Sunstroke and Other Stories Read online

  She was making notes for a lecture on women novelists and modernism; books by Rhys and Woolf and Bowen were piled all around her, some of them open face down on the table, some of them bristling with torn bits of paper as bookmarks. When she suddenly remembered the news about Alan she lifted her mind from its entanglement in the Paris and Ireland of the twenties and stared around in surprise at her real room in London: tall and white and spacious, with thriving house plants and, filling the wall at one end, a floor-length arched window. The rooms of the flat, where Christine lived alone, were all small – bedroom, bathroom, kitchen – apart from this big one, the centre-piece. Here she worked at a long cherrywood table; when she entertained she pushed all her books and papers to one end and laid places at the other. It was March. Outside the window a bank of dark slate-grey cloud had been piled up by the wind against a lakelike area of silvery-lemon sky, smooth and translucent; the alterations in the light flowed fast, like changing expressions, across the stone housefronts opposite.

  Christine’s flat was on the second floor; the house was one in a row of houses all with the same phenomenal window and cold north light, built as artists’ studios in the 1890s. Some had been renovated and cost the earth, like hers; others were still dilapidated, bohemian, mysterious, the windows draped with rags of patchwork and lace curtains or satin bedspreads. Inside the room, the weather and the light were always intimately present; there were long white curtains at the window but she didn’t close them very often. Instead of shutting the drama out, they suggested too eloquently immense presences on the other side. It had been difficult to choose paintings for the walls; in the end Christine had hung a couple of prints of Mondrian drawings. Nothing else had seemed quite still enough.

  The doorbell rang, she padded in her stocking feet to the intercom.

  —Mum? It’s Thomas.

  She made them both coffee, hasty – measuring out the grounds, taking down the mugs – in her pleasure at his visit, her eagerness to get back to where her son, her only child, was sprawled in the low-slung white armchair in front of the window. She put milk and sugar on the tray, she was glad she had bought expensive chocolate biscuits. She found an ashtray: no one else was allowed to smoke in her flat. Thomas always for some reason chose that armchair, and then leaned his head back against the headrest so that the ridiculous length of him (he was six foot four) stretched out horizontally, almost as if he were lying flat; he crossed his ankles and squinted frowningly at his shoes.

  Today he was wearing his disintegrating old trainers, not the brogues he had for work; his unironed khaki shirt was half in and half out of his trousers. Christine, who hated uniforms, was almost ashamed at how handsome she found him in his obligatory work suit and tie; but she also loved him returned to his crumpled, worn-out old clothes, youth and beauty glowing steadily through them. Thomas was odd-looking, with a crooked nose and a big loose mouth. He hadn’t bothered to get his tawny hair cut; his skin flared sensitively where the raw planes of his face were overgrowing their childish softness. From under his heavy lids, the green eyes flecked with hazel glanced lazily, like Alan’s. If she thought of Alan at all these days (she hadn’t seen him more than five or six times in the last twenty years), it was only when Thomas’s likeness to him took her by surprise.

  —So I hear your father’s getting married again?

  —Who told you? There was a flicker of solicitousness in his expression, in case she minded.

  —Someone who knows Laura. Poor Laura.

  Laura had been Alan’s first wife, the one he was married to all through his affair with Christine, those long years ago. Laura had always made Thomas welcome in her home, even after Alan strayed a second time, and then a third, and then stayed away permanently. Thomas was close to his half-brothers and -sisters, and managed gracefully a whole complex of loyalties.

  —I think Laura’s OK, Thomas said. —I think she’s pretty indifferent these days to what Dad’s up to.

  This wasn’t what the person at the dinner party had told Christine.

  —I hear the girl he’s marrying is young enough to be his daughter.

  Thomas couldn’t help his grin: spreading, conspiratorial. He was easily entertained. —You know what he’s like.

  —Have you met her?

  —She’s OK. I reckon she knows what she’s getting into. But put it this way: I don’t think it was her intellectual qualities he fell for. I thought that you might be in college today, he added. —I only came here on the off chance.

  —Thursdays I usually work at home. Why aren’t you in the office?

  —I phoned and told them I was ill. I haven’t pulled a sickie for ages. I’ve got a lot of stuff going round in my head and I wanted some time out to really think about it. And I thought I might stop by to have a bit of a chat about something that’s cropped up.

  Christine was touched: he rarely came to her to talk about his problems. In fact, there had been almost no problems. He was an affable, sociable boy whose directness was of the easy and not the exacting kind. Thomas heaved himself upright in the chair, so that his knees were jackknifed in front of his face; he stirred two spoons of sugar into his coffee and ate chocolate biscuits.

  —Is it about your dad and this wedding?

  —God, no. That honestly isn’t a big deal. I’m glad for him.

  —Work?

  He made a face. —And other stuff.

  Thomas had finished at Oxford the year before and had been working as an assistant to a Labour MP, a woman, no one very special. All he did was photocopy and file and send standard answers to constituents’ letters, but the idea was that this could lead to bigger and better things, some kind of political career. It was only an idea, being tested. Thomas didn’t know whether a political career was what he really wanted. Christine thought he might be too finely constituted, too conscientious for it. On the other hand she was proud of his realism, and that he was thinking unsentimentally about ways to get power and change things.

  —I’ve got myself in a bit of a mess, Thomas said. —With Anna.

  —Oh?

  He fished his tobacco and rolling papers out of a pocket and used the flat tops of his knees as a table.

  —I seem to have got involved with somebody else.

  —Oh, Thomas.

  He told her about a girl he had met at work. He said that he hadn’t liked her at first – he’d thought she was too full of herself. But then they’d had to work on some assignment together and he’d got to know her a lot better. He could talk to her in a way he’d never talked to anyone else. She was very bright. She wasn’t good-looking in the way Anna was good-looking.

  —She’s quite big, he said. —Not fat. Curvy. With this sort of messy black hair. Long.

  Thomas’s own hair was hanging down across his face as he rolled his cigarette, so Christine couldn’t see his expression. She could hear, though, his voice thick with an excitement that she recognised as belonging to the first phase of infatuation, when even speaking about your lover, saying ordinary things about him or her, is a part of desire.

  —The worst thing is, he said, shaking his hair back and looking frankly at her.—Well, not the worst thing. But they both have the same name. Not quite the same. She’s called Annie.

  Christine couldn’t help a puff of laughter.

  —I know, he said. —Shite, isn’t it? He laughed with her. —The two Anns.

  —Have you told Anna?

  He shook his head. —I thought at first it was just, you know, nothing. Not worth upsetting her about.

  —But it’s something?

  He shrugged and opened his hands at her in a gesture of defencelessness, squinting in the smoke from the roll-up that wagged in his mouth. How was he to know? Nothing like this had ever happened to him before.

  Christine felt protective of Anna, although she had sometimes thought her too sweet and dull for Thomas. How clearly she could imagine this new girl: less pretty, overweight, clever, treacherous. These were all the things
that she herself had been: she was on her guard at once, as if against a rival.

  —She’s different, he said. —She’s funny; she makes me laugh. She doesn’t take everything too seriously.

  —And how do you feel about deceiving Anna?

  He gulped his coffee. She saw him flooded with shame then, not able to trust himself to speak: an unpractised liar.

  —These things happen, she soothed. —We can’t pretend they don’t. Even if we were good, if we were perfectly and completely chaste, we can’t control what happens in our imagination. So being good might only be another kind of lie.

  When Christine had begun her affair with Alan, there had been a possibility of his leaving his wife and family. For a while, in fact, he had left, and they had lived together. Thomas was conceived during that time. It had not worked out, they had fought horribly, and Alan had been sick with missing his children. In the end he had taken himself home. Such storms, such storms, there had been in Christine’s life then: with Alan, and with others, afterwards. When she longed for her youth, those storms were what she missed, and not the happy times. The excitement of upheaval, a universe open with possibility, the phone calls that changed everything, the conspiratorial consultations with girlfriends, the feverish packing for surprise trips, escaping out of the last thing or rushing to embrace the next. Perhaps Thomas remembered some of those adventures, too: late-night train journeys when he had sat beside her with big sleepless eyes, sucking at his dummy, fingering the precious corner of his blanket, his little red suitcase packed with books and toys.

  Later, once he was established at school, she had settled into a steadier routine for his sake. But perhaps now, when he found himself infatuated and intoxicated and behaving badly, at some level of consciousness he’d recognised it as her terrain, and come to her because he thought she would know what he should do next. Perhaps his coming to her with his own crisis was a kind of forgiveness, for those upheavals.

  —What about work? she said.

  Thomas looked at her vaguely. Work seemed, of course, a straw, in relation to the great conflagration of his passionate life.

  —You said there were work issues as well that you were worried about.

  —Only the old question. I mean, here I am stuffing envelopes for an MP who voted for the war in Iraq. Should I stay inside the tent pissing out? Perhaps it would be more dignified to get out and do some pissing in.

  —Dignified pissing.

  —But we’ve been over all that so many times.

  —Only now it’s complicated because she’s there at work? Annie.

  —It would solve everything if I just took off and went away by myself to live in Prague or somewhere. Budapest.

  —Leave both of them you mean? Christine said. —Woman trouble, she sighed, making a joke of it.

  She was suddenly quite sure that he would, in fact, move abroad for a while, even though he didn’t know it yet himself, and it had only popped into his conversation as a joke-possibility. After much confabulation and self-interrogation and any number of painful scenes with his two girls, this was what he would do.

  —I’d miss you if you moved to Prague, she said.

  —Get a sabbatical. Come out and stay.

  She loved having him near her in London. But as soon as she had imagined Prague she knew that it was what she wanted for him: something more than the slick game of opportunity and advancement, a broader and deeper initiation into old sophisticated Europe, into a grown-up life with complications.

  —I have to go, Thomas said.

  He had looked at his watch three or four times in the last fifteen minutes.

  —You’re meeting Annie?

  —No, he lied.

  Though he had made his confession to Christine, she wasn’t even in imagination to follow him to wherever he was meeting his big, dark, clever girl. She was only his mother, after all. It might be Anna’s night for Pilates or whatever it was she did. The lovers might have the whole evening ahead of them, after Annie had finished work, to sit in a hidden corner in a pub somewhere, crushing out cigarettes half smoked, going over and over the same broken bits of logic, pressing knees against knees under the table, getting excitedly drunker. Or to go back to her place. All that stuff.

  By the time Thomas left, the sky outside Christine’s window had changed again. The bank of grey-black had broken up and swallowed the lemon lake; now tousled scraps of cloud tumbled untidily in a brooding light. Christine had another hour to work before she finished for the day and showered and changed; she was meeting a friend for a film – a Bergman screening at the BFI – and a late supper. She picked up her copy of Good Morning, Midnight. Her name was on the flyleaf: Christine Logan, Girton College, 1971. She was certain that she had held this same copy in her hands the morning of the day that Thomas was born, in 1980 – not his birthday but the day before, since he wasn’t actually born until half past midnight. She had been working on her thesis then, typing up a new chapter to show her supervisor, checking every quotation carefully against her text, when she felt the first pain.

  The first pain – the first sign she’d had that Thomas was coming, two weeks before his time – had been like a sharp tiny bell struck as a signal; feeling it had been more like hearing something, a very precise high note, from deep inside her swollen abdomen, which was pressed with some difficulty into the space between her chair and the little rickety desk she worked at. None of the other things that the midwives at the hospital had warned her to expect had happened – the show of bloody mucus, or the waters breaking – only this little bell of pain, so small it was more pleasurable than unpleasant, zinging away from time to time inside her. She knew that she was supposed to delay going into the hospital for as long as she could, so she continued typing, her mind seeming to move at a pitch of high, free clarity between the words of the novel and her own extraordinary circumstance. All this went on in the sitting room of the little cottage she rented from Jesus College in those days, in the Kite in Cambridge. The cottage was gone now, pulled down to make way for new developments.

  Once, while she waited, she had got up from the desk and stared at her face in a tarnished old junk-shop mirror she kept propped up on the mantelpiece for the sake of its frame. She thought that only fifty years before, at the time when the Rhys novel was written, she might have stared at herself like this, on the brink of the unknown ordeal, and been justified in wondering whether she would survive it. In the novel, Sasha’s baby died. Christine was not afraid, exactly, but she could not imagine what lay in wait for her on the far side of the hours to come. When she was at the hospital for her antenatal appointments, she had sometimes passed new mothers walking out to a waiting car or a taxi, followed by nurses carrying their babies bundled in white shawls. She didn’t have friends with babies; she didn’t know what it would mean, to be responsible for a white-wrapped bundle of her own.

  She had picked up the telephone once or twice to call Alan, but cut herself off before she even finished dialling. Although the plan had always been for him to be there with her at the birth of their child, for the first time the idea of his large presence bothered her: he was a big tall man with a booming voice and a curling salt-and-pepper beard, a historian, a Marxist. I can manage this by myself, she had thought that morning, timing the little bells of pain which began to ring louder and stronger. It was as if she had intuited with the first pang of Thomas’s arrival, and quite rightly, that her delighted possession of her son would push apart whatever mechanism it was that had bound her to his father for those years of her youth.

  Christine’s thesis was on certain women writers of the early twentieth century. She had argued that in their novels and stories they had broken with the conventions deep-buried in the foundations of the fiction tradition: that all good stories end in marriage, and that the essential drive in plot is courtship, bringing men and women together. Katherine Mansfield’s femmes seules and Woolf ’s solitaries represented a break that was at least as revolutionary,
surely, as Lawrence’s and Joyce’s iconoclasm. In the late seventies, the automatic gesture of obeisance to feminism had not yet been internalised among academics, and an amused hostility was still the norm. Alan wouldn’t read Christine’s work then: he said once that he took no interest in the nuances of bourgeois ladies’ hypersensibility. She had tolerated this attitude, at least at first; she had even been attracted by it, as if in his contemptuous maleness he were a huge handsome bear whose ferocity she had to take on, and tame, and teach.

  When Thomas was four or five years old he had asked her once if he was going to die. She wasn’t sure where this exchange had taken place – on a beach perhaps, although not on a summer day. She associated it vaguely with a windy walk across pale pebbles that were awkward underfoot, along the sea’s rim of crisp-dried detritus: seaweed, plastic netting, bird bones. Perhaps it was on one of their trips to the Norfolk coast with Alan when he and she were still seeing each other.

  She must have been carrying Thomas. She remembered his weight slipping on her hip.

  —It’s all right, Christine said.—Don’t worry about dying. Maybe by the time you grow up they’ll have invented some medicine so you won’t have to.

  She remembered Alan stopping abruptly. Perhaps she put Thomas down then and he went to dabble in the sea-rubbish.

  —I can’t believe you just said that.

  He was laughing, but she thought with certainty at that moment: He hates me. The conviction reverberated like a blow against armour; she tasted blood and she wanted to fight.

  —What’s wrong with saying it? I used to think that when I was a little girl.

  —But it isn’t true.

  —Of course it’s not true. It’s something reassuring to keep you going until you’re old enough. You know, like Heaven.