The Summer Before the Dark (14 page)

The feeble spurt of emotion was the same as that which had led her, the winter after that dramatic scene with her son Tim, to take in a stray cat. Her emotions about this cat—while they had lasted—had been strong. She would not have been the product of all the years of “love talk” if she had not been able to say to herself: that cat represents me, is myself. I am looking after this poor cat because I feel I should be looked after. But by whom? By my family, of course! Who no longer need me, and who find me intolerable.

The family were aware of the cat’s role, and her thoughts about it; aware of their part in it, their emotions. They had been humorous and indulgent. “Oh go on, you’ve taken in that smelly old cat just because we aren’t being nice to you!”

“He’s hit it on the head, mother. You’re just
showing
us, that’s all.”

Sitting on that balcony, hundreds of miles away and over two years later, she wanted to spring up and shout out her rage and bitterness to them. At the time she had smiled, of course, been “humorous.” Now she wished that she had slapped them hard, her delightful daughter Eileen, her charming Michael, Tim—all of them. “I wish I had hit him,” she heard herself mutter. “I do, I wish I had hit them all hard!”

She had seen Mary Finchley scream abuse at her husband, at her children: afterwards she collapsed in laughter. She had done what she had felt like doing, at the time she felt like doing it.

The family had treated Kate like an invalid and the cat a medicine.

“Just the thing for the menopause,” she had heard Tim say to Eileen.

She had not started the menopause, but it would have
been no use saying so: it had been useful, apparently, for the family’s mythology to have a mother in the menopause. Sometimes she had felt like a wounded bird, being pecked to death by the healthy birds. Or like an animal teased by cruel children. And of course she felt she deserved it, because she disliked herself so much—oh, that had been an awful spring, to follow a bad winter; she had feared she was really crazy, she spent so much of her time angry. Then the two older ones had started to give their time entirely to university, to friends, and she had been delighted. Absolutely delighted, though of course she then felt guilty that she was delighted. Feeling guilty seems almost a definition of motherhood in this enlightened time. It was a lot of nonsense, it was all a lot of rubbish, all of it—somewhere along the line they have gone wrong—Who? Herself? Not the children, of course not! Society? But
why
so much tension and antagonism and resentment—it was over though. Eileen was busy with men; there was only Tim who still had his sights on her—that was how she felt it. So the nasty time was past. She looked back on it … but if that were really so, why was she here now, with this young man who Mary Finchley at least would have seen at first glance was going to offer her what she already knew, what she did not want … she did not leave the balcony until the sun’s rim shot hot rays over the sea and into the town. She was really tired. Inside the room a blackness filled eyes that were adjusted to the day. Her eyes cleared and she saw that Jeffrey lay looking at her. She smiled, prepared for speech—saw that he was not really awake. He scrambled up, crouched on the bed, stared, a surprised animal, his dancer’s limbs expressing the dream he must still be in, his face alert, suspicious, ready to turn itself aside. She said, carefully, “Jeffrey!” but he made a
hot confused denying sound, and shot into the bathroom. She heard him being sick. She went on standing where she was, wondering if he would be awake when he came back. He came into the bedroom by dragging himself on the door frame, then the edge of a chest. He must feel himself alone, then: he saw her, lurched forward, clutched the bottom of the bed, stared. She was, she understood, outlined against the door onto the already dazzling balcony; she must seem a dark watching shape to him. At last he smiled: he knew he ought to know who she was. It was an effort, because he was three-parts asleep, but he was a polite person, he had been brought up to please, to offer courtesy. The smile was courtesy offered to a situation which demanded it and did not warm into pleasure. He manhandled himself into bed, and collapsed, asleep again immediately.

She sat by him in her white frilly robe that had on it the sweet coolness of the night air she had brought indoors away from this day’s heat. She was swearing to herself that when she woke she would not be maternal, she would not suggest a doctor, she would not be concerned. Lying beside this young man, whom she knew was at the least “off-colour,” if not ill, she tried to put herself into the frame of mind of a woman who had come here to be with him for love. Suppose that she were still “a love woman”—this was how she put it—and not a maternal woman, as a result of a quarter of a century’s nursery work—if she were this “love woman” then how would she be feeling? That was easy—she had only to remember Michael. She would be waking Jeffrey to make love—she and her husband had enjoyed making love when she, but particularly he, had fever. He had tended to run temperatures for the least thing; and for years they had made the most of this condiment
for eroticism—or so they had seen it. But she could not imagine approaching Jeffrey erotically. For one thing (as of course literature and all sorts of experts, marriage counsellors and the like, could have told her) if a woman is attuned well and truly for one man, then a new one doesn’t come so easily. (For which reason she had never been able to believe in the easy pleasure of wife-swapping and amiable adultery.) And after all, her sexual experience had been with Michael, and, at second hand, through Mary.

Of course, if she had been madly in love as the occasion demanded, as even an aesthetic sense, a sense of the appropriate demanded, she would not be lying here trying to imagine herself erotic.

She leaned on her elbow and examined him with all the caution of a mamma with sick child. He managed to suggest, even while his flesh flung out heat, that he was cold. There was a chill damp coming off his forehead. He smelled sickly. No, not even a woman madly in love could choose this moment to approach him. There was something about his present condition which was antipathetic to sex.

It was of course possible, indeed, likely, that
he
was antipathetic to sex, at least in his present mood of worry about the future, or at least, with her … the degree of her uninvolvement with him was confirmed by her coolness as she came to this conclusion.

She fell asleep and was at once on a rocky hillside. Yes, there was her poor seal, slowly, painfully, moving itself towards the distant, the invisible ocean. She gathered the slippery creature up in her arms—oh, she ought not to have left it there. It was weaker; its dark eyes reproached her. Its skin was very dry; she must get some water for it. In the distance was a house. She staggered towards it. It was a wooden house, its roof steeply sloped for snow
which—she knew—would soon fall, for it was already-autumn. The house had no one in it, but people were living there, because in a tiny fireplace were embers of a fire that was going out. She laid down the seal on the stone before the fireplace and tried to blow the fire into life. There wasn’t much wood, but she made the fire blaze at last. The seal lay quiet, its sides heaving painfully. Its eyes were closed. It needed water badly. She carried it to the bath house and splashed water on it from the wooden buckets that stood along wooden walls—the dream’s flavour was still, was more and more, that of another time; myth, or an old tale. The animal’s eyes opened and it seemed to revive. She thought that there were many things she must do: she had to clean the house, to fetch wood for the fire from the forests before the winter snow came down, to get food, to take warm clothes out of the chests and lay them ready for herself and for the people in the house who, she knew, were her family, but transformed and transfigured into myth creatures, larger than themselves, representing more than they were in ordinary life. In an upper room of the house she saw a tall fair young man with blue eyes. She knew him. He was her lover. He always had been. They made love. They had been waiting for years and through waiting and wanting made this love perfect … she remembered the seal. The seal needed her, was lying abandoned on the floor of the bath house, waiting for her. She left the fair young man who was a nobleman of some kind, perhaps a prince, saying, “I am sorry, I want to stay with you, but I must take the seal to the sea first.”

She woke to find herself assaulted simultaneously by a blaze of sunlight and by Jeffrey, who was making love like a ten-year-old who has been dared by his gang to
climb a high wall, or like a Soviet factory worker overfulfilling a norm. While her experience—limited, as has been said—had not included love with an American, literature had of course acquainted her with American male sensitivities in this field. Besides, Mary Finchley had once spent a fortnight with an American airline pilot and had reported—in detail, of course. (There had been no need to listen, Kate had often chided herself.) But the situation last night had demanded sex; he had failed to provide it; his masculinity was now in question.

She thought of making a joke or two about conditioning—as he did, continually—but understood from his bloodshot eyes and his sullen body that on this subject jokes were not possible. It was six; she had slept for less than one hour. Now that his aggression was spent, it was clear that he was ill: they ought, as reasonable people, to part amicably and go their separate ways across the world?

Lying in a welter of now crumpled white frills, the very picture of a woman seductively dishevelled, she regarded a surly eighteen-year-old who, if he had any sense, would go to the doctor.

An effort of will enough to fuel a decent-sized moon rocket kept her from suggesting a doctor.

They had got dressed and were breakfasting on the terrace, which was already crammed, lively, multi-tongued, when, having had to depart to the lavatory three times, he confessed he had the tourist trots, and would go to the chemist.

She sat on alone and watched a man of fifty or so sitting against a background of plumbago with a girl of about twenty. He, like Michael, had his hair cut straight around neck and face without a parting, growing from a centre point at top back; on women it had been known as
the urchin cut. Kate had worn it, but some time ago. The man’s haggardly handsome, burned face, which was being kept ironical out of self-respect, wooed the girl’s heartbreaking freshness; she was flattered, and rather bored. The man looked intelligent; snippets of conversation—in English this time—caused Kate to say to herself, Well at least
mine
is not stupid. She supposed she must be feeling ashamed?
Mon semblable
, she was silently addressing him, while she remembered that not more than twenty-four hours before, she had said goodbye to Ahmed, the world’s servant, another facet of herself, whom she had addressed also, but privately, as
brother
. Somewhere in the States her Michael—urchin haircut, lean attractive face, experience—was probably protecting himself with irony while youth itself, capsuled in delicious flesh, sat opposite being flattered and bored. If so, Kate did not know him: she had never known him urbane, ironical—vulnerable. Nor did his woman have to be very young; Kate didn’t really know what he looked for. Of course, Eileen was around, which meant he wouldn’t be free to do as he liked; perhaps the young girl sitting opposite him was his daughter, and he was looking proud and cherished, as middle-aged men did with their female children. If there was one thing certain, it was that when Mary did this—had the affair older woman-younger man—there hadn’t been any mysterious indispositions or sweet-sour mirror encounters on sunny Southern terraces with middle-aged gents and their popsies. Birds. Of course not. For about four years Mary had intermittently had it off with a waiter in a Greek restaurant. He had been about twenty-three when it began, was handsome, and “ever-so-keen,” as Mary said. He had adored her. He was prepared to marry her, and wished to move in and become father to her three children. This being
vetoed by Mary, they had conducted an affair remarkable for its good temper, its sweet reasonableness, and its mutual liking until he had gone back home to Greece.

When Mary had wept. This was the only time Kate had known Mary to weep. So even Mary paid tribute to the altogether high quality of this category of affair.

Jeffrey was easing his way through packed tables, cumbered with many packages: pills of all kinds. They spoke for some minutes of various possible plans, but he was looking critically at the holiday scene around him and soon he said that he wished to go inland, to the “real” Spain.

The question of money now confronted them. He did not have the money to fly inland, nor to hire a car. Coaches and trains were what he could afford and were what she, too, was committed to. Besides, she would enjoy them.

Beyond the terrace the beach still lay empty, ploughed by last night. Two men with great rakes were smoothing the sand ready to accommodate the young, who were all still in bed; though some lay asleep along the edges of the beach where it met the terrace wall. They, she knew, would not have any “hangups” about money; they shared what they had. The fact that Jeffrey could not take money without feeling it—as he said himself—in his guts, would have put him beyond “the children’s” company, if nothing else did.

“There is a cheap place up the coast,” he said. “And there are no tourists. You can get a room for a dollar a night.”

He sat leaning back into the thin shade from the oleanders, his hand on his chest, as if protecting it, his eyes half-closed. Under his hand his chest was rising and falling very slowly, like a sleeping man’s. He kept subsiding into
long silences, while his other hand went loose on the table, even twitched a little—he was falling off into dozes and making himself wake again. A wasp settled on a minute patch of jam on his forefinger. He watched it for a while, then he shook the beast off in a movement enough to startle an elephant.

“I think you ought to go to bed and stay there till you are better.” These words spilled out of her mouth, and he jerked his head up and glared.