THE HEAT

The heat swarms across the country with a plague-like ferocity. In Pwll, Ida Fairclough wakes into a muggy morning and, unable to ease the headache it brings on, finds herself walking along the beach, shoes hooked over her right-hand fingers, toes kneading the sand, before the postman has deposited the first of his letters. In the valleys, the miners allow themselves to be glad, for a few very secret hours, that they do not yet have jobs to return to and share cigarettes and newspapers with their buddies, sitting outside their own front doors. Hundreds of miles away, in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, horse hooves rattle the otherwise still air as ice-cream carts are dragged out and cleaned up and taken on their first outing of the summer. Lovers sneak away from their offices on their tea breaks to rush, giggling, down quieter city streets. Cats flatten themselves under beds and dogs give up on barking and pigeons strut slower than before. Down at the docks, the men wipe their greasy brows in their shirt sleeves and curse that Jack Turner chap for not turning up, today of all days. And at his desk, beneath the single too-small window of Classroom F, Grayson Steck hides his face in his hands and decides that this is the first time, the very first time, that he has welcomed the building’s eternal cold.

He peeps through his fingers to check his watch. The children will not arrive for another hour yet, but the next sixty minutes cannot last long enough for Gray. Readying himself for the day ahead seems suddenly an impossible task. He has such a choice to make that his brain refuses to consider anything beyond his two conflicting options. Surely, he cannot think about history. Or rather, none but his own.

Saturday, with Matilda, had been difficult and wonderful and terrifying all at once. They’d made love right there against the dining table, Tilda draped back over the wood so that her chest bucked up and her neck grew long and her ribcage opened up like the wings of a swan. Gray’s body, still drying from the bath as the morning snuck through the window to warm them, only spoiled hers, casting its lumpy shadow, but he could not move away to admire her. Not for a second. He was too desperate for this. When they had finished, they had taken a moment to laugh at each other, at their urgency, then they had gone to bed and done it again, playfully this time, slowly, reminding each other of tricks and peculiarities the years had stolen.

‘Do you remember the first time?’ Matilda whispered, and Grayson laughed again.

‘Wasn’t it awful?’ he said.

‘Truly awful,’ Matilda replied.

‘I don’t think there was any need for the truly, thank you very much.’

‘Oh, no, there was.’ Matilda pressed her cheek to his shoulder, like a pet waiting to be fussed. ‘There really was. In fact, I nearly gave up on you after that first time.’

‘That is a lie!’ Grayson protested. ‘I clearly remember you pursuing me, actually.’

‘Now that’s a lie. A great, whopping one.’

For hours they joked and messed like that, twisting their memories into funnier things than the reality ever had been. As the day aged, they kicked their sheets down the bed and lay naked, trying to ignore the bubbling temperatures, the streamers of sweat leaking down their necks, over their stomachs, along the creases of arms and legs and buttocks and breasts. Lacking the energy to make love a third time, they resigned themselves to kisses and touches and words: words in the shapes of promise and hurt and hope and regret. And eventually those words, all those words, led them – naturally, painfully – to Sally.

Grayson baulks now at the way Matilda had avoided her name, unable to lend her voice to those five simple letters, unable to bear the pain. He is ashamed to think that he too had avoided it, that cowardice had silenced his truth. He loved Sally. Hadn’t he told her so? Wouldn’t he have to tell Matilda the same thing?

He stands and drifts between the rows of desks, dragging a finger through the dust on their hinged surfaces and watching the furry little particles scatter through the air. As a boy, he would have marvelled at the complexity of their tiny flight, the same way he marvelled at the crunch and stretch of a caterpillar’s walk, or the first drop of rain to flop heavily onto your head, or the way that sometimes, when you went to sleep at night, you woke an instant later and it was day again, as though someone had thieved away your darkest hours. Grayson frowns. When had he lost that way of seeing the world? With the first shooting hair on his chest? The first time he slipped his hand under a girl’s dress? The day he got married? He doesn’t know. But had he had children, he thinks, he would have rediscovered it. He would have observed the same inclination in them when, waking one morning, he found them pressing their noses to the window pane perhaps, inspecting the mass race of condensation beads down the glass and wondering at why the winner won. He would have remembered, then, how to be the boy he once was.

And now – now it seems he will be given the chance to do just that.

They had agreed, he and Matilda, that he should visit Sally that same night; that it would be the kindest way; that the girl would understand, wouldn’t she, that it couldn’t have gone on forever. Hour by hour, they talked themselves into belief, and when Grayson finally dressed and stepped outside to begin the walk to Sally’s flat, he felt fall over him a curious sort of anticipation. Here was his answer. He would call it off with Sally. He would tell her that he was sorry, that Matilda had come back to him, and Sally, being Sally, would not fight for him. She would, with all the dignity he knew she possessed, wish him well and say goodbye, probably with one last kiss. And then his life would be right again. He knew it. They could find their way back, he and Matilda.

As he walked, London buzzed into life around him, as loud and intense as the crackly opening note of a theatre performance. It was Saturday night, after all. People had important business to attend to, like fun and frivolity and living. And the heat! The heat had drawn hundreds onto the streets. Groups of giggling couples tumbled out of dances and flowed over the pavements, their feet still moving at triple time, their smiles burning their cheeks. Restaurants flung their doors open to bring their failing waiters some relief as they squeezed between customers, trays held high, top shirt buttons surreptitiously undone. Men sat in doorways, skimming paper hearts and clubs and diamonds and spades at each other. And in one water trough, three boys stood, kicking passers-by wet. Probably, Grayson thought, Sally would not be home. But if she was not home, where was she, and who with? Jealousy reared up in him like a frightened horse. Sally might be out on a date.

As it happened, she was home. She opened the door before Grayson had even begun to consider a second knuckle-tap on the paintwork, and he was free to breathe again, temporarily. Though it was only nine o’clock, Sally was in her nightdress. Her hair, undone, hung about her face. Her eyes were light and soft-lashed without mascara. And, wasn’t she pale? Yes, definitely. She was definitely pale. She was ill, then.

Grayson cupped her jaw in his palm. ‘Are you unwell?’ he said, his concern making him forget, for the minute, the reason for his visit. He’d vowed not even to go inside.

‘No.’

‘What then? What is it?’ Grayson urged, taking her hand and sliding through the door. ‘Tell me.’

But Sally would not, and when her tears welled up and threatened to drop, he began to understand.

At nine o’clock that same morning, Henry finds himself hunched in the curve of his bay window, his back to the light, the chain of Ruby’s sapphire necklace looped through his fingers. He holds the pendant at eye level and lets the jewel swing, as though he is attempting to hypnotise himself. The sun sparks somewhere deep down inside the blue, and each time the chiselled stone reaches the high point of its arc, his mind chants out a syllable of her name. Ru … by … Ru … by. It is like the ticking of a clock, though Henry knows he must not wait for the relief of a chime. It will not sound. Ruby, as she once was, is not coming back.

And hadn’t he always feared this? He is ashamed to recall how angry her absences had made him in the beginning. The first time she had stayed at the flat, Henry had woken the next morning to find her already gone. It was the only night in many years that his nightmares had not dragged him into the dawn, and he’d wanted to turn over and find her there, waiting for him, ready to make his every day better. Selfishly, he had expected that of her. All she had left in her place was a note, wound out in her hasty hand on the back of an old bus ticket. Daisy will have missed me. And how will I explain! Tomorrow.

But Henry had not wanted to wait until tomorrow.

He had fathomed later – though only because Ruby had explained it to him – that she had rushed home to Daisy because she was happy. She had let herself in, stumbled through that jumbled attic flat, jumped onto Daisy’s bed, laughed herself weak when the poor girl woke with a squeal, then proceeded to talk for two whole hours about the man she was going to marry.

‘So, what exactly did you tell her?’

‘What?’

It was the ‘tomorrow’ Ruby’s note had promised and they were sitting on a bench in Hyde Park, knotted into each other. The grass was crispy with cold and shone white under a murky crescent moon. Their breath misted the air.

‘What did you tell Daisy about me?’

Ruby shrugged her way further into her scarf. ‘Oh. I don’t remember.’

‘Yes you do.’

‘All right. I said you were quite good looking, but you certainly weren’t to everyone’s tastes.’

‘Honestly?’

‘Of course. And I said that really you were a bit too full of yourself, considering you were a little on the chubby side, you know, and starting to bald.’ She motioned to the top of her head and clamped a smile away between her lips.

‘Ruby, tell the truth.’

‘No. I can’t remember. Truly, I can’t.’

‘Ruby!’ he pestered. He wanted her to keep playing now that she had reassured him, now that she had sworn to him she would always come back.

But when she met his eye and sighed, ‘Henry,’ she had finished with the game. She untangled his arm from around her shoulders and sat sideways, to better see him. ‘I told her,’ she whispered, ‘that I’d found the man I always wanted to walk into rooms with. That I’d found the man I wanted to do tedious things with, like take long train journeys or straighten the bed. That I’d found the man I hoped would sit next to me whilst I listened to the gramophone and dozed, because just feeling him there, without us speaking or looking at each other or touching, would keep me from ever feeling lonely again. And I told her how frightening it was even to hope for any one of those things. Are you happy now?’ She was not whispering any more. ‘Or do you need to know all my secrets before you’ll just believe that I’m not going to leave you? Because, you know, Henry Twist, a girl isn’t so easy to love once she’s lost her mystery. And haven’t I agreed to marry you? Isn’t that enough?’

Before she could reiterate her questions, Henry stood and pulled her up off the bench. He held her to him and kissed her, in that way he had learned made her weak, their lips barely touching for the longest time. Then they walked along the Serpentine, her arm hooked into his, and listened to the secrets of the water instead of their own. Ruby taught him how.

‘Listen,’ she insisted. ‘I’ll bet this lake has heard all the city’s best secrets. Don’t you think?’ She looked up at him with a grin. He was forgiven. ‘I’ll bet it’s heard them all, and that the sound of the water is really just the sound of all those naughty tales being whispered back to us. Isn’t that a lovely thought?’

He closes his fist around the necklace and rests his head on his knees. He is not crying, but he is, he realises slowly, emitting a low sort of groan; a sound which throbs from his middle, to the rhythm of his pulse perhaps. It is redolent of some animal call, but he cannot think which. It is an idiotic sound. He is glad no one can hear it. No one, that is, except Ruby. Ruby’s ghost. Because now that Jack has disappeared again, Henry has begun to suspect once more that the man is nothing more than a puff of imagination. Naturally, the proof he had presented himself with previously was flawed. That Jack had interacted with that costermonger, and then with Libby, and later with Monty and Tilda and Gray and Ida and Viv – that was not conclusive. If Henry had managed to invent an entire man to hold onto while he clambered out of his grief, then surely he could have invented all those exchanges too. That is what lunatics do. And, of course he should have invented a man. It makes perfect sense now that Jack is no longer here to distract him from the truth. Henry Twist, so recently a widower, would not have allowed another woman into his bed. Henry Twist, so guilty a soldier, needs to bring men back to life almost as much as he needs to resurrect his wife.

A knocking jolts him out of his thoughts: an uneven four-beat. It makes Libby cry. When he lifts his head, he finds the room an odd place: too light, too square, too real. He wants to close his eyes again, to fill the infinitude behind them with pictures of lost people. But the knocking continues, and his mind echoes each knock with a single word: Jack, Jack, Jack.

He struggles to an upright position and steps towards the hallway, slow on his feet, his past making him heavier than he really is.

He is careful not to look into the mirror as he passes; she never stands before him in it any more.

He opens the door to a figure he ought to recognise, but can’t. The man – possessed of one or two too many chins – has a soft, swinish face, upon which he has balanced a pair of spectacles so dainty and round that they must surely belong to a child. The arms of the spectacles squeeze around the sides of his face and disappear into the tufts of blunt, thick hair which shoot out uniformly from his skull. He does not wear a hat. Beneath his chins, a tie secures his head directly to his chest, and Henry entertains the idea, fleetingly, that were he to unfasten that tie, his visitor’s head would simply pop free and float away. Henry would not like to be left with custody of the body it would leave behind. It is a body familiar with good food, and probably good drink, and it does not look easy to move.

A hand is offered, which Henry takes up.

‘How is it, Twist?’ the man says. And still Henry cannot place him.

‘Fine,’ he answers. ‘Good, you know.’ He does not know how to speak to this man.

‘Yes, well.’ The man’s head drops. ‘It’s a funny time.’

‘It is.’

‘Which, incidentally …’ the man appears increasingly apologetic, ‘… is the reason for my visit. You know, you’ve always been a reliable tenant, Twist.’

And there it is. Of course. Mr Larkin – the landlord. Henry steps aside and pushes the door fully open.

‘Come in, Mr Larkin,’ he offers. ‘I’ll get you a cup of tea.’

As Henry places Mr Larkin’s tea down in front of him and awaits his scolding, and Grayson tries desperately to remember just how all those figures fighting the War of the Roses had been related, and Ida checks the post for news from her brother-in-law, Matilda is spreading herself star-shaped over the grass in Monty’s garden. She pushes her arms straight out, as though she is a bird in flight; she sets her legs as wide as her skirt will allow. Beyond the walls, London is hot and busy and loud, but here – an increasing rarity – it is quiet. There is no one present but Monty, who sits nearby, his legs crossed as if he is a Sunday-school boy awaiting his lesson. Matilda stares up at the flat blue sky, searching a crease, a wrinkle, anything. But there is nothing. It is perfect. Everything is perfect.

Except, of course, for her. Matilda Steck, née Fellows, is a criminal of the highest order. Her guilt, like a rolling snowball, gathers weight with every passing second. It is as unstoppable as that sequence of events she has initiated. At some point, it will crush her.

‘I don’t think I can recall such a sudden heat, Monty dear,’ she says, fanning her face with a flattened hand. She is attempting her usual aloofness, but she cannot keep the wobble from her voice. Monty – attentive at last to this woman, though it is younger women, merrier women, he needs to keep him going – catches it.

‘Do you know what I miss about Ruby?’ he says, after a long silence.

Matilda lifts her head and, when they lock eyes, she notices that Monty appears softer than before: it is as if his edges are starting to blur. Old age, she thinks, but she swallows the thought. It is another fear she doesn’t have the energy for just now.

‘The sight of her chest?’ Matilda suggests, attempting a joke. It comes out bitter-sounding. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘What?’

‘Her honesty,’ Monty answers.

‘Yes,’ Matilda agrees, nodding. ‘Her honesty.’

It was perhaps on account of her youth that Ruby felt able to say pretty much anything she wanted. She might, given the opportunity, have grown out of it. But, no, Matilda decides. It was an essential part of her, that way of being able to deliver a truth, any truth, with so much sincerity that it could not cause offence.

‘So,’ Monty advises. ‘Why don’t you say what it is you need to say? Ruby would have.’

Matilda sighs, loud and long. ‘Because I can’t,’ she replies. ‘Because it’s too many kinds of awful.’

‘Is there any chance,’ Grayson pleads, ‘any chance at all, that I can get a date out of you, Mr Pollock?’

Pollock – a skinny, freckled boy with a mess of stringy blond hair – glows red and, near the back of the classroom, a couple of the other boys snigger. Ordinarily, Grayson would punish them for that. He would order them to stand in front of the class and recite facts to childish nursery rhyme tunes: humiliation, he has always found, is a far more effective deterrent amongst boys than a sharp whack to the palm. But today he is too busy bullying Pollock. Poor young Pollock. He has blundered onto the wrong side of Mr Steck today and it is in no way his fault. Grayson cannot stop thinking about what awaits him down the corridor.

‘1485, sir,’ Pollock answers finally.

And Grayson, taken aback, can’t for the life of him think whether this is the correct answer. He turns to the blackboard for help: there is nothing written on its dark plane. He scans the faces of his students, seeking, in the curl of a lip or the roll of an eye, confirmation that Pollock’s response is wildly inaccurate. It might be; Gray doesn’t know. He finds no clue. In the end, he resorts to that tactic all the worst teachers must employ – he forces the children to teach themselves.

‘So,’ he says, tapping the board with a snatched-up tip of chalk-stick. ‘What do the rest of you chaps think to Mr Pollock’s answer? Is he correct? Is he correct and why is he correct? I want evidence, gentlemen.’

The puzzlement this task brings about allows Grayson to be silent again for a time, and he resumes his place behind his desk, the chair hard under his backside.

For once, they hadn’t gone to bed. At least, not in the manner they usually did. Sally had shown Grayson inside then sat down on the edge of her mattress, facing the window, refusing to properly meet his eye. She had developed, quite suddenly, an odd way of moving: mechanical, almost, as though Sally Emory had been left out in the cold too long and stiffened. Gray perched next to her, his arm tight around her shoulders, but she did not thaw into him.

‘What’s upset you?’ he asked. He didn’t want to give his suspicions access to the conversation. Not yet. He had to keep talking until she interrupted him. ‘Something’s upset you. You can tell me.’

But Sally wouldn’t speak. Or couldn’t. She shook her head, considering the floor as though intrigued by the arrangement of their feet there: hers bare and slim and grey in the moonlight; his larger, shoed, and altogether clumsier. When he gave up trying to look at Sally, he took to staring out through that enormous sash window and attempting to ignore that it was forcing him to see the world through a series of small rectangular frames. Hadn’t he been doing that his entire life? The answer was yes, of course. He lived inside a box. He always had.

Sally had been his only stab at escape.

‘Tell me something else, then,’ he said. ‘Anything at all.’ He couldn’t say exactly why, but he wanted so much to hear her voice. She had uttered only one word since he’d arrived. ‘No,’ she’d said. ‘No.’ And Grayson needed more. He needed her to be that force he watched walking the school corridors, a sway of colour in the drabness. He needed her to be the woman he’d been to bed with, so poised and self-assured. But something had drained all that from her, and he suspected that something was him.

‘Tell me,’ he insisted, ‘… about a time when you were so embarrassed you thought you might explode if you were stuck in the situation for one second longer.’

Sally very nearly smiled.

‘Go on,’ Gray pushed. ‘Then I’ll tell you mine. It’s a good one, I promise.’

‘It was that day.’

‘Which day?’ He rested his chin on her shoulder and pressed the tip of his nose to her jawbone.

‘That day. The day I came into your classroom.’

Grayson kissed her cheek. ‘That was very brave.’

‘I knew all those boys were laughing at me.’

‘Not for long they weren’t.’

‘What was yours?’

Grayson kissed her again. ‘I didn’t have one in mind,’ he admitted, smiling. ‘I just wanted to hear your voice.’

‘Sneaky. Think of one.’

But he hadn’t been able to. His mind was racing ahead to the revelation he was dreading and aching for all at once.

‘Sir.’ One of the boys, Hunt perhaps, is calling to him, as though he is a man who has collapsed in the street, as though he has not been present for some time. He can’t imagine why. Here he is, discussing the War of the Roses, and trying to recollect long-ago dates, and struggling not to snap at the children who are temporarily in his care, and avoiding contemplating the fact that, though Matilda thinks he has, he still has not broken it off with Sally, and all the while his son or his daughter is just down the corridor, sprouting into life. His son or his daughter. His daughter or his son. A tiny seed of a thing who could become just about anyone: a doctor or an artist or an explorer or the prime minister. Grayson is uncomfortable thinking in these terms. He has never indulged his hopes like this before, but already names are darting into his mind. He considers them as though they are some fragile antique item he might want to purchase: he seems to hold them in his hands, the letters solid and heavy, and turn them about, looking from all possible angles, searching for the faults. Just this morning he has found four options he wants to share with Sally.

And the thoughts are exciting, of course they are, but they are also laden, laden with guilt. At some point, he is going to have to tell Matilda; his poor, unknowing Matilda. And he has no doubt that the words are going to kill her.