Heat Wave, by Penelope Lively (1996), Written assignment

Written assignment

Heat Wave, by Penelope Lively (1996)

Instant où Harry rentre chez lui et trouve sa femme Pauline, en train de brûler son livre. Attention, ce qui suit n’est qu’un simple sujet d’invention, il n’est en aucun cas ce qui se passe en réalité dans le livre. J’en parlerai par la suite, je pense étudier ce livre dans son intégralité dans le cadre d’un exposé oral.

Topic: What happens next in the story?

‘He looks at her now, instead of at the typescript.

‘Why? Why – for Christ’s sake.’

She looks back at him. ‘You know’, she says.’

Just then, the baby starts crying, at the beginning some tears and then true cries. The young woman looks at Harry who does not move, he looks confused. She turns on her heels to join her baby. Harry who remains alone approaches with slow steps, like a ghost gliding on a waxed parquet floor, of the tiny Victorian fireplace. He kneels down and looks at the burning wrecks of his life, the heat of the fire accentuating the coldness of a body, from now on, deprived of a soul. Harry is curiously calm, he is unable to think, he does not understand. He can feel a presence behind him, also slowly, he turns around. Pauline is there, with her baby in her arms, their baby. Both have tears with their eyes, one of hunger and the other of sadness. Harry remains very calm and he does not seem to understand, not to know what drive her to commit the crime of burning a book.

‘Look’, Pauline says, ‘Audrey, our baby. She will be three months tomorrow and I have never seen you tightening her in your arms. A father should have taken his baby in his arms!’

With effort, he manages to pronounce a weak ‘I do not have the time.’

He is so white, Pauline is aware that she has been killing her husband. Today all has changed. From now on, she cannot move back any more. She opens her mouth to speak but her husband, in a tired tone, precedes her:

‘I had said it to you, I had warned you, writing first, you afterwards.’

A sob shakes Pauline, it is right, he had said it to her, she remembered his look, when they had met in the street. Pauline had hoped to change him, and she thought that the birth of Audrey would enable him to realize that a family was more important than everything else. But it was worse. Before, they went out, sometimes the evening, he took her to the theatre… But when Audrey was born he went away only at greater length.

‘I wish you had spent more time with us… Look, you do not even know your own daughter; you are a stranger for her.’

Without a glance he rises and looks at the typescript. Tears bead on Pauline’s cheeks. Slowly, she approaches him and murmurs: 

‘When you come you are indifferent, we do not exist for you… Look, you are late again… I feel lonely.’

‘I feel lonely too, you do not understand anything.’ he answers while turning around to look at her.

He shakes his head. Pauline carries of speaking:

‘But I tried hard to understand your passion, to understand your priorities. I swear it is true!’

Harry does not answer. He looks at Pauline and Audrey. None makes the least gesture. Without transport, with calm, he pronounces these last sentences:

‘Listen Pauline, I am going away. My book, my writing, it is all my life. And I have seen today that you cannot understand. Then it is preferable that I should leave. I cannot stay here with what occurred today. Sorry but I can’t. If Audrey reads my book one day, perhaps she will understand.’

And he takes his hat, as in front of two foreignes, inclines himself in front of his wife and his daughter. Pauline had never thought that he would leave them. Audrey looks lovingly her father but he does not take care.  Powerless, she starts to cry but her father is not there any more. Between passion and family, he chooses his passion. As certain men have the passion of women, he has the passion of writing, stronger than all, a small family is only one spark of short length compared with the unchanging fire of passion.

BILAN: 15,5 / 20 . Les fautes sont ici, pour la plupart je l’’espère, corrigées.