Instructions For A Heatwave Quotes
"The air in the kitchen is like a solid entity filling the space, pushing Gretta down into the floor, against the side of the table."
"A woman at Mass told her it worked and it does, up to a point, but it is never quite the same."
"Everything around them is so familiar, it’s impossible sometimes to tell what your eye has been trained upon."
"It is the third month of the drought. For ten days now the heat has passed 90ºF."
"Swarms of red-backed aphids have, in the past week, been passing over the city."
"It used to drive her crazy when they were first married – she used to long for a bit of invisibility, a bit of liberty – but she’s used to it now."
"She’s always done her best to keep Ireland alive in her London-born children."
"But not her. Robert likes to know where she is at all times, he frets if she leaves the house without telling him."
"Gretta saws a hunk from the end of the loaf and slathers it with butter."
"She gets a terrible weakness in her limbs if she doesn’t eat regularly."
"He swats a bead of moisture from his upper lip and switches his briefcase to the opposite hand."
"He sets off in the most direct route, straight across the burnt-out grass."
"He is, for a moment, exactly the person he is meant to be: a man, returning from work, on the threshold of his home, about to greet his family."
"Hughie came out of the womb as Claire’s defender, ally, henchman."
"He reaches down and lifts her into his arms. ‘Vita,’ he says."
"He is filled with – what? Something more than love, more than affection."
"It seems to him that, for as long as he can remember, he would come home to find his wife with at least one child attached to her body."
"That was the way things had been, the way life was in their house: Claire was two people or sometimes three."
"She had learnt to blank out what she didn’t like to see."
"It wasn’t a baby Monica wanted. It was a child."
"Monica stood up from her dressing-stool, ready to face the evening."
"Nothing mattered any more because she was getting out of that family and into her own."
"I’ve been busy. As I am now. What do you want?"
"She continued to stare at her husband. 'What’s happened?'"
"A prickle of irritation to observe that her mind had, once again, been pulled back to her younger sister."
"They had got used to it in the end, to living their lives with the foreground noise of Aoife’s rage."
"She can hold words in her head – she hoards them there."
"Aoife reaches the top floor of the building and fishes in her pocket for the key."
"Your place? In half an hour? Forty minutes?"
"Aoife raises the receiver, listens to the purr of the dial tone and replaces it."
"People told her, again and again, how lucky she was to be leaving London, to be moving to the country. The truth is, she doesn’t."
"Gretta calmly handing out remarks like sweets, but with a subtle lacing of poison."
"He strains his voice to speak over them: ‘So, listen, what’s the plan for today?’"
"Always strange, to catch yourself echoing your parents’ words, to find experiences coming round again."
"She thinks of how she once read somewhere that gradually, after years and years, panes of glass become thicker at the bottom."
"She would never tell anyone this but she still finds it strange to call him that, even after three years."
"Homesick: she’s found that it really does make you feel sick, ill, maddened by longing."
"‘The thing is,’ Gretta says, putting down her teacup and fixing her eyes on Aoife, ‘he’s been so much happier since he retired.’"
"‘What is that supposed to mean?’ Michael Francis looks at a sliver of his face in the tiny, plastic-rimmed mirror over the toilet."
"He has no real sense of how his father has been spending his days since he left the bank."
"Was that so much to ask? It was late and the children were in bed and his mother had cried and cried and he wanted to sit on his sofa, with his wife, for a few minutes, just like they used to."
"Claire had looked up and he’d seen it, the fleeting expression of dismay, before she’d said it: You’re back."
"It’s good for them to have a mother who is fulfilled, who is stretched."
"He laughed, a loud explosion from somewhere deep in his chest."
"She was a marvel to him and he wondered if there was some way he could communicate this to her, via the touch of their skin."
"I want them to be cocooned. I want them to be sheltered, safe, insulated, protected, now and for ever."
"Jesus, Monica. Of course not. What do you take me for? You’re out of your mind if you think—"
"‘I didn’t tell him,’ Aoife says, in an unsteady voice. ‘Of course I didn’t. Why would I?’"
"She sits there and feels her aloneness and the lack of him, and she looks out at the plane trees, their yellow, crinkled-up leaves, motionless in the still, heavy air."
"And she knew, when she came round from the trance of birth, in the trundling ambulance, alone but for a howling baby, that Monica, while perhaps not having seen it all, had seen too much, far too much."
"‘Who?’ the child says again. Monica inhales, she presses her fingernails into her palms."
"She grips the back of the armchair that belongs to Robert and no one else."
"Her father has left. She still cannot accept this fact, still cannot believe it."
"The sensation of wanting to speak to Aoife surges up in Monica."
"Monica feels herself to be once more on the verge of tears."
"A beautiful wedding, a baking hot day in the middle of summer."
"They would never understand, these children of hers."