The Summer Before the Dark

  And now he was here, for the fourth time, and in August—which was in itself enough to make him feel a foreigner, a greenhorn. For like everyone who has spent more than a month in a country, on his own steam, without much money, he felt like a native; and it was humiliating for him to be here at a time when every native—very properly, of course—had only one thought, that his country was not his, was temporarily sold to tourism.

  The country was corrupted, ruined, debased, compared with when he had first come here.

  They discussed this at length, watching the golden boys and girls playing on the verges of the tainted sea.

  When he had first come here, at the beginning of the sixties, there had been a pride, a dignity; there had been a readiness to proffer small services, unasked, without wanting money; there had been a dimension in the Spaniards, even on the already developed coasts, which went far beyond commercialism. There was a humanity in … a stature … a depth … He began to laugh at himself, when she did. There were tears in his eyes, certainly not for the Spaniards.

  As for her, she had come by car with her husband and the four children, for a prolonged camping holiday—she found this hard to say, but made herself—getting on for twenty years before. They had been among the very first tides of tourists. Along this coast, now loaded with hotels and holiday camps, had been nothing—nothing at all. Sand in which some thin grass grew stretched from headland to headland; camping under the pines, they had seen no one for days at a time. She too had memories of all sorts of spontaneous kindnesses from the natives—she was more than able to match his words—dignity, pride, and so on and so forth.

  She started to tell how, in those days, when the rare foreign car came into a town, an army of young men and boys would fight to earn sixpence for keeping watch on it for the night; how, when the Browns ate their frugal-enough meals in restaurants there would be a dozen hungry faces pressed to the glass, so that the Brown children had their fairy tales illustrated for them—those where the poor little boy gazes in at riches, but is noticed, and is brought inside by the kind family, or compensated by a fairy godmother—sometimes by being taken away altogether from his poor streets into heaven. She was telling him of children in rags and without shoes, children with sores and with flies crawling on their faces and into their eyes, children with the swollen bellies of malnutrition. But as she talked she was thinking how once and not so long ago these things had seemed like surface symptoms, soon to be corrected by the use of a general common sense, they had not yet presented themselves as the general condition of man which would soon worsen and darken everywhere. She was thinking how once talk of this kind sounded almost like a blueprint for a better world, or like a statement of concern. Now it sounded like callousness. In a moment they, Jeffrey and she, would be outbidding in each other in that most common of middle-class verbal games: which of them had acquired more grace by being close to other people’s sufferings.

  That was not her own thought: it was her son James’s. He got into a fury whenever poor people anywhere were mentioned—usually by Eileen, or by Tim, who engaged themselves in welfare work of different kinds. James saw the solution as simple: it was revolution. Anything less was insulting to the suffering poor, and a waste of time. The classic revolution—like Castro’s.

  But the four children had all evolved their own positions, quite different from each other’s. They had evolved, too, individual attitudes towards tourism, towards travelling so indefatigably in so many countries.

  Stephen the oldest was in advance—it was a way of looking at it—of them all. His attitude that all governments were equally reactionary left him free to travel everywhere, exactly like the selfish and the indifferent, whom he spent much of his time attacking. Eileen, uninterested in politics, travelled without scruples of conscience, like Stephen. James had a more difficult time than any: for instance, he would not have visited Greece, but had visited Spain last year because he was, he had said, adding to his political education, regarded Israel as too fascist to enter, but had travelled with equanimity through the military dictatorships of the Near and Middle East. Tim believed the end of civilisation was close, and that we should shortly be looking back from a worldwide barbarism formalised into a world-bureaucracy to the present, which would from that nasty place in time seem like a vanished golden age: he made journeys like someone tasting the last bottle of a rare vintage.

  As for their mother, here she sat with (there was no other word for it, she supposed) a young lover, drinking apéritifs on a terrace in Spain: they were going to a bullfight tomorrow because he adored them. For aesthetic reasons.

  Before the two went to their room they descended to the beach along paths scented with oleander, sun oil, and urine, and stood on the same level as the throng of youngsters, their feet in churned sand. It being late, and the half moon standing up high over the sea, and the crowds much thinner along the terraces, some of the young ones had put themselves to bed for the night and lay in each other’s arms—anywhere, in the shelter of a rock, on a stretched towel, on sleeping bags. Reed mats had been laid on the sand, and on these some still danced, their hair flowing, their eyes gleaming and drowsy. Near the sea’s edge a group sang to a guitar played by a girl who sat on a rock like a mermaid.

  Kate was now careful not to look at her companion; she knew that he would certainly, in the state of emotional sensitivity he was in, resent it: already she was making comparisons with her own children’s reactions. But she was remembering—not her youth, no, that was too far off and too different to be matched with this context. She was thinking of that time ten years ago when she had been in love with that boy. That pain, a longing after something beyond a barrier of time, matched with what he was now feeling. She had lived through and out the other side—well, she had had no alternative. So, of course, would he. But despite what people said about the poignancy of that class of experience, and what she said herself, she did not like remembering that time. It had been false memory again, she had dolled it up in her mind, making something presentable of it to fit the convention “older woman, younger man.” But really it had been humiliating. Yes, looking at all these beautiful young creatures, all moving, or lolling, or sleeping in their postures of instant grace, she said to herself that that time had been horribly humiliating. The reason had been simple, and why old Goethe (or Mann) had talked of “worming it.” Long marriage, long, gratifying sex, had absorbed sex, the physical, into the ordinary and easy expression of emotion, a language of feeling. But the boy had had practically no sexual experience, understood only fantasy, the romantic. Her sexuality for him had been horrifying—or would have been; she had, of course, damped it, learning that the conversations of the flesh were for the mature, learning, with the first inklings of unease, of her dependence on this long married conversation. She had felt when with him as if she had a secret or a wound that she must conceal. Young, as that girl in a white dress (another convention, like an old-fashioned portrait: “Girl in a White Dress with Lilies”), a kiss had seemed a gateway into a world which had in fact turned out everything she had imagined—until she had had to look at it through the eyes of a twenty-year-old from public school and English university, a virgin as far as women were concerned.

  She knew that she ought not to add to her companion’s wild misery, which was mixed with so much animal shame—like her own with that boy—by letting him know how easily she was able to share what he felt.

  As they stood there, not twelve paces from the young ones, but absolutely separated from them, a girl went past, smiling to herself, and dragging naked feet in the sand for the pleasure of the sensation. She glanced at Jeffrey; the smile was blotted out while she presented to him a blank face, and went on, smiling. Kate recognised that face: it was what one shows to someone outside one’s own pack, herd, or group. She tried to put herself in the girl’s place—she was about seventeen, with thin brown arms and legs and long black hair and what seemed like an absolute self-sufficiency—in order to see Je
ffrey as a man old enough to be so looked at. She managed it with difficulty. So she herself had looked at men over twenty-five when she had been that age. She could just remember that the godlike creatures had had above all the glamour of responsibility, or power in the adult world. Returning herself to her own stage or stratum in the human community, she could see only a young man whose strength was all going into recognising his own weakness and not collapsing under it. He turned to her and said, “Good thing you are here or I’d be dragged back into it again.”

  At this most frank statement of why she was here, with him, her heart did give an obligatory gulp, or grimace of pain—but nothing much, for it was much too occupied with painful reminiscence for small considerations: the official memories of all kinds were wearing thin, were almost transparent. If she had been asked, let us say in late May, on that afternoon when her husband’s casually met acquaintance had come to her garden—when the series of chances which had brought her here had begun?—if she had been asked then what scene or set of circumstances would be best calculated to bring home to her a situation, a stage in life that she must recognise, no matter how painful, then she might have chosen this: to stand on the edge of a mile of soiled and scuffed sand that glittered with banal moonlight, watching a hundred or so young people, some younger than her own children, beside a young man who—it was no use pretending otherwise—made her feel maternal. Almost she could have said: There, there, it will be better soon, and hugged him. She was actually thinking, like a mother, Off you go then, you’ll have to live through this, much better if I am not anywhere around—except, of course, that I have to be watching and guiding from somewhere just out of sight.…

  Their hotel was not in the glittering strip along the luxurious part of the little town. It was set back in the older part which in normal months was inhabited only by Spaniards. But they entered a foyer as lit and as lively as in day, for this was holiday month and sleep could be postponed. Couples of all nations sat about drinking. The dining room was open, and people were still at dinner—it was past one o’clock. The desk clerk handed the key over to Mr. Jeffrey Merton and Mrs. Catherine Brown without any dimming of his smile, but his body expressed offended disapproval without knowing that it did.

  They ascended to a bedroom which was not the best the hotel had: she had a lot of money because of the highly paid job, but was scaled down to him, who was making sure that his grandmamma’s money would continue to preserve his independence for him—none of it was invested, he had insisted on putting it into jewellery and pictures, which were in a bank’s keeping. It was the kind of hotel she and her family might have chosen: unpretentious, old fashioned. The room had a balcony, which overlooked a little public garden; from it came a gay churning music, the sound of voices. She went to stand on the balcony. He joined her. They kissed, expert lovers. He departed to the bathroom. Down in the moon-whitened street people sat on doorsteps, talking. Their children, even small ones, sat with them, or played nearby. It was warm and soft and the small isolated music intensified a general stillness. People had slept all afternoon and would not go to bed until the sky lightened. The town felt more awake, more flowing and alert than it ever did in the day. In the cities of southern Spain, at night, in the biting summer, another vitality awakes, holding together in a web of sociability that runs from street to alley to garden the cries of children, the barking of a dog, music, gossip. This is the time for sitting and watching, for talk, for living. From everywhere in the quiet dark, from the pools of light where the street was lit, arose voices.

  Jeffrey had come back into the room. She left the balcony and went towards the bed to turn it back as he pitched forward on to it, prone. At first, her femininity rose and shouted that this was an insult: they had made love only once, and they were supposed to be lovers. Next, she found herself laying two fingers on his pulse and a hand on his shoulder, to assess his condition and his temperature. His flesh was hot, but then the air was. He looked exhausted. What she could see of his face was a beaded scarlet. His pulse was slow. She used all her strength to turn him over, to lay him in bed, to pull the sheet up. The flush was rapidly draining from his face: now he was pale, sallow. He might not have a temperature but he certainly wasn’t well.

  While her femininity continued to shout, or rather, to make formal complaint, that it was outraged, and that she ought to feel insulted, she returned to the balcony, on the whole with relief. She fetched a straight chair from the room which seemed stuffy as well as unwholesomely dark compared with this light airy night over a street that still moved and laughed, and she put the chair in the corner of the balcony, and sat herself there. She wore a white cotton robe that left her arms and neck bare to receive what breezes there were. There she sat, in that most familiar of all situations—alert, vigilant, while a creature slept who was younger than herself. The block of moonlight on the balcony soon shifted. She moved her chair out of it, in such a way that her legs and arms might lie in it but her head would stay in the shadow—exactly as if the moon were a sun.

  Some fifty feet down, on the opposite pavement, two men were talking. They were two papas, stout men, in creased light summer suits that from here looked dazzling—like the sand on the beach in moonlight. The creases showed black. Beyond them boughs waved: the square where the music had stopped. Occasional cars went past, noisy, saying that the music had been louder than it had seemed. In the intervals between the roarings and hootings she could hear the men’s voices quite clearly. The Spanish was coming into her ears in lumps or blocks—unassimilable. It was a veil between herself and Spain which she could not pull aside. But it was a semitransparent veil, unlike the Turkish of only that morning. It had moments of transparence. The Portuguese that was in her, like an open door to half that peninsular, a large part of Africa, and a large part of South America, sometimes fitted over the sounds she was listening to, sometimes not. A language she knew nothing of, like German, was all thick and impenetrable. But this listening to the Spanish was like seeing something through trees off a road one is rushing along. The conversation nagged, on the edge of meaning. When she leaned right over the balcony, receiving moonlight all over her, in a cool splash of white, so that she felt so prominent and self-displaying she could not prevent herself glancing this way and that along the face of this hotel—no, she was the only person out on the balconies—when she leaned right over so that she could see the gestures, the poses, the positions of the two portly bodies, then she was able to understand much more. A set of the fat shoulders, or a flinging open of a palm added to the messages sent out by the intonation—almost she was understanding Spanish. They were talking about business, that was clear. Yet she had not heard one word that told her this. Their voices were those of men talking about money; their bodies talked risk and gain. The shriek of a passing car swallowed the talk, spat it out again: it was a near intelligibility, like windows paned with sheets of quartz instead of glass. The voices stopped. A smell of tobacco. She looked over and saw them lighting cigars. The smoke drifted away in small mists and sank into leaves. One fat man went away; the other lingered, looking about as if the night might offer him a postponement of sleep; then he went too. In a few minutes they would be in striped pyjamas. The pale suits would be heaped on a tiled bathroom floor ready to be picked up by their wives and put into the wash. The men would be sliding into bed beside two fat pale women.

  Darling! Chéri! Carissimo! Caro!

  She inspected the bedroom, so dark because of this blaze of cold light outside. On the bed, her lover lay sprawled. She could hear his breathing. She did not like the sound of it. If he had been one of her sons, she would be thinking about calling the doctor in tomorrow—she must stop this at once!

  It was getting on for four. At last the streets were emptying, though in the square people still reposed on benches, breathing in the night, dreaming, smoking. The steps below were empty now. But two children played quietly against the hotel wall, while their father sat by them on a stool, his back
against bricks which were probably still warm. The mother came out and said the children should go to bed, and they set up a wailing protest; one did not need Spanish to understand what everyone was saying while papa was being stern, mamma exclamatory, the children clutching at the life their parents wished to bury in sleep. Then mamma brought out a chair and sat by her husband; one child sat on her lap, the other on his. The children were drooping in sleep; the parents talked quietly: hotel employees, from the kitchens perhaps? The cars were few now. The town was as quiet as it could be in these frenetic months of the tourist.

  Kate was far from sleep.

  She was tempted to slide into the big bed and sleep simply to avoid—what she had to do, at some point.

  Besides, she was still able to savour moments like these, without pressures of any kind, after the years of living inside the timetable of other people’s needs. She could still hug to herself the thought: If I don’t go to bed until the sun rises it doesn’t matter. I needn’t get up till midday if I don’t choose.

  It had not been until three years ago that this freedom had been regained by her—of course, that was where she was going to have to look, at the time of the children’s growing up. But she could have claimed the right to freedom years before. Years before. What about Mary Finchley for instance? If she felt like staying in bed till mid-afternoon she did, and shouted at the children to bring her food or tea. In between Kate the girl who had married Michael, and Kate of three years ago which was when she had become conscious there was something to examine, the rot had set in.

  The climactic moment of three years ago had been when Tim, then a tumultuous sixteen, had turned on her at the supper table and screamed that she was suffocating him. This had been wrenched from his guts, it was easy to see that. All the family were present, everyone was shocked—oh yes, they had understood that this was an event of a new quality, destructive, which announced a threat to that unit which they were; all had rallied into tact, smoothing this moment of real misery and fright for both herself and the boy. For it had been wrung out of him, and he was shocked at the hatred he had shown. Normally, in this well-tempered family—so they had thought of themselves, well-adjusted, with effort spent to keep them so—such conflicts were out in the open, discussed, bantered away. Sometimes brutally. It could be said that the spirit of the young couple’s “Phase Two”—discussion to soften the painful limits of “Phase One”—had been taken into use by their growing family, years later. No one could have said—who? Kate was imagining some sort of critic, a welfare worker perhaps—that this was a family in which things were smothered, hidden, and had to go underground.