

This time Hughie takes his eyes from the screen and looks at him. “In the attic,” he says, very clearly, very precisely.

Father and son regard each other for a moment. Does Hughie, he wonders, have any idea that this is what he has been dreading since he left work, since he forced himself onto a crowded, sweltering tube train, since he made his way across this burning city? Does Hughie know that he has been hoping against hope that he might come back to find his wife in the kitchen, serving something fragrant and nutritious to his children, who would be dressed and clean and sitting at the table? How much does Hughie understand about what has been going on lately?

“The attic?” he repeats.

“The attic,” Hughie affirms. “She said she had a lot to do and that we weren’t to disturb her unless it was a matter of life and death.”

“I see.”

He moves through to the kitchen. The stove is empty, the table covered with an assortment of objects: a tub of what looks like shreds of newspaper in dried glue, several paintbrushes, which appear to be stuck to the table, a half-devoured packet of biscuits, the packaging ripped and torn, the leg of a doll, a cloth soaked with what is possibly coffee. The sink is piled with plates, teacups, beakers and another doll’s leg. He can see, through the open back door, his daughter sitting in the empty paddling pool, a watering can in one hand and the legless doll in the other.

He now has two choices. He could go outside, pick up Vita, ask her about school, coax her inside, perhaps feed them both something from the freezer. Assuming there is anything in the freezer. Or he could go upstairs and find his wife.

He dithers for a moment, gazing at his daughter. He reaches down for a biscuit and crams one into his mouth, then a second, then a third, before realizing he is not enjoying their sandy sweetness. He swallows quickly, hurting his throat. Then he turns and goes up the stairs.

On the landing, he finds his way blocked by the aluminum ladder that leads to the attic. He himself had installed it when they first moved here, after Hughie was born. DIY is not his strong point but he had bought the ladder because he had always wanted a playroom in an attic when he had been a boy. A space under the eaves to which he could have escaped, a dark place smelling of mice and exposed wood; he imagines the cacophony of his family would have sounded distant, benign, from it; he could have pulled up the ladder after himself, sealing the entrance. He had wanted this for his son, this place of refuge. He had never anticipated it being commandeered—because this is how he sees it, a military move, a requisition—by his wife, of all people. No, the attic is not how he had envisaged it at all. Instead of a train set, a paper-strewn desk; instead of a den, perhaps made of cushions and old sheets, shelves of books. No model planes hang from the rafters, no collections of butterflies or shells or leaves or any of those things children covet, just paperbacks and notebooks and half-filled folders.

He grips the rungs of the ladder. His wife is there, just above his head; if he concentrated hard enough he could almost hear her breathing. He is so close to reaching her but something makes him stop, there on the landing, his fingers curled around aluminum, his face pressed to his knuckles.

What he finds hardest about family life is that, just when you think you have a handle on what’s going on, everything changes.
It seems to him that, for as long as he can remember, he would come home to find his wife with at least one child attached to her body. When he returned from work, she’d be on the sofa, buried beneath the combined weight of their son and daughter, standing in the garden with Vita at her hip, sitting at the table with Hughie on her lap. In the morning, he would wake to find one or other of them entwined about her like ivy, whispering secrets in her ear with their hot, sleep-scented breath. If she walked into a room, she’d be carrying someone or there would be a small person attached to her hand or hem or sleeve. He never saw her outline. She had become like one of those matryoshka dolls with the long-lashed eyes and the swirl-painted hair, always containing smaller versions of herself.