PENELOPE LIVELY
Heat Wave
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
HEAT WAVE
Penelope Lively grew up in Egypt but settled in England after the war and took a degree in History at St Anne’s College, Oxford. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of PEN and the Society of Authors. She was married to the late Professor Jack Lively, has a daughter, a son and six grandchildren, and lives in London.
Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger. Her other books include Going Back; Judgement Day; Next to Nature, Art; Perfect Happiness; Passing On, which was shortlisted for the 1989 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award; City of the Mind; Cleopatra’s Sister; Heat Wave; Beyond the Blue Mountains, a collection of short stories; Oleander, Jacaranda, a memoir of her childhood days in Egypt; Spiderweb; her autobiographical work, A House Unlocked; The Photograph; Making It Up; Consequences; and Family Album, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award.
She has also written radio and television scripts and has acted as presenter for a BBC Radio 4 programme on children’s literature. She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. She was appointed CBE in the 2001 New Year’s Honours List.
1
It is an afternoon in early May. Pauline is looking out of the window of her study at World’s End. She looks not at the rich green of the field sweeping up to the cool blue of the sky, but at Teresa, who stands outside the cottages with Luke astride her hip, staring up the track towards the road. Pauline sees Teresa with double vision. She sees her daughter, who is holding her own son and waiting for the arrival of her husband. But she sees also an archetypal figure: a girl with a baby, a woman with a child. There is a whole freight of reference there, thinks Pauline. The girl, the child, the sweep of the cornfield, the long furrowed lines of the rough track reaching away to elsewhere. Seen through one lens, Teresa is a Hardy heroine – betrayed no doubt, a figure of tragedy. Seen through another, she is a lyrical image of youth and regeneration. And for Pauline there shimmers also a whole sequence of intimate references, other versions of Teresa which hitch them both to other days and different places. It is a day in May at World’s End, but it is also the extent of two lives – three lives, if Luke’s fifteen months are to be considered.
In fact, Teresa is standing where she is for good reason. She has already spotted the glint of the sun on the windscreen of Maurice’s car as it turned off the main road, and now indeed here comes the car, creeping in the distance like some sleek dark beast amid the rippling green. And Luke too has seen it. His whole body registers attention and anticipation. He twists his head. He points with all four fingers. ‘Da!’ he says. ‘Da!’ Here comes my father, he is announcing.
Pauline hears him, through the open window. She too notes the car. She watches its approach, she sees it pull off the track on to the area alongside the cottages that serves as a parking space. Maurice gets out. He kisses Teresa and they go together into the cottage, into their half of the pair of cottages which is World’s End. Pauline turns from the window and looks down again at her desk. She picks up her pencil and makes a note on the manuscript in front of her.
World’s End is itself something of an archetype, and as such is unreliable. It is a grey stone building set on a hillside somewhere in the middle of England. The stone is weathered, the hill behind reaches up to a crown of trees which are a delicate tracery against the sky. Adroitly photographed, it could be used as an advertisement by car manufacturers (you need one to get there), the bread industry (there grows the good healthy wheat) or those who operate the tourist trade (come with us and you too will see such scenes). The building appears to be locked still into the early nineteenth century – a terrace of three two-storey cottages with attic dormer windows, constructed of stone dug from a quarry a few miles away and roofed with stone slate also of local provenance. There it sits, tucked snug into the fields. It could have simply grown of its own accord, you feel – made from the very bones of this land. It is an emanation of a time and a place.
The truth is that World’s End is suspended in this landscape like a space capsule, with its machinery quietly humming – its computers, its phones, its faxes. Its microwaves, its freezers, its televisions and videos. World’s End in fact is nicely disguised, like one of those turfed-over bunkers kitted out as command posts in the event of nuclear attack.
The building has been gutted. Three dwellings are now two, with nothing left of the original construction but windows, fireplaces, a few oak beams and a staircase. The front door of the left-hand, larger cottage – now used by Teresa and Maurice – opens straight into a big open-plan kitchen. Behind that a new extension provides the sitting-room which overlooks the garden common to both cottages. A cleverly constructed space-saving staircase twists up out of one corner of the kitchen to the bedroom and bathroom floor above. The attic is Maurice’s study.
The smaller cottage – Pauline’s – is rather different. Kitchen and sitting-room are paired at each side of a tiny hallway, from which the original staircase rises to the upper floor. It is a disconcertingly precipitate staircase, much too steep and with narrow treads. Pauline has had hand rails put at either side, but even so visitors have to be warned. She wishes occasionally that the staircase had been ripped out when the building was done over, but at the time it seemed appealing and in some way integral to the cottage, and now she cannot be bothered with any further upheaval.
The whole place is of course radiant with electricity and central heating. It ticks and tocks with timing mechanisms and remote-control devices. Green digits blink from display panels. Telephones are poised for action. Computers and faxes stand waiting in Pauline’s study and in Maurice’s. Both of them can tap into a global communication network, both can conjure up the information resources of distant libraries. World’s End is a wolf in sheep’s clothing – it is no more rooted in a time and a place than is the flight deck of a 747.
A curious name for a row of cottages – World’s End. When Pauline bought the place ten years ago she was puzzled by the term but found no explanation until Maurice pointed out that such names were often given to farm labourers’ dwellings sited out in the fields in the last century – new constructions away from village centres and labelled accordingly, places that seemed remote, or – ironically – idyllic. World’s End. Botany Bay. Tasmania. Utopia Cottages. Paradise Row. He threw out the observation casually, offhand, standing down there on the track the first time he came there, before he married Teresa – as though it were the sort of thing everyone knew.
Pauline, sitting now at her desk, making another quick note on someone else’s manuscript, looks again out on to the track and sees the shadow of that Maurice, back then, making that observation. He slides her the self-deprecating glance he often uses when giving information, and she is at once interested and faintly irritated. Teresa flickers there also for a moment too, standing to one side while Pauline and Maurice talk about the cottages, her eyes o
n Maurice, far gone in love, snared, committed, lost.
Teresa is still in love with Maurice, three years on. This is plain for all to see. For Pauline especially to see. She saw it just now, saw it as Teresa stood watching for Maurice’s car, saw it in her stance, in the movements of her head, in the way her hand frets up and down the fence. And seeing this, she knew quite precisely what Teresa felt. Pauline could take her place for an instant – becoming not Teresa but herself on another day, in another decade, waiting thus for a man.
And here he comes – not driving a car up a dirt track but walking quickly through the crowds at Victoria station. She sees him coming from a long way off and does not go forward to meet him but stays where she is because these are the best moments of all – the thrilling jolt of recognition as she identifies him, an up-rush of being as though all the senses were intensified. She will spin it out, this exquisite anticipation. And then he is yards away, is smiling, waving. And then he is holding her. She can feel him, smell him. Harry. There is nothing else like this, she knows – nothing in the world.
And as the moment comes gushing back to her today at World’s End, it is the sensation that is sharpest, clearer by far than anything she sees – the station concourse, Harry’s face. Harry himself is reduced to a prompt – the trigger for recovered emotion.
Pauline reads another page of the manuscript she is editing. She makes a spelling correction, draws tactful attention to the repetition of a word. Then she shunts the manuscript to one side of her desk, yawns, stretches, and sits for a few moments looking out at the end of this May afternoon. It has become warm, all of a sudden, after a chill grey spring. Summer is a distinct possibility. She has opened the window while she is working, almost for the first time. The window next door must be open also: she can hear Luke-noises – a sequence of wordless urgencies – and Teresa’s responses. She can hear Maurice – an indecipherable murmur. Maurice must be on the phone. Maurice is frequently on the phone.
World’s End is around a hundred and seventy years old. Pauline is fifty-five. Teresa is twenty-nine. Maurice is forty-four.
Pauline’s purchase of the cottages had been made possible by her inheritance of her parents’ house when her mother died two years after her father. She was still working as a full-time editor at a London publishing firm. Teresa was at art college. Maurice was unknown to either of them and therefore off-stage to all intents and purposes. In fact Maurice was busy establishing an early reputation as the maverick young author of books on quirky aspects of history that flattered the reader by being simultaneously scholarly and inviting. A sparky account of the tobacco industry, a contentious book on the marketing of the stately home business. Right now, Maurice is working on a history of tourism – a hefty project which will discuss the ways in which the natural and the manmade environments have been exploited in the interests of commerce. He is in frequent communication with an influential film producer. There is serious talk of a TV series as a tie-in with the book. These discussions have had an inevitable effect on the enthusiasm of Maurice’s publisher for the work in hand. Maurice has stepped from the position of an interesting author of eccentric books to a potentially valuable asset.
It is because of this book that Maurice and Teresa are at World’s End this spring. Before their marriage, Pauline used to let out the larger of the two cottages while keeping the smaller one for her own use. When Teresa married Maurice, Pauline gave her the larger cottage as a weekend retreat. This year, Maurice has announced that they will spend the whole summer down here so that he can apply himself undisturbed to the book, of which the first draft is complete. He will of course have to make occasional forays to London to check references, and his editor, James Saltash, will be coming down to World’s End sometimes at weekends to go through the manuscript with Maurice. World’s End will become an editorial powerhouse this summer.
Pauline gave up her job five years ago. She now works from home as a freelance copy-editor, in demand because she is widely known and highly competent. She takes on as much or as little work as she wishes, and spends her time rescuing authors from semantic outrages and the carelessness of creative zest. She plods through novels checking that the heroine’s eyes have not turned from blue to grey half-way along, that spring has not suddenly given way to winter, that Sunday does not follow Monday. She queries awkward sentence constructions and tactfully indicates that the colon and the semicolon are not interchangeable. The manuscripts on which she works are peppered with her succinct and neutral comments – questioning the sense of a tortuous passage, drawing attention to a cliché. The author will of course go his or her own sweet way in any case. Many will accept some or all of Pauline’s amendments, with a varying degree of resistance. The intransigent few will fight to the last comma for the principle of authorial infallibility. Pauline rather enjoys these exchanges – the trading of dictionary references and literary precedent, and of course so far as she is concerned if they so wish they can go down with all solecisms blazing. It’s no skin off her nose. She has done her stuff, and enjoyed the doing of it, working away through long quiet days at her desk in front of the window, lifting her eyes now and then to note the changing light on the field as the sun swings up and over, getting up from her chair to take down a reference book or make a cup of coffee.
Pauline knows this field intimately – its range of mood and colour, its seasonal changes. It is growing wheat – winter wheat which at this May moment is a rich green pelt. It is a large field and will yield sixty tons of wheat in a reasonable harvest. So the emerald quilt which ripples silver in the wind represents around £5,000. Pauline has established these facts from Chaundy, the farmer from whom she bought World’s End. Chaundy is not an overly friendly man and their relationship is one of guarded acquaintance, no more, but from time to time they meet on the track and a desultory conversation takes place. On one of these occasions Pauline solicited this information about the field.
‘Thinking of taking up farming?’ said Chaundy, sardonic.
‘Certainly not. But I look out at that field all the time – I thought I’d like to know more about it.’
Chaundy was not interested in Pauline’s interest. He answered her queries grudgingly, in a throwaway manner. Acreage. Yield. He is not interested in Pauline, come to that. She is simply someone with whom he once did business and who is now a neighbour, but in a peripheral way, since she is not of his community. He is not obliged to deal with her from day to day. She does not work for him, or sell him fertilizer, or buy his grain, or share his concerns. She does not inhabit his world, except in a literal sense.
Chaundy is a big farmer, as they go. He has land here, and also over in the next valley. He runs a caravan site ten miles away, and a pick-it-yourself fruit farm on the other side of the hill, complete with farm shop and restaurant. He also has a large range of broiler chicken houses. Chaundy probably does not get his hands dirty very much, these days. Mostly he drives from one to another of his concerns in a newish but battered Peugeot, issuing terse instructions. Quite a lot of people work for Chaundy, most of them for rather small amounts of money.
Up at the top left-hand corner of the field, where its neighbour begins, there is a triangle of glaring yellow which tips away over the crown of the hill. Oilseed rape. Pauline is not entirely sure where she stands, vis-à-vis oilseed rape. Aesthetic opinion is sharply divided over this issue. There are those who find it cheerful – a nice splash of colour. The purists – who are the most vociferous – deplore it as a discordant and jarring note amid the subtle tones of the English landscape. The stuff is decried as an intrusive blight from across the Channel (EC agricultural policy has made rape a profitable cash crop) and it has therefore achieved sinister political overtones, as well as being a nasty colour. Pauline, looking over at that citron flag on the hillside, has mixed feelings. Sometimes it does indeed strike a note of gaiety – she thinks of the warm south, of fields of sunflowers. At others it appears as an aggressive shout against the skyline.
But in any case it will pass. By June it will be extinguished, in line with the ephemeral qualities of this landscape.
Thus, World’s End, on this May afternoon which shades off now into evening, as Pauline tidies her desk, leaves her study and goes down that odd precipitate staircase to see what she has got in the fridge for supper. And thus also Pauline, Teresa, Maurice. Mother, daughter, son-in-law and husband. Neighbours, relatives, poised for this agreeable summer of industry and companionship.
2
It is ten o’clock on the following morning. Pauline, Teresa, Maurice and Luke are gathered together in the open-plan kitchen of Teresa’s cottage.
Teresa is talking to Luke – the murmuring pigeon-talk of a mother to a baby – inconsequential chatter to an adult ear, a luminous revelation to the baby. ‘There we are …’ says Teresa. ‘Trousers on now. One leg … Other leg … Red trousers today. There we go.’ And Luke perceives that the sounds he hears are mysteriously linked to the things he sees. ‘Da,’ he says. ‘Da.’ Or perhaps ba, or doh. His sounds are not yet hitched to anything – to objects nor yet to vowels or consonants. They are simply sounds. The radio talks about an election in Italy, breaks off for a burst of music, talks now of slaughter in Rwanda. Pauline is reading a letter. She looks across at Teresa and says: ‘Jane has this flat in Venice for September. Maybe I’ll go there for a week.’ ‘Oh, right …’ says Teresa. ‘D’you want some banana, Luke? Mmmn … nana?’ Maurice is on the phone: ‘So we’ll see you both this weekend. Excellent. Oh … and could you bring a copy of Defoe’s Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, James, if you can lay hands on one? Thanks.’
There is a blizzard of words in this room – Luke is bombarded with them, they stream through his head like particles through matter. He is battered by sensation – the white noise of language, the brilliance of the visible world. For him the room and the day blaze with novelty and revelation. The kettle whose shining surface dances with the reflection of blue flowers in a vase; the chair whose feet shriek against the floor as his father rises. Knowing nothing, he is astonished by everything. He exists on a different plane from Teresa, from Pauline, from Maurice – seeing what they cannot see, hearing what they cannot hear. Of the four of them, it is Luke who is in a state of shimmering perception. He sits there on Teresa’s lap, a visitor from a world of lost capacities. ‘Da,’ he says. And Teresa beams, uncomprehending. ‘He’s got that rash again,’ she says to Pauline.