Tessa Hadley: Sunstroke and Other Stories

However, Kieran has brought with him a big polythene packet of weed, which, as they set about rolling it up and smoking it, produces an immediate cheerful camaraderie. They sprawl in the plastic garden chairs in the sunshine, smoking and drinking cup after cup of tea. Sam is so relieved he doesn’t have to make conversation with Vince all by himself that he becomes expansively friendly towards him. He always forgets what it is that Vince does for a living (usually he covers this up by talking about the contemporary novel: Sam had one published three years ago and is supposed to be working on the next). Tactfully now, he leads the conversation around to the kind of crossover electronic music he remembers Vince likes, and Vince tells them that he designed the lighting recently for a concert in the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Vince is eager to please. He is lean, with the wedge-narrow face of a well-bred collie, and his hair, bleached-pale silk, is cut to flop into his eyes. He has the kind of good looks that men don’t mind imagining women like. Sam doesn’t hold it against Vince that he himself is bulky-shouldered and putting on weight. His brown curls are thinning on top and he wears little gold-rimmed glasses; he fancies he looks a bit like middle-period Coleridge.

The peace of the afternoon seems deeper because of all the children’s toys lying where they were dropped, the bikes beached on their sides, the swing hanging still. The cottage is tucked into the bottom of a crease worked deep between the rounded slopes of the hills; sheep are grazing in the field that rises so steeply behind them that you can almost touch their roof from the path that winds along its lower edge. In the wide bowlful of tender light the buzzards sail superbly, mewing and turning their pale undersides to the declining sun. Wrens are pecking the greenfly from Rachel’s sweet-pea plants.

Kieran is telling the others about his grandfather who worked as a salesman for a company selling private telephone systems, mostly to the collieries; he did business in the West Country coalfield that’s not far from the cottage, worked out and half forgotten now. The telephones they used down the mines were made of cast iron, he tells them; they weighed a hundredweight each. Kieran is shorter than the other two; he has a big distinctive head, with deep-hooded eyes whose glance mostly idles downward, and several days’ growth of strong black beard. His body is indefinite, shapeless because it’s wrapped as always in dark loose clothes, more layers than are necessary in this weather.

— He worked in North Wales, too, Kieran says, — putting in systems for the slate mines. Do you know that when the slate miners were dying of silicosis, average life expectancy thirty-five to forty, the local doctors wrote a paper blaming it on the stewed tea they drank?

Kieran always knows things; he trusts facts more than opinions. He talks with his usual concentration and exactitude, but something arouses in Sam the solicitude for his welfare that has been an element of their friendship from the beginning. Kieran’s face is puffy and a nerve is jumping beside his right eye; he hunches over the rolling papers in a tension of fatigue that makes Sam worry that the job in cardiology at Barts is disillusioning, and that Kieran is beginning to brood over this second career, which was supposed to save his life from academic futility. He isn’t telling his stories any more, about medical dilemmas or patients presenting extraordinary symptoms. In these stories, his work in medicine seemed to open up a whole world of meaning.

Rachel telephones the cottage to tell Sam that she and Janie are going to buy tea for the kids in town. He’s relieved that she doesn’t seem to mind Kieran’s turning up. After another cup of tea and a share of the toke, Sam goes into the kitchen, opens the door of the fridge, and stands frowning perplexedly at what’s inside, then begins with an air of bemusement, as if he’s never done it before, to make the tomato sauce he’s actually been able to cook for at least fifteen years. He rattles around in the kitchen drawers hunting for wooden spoons and the garlic press. Kieran in the garden opens a bottle of wine he brought. Vince turns out to know something about wine. Kieran doesn’t; he just drinks it. He’s the same with food: he only eats to fuel his system.

Vince was uncomfortable at first, alone with these two men who are a few years older than him and whose displays of cleverness he finds both irritating and intimidating. He reads, but he hasn’t read any of the books they’ve read. (He knows that they studied literature, but as far as he can see they mostly talk about philosophy.) This morning, when Janie went out with Rachel and all the kids and Sam was writing upstairs, Vince wondered what point there was in his being here (wasn’t the whole idea of the holiday that he was supposed to spend more time with the kids?), and he even contemplated driving back to London and coming down to pick them up at the weekend. He was just wasting days that he could be putting in at the studio. After a few smokes, though, his sociable nature has reasserted itself and he is enjoying everything. He’s looking forward to the kids coming back; he really does want to spend more time with them.

When Sam goes into the kitchen to cook, Vince finds himself telling Kieran in great detail about the logistics of the lighting set-up he’s arranging for a show at the Albany. He is gratified by Kieran’s questioning. He tells him about the concern in the industry over the decline in the quality of sound recording in television and documentary work, now that digital technology means that no one bothers to employ the old sound guys any more. The BECTU newsletter is full of laments for past standards. Kieran makes a much better listener than Sam, Vince thinks. Sam always wants to take over the conversation. Vince has tried to read Sam’s novel but can’t get past the second chapter. None of the characters ever have a thought that doesn’t lead into dense thickets of historical and cultural association. There is no room left over for anything actually to happen.

When Janie and Rachel come through the gate into the garden, Kieran stands up at once from where the men (stoned, by the looks of it) are sprawled on garden chairs. There are plates on the table and a saucepan lying nearby on the grass. Both women see quite clearly that the moment they come into view, their arms full of children and shopping, Kieran is looking for Rachel, and that on his face when he sees her there is a moment’s naked flash of feeling: of relief, perhaps, or desperation. He hurries forward to help them. In reaction to this glimpse of emotion, Rachel becomes queenly and remote, retreating into her role as homemaker, unpacking the shopping into the kitchen cupboards and the fridge, running hot water for the dirty pasta plates.

Soon after their arrival home, Sukey begins to droop. This isn’t usual: she is a cheerful little girl with stout strong arms and legs and a mop of straw-textured fair hair. Now she whines and clings to Rachel and says that her head hurts. Her face is flushed and hot, and as soon as Rachel gets her settled on the sofa with her doggie and her blanket she throws up over everything.

— Too much sun. My fault, Rachel says, on her hands and knees with a cloth and a bucket of disinfectant and water. Sukey lies languidly across Sam’s lap, wrapped in a sheet and hanging on to a plastic bowl. — I should have insisted she wore her hat. I should have made them stay in the shade more.

— We needn’t go to the pub, Sam says. — If you think we oughtn’t.

There has been a plan for all the adults to go to the pub, which is ten minutes’ walk down the road into the village, leaving Joshua and Tom in charge, with mobiles in case of emergency.