The Summer Before the Dark (27 page)

What a lot of rubbish, what a con it all was,
what a bloody waste of time
.

Everything was dark in the flat when she got back to it. In the room which in daytime was full of light, bringing birdsong and the scent of grass from the many back gardens of this rich street, Maureen was lying in the arms of Philip. She lay in a cocoon of sweet warmth. She lay safe and held. She lay inside arms that shut out all threat. Inside them, Maureen lay. Asleep? Of course, of course: remember the warm safe sweet sleep that is the dream of flying when you are young and lonely, which is all your fantasies come true at once?

Next day Kate woke late. There was a note from Maureen on the kitchen table: “We have gone to the seaside for two or three days. See you, Love. Maureen.”

Kate noted that the conventional little word “love” triggered off in her a warm spurt of emotion. She tore up the note and said,
Shit to that!
using the word her children used, and Maureen used, but which she never had. She appropriated it, feeling it was her right: What a con! What a bloody great stupid game! What a load of shit.

To use the word was like entering forbidden territory—self-forbidden, self-censored, even a form of tact, like not going to America at the same time as her daughter, in case she might spoil things for her. Fuck had once been such a word. She could remember discussions with contemporaries about permissible language: bloody was then their word, but that had once been abrasive enough, so it was said. But fuck they would not use, they could not bring themselves to it: for one thing it was denigratory of sex and therefore deplorable. So, once, they had felt: but soon fuck was coming as smoothly off their tongues as bloody. But not shit, no, she had felt about that as once she had felt about fuck.

All her children shat, shitted, shit, in every sentence, like the workingman’s fuck, fucking, fucked.

Now she had said shit without knowing she was going to.

So much for a word.

She went shopping in her old clothes, her hair falling, went up and down the street market, invisible, and as she did this, watched Mrs. Michael Brown walking—graciously was the only word for it—up and down the shops and streets of her own area, while everyone smiled, and acknowledged and recognised, and she smiled and basked and grew subtly fat and happy because of all the note taken of her, attractive Mrs. Brown, who had lived so long in Byron Park Road, and who had bought—and paid for—so many hundredweights of food and groceries from all these loving friendly shopkeepers, Mrs. Brown, the mother of so many consumers of food and travel and books and sports goods and …

She was quite alone in the flat. Young people came to ask after Maureen. One night a sullen girl slept on the
cushions in the hall, demanding to come in as her right—she “always” slept there—and would not say Good Morning or Goodbye to Kate, but stared right through her, with an indifference of total dislike. She disappeared again without a word.

Kate noted she did not mind about being disliked, yet only a week ago she might easily have wept.

She was eating well again; her sag into sickness already seemed in the past. She was getting restless. She started doing things to the flat, scrubbing the sink, tidying a cupboard. Catching herself at it she finished what she had begun—her training was too strong to allow her to leave it unfinished—and then stopped herself from vacuuming a floor. If she was going to do all this, she might as well go back home.

Who
was going to go back home? But she didn’t have to make decisions yet. She still had a month before the end of October.

A letter came from Maureen. Kate read it with a fatalistic contempt:
Oh well, what is the use? What can one expect?
The letter was humorous and resigned and made little jokes.

She said she had “more or less” decided to marry Philip. “After all”—“what else”—“who’d have thought that she, Maureen …” “Ah well, I suppose there’s no bucking it …”

Kate dropped the letter into the rubbish bin, went out into the street without remembering to check in which of her persons she temporarily was—she was respectable; got onto a bus, went to Global Food, and found letters for Mrs. Brown.

She returned to the flat before opening them.

Her husband was missing her very much, but was still
having a wonderful time. He was thinking of doing the same thing next year. She ought to come along too, what about it old girl? He would be back a week or so earlier than he thought. If the house was still let—he couldn’t remember the exact date it became theirs again—he would find a bed in the hospital for a few days.

Kate knew to the minute when the house would be theirs again.

Stephen. Algeria was marvellous. The government was shit. He would be back as planned.

Eileen. The States was great. Everything was a mess but it was everywhere wasn’t it.

James. The Sudan was fantastic. People in Britain had no idea of what went on in other parts of the world, insular didn’t describe it, he would be back again soon.

Tim. He had caught some sort of a bug, he didn’t know what. He had been quite ill, but had not written to say so before, because he didn’t want to spoil people’s holidays, but he was coming home three weeks early and as he had been told to take things easy he thought it would be best if …

Mrs. Brown stepped from her ashes, her hand stretched towards the telephone. She rang her own home and spoke to Mrs. Enders, who said what a funny thing Mrs. Brown had rung just then, she was thinking it would in fact suit them fine to go back to the States earlier.

Kate could take possession of her home in three days from now.

She stood near the telephone, her mind spinning in its grooves. She must send wires to various people, and then ring up the shop that delivered groceries—no, better first get in cleaners to undo the mess the Enderses would certainly have left, and then order the groceries in. It would
be a sensible thing if … she knew she was smiling, that every movement she made had energy in it, conviction, decision. It would be best if Tim took over the spare bedroom on the second floor, which got sun all day, his letter sounded pretty depressed, and he would need cheerful surroundings.

She reached for the telephone. “Is that The All Purpose Cleaners?” she began, and saw that Maureen stood in the doorway, staring at her. Philip was behind her, his hands on either side of her waist, as if presenting her to Kate. Presenting something he had created? Maureen was different. The fantasy had gone out of her appearance. She wore a sensible suit, and her hair was wound in Gretchen braids around her head.

Kate flashed them an “I’m busy but later” smile, and went on telephoning. They came into the kitchen, and sat. Silently. They were watching her. Or rather, Maureen was; Philip was watching Maureen because of the intensity of her preoccupation with Kate.

Kate was soon too deep inside skilled organisation to remember Maureen and Philip were there. Making herself a cup of tea, in an interval, she turned to offer them the teapot, when she saw they were not there, but in the bedroom. They were quarrelling. While she rang Mary Finchley to ask her to tell the windowcleaner they both used that a special visit would be needed, she turned to see Maureen, eyes red, face swollen, seated at the table. She was again staring at her. “Don’t cry!” she called cheerily; and saw the girl’s face set in hate. “Don’t talk to
me
like that,” said Maureen, and Kate was almost checked. Not quite: she was still at the height of pleasure at her own capacities, unused, she was feeling, for decades, not weeks. But she was looking at Maureen, as she listened to the telephone ringing in Mary’s house. Mary was out. Kate put
the receiver down, and saw that Maureen’s face had gone slack and pathetic with the force of whatever woe she suffered. It was a little girl’s face, and she stared at Kate in fear.

“What’s wrong?” said Kate, and as she heard her voice, understood that there was in it everything there had
not
been when she had said so mechanically, “Don’t cry!”

Kate’s limbs were beginning to understand that they had been in some kind of a fever, which was now subsiding: they had already lost their pleasure in decision. Kate was all at once tired, and understood that she had been, for the last minutes, a little crazy. She stared at Maureen. Maureen stared at her.

“But what
is
wrong, Maureen?”

“I’ve just told Philip I won’t marry him,” said Maureen. This was so much of an accusation, that Kate knew that everything she had organised in the way of returning to her own home was going to have to be undone again. She sat down at the kitchen table.

“Why?”

“I’d do anything, I’d live alone for
always
rather than turn into
that.”

Kate, in silence, now looked at
that
, her self of a few minutes before.

“It’s my fault, is it?” she said, attempting a dry but humorous accusation, but she was not going to get away with it.

Maureen flashed back, “Awful. Dreadful. Awful. You’ve no idea—can’t you see? If you could just see yourself.” She put her head down on her forearms and cried.

Kate said, “That may be so, but you were miserable about marrying Philip, and something would have changed your mind for you, if I hadn’t.”

Maureen made a small gesture with her head that said,
That isn’t the point
. She brought out: “About marrying anyone.” And went on crying. Noisily.

Kate sat down and kept silent. She was thinking that she had indeed made a long journey in the last months. Before it she could not have sat quiet, while a girl her daughter’s age wept with misery because of her, Kate’s, power to darken her future. Kate, at the other end of what she suddenly was feeling as a long interior journey, would have been “sensible,” made balanced remarks of one kind or another, attempted consolation, because she had still believed that consolation could be given. Yes, that was where she had changed. She remarked, “Where I think you may be wrong is that you seem to be thinking that if you decide not to become one thing, the other thing you become has to be better.”

Maureen nodded, without lifting her head. But she stopped crying, and after a time, straightened herself with: “All the same, when I was about
ten
I took one look at that and said I’d do anything, I’d rather
die
than be that. It’s
awful.”

“It’s what I’ve become good at.”

“All day long, busy busy busy—at what?”

Kate said, dry, “At bringing you up.”

“Oh no you don’t, don’t put it on me,” she shrieked—at her mother, obviously.

“You’re saying this to me because you have never been able to say it to your mother.” She laughed, and said, “Probably at this moment somewhere in America Eileen is screaming at some poor female because she never has at me. She’s only …”

“What?”

“Sulked. Muttered. Broken plates. Slammed doors. Pretended to be pregnant so the whole of the house was in
suspense for weeks—the lot.
You
know,” said Kate, in a sudden flush of pure hate, retrospective and nothing to do with Maureen.

Maureen said, “You’re wrong. I did say it all.
I
said it and said it. But they are impervious, that crowd. What they are is what they have to be. And what they are is right. I can’t imagine my mother ever, not for a minute, stopping to wonder if she might be wrong. Her whole shitty life doing nothing, fuss fuss fuss about details, details.”

“Bringing you up, and making not a bad job of it,” insisted Kate.

“Oh no, I’ve said already. No, it’s not good enough.”

“Anyway”—Kate felt herself being carried on pleasurably on tides of reminiscent anger—“I’m not going to be saddled with the responsibility for your breaking with Philip.”

“Who said you were responsible?” screamed Maureen. “Who? I didn’t. Why does it have to be your responsibility? Why? Why does it have to be, always? I’m not going to be like you—it’s my responsibility, saying no. I’m not going to be like my mother. You’re maniacs. You’re mad.”

“Yes,” said Kate. “I know it. And so you won’t be. The best of luck to you. And what are you going to be instead?”

At which tears came back into the girl’s voice; and she sat blinking them away.

She said, “What are we to do? What? The thing is, I think I love Philip.” Kate must have been looking something she was not aware of, for Maureen insisted, “Yes. It’s not the first time I’ve been in love. This is it. Love. It’s why one gets married. I was in love before and I know. I
wouldn’t marry him either. I’m not going to be one of that crowd.”

“Which?” said Kate, having a fair idea. For one thing, the flat: Maureen paid the rent, and Maureen did not earn money. And she had the careless, almost callous self-confidence that is the property of a class. On the other hand, an accent, and that same self-confidence can be put on,
is
put on, and quite successfully, by waifs and by adventurers.

“The aristocracy,” said Maureen. “No, not my family. Mine is just a good family, you know, nothing special. But I was asked in marriage by a younger son. William. He is very nice. He is as nice as Philip is when he isn’t being so
silly
—oh listen to me, I say
silly
because I don’t want to know, but silly isn’t the word for what Philip is going to be when he gets going, I know that. But what he’s suddenly become, you know, omelettes-and-eggs, that’s quite new. He was just like everyone else before, but reliable, not opting out. It’s terrifying,” she wailed, tears spattering, “what happens to them? But I would have been rich and everything with William, and I turned him down because of that crowd of his, you know, they never see anything that happens outside their little paddock, they’re just nice and kind inside their paddock. So I’m not going to marry Philip after turning down William. But I love them, I do, I do, I do. When I fell in love with William I thought Hello, that’s odd—so you want a strong man do you? But now I know it. First William and now Philip. I don’t love Jerry. I don’t love the others. I can’t take them seriously. I mean, my mind can, but something in me doesn’t. It’s true, isn’t it? Women can say what they like but … Jerry has been my chum for years and years. He’s another like me, you see. He’s a general’s son, believe it or not. He’s walked out of all
that
, like me. He’s a bum and he meditates.
You know. It’s a full-time job with him. The perfect all-time alibi. Oh—he’s very nice, very nice, why do I knock him? I’m not any better? I don’t
do
anything, and I live on my father. But if I’ve got to choose between a Jerry and Philip it’s Philip every time. But I don’t have to choose. That’s something.”