The Summer Before the Dark

  “The key?” prompted Kate.

  “Oh yes. It’s somewhere, I suppose. Yes, I remember.” She jumped up, straightening herself into the perpendicular in a single movement, bent without bending her knees, in another sudden movement, and picked up cushions at random. Under one was a key. This she handed up to Kate—she had not straightened herself, and then, neatly folding her legs, jumped into a sitting position on the same cushion.

  “You’re a dancer?” said Kate.

  “No, I’m not a dancer. I do dance.” She was frowning—lost among the rigid categories of the old?

  On the way out Kate stopped in front of a long old-fashioned swing mirror in the hall. She saw a thin monkey of a woman inside a “good” yellow dress, her hair tied into a lump behind her head. She pulled off the scarf and the hair stood there, stiff and thick. She noted that she was in the grip of a need to do something for herself—get her hair done, buy a dress that fitted; this was because of the girl with her healthy young flesh, and her fresh clothes. She noted, too, that this impulse had something to do with her own daughter: Maureen was about Eileen’s age. She saw that the moment of returning to her own family was going to be a dramatic one, whether by that time she had pulled herself together—in other words, returned to their conception of her—or had decided not to … surely she couldn’t stay as she was? Could she? What an interesting idea! But the family would, as it is said, have a fit. The idea was making her prickle pleasurably, with exactly the same sensation as if she had swallowed too large a mouthful of water ice, and her mouth and throat were being paralysed by it—as she had felt yesterday, when Mary Finchley did not recognise her, and as she had felt while derisively watching Natalia Petrovna at her tricks of self-deceit.

  This pleasurable sensation faded and left another, not nearly so agreeable. Now she was again in the grip of vanity. If she were to go home looking as she did now, all that her husband and four children would say was that she did not look herself—for they knew what she could look like. But Maureen, that girl sitting on her red cushion dreaming in the tangy blue-swirling clouds, had never seen her in any other guise but that of a sick monkey … there was no doubt at all that she was mad. What on earth did it matter to the girl, or to herself, what she looked like? Or, for that matter, what she was—if she, or if anyone, knew what that was. She, Kate, had hired a room from Maureen, that was all. It was a neat reversal of a recent situation for Kate, who, earlier that year, had let stay in her house a young girl who was the Belgian friend of James’s best friend: the girl wanted to learn English. What Kate had cared about was that the girl should fit into the family atmosphere, adding to it because of her humorous friendly nature which was also a trifle persnickety and old maidish—her upbringing had been conventional—but not disturbing it too much. This she could have done by falling in love with her own husband—not that Kate had thought her husband would have fallen in love with the girl … here Kate pulled herself up short and shouted to herself, Don’t start that again, remember the au pair Monique, there was hell to pay because you thought Michael had fallen for her.

  Kate finished the list of the requirements she had had for the Belgian girl in the mode of the gloss: that she should not fall in love too much with any one of the three sons, unless the son in question fell equally in love with her. That she should not get pregnant, requiring her, Kate, to deal with the problem—like Monique, whose abortion had had to be paid for by the Browns, since the foetus’s father, a young Frenchman met at a language class, had no money. That she should not take drugs like Rosalie, a former au pair from Frankfurt—that is, it would be all right if she smoked pot, but not anything stronger. That she should not play the hi-fi too loudly. That she should not … but in the tone of her present self, Kate summed it all up: that she should not do more than conform comfortably to her, Kate’s, way of life because while it went without saying Kate would not claim any particular virtues for the way of life as such, she did not want to suffer the annoyance of it being disturbed.

  Maureen had come into the hall, like a milkmaid in a nursery rhyme, on bare feet. Seeing Kate standing in front of the glass, in a semidark, she switched the light on, and walked in her springy energetic way quietly along the passage until she stood just behind Kate, reflected in the same glass.

  Maureen pushed back her yellow hair and looked at herself and then at Kate. She frowned. The frown was the result of perplexity, the need to understand the situation?

  Maureen smiled dazzlingly, all white teeth and red lips, and began dancing. It was an energetic hopping springing sort of dance, and she watched herself in the mirror as a child watches itself do something for the first time. She decided to be delighted with her dance, she smiled. Then, flinging back her head, flinging out her arm, she circled round and round, her feet pattering about under her as she got dizzy, when she slumped against a wall laughing.

  All this had been self-absorbed, almost a private performance. But now she pushed herself up from the wall, using a heave of her shoulder, and came to stand by Kate. Kate caught the smile on her own face; it was a middle-aged smile, a bit sad, humorous, shrewd, patient. This smile was what had provoked that perky provocative dance?

  Maureen leaned forward and looked at herself carefully past Kate’s shoulder. She stuck out her tongue at Kate. This was out of resentment, of self-assertion. Then, equally disliking, she stuck it out again, but at herself. Then with a false jolly smile at Kate, she returned rapidly to her sunny room.

  Kate felt assaulted. No matter how her mind said that it had been friendly, a sharing—the girl had come to share her moment at the glass—she felt it as aggression, and this was because, quite simply, of the marvellous assurance of the girl’s youth. Of her courage in doing what she felt like doing. Yes, that was it, that was what she, Kate, had lost.

  But it was no good standing on and on here, in this large hall full of cushions—which were all tumbled and disarranged, as if they had been slept on the night before, simply because she did not want to go out into the street, to expose her weakness. And she had to rest soon. She should start eating.

  She went out again into the sunlight, up cement steps. She stood under the heavy trees that lined the canal and was two steps from the Ristorante. She had decided that she ought to be hungry, or at least, that the demands of the coming weeks meant she must be fed—but why, with nothing to do, with no claims on her, did she think of demands, claims, strain? She would go and eat well, keep the meal down, enjoy it if possible … She went towards the Ristorante that had little bay trees on either side of the entrance. Through the glass of the frontage she could see a waiter bending attentively over a woman of about her own age, who was absorbing his flattering deference and smiling—“like a silly old fool,” Kate thought. At the door she was thinking that before her flight into the international elite, she would have gone into such a restaurant on special occasions; that she would as automatically have passed this place and looked for a cheaper one as now she singled this one out as being the only possible one in this road. Now, as she turned herself away from it, it was with a feeling of real deprivation. A hundred yards on she went into a restaurant of the kind that occurs in every street in London at intervals of a few yards. It was nearly empty. The lunch time rush had not started. She sat by herself and waited for service. In front of her stood the unvarying British menu. At the other end of the room, a waitress was talking to a customer, an elderly man. She was in no hurry to come over.

  When she did come, she did not look at Kate, but scribbled the order down hastily on a small pad, and went back to talk to the customer, before shouting the order through a hatch into the kitchen. It seemed a long time before the food came. Kate sat on, invisible, apparently, to the waitress and to the other customers: the place was filling now. She was shaking with impatient hunger, the need to cry. The feeling that no one could see her made her want to shout, “Look, I’m here, can’t you see me?” She was not far off that state which in a small child is called a tantr
um. It was checked by the arrival of a plate of liver and chips and watery cabbage, which was set in front of her by the waitress who still had not looked at her. Kate could not eat the food. She felt like a small child who has been told to sit in a corner to eat its food because it has been naughty, and then is forgotten. She was raging with emotions which stopped any sensible thought. Saying to herself that she had been ill, and was not to blame, she knocked over a glass of water. She expected the waitress to come over, even to be angry with her, but she did not notice. Kate got up herself, crossed the room to the waitress, who was now chatting with another customer, and said, “I’m sorry, but I’ve spilt my glass of water.” Her voice was tremulous.

  The waitress now looked at her—only long enough to see that here was a woman being difficult. She said, “I’ll come in just a tick, love,” and went off to lay a table. When she did come, she gave the sodden patch on the cloth an indifferent look, and said, “If you can manage, I’ll change the cloth when you are finished.”

  And off she went.

  What could be more sensible? thought the housewife in Kate—a wet patch on the cloth would not hurt her. But after a minute she called for the bill, and noted that as she left the restaurant, it was with a little flounce of her skirt that she could swear she had never used in her life before: it was like the sniff of a woman who means to convey: Well, I don’t care! Why should you think that I care one way or the other?

  Midday in the Edgware Road. The liveliest of scenes, particularly on a summer’s day, particularly with everyone dropping in and out of cafés and sandwich bars where they were well known, for lunch, for a cup of tea, for a sit-down. Kate walked slowly across to the Ristorante, and looked through the thin muslin into the interior. If she had been inside there, with that attentive young man bent over her, she would not have wished to weep, to make pettish gestures—she would not have spilt her glass of water!

  Well, being so long in that hotel, being looked after by Silvia, by Marie, had done her no good at all. She had been returned to childishness, she needed to have someone’s flattering attention all the time.

  She descended from the bright leafy day into the shade of the flat. On the floor of the hall, sprawled over cushions, lay a young man, face down, his arms spread. He was asleep. Maureen did not seem to be about.

  Kate went to her room, saw there were no sheets on the bed, found a cupboard in the hall that had in it sheets and towels, took out what she needed without disturbing the youth, who hadn’t slept for some time to judge by the depth of his sleep now, and put herself to bed. There she did something she usually did not allow herself to do. She wept, long and deliberately. A safety valve? That, too; but it was more an acknowledgement that there was something to cry about. She was being assailed on all sides, and from within, too, by loneliness. So a small child weeps on learning that he is to be sent away to boarding school, or that his parents are going off on a long voyage and leaving him with strangers.

  But while her body heaved and manufactured tears, she was thinking, quite coolly, that coming here, coming to the hired room where no one knew her, was the first time in her life that she had been alone and outside a cocoon of comfort and protection, the support of other people’s recognition of what she had chosen to present. But here no one expected anything, knew anything about her supports, her cocoon. Now she was looking back with pleasure at the little scene in the hall when Maureen came to the mirror: Maureen had been responding directly to Kate, to what Kate was, to what Maureen saw of Kate—which was a dry, wry, cautious smile.

  She finished crying, went to sleep, woke in a strange room that was chilly but had in it a long ray of sunlight: since that morning the sun had moved from one side of the flat to the other.

  She had to buy food. Now the cushions in the hall were empty; and she did not see the young man again.

  In the kitchen Maureen was sitting by herself, eating baby food with a teaspoon. Apricot and prune pudding. There was a stack of baby food tins on a shelf, all desserts.

  Maureen wore a scarlet frilled mother hubbard, and her hair was in a pony tail. She looked ten years old.

  She said, “You’ll find everything you want somewhere, I think,” and jumped up, still licking the spoon. She flung the empty jar into the rubbish bin and the spoon into the sink, where it landed with a tinkle. She danced out.

  Kate pulled towards her a shopping basket on wheels and a roomy grass basket, and was at the door before remembering she was not shopping for anything between six and sixteen people, but for herself. She went back up into the sunlight, with a plastic carrier bag. It was late afternoon, and the shops were about to close. There were a lot of shops which were the counterparts of the restaurant in which she had eaten, or rather, not eaten her lunch. They were all small, and crammed with tinned and frozen foods. There were no shops in this road like the ones she used in middle-class Blackheath. Block towers of flats were all about, and in between old houses whose inhabitants had lived there all their lives: these were the people who used the shops, which sold nothing which Kate would normally dream of buying. Inside one she bought a loaf of dead, white bread, half a pound of butter that had been dyed yellow, a packet of processed cheese, and a pot of strawberry jam of a kind which she would at home consider herself criminal for even considering. She noted that her emotions over buying these second-rate goods were very strong indeed. What she was feeling would be appropriate to hearing that she was about to be put into prison for a year: for all her married life a good part of her energies had gone into such classifications of excellence. She was thinking, too, that the people in the village in Spain had probably never seen such bad dead food, though they were poorer than anyone who ever came into this shop, which was full of what is known as ordinary people, that is to say, the British working people, who used the awful restaurants, these awful shops … and so what, what was wrong with her, what did it matter, she was on the point of bursting into tears, she could easily stamp her foot and rage and scream—why? Meanwhile millions of people were dying all over the poor parts of the world because they got nothing to eat, millions of children would never be normal because such food as she had put in her pretty plastic bag that had a design of orange and pink daisies on it did not come their way at all … At the cash desk, she was in a rage of childish resentment, and tears stood behind her eyes. Why? The man had not looked at her, had not smiled and said, Oh Mrs. Brown, oh Kate, oh Catherine, how nice to see you—that was all. His manner, she was feeling, was cold. She was insane, there was no doubt of it—so spoke her intelligence, while her emotions were those of a small child.

  She walked in the direction of Marble Arch. There was a street market, ready to close. Then it must be Saturday?—there had never been a time in her life when Kate had not known the hour of the day, let alone the day of the week.

  In front of her was a wooden platform on which rolled some tomatoes among flattening lettuce, the ravaged remains of that morning’s display of fresh growth. In front of her descended a wooden flap. Like a door shutting—a panic of deprivation made her run around the side of the stall and almost shout—but she was smiling; she could feel the desperate grimace stretching her lips, “Can I have some tomatoes, a pound of tomatoes?”

  The man said, showing dislike, “I’m shutting. It’s past my time.”

  “Oh, please,” she gasped, and heard her own voice making it a life-and-death matter.

  The man now deliberately looked her up and down. Then he as deliberately turned and looked along a stretch of stalls open, still showing a scattering of fruit and vegetables. He then turned his back on her, and pulled down the side flap of the stall. To the air he delivered the verdict she deserved, as formalised as the rituals of a law court: “Some mothers do have ’em.”

  She went to a near stall, queued, and listened to the woman in front of her—a woman like the normal Kate, or rather, the normal Kate of the past, with a shopping basket on wheels and carriers and net bags, buying a large family’s supply
for the week.

  She moved away, bowed down, weighed down, a slave, her shoulders saying how satisfying it was to bear burdens for others. Since Kate had her attention on this woman, she missed her place in the queue, and that complex of emotion was set going that is part of the queue rituals. The woman who had taken Kate’s place was aggressive, and kept an adamant self-righteous cheek towards Kate, while she said to the woman on the other side, “I haven’t got time to stand here all day if she has.”

  Kate bought, from a man who didn’t look at her, two lemons and a green pepper, having suppressed the reflex to buy a dozen lemons and two pounds of green peppers.

  She returned to the flat, knowing that she had not begun to understand what she had to face. She had not had an inkling of it before today. If she had not been low in vitality, if she had not been ill, she would not have had these excessively strong reactions—of course not. But how glad she ought to be that this was happening—otherwise, each one of these violent emotions would have been small impulses, minor spurts of pettiness. She might easily have not known what they were, might have been able to pretend she did not feel them.

  But what was she going to do about this monster inside which she was trapped, a monstrous baby, who had to be soothed and smiled at and given attention on demand: the woman who for years has been saying, implicitly, of course, Have you forgotten who I am, my position in this house? Natalia Petrovna came straight out with it; the fact that Kate Brown would be ashamed to say it aloud showed there had been some progress?

  Outside the flat, on a low wall, sat a languid young lady with a large yellow chignon, eyes limned with blue paint, a bright pink doll’s mouth. She was wearing an ancient black dinner dress in lace and satin.

  The young lady’s haughty face vanished in a wide smile, and Maureen said, “Why are you so thin?”

  “Because I have lost a lot of weight.”