The Summer Before the Dark (21 page)

Dragging herself up the hotel steps, trying to make herself invisible in the lobby, leaning against the wall of the dizzying lift, collapsing into bed in the noisy room, she was repeating: They looked right through me. They didn’t know me. Far from being saddened by it, she was delighted, she felt quite drunk with relief that friendship, ties, “knowing people” were so shallow, easily disproved.

She slept through a hot afternoon, waking to tell the solicitous Silvia—back again on this floor after her flight into the higher regions of her profession—that she felt much better, yes, she felt fine, yes, she was probably cured. Although it was foolish to get up again—she had still not been able to keep anything down—she got the hotel to book her a ticket for a play.

She did not care which play. She wanted to see people dressed up in personalities not their own, that was all. Her closest friend had not known her: a loss of weight, a hat put on any how, probably a walk that dragged, the fact that Mary imagined her somewhere on the shores of the Mediterranean—these small things had been enough for Mary not to recognise a woman she had seen every day of her life for years; all that had been needed was that Kate should play a very slightly different role from her usual one.

The people at the desk were proud that they had got for her a ticket to
A Month in the Country:
they were able unerringly to choose right for her; that was what they were proud of.

At eight o’clock she was in her seat in the front row of the stalls. The theatre was packed. Normally this play would be in a smaller theatre for a choicer audience, but it was September, a month almost as much washed in gold as August. Dollars. The audience were mostly American.
They had come to see the leading lady, a famous name, in a famous play. This was a high-class and cultural experience; the atmosphere was much too heavy, because of the amount of respect it had to carry.

A Month in the Country
is quite a funny play in its way. Funny in the high-class and lifelike way, a tear behind every second or third wry smile. You have to be in the right mood, though. In the frame of mind, in fact, that Kate had been in when she was here last, four years ago: she had come out, she remembered, as if she had eaten a particularly well-prepared meal.

Kate and Michael went often to the theatre. If they let time go by before going again, they felt remiss, as if not doing their duty to themselves. They usually came together, or with friends, because their children preferred the cinema. They went as easily to the new kind of play, where audience and actors mingled, or people wore no clothes, or the actors insulted the audience, or old plays, like Shakespeare’s, turned on their heads to illustrate some director’s private vision, as to plays like this, which were like hearing well-known poems beautifully read. In judging the experience: That was rather good, that wasn’t very good, what made the judgment was the feeling of having eaten well or not, of having been filled, sustained, supported, or left hungry and needing some sort of confirmation. Confirmation of what? But this kind of play Kate had always found to be the most filling. Ibsen, Chekhov, Turgenev—the sort of play where one observed people like oneself in their recognisable predicaments.

“So very Russian,” people around were murmuring. That they did meant this was an audience pretty low down on the scale of sophistication, otherwise they would be saying, “Just like us, isn’t it?”

And indeed, Kate was thinking that the household of Natalia Petrovna was very like her own. Or, rather, that is what she had been thinking last time she saw the play. Perhaps it was a mistake to come to the theatre when just out of a long stay in bed?

A woman sat prominently in the front row of the stalls, a woman whom other people were observing. Some were looking at her as much as they did at the play. She seemed quite out of place there, an eccentric to the point of fantasy, with her pink sacklike dress tied abruptly around her by a yellow scarf, her bush of multi-hued hair, her gaunt face that was yellow, and all bones and burning angry eyes. She was muttering, “Oh rubbish! Russian my aunt’s fanny! Oh what nonsense!” while she fidgeted and twisted in her seat.

Natalia Petrovna said:
And what, pray, am I hoping for? Oh God, don’t let me despise myself!
—and this distressing creature, who must nevertheless be rich, to be able to afford such a price for her ticket, said out loud, speaking direct to the players in an urgent, and even intimate way, “Oh nonsense, nonsense, why do you say that?”

She was thinking that there must be something wrong with the way she was seeing things. For although she was so close in to the stage, she seemed a very long way off; and she kept trying to shake herself into a different kind of attention, or participation, for she could remember her usual mood at the theatre, and knew that her present condition was far from that. It really did seem as if she looked at the creatures on the stage through a telescope, so extraordinary and distant did they seem from her in their distance from reality. Yet the last time she had sat here she had said of Natalia Petrovna, that’s me. She had thought, What person, anywhere in the world, would not recognise her at once?

Well, for a start, not the people in the village in Spain where she had just been with her young lover Jeffrey. Not them. What those women had in common with Natalia Petrovna was that she was supposed to be twenty-nine, or so Turgenev said, but she was behaving and thinking like—was being acted by—a woman of fifty. A woman who thought of herself as getting old, grabbing at youth. Obviously the nineteenth century, like the lives of poor people, aged women fast. You couldn’t imagine a woman of twenty-nine behaving like that now; she wouldn’t regard falling in love with a student as an expense of spirit, far from it.

In which case what were they all doing here? Well, what? Rubbish, it was all rubbish—oh, not the acting, of course, not the way the thing was done, it was all wonderful, wonderful. “You’re marvellous,” she cried out to the actors, feeling as if her powerfully critical thoughts might have damaged them, but they continued regardless, taking no notice of the mad woman a few feet away.

Yes, wonderful; and four years before she had squirmed, she had felt personally criticised; she had been full of discomfort at the self-deceptions and the vanity of the lovely lady, the mirror of every woman in the audience who has been the centre of attention and now sees her power slip away from her.

But no matter how she called out Wonderful!—or felt that she ought and refrained, for people were glaring at her and telling her to shush—there was no doubt that what she was paying a lot of money to sit here and look at seemed (it was the mood she was in, that must be it) as if a parcel of well-born maniacs were conducting a private game or ritual, and no one had yet told them they were mad. It was a farce and not at all a high-class and sensitive comedy filled with truths about human nature. The fact
was that the things happening in the world, the collapse of everything, was tugging at the shape of events in this play and those like them, and making them farcical. A joke. Like her own life. Farcical.

But they would go home, these people here, across all those thousands of miles of sea and air and tell their friends they had seen
A Month in the Country
, and keep the programme in a box full of special memories.

“Oh do be quiet,” someone was saying. To her. She was still expressing her feelings then? How very bad-mannered of her. Perhaps she ought to slip out and go back to bed.

I’m standing on the edge of a precipice, save me!
cried Natalia Petrovna, and the audience vibrated with her emotion.

Kate now had her lips tight shut, so that nothing could come out of them; and she was thinking: She’s mad. Nuts. Loony. Allowed to be. More, encouraged to be. She should be locked up. And here we are sitting and watching her. We ought to be throwing rotten fruit at them. At us. Yes, that was it, if she had an apple or two or a banana, rotten if possible—but for God’s sake don’t think of food. Don’t look at the stage either, much better not.

She looked at the people around her, knowing that it was with a cocky aggressive sideways cast of her eye, as if expecting them to hiss back at her, “Don’t stare!” But look at them, all these tourists, just as she herself had been till a week or so ago, with their good clothes, and their solid flesh, and their grooming, their carefully arranged faces and their hair—good Lord, look at the heads around her, there were parts of the world where a family could be kept alive for fifty pence a week. Some heads here would keep a dozen families alive for months. This was a
ridiculous way of thinking, because it was no more than what people had been thinking for the last two hundred years. The French Revolution. Two thousand years. Christianity. Probably thousands of years longer than that, if one only knew it. For many thousands of years people had looked at expensive heads of hair and thought of how much food and warmth they represented, so obviously it was a thought of no use at all, so why bother to have it? But thoughts of this sort did go ticking on, useless or not. The old woman next to her was a fat old thing with dead-white hair carefully puffed and curled to hide a shining pink scalp. Her carcass with its diamonds and its furs would feed hundreds of families for years and years. As people had probably never stopped thinking. But what a remarkable thing it was, this room full of people, animals rather, all looking in one direction, at other dressed-up animals lifted up to perform on a stage, animals covered with cloth and bits of fur, ornamented with stones, their faces and claws painted with colour. Everyone had just finished eating animal of some kind; and the furs that were everywhere, despite the warm evening, were from animals that had lived and played and fornicated in forests and fields, and everyone’s footcovering was of animal skin, and their hair—no, one had to come back to this again, it was impossible not to—their hair was the worst: mats and caps and manes and wigs of hair, crimped and curled and flattered and lengthened and shortened and manipulated, hair dyed all colours, and scented and greased and lacquered. It was a room full of animals, dogs and cats and wolves and foxes that had got on their hind legs and put ribbons on themselves and brushed their fur. This was a thought even more useless if possible. There had been a caricaturist, hadn’t there, who drew people as animals, so what was the point of thinking
like this,
he
hadn’t achieved anything by it, for it all went on and on.

Natalia Petrovna was saying with measured flirtatiousness:
Well, if the word “morbid” doesn’t appeal to you, then I’ll say that we’re both old, old as the hills
.

Oh for God’s sake, thought Kate—but alas, had said it, too, for a woman several seats down leaned forward to give her a contemptuous stare. The woman looked like a cat, an old pussycat that has gone fat and lazy; but enough now, stop it, she should keep her attention well away from the stage since she couldn’t behave properly—really, why was it that no one but she could see, couldn’t anyone
see
that what they were all watching was the behaviour of maniacs? A parody of something. Really, they all ought to be falling about, roaring with laughter, instead of feeling intelligent sympathy at these ridiculous absurd meaningless problems.

Unhappy woman, for the first time in your life you are truly in love!

And soon off went the audience, jostling and pushing and heaving to get their glass of something or other, and Kate went to the cloakroom, where she was not surprised to see that a monkey looked back at her from the mirror. The attendant was a fat old pig, and women coming in for a wash or a pee were cats and dogs. One was a pretty little fox, all sharp nose and bright observant eyes. Returning to the audience, now getting themselves uncomfortably back into their seats, Kate saw that they had all become what a few minutes before she had fancied they might be: she was in a room full of animals, each one dressed more ridiculously than the next. Was this how that old artist had always seen humanity? It had been no fancy of his, but he had lived always in the state she was in now? He had been
served in shops by pigs and monkeys, had loved women with the faces of cats and little bitches, had evaded wolves, looked into mirrors hoping that one day a human face would at last appear there, dissolving the animal mask that always confronted him, no matter when and how he crept to the glass, trying to take himself by surprise, hoping that the light of an early morning, or a break in his sleep, or a sudden turn away from his easel or sketchbook would let him see the face of man with the eyes of a man looking back into his?

And he thought that perhaps one day when this happened the animal masks would dissolve away from all the people around him and then—well, what?

Then the Lion would lie down with the Lamb no doubt, and all these ridiculous thoughts could stop running around in people’s heads, the old “progressive,” “liberal,” “intelligent”—or socialist or what-you-will—thoughts, because they were useless, they did not change anything, that lot on the stage there had been swept off the boards by a revolution, and what of it, there they were still at it, and nothing had changed, and the same thoughts went revolving and revolving in their grooves in people’s heads, and quite soon they would sound loudly for what they were, like a lot of old scratched gramophone records, because people would find what was grinding around and around in their heads intolerable because of its repetitive meaninglessness. They would put an end to it. They would have no choice.

Natalia Petrovna, in an exquisite green gown—the third that evening—was on the point of tears. Tears came into Kate’s eyes in sympathy.

To do this so well, to portray ridiculous shameful behaviour that everyone should be hissing at and condemning,
men and women of the highest intelligence and talent spent years of aspiration, hard work, devotion, study, humiliation, living on hope or tuppence-halfpenny in the provincial rep. They sweated and suffered for this, the moment of high art, when Natalia Petrovna sweeps languid skirts across dirty boards and says to a girl who fancies the same young man:
When you think that our secret—entirely my fault, I know—that our secret is already known in this house by two men—instead of mortifying each other, shouldn’t we be trying to rescue ourselves from an impossible situation? Have you forgotten who I am, my position in this house?