The Summer Before the Dark

  “What about her husband?”

  “There you are, you aren’t savage, you aren’t like her. You’ve been sitting there thinking, What about her husband, what about the children? Yes. Well. She had sex with other people almost from the first. But she was so casual about it it was some time before Bill believed it was really happening. He tackled her with it, and she said, ‘Yes, but I’m like that.’ Embarrassed for him because he wasn’t. He made rows. When he did she got sad and uncomfortable. What was all the fuss about? That was what stymied him, you see, her attitude. She wasn’t guilty. Then there were three children. Mary would say, Kids are all very well but they cramp your style. They weren’t cramping hers much. One day Bill came home and found Mary in bed with some man whose name she didn’t know. The baby was in the pram in the same room, and the little boy—Cedric, he’s sweet—was playing on the floor. Bill started a divorce. He was heartbroken. So was she. He got his divorce and custody. Mary didn’t contest it, she couldn’t anyway. About a year after the divorce they got together again. He wasn’t in love with anyone else. He has said to all sorts of people that after Mary he can’t really take to a woman, ‘she’s very immoral, but she’s wonderful apart from that.’ I suppose the point is that her being unfaithful doesn’t attack him, isn’t a criticism of him. And when he is unfaithful to her, she screams at him a little and then they make love. Well, sex. During the year they were divorced, they were both quite lost, they were operating from two different sets of laws. He had divorced his bad vicious wife who was corrupting the children, but she was the victim of a crazy man. ‘Well what’s the matter with you?’ she kept saying. ‘We get on all right.’ When they married again he made all kinds of conditions, for the sake of his pride of course. He must have known she wouldn’t fall in. And he wouldn’t have married her again if she didn’t suit him. And that’s how they get on. The children are now in their teens and by all the rules they ought to be casualties. But they aren’t any worse than most. It is true that Mary thinks it is all a bit much. She says that every time she has a bit on the side then it all gets discussed by everybody on its merits. She says no one can ever get the point—that there aren’t any merits. She fancies a little bit and she has it. If the children have noticed—she does try a bit of discretion sometimes—then they discuss it, give their verdict, as it were. She says, Oh for God’s sake, leave me alone, it makes me tired all your because’s and why’s. I like sex. Her children are in and out of my house all the time—they are younger than mine but they are a sort of family. My four have discussed Mary all their lives. They like her. Every one likes her. They got the point much earlier than I did. It took me years. They understood that she wasn’t like other women. Really not. Once she seduced my husband. If that’s the word for it. No, she fancied him, and so she had him. I was going through hell, and thinking of being betrayed and God knows what. She said to me, next time we were having a cup of coffee in her kitchen, ‘He’s all right, Michael is. He gave me a really good time.’ ”

  “And so?” said Maureen. She sounded defiant. “What are you wanting me to conclude from all that?”

  “I’ve never been able to conclude anything from it, except that she’s quite quite different from me. That’s all. Every time I do anything—or don’t do anything, that’s more it, I like the look of a man and think, I wouldn’t mind him but of course I’d never do anything about it—then I think of Mary. At one time thinking of Mary was a kind of comfort and support—I’d think I’m much better and finer-feelinged and sensitive than that irresponsible creature. But now I wonder. I really do. I sit in the theatre and see people tearing themselves to pieces about love, and suddenly there’s Mary, and she literally can’t understand what all the fuss is about. Or I sit in a cinema … sometimes I’ve been with Mary, and its like … afterwards she says, ‘What a carry-on!’ In the beginning, you know, when she said things like that I thought it was a defence, the way we all do it, but if you are with someone who really does think it is a joke, but really, from the heart—if that’s a word you can associate with Mary—then it’s odd, it changes your perspective. There are times you know when there’s a sort of switch in the way I look at things—everything, my whole life since I was a girl—and I seem to myself like a raving lunatic. Love, and duty, and being in love and not being in love, and loving, and behaving well and you should and you shouldn’t ask and you ought and oughtn’t. It’s a disease. Well, sometimes I think that’s all it is.”

  “Once I believed my mother was in love with someone else. I still don’t know how serious it was. It shattered me,” said Maureen. “It really did. I thought she was going to leave Daddy and me. I’ve never looked at her in the same way since. I know it is silly. It was the worst thing in my childhood.”

  “Mary’s children, and mine, discuss her goings-on as if they were the symptoms of a disease. To be tolerated.”

  When Kate told the girl about Mary she had not realised she was putting an end to Tell me a story, please tell a story, Kate!

  But so it was.

  Kate dreamed again about the seal, or rather, dreamed and remembered. The seal had made restless movements in her arms; it had wanted her to notice something. She stopped, while the snow fell silently, straight down, all about her. She could see the snow: the air was lighter than it had been? Immediately in front of her there was a glimmer, like candlelight, and there all by itself in the snow, was a silvery-pink cherry tree in full bloom. Kate pushed through deep snow to the tree and pulled off a flowering twig, and held it in her frozen fingers as she walked on past the tree into the dark ahead.

  She told Maureen this new stage of the dream and Maureen said, “Well, I suppose it won’t be long now.”

  This was, but unconsciously, forlorn. Kate saw that the girl was sad, listless. She had lost all her animation. Kate sat by her, put her arms around her, hugged her, as if she were her daughter. Maureen put her head on Kate’s shoulder, and allowed herself to be hugged and petted. They fell asleep.

  When Kate woke Maureen was sitting upright and cross-legged on a cushion in front of her. What Kate was looking at made her sit up, look again, shake herself into attention. Maureen’s face was a new one, or at least, to Kate.

  The girl said, “Do you know, when I woke up, I had my thumb in my mouth?”

  Maureen had sat quiet there, on her cushion, waiting for Kate to wake so that she could shoot this accusation at her. Now, having said it, Maureen slid off her cushion and went off to the kitchen. Kate did not follow her. She was, of course, feeling guilty, in the wrong. She sat wondering where she had gone wrong, what she had done wrong.

  An hour later, finding Maureen eating baby food, she sat down, wanting to know what the verdict was. Maureen said, “Do you realise? Your stories. We like different things. What you like is to tell about your children when they were very young. That’s what you remember best. That’s what you wanted to tell me, and when I wanted you to talk about being happy with Michael, you had to tell me about Mary.”

  “Was that why?”

  “Yes. And it was a destructive thing to do. That’s what I think. Yes, I think so. What use is Mary to me or to you? She’s no help at all.”

  Maureen finished her food, washed up, made the kitchen tidy, while Kate sat and watched. Then the girl slung a satchel bag over her shoulder and went out.

  She came back in the evening, and at once looked for Kate so that she could say, “I’ve been at the zoo.” She was exploding with emotions. She was very angry. With Kate? Was she the cause? Why had the girl come at once into this dismal little room in search of her? “Yes, I’ve been there all day.”

  “It’s not my fault,” said Kate, attempting humour. Maureen said, “Who cares whose fault? That isn’t the point, is it?” She was on her way out of the door when she turned with, “Why did you say that anyway? Why does it have to be your fault? It’s just megalomania. That’s all you are, a megalomaniac.” Kate could not say anything. Then Maureen said, “Oh I’m sorry, I’m sor
ry. But it’s all very well for you, isn’t it?” And she ran out of the room, crying in her unashamed noisy way like a child who has been slapped but who knows that tears are part of the thing, to be taken no notice of.

  What she was saying was: You’re already through it, you’ve done it, for better or worse, but I have to decide whether to do it or not.

  Her concern over Maureen told her the girl’s accusations were just. Maureen had become one of her children; she felt for her as she did for them. More so, she told herself, with the stubbornness that means one is defending something, holding fast to something one had no right to—that one hasn’t earned—the last weeks had held the delight in companionship with a young creature that she had not enjoyed with her own children for … she had been going to think years, and the exaggeration checked her. The family always had times of enjoyment in being together (remembering these, Kate was longing to go home this moment), and this was true even when there was antagonism between the young ones and the parents—for Michael had his difficulties too, she had not been remembering that; she had not chosen for some time to think that Michael and his sons fought, or sulked or competed and that Michael worried over it. What it all amounted to was that because family life was difficult at times (as of course every authority let alone experience said it had to be), because Kate played the role she had to, a mother who had to be resisted, fought, reacted against, because she wasn’t always loved and appreciated, then she had to damn it all, see it all as black, as ugly … her reactions of the last few months had been nothing more than that? She had not been loved enough, noticed enough, licked and stroked enough? Was that all it was?

  She was on the point of feeling so; and this was as much of a reversal of her view of herself as the one before—a gradual reversal, that had been—when she had come to see herself, and the family, and her husband, as a web of nasty self-deceptions.

  What she thought about it was probably not important at all.

  The mood she was in when she walked in at her front door again would be irrelevant: now that was the point, it was the truth. We spend our lives assessing, balancing, weighing what we think, we feel … it’s all nonsense. Long after an experience which has been experienced as this or that kind of thought, emotion, and judged at the time accordingly—well, it is seen quite differently. That’s what was happening, you think; and what you thought or felt about it at the time seems laughable, jejune.

  How was her summer out of the family going to seem to her in a year or so’s time? She could be quite certain that it would not seem anything like it did now. So why bother to assess and weigh, saying, This is what I am thinking, and therefore I should do this or that, this or that is happening … at which point in Kate’s deliberations (for she was, of course, doing what she was deciding was pointless) Maureen came in, and said, “Kate, you know what it is? It doesn’t matter, that’s what it is. I can’t feel that it matters. Whatever I decide to do.” She went quickly out again.

  Next morning she asked Kate to go to the shops with her. On the way there they saw coming towards them a young woman about Maureen’s age, who was pushing a fragile push-chair in which a small child was tightly strapped. She was pulling another along by the hand. The infant in the chair was tear-stained and uncomfortable, for his mother had piled a package on the foot rest in such a way that the small legs were sticking straight up over it. At a casual glance, it was just a baby in a chair; then its bewilderment, its distress seemed to shout to the street, yelling for aid against the tightness of the straps, and the awkward parcel, and the noise of the traffic that was roaring past, and the sun dazzling into its face. The mother, half mad because of the irritation of the two small children, was pushing the chair in sharp hard jerks, and then was pulled sideways by the other child who was lagging, tugging at her hand. This child was sullen with rage, because he had been slapped. One side of his face was scarlet.

  “Come on,” said the girl, “get a move on or you’ll get it again, I’m warning you.”

  The child still hung back; because his rage was claiming all his energy, not because he had decided to.

  The girl let go his hand, and hit him back and forth across the face with her palm, then with the back of her hand, then with her palm again. The child stood still, and stared at her. Slowly the tears filled his eyes, and poured over his reddening cheeks.

  “Come on,” shouted the girl, frantic. She snatched his hand again, and dragged at him: he swung off his feet, fell against her, caught at her dress to save himself, and was on all fours on the pavement. He held his scarlet face in front of him, as his lips blubbered and snot ran from his nose.

  “And now look at my dress,” said the girl. He had left smudges over it of grease, sweat, tears, and sugar from the lollipop which he held in his other hand and which was now splintering on the pavement.

  “If you don’t get up and walk home I’ll strap you till you can’t sit down,” said the girl, bending down to whisper this message to him, her eyes full of hate.

  He slowly got up. She grabbed at his hand again. The baby started to cry. It was out of misery, not rage, or sullenness. This set the little boy off, who began to cry in the same hopeless way. He trotted desperately after his mother who was flying in great strides up the street, pushing one child in front of her, pulling the other. Her face, as she came level with Kate and Maureen, was as miserable as her children’s. She saw the two women looking at her, and flashed them looks of defiance and mind-your-own-business.

  She took in Maureen, this morning in an embroidered smock—white, with flower patterns in blue—over which her yellow hair fell in pigtails. The girl’s look at Maureen said everything about what she had lost when she became the mother of two small children. Water filled her eyes and the three creatures went on up the street, more slowly now, all three in tears.

  “You never remember anything like that,” said Maureen. “Why don’t you?”

  Kate was going to say: Because nothing like that happened. But she walked on in silence, trying to remember if it had.

  Then Maureen said, “If I married William, then I needn’t bother, need I? Nannies and nurses all the way. Well, perhaps that is what I’ll decide after all. I’d be running true to form, wouldn’t I? A few years in the wide world and then back to the home paddock.”

  Maureen looked white; she seemed ill. She was very far from the girl who should be inhabiting the bright effrontery of the smock. As soon as they reached the flat Maureen ran off, tugging the smock over her head. She came back in a dark sober dress. She sat down, leaned her head against the kitchen wall, and shut her eyes. Tears flooded her cheeks. Soon she wiped her face dry in a businesslike way with tissues, splashed water on her eyes, and went out.

  Kate tidied herself and left the flat—the cave rather, for it was a space dug out of earth and lined with brick. It was a cave, whatever it was called. This thought took her to the bus stop where she could catch a bus to the zoo.

  As soon as she got inside the place she saw Maureen ahead of her. Or rather, she saw two dazzling plaits on dark muslin.

  It was a weekday, the place not very full. The sun was at midday position, and unobscured. The zoo was full of a thick damp sunlight. Kate had not come to watch Maureen, so she set off by herself. She saw a sign: To the Sea Lions, and stood by their pool where, conscientiously, she put a coin in a machine that dispenses information. While she watched the sea lions, larger and more cumbersome than the half-grown animal whose weight in her arms she could feel all the time now, even in the day, she heard that these animals were not real seals, because they had small ears and could move easily over rocks and earth. No, her seal had no such mobility. She wandered on to the round pool where the real seals were, and there she leaned, watching the two of them, swimming around like goldfish in a bowl. To vary the tedium of their captivity they had made up little games. They turned on their backs for part of the circuit, then flipped back again; they played in and out of the jet of water that came up from the bas
e of the pool in rays of bubbles; they swam across each other, under each other, around and around.