Heat Wave
By Penelope Lively
HarperCollins, 215 pages, $22
`Heat Wave” is a powerfully narrated, entertaining new novel by an Englishwoman at the peak of her literary life. Penelope Lively, winner of the 1988 Booker Prize for fiction and a best-selling author in England, has drawn an enormously intelligent, loving, cool-eyed, witty and universal story of the passions of two generations of a small urban family that is on vacation in a 19th Century stone farmhouse two hours from London.
The tale of a summer in the country is told primarily from the point of view of an infinitely wise and very likable 55-year-old London woman named Pauline, who is sharing her summer residence (curiously named World’s End) with her beloved and unspoiled daughter Teresa, her infant grandson and her worrisome son-in-law Maurice, who commutes to London and is writing a clever book about the history of tourism.
Pauline is the only one who observes that Maurice subtly sets everyone around him in motion to further his own interests. Fifteen years older than Teresa, the 44-year-old Maurice at once mildly irks and impresses his mother-in-law, particularly when he slides her a practiced, self-deprecating glance and explains that country cottages such as World’s End were given ironic–or idyllic–names by inhabitants who had been sent away from their village homes to live and work in these outlying fields.
Teresa is a breathtaking young girl, the embodiment of virtue and beauty, an artist who has taken a break in her successful design career to raise her son. Pauline knows that Teresa has never truly rocked from her moorings because she always believed that things would turn out for the best and that the world was good.
The four members of Pauline’s family are living in what were once three adjoining farmers’ cottages in the middle of a glorious wheat field. Pauline has modernized the interiors of her three cottages, creating two contemporary living spaces with home offices.
The cottages are “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. . . . It 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 communications 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.”
Pauline believes she knows herself, and she reckons that things are not too bad–yet in some areas, not too good either. She has brown blotches on her hands, and the libido is not what it once was, but perhaps that is just as well. A successful book editor and divorced mother, Pauline finds herself truly settled in her life pattern.
It is almost impossible for Pauline to watch her daughter and simply see a lovely young woman standing outside the farmhouse with her infant son on her hip, staring toward the road as she awaits her husband’s return by car from London. Pauline also sees riveting memories of her daughter’s past vulnerable moments. Observing her daughter, Pauline is troubled that Teresa is still so passionately and blindly in love with Maurice. Pauline and her daughter do not look at all alike, but watching Teresa, Pauline sees herself, too–“that eerie echo of self that a parent sees in a child.”
Pauline flashes back to a moment years earlier when she was waiting for her own husband at crowded Victoria Station. What she describes is almost universal:
“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 these 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 like this, she knows, nothing in the world.”
Alas, despite Pauline’s overwhelming love for Harry, he soon began to have affairs. Pauline senses that her beloved daughter could be facing the same life-altering tragedy. In a flashback we learn that Pauline had wanted to speak out against her daughter’s marriage but was stopped by respect for Teresa’s joy at falling completely in love for the first time and having that love returned. At that point, Pauline’s dread of Maurice was based only on small clues.
During the summer spent in the stone cottages, Pauline realizes that she was correct in her early observations of Maurice. From her son-in-law’s smallest inflection, Pauline fills in an entire psyche based on her memories of her ex-husband’s similar gestures and feelings. Normally awkward at touching even his own son, Maurice adroitly ministers to the injured knee of a beautiful girl. Pauline soon watches her daughter’s silent, precipitous decline as Teresa is overwhelmed by signs of her husband’s drift into casual perfidy.
Pauline tersely tolerates Maurice and is mildly surprised when he understands that the countryside is not a peaceful, serene place. Hunters, maurauding local teenagers and cycles of nature make death and violence much more a part of the farm landscape than most vacationing Londoners care to see.
At the middle of the summer, we are introduced to Pauline’s ex-lover Hugh, an emotionally muted, unpretentious, globe-trotting purveyor of rare books who is also her best friend–and, in a sudden flurry of events, her renewed suitor.
Pauline feels guilty that her enjoyment of her place contains little reminder of past occupants and their miserable toil. There remain, of course, fireplaces, a few oak beams–and in Pauline’s half of the cottages, the original precipitate staircase with dangerously narrow treads. (The steep staircase is Chekhov’s shotgun on the wall–it will go off, as it were, showing the reader that all of life is essentially violent.)
A growing tension forebodes disaster for the little family. The book ends with a tragedy, but because of the author’s consummate skills, the event is also utterly satisfying.
I recommend “Heat Wave” to any woman older than 40 who wants to confirm her suspicions about great expectations of first love. I also recommend “Heat Wave” to any woman younger than 40 who wants a major hit of perspective without the customary painful experiences.
