Heat Wave Read Online Free Page B

his coffee and goes back into the house.
    If asked, Pauline would say that she was happy, generally speaking. As it is, few people would have the temerity to ask. Pauline is seen as self-sufficient, confident, and possessed of a nice balance between good self-esteem and a healthy regard for others. She is the sort of woman who would have a therapist running for cover. Or so it seems.
    She is indeed independent. But the independence is hard won, which is why she prefers not to answer Maurice’s question. She is a woman who has lived alone since her daughter grew up and left. Well, not always entirely alone. There have been men now and then, a couple of whom have had, for a while, quasi-resident status. But she has been alone in principle, leading the flexible, slightly opportunistic life of the unattached. She has the habits of those who are solitary, whether by choice or by circumstance – changing plans to indulge the mood of the moment, making and breaking contingency arrangements. She is practised in social duplicity. It is often a good life, occasionally a bad one. A life rich in carefully nurtured minor satisfactions, in the easy gratification of self-indulgences. An unfettered life, a life without the grating irritation of presences that are too present, a life in which anything might happen and in which
it sometimes did. A life also in which a day could suddenly become a treacherous void, in which spectres come swarming round the bed in the small hours.
    Unlike Maurice, Pauline is not outraged by the fact that she is getting older. When she considers the matter – when she remembers that she is fifty-five – she is amazed rather than offended. Amazed to be here, thus, at this point, having negotiated so much. The long continuous present of childhood and the helter-skelter of youth and then the ferocious onward rush of events. Here she is – now, today – and it is not too bad, though perhaps in some areas it is not too good either. There are brown blotches on her hands, her teeth look like giving out before the rest of her, and the libido is no longer what it was, which is perhaps just as well. But the world still shines for her, expectation is as rich.
    Luke has lost interest in the dandelion clocks. He has found his ball. He throws it, pursues it, falls over, picks himself up again, throws the ball once more – a burgeoning skill. Pauline, watching him, thinks that there is also this phenomenon which is Luke-time, a process of accelerated change whereby Luke seems as though he is not hitched to the ordinary passage of the calendar year but is set on some hectic course of his own which has spawned a dizzying sequence of Lukes – the sloe-eyed baby with waving starfish hands has become the pneumatic crawler and is now this tottering figure weaving in pursuit of a slippery plastic globe. Luke is on a fast-track which is not synchronized with Pauline’s days, nor indeed with those of his parents.
    It has clouded over. The weather is playing false once more, capricious as ever – the bright morning giving way to looming skies. A grey pall has come tilting up from behind the hill, intensifying the green of fields and trees and hedges. The landscape is vivid. And the first drops of rain begin to fall.
    Pauline carries Luke inside.

3
    Pauline remembers the first time she saw Teresa with Luke. She walks down the hospital ward between a double rank of legs – legs ranged carelessly on beds, sticking out below nighties and dressing-gowns. Brown legs, black legs, pale pink legs. An acreage of female flesh, casually exposed, legs and thighs and whole breasts into which are tucked the furry heads of babies. No one is modest or prudish here, there is a frank acceptance of what is going on. This is all about bodies – the bodies of women. And the place is awash with people. Nurses hurrying up and down, acolytes around each bed – the husbands and the friends and the parents, the brothers and sisters. There are flowers