The Summer Before the Dark (26 page)

He also belonged to an organisation called The Young Front, which in turn was affiliated to something only recently formed, called The British League of Action.

And what did it all stand for? enquired Kate. Meanwhile Maureen was toying with fingers of toast, watching Kate engaged with Philip—she was trying to find out what
her own reactions were, or ought to be? What her mother’s reactions were likely to be? At any rate, Maureen was sitting back and letting Kate get on with it. Kate was back inside having to be responsible; she was accepting it: she had to.

“Well Mrs. Brown, I don’t have to tell you—everyone can see the mess everything is in.”

“Of course.”

“We’ll have to pull it together.”

“Of course. But how?”

“We stand for responsibility. Not for all this carping and criticising and muck-raking and doing nothing. No, we do things. We will get things done. We don’t mind getting our hands dirty.” He was eating fast as he talked, he ate and talked, looking at Kate and at his love Maureen, who indolently bit into toast, while her painted eyes seemed far away from him, concerned only with herself. “Yes, I am not ashamed to say it, it is decency we want, we have had enough of muck for muck’s sake, we need standards now.”

“In aid of what?” asked Maureen suddenly. Her voice sounded tremulous. Beneath all the paint and lace and the flounces, she was in strong conflict—Kate could feel it. Well, Philip
was
attractive. In Maureen’s place, offered Jerry and the rest as alternatives, she knew whom she would be responding to—and be feeling afraid of her response.

“Well look at you, Maureen,” he said, in a bluff kindly way that sounded forced: the truth was he was trying to hold himself calm and steady inside the force field of her attraction. He could hardly look at her, because of the strength of his love, and his detestation. He kept giving wincing glances at her almost naked breasts, and then said angrily, “How much do you spend on yourself a week
would you say? On your clothes, your face, your hair?”

“Not as much as you may think,” said Maureen, getting up to lift away plates, butter, a fragment of paté. “I buy clothes off junk stalls mostly. And I make them. I am very clever. I don’t spend much.”

“But it’s all you do, it’s how you spend your time.”

“And millions of people are starving? Millions of people are dying as we sit here?” She sounded troubled, while she tried to jeer—not at what the words meant, but at his claims for himself.

“Yes,” he said gently, forcing himself to stand up to her, trying to make her face him. She did look at him, but sighed, and turned away with her laden tray to the sink.

“Yes,” he insisted, “it’s all you ever do, change your clothes all day and paint your face.” He gave another anguished look at her bosom, and grabbed out for an apple. He remembered they were not at the fruit stage of the meal, and sat still, his hands in two fists on the tablecloth.

“No,” she said, after quite a long pause. “That’s not true. It’s not what I do. It’s not how I spend my time. That’s what it looks like.”

“You and all your lot,” he insisted, gruffly and with difficulty, because she had been definite, had made a definite claim.

“My lot?” she said laughing.

“Yes,” he said, dissociating himself from the past generation in that word.

Maureen lifted a pot of stew from the stove and drifted gorgeously to the table. “You are so fucking sure of yourself,” she complained.

“Yes, in a way I am. I’m not saying we have all the answers.”

“This we of yours,” said Kate.

“We are getting a good deal of support.”

“That isn’t an argument in itself.”

He did not take her point.

“What Kate is saying,” said Maureen for herself, “is what you are saying isn’t new. To put it mildly.”

“To put it mildly,” said Kate.

He looked from one to another, blinking a little. Just as, when the last generation had stepped as one man onto the scene, identical in voice and vision, they did not see themselves as a repetition of the one before—not in appearance or in belief, but in their conformity with each other—so, now, Philip: he saw himself as new, fresh-minted by history.

“They call us fascists,” said Philip suddenly. He was hot, resentful—all aplomb gone for the moment. “Well, sticks and stones may break our bones but words won’t.”

“Yes, but what are you going to
do?”
said Kate. “You don’t say.”

“No, he never does,” complained Maureen.

“The first thing is to get together, then to agree what should be done.”

“You sound as if it will be easy. It won’t be.”

“Yes, perfectly easy,” he said, using an arrogance that made Maureen sigh again. “First we have to agree about one simple thing—that everything is in a mess, it’s getting out of hand. And then, put things right. There can’t be much argument about what is the cause of the mess—there haven’t been any standards for a long time. We need to get back to the old values. That’s all. And eliminate what’s gone rotten.”

“Me,” breathed Maureen, ladling stew into bowls. She propped her chin in one hand as she did this, her long eyelashes purple over bright pink cheeks. She was as it were
sliding down and away out of her role as correct hostess, collapsing under the weight of everything.

“Yes,” said Philip. “As you are now, yes.”

“Then why do you want to marry me?”

He went scarlet, despite himself, looked in resentful fascination at Maureen, shot a glance of appeal at Kate: he saw her
in loco parentis
. He pulled himself up, with an effort, and said, courageously, for it was obviously hard for him to go on, “I don’t want to marry what you are now. But I can see what you really are. I can. You aren’t what you make yourself look. You aren’t just a spoiled, silly …” He began hastily spooning in bean stew, not at all good-mannered now. The three of them had quite abandoned the good behaviour of the start of the meal. They were all disturbed.

“This business of getting rid of what’s gone rotten,” said Kate.

“Yes,” said Maureen.

He said firmly, for the first time in history, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”

They finished their stew in silence.

Maureen still had her chin on her one hand as she ate. She was irritating Kate as well as Philip. The girl was deliberately at a distance from the scene, as if none of it were her business. And Kate was feeling like a hostess: she ought to be making conversation, putting Philip at his ease, restoring a tone of formality for the sake of the occasion: she suppressed all this, and ate on in silence.

At last Philip cracked with: “It’s just a question of organisation, of getting things organised the right way.”

The women said nothing.

“Things have to be taken in hand—not allowed to go from bad to worse.”

Maureen’s sigh was not deliberate: it silenced Philip.

Kate was thinking that probably one or more of her own children would take to this Youth Front or something of the kind. Who, Tim? No, he was not organisation material. Why was she so sure? People changed, people became anything under pressure. Stephen? But surely someone who saw everything as rotten was likely to be saved from taking positions on this or that platform? Perhaps. James? Out of the question—he was too much of a socialist, a believer. Well, it had happened before. Eileen? She wanted to be married more than anything else: this was how one saw her future.

But it was undermining, thinking like this, diminishing. More and more the political attitudes seemed like the behaviour of marionettes, or little clockwork figures wound up and continuing to display their little gestures while they were being knocked about and around and blown in all directions in a typhoon.

Yet the Browns were political, like all the people like them; they were political as their parents had been religious. All their adult lives, ever since the war that had formed them, they had been setting their course, holding themselves steady in self-respect, with words like liberty, freedom, democracy. They were all varying degrees of socialist, or liberal. Whom did she know who was not? Yet the truth was she was thinking, and she knew that Michael did, more and more, that it was all nonsense. But they could not bear to think it.

Her violent reaction to Philip—that was fear. But probably all his little attitudes would turn out to be as much puppet-behaviour as everything else; his Fronts and his Leagues wouldn’t be anything very much—words again!

Putting aside the words, what had Michael offered her when they married? This! No, of course he would never have used words like decency, responsibility, organisation—he would have been too self-conscious; such phrases smacked, then, of what the recently finished war had been fought to end for ever. They had not, then, the ring of fine new-minted truths, which she supposed they did have to young people after a decade or so of what this boy called “anarchy, licence, and self-indulgence”? But the life she had had with Michael was in fact that typical ordered middle-class “responsible” life anywhere, obedient to the necessities of work and the family. Just what this young man believed in and wanted Maureen to share with him. So what did the slogans matter? Except that neither she, nor her Michael—nor anyone they knew, if it came to that—would have spoken or thought of “getting rid of what’s gone rotten.” Well, here it was again, things had come round again, they always did. “Philip,” she said, “when you say ‘getting rid of what’s gone rotten,’ doesn’t that strike a very old bell for you? You haven’t heard it before somewhere?”

“Well everything’s been said before,” he said. Yet there was a look of guilt about him. It occurred to her that this evening might be the first time he had thought like this, had said it in words: but it had come out, he had heard what he had been thinking, perhaps unknown to himself. And it sounded all right, it sounded fine! Now it would be part of his new programme, the manifesto of The Young Front or whatever it was.

“Are you a leading light in this thing of yours?”

“I suppose you could say so. Among others. I didn’t start it. But the people who started it were …” He stopped, remembering these were outsiders.

“They were a lot of wishywashy liberals but now you are putting some real guts into it,” she said. He looked at her. “It can be taken for granted,” said Kate, sweet, “that that is what has happened. And will happen.” She nearly said,
Your turn next
. It occurred to her that her rage of opposition to him should be directed at history, not at a youth about the age of her second son. She tried to damp her anger; besides what was the point? What she was feeling was fear, of course.

“I think I am going to be one of the people you’ll have to eliminate.”

“Oh no,” said he, shocked. “You got me wrong. It’s not
people
who have to be eliminated. People’s
thinking
must change. It must. It had to come. There are all sorts of things that are possible now. For one thing, new research says we can change behaviour—antisocial behaviour, of course, just what’s dangerous to other people. With drugs. Of course that would be a bit tricky, but there
are
possibilities there haven’t been before.”

Maureen got up, removed the plates, brought back a platter of cheese in one hand, a loaf of bread in the other. She plonked down the cheese, and dropped the loaf onto the table from the height of a foot or two. Then she sat down, leaned back in her chair, spread her legs under her phantasmagoria of a gown, set her heels on the floor as if they were in boots—but they were in buckled high-heeled evening shoes—crossed her arms on her chest, and stared at the end of the room.

Philip coloured again, started to say something that sounded like the beginning of a speech or a statement, then glanced at Kate for aid. She would not give it, she looked down.

Philip stood up. He was visibly controlling something in himself.

In a moment he had succeeded. In the light humorous tone that probably had been his normal manner before his recent reincarnation as saviour of the nation, he said, “You don’t give me a chance, Maureen, do you?” He went behind the girl, and put his hands on her shoulders. Kate could see how she shrank a little, then softened, then tensed: oh yes, Maureen was very attracted to him, very. Whether she liked it or not.

“I shall make a good husband,” he announced, already confident again, laughing at her, at himself. “I love you. God knows why! You’d be mad not to marry me. You’ll never get another like me.”

“Never a dull moment,” said Maureen, sounding both resentful and amused.

“No. And I’m not out of work. Nor am I likely to be. That’s surely something?”

He was joking but he spoke with real pride, and was not ashamed of it: a revolution was complete!

“That’s what I’ve been looking for all my life,” said Maureen.

She laughed, though. He leaned over her, looking down at her sunset-coloured face, and past it, at her jewelled breasts.

She did not move.

“I’ll go if you like,” he said, huffy again. As she still did not respond he said, “Very well, then.”

“No,” said Maureen. “No.”

Not looking at Kate, she got up, and the two went off to her room together, good night, good night, as they went.

It was midnight. Kate walked slowly to Marble Arch and back again, receiving looks, invitations, muttered compliments, the looks of grinding hate that poor sex gets from its prisoners. She was as prominent as a bitch in heat at that hour, in that street. And all the way there and back
she thought that in her other guise no one would have seen her, literally, she would have been invisible, and yet inside, the way she felt, would have been no different, she was the same despite the masks. She would have walked past dozens of sober family men, respectable young men, good fathers and grandfathers and brothers and husbands, she would have walked for four miles along the pavements of London and never known that sex was a commodity much traded. After a certain age—or rather, after a certain age and presented in a certain way—a woman feels as if the streets have had a magic wand over them: where are all the hunters gone? Magicked into respectability, every one.