The Summer Before the Dark (24 page)

But what was she going to do about this monster inside which she was trapped, a monstrous baby, who had to be soothed and smiled at and given attention on demand: the woman who for years has been saying, implicitly, of course,
Have you forgotten who I am, my position in this house?
Natalia Petrovna came straight out with it; the fact that Kate Brown would be ashamed to say it aloud showed there had been some progress?

Outside the flat, on a low wall, sat a languid young
lady with a large yellow chignon, eyes limned with blue paint, a bright pink doll’s mouth. She was wearing an ancient black dinner dress in lace and satin.

The young lady’s haughty face vanished in a wide smile, and Maureen said, “Why are you so thin?”

“Because I have lost a lot of weight.”

“Makes sense.”

“Not to me—yet,” said Kate, and descended into the flat.

And now, like someone trying to deal with a faulty machine, an engine needing oil perhaps, she set about the business of making herself a meal she could eat. She had to eat. She needed the energy. She had to build up energy in order to defeat the monster which had swallowed her whole.

She made toast out of the awful bread, buttered and cheesed it, and sat herself down at the kitchen table to eat it. But each mouthful became an unswallowable mass. Maureen strode in, her lace dress flapping about naked ankles and feet.

“Have you been ill?” she demanded.

“A little.”

Maureen pulled down off the stack a jar of baby food called Plum and Semolina and, hitching up her lace, sat on the end of the table and began to eat. Seeing Kate chewing, she waved her hand at the baby food and said, “Try that instead? I never eat anything else.”

“You’ll get a vitamin deficiency,” said Kate, automatically, and sat fighting tears as Maureen rocked with derisive laughter.

Maureen handed her a jar of apple purée, and Kate was able to swallow the stuff.

“I like being ill,” said Maureen. “It’s better than hash.”

“Hash didn’t do anything for me when I tried it.”

“You didn’t persevere with it, did you?” stated Maureen.

There now entered a young man with a King Charles haircut, jeans, and a frilly silk shirt. He nodded at Kate, went past her to Maureen, lifted her off the table, and said, “We must move. It starts in five minutes.”

Maureen pulled on a pair of white kid lace-up boots, and arranged a rather beautiful Spanish shawl, which was full of moth holes, over her bare shoulders.

The two left, nodding at Kate, who felt a wash of violent anguish appropriate to saying goodbye to loved ones departing for several years. She was full of loss because this delightful, ruthless inconsequence had been taken from her, even for an evening. Her children were much more solemn, not nearly so casual. It was her fault this was so? She ought to have …

She checked herself, as it were pleading with guilt, and with sorrow, to stay away till she had strength to withstand them.

Kate piled blankets on her bed and dived into them. She slept. She was searching for the dream of the seal but could not find it. Other dreams captured her, kept her prisoner, dreams smaller and less important; in her sleep she felt like someone a couple of yards from the centre of the maze, but no matter how she turned and tried, she could not reach it. The seal was there; it was being carried north by Kate whose business it was to do this, but this was going on in a part of Kate that was obscured from her by dreams like so many parcels that she had to balance and secure.

She woke. Air was flowing, carrying a multicoloured music. It was heavy air, damp, but reminiscent of irresponsibility, of gaiety, of people mixing and moving: this summer
air, a summer Saturday night’s current tingled across Kate’s face in a thin dark that had leaf shadows printed on it from the window: there was a street light on the pavement outside. One of the patterns of music came from inside the flat.

Kate thought she was much better: the violences of the day seemed gone. It was because she had eaten something at last—she would go and eat again. It pleased her that she would probably run into Maureen. She put on a yellow beach robe, and went out into the hall. It was empty. She saw herself in the long mirror: there was nothing for it but to laugh at what she saw. It didn’t matter, it would only be Maureen. The kitchen door was shut. She opened it with a smile, onto a scene that confused her, like an undeserved assault.

Five young people sat around the kitchen table, which had plates of food, and glasses of wine. A dark girl played a guitar. Kate realised that the smile that she wore was a habit of that other house, her own home: walking into a room there that had in it her children, their friends, it would be with this smile that expected a welcome, even if the welcome had to be inside the family convention of teasing, the “love talk.”

“Ohhhh, look who has come in!”

“I suppose you are going to tell us to come and eat.”

“That’s my mother, that is! I told you, she’s not too bad, I suppose.”

That was from earlier, from the mid-teens, a raucous jeering that was quite friendly really, was full of need, which knew that she, mother, would be there, would come in always with that smile, would say not more than, “Thanks for the compliment. Yes, supper’s ready.”

Now it was adult politeness, much harder to take:

“Come in mother. This is my friend from Scotland/Penzance/Spain/The States. Can he/she stay here a bit? I’ve bought a new sleeping bag. There’s no need to bother about a lot of extra cooking, please.”

It seemed to her now that the five faces, one of them Maureen’s, were turning towards her in the same slow movement set to seem indifferent, which indifference was of course an affectation, but necessary to them, as protection against—what?

Five faces stared at a skeleton in a shocking-yellow robe, her hair in a dry mass around a worried face.

She fled from what seemed to her like a glare of hostility, muttering, “I’m so sorry.…”

In her room she knew that her feeling of total rejection was outside the range of anything rational; she could only observe it. She hurried herself into one of summer’s beautiful dresses, bones inside a tent, tried to push her hair closer to her head, and gave up, then went out into the street. Under the street lamps, groups of young men hung about, hoping that something would happen: the pubs must just have closed.

She thought,
I
can’t, I can’t go past them:
for each group of men, even a couple of young boys standing by themselves, seemed threatening. But she forced herself, a self-prescribed corrective to a need to dive back down into the flat, pull blankets over her head, and stay there. The street seemed wide, endless, each object in it embodied danger; she seemed to herself all vulnerable surfaces. She walked, with her eyes straight ahead, as she would in Italy or Spain, where women are made to feel overexposed, roped off like municipal grass:
Keep Off
.

No one took any notice. She received indifferent glances, which turned off her at once, in search of stimulus.

Again, she might have been invisible.

Her whole surface, the shields of her blank staring eyes, her body, even her trimly set feet, had been set to receive notice, like an adolescent girl who has spent three hours making up and who has staked everything on what will happen when she presents herself to batteries of search-lighting eyes. Kate felt light, floating, without ballast; her head was chaotic, her feelings numbed with confusion, she was suppressing impulses so far from anything she had ever had, or could have imagined as hers, that she was shocked by them as if reading about them in a newspaper: she knew that if she were not careful she would march up to one of these groups of lolling men and lift up her skirts to expose herself:
There
, look at that, I’m here, can’t you see? Why don’t you look at me?

A small café, serving exactly the same food as the one she had been into for lunch, was still open. But beside this menu was a slighter, almost apologetic card that indicated the Greek parentage of the place. They offered the skeleton of the Greek menu abroad: hummus, taramasalata, shish kebab. It was full of young people from the tall council flats, who did not want to go to bed now the pictures were finished, the pubs closed. No one took any notice of her, though she had stiffened herself to take criticism. She knew now, she had to know at last, that all her life she had been held upright by an invisible fluid, the notice of other people. But the fluid had been drained away. She swayed, had to sit down quickly at a table which had a young married couple and another girl—the sister, apparently, of the wife. The sister was sulking about something, but enjoyably: she was acting out being huffed and indifferent; the young wife was nagging to get back to her baby, because the neighbour who was looking after
it would want to get to bed; the young man was looking around the restaurant and contrasting present bondage with past freedom.

The Greek who served the shish kebab was trying to make the sixteen-year-old look at him; and so Kate did not ask why they had not seasoned the food at all, did not say that not all English palates were bland; did not suggest that they might cook for her as they would for themselves.
Especially for me
were the words she found on her tongue.

She ate fast, and left the noisy friendly scene which seemed, as closing hour came near, to be swelling up like a boiling liquid which would overflow everywhere into the street.

Kate was congratulating herself that she had
not
, when she paid the bill, attracted attention by presenting an emphatic smile, sending out the signal: I am accustomed to being noticed.

In the flat, the door to the kitchen was now open, and Maureen stood against the wall near it, beside a young man Kate had not seen before. They held hands. Maureen saw Kate and said, “Why didn’t you come into the kitchen before? You must, any time. You mustn’t mind what we do.” Before the girl had even finished, Kate’s emotional self was weak with grateful emotion.

“This is Philip,” said Maureen, and, removing her hand and giving the young man a small push towards Kate, “this is Kate. She’s a friend.”

Philip obeyed Maureen with a small smiling bow at Kate, and then went off down the hall to the door, remarking, “Right then, tomorrow.” There was something admonishing about it, like an ultimatum. Maureen was reacting with a shrug, and a look of strain.

“All right,” she said. “I promise. But I
do
think about it. But you come on so strong about everything.”

“Of course I do.
I
know what I want,” said Philip, and without looking around, went out into the night.

Maureen sighed noisily, wanting it to be seen that a weight had been taken off her, and went into the kitchen. In the half an hour since Kate had looked in on it, the scene had quite changed. The young people had vanished, the tables were cleared of plates, glasses, food. Only the guitar player was still there, her hair and her hands sweeping the strings. She took no notice of Kate.

Maureen was looking frankly and critically at Kate. She examined the mass of crinkling hair, with its wide grey band down the middle. She looked at Kate’s dress, walking, or stepping, carefully around Kate to do so. Then she said, “Wait” and went off for a minute. She came back with some dresses, and held them up one by one, frowning, in front of Kate. The two women began to laugh: the laugh built up so that the guitar player glanced up to see what was so funny. At a skinny frilled dress stretched against Kate’s bones, she smiled briefly, and retired back into her music.

One of the dresses was a straight dark-green shift, and Kate unwrapped herself from the one she wore and put it on.

It delighted Maureen that it fitted.

“You’d better keep that. No, use it till you get fatter again. No, really, you look such a sad sack of a thing in those awful couture-ish clothes of yours. You must be rich, I suppose.”

Great waves of self-pity washed over Kate: never had she foreseen that she could be called a sad sack. But it was the girl’s kindness that was forcing tears. To hide them,
she made tea, her back turned, and when she returned to the table, with her cup, the guitar player wandered off, and could be heard from another room, and Maureen, spreading her black lace flounces, setting the heels of her white laced boots apart, had sat down and was frowning at Kate.

“You wear a wedding ring?”

“Yes.”

“Are you divorced?”

“No.”

Kate was afraid to use these monosyllables, in case the girl might withdraw her friendship, but after a while Maureen enquired, “Are you sorry you married?”

At this Kate first let out the small snort of laughter that announces it has been prompted by an indiscreet question; and then surprised herself by sitting down and laughing. Uncontrollably. She had to stop, for she was starting to cry. During this Maureen leaned her chin on her two forearms, that were on the back of a chair which she was using like a gate into a field on which she was leaning to watch horses, or at any rate, some kind of animal, and stared at Kate with a steady, stubborn blue gaze.

This she kept up when Kate had stopped laughing, so that Kate had to explain: “It is funny to be asked that, don’t you see? I mean, after having been married ever since you were a girl.”

“I don’t see why it is funny,” said Maureen.

“But I have children. Four. The youngest is nineteen.”

Maureen changed neither her pose, nor her steady gaze for some moments after that. Then she got up, and dismissed what she obviously felt as a disappointment by shrugging, and then rolling herself a cigarette, in which were carefully shredded some strands of the acrid weed.
She went striding off after the music, not saying goodbye or good night.

Kate went to bed. It was midday when she woke. She lay looking through the window at the white wall that had plants in pots against it, and beyond the wall at trees, foliage, everything in heavy sunlight. There was not a sound in the flat. Without running into anyone she bathed, and went into the kitchen. No one had been in there since the night before. The telephone began ringing in the hall. Maureen answered it, and then came to stand in the doorway. Where Kate had stood last night, looking in at the five faces all turned to stare at her, now Maureen stood, looking at Kate. She wore white beach pyjamas, and her hair was in two pigtails over either shoulder, tied with white ribbons.