The Summer Before the Dark

  “Yes,” said Kate. “I know it. And so you won’t be. The best of luck to you. And what are you going to be instead?”

  At which tears came back into the girl’s voice; and she sat blinking them away.

  She said, “What are we to do? What? The thing is, I think I love Philip.” Kate must have been looking something she was not aware of, for Maureen insisted, “Yes. It’s not the first time I’ve been in love. This is it. Love. It’s why one gets married. I was in love before and I know. I wouldn’t marry him either. I’m not going to be one of that crowd.”

  “Which?” said Kate, having a fair idea. For one thing, the flat: Maureen paid the rent, and Maureen did not earn money. And she had the careless, almost callous self-confidence that is the property of a class. On the other hand, an accent, and that same self-confidence can be put on, is put on, and quite successfully, by waifs and by adventurers.

  “The aristocracy,” said Maureen. “No, not my family. Mine is just a good family, you know, nothing special. But I was asked in marriage by a younger son. William. He is very nice. He is as nice as Philip is when he isn’t being so silly—oh listen to me, I say silly because I don’t want to know, but silly isn’t the word for what Philip is going to be when he gets going, I know that. But what he’s suddenly become, you know, omelettes-and-eggs, that’s quite new. He was just like everyone else before, but reliable, not opting out. It’s terrifying,” she wailed, tears spattering, “what happens to them? But I would have been rich and everything with William, and I turned him down because of that crowd of his, you know, they never see anything that happens outside their little paddock, they’re just nice and kind inside their paddock. So I’m not going to marry Philip after turning down William. But I love them, I do, I do, I do. When I fell in love with William I thought Hello, that’s odd—so you want a strong man do you? But now I know it. First William and now Philip. I don’t love Jerry. I don’t love the others. I can’t take them seriously. I mean, my mind can, but something in me doesn’t. It’s true, isn’t it? Women can say what they like but … Jerry has been my chum for years and years. He’s another like me, you see. He’s a general’s son, believe it or not. He’s walked out of all that, like me. He’s a bum and he meditates. You know. It’s a full-time job with him. The perfect all-time alibi. Oh—he’s very nice, very nice, why do I knock him? I’m not any better? I don’t do anything, and I live on my father. But if I’ve got to choose between a Jerry and Philip it’s Philip every time. But I don’t have to choose. That’s something.”

  “Anyway,” said Kate. “I’ve got things to do.” And she returned to the telephone, cancelling appointments, telling neighbours plans had changed, and causing groceries that had certainly already left their shelves—Mrs. Brown’s custom was too valuable not to ensure the promptest efficiency—to be returned to them.

  Maureen sat quiet, leaning a head that was obviously aching, against a wall. She watched.

  Kate sent this telegram to the States: “Very sorry. Have already made plans returning end of October.” She was adding, “Suggest Eileen take command” but saw Maureen smile. She ended, “All my love, Kate,” believing that she would mean it probably, by the end of October.

  To Tim she wired, “Very sorry unable nurse you house open from day after tomorrow.”

  To the Enderses she wired, “Leave keys Mary Finchley my plans changed.”

  The day went by. Sometimes one or the other made cups of tea, coffee. The door rang, or the telephone: they took no notice.

  Once Kate said, “I’ve just remembered, I had a dream about you the other night. I dreamed you were a brilliant yellow bird dashing around this flat, but it was a sort of a cage, and you were darting in and out of dark spaces where shafts of blinding light were falling.” Here the two women looked at the dusty spaces of dull sunlight that stood here and there in the subterranean air of this room, and laughed. “And you kept saying No, no, no, no, oh no I won’t.”

  They smiled, then they laughed. They began to be hysterical, rolling in their chairs while the tears fell.

  “We’ve got to stop this,” said Kate.

  “Yes. In a minute.”

  “I’ve a dream going on—I don’t know how to put it. It’s a serial dream, you know?”

  “Oh yes, I like those.”

  “Yes. Well. Shall I tell you? I think perhaps that is what I am doing—what I am really doing—at this time. You know, at this time of my life, since early summer.” There was a long silence here, which Maureen waited through, watching. “Yes,” said Kate at last. “Looking back—over this time, you know, since that afternoon, the afternoon everything changed—it was like a thunderclap or an announcement or something, at any rate, out I went, out of my life, since then, what I think has been really going on is my dream. It hasn’t been all the other things at all. Or if so …” She waited again, waiting for the thought to finish itself. “If so, all the things that went on outside, the job I did, and the travelling, and the affair—I had a love affair, if you can call it that, it was silly really—well all that simply … fed the dream. Yes. It was the dream that was … feeding off my daytime life. Like a foetus. I’ve only just seen it.”

  “Go on then, tell me.”

  Kate told her about the seal, beginning like a fairy story or fable: “A woman was walking down a dark rocky hillside, in a northern country, and she saw something lying among the rocks. She thought it was a slug, a big ugly slug, then she saw it was a half-grown seal, and it was trying to hump its way across all those rocks. To the sea. It had to get to the sea, that was the point.” She stopped. There was a falseness. It was because she was evading something by putting in the third person. She was trying to protect herself from the force of the dream by A woman who … she …“And then I saw the poor seal’s hide was all dry and rough, and its whiskers were broken and sticking out, and I splashed water …”

  As she talked, she realised that night after night she was dreaming of her journey with the seal, and that she was waking often in every night, after stages of the dream, but was forgetting by morning. The dream had recently gone—she couldn’t think of a better way of putting it—back into the dark, beyond her reach, except in flashes. Why? Because of the painfulness of this stage of the story? Or because her waking life at this time, in this flat, with Maureen was wrong, was not feeding the dream into a strength which would enable her to remember it? At any rate, what she did remember was the loneliness and difficulty of her struggle north into the cold dark. Night after night she lugged and hauled that poor animal with its patient eyes through a terrible cold that bit and ate them both. Storms of snow full of sharp cutting pieces of ices fell on them. All around her feet, and dragging at the tail and flippers of the seal which she was not tall enough to keep off the ground, sharp rocks jagged the snow, and the edges of cracked ice were like knives. It was now completely dark. She could see nothing. Sometimes she felt what seemed to be pressure or presences near her, and knew they were trees: several times she moved into the resistance of weighted branches: they swept about her, scratching her face, reaching for her eyes and the eyes of the seal, releasing their freezing showers of snow. She could not feel her feet. Her hands clutched the seal who slipped and slid in her grasp.

  “I don’t know how far ahead the sea is. If there is any sea. I’m full of fear that I am walking the wrong way after all. Perhaps I’ll never find the open water the seal needs. Perhaps its all ice and snow and dark always, for ever, there is no end to it—perhaps I and the seal will fall into the snow and never get up again. But why then should I be dreaming at all? What would be the point of a dream that had to end in me and the seal dying, just dying, after all that effort?”

  When Kate ended, and sat silent, Maureen who had been listening as if being told an old tale, jumped up saying, “Do you know what? I think we should have something to eat. And get ourselves fixed up. Look at us—we’re both such a mess.”

  She cut bread and buttered it, put out a plate of fruit an
d another of cheese, fetched down a couple of tins of the baby food. They made their evening meal in silence.

  Then Maureen said, “I think what you have to do is to finish your dream.”

  “Yes, but I can’t make it happen.”

  “I meant, you must finish the dream before you go back to your family. You mustn’t go back before it is finished.”

  Afterwards she bathed, did her hair, got dressed; and Kate did the same, finally tying her hopeless, intractable hair back with a ribbon: like a schoolgirl, but at least it was off her face. The grey band bisected her head from midscalp to forehead. And there it was going to stay. “Oh no,” Kate heard herself muttering, as she looked at the grey, encouraging it to grow fast, to spread, to banish the dye with the truth, “oh no, not again, never again, I must have been mad.”

  In mid-afternoon the doorbell rang so long that Maureen answered it. There stood Philip. All quiet emphasis, but apparently non-accusing, he stood in the hall looking at Maureen, and, past Maureen, at Kate in the kitchen.

  “I want you two to come with me. I want you to see something.”

  “What for?”

  “Please. It’s not much to ask.” His manner had not at first seemed accusing because his being here was an accusation. That much was already clear. He was standing directly in front of Maureen, full of purpose, his hands down by his sides, his eyes pressuring hers. In his uniformlike outfit he looked a soldier.

  Maureen was being drawn towards him, because of his deliberate dominance. At the same time, she was repelled: she stood indecisively there, pale, almost ill. At last she turned to look at Kate, who shook her head. But Philip at once commanded, “You too. Come on, Mrs. Brown. There’s something I want you both to see.”

  Maureen shrugged and obeyed. Kate went after her. The open door showed leaves flying in a dusty wind. The women went up the steps to the car, which was a mini. It had stickers all over it: Buy British. Support Your Country. Your Country Needs Your Support. Support Britain, not Chaos. Pull Your Weight. Be British.

  The car looked as if it had been decorated for a pageant, or perhaps a musical about the Thirties—but what had it been all about in those days, Japan, was it? Hong Kong?

  Philip opened the front passenger door, but Maureen tried to get into the back seat. Philip held her back with a hand on her shoulder, and said to her, “No, I want you to sit beside me.” His voice was gentle and authoritative; but it and his manner were making a caricature of an authoritative manner made gentle by self-belief. The scene, the car, everything, was becoming more and more like a charade or a “happening” and as Maureen got in beside him she said, “But this is so silly. What am I doing here? Why did we come, Kate?”

  “Trust me,” said Philip, in a voice radiant with sincerity. “Trust me, Maureen.”

  “Oh for God’s sake,” said Maureen, but after all the women were in the car, and Philip was driving down the Edgware Road. Ordinary traffic surrounded them until Hyde Park Corner, where a change became visible. Cars with stickers like Philip’s were everywhere, and groups of people of all ages under large banners of The British League of Action held up placards and slogans of the same sort. People in cars made thumbs-up signs, and in one a woman shouted to a poster on the pavement which said: Back the Old Country! “Jolly good show, keep it up.”

  Down they drove past Buckingham Palace, where people hung about as usual to breathe its air, and then to the Embankment. There, all along the pavements, were long lines of people; hundreds of them, thousands. There were as many posters as people, but these were homemade, and amateur: the only professional banner of the kind specially designed to sum up a cause, or an occasion for the public said: Feed the Hungry at Your Door. Feed Your Own People. But on squares of cardboard, even on sheets of ordinary typing paper, were a thousand different individual appeals, scrawled in crayons and coloured inks—even typed: You Want Us to Starve Silently? Out of Sight Out of Mind! … We Haven’t Eaten Today. Have You? … Just Had a Good Meal? You’re Lucky! … Have You Got a Job? I Haven’t.

  Philip kept glancing at Maureen, and looked pleased with himself. He was driving them as slowly as he could.

  At first sight the waiting people did not seem to be starving. For these were the poor who did not actually die of hunger, or not dramatically. They lived on the margins of hunger, kept alive on pensions and allowances and handouts that were never quite enough, and on visits from the Government Relief Vans. But, if one looked close, the listlessness, the apathy, of deprivation, became apparent; these were symptoms, of course, familiar from the television screens, but ones easily associated with other countries.

  Men, women, children, stood about under the yellowing trees, as leaves whirled around them, and as one had to ask what was different about this demonstration, the answer came—not easily, for it was a long time since this phenomenon had been seen—that the difference was that the groups were families, mother and father and their children, not trade unions, or political parties, or pressure groups. Families had come out of thousands, out of many thousands of London homes, and now were standing in silent accusation along the streets, looking back at the fed and the—for the moment—secure, who looked at them. But the observers were not showing any confidence or superiority, far from it; since all knew how easy it was to make the step across into those hopeless queues. There were a great many people on the opposite pavement, staring. More were coming in every minute. The word had gone around the nearby streets, and people were coming to see their own fears embodied here.

  Philip continued to drive as slowly as he could. He was becoming intoxicated with what he was showing them: he seemed to glitter. Maureen, for her part, was going pale and then red, and leaning forward to look at the hungry people, and then looking at him with incredulity, anger, hate—and, of course, attraction.

  “Right,” said she, “very well. Here we are. Fine. And now what do you want me to do? Get out and distribute my spare change? Perform the miracle of the loaves and fishes. What?”

  “I wanted you to see,” said Philip. He was actually trembling with exaltation, with purpose. The rather country-ish quality of him, the clumsy fresh cheeks and stocky body and staring honest eyes, had gone, had been absorbed into his transfiguration. What was becoming stronger every minute, his need that Maureen should stand by him and give him her support, could be felt encompassing her. She was trembling too, but she got as far away from him as she could in the corner of her seat. He saw this and said, “All right, don’t think I haven’t got the message, you don’t want me, I’m not stupid, don’t think I am, I just wanted you to see.”

  These phrases, like the words of the woman in the car shouting, “Jolly good show, keep it up!” sounded like the phrases on the posters.

  They had driven half a mile, past the long lines of dying people, and past the pavements crammed with staring sightseers.

  “What’s the matter with you?” asked Maureen. “Well, what is?” She too sounded as if she were manufacturing words whose destiny was to be scrawled on a poster or stuck on a car window. “Has it all just struck you or what? Millions of people have been dying every year from hunger for years. Millions and millions. Millions of children grow up to be thick or stupid or mentally backwards because they haven’t had the right things to eat. Everybody knows that. So why are you suddenly dragging us down here? You can’t turn the television on without seeing it going on somewhere. We are solving our overpopulation problems by letting people die … oh fuck it, what’s the use,” she ended, in a rage of exasperation, her own words overwhelming her with their placardlike quality.

  “It’s here,” said Philip, who had listened while his face worked with nobility and dedication. “It’s here in our country. Not somewhere else. I don’t care about the other places. But I care about my country. About Britain.”

  “Oh—shit,” said Maureen, turning herself away from the interminable lines of people: but now she had nowhere to look but at the sightseers, so she turned herself away from
them too and looked in front of her. They drove on and on, among cars that were all going slowly, full of watching people.

  Police cars stood in groups at strategic places. But the police did not get out of their cars. They sat where they were, spectators with the rest of the population who were still in work, or who had private money. Or jewellery or pictures or land.

  We don’t want Charity, We Want Work. Give Us Work. Give Us Our Rights, Work and Food.

  A man with a gaunt face walked out from the crowd of people and posters and began to make a speech to the sightseers. “As long as we starve quietly behind four walls, that’s all right, isn’t it? You don’t mind that! But here we are, and here we are going to stay.”

  Two policemen jumped from a panda car, shutting the doors smartly behind them. They crossed to the orator and began shaking their heads and waving their fingers like nurses to a naughty child: it seemed that speeches were out of order.

  But the man leaped onto the shoulders of two of his friends who raised their hands to support him as he straddled there: for a moment it looked as if this were the beginning of some circus act—a human pyramid. He shouted, “Here we are. And we shall starve publicly, not out of sight. To the death, if need be. That is why we have come. We shall starve ourselves to death where you can see us doing it.”

  The policemen stood irresolutely side by side, looking up at the orator. Their personal sympathies were entirely with the demonstrators: they kept sending glances and smiles into the crowd to say this.

  A television van stopped. Men were leaping out of it and running across the road amongst the traffic, holding their cameras in front of them. That evening’s news was in the process of being manufactured.

  “They surely aren’t going to be allowed to stay there, are they?” demanded Maureen. She sounded furious, as if she wanted to sweep the demonstrators out of sight, or to have the police do it for her. Now her face had a sullen reddened look; she was crying; tears flooded over the swollen surfaces of her cheeks. Her tears pleased Philip. She knew this and struggled with herself. The more she fought what she felt—whatever that was, mostly rage from the look of it—the more she weltered in emotion. But now it seemed as if Philip had had enough, and he turned the car away from the Embankment and began driving them home.