Heat Wave by Penelope Lively

it?’
    ‘Deep conditioning got the better of me.’
    ‘Whose book was it?’
    ‘My husband’s. Former husband.’
    ‘Oh,’ James sounds disappointed. ‘I thought it would have been one of your authors.’
    ‘Better go left here,’ says Pauline. ‘There’s a car park, I think.’ For they have arrived at Worsham, and must confront the problem of how to detach themselves from the car and become people rather than traffic. James will not now hear of the burning of the book. ‘There are the others,’ he says. ‘They’re going that way too.’
    It is quite difficult to burn a book. She takes the first page – page one of Chapter One – and crumples it up in her fist. She puts it into the grate of the tiny Victorian fireplace which is a decorative feature in this restored and centrally heated terraced cottage in a small cathedral town. She strikes a match and puts it to the ball of paper. It flares up. Some feathers of charred paper float out on to the rug. She goes to the table and takes page two from the pile of typescript, crumples it, places it in the fireplace, strikes another match.
    Each time she revisits this scene it becomes like a Dutch interior. She sees it with interested detachment: the quiet room across which lies a wedge of sunlight from the open door, beyond which can be seen the pram in the garden, in which a baby sleeps, the young woman who stoops before the fireplace, doing something with paper and matches.
    The scene that Harry saw, when he walked into the room. Except that by then she was sitting at the table.
    He halts, sensing that something is awry. ‘What have you been doing?’
    ‘I’ve been burning your book,’ she says.
    And he goes white. She has never seen anyone do that before. His face changes colour before her eyes – bloodless, drained. He cannot speak. He simply stands there, staring spectral at the fireplace, at the
black mound therein, at the charred feathers on the rug. And then his glance swivels to the table. He sees the pile of typescript jutting from under the newspaper. He puts out a hand.
    ‘Don’t worry,’ says Pauline. ‘I couldn’t go through with it. I’m too well brought up.’
    He is examining the typescript, feverishly. He sees that only the first two pages are missing. The blood comes back into his face.
    ‘But I made a start,’ says Pauline. ‘The spirit was willing. It was the flesh let me down.’
    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.
    Worsham is everything that Maurice had hoped for – awash with people. The pavements of the wide central street are teeming, as the crowds move slowly past the antique shops and the picture galleries and the pubs with flowered façades. Maurice has shot off into the Information Centre to pick up some brochures, of which he has a collection that must by now be of national importance. Carol has drifted after him. Teresa is administering juice to Luke.
    ‘What was your husband’s book about?’ says James. Perhaps he feels it is more tactful to ask that than to ask why she wanted to burn it. Or maybe the interest is a professional one. They are standing outside a craft shop, desultorily inspecting expensive pottery and children’s toys made of polished yew.
    ‘Demographic history. An analysis of population trends in the seventeenth century.’
    ‘Ah,’ says James.
    ‘Quite. Actually, an interesting book. He was in the vanguard of academic fashion at the time.’
    Maurice has now joined them and is leafing through a handful of brochures. ‘Right. First stop, the Model Village.’
    ‘Model of what village?’ inquires James.
    ‘Any village. An apocryphal, ideal village. All done to scale, it says here, but waist high, and you can peer in through the windows at exquisitely reconstructed nineteenth-century interiors.’
    ‘Must we?’ says Teresa. ‘There’s a great queue. I saw it as we came