Long Hot Summer

by Rosemary Friedman

Genres: Family Life

Synopsis

Lorna Brown has everything...so why does she feel so dissatisfied? The clothes, the house, the Poggenpohl kitchen do nothing to give her life meaning. The death of a friend makes her question her existence still further. Then she meets Armand, her daughter's friend, and Lorna's yearning for something different takes shape. Envying the assurance and spontaneity of her daughter and her companions, she suddenly makes a decision and abandons her easy comfort for a squat in Regent's Park. Will Lorna find there the contentment she craves?

Release date: January 1, 2016

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 256

Sample

She liked the house in the early morning before anyone was awake, particularly in the summer. In the hall the leaves of the monstera and the ficus shone with the slanting rays of the sun which had been up since five. In the lighted tank the Black Mollies and the Rosy Barbs glided back and forth with rhythmic certainty in their own perpetual daytime. She must remember to tell Joey to do something about the water.

In the Poggenpohl kitchen everything was as she’d left it the night before, except for the cereal trail bearing evidence of Joey’s night starvation. Mechanically she cleared away the packet with its ‘Free Inside’ and the sugar and mopped up the puddle of milk. Cassius stretched and shook himself, then walked sedately to the garden door, knowing the pattern. She unlocked the three security devices insisted upon by the insurance company after their burglary and let him out. The garden, ravaged by the drought, was not its best, the lawn bald and browning, the roses fatigued. There had never been a summer like it. Not that she could remember. Day after day with the mercury over seventy – over twenty rather, she never could get used to it, any more than she could the grams and the millilitres, having to refer to her conversion tables every time she cooked.


She did not like the heat but took care not to complain too much because Derek, who tolerated it better, said it was ‘her age’, a comment guaranteed to send her into an inner rage belied by the outward tolerant smile. Everyone was suffering. Joey could not sleep, Derek carried a spare shirt in his briefcase, and even Cassius lay dormant all day under a tree. Only Anne-Marie seemed happy, lying out, whenever she could, in the full heat of the sun, in the briefest of bikinis.

The unprecedented heatwave was the major topic of conversation. People discussed the discomfort of it and exchanged hints on how to keep cool. London had taken on an air of New York with men in shirtsleeves. The tube trains were unbearable. No one wanted to go to bed and the streets were still busy at midnight. Soft drinks were at a premium, as were ice creams which scarcely survived the journey to the mouth. Ice had run out but not the beer. The TV newscasters reported the soaring temperatures nightly and showed strange scenes of Londoners adapting to the heat. Hoses were banned both for gardens and car washing. Small boys flaunted their dirty necks as chauvinistic evidence of their efforts to save water. Some said it was the end of the world.

If one had to cook, early morning was the best, the only time. After that the heat in the kitchen became intolerable. Derek berated himself for not having put air-conditioning into the house, but how was one to know?

It was the end of term and Camilla was coming down. Lorna had got up to make a chocolate cake. She always made one at the beginning of each term for Camilla to take up to Warwick with her, and one when she came down. It was a tradition, like so many other things she had started, and it was expected of her. Half the campus seemed to wait with anticipation for her chocolate cake. It was always the same one; enormous and quite a feat of cooking; enough for dozens of mouths hungry for the sweetness of homes they had left behind.


It didn’t seem like two years since the first chocolate cake. She and Derek had taken the uncertain Camilla up to her new home in the Midlands. It was the first time she had been away except for holidays. She remembered the bare room on campus which had seemed so impersonal, so cell-like, with its narrow bed, its single cupboard, its window looking out on to other curtained windows shielding what she afterwards discovered were the Sunday afternoon couplings. What else was there to do? They had brought coloured bulrushes in the market and a green vase to put them in, and a Degas poster which Derek fixed to the wall with Blue-tak. The room began to look a bit better and Camilla put her name in the slot outside her door, her groceries in the locker in the tiny kitchen, and her butter in the fridge which she had to lock.

The corridors had been full of activity, everyone staggering in with heavy cartons in which all that could be seen were stereos and giant boxes of cereals. Grown men hidden behind the Sugar Puffs and the Cornflakes and the Frosties. They’d left her listening woefully to ‘Abbey Road’ and felt like executioners, forgetting that this was the moment they had striven for through the struggles with O-levels and with A-levels and the trials of the interviews. Derek and she had not spoken on the way back down the motorway, each choked with the emotions engendered by their firstborn flapping her sticky little wings and leaving the nest.


They had adapted quite quickly. She had cleared away the half-eaten apples and the crumpled Kleenex and the woolly hat Camilla had left around and found it pleasant to have the house tidy and receive the unexpected phone calls cut off by pips in their prime so that they never did discover what she had swapped her balalaike for. The second year had been different. She had moved to a flat off campus. Flat! Well, three rooms, kitchen and bath shared with two others in an old house in Leamington Spa. The stairway was strewn with bedding and divan legs and motorcycle engines. Her mattress was on the floor. She had her teddy bear by her side and Marx on the mantlepiece. She had been driven up by a young man with a red beard and held her deck on her lap all the way as if it were Sèvres.

She was an old hand now. They were all old hands, used to the comings and goings. They visited and tried not to show their distaste of the ice-cold bathroom and the rings inside the mugs from which they had to drink their tea. Camilla was reading philosophy but they heard more about Wreckless Eric, the Damned, the Clash and the Jam than Cartesian meditations and Wittgenstein.

Sometimes Lorna wondered if it was right for her to have gone away. From a conventional schoolgirl whose world was pretty well circumscribed Camilla had made the transition into one of the world’s myriad blue-jeaned semi-adults who shot their mouths off about society without having had the experience which would qualify them even to hold an opinion. The whipping boys were familiar. The Establishment, nuclear deterrents, the phoney values, the megalomania and the capitalism of the middle-classes. The arguments went round and round like skittles at a fairground. Camilla and her friends, who had never had to work from nine till five most probably never would (they would not after all be up in time), knocked them down from their vantage point on the floor where they sat in the small hours (what other hours were there?), drinking from the rivers of coffee which flowed through the campus.


She was sure that the chocolate cake was a symptom of her own maternal needs and kept the recipe in her kitchen ‘File-It’. The children had given this to her for a birthday. A ring file, such as they used for school, it had inspired her originally to organize her culinary data as they did their work. The good intentions persisted for several weeks. Hors d’œuvres and Starters were followed by Soups and Entrées, with Puddings and Pastries bringing up the rear. The good intentions lasted no longer than her determination, at various times, to keep her drawers tidy, to take up needlepoint, or to learn a new language. Scraps of paper torn surreptitiously from magazines in the hairdresser’s began to infiltrate the pages. Backs of envelopes on which she had scribbled ‘Unusual Cucumber Salad’ and ‘Watercress Soup’ slid hither and thither. Bon Viveur and Katie Stewart were seconded from the Telegraph and The Times to make bedfellows for Lois’ kipper pâté and Irene’s strudel. The whole caboodle swelled hideously with time, and lost its pristine whiteness in blobs of cake mixture, smears of oil, and various splashes of this and that. ‘University Chocolate Cake’, now nestling incongruously between ‘Lemon Sorbet’ and ‘Sukiyaki’, was well endowed with cocoa, the ink running down the page in dried purple tears. She got as far as ‘400 grams butter’ when Cassius yelped to be let in. He sidled past her as she held open the door, leaving hairs on her dressing-gown. He made for his water-bowl and lapped noisily.

Her relationship with the dog was ambivalent. The depressed-looking collie represented for Derek the obedient child he did not have, perfectly trained, never arguing, no complaining at the longest walk in the foulest of weathers. He did not, however, have to wash the muddy paw-marks off the floor on winter days, dry the shaggy coat when he came in from the rain, open the smelly cans of meat and remember to order them, cope with the occasional manifestations of digestive disorders as they appeared, restrain him from molesting the window cleaner in intimate places and attend to his daily exercise. Derek had bought him and took him over at weekends. He had, however, attached himself unequivocally to Lorna. He moved where she moved, stood when she stood, sat when she sat. The house, she knew, smelled of dogs, especially when it was wet outside. She had never been an animal lover and every autumn when he shed lumps of fur over the furniture she vowed to get rid of him. Only occasionally, while walking him, did she feel virtuous and that he served some purpose. Over the common, woman and dog; without him she would certainly not have walked; it helped her with her weight problems.


He padded back and forth to the larder and cupboards as she got out scales and tinfoil, sugar, eggs, flour, milk, and cocoa. The butter and the sugar went into the Magimix, a present from Derek for Christmas. Her kitchen was so mechanized that often she felt the penchant for labour-saving devices had come full circle and that the labour saved was now equivalent to the labour involved in terms of breakdown, maintenance, nuisance, and service. Because Derek was an architect he insisted that she had the benefit of every convenience that was going. He liked ‘toys’ and he liked leading weekend visitors on a tour of the gadget-oriented kitchen. Proud as he was, however, of the built-in, self-clean automatic cooker with its roast-guard (bells ringing when the beef was rare), rotisserie, simmerstat and lights (all that was lacking was the music), he was unable to make himself an omelette as he could not operate the banks of controls. There were times when Lorna herself found it menacing. A kind of science-fiction kitchen round which she felt she should be walking in a space-suit. There were days when she loved its smooth efficiency (provided everything was working) and others when she fantasized about scrubbed wooden tables and stone sinks and Aga ranges bearing simmering stock-pots. Surrounded by her automatic waste-grinder, can-opener, dishwasher, clothes-washer, fruit-juicer and coffee-grinder, each vibrating with its own particular rhythm, she felt she needed a conductor’s baton to harmonize the cacophony, or that she was a spider caught in a web of its own making. On headache days she could not stand the noise and fled from the kitchen, tightly closing the door. Today, with another certain eight hours of unbearable heat, Camilla coming down with her friends, people for drinks, Grandma for tea, she was at momentary peace with the teak formica and the dark red ceramic tiles.


The butter creamed easily, changing in seconds from hard yellow squares which she’d fled into the Magimix to pale, sugary foam. She ran the spatula round the bowl and, sliding her finger down what remained on the white plastic blade, put it in her mouth. The sweet creamy taste of the mixture reminded her that she had had no breakfast. She filled the kettle and cursed as the orange rubber sink-swirler dropped into it from the tap. She fished it out. It always reminded her of an orange penis. It was past its prime and had stretched. She must remember to get a new one. She started again with the water, then switched the kettle on and wrote on the plastic memory-board with the special pencil, ‘sink-swirler’, underneath ‘greaseproof paper’ and ‘carpet cleaner’. She broke the eggs into a clear Pyrex basin, looking with disgust at the two rusty globules of embryo chicken. She never quite knew how to cope with them. Sometimes she ignored them and simply added them to whatever she was making, pretending that she hadn’t really seen. On other occasions she fished them out meticulously with the half eggshells, to which they seemed to be mysteriously attracted, as she had been taught to do at ‘Advanced Cookery’.


Today she pretended they did not exist, and, overcoming her revulsion at the new life they represented, she added the eggs to the butter and sugar and in a few whirrs the mixture was amalgamated and her conscience salved. She sifted the flour with the cocoa, feeling irritated with the lumps which conglomerated in the bottom of the sieve. She pushed the last of them through with her fingers, then heard the newspaper thud on to the mat and had a moment of regret at getting up so virtuously early. She went to pick them up and wondered whether to take them to Derek or if he was still sleeping as he had been when she had slipped out of the bed. She decided he was and left them on the hall table on the brass tray they had brought from Istanbul. She left a cocoa thumb-print on the front of the Sunday Times.

There was something about the Sunday newspapers. She liked to read them in bed with Derek. They did not quarrel about the sections. Derek read the news, the comments on the news, the letters. She read the faits divers and the Review Sections with their surveys of the Arts: books, plays, radio and television. She also read the adverts – all of them. Houses, holidays, for sale, wanted; Special Offers for which she sometimes sent away (her sorbetière, the briefcase she had given Derek for his birthday), the fashion pages, and the account of ‘One Person’s Day’ which she generally thought extremely dull. She was aware that the dichotomy was due to the fact that Derek lived in the real world while she lived mostly in her head. She believed this a circumstance which had come about because of the life she led, and had lately felt that the consequences could be dangerous. Something to do with a thin line which she must be careful not to cross. Its definition was not absolutely clear and she did not think about it too much. Later in the day they swapped sections and she would read about ‘New boosts to industry’, ‘Railways expect to halve freight loss’, and the latest extradition of terrorists, proclamation of rights, and denials and affirmation of defence cuts. On most Sundays by the time she got out of bed, her face grubby with newsprint, she had bought a flat in the south of France, contemplated a holiday in the Western Isles, and vowed to attend an exhibition of watercolours in Bond Street, an Arts Council lecture at the Serpentine Gallery, and at least six concerts at the Festival Hall. Lying in bed in the terylene and cotton ‘Patience Rose’ sheets (Harrods sale), none of it was any trouble at all. By the time Monday morning came it was a different story.


The cake was too large for any of her cake tins. Irene, who had given her the recipe, had suggested a roasting tin lined with tinfoil and that was what she always used. She took the long silver baton out of the drawer and tore off more than she needed. She thought, as she often did, how extravagant, and that her grandmother had cooked without silver paper and Snappiwrap and Handiwrap and silicone paper and plastic bags, just as she had managed without electric fryers and pressure cookers and thermostatically controlled everything. There had been a grey gas-cooker, she remembered, and big black saucepans and the food seemed to smell more like food. She glanced at her shelf of recipe books, Elizabeth David through Claudia Rodin to Muriel Downes and Rosemary Hume. She couldn’t remember her grandmother’s having a recipe book at all, she just cooked out of her head, throwing in handfuls of this and that and tasting from a wooden spoon. She ground salt too from huge oblong blocks and made butter into patterned balls with wooden bats you dipped into cold water. The butter had been served in Sainsbury’s by ladies with muslin turbans who weighed it and slapped it into shape on the marble slab before wrapping it with a few deft movements to individual order. There had somehow been time. Time to wait at the counter for butter, then at another for eggs; to pass the time of day with friends and neighbours not caught in the frenetic rush there was today. There was little of either leisure or pleasure in shopping now. Charging round Sainsbury’s with laden trolleys, everyone absorbed in her own little grand prix, in and out of the sections, delicatessen and soap powders, and into the straight for the final lap to the checkout. They bent and stretched and stood mesmerized and pondering, struck into ghastly frozen moments of indecision between the long grain and the pudding rice. The trolleys assumed lives of their own as they grew increasingly unmanageable with their rapidly growing loads of drunken, double-pack toilet rolls and spaghetti hoops and jumbo soap powders. Often she thought of it as a ballet; arabesquing for the tomato chutney and pliéing for the water-crackers (3p off). It could at times be quite aesthetic, the higgledy-piggledy load of packets and tins finally passing in dignified order along the conveyor belt to be packed neatly in cardboard boxes while she stood with her chequebook in her teeth trying to prevent the boursin being crushed into unrecognizable shape by the relentless arrival of the bullying tins of peaches and of sauerkraut. It was quite a feat of strength. Shelf to basket, basket to check-out, check-out to boxes, boxes to car, car to kitchen, kitchen to store cupboard and to fridge. You needed the strength of an ox these days. Some women had small children as well, perched on their trolleys. She always felt sorry for them and for herself when Derek said what have you been doing all day as though she’d done nothing more strenuous than sewing samplers. Sometimes she looked at the load and the long snake of paper itemizing what she had spent, which seemed to add up to more and more each week, and thought thank God I won’t have to shop again for a month, but in a day there was tomato purée and bay leaves chalked up on the memory-board and she had run out of bleach and whole black peppers.


She turned the oven on and put the creamed mixture into her other mixer which was better at mixing then creaming and had the motor turning gently as she added the milk and the eggs and the cocoa and the flour which spurted up out of the bowl in a soft brown mist.

She watched, fascinated, as the mixture became blended into a glossy, beige mass and, tasting some, wondered whether she was going to eat any when it was done. She wasn’t the only one with a weight problem. It was one of the many crosses of middle-age. It didn’t seem fair that up till the time Joey was born she had been stick-thin like Camilla and tucked into everything she could lay hands on without gaining an ounce. Now there was nothing for nothing. She had to pay for every excess with too-tight trousers and skirts, an uncomfortable feeling of heaviness and the thickening round the waist that brought problems of guilt and depression, which could be alleviated temporarily by chocolate and apple pie and cream, eaten furtively, which added more pounds and more guilt and depression… There was no winning. Life, without a doubt, was on the side of the young. They were not punished for beer or chocolate bars. Never thought about it; neither had she or Derek once. Now the morning weigh-in had become a daily ritual. Sometimes she forgot and stood on the scales with the shower-cap, then took it off as if it could make the slightest difference. Often she cheated, adjusting the dial to just under the correct reading, aware that she deceived only herself. She did try. She went to exercise classes run by a skinny Viennese of indeterminate years who rolled on the floor in a black leotard, twisting herself into all manner of knots and exhorting her ladies to do the same. The exercises helped with her thighs and her ‘hanging bottom’. They did nothing for her weight which was a problem of sheer self-control. At times she had it; sitting virtuously before pallid mounds of cottage cheese, knowing full well that a sudden shift in equilibrium brought about by unexpected stress or strain or the dark machinations of her hormones would send her running for the French bread and butter, the mashed potatoes she made for Joey, and the comfort of the chocolate bars whose wrappers littered her car.


It was hard to be a woman. Apart from the difficulties common to both sexes, one had to cope with the appalling cataclysm of adolescence, the trials, great and small, of child-bearing, and before one had time to turn round the tumultuous finale of the fertile years. Sometimes she wondered if there would ever be any peace except that brought by death from the extortionate demands of her own body.

The bowl, with its great mass of mixture, was heavy to lift. She was about to tip the lot into the silver-lined roasting tin when she suddenly remembered with horror that she had forgotten to add the beaten egg-whites. Typical of her memory lately. Lucky she had remembered or the whole lot would have been wasted. It had something to do with concentration. Lack of it. There was so much clutter in her mind, like a junk room that needed a good sort out, that there seemed no room for some of the things she tried to retain. Irene found the same. She’d waited an hour at the bus stop for her daily help who came on Tuesdays before she had realized it was Wednesday.


She used to have a good memory. She had been clever at school, only in those days one never did anything with it; took a secretarial course and had a job for a while or was finished in Switzerland, passing the time as best one could while waiting for Mr Right and marriage. Judging by the troubles a great many of her friends were having, it had turned out to be Mr Wrong, but that was beside the point, it was marriage that was the operative word, the be-all and the end-all. It was expected. Now it was university degrees for all; it had become a sine qua non like A-levels and fitted you for as little. It provided and excuse, however, for three years of lazing around with no responsibilities to either state or parents who provided the grants, at the end of which one had become used to being thoroughly idle and iconoclastic.

The egg whites took moments only. At cookery school it had been a balloon whisk and a copper bowl, probably better, but the chocolate cake would be eaten anyway, not too closely analysed. It was a question of air and volume but one could not be too pedantic.

She cut the white clouds into the chocolate mixture in figures of eight with a metal spoon. When it was done she sloshed the lot into the roasting tin and levelled the surface. The light on the oven had gone off, indicating that it had reached the required temperature. She put the cake in and set the timer for sixty minutes.


Looking round the kitchen with distaste she wondered whether to leave the mess for Anne-Marie, then decided it wasn’t worth the long face and collected the bowls and spoons and spatulas and wiped the chocolate pools and rivers and opened the dishwasher, only to find it was full of dishes from the night before. She closed it again and stacked the things on the draining board.

It was eight o’clock and, despite the open windows, already warm in the kitchen. She didn’t know how people managed in hot countries; didn’t think she’d survive five minutes.

On Sunday mornings Anne-Marie brought them breakfast in bed. There were no signs that she was stirring so Lorna, after listening outside her door for a few moments, opened it. Her room was the smallest in the house but pleasant. The blue and white wallpaper matched the curtains and the bedspread. The carpet was scarlet. The au-pair girls liked it.

Because of the heat Anne-Marie had removed her blankets which she had folded neatly on the chair. She slept on her stomach. The ink-black hair with which she could do so many things lay over the sheet like a jet curtain. She was dead to the world and Lorna knew it would take more than calling to wake her.

“Anne-Marie! Anne-Marie! Eight o’clock, Anne-Marie!” She sighed and pulled back the curtains. There was no reaction. On the dressing table were Christian Dior nail varnish and expensive face creams. On the bedside table the latest in Swiss travelling clocks and transistor radio in maroon leather.


She shook the shoulder tanned from days of lying in the sun. “Anne-Marie!”

She began to grow angry with the girl, as if she were doing it deliberately to annoy. She shook her rather more roughly. “Anne-Marie!”

“Eight o’clock, Anne-Marie.”

A slim arm reached for the clock.

“I was sleeping,” Anne-Marie said.

“You were. You’re nearly as difficult to wake as Camilla. It’s Sunday. Will you bring breakfast? There are people for drinks and lunch. Camilla’s coming down.”

In their own room Derek was stirring. He lay naked on top of the bed, running to fat round the middle.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“Eight o’clock. I’ve already made a cake.”

At eleven o’clock Lorna, in blue jeans, was hoovering the living-room while in the kitchen Anne-Marie, still in her house-coat, dreamily cut radishes into perfect flowers. It had been a mistake to give her salad to prepare. She knew it the minute it was out of her mouth, by which time it was too late. She had been at it since ten o’clock and there were now a dozen radish flowers opening their petals as dreamily as Anne-Marie herself, in a cut-glass bowl.

She was a sweet girl, sweet and kind. She did anything Lorna asked but it took her all day. She seemed to live in a trance from which it was impossible to wake her. Sometimes, especially when she was harrassed as today, Lorna longed for one of the efficient bitches they had had in the past. She didn’t like giving house-room to other people’s problem daughters at all, feeling that she had enough trouble with her own, but now that Camilla was away it meant that without someone in the house she couldn’t go out in the evening with Derek or away for the weekend because of Joey, whom Anne-Marie adored.


She noticed him now at the door of the living-room in his striped pyjamas. He was mouthing at her. She switched off the Hoover.

“…steel wool.”

“Under the sink.”

“That’s got soap in. It’s for the fish.”

“You’re not going to start . . .