Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O'Farrell

frothing, shivering, at the bottom of the bath. The zip was stuck halfway down; Monica swore and tugged at it and didn’t even care when she heard the sharp sound of fabric tearing; she had to get out of this dress, she had to bathe, she had to be looking nice, seeming calm, for when she told Peter about the cat, for when she asked him to say that it was him who’d had it put down. She had to make him see that this was the only way, to tell the girls that it was him who had found the cat, that it was him there with it at the end. But would he lie to them for her? She had no idea.
    The dress fell at last in a pool of heated cotton around her ankles. Monica upended the box of bath salts Peter’s mother had given her for Christmas—and what kind of a present was that to give your daughter-in-law, anyway? Monica had said nothing when Jessica had let slip that Granny had given Jenny a cashmere scarf, but it had hurt. It had hurt a great deal.
    Monica stepped into the illegal water. She’d got it just right. A lovely, reviving tepid. She slipped her body under the silkenwater, feeling the grit and rasp of undissolved crystals, not unpleasant, beneath her.
    There had been no word from Aoife, again, at Christmas. Whereas she, Monica, had sent a card to her place of work. Some things needed to be observed, no matter what. Her mother had had a card, of sorts, from Aoife, she’d noticed. And Michael Francis, too. But she’d said nothing.
    The bathtub was cast-iron, large enough to lie down in. She would have liked to put in a new suite but Peter, of course, wouldn’t hear of it. That was what came of marrying an antiques dealer. Peter went on and on about—how did he put it?—the integrity of houses. It’s an early-Victorian farmhouse, he would say, why confuse the place with horrible, modern tat? She would have liked to ask how a house could possibly be confused. And why couldn’t she have a bathroom carpet? But she kept her counsel. She had a suspicion that his reluctance to change a single thing about the house had more to do with wanting it to be the same as when the children were living there all the time, in Jenny’s era, to foster the illusion that nothing had changed. As Gretta always said: some things were better left alone.
    So she had a bathroom with a flaking iron bathtub that stood on lion’s feet. A toilet with a peeling wooden seat and a pull chain that constantly broke. Shelves that should have held bath foam and shampoo bottles but instead displayed some of Peter’s collection of nineteenth-century medicine bottles. Their bed had a sagging feather mattress, which made her sneeze, and a rusting iron frame. She wasn’t allowed a nice electric oven, like everyone else, but had to struggle away with the range that Peter had found on some wasteland, dragged home and done up, blackening it himself, and most of the floor, in the process. The thing ate wood like a great, fiery-mouthed monster and the effort involved in rustling up dinner when the girls were hungry was unbelievable. The hallway and driveway and barn and backyard were foreverjammed with stacked chairs, tatty sofas, tabletops that Peter was “in the middle” of doing up for the shop. It was beyond Monica why anyone would want to buy this stuff. But buy it they did.
    Monica sat up when she heard the phone ring. Could it be Jenny? No. Those weeping phone calls seemed to have stopped recently. Peter? Her mother again? She contemplated the bathmat, the distance to the towel. She wasn’t ready to have the conversation about the cat yet. Her throat closed again at the thought of it, the drifting look in its eyes, that cardboard box waiting in the barn. What on earth was the matter with her?
    It would have been three this coming autumn.
    She sloshed back down into the water, closing her eyes as the phone continued to ring, only opening them again when the house was silent.
    It had been an antique necklace that had started everything between her and