The Summer Before the Dark

  Kate often thought about this, but as of something that was years off.

  Meanwhile it was May, the English summer fitful and shallow, and, looking ahead to autumn, there was a hiatus in the life of the family, that organism which pulsed quietly in South London: Blackheath, to be exact. From this suburb every year, increasingly as the children became adults, it was as if that unit, or creature, or organism, exploded outwards, scattering further and further over the globe. It was like a yearly breathing out that began in late spring, with an inhalation in September.

  Last year Michael, who was a neurologist of some standing, had gone in July to America for a conference, had taken the opportunity to work for three months in a Boston hospital, had returned only in October. Kate had gone with her husband to the conference, had returned for family reasons, had visited him again in September—her movements always fitting in with those of the children, as of course they had to do. They were coming and going to and from various parts of Europe all summer.

  This year Michael was to visit the same hospital in Boston for four months, on exchange with a colleague. The oldest son, Stephen, now twenty-three and in his last year at university, was going on a four months’ trip through Morocco and Algeria with friends. Eileen, twenty-two, was accompanying her father, to visit friends made on a camping trip the year before last in Spain. The second son, James, had been invited on an archaeological “dig” in the Sudan, before beginning university that autumn. As for herself, she had decided not to go to the States again. This was partly because she did not want to cramp her daughter’s style, which she knew she would. Also, it would be so expensive if three people went. Also, there was the question whether she would be cramping her husband’s style … to go with this thought there was an appropriate smile, almost a grimace, suitable perhaps for the words: There has to be give and take in any marriage; she was quite aware that she was disinclined to examine this area too closely.

  For another thing, Tim, although now nineteen, and much encouraged by everyone to be independent, had no plans to travel anywhere. He was, always had been, the “difficult” or problematical one. The house in South London would therefore be kept running for his benefit. She, the mother, would run it. For her, the coming months stretched ahead as they had done for many past summers. She would be a base for members of the family coming home from university, or dropping in for a day or a week on their way somewhere else; she would housekeep for them, their friends, their friends’ friends. She would be available, at everyone’s disposal.

  She was looking forward to it: not only to the many people, but the managing, the being conscious of her efficiency; she looked forward, too, to a summer’s expert gardening. When they—she and Michael—did leave this house as a couple retiring from an active scene, it wouldn’t be the house that would be missed, but the garden, which was as lovely as an English garden is after twenty or so years of devotion. It looked as if man had not planted it, but as if it had chosen to grow into lawns and clumps of lilies, rose arbours and herb patches. The birds sang in it all the year. The wind blew tenderly in it. There was not a crumb of earth that Kate did not feel she knew personally, had not made—of course with the aid of earthworms and the frost.

  She sat taking in breaths of rose, lavender, thyme, and watched her husband come out of the house with their guest.

  He was Alan Post, and had nothing to do with medicine, but was a civil servant of the international variety: he worked for one of the bodies associated with the United Nations. He and Dr. Michael Brown had met in the airport lounge at Los Angeles when their aircraft was delayed by fog. They had played chess, drunk whisky, exchanged invitations. A week ago the two men had bumped into each other in Goodge Street, and then lunched together. Michael had invited Alan to a family Sunday lunch.

  If there had not been the power cuts, the Browns would have provided the traditional British Sunday meal, not for their own benefit, since they no longer used the old patterns, but for their guest’s: the family had often enough joked that when they entertained their many foreign friends, they served traditional dishes like peasants dependent on the tourist trade. But Eileen had cooked the meal today, with Tim’s help, before rushing off somewhere. She had made a Turkish cucumber soup—cold; shish kebab over the fire, and an apricot water ice—the refrigerator ran on gas. They had drunk a great deal of sangria, the recipe for which had been acquired by the second son last year in Spain.

  Michael and Alan Post sat down and continued the conversation they had enjoyed throughout lunch, and afterwards upstairs in the study. She poured the coffee into the pretty plastic cups she had used in the garden ever since next door’s dog had bounced through in pursuit of another dog and had smashed a whole tray full of her best china. Having handed them coffee and chocolate wafers, she set an attentive smile on her face, like a sentinel, behind which she could cultivate her own thoughts. In fact she was thinking of her husband.

  Whenever she saw him like this, with a colleague, particularly those from overseas, it was as if he had walked away from her. This was not because he was one of the people whose manner alters depending on whom they are with—not at all, but with Alan Post it seemed that a larger, finer air blew around him, he was expanding, he looked as if he were about to take wing … last year, in the States, when she had been with him, she had felt part of the expansion, the enlarging; she had felt as if for all these years of marriage this man had been keeping in reserve some potential that could never find growing room inside the family: they had discussed what she felt, of course. She had half hoped he might say that he had sometimes felt the same about her, but he didn’t. Now she thought that this year he would be without his wife, only intermittently with his daughter, for four months: the appropriate smile, dry, ironic, was on her face again. She knew it was there; she had as they say “worked” on that smile, or on the emotions it represented. If this had been the right occasion for it—a younger woman’s question for instance (not a woman her own age, she realised, not Mary Finchley)—she might have leaned back in her chair, allowed her eyes to hood themselves in irony, and said: Perhaps we all make too much fuss of this kind of thing when we are young—the little affairs, you know, they are of no importance in a real marriage! Self-congratulation accompanied this smile that was half a grimace, she knew that; also relief, that of a person successfully negotiating a trap, a danger point … Sitting under the summery tree, holding up the coffee pot to indicate to the men that there was plenty more in it, smiling, she was hearing herself think: I’m telling myself the most dreadful lies! Awful! Why do I do it? There’s something here that I simply will not let myself look at. Sometimes with Mary I get near to it, but never with anyone else. Now, look at it all, try and get hold of it, don’t go on making up all these attitudes, these stories—stop taking down the same old dresses off the rack … She was listening, properly now, to what the men were saying: it seemed that it concerned her in some way, that the conversation had concerned her for some minutes, but she hadn’t been listening.

  The conference Alan Post had come to London to attend was in difficulties. Or rather, a committee of that conference: the organisation under whose umbrella the conferrings and committeeings were going on was called Global Food, and its business was what mankind ate. Or did not eat. Due to a series of mischances—flu, a broken hip, the death of a man in Lisbon—when the members of the committee were already sitting around their table waiting to start their deliberations, it was discovered that there were no translators. Now, nothing was easier than to find fluent translators in French, German, Spanish, but it was harder to find people who spoke fluent Portuguese as well as English and who were educated enough for this demanding work. Portuguese it had to be, for this subcommittee was to do with coffee; and Brazil, the world’s leading coffee country, used Portuguese. The committee had adjourned so that Portuguese translators could be engaged. Two had been found, two more were needed: Alan Post and Michael were both looking at Kate, waiting for her to say that s
he would be happy to be a third. Three years before Kate had typed out, as a favour to a friend whose typing was bad, a book for popular consumption on the growing and marketing of coffee. Because of this, she knew a great deal about that commodity. More: she had always been good at languages. Her knowledge of French and Italian was good; her Portuguese was perfect, for on one side she was Portuguese. It had happened that she finished school early, since she was clever, with a gap of three years before she was to go to university—to which, in the end, she did not go, having decided to marry Michael instead. She spent a year in Lourenço Marques with her grandfather, who was a scholar. There she spoke only Portuguese. As the daughter of John Ferreira, an English-naturalized Portuguese who taught Portuguese literature at Oxford, she had never been more than gratefully conscious that her background contained treasures: it was her grandfather who had introduced them to her, so that she became soaked in Portuguese literature, Portuguese poetry, soaked in “the spirit of the language.”

  What else had she learned during that year in the city on the edge of the Indian Ocean, a year devoted entirely to pleasure? For one thing, her grandfather was old-fashioned, and his attitudes towards women strict. Kate had never dreamed of fighting an old man whom she loved; and besides, why bother?—she was only there for such a short time. But for that time she was never alone with a man, was shielded from unpleasant experience, literary or in life, and tasted a not unpleasant (for a short time) atmosphere compounded of elements so foreign to her that she had had to identify each one separately. She was sheltered and distrusted. She was precious and despised. She was flattered by deference to her every wish—but knew that she, the female thing, occupied a carefully defined minor part of her grandfather’s life, as his wife had done, and his daughters. Her image of herself during that period: a girl as fragile as a camellia with a dead-white skin and heavy dark-red hair, wearing a white embroidered linen dress designed to expose and conceal throat and shoulders, sat on a verandah in a swing chair, that she slowly pushed back and forth with a foot which she was conscious of being an object so sexual the young men present couldn’t keep their eyes and fantasies away from it. She fanned herself with an embroidered silk fan, using a turn of the wrist taught her by the old nurse, while these young men, all of whom had asked her grandfather’s permission to speak to her at all, sat in a half circle in grass armchairs, paying her compliments. The year was 1948. She was a great success in Lourenço Marques, partly because after all she was British, and not all her good intentions could keep her within what her grandfather approved; partly because the combination of short red hair and brown eyes were rare in a country full of señoritas; partly because the strictness of her grand-father was excessive even in this colony, so that on more than one count Kate’s behaviour, her position, seemed like a wilful or whimsical play acting, probably undertaken with the intention of being provocative.

  When she returned to England, she looked back into a steamy place, full of half-concealed things, one of them being her own wistful longing to be like her own grandmother who—unless this was her grandfather’s false memory—might never have left Portugal at all, for all the difference it had made to her way of life. A beautiful woman, so everyone said she had been; a wonderful mother, a cook for the angels, a marvellous, marvellous being, all warmth and kindness, with not a fault in her—yes, well, however all that might have been, the propaganda had its predictable reverse effect, and Kate returned from Portuguese East Africa more than ready to go to university, where she was going to study Romance languages and literature. She actually did get herself up to Oxford, and into residence. Then she met Michael, who after ten years of war and crammed training was just beginning his career. She moved into his lodgings and they started delightfully on what they called The First Phase.

  If she had not married, she would probably have become something special in her field? A lecturer perhaps? Women did not seem often to become professors. But these were not frequent thoughts: she had not found children boring. Besides it was not as if her husband cut her off from his interests, from interesting people. She sometimes did translating for him or his colleagues. She had once even translated a Portuguese novel, which earned her little money, but much praise. She met people from all over the world, particularly since the children started growing up, and brought home all their globally scattered friends.

  If she had not married—but good God, she would have been mad not to marry, mad to choose Romance languages and literature.… Michael and Alan Post were helping themselves to coffee, and waiting for her. What she was feeling was a kind of panic. Knowing this made it worse. It was stupid and irrational to feel frightened. What of? This was not something she could have confessed to anyone, not even Michael—that when actually faced with a job, quite an ordinary sort of job after all, well within her powers, and obviously only for a short time, she felt like a long-term prisoner who knows she is going to have to face freedom in the morning.

  “But I don’t see how I can,” she said. “Tim is going to be here on and off all summer.”

  She observed the tightening of her husband’s mouth: frequent discussion about Tim had not resolved disagreement. Michael thought his youngest son was overprotected. She, while agreeing that he might have been, could not believe that the way to put things right was to “throw him out and be done with it.” How, throw him out? Where to? And why was what the boy doing so bad that he needed such dramatic cure: he sulked, he threatened, he hated, but so had all the children in their different ways. Kate believed that if she favoured Tim, it was because her husband was unfair to him: she was aware that this area was too emotional to be looked at straight; she had attitudes about it, which were known to be hers and which she defended, inside the family and out.

  “But the committee won’t be going on for longer than—how long did you say?” Michael asked Alan.

  By now Alan had understood that there was a problem between husband and wife, and he said, looking at neither, but away over towards the house, where a young boy was emerging and coming towards them, “Not more than a month at most.”

  “There is Tim,” said Kate; meaning Not in front of the children.

  When Tim arrived under the tree, it was clear that he was older than his slight build and light walk made him seem from a distance. He was sulky now. Looking hard at his mother he said, “I’m awfully sorry mother but I’ve changed my mind. The Fergusons have asked me to go to Norway. They’re going climbing. I’ll go if you don’t mind.”

  “No, of course not darling,” said Kate automatically. “Of course you should go.” She was delighted that he was not going to be excluded from the summer’s pleasures, as delighted as if she were going to Norway; but the boy had already glanced at his father, who nodded at him. He then smiled formally at the guest, momentarily appearing a completely different person, the responsible man he would become, turned back into a sulky child in his look at his mother as he said, “That’s all right then, I’ll be off to pack now. I’m going tonight.” And he ran off to the house as if escaping.

  She shouted after him, “Tim, before you go, see if you can make the kettle boil again, I need the hot water for washing up.” But either he didn’t hear or didn’t want to.

  “So when can you start, Kate?” said Alan. “When? Tomorrow? Oh please do?”

  Kate said nothing, but she was smiling agreement. She knew she might burst into tears. She felt as if every support had been pulled out from under her. She felt—to use a metaphor she had been using, indeed, developing, in her own thought, and for some time now—as if suddenly a very cold wind had started to blow, straight towards her, from the future.

  She said, “Of course I’d like to. Can I do the washing up first?”

  They laughed, she laughed. Alan then said, “Well, if somebody else could do the washing up while you telephone?” He gave her a name, a number, and escorted her into the house, using a pleasant formality, like an intimacy that is so easy it is almost impersonal: she recogni
sed this as the air of the life she was about to enter. It was both supporting and relaxing, this manner of his; he stood by her while she telephoned, mouthing at her words she should use—words that would not have come easily to her, because they had the ring of committees. All that finished, he kissed her on both cheeks, and with his arm around her, led her back to the tree on the lawn. He was a good-looking man, of about their age—Michael’s and hers—a family man, with a wife and growing or grown children, a man who earned a great deal of money and spent all his life travelling from conference to conference to talk about food with people from dozens of countries. She liked him. She was thinking that after all it would be a release and a relief to breathe that easy impersonal air for a while. She really did like everything about him, including the way he dressed and presented himself: she had not been much liking the way her husband was dressing these days, nor the way he cut his hair. But better not to think about that, for after all it wasn’t important.

  The reason she felt as if she were falling through the air was because if Tim were not going to be here, there was no point at all in keeping the house open.

  Back under the tree, the hot Sunday afternoon proceeded towards evening, while the men were talking about some medical problem in Iran.

  The question of the letting of the house had been dealt with in a dozen words.

  In the past great discussions had gone on about the letting or the non-letting of the house, everyone having strong opinions about it. They had gone on for days, weeks.