The Summer Before the Dark (19 page)

“I’m sorry,” said Kate, “I’m not well.” And she tried to get up, staggered, was supported by the girl. Warmth and concern were already being poured all over Kate: oh yes, the girl knew her job, who should recognise this better than Kate, who had done it herself, and so very recently.

“Oh, I am so sorry, they told me you were not well, and you don’t look it, but let me take you to your room, you should certainly be in bed, one can see that.”

One had to wait for the attention, for which one paid so highly—it was midsummer, it was August; but when the attention was switched on, then it was of the very highest quality.

In a cocoon of love and warmth, Kate was soon in her room, and the girl, Anya from Austria, here in England to put the finishing touches to an obviously admirable training as a hotel manageress, helped Kate undress, saw her into bed, drew curtains to make a soft dark, called the floor service to bring lemon tea and dry biscuits, prescribed rest, peace, silence, and departed, having handed Kate over to the care of another girl from Italy, equally delightful and solicitous, here to perfect her English and to further her training—she was not as advanced towards managership as her colleague Anya. For while Anya’s loving sympathy and devotion were spread over all the floors of the hotel, Silvia’s were only for this floor.

Silvia withdrew, smiling, having offered Kate her services whenever Kate chose to push the appropriate button.

Kate was lying in a room the size of the smallest bedroom in her home. It was planned and fitted like a work-box. The bed she was in—a single—was the size she and her husband had shared for their early years, when they could only afford the smallest size in double beds. The twin to it stood at a hand’s stretch away, still covered in its dove-grey skin, in which two rosy cushions lolled to suggest home, comfort: there was nothing else in the room that was not functional. The curtains were thick, rose-colour, would wash in a washing machine, would not need ironing—what was the use of being in a hotel if you brought with you the housewife? She continued, however, with her inventory: the carpet was dark grey, would not show the dirt. The walls, she decided, had not been intelligently
surfaced: they were white, papered in a blistered or pockmarked stuff that held dust easily; these walls would probably have to be vacuumed at least twice a week? There was television and radio, and a board behind the bed full of switches and buttons to press and turn.

But it wasn’t quiet, no: traffic raged and swore below windows which of course had to be open, in this weather, and not far off along the corridor there must be a working room of some kind: there was much clattering and laughing coming from it. She could have the dark, immobility, rest—but she was not going to have quiet.

She should, however, submerge herself in sleep until the malady, whatever it was, had passed. Jaundice? No, she was not yellow at all. Nor was her flesh cold; on the contrary, it burned, as if the dry heat of Spain was in her body still. She felt as if she had a fever, and her head ached. Yet she was nauseous, and felt as if inside her she was cold, very chilled, despite her burning surfaces. She was realising how awful had been that long journey on jolting buses, and in the air, and then again in the taxi—a nightmare of hot, sick movement that had in it a cold nausea.

She needed to be sick. She was sick. And again … holding on to a basin with both hands, she saw in the mirror a greenish-white face that had flaring scarlet on the cheekbones, and lank slabs of tarnished red hair falling over it. The grey was pushing up into it fast. The bones of the face were prominent, the skin creased and shabby. If this face had walked through the village, the women would have recognised kindred flesh: she staggered back to bed, and dozed. She was conscious of a discreet knock, and the entrance of Silvia, and the smiling face, bent over her. But Kate did not move; and there followed a long, slow, underwater time, in a room that showed if it was day
or night by whether it was like a dark noisy cave that had painfully brilliant vertical streaks of light from which she had to turn herself away, or a dark cave lit by a horizontal streak near the floor from which, again, she had to screen her eyes. Silvia came in often, with a drink her training prescribed for Kate’s condition, of lemon, that had white of egg whipped into it. It was delicious, and Kate drank each glass as it arrived beside her—and was sick when Silvia had left. For she knew that Silvia was a spy sent by the management to make sure that Kate was not suffering from some disease that would earn the hotel condemnation on the part of authorities higher still: Silvia was reporting on Kate—as of course Kate would have done in her place; she did not blame Silvia, on the contrary, she merely took care to hide how often and how thoroughly she was sick, and that the noise was an affliction worse than the nausea. For Kate, who lay neither asleep nor awake, felt the noise washing all about her, felt it crash on her, making her bones ache; a screech of brakes from the street hurt her backbone, and the voices in many languages from the corridor, the thudding of feet, vibrated and shook in a lake of sensation that filled her head.

Several times there was a heavy trundling sound; and apparently she had asked Silvia about it, for the information in her mind was that a trolley carried cleaning materials for the rooms, and that others bore meals and drinks and cigarettes, and that these trolleys journeyed up and down and around all day and most of the night. They clanged, and they rattled, and they shook, and the thin walls trembled, while the windows vibrated with the traffic.

She must have had other conversations with the always kind and gentle Silvia. For instance, she knew that Silvia came from near Venice, in the country, where “my father
has an inn, the family are all in the business.” Silvia had worked in every capacity in the family inn, as waitress, maid, and cook, even substituting for her papa when he had gone on a holiday with her mother to Sweden last year. Next year she would be in Lyons, in a hotel where she would be fulfilling the function that Anya was in now: she would have moved up a stage. And the year after that? She would be married to her fiancé, who was this summer in Zurich, learning the wine trade. They would get a job in the same hotel, perhaps in Italy, but it did not have to be; France, Germany—even here, in Britain. After all, these days, it could be anywhere, not so? She saw herself as a manageress, he as manager, and in a good hotel, of course, something of this class or even better. This hotel was very good, yes, she had been pleasantly impressed, but in due time she would like a country hotel, like her father’s only on a higher level, for the very rich, who could afford perfect simplicity, perfect quiet, the ultimate in everything—and, it went without saying, attention of the highest quality. By which time of course Silvia herself would not be the one who would allow sympathy and love to flow forth whenever it was needed; other people would be employed for that function.

But in the meantime she was so very good at what she did that her face, bent over Kate in the darkened room, had become a symbol of reassurance, of kindness—ridiculous, absurd, yes, of course, even in her illness Kate knew that—but in the meantime how very pleasant. And no wonder that handsome couple in their fur as supple as silk, in the white crêpe de Chine with the hundreds of minute buttons, each one clothed separately in a silk of a slightly different texture to the crêpe, so that you had to look and look again to see if a different material had in
fact been used to make the tiny buttons more glossy than the gown, seem almost, at first sight, like ivory or a polished bone—no wonder they were so confident, so assured, so effortlessly in command of themselves: the self-immolation of Silvia and a thousand like her had made them so. Where were they by now? Switzerland? Greece? But they wouldn’t have to confine themselves to Europe, they might already be in South America, or in Iceland.

Kate found herself awake, and in a real silence. Nothing trundled along the corridors, and the traffic was absent. She was hungry. Telephoning, she discovered it was four in the morning; but decided that if she was in such a hotel she might as well get the benefit of it. Room service brought her a cold meal, and some pleasant wine, but it was too soon. She ate a little, and was sick again, but was still clear in her head, and ready to start living. The day began, in its din, the light blazed and hurt. She got up and dressed. Her clothes dragged around her; she had lost, the scale said, fifteen pounds. In how long? She tried to remember, but could conclude only that now it must be early in September.

She stood in front of a glass, the curtains pulled right back at last, showing the square packed with the hot glitter of traffic, and the heavy damp weight of leafage above. She saw a woman all bones and big elbows, with large knees above lanky calves; she had small dark anxious eyes in a white sagging face around which was a rough mat of brassy hair. The grey parting was three fingers wide. She looked nothing like the pretty cared-for woman of the home in South London; and the people who had been so happy to see the kind, the smiling, the elegant Kate in Global Food and in Istanbul would not have recognised her.

It was her hair, her hair above all, but nothing was easier than to put this right. She telephoned for an appointment in the hotel’s hairdressing salon, discovered that she would have to wait until late afternoon, and discovered too that she had not enough energy for what she had planned to do, for what she had got herself out of bed and dressed: she had meant to walk across the mile or so of streets that separated this hotel from Global Food and pick up the letters that should be waiting there for her. In fact, she fainted, found herself on the floor with a bruised shoulder, got herself back into bed, and asked for the hotel to send a messenger for her mail. It came; there was not much of it. It was the letters from her husband that she longed for. She had sent him many postcards and one real letter from Istanbul, saying that she planned to “drop over” to Spain, knowing that he would certainly think she had found attractive company, but deciding it was better to say it in so many words now, so that he would have had time to digest it. There were two letters from Michael, warm, humorous, full of information about everything, including the doings of their daughter, who was staying with some friends in Philadelphia and who might be seriously in love. These letters cancelled every critical thought she had ever had about her situation, about her marriage. She lay in bed, feeling very sick again, but longing for her husband, the familiarity of their knowledge of each other, their intimacy. Now it seemed to her that she had been childish ever to resent his affairs—they could not matter compared to this—that if she held out a hand to him, or he to her, in that gesture was contained a quarter of a century’s being together. The empty bed a hand’s stretch from hers diminished her; her being here at all, her having left even for one moment the pattern her life was set in, seemed a mistake
chosen by a madwoman. The violence of these reactions, her reluctance to get out of bed again, her need to weep, her need to send a telegram to Michael asking him to come home—all this told her she was still ill, and that she might even be sensible to call a doctor. But having decided that this was what she would do, she slid down and away again from her daylight self, as much to lose her miserable need for her husband as for anything, and dreamed she was in a country where pine trees and spruce stood around her in thick clean snow. The sky was a sunless grey. She approached a village built all of wood, and people streamed out of it towards her; among them—taller than they, dominating them—the young king, he whom she had met in the wooden house where she had laid down the seal while they made love. He was fair, with a handsome bony face and strong blue eyes. But he had grown older since she saw him last. He bent to kiss her, claiming her, and then whirled her off in a dance. The people of this village were all dancing, old and young, men and women, holding hands and swinging each other around, or with hands on either side of each other’s waists. He and she, the young king and herself, danced on a raised wooden platform, so that the people of the village could see them clearly, for, as these people danced, they kept their eyes on their king and on herself, his chosen consort, and they smiled and laughed because of their pleasure that she was there with the king. The music was loud, and she could not see where it was coming from. Then the young king stepped down from the platform, leaving her without a look, and, taking by the hands a young girl who had been dancing with a boy who seemed to be her brother, he drew her smiling up onto the platform and took up the dance with her. Her long gold plaits, each tied with a red ribbon, flung out as
she spun about and around, guided by his hand on her waist, and she laughed up at the smiling face that was coming close down towards hers in a kiss. Kate was running away, in a desolation of grief. The people of the village came after her, shouting: she had become an enemy, because she had been discarded. They caught her and held her; meanwhile the young king ignored them, ignored her, while he danced with the girl. They put her in a pit that was framed with wood, so that she was surrounded by fragrant planks, and she could not get out of it: her eyes were above the lip of the pit, and she could see the young king dancing with the girl on the platform. She shouted out that she was unjustly imprisoned, unjustly deposed, and the king, his face turning sharply from smiles to anger, came swiftly across the snow, pulling his partner by the hand, to stand over the pit and chide her for her lack of generosity, her niggling and critical spirit, her failure in communal feeling, but above all, for her lack of understanding for the laws that governed life: it was necessary for the king to dance with one woman, one girl, after another, until every one of them had been singled out, and had danced with the king on the raised platform in the eyes of the village. The dance was going on, the loud music, the singing, the laughter, the kisses. Overhead pine trees swung and hissed, as a cold wind blew faster, began to wail and shriek. Kate had to get out of the pit, she knew that. Somewhere not far away the seal was, alone; and it was again trying painfully to make its way along the ground towards the sea. It believed she had abandoned it.