42 pages • 1-hour read
The Heat of the Day
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Chapters 5-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary
Stella remembers meeting her lover, Robert, two years earlier. He had come to the War Office about a knee injury that ended his active army service. She thinks about the experience of wartime London and its strange effect on personal relationships and the passage of time. She remembers that a bombing occurred during her first conversation with Robert. She thinks about their closeness, and how they live together in “every way but that of sharing a roof” (107).
When they meet a few days after Roderick’s departure, Stella tells Robert about Harrison’s visit. She mentions Harrison’s claim about Robert only very obliquely, and he brushes it off.
Chapter 6 Summary
Stella and Robert travel to the country for the day to visit Robert’s mother. They meet his older sister, Ernestine, his niece and nephew (the children of his second sister, Amabelle), and his mother, Mrs. Kelway. They share an awkward afternoon tea, and Robert takes Stella on a tour of the house. He tells her, “stop thinking you’re making a bad impression; I assure you you’re making no impression at all” (127).
They go to his room, and discuss the fact that his mother and Ernestine have hung a large number of pictures of Robert in it. Stella observes that they must be proud of him, and that they’ve decorated it as if he were dead. He tells her they just think he thinks highly of himself.
Chapter 7 Summary
Robert and Stella return to London and go their separate ways. She returns to her flat to find Harrison waiting for her. Harrison tells her that he can see she’s been thinking things over after their talk. She says she doesn’t know what he means. He tells her she has been doing just what he would in her situation, suggesting that the trip to visit Robert’s mother was an attempt “to look at the first place where rot could start” (144). She brings up Francis’s funeral, and they discuss the fact that their meeting has made things difficult for both of them. Stella is surprised Harrison feels the same.
Chapter 8 Summary
Louie looks for Harrison in the park, but fails to see him again. She is preoccupied with him, and tells her friends about how she met a man who was “a bit off” (159). She reflects again on her loneliness, and about London seeming indifferent to her.
At her residence, Louie meets a woman, Connie, and they become friends. Connie is obsessed with newspapers, and Louie becomes more aware of current events and begins to form her own point of view.
Chapter 9 Summary
Stella tells Robert about going to Ireland to check on the Mount Morris affairs. He doesn’t want her to go, in part because “there, [she] will be away completely” (177). She arrives at Mount Morris and meets the caretaker, Donovan, and his daughters.
On Roderick’s request, she asks whether there is a boat. Donovan tells her the “master” sank it on his last visit. When she asks for more clarification, Donovan describes the visitor, and she is upset to realize Harrison has been visiting Mount Morris. She realizes he was telling the truth about his closeness with Cousin Francis, and begins to worry he might be telling the truth about Robert as well. She thinks about Robert, imagining what his reaction might be if she asked him about Harrison’s accusations. Donovan announces that the tide of the war is turning in their favor after a victory for Montgomery in Egypt.
Chapters 5-9 Analysis
In this section of the novel, Bowen raises the stakes of the question of Robert’s guilt or innocence by characterizing Stella and describing her relationship with Robert. Stella thinks about Robert as being like “a habitat” (97) to her. The lovers were in many ways in their own world, “which, like the ideal book about nothing, stayed itself on itself by its inner force” (97). Given their closeness, Stella’s progression toward doubting Robert is even more stark. Their relationship is the key representation of the novel’s theme of The Effect of War on Personal Relationships, with Stella suddenly having to confront how well she actually knows Robert.
Significantly, the couple met during the London Blitz (See: Background). Their first conversation is interrupted by bombing:
[H]e and she stood at attention till the glissade stopped. What they had both been saying, or been on the point of saying, neither of them ever were to know. Most first words have the nature of being trifling; theirs from having been lost began to have the significance of a lost clue (104).
In this passage, Bowen emphasizes the heightened significance of Stella and Robert’s interrupted interaction and subsequent relationship, given the heightened state of tension the wartime atmosphere has created. The comparison to “a lost clue” implies that there may be something mysterious going on with Robert that Stella did not initially pick up on. The narrative also describes how “in their first weeks of knowing each other they did not know how much might be the time, how much themselves. The extraordinary battle in the sky transfixed them; they might have stayed forever on the eve of being in love” (105). Through these statements, Bowen ensures that Stella and Robert’s relationship is inseparable from its wartime context, suggesting that this context may have shaped the relationship in ways Stella is not yet aware of.
Bowen emphasizes the intense nature of Robert and Stella’s relationship with the inclusion of word choices related to war, military, and injury. For example, they stand “at attention” like soldiers while they wait for the bombing to stop. Similarly, when they part ways after returning from Holme Dene, Stella thinks of their parting as the “amputation of their goodnight as lovers” (138). Since the descriptions of Stella and Robert’s closeness all come after Harrison’s claim that he is a Nazi spy, the reader shares Stella’s experience of trying to gradually discern his true character.
Bowen also uses several metafictional references to describe Stella and Robert’s relationship, further emphasizing the idea that there may be something fictional in Robert’s self-presentation and their relationship dynamic. In addition to the reference to a “book about nothing” (97), their relationship sometimes seems to be “over the borderline of fiction—so much so that, making her way thither, [Stella] felt herself to be going to a rendezvous inside the pages of a book. And was, indeed, Robert himself fictitious?” (106, emphasis added). As well as showing Stella’s process of questioning her lover and trying to untangle falsity from truth, Bowen’s metafictional terminology draws attention to the novel as a novel. The use of metafiction also contributes to The Experience and Limbo of Wartime, with both daily life and personal relationships taking on the surreal characteristics of fiction during the war.
Bowen builds tension throughout this section of the novel primarily within Stella’s thought process. Particularly when Stella travels to Mount Morris, Bowen includes extended stream of consciousness passages: When Stella begins to doubt Robert more after what Donovan says about Harrison visiting Mount Morris, she has several extended meditations on how he might respond if she were to ask him about it. These thoughts characterize Stella and her feelings toward Robert, as well as characterizing Robert himself. The primary tension throughout this section is Stella’s internal struggle with Personal Versus National Loyalty. She thinks in detail about whether or not she has reason to believe that Robert is selling out his country. Her focus on the potential disastrous effect on her relationship if she falsely accuses Robert also suggests that her love for him is strong, while the possibility that he is committing treason suggests that Stella may ultimately have to choose between her lover and her country.
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