The Summer Before the Dark (25 page)

She came in, cut herself bread off Kate’s loaf, spread jam over it, and sat down to eat.

“Are you going to dye your hair again?”

“I don’t know yet. I’ve got nearly six weeks before I have to decide.”

“What colour was it when you were young?”

“This colour.” Kate saw an end of brassy red on her right shoulder, and said, “No, it was dark red.”

“You must have been pretty,” said Maureen.

“Thank you.”

“If I went away and left you in the flat would you look after it? I mean, there wouldn’t be all these people floating in and out, just you.”

At this reversal to her life’s condition, or life style, Kate could not help laughing.

“You wouldn’t want to then?”

“No.” With an effort, Kate stopped herself from saying, “But if you want me to,
of course
I will.” She said,
“You see, it’s not often that I get the chance to be absolutely free, and not to have to do things, look after things. I don’t know when I shall have it again.”

“How long?”

“What?”

“Since you had it, since you were free.”

“This is the first time in my whole life that I’ve had it.” Kate could hear the irritable despair in her voice, the statement: It’s not possible, I can’t believe it myself.

Maureen shot her a look that seemed unfriendly; then Kate saw it was because she was scared. Maureen got up, lit a cigarette—an ordinary one—and walked or stepped lightly around the room, on an invisible pattern that she was making as she went.

“Never?” she asked at last.

“Never.”

“You married young?”

“Yes.”

Another long, indrawn breath, of fright, of apprehension: the girl halted her stepping dance, that was like a bird’s on a shore, and demanded, “But
are
you sorry? Are you? Are you?”

“How can I answer that? Don’t you see that I can’t?”

“No. Why can’t you?”

“Are you thinking of marrying?”

“I might.”

She went on with her dance—it was like the private dance-walk a little girl who has been brought up too strictly makes for herself: she was stepping over invisible bars, barriers, lines on the floor. Then she saw that her careful avoidance of these lines was making another pattern. She frowned, irritable, discouraged. At the other end of the room sunlight lay in a yellow square. She began walking
around the square of sunlight, on tiptoe, like a soldier, one, two, one, two.

“If I left I’d go and meet Jerry in Turkey.”

“To marry him?”

“No. He doesn’t want to marry me. But Philip does.”

“You mean, you want to run away to Jerry for fear of marrying Philip?”

At this Maureen laughed, but went on with her fast tiptoe walk around the square.

“And if I don’t watch it, I’ll start feeling guilty for refusing to be a housekeeper in the flat, thus forcing you into marrying Philip.”

Maureen laughed again, and sat down suddenly at the table.

“Have you daughters?”

“One.”

“Is she married?”

“No.”

“Does she want to?”

“Sometimes yes and sometimes no.”

“What do you want for her?”

“Can’t you see that I can’t answer that?”

“No.” She shouted it. “No, no, no, no. I don’t see why. Why can’t you?” And she ran out of the kitchen her pigtails flying.

Mrs. Brown strolled in the park all afternoon. She had not at first realised she was again Mrs. Brown, but then she noted glances, attention: it was because she wore Maureen’s properly fitting shift, in dark glossy green, because she had done her hair with the twist and the lift that went with “piquant” features—because she was, as they say, “on the mend,” and the lines of her body and face had conformed?

A man came to sit near her on a bench and invited her to dinner.

She walked home through a summer Sunday dusk, among the possibilities offered by men’s eyes.

Kate stood in front of the long mirror looking at the slim decorative woman—the haggardness of her face had as it were been absorbed by the over-all impression of an amenable attractiveness—and flung off the dress, put on one of those that folded and sagged, shook her hair out, and walked out into the evening. And again she might have been invisible.

Yet she needed only to put on the other dress, twist her hair so and so—and she would be drawing glances and needs after her with every step.

The maternal feelings of a woman are aroused, they say, by a certain poignant curve of the baby’s head: cunning nature has arranged it thus. A goose just out of its egg follows a shape or a sound and is imprinted ever after by “Mother”—whatever that shape or sound chanced to be at a certain crucial moment of its chickhood.

A famous African hunter describes how, when hunting, he kept the shape of the duiker or deer somewhere behind his eyes, and this inner print fitted over the camouflaged beasts that were so hard to see among their patterns of light and shade: but in this way he did see them easily.

A woman walking in a sagging dress, with a heavy walk, and her hair—this above all—not conforming to the prints made by fashion, is not “set” to attract men’s sex. The same woman in a dress cut in this or that way, walking with her inner thermostat set just so—and click, she’s fitting the pattern.

Men’s attention is stimulated by signals no more complicated than what leads the gosling; and for all her adult
life, her sexual life, let’s say from twelve onwards, she had been conforming, twitching like a puppet to those strings.…

Next day Maureen was not anywhere to be seen—she had perhaps gone to Turkey?—and Kate wore the dark-green dress and was Mrs. Michael Brown all day, for with the mask, the charade, the fitting of herself to the template, came the old manner, the loving lovely Mrs. Kate Brown, whom shopkeepers served with a smile, and waiters liked to hover over.

The well of tears in Kate that had been threatening to flood over at the slightest nuance of indifference subsided a little, the querulousness went out of her voice, and she did not knock over glasses of water.

On the day after that Kate was in a grocery shop when she saw at the cash desk in front of her a middle-aged woman with hair of dry brass—the dye had taken badly—high heels, a tight skirt. She stood squarely in front of the shopman smiling and chatting and emphasising her presence, while he said, “Yes?” and “Is that so?” and “Fancy that!”

On and on she went, the lonely woman, her eyes forced full of vivacity, her voice urged full of charm, until the shopman turned deliberately to Kate and put an end to her.

The other woman’s face set into forlorn lines; she smiled pathetically while tears brimmed; she jutted out her chin and went out into the street with a little flouncing movement of disdain.

Kate followed her; Kate was following herself slowly, along the Edgware Road, watching how she looked long into every approaching face, male or female, to see how she was being noticed,
how she was fitting into expectation
that had been set in that other person by the modes of the time
, she saw how she stood at shop windows that showed clothes, examining dresses that would be appropriate for Maureen, or her Eileen; how she kept sagging into tiredness, for her heels were punishing, then pulling herself up and throwing glances everywhere that were aggressive and appealing at the same time.

Kate came back into the flat to find Maureen lying on the cushions in the hall, looking at the ceiling. She wore a long smocklike garment in scarlet linen, with scarlet boots, and her hair was loose. She was like a doll.

“I thought you’d gone to get married,” said Kate.

“Don’t joke about
that!”

Kate went to her room, took off her fitting dress, put back an ill-fitting one, pulled out her hair.

Maureen looked at her from where she lay and said, “Why?”

“I’m seeing something. I’ve got to understand something.”

Blue smoke eddied—ordinary smoke, it lacked the dry nostalgic tang of the weed. Maureen lay beneath, as if she were drowning in smoke. Her silent question made Kate say,
“Who
has been married all this time?”

“I see.”

“Ah no, you don’t. Or I don’t think you do.”

“You patronise me,” said Maureen.

“How can I help it? The questions you ask—there is no weight behind them. Not of experience, you see.”

“And that’s everything? Ripeness is all?”

“If it’s
my
all … what else can I say? I haven’t anything to offer. I’ve never done anything so that I could say—but I don’t know what you value. I haven’t travelled the golden trail to Katmandu or done social work among
the aged or written a thesis. I’ve just brought up a family …” she stopped because of the bitterness in her voice. She sat abruptly down in a chair and said, “Oh my God—listen, did you hear that?”

But Maureen jerked to her feet, as blue smoke waves washed about the hall at waist level, and she was screaming, “You don’t understand. Why don’t you?”

“When I say what I feel, you say it’s patronage.”

“Oh fuck you all!” Maureen went off into the kitchen. Kate went to her room. In a few minutes Maureen came in without knocking and found Kate sitting on a straight chair staring at the window, along the top half of which people’s legs were scissoring: a film had slipped out of true, and the top half of one frame—plants on a wall with sunlight—showed with the bottom half of another, legs without torsos.

“Philip is very hot on marrying me. He says: Please marry me. I love you. I will give you a home and a car and three children.”

“Well?”

“I’m surprised you didn’t say: Do you love him?”

“Is that what your mother says?”

“Oh my mother! But yes, she does. And I do too.”

“What’s wrong with your mother?”

“Nothing.”

“Yes there is. What?”

“She’s such a failure. She’s such a …”

“Asad sack?”

“Yes
. Who’d want to be like that? Why can’t you—but
I’m
not getting into that, be what you like, I don’t care. But what do
you
say?”

“Be what you like. I can’t help you.”

“Then what is the use of all that ripeness?”

“None, I think.”

“He’s coming to supper tonight. Would you like to meet him?”

“How formal.”

“He is formal. On principle.”

“Oh?” For there was more behind this.

“He’s one of these new ones—the fascists, as they are called. Do you see?”

“I haven’t met any yet. But my youngest went to a meeting and said he thought they were being maligned. He sounded tempted.”

“Oh, it’s tempting all right. Law and order. Values. And of course, one is made to feel absolutely like dirt—what could be more attractive?”

“All right, I’d like to meet him.”

Maureen went out, saying, “Eight o’clock.”

The table in the kitchen had a tablecloth over it. It had three places laid. There was a bottle of wine already opened.

Kate had made herself look respectable. Maureen on the other hand, asserting herself, was outrageous, in a dress that had every conceivable pattern and print, stripe and check, incorporated into it. It was a piece of skilled engineering, that dress, so that the eye kept returning and returning to it, to find out how it was done. And it was low in front, a screen of beige lace to the waist, showing breasts whose nipples had been painted like eyes. Maureen’s own face was invisible behind a mask of paint.

Philip wore what was obviously the new uniform, a development of the old style; it was not so much the clothes that were different, as that they were worn differently. Jeans, but they were dark blue, unfaded, and crisp. His cotton shirt was dark blue and fitted him. His jacket was
military, dark blue again, with buttons and tabs. He wore a narrow black tie. His hair was not short-back-and-sides, but getting close. It was the urchin cut again, the cap fitting over the skull without a parting, from a centre point. It had the effect of absolving him from responsibility: one wanted to run one’s hand through it; it was boyish. One could assume that this style would soon be superseded by something sterner. But the general impression was of cleanness, alertness, a pleasant readiness to take responsibility. This, however, seemed not to be his attribute, but rather the result of an act of will—the collective act of will. Looking at the trim barbered man, suddenly his rather red, slightly overful, countryish cheeks, his eyes that overflowed with the need to impose, shouted that his real, his own nature, was other. But above all, and here was the point, he had the confidence which shouted that
he
was the new thing, on the rising wave; he knew that his presence was enough to make all the Jerries and the Toms and the Dicks and the Harrys look scuffy; suddenly all the longhaired ones, the fancifully dressed, the anarchists, the dissidents who so recently had stamped on them the approval of
the time
—all these were going to look wan, tatty, and as if transparent: ghostlike, they were going to have to fade away; Philip’s presence would be enough to see to that.

Well, just as so many years ago an entire generation of young people (not her children, they had been too young, had had to fit themselves to the pattern as one after another they grew up) had come into existence, it had seemed overnight, with an identical vocabulary, manner, clothes, political and social ideas, millions of them, exactly the same as each other, now it was obviously time for a new metamorphosis. And Philip was it? No, he was likely
to be an intermediate type; he would be superseded. Meanwhile his attraction was great: it was that of absolute self-assurance. He did not have to say in so many words that what he offered was a thousand times better than the anarchy and sloppiness of the other young men who—this was how one had to see them, compared with himself—slouched and slithered and slid through her life.

Maureen was serving paté and hot toast. All very correct. Because of Philip they were all three behaving like middle-class people at a dinner table.

But he wasn’t middle-class. He was the son of a printer, and he had even “dropped out” of school; but had gone back again and taken examinations, was now in a job that looked, as far as anyone could see, secure. He was a municipal official, and his work was to do with deprived children. He had all the attractive experience of dissidence, of having refused what “the system” offered, behind him. He used the phrase “the system” as the generation before his had done, but he saw it as something that needed to be reformed, stiffened, made authoritarian, not rejected. He was, in short, the very newest model of authority figure, the welfare worker, the social worker, whose power derived not from: Do this because there is a law agreed to by all of us—we are a democracy, aren’t we?—or, Do this because the Party says so—but Do this because you are poor, hungry, ill-educated and desperate: you have no alternative.