Instructions for a Heatwave Read Online Free PDF

turns to heat baby bottles on the gas-ring. They went to Hampshire for the weekends and endlessly debated whether or not he should let his father-in-law lend them the money to buy “somewhere decent to live.”
    ·  ·  ·
    He circles a wooden spoon around the saucepan, then tips the spaghetti hoops onto two plates.
    Sometimes, when he catches a distant expression on hiswife’s face, he wonders if she is thinking about the house she might have had. In Sussex or Surrey, with a lawyer husband.
    He is careful to keep the hoops clear of the toast on one plate—Hughie won’t eat if one type of food has contact with another. “No touching!” he’ll yell. Vita’s he heaps on top of the buttered toast. She can and will eat anything.
    He is just setting the plates in front of their respective chairs when he feels something butting his leg, something solid and warm. Vita. She has come in from the garden and is knocking her curly head into his thigh, like a small goat.
    “Daddy,” she croons. “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.”
    He reaches down and lifts her into his arms. “Vita,” he says. He is, again and for a moment, completely the person he is meant to be: a man, in his kitchen, lifting his daughter into the air. He puts down the wooden spoon. He puts down the pan. He wraps his arms around the child. He is filled with—what? Something more than love, more than affection. Something so keen and elemental it resembles animal instinct. For a moment, he thinks that the only way to express this feeling is through cannibalism. Yes, he wants to eat his daughter, starting at the creases in her neck, moving down to the smooth pearlescent skin of her arms.
    She is arching back, wriggling her legs. Vita has always been an earthbound child; doesn’t like to be held. Her favored form of affection is a hug around the legs. She hates to be off her feet. She’s always had a solidity, a firmness to her body that Hughie never had. Hughie is a sprite, a light, reedy being, his too-long hair flying out behind him, diaphanous, an Ariel, a creature of the air, whereas Vita is more of a soil-dwelling animal. A badger, she reminds him of, perhaps, or a fox.
    With a sigh, he puts her down, whereupon she proceeds to run around the kitchen table, shouting, inexplicably, “Happily ever after,” over and over again, with a variety of emphases.
    “Vita,” he says, endeavoring to talk at a normal volume over the noise. “Vita, sit down. Vita?”
    Hughie wanders in and slumps at his place at the table. He picks up a fork and toys with his spaghetti hoops, the orange sauce of which is cooling and congealing. He frowns, looping one, then two, then three hoops onto a tine of his fork and Michael Francis is torn between telling him that he’s sorry it’s spaghetti hoops again and telling him to eat up now.
    Last time his mother visited—she comes every two weeks but only for a cup of tea, refusing to stay any longer because she doesn’t want to “put Claire out”—she’d remarked at a dinner such as this that, for a man with a full-time teaching job, wasn’t it surprising how much cooking he did? Claire had been in the living room but she’d heard. He knew she’d heard by the way she slapped down the book she’d been reading.
    “Vita,” he tries again.
    Vita prances around the table, naked, dust-smudged, chanting, “Happily ever
af
ter. Happily ever af
ter
.”
    Hughie smacks a hand to his forehead and slams down his fork. “Shut up, Vita,” he hisses.
    “
You
shut up,” Vita shouts back. “You
shut
up, you shut
up
, you—”
    He seizes hold of his daughter as she dances past him and holds her above his head, kicking and yowling. He has, he knows, two choices at this point. He can go stern, tell her to behave, to sit down this instant. This has the attraction of venting some of the frustration that’s been building in him all day long, but the danger is that it will backfire and that Vita will take things up a notch or two. Or he