The Summer Before the Dark (20 page)

She woke, very cold. Trying to get out of bed to look at herself, to see if she were yellow or red or some colour that would be a diagnosis, she fell back into it, and rang the bell for Silvia. In came a girl she had not seen before.
She was a plump dark girl in a short white dress. She had a plump face and friendly black eyes. Her mouth smiled; over it was an infant moustache that sketched the handsome authoritative woman she would become. She moved on a centre of self-assurance and self-appreciation, and this was caused, as with Silvia, as with Anya, by her knowing that she was doing this job of hers so well. She bent smiling over Kate, laid her fresh hand on Kate’s, and demanded how she felt today. She sat on Kate’s bed, and held Kate’s hand, and said that she too was Swiss, and from the French-speaking part, and was training for the hotel business; she too had a fiancé apprenticed to wine; she was taking Silvia’s place while Silvia took Anya’s—for Anya was manageress for a fortnight, while the manageress went to visit a mother suddenly taken ill. Her name was Marie, and she smiled and she laughed, and she said that madame did not have a temperature, but perhaps she was worried about something? This made Kate laugh, and they both laughed, Kate’s tailing off in a tearful wail that was like a demand for instant love. There was nothing wrong with her; both of them thought this. Yet she was lightheaded, nauseous, and the flesh was melting off her. Marie brought some soup, which Kate at once vomited; the girl was in the room, and able to help Kate to the bathroom in time. Now it seemed to both of them that the ritual act of calling the doctor should be performed. One came, and like the doctor in Spain, he was full of negatives. Kate did not have jaundice. No, she did not have typhoid. No, she was not anaemic, or if so, only a little. She probably had flu in one of its many manifestations, and she ought to stay in bed and take these pills … Kate went back to sleep.

Far behind her, the sun slid up sideways over a horizon of dark lowering mountains where ice never melted,
and after a crab’s scuttle very low down, a few inches above the peaks, fell back into its day, leaving this dark land to cold shadows. She was in a heavy twilight, only just able to see the dry hummocks she was picking her way among. The seal was inert in her arms, its head on her shoulder. But it slid about as she walked, for it was in a coma, or dying. She could hear its dry harsh irregular breathing. She should wet the seal’s hide again. But everything was frozen, and the seal needed to have on its dry hide some salt water. She laid the animal down on the snow and searched about in the dark for something to help her. She found a black rock that had salt crystals in its seams. In a hollow between this rock and another she saw ice and broke the surface. A little water was congealing there. She broke the crystals off into this water and made a saline solution. She carried the half-dead seal near this pool which was already trying to freeze over, despite the salt, and she splashed the animal with the liquid, quickly, even more quickly and frantically as the surface of the little pool froze and the water vanished. But before the ice was solid, she had been able to smooth the water all over the seal, over its poor dry hide, its face, its eyelids. Its eyes opened and it moaned softly, but in greeting. She knew the seal was now alive and was saved, for the time at least. She must pick it up and walk north, north, always north, away from the sun, which was so far down south in its eternal day. The dark about her was thick. It was snowing again. She lifted the seal, whose weight was now easier because it was breathing and alive, and went on her way north.

It was mid-September before she dragged herself out of bed. She had lost more weight. Her hair stuck out around a face all bones, stiff and frizzy, streaked with orange, grey-rooted. She could not get her brush through
it. Of course, a little patience over an appointment, and in a couple of hours it could be restored to the heavy sleek silky shape that was “her” style. Or had been, for three months. When she returned home though, she would have to return to “her” style of before that summer, pretty and discreet waves, a total lack of provocation. What was the point of doing either, when her body was all bones: this thought, analysed, turned out to be that she could not face sitting under the dryer.

She tied her hair back off her face: this was too young for her, but she found she did not have energy to do more. She went out through the noisy lobby that smelled so strongly of perfumes that she felt sick again, into the street where every face was that of a busy tourist, seeking sensation. People stared at her. Seeing herself in a shop window, she could understand why. She saw she should have tied a scarf around her head, and another to make a waist around the sack that dragged from her shoulders. She went into the first shop that sold them, bought a large hat at random, and pulled it down over her face. Now she felt protected from stares, from criticism.

She found a bus and climbed painfully to the top, and sat rocking slightly from weakness as she was taken the several miles south to her own home. She wanted to look at it. No, not to go in, but just to see it. She had never looked at that house as she would now, when tenanted by other people. It would be like looking in at her own life.

She got off that bus, changed to another, and was at the end of her street. It was wide and tree-lined. There was nobody about. Mr. Jasper’s spaniel was sitting on the pavement panting. It recognised her, but did not move. Its tongue was shaking off great heat drops. Seeing the overheated dog in its mass of fur, she understood that it was very hot, and that she was sweating.

She walked slowly down her street. She felt as if only now she had returned home, to England, from abroad. Now she was really home. She had left cosmopolis. Young Mrs. Hatch was in her front garden, digging around her white rosebush. The girl glanced up at Kate who was walking past her garden, looked again, and as Kate was about to greet her, lost interest in the strange female, and went on digging.

Kate stood under plane trees at the foot of her garden, looking in. The large solid place stood silent under the mid-morning sun. The sky was clear, and the garden seemed overexposed, a bit limp. Things needed watering. A dove was cooing in the tree under which they had sat on that climactic afternoon. The lawn could do with some cutting: the tenants would probably cut it, in the last-minute rush before they expected themselves, the real family, to come back. A deck chair lay on its side on the lawn, looking desolate.

Kate went on standing there, in the heavy shade. Perhaps someone would come out. But nothing happened. Mrs. Enders was cooking, perhaps? Had gone out shopping? But it was not Kate’s affair. This was how her house, her home, would look very soon when Michael and she had left it to live in a flat somewhere. One says “my house,” “my home.” Nonsense. People flow through houses, which stay the same, adapting themselves only slightly for their occupants. And Kate was not feeling anything at all about this house in which she had lived for nearly a quarter of a century. Nothing. She did feel rather vague and light, as if she might take off somewhere, through lack of substance. Certainly it was foolish to get out of bed so abruptly, after being in it for three weeks and not eating for so long, to come halfway across London. She would go back to bed for that day. She left the shelter of the tree, and on the
opposite pavement saw Mary. Mary was wearing a hat and gloves. She hated wearing both; she seldom did; what occasion could she possibly be returning from? Kate’s mouth had stretched into a smile, for the moment when Mary would look at her. But Mary’s frown did not change. Like Iris Hatch, she glanced at the woman standing there, looked again because of the creature’s eccentricity—what was a tramp doing in this respectable street?—and walked on.

And now Kate did feel emotions, violently. One was fear, another, resentment. How
could
Mary look straight through her? They had been close friends for years and years? Why, Mary must be drunk or something like that! They had shared crises, domestic and personal, each other’s children—perhaps their husbands? Kate knew that Mary had at one time fancied Michael—being Mary she had said so. And Kate knew that Michael found Mary attractive—well, all men did, even if they did not want to, even when they disapproved of her. Which Michael did. Kate had even been a little jealous—damn it, she was doing it again, using false memory: the truth was she had burned with jealousy, had made herself ill with it. The intensity of her relationship with Mary dated from that time. It was not a memory that she could be proud of, to say the least.

Kate watched Mary’s retreating back, a straight and competent back, under a straightly set and sensible hat: nothing of what she was seeing now was true of Mary, who was in disguise.

She realised she was relieved that Mary did not know her. More: she was elated, as if she had been set free of something. She quickly left the shade of the trees, and walked through deep wells of shade along the glaring pavement. She saw that Mary had already flung off her hat, gloves, and shoes, and stood on her lawn, barefooted, her
legs planted apart, hands on hips, breasts flopping inside her dress. Her face was screwed up with the glare and she was staring across at Kate’s house.

The screwed-up eyes made her look puzzled: this was characteristic. More often than not Mary confronted situations with this look of someone needing an interpreter.

For instance, the occasions they referred to as cow sessions. There had been, in fact, only two of these. The first was about a year ago, and it had followed a visit from Mary’s ten-year-old son’s teacher, who had come to get across to Mary that there was something the boy needed that he wasn’t getting from what the teacher described as “his home environment.”

It happened that Michael was away that weekend, Mary’s husband working, Kate’s and Mary’s children variously occupied. Having exclaimed several times how remarkable it was that they both found themselves alone at the same time, they found they had created the atmosphere of an occasion, and they drifted to Mary’s bedroom where they were drinking first coffee, then whisky.

Mary was telling Kate, detail by detail, in her way that sounded conscientious, but was the result of her puzzlement, the teacher’s recommendations for the child’s “better integration.” The phrases followed each other: well-adjusted, typical, normal, integrated, secure, normative; and soon they were smiling, as hilarity mounted in both that was partly the prospect of two days’ perfect freedom, and partly the Scotch.

Kate, putting in her mite, told Mary how a counsellor had once come on a similar errand about Eileen, then being “difficult” for some reason or another now forgotten. “She said,” said Kate, “that Eileen’s problems would be easily supported and solved in a well-structured family unit like
ours.” Mary suddenly let out a snort of laughter. “A unit,” said Kate. “Yes, a unit she said we were. Not only that, a nuclear unit.” They laughed. They began to roar, to peal, to yell with laughter, Mary rolling on her bed, Kate in her chair. Other occasions came to mind, each bringing forth its crop of irresistible words. At each new one, they rolled and yelled afresh. They were deliberately searching for the words that could release the laughter, and soon quite ordinary words were doing this, not the jargon like parent-and-child confrontation, syndrome, stress situation, but even “sound,” “ordered,” “healthy,” and so on. And then they were shrieking at “family,” and “home” and “mother” and “father.”

But Kate began to feel uncomfortable; and her discomfort—Mary’s instincts were acute—communicated itself; and Mary’s face put on the familiar look of curiosity, of readiness to be instructed: why was Kate now reacting in some sort of disapproval, whereas she had not a moment ago?

A few days later, in Mary’s kitchen, waiting for a dish to get itself cooked, they began laughing again, because of a word that had, without Kate’s meaning it to, slipped out of its place in a sentence and been given emphasis. She had been saying that she had walked into her living room and seen her children and her husband playing some game of cards; but the word “husband” had isolated itself and they had to laugh. They could not stop themselves. They began improvising, telling anecdotes or describing situations, in which certain words were bound to come up: wife, husband, man, woman … they laughed and laughed. “The father of my children,” one woman would say; “the breadwinner,” said the other, and they shrieked like harpies.

It was a ritual, like the stag parties of suburban men
in which everything their normal lives are dedicated to upholding is spat on, insulted, belittled.

It was Kate’s guilt, it goes without saying, that ended this occasion too; and Mary checked herself, quite willingly and promptly, when Kate did, and lit herself a cigarette, and sat smoking it, scattering ash all about the place, and smiling in her usual way: Well, so we have stopped doing that, have we? We’ve gone over the mark, I suppose? What mark? Do tell me, do explain?

Quite soon the two incidents, unrepeated, had gone into the past and Mary was referring to them like this: “When we laughed, do you remember, Kate? When we had our cow sessions.” And the expression on her face was as it was now while she stared at the house opposite her own, the sun contracting her eye muscles: I don’t understand, but if you say so I suppose I’ll have to accept it, I’m doing my best to fit in with your ideas you know. I always do.

Mary stood among deck chairs, an outgrown children’s climbing frame, bicycles, a garden table, a bird bath, hydrangeas, a lawn sprinkler, two cats, a watering can, and a small heap of colour lying on the grass that was her handbag, her hat, her gloves, her shoes.

Kate passed the spaniel that lay stretched out, its pink tongue gathering gravel, its tail lazily moving in greeting.

On the bus she was thinking, over and over again: Mary did not know me. That girl, Iris Hatch, didn’t know me.

It being the middle of the day, and the traffic thick, it took over an hour to get back to central London, and all the way Kate was thinking: they didn’t know me, they see me every day of their lives, but they didn’t know me. Only the dog did.