Free Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O'Farrell

all-in-one with a zip up the middle, before settling on a frilled dress in lawn cotton. One of Peter’s favorites. He said it made her look like a milkmaid. Apparently this was a good thing. They had gone together to a boutique in Oxford to buy these clothes. Shopping with a man was not something Monica was used to. She had always gone with her mother or her sister; she wasn’t one for shopping alone, found it hard to make up her mind, could never decide if something suited her or not. So she had taken Gretta or, in later years, Aoife, who, despite dressing like a tramp, was surprisingly good at knowing what looked right on people. Monica wasn’t at all used to the idea of coming out through the curtained door to display yourself to a man waiting in a chair, to elicit his approval before you even knew yourself whether you liked it. Joe had hated shopping, would never have gone with her, even if she’d asked.
    Monica pushed the tiny pearl buttons through the frills and into their holes. So many of them and all so small. She’d forgotten that. She faced herself in the dressing-table mirror (Art Deco, oak, with a rosewood inlay) and pushed her earrings into place (marcasite and ruby, flower design, 1930s). She hadn’t wantedchildren. She’d known that. She’d told Joe so. Right from the start. But it seemed that he hadn’t believed her, that he’d thought she’d come around, that she’d change her mind. She’d told Peter, too, and he had said, Fine, don’t fancy doing it all again anyway. Peter came with a ready-made family, with spare children; she’d hoped she might slot into their lives almost as if they were her own. It had seemed perfect, really, when she’d thought about it: children without having to give birth to them.
    She hadn’t ever wanted children and yet she had. She had and she did.
    She pulled the brush (enamel-backed, silver-handled, initialed
H
, another probate sale) through her hair, again and again. A hundred strokes a day, her mother had always decreed. Keeps it healthy.
    Careful
was the word she used. Monica was careful with herself. She had learned to blank out what she didn’t like to see; there was a trick she had perfected, a slight narrowing of the eyes so that the lashes rendered the scene soft, furred at the edges, an ability to slide her pupils sideways should anything untoward come her way. She had a problem, she’d realized recently, with children of about three or four.
    It wasn’t a baby Monica wanted. It was a child. She had no desire for those cocooned beings in blankets, terrifying in their fragility, insistent in their demands, so new as to be still redolent of bodily fluids, of milk and blood, all the gore and effort and violence of birth. No. She couldn’t have done it, couldn’t have gone through what her mother had with Aoife.
    Monica liked Michael Francis’s youngest, Vita. Not the boy, who looked too much like his mother—that rather moony forehead. Vita was a real Riordan; Gretta was always saying how she was the spit of Aoife at the same age. “But mercifully without all the weirdness,” Monica had once added, and her mother had laughed and said, “True enough.” The last time Monica had seenher, Vita had taken her hand and shown her a doll’s house. Tiny rooms, precisely arranged, books with real pages lined up on the shelves, a cook preparing a painted ham in the kitchen, a dog curled up on a minuscule hearth rug before a crackling polyethylene fire. Monica had thought then, as she pressed her eye to the window with its own flowered curtains, that she would have liked a little girl with a doll’s house, a girl with hair slides and red T-bar shoes, like Vita’s. Monica had seen a charming miniature sideboard in the window of a toy shop and had gone in and bought it and sent it to Vita and she’d received a crayoned card by return. Claire was good about that sort of thing; Monica appreciated a thank-you letter. Who wouldn’t?
    It did no good dwelling