He draws in a breath through his nose and, realising 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 greaseproof 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 round the corner, then it’s his street. He can make out the roofs of his neighbours 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 stand-pipe. Several of his neighbours, a lady from down the road and a few others he doesn’t recognise, straggle across the pavement and on to 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-grey 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 on to 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 favouritism 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 on to 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 realising 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 aluminium 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 esc
aped, 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 aluminium, 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.
That was the way things had been, the way life was in their house: Claire was two people or sometimes three. Presumably she had thought this, too, because in the last while, since Vita had turned four, he had been greeted by the unprecedented sight of her standing alone in the kitchen, one hand resting on the table, or sitting gazing out of the bay window into the street. He could suddenly see all of her, in her astonishing separateness, the children away, gone, living their children lives: upstairs, crashing about in their bedroom, giggling together under a blanket or out in the garden, scaling the walls or digging in the flowerbeds. You might have thought she’d be feeling relieved at this change, after a decade of intense child-rearing, a break in the clouds. But the look on her face, when he chanced upon her in these moments, was that of someone who’d lost their way, who’d been told to go somewhere but had taken the wrong turning, the look of someone who had been on the verge of doing something important but had forgotten what it was.
He had been thinking about a way to vocalise to her that he mourned its passing, too: the sense of the children’s intense, zealous need of you, their overwhelming urge to be near you, to study you, to watch you as you peeled an orange, wrote a shopping list, tied your shoes, the feeling that you were their study in how to be human. He was thinking how he might say to her, yes, it’s gone but life holds other things, when everything changed again. When he got home, she was no longer in the kitchen or the bay window but elsewhere in the house, upstairs, out of sight. There was no dinner simmering on the stove, or roasting behind the oven door. He began to notice strange things lying around. An old exercise book with his wife’s maiden name inscribed on the cover in careful cursive. A much-thumbed, soft-cornered copy of Madame Bovary in the original French, with Claire’s grave, adolescent marginalia. A worn old pencil case in red leather, filled with freshly spiked pencils. These things he would pick up, weigh in his hand and put down again. Claire began to need him to babysit because she was suddenly going out in the evenings or at weekends. ‘You’re around tonight, aren’t you?’ she would say, on her way through the door. There was a new look in her eye – one of trepidation mixed with a kind of spark. One night, finding her side of the bed empty, he wandered about the house, searching for her, calling her name into the dark; when she answered, her voice was muffled, disembodied. Several minutes passed before he worked out that she was up in the attic, that she had gone up there in the middle of the night, leaving their bed, pulling the ladder up after her. He had stood in the middle of the landing, hissing at her to let him come up – what, in God’s name, was she doing up there. No, her voice had come down at him, nothing, no, you can’t come up.
From ripping open an official-looking letter addressed to her, one evening when she was yet again mysteriously out, he learnt that she was taking an Open University history degree. He flung the piece of paper down on the table between them when she came back. What on earth, he demanded, was this? Why was she doing this course?
‘Because I want to,’ she’d said defiantly, twisting her bag strap in her hands.
‘But why the Open University?’ he’d said.
‘Why not?’ she’d said, twisting her bag tighter, her face pale and tense.
‘Because you’re far too good for them and you know it. You got three As at A level, Claire. The OU take anybody and their qualifications aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Why didn’t you tell me about this? We could have discussed it instead of—’
‘Why didn’t I tell you?’ she’d interrupted him. ‘Maybe because I knew you’d react exactly like this.’
Soon after this various new friends had appeared in the house, hot on the heels of the sharpened pencils and the Flaubert. They, too, were taking OU degrees and, Claire said, wasn’t it great because most of them lived just round the corner? Claire would be able to get help with her essays from them, and Michael managed not to say, why don’t you ask me for help, I am a history teacher, after all. I have a history degree and some of a history PhD. All of a sudden, these people rarely seemed to be out of their house, with their course notes and essay sheets and files and their talk of personal expansion. They were nothing like Claire’s other friends – women with young children and houses full of beakers and toys and finger-paintings, befriended at the school gates or coffee mornings or Housewives’ Register meetings. The Open University crowd left his house with an edgy, electrical charge hanging in the air. And he, Michael Francis Riordan, was not comfortable with it, not at all.
He takes a moment to collect himself before he climbs the ladder. He smooths his hair, he tucks his shirt back into his waistband.
His wife appears to him as he ascends into the roof space that he created, installing this ladder, hammering chipboard over the beams, clearing the skylight of dead leaves, from the feet up. Bare toes, narrow ankles, crossed calves, her rear, seated on a stool, her back curved over the trestle table, her thin white arms uncovered, her hand clutching a pen, her head turned away.
He stands before her, offering himself. ‘Hello,’ he says.
‘Oh, Mike,’ she says, without turning round. ‘I thought I heard you.’
She continues to write. He reflects, for a moment, on that ‘Mike’. For years, his wife has mostly called him by his first and middle name, as he is known in his family, as he was called as a child. She picked up the habit from his parents and sisters – and their vast web of cousins, aunts and uncles. Colleagues call him Mike; friends, acquaintances, dentists, not his family, not his beloveds. But how to tell her this? How to say, please call me by both my names, like you used to?
‘What are you doing?’ he asks instead.
‘I’m . . .’ she scribbles frantically, ‘. . . just finishing an essay about . . .’ She stops, crosses something out, then writes again. ‘What time is it?’
‘Around five.’
She lifts her head at this piece of information but doesn’t turn round. ‘Working late, were you?’ she murmurs.
The figure of Gina Mayhew seems to pass by them, across the attic, like a poltergeist. She throws a look at him from under that squarish brow of hers, then disappears down through the hatch. He swallows – or tries to. His throat
is constricted and dry. When did he last drink anything? He can’t remember. He is, he realises, thirsty, horrendously, horribly, unbearably thirsty. Glasses of water, rows of stand-pipes, burnt yellow stretches of grass ripple through his mind.
‘No,’ he gets out. ‘Last day of term stuff and . . . the tube. Delayed . . . you know . . . again.’
‘The tube?’
‘Yes.’ He sets up a vigorous nodding, even though she’s not looking at him, and asks in a rush, ‘So, what’s your essay about?’
‘The Industrial Revolution.’
‘Ah. Interesting. What aspect of it?’ He steps forward to see over her shoulder.
‘The Industrial Revolution and the emergence of the middle classes,’ she says, turning to face him, putting an arm over her page, and he experiences a dissolving feeling in his abdomen. Part lust, part horror at her short hair. He still hasn’t got used to it, still can’t forgive her for it. He’d come home a few weeks ago and opened the front door, as yet innocent of what had occurred behind it that day, as yet full of trust that his wife was still the person she’d always been. The fan of hair he’d thought would still be there; he had no reason to believe otherwise. The hair that rested on her shoulders, the colour of honey held up to the light, the hair that spread itself over her pillow and his, the hair he’d gather up in his hand like a silken rope, the hair he’d liked to form a tent around them in the dark as she rose and fell above him. The hair he’d noticed in the first term of his PhD, in a lecture about post-war Europe: the clean, smooth, sun-catching length of it. He’d never seen hair like it; certainly never felt hair like it. The women in his family were dark-haired, red-haired, curly-haired; they had unruly hair, kinked hair, thin hair, hair that required setting and lotions and pins and nets. Hair to be lamented, complained about, wept over. Not hair that was celebrated, like this, left to hang and sway in its full, uncomplicated, Anglo-Saxon glory. But as he’d stood there in the doorway of the upstairs bathroom, keys still in hand, he saw that the hair he loved and had always loved was gone. It was off, scissored, finished. It littered the lino in strange, mammalian drifts. And in place of his wife was a shorn-headed boy-child in a dress. ‘What do you think?’ the changeling said, using his wife’s voice. ‘Lovely and cool for the summer, isn’t it?’ And it laughed, with his wife’s laugh, but then looked at itself in the mirror with a sudden, nervous twist of the head.