The Summer Before the Dark

  Yet that the boy had had to crack himself open in that way, before them all, and under pressure, showed that perhaps all the banter and psychologising and criticism was not the healthy and therapeutic frankness she had imagined, they all had imagined, but a form of self-deception? A family folie, like the madness that encloses lovers who destroy themselves. If there is a folie à deux then there is certainly a folie à—as many as you like!

  Looking back at a typical family scene, during the adolescence of her four, she saw herself at one end of the table, tender and swollen like a goose’s fattening liver with the frightful pressure of four battling and expanding egos that were all in one way or another in conflict or confluence with herself, a focus, a balancing point; and her husband at the other end, being tolerant, humorous—a little weary. But not really implicated, not involved, for he worked so hard, had so little emotional energy left over to give to the family, to the four children—monsters. They called themselves so: we four monsters. Five monsters: she had been so involved with their growing, the continual crises, their drive up and out from herself, all the emotions, that she had found it hard to separate herself from them. She still did. Yet the monsters’ pressure on her, the insistent demands, had ended. Well, nearly, except for the youngest, Tim.

  On that particular occasion she had retired from the table as soon as she could without it seeming as if she were a little girl going off to sulk or weep. Even so she had been like a cat or a dog that has been kicked inadvertently by a friend. She knew that as she went. She was conscious of five pairs of eyes deliberately not looking at her. She had gone to her room while the boy fled in shame because he had shouted, having kept his head down over his plate to finish his pudding.

  In her room she had sat and thought, had tried to think, while emotions rioted. She had felt nearly crazy under the pressure of her old feeling: It’s not fair, what do they expect of me?

  It was her fault that Tim was very hard, on himself, on the others—on her? The three others had stepped imperceptibly from being “children” into being adolescents. All stormy and problematical, certainly, but Tim’s explosion into adolescence shook everybody. Everybody discussed, understood; much verbal display went on among these clever modern children. Tim was judged by them all to be more monstrous than any; and Kate as his victim. But the one thing that had not happened—she had to come back to this point again and again—was evasion, secrecy. During those years when she felt as if she were locked for ever in a large box with four perpetually exploding egos, she had consoled herself with: But nothing’s being hidden, everything’s being said. And she had contrasted her own family with others—not with the Finchleys, they were beyond comparison, they had their own laws—and all families with adolescents were like this. At the hub of each was a mother, a woman, sparks flying off her in all directions as the psyches ground together like pebbles on a beach in a storm. She had been overanxious about dominating, controlling, keeping them younger than they should be? She had been as anxious about giving them too much freedom, treating them like adults too soon—but perhaps that was the fault, and Mary was right, who never gave a thought to how she should behave—she simply followed her mood. But it wasn’t a question of domination or not, it was all to do with involvement. She had been too involved with everything, had sunk herself into it too far, so that the children had not had some strong fixed point to rely on? But surely the man, the father should be that? Perhaps after all Michael had been right all the time, she had been wrong in criticising him: his degree of involvement had been the right one. For why should it be necessary for a mother to be there like a grindstone at the heart of everything? Looking back it seemed as if she had been at everybody’s beck and call, always available, always criticised, always being bled to feed these—monsters. Looking back at her own adolescence she could see nothing similar. Of course, she had had a close, a very close, intimacy with her mother until she died, the year before the trip to Lourenço Marques; and her father had been away for most of the war, leaving the two, mother and daughter, together; but she could not believe it had been the same thing at all.

  But what was the use of her sitting here balancing and sifting—making excuses? For Tim had cracked, shouting that she smothered him, she had made him into a baby, and the fact that this had not been just routine “love talk”—the family’s own name for their criticisms of each other—was shown by everyone’s reactions.

  Very well, then, she had been too dominant with him.

  But the remarkable thing was that just as now, sitting on this moonlit balcony, she was quite aware of her current situation, standing as it were on a cliff with the north wind blowing straight into her face that would strip her of flesh and feature and colour, then, too, she had been aware, right from the start, of the danger to the last of a family when he was growing up. Clearly it was not enough to know a thing, otherwise he would not have screamed out: “For Christ’s sake leave me alone, you are suffocating me!”

  All she had done was to tell him not to forget something, she couldn’t now remember what—had that been the point, it had been the what, and not the how of it?—but she couldn’t remember, that had gone. Gone because she didn’t want to remember, had arranged the incident so it could take its place among her official memories, memories that had stood in her mind for ten, fifteen years; a quarter of a century? But certainly there had been a girl all vital energy and individuality, and much wider experience than most (for instance, there had been the year in Portuguese East Africa spent self-consciously, if not theatrically, as a jeune fille); a girl with the temperament that goes with being a redhead (she had been congratulated on possessing this temperament from her earliest girlhood, that she could remember very clearly); a girl who had stood out, she knew she had, wherever she was, among others, not only by virtue of that dramatic colouring, but also by her style and her manner—well, had any of that been untrue? She was deceiving herself in this description? She did not think so. This girl, much coveted by a variety of men, had married her Michael. After first living together for a year (Phase One). They had become an attractive young couple, and a centre for others not yet married, or soon to be married, or married and lacking their—charm? Personality? This marriage had, however, been offered up as a charming, almost whimsical sacrifice to convention; they had continued to behave like a couple living together, in love, loving, lovable. The first baby had altered this, but not much. The baby (now Stephen) had been fitted into the life of an attractive young couple doing things rather more vitally than others. The baby accompanied them to parties, had travelled with them, had not prevented her from attending a course of lectures on Saracen influence on Provençal poetry. It was true that to continue living as if there had been no changes, with the wakings in the night, and the having to get up early, and the always-being-bound to the infant timetable had been hard. But at the time this wrench in her habits had not seemed—as it did later—the important thing that was happening. When this first baby was a year old, she was pregnant. In the minds of both parents was the notion that they could continue living in this way with two children.

  Anyone could have told them this was nonsense.

  The real sharp change came not with the first but with the second baby (now a young woman called Eileen). With one baby they had been a young married couple, still radiantly paying unforced tribute to foolish convention, to social demands. With the second the emphasis had sharply shifted. Seeing how different their life had become, they decided to have the third “to get it over with,” a very different spirit; and they soon had a house, a mortgage, a small car, a regular charwoman, a regular life, all for the sake of the children. It was extraordinary for how long this couple continued to think of all these extraneous objects, car, house, and so on, as having nothing to do with them personally—not for their sakes at all, but only because of their children.

  As for Kate, she was acquiring hard-to-come-by virtues, self-disciplines. Looking back now at the beautiful girl, indul
ged by her mother, indulged and flattered by her grandfather, treated always with that very slightly mocking deference which is offered to girls, and contrasting her with the same young woman of only five years later, she was tempted to cry out that it had all been a gigantic con trick, the most monstrous cynicism. Looking back she could see herself only as a sort of fatted white goose. Nothing in the homage her grandfather paid womanhood, or in the way her mother had treated her, had prepared her for what she was going to have to learn, and soon.

  With three small children, and then four, she had had to fight for qualities that had not been even in her vocabulary. Patience. Self-discipline. Self-control. Self-abnegation. Chastity. Adaptability to others—this above all. This always. These virtues, necessary for bringing up a family of four on a restricted income, she did slowly acquire. She had acquired the qualities before she had thought of giving names to them. She could remember very clearly the day when, reading certain words that seemed old-fashioned, in an old novel, she had thought: Well, that’s what this is—getting up several times in a night for months at a time, and always good-temperedly; and that’s what that is—not making love with Michael when a child was ill. And as for being a sponge for small wants year after year, so that anything that was not a child seemed a horizon too distant ever to be reached again—what was the word for that? She had been amused by big words for what every mother is expected to become. But virtues? Really? Really virtues? If so, they had turned on her, had become enemies. Looking back from the condition of being an almost middle-aged wife and mother to her condition as a girl when she lived with Michael, it seemed to her that she had acquired not virtues but a form of dementia.

  On the morning after her youngest’s outburst, it happened that she was out with a shopping basket in the High Street, and she was held up in a brief traffic jam. She watched a young woman walk up the street with a baby in a push chair. This girl, perhaps nineteen—about her own age when she had her first child—wore a brief skirt, had wild dark-red hair, green eyes, a calm energy. She looked, however, like a little girl playing at being mum. She was pushing the baby along with one hand while she carried a vast bag of groceries in the other. She strode along like a viking’s woman. From this girl Kate had turned her attention to others. It seemed as if the street was filled suddenly with young women, unmarried girls, or girls with babies, and they all of them moved—yes, that was where you could see it, in how they moved—with a calm, casual, swinging grace, freedom. It was confidence. It was everything that she, Kate, had lost in excesses of self-consciousness, in awareness of the consequences of what she did.

  Then, having most conscientiously absorbed the truth of these young women—it was painful, the contrasting of herself with them—she looked at the movements, at the faces, of her contemporaries. Twenty years was the difference, that was all it needed, to set these brave faces into caution, and suspicion. Or, they had a foolish good nature, the victim’s good nature, an awful defenceless niceness—like the weak laugh that sounds as if it is going to ebb into tears. They moved as if their limbs had slowed because they were afraid of being trapped by something, afraid of knocking into something; they moved as if surrounded by invisible enemies.

  Kate had spent the morning walking slowly up and down, up and down that long crammed street, taking in this truth, that the faces and movements of most middle-aged women are those of prisoners or slaves.

  At one end of some long, totally involving experience, steps a young, confident, courageous girl; at the other, a middle-aged woman—herself.

  Kate had then gone home and spent weeks watching herself move, talk, act, but from this other viewpoint, and had concluded, quite simply, that she was demented. She was obsessed, from morning till night, about management, about organisation, about seeing how things ought to go, about the results of not acting like this or of acting like that. Watching herself, listening to herself, she turned her attention to the women of her own age, who were her friends. All, every one, had had a long education in just one thing, fussing. (Not Mary Finchley of course. Not Mary. But she was going to have to understand what Mary meant to her, what she was standing for. Obviously one couldn’t simply exclude her from every normal category and leave it at that.) That was what all those years of acquiring virtues had led to: she and her contemporaries were machines set for one function, to manage and arrange and adjust and foresee and order and bother and worry and organise. To fuss.

  Her family, she saw now, were quite aware of it. She was being treated by these independent individuals—husband, and young people only just free from the tyrannies of adolescent emotion and therefore all the more intolerant of other people’s weakness—as something that had to be put up with. Mother was an uncertain quantity. She was like an old nurse who had given her years to the family and must now be put up with. The virtues had turned to vices, to the nagging and bullying of other people. An unafraid young creature had been turned, through the long, grinding process of always, always being at other people’s beck and call, always having to give out attention to detail, minuscule wants, demands, needs, events, crises, into an obsessed maniac. Obsessed by what was totally unimportant.

  That realisation had been three years ago. While continuing to run the large and demanding house, running what she felt had become a hotel or resthouse for the family and friends and friends’ friends, she had tried to withdraw. It had been an inner withdrawal, since it was hardly possible to announce her plan to do so without adding to the family’s irritation, to their feeling of being obligated to herself, the servant who kept it all going. It was made harder because her efforts were not noticed. Her husband had been particularly busy, and she could understand that he was arranging to be, for in his position she would take any chance to expand out, to go out and away from the narrowing of middle-age—he was older than she was, by seven years. The children were quite naturally no more involved with her, her problems, than any healthy young adults are with their parents. But she found that they were always using mechanisms of defence against her in situations where she had been trying to make them unnecessary. She had been continually dragged back into—outgrown, she had hoped—patterns of behaviour by people who still expected them of her.

  But why should she not announce to the family that she was going to change, was in the process of changing? She could not. They would see it as a claim on their attention, their compassion. As she would have done in their places—the point was, and here she was coming back to it again, it was all nonsense, the out-in-the-open discussion and the talk and the blueprinting and the making decisions to behave in this way or that way. (That was not how people changed; they didn’t change themselves: you got changed by being made to live through something, and then you found yourself changed.) But if all those years of “love talk” had been any use at all, she now could have used it, could have said: And now, enough. I’m like a cripple or an invalid after years of being your servant, your doormat. Now help me. I need your help. But she could not say this.

  Soon after the incident of Tim’s screaming at the supper table, she had gone away by herself to visit old friends. She left her daughter in charge. She kept prolonging the visit, on all kinds of pretexts. She thought that if she could keep it up long enough, the pattern would be broken, the cage would be open—She went home earlier than had planned, because Eileen decided to go off on a visit of her own.

  Even though she had almost at once slid right back into what she had been flying from, she was able to look at herself, the worrying woman at whom the boy had shouted, as at a creature who had been really mad. Crazy.

  That summer, the scene at the supper table, her going away, had been the begetter of this summer’s event, for without them she would not have responded to Alan Post, not even with her husband’s help—yes, his irritation with her for not leaping at the opportunity had been that. It is always a question, when in a cul-de-sac, a trap, of seeing what there is for you, one has to be listening.

  But what had sto
pped her from saying that she wanted to take a room by herself somewhere in London for the months of summer? Nothing, except that it was inconceivable! It would have been so exaggerated a thing to demand that she wouldn’t have thought of it; yet it was what, probably, she should have done.

  She had needed a springboard.

  She now sat on a balcony from which the moonlight had quite gone, looking up at a sky where stars stepped back into a cool grey, looking down into a street that was now really empty, at last. Now if she were alone, really alone, in this country, able to please herself … yes, that is what she could have arranged for herself; it had never crossed her mind, of course.

  She could have sat here while the dawn came up, then slept all day if she wanted, then wandered about this town, which was after all a Mediterranean port, as well as being a provider for tourists. She could have wandered on her own will, and returned home in two months’ time, by herself, having been really alone—that is, a person operating from her own choices.

  But now she sat in a cool dawn, thinking that she should go to bed because he would wake up fresh just as she was ready to collapse in sleep. And unless she was very much mistaken, she would be faced with a man on the defensive because he had keeled over the night before and gone to sleep and not made love as circumstances and convention demanded. Almost, she was able to hope that he was a little ill—not much, just a little.