The other day, a woman said to me that she does not re-read books. This was a statement, not an observation. Life, presumably, is too short, and the bookshelf too long. I did not argue, although I might be inclined to counter that life is too short to waste time on books that you’re not going to re-read. Having read most of the books that I own, I must be holding on to them for some reason other than show. And I am: there’s nothing worse than wanting to re-read a book, right now, that I seem to have given away. That’s why, for example, I’ve held on to all of the novels by Penelope Lively that I’ve bought.

I’m happily re-reading my five favorite Livelys. They stand out for me from all the others, and I have already re-read each of them at least once. They are: The Photograph, Family Album, According to Mark, Heat Wave, and How It All Began. I’ve just finished Heat Wave, which I know I’ve read three times at least. You might say that I know it pretty well. I thought I did. I was bold enough to begin writing about it yesterday, before I’d even reached the end. This morning, when I looked at what I’d written — having made my way to the final page last night — I saw at once that I was going to have to throw it all out and start afresh. That’s how well I knew Heat Wave. You might say that I had developed a very strong misunderstanding.

Which is basically what I had come to attributing to the heroine, Pauline Carter. Too clever by half, I had “remembered” the book as if, like Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” it left open the question whether the heroine, through whose point of view the action was filtered, might be deluded. But Pauline is not deluded. She is deranged.

Anybody would be, under the circumstances, and, honestly, the only improbable thing about the book is that anyone as worldly-wise as Pauline would have engineered the setup. Which is that she, her daughter, and her son-in-law have committed to spending the summer together in an isolated stone cottage situated amid fields of wheat and cabbage. A particularly fine, not to say just plain hot, summer. Given, that is, what we know Pauline already thinks of her son-in-law, Maurice, and how bitterly responsible she herself feels for having invited him to a party also attended by her daughter, Teresa. A match was the last thing that she’d had in mind. At their wedding reception, now a few years in the past, Pauline learned that the reception’s hostess was a former lover of Maurice’s.

Pauline looked across the room and saw Maurice as though she had never seen him before — a man she hardly knew with whom she was now inextricably associated. Teresa stood beside him, seeming both happy and bemused. I did this, Pauline thought. I didn’t mean to, but I did. (89)

Looking out a window at Teresa and Maurice,

She thinks about Maurice, and it comes to her that the Maurice she now knows is irrevocably detached from the Maurice she once knew, who seems in retrospect a weightless figure — just someone she had come across and found agreeable, no more, no less. The new Maurice is loaded with implications — nothing he says or does can be seen in the same way. (87)

Heat Wave‘s theme is the possible confusion of implication with actuality. Correction: that is what I was sure it would turn out to be, despite having read it three times before.

It is clear at the very start of the novel (to the re-reader, anyway), that experience has crushed any thought that Pauline might have had that sustained proximity to Maurice would have eased her malice toward him into something more friendly. Opening a novel entitled “Heat Wave,” we encounter an opening paragraph of chilly, staccato observations from which the viewer’s feelings, but not her judgments, have been omitted.

Seen through one lens, Teresa is a Hardy heroine — betrayed no doubt, a figure of tragedy. Seen through another, she is a lyrical image of youth and regeneration.

This doubleness of view is a principal characteristic of Heat Wave. A novel about jealousy, it tells, appropriately enough, a triangular story, albeit one with a difference: a mother, a daughter, and a son-in-law. But there is a second triangle, set in the past, in which Teresa is doubled by Pauline, and Maurice by Harry, Pauline’s ex-husband and Teresa’s father. Both planes of time are seen from the one point that they share, that of fifty-five year-old Pauline. As the tale approaches its climax, the two planes collapse into one, and the present disappears for Pauline into a repetition of the gut-chilling misery caused by Harry’s self-centered infidelities. Pauline’s present centers obsessively on the son-in-law who seems bound to mistreat her daughter in the same way.

Pauline is deranged not so much by what Maurice does as by how insistently he reminds her of Harry. And, if she blames herself for having inadvertently brought Maurice to Teresa together, she seems to be bent on finding expiation in punishing the him. Maurice’s slightest gesture is suspect, not at least his attempts to charm her. Confronted by Pauline’s ostensibly innocent proposal for the coming weekend that would (she is certain) thwart his plans for an illicit tryst, Maurice is smooth.

Maurice is considering this proposal. “Well, that’s a thought….” It is beautifully done. His tone is just right. He is in no way put out. He looks at Teresa. “What do you think?” (126)

Can we be certain that Maurice is “doing” anything? Might it not be that Pauline’s imagination is running away with her? So I had come to wonder.

Lively exploits her third-person narrative voice to lend authorial authority to Pauline’s thoughts. This aroused my suspicions. Of Harry and Maurice meeting: “She had seen it all as though in a shaft of light — the three of them at a table, Teresa between the two men who eye one another and see an uncomfortable reflection.” (90) Is Lively telling what was the case, or only what Pauline imagined?

“I begin to wonder if perhaps it is all in my mind, if perhaps I am indeed becoming slightly paranoid — that is a word that has been used when your daddy is feeling particularly self-righteous.” (119)

In a flashback, we hear Pauline tell Harry that she is going to leave him because she cannot trust him. That is, he has robbed their marriage of the reliability and good faith that are essential to a healthy relationship. Not only does Harry cheat, but he lies about it, and not only does he lie about it, but he accuses Pauline of imagining things. The marriage, it seems, is all about him.

Maurice revives all these toxic feelings, which Pauline has no trouble projecting onto Teresa. Which might be rather abstract if Pauline were not beset by harrowing memories (thought to have been put away) day after day, prompted by the presence (which she deliberately avoids) of their occasion.

As I’ve said, Pauline is not deluded. Her imaginings are soon enough confirmed by Teresa, to the extent that Teresa’s conclusions are proof of anything. The question of how Teresa might deal with them, however, must remain an open one. For there is an accident at the end, a fall down a steep flight of stairs, brought on by a tipsy Maurice saying, “You’re a grown woman. These things happen — you must know that.” This offensive remark probably would not have resulted in an accident  if Pauline had not been overcome by the fury fed by a summer’s simmering:

She has never felt such rage — it came rearing up from somewhere deep within. The whole scene is distorted by its ferocity. She moves. She may have raised her hand. (212)

Well, I was not so very wrong, and, looking back at yesterday’s work, I see that most of it is still here. I didn’t have to throw it away after all. One thing that I would advise you to throw away, if you believe it, is that, if you read a book once, you’ve read it forever. That’s not true.