The Summer Before the Dark (3 page)

The conference Alan Post had come to London to attend was in difficulties. Or rather, a committee of that conference: the organisation under whose umbrella the conferrings and committeeings were going on was called Global Food, and its business was what mankind ate. Or did not eat. Due to a series of mischances—flu, a broken
hip, the death of a man in Lisbon—when the members of the committee were already sitting around their table waiting to start their deliberations, it was discovered that there were no translators. Now, nothing was easier than to find fluent translators in French, German, Spanish, but it was harder to find people who spoke fluent Portuguese as well as English and who were educated enough for this demanding work. Portuguese it had to be, for this subcommittee was to do with coffee; and Brazil, the world’s leading coffee country, used Portuguese. The committee had adjourned so that Portuguese translators could be engaged. Two had been found, two more were needed: Alan Post and Michael were both looking at Kate, waiting for her to say that she would be happy to be a third. Three years before Kate had typed out, as a favour to a friend whose typing was bad, a book for popular consumption on the growing and marketing of coffee. Because of this, she knew a great deal about that commodity. More: she had always been good at languages. Her knowledge of French and Italian was good; her Portuguese was perfect, for on one side she was Portuguese. It had happened that she finished school early, since she was clever, with a gap of three years before she was to go to university—to which, in the end, she did not go, having decided to marry Michael instead. She spent a year in Lourenço Marques with her grandfather, who was a scholar. There she spoke only Portuguese. As the daughter of John Ferreira, an English-naturalized Portuguese who taught Portuguese literature at Oxford, she had never been more than gratefully conscious that her background contained treasures: it was her grandfather who had introduced them to her, so that she became soaked in Portuguese literature, Portuguese poetry, soaked in “the spirit of the language.”

What else had she learned during that year in the city on the edge of the Indian Ocean, a year devoted entirely to pleasure? For one thing, her grandfather was old-fashioned, and his attitudes towards women strict. Kate had never dreamed of fighting an old man whom she loved; and besides, why bother?—she was only there for such a short time. But for that time she was never alone with a man, was shielded from unpleasant experience, literary or in life, and tasted a not unpleasant (for a short time) atmosphere compounded of elements so foreign to her that she had had to identify each one separately. She was sheltered and distrusted. She was precious and despised. She was flattered by deference to her every wish—but knew that she, the female thing, occupied a carefully defined minor part of her grandfather’s life, as his wife had done, and his daughters. Her image of herself during that period: a girl as fragile as a camellia with a dead-white skin and heavy dark-red hair, wearing a white embroidered linen dress designed to expose and conceal throat and shoulders, sat on a verandah in a swing chair, that she slowly pushed back and forth with a foot which she was conscious of being an object so sexual the young men present couldn’t keep their eyes and fantasies away from it. She fanned herself with an embroidered silk fan, using a turn of the wrist taught her by the old nurse, while these young men, all of whom had asked her grandfather’s permission to speak to her at all, sat in a half circle in grass armchairs, paying her compliments. The year was 1948. She was a great success in Lourenço Marques, partly because after all she was British, and not all her good intentions could keep her within what her grandfather approved; partly because the combination of short red hair and brown eyes were rare in a country full of señoritas; partly because the strictness of her grand-father
was excessive even in this colony, so that on more than one count Kate’s behaviour, her position, seemed like a wilful or whimsical play acting, probably undertaken with the intention of being provocative.

When she returned to England, she looked back into a steamy place, full of half-concealed things, one of them being her own wistful longing to be like her own grandmother who—unless this was her grandfather’s false memory—might never have left Portugal at all, for all the difference it had made to her way of life. A beautiful woman, so everyone said she had been; a wonderful mother, a cook for the angels, a marvellous, marvellous being, all warmth and kindness, with not a fault in her—yes, well, however all that might have been, the propaganda had its predictable reverse effect, and Kate returned from Portuguese East Africa more than ready to go to university, where she was going to study Romance languages and literature. She actually did get herself up to Oxford, and into residence. Then she met Michael, who after ten years of war and crammed training was just beginning his career. She moved into his lodgings and they started delightfully on what they called The First Phase.

If she had not married, she would probably have become something special in her field? A lecturer perhaps? Women did not seem often to become professors. But these were not frequent thoughts: she had not found children boring. Besides it was not as if her husband cut her off from his interests, from interesting people. She sometimes did translating for him or his colleagues. She had once even translated a Portuguese novel, which earned her little money, but much praise. She met people from all over the world, particularly since the children started growing up, and brought home all their globally scattered friends.

If she had not married—but good God, she would have been mad not to marry, mad to choose Romance languages and literature.… Michael and Alan Post were helping themselves to coffee, and waiting for her. What she was feeling was a kind of panic. Knowing this made it worse. It was stupid and irrational to feel frightened. What of? This was not something she could have confessed to anyone, not even Michael—that when actually faced with a job, quite an ordinary sort of job after all, well within her powers, and obviously only for a short time, she felt like a long-term prisoner who knows she is going to have to face freedom in the morning.

“But I don’t see how I can,” she said. “Tim is going to be here on and off all summer.”

She observed the tightening of her husband’s mouth: frequent discussion about Tim had not resolved disagreement. Michael thought his youngest son was overprotected. She, while agreeing that he might have been, could not believe that the way to put things right was to “throw him out and be done with it.” How, throw him out? Where to? And why was what the boy doing so bad that he needed such dramatic cure: he sulked, he threatened, he hated, but so had all the children in their different ways. Kate believed that if she favoured Tim, it was because her husband was unfair to him: she was aware that this area was too emotional to be looked at straight; she had attitudes about it, which were known to be hers and which she defended, inside the family and out.

“But the committee won’t be going on for longer than—how long did you say?” Michael asked Alan.

By now Alan had understood that there was a problem between husband and wife, and he said, looking at neither, but away over towards the house, where a young
boy was emerging and coming towards them, “Not more than a month at most.”

“There
is
Tim,” said Kate; meaning
Not in front of the children
.

When Tim arrived under the tree, it was clear that he was older than his slight build and light walk made him seem from a distance. He was sulky now. Looking hard at his mother he said, “I’m awfully sorry mother but I’ve changed my mind. The Fergusons have asked me to go to Norway. They’re going climbing. I’ll go if you don’t mind.”

“No, of course not darling,” said Kate automatically. “Of course you should go.” She was delighted that he was not going to be excluded from the summer’s pleasures, as delighted as if she were going to Norway; but the boy had already glanced at his father, who nodded at him. He then smiled formally at the guest, momentarily appearing a completely different person, the responsible man he would become, turned back into a sulky child in his look at his mother as he said, “That’s all right then, I’ll be off to pack now. I’m going tonight.” And he ran off to the house as if escaping.

She shouted after him, “Tim, before you go, see if you can make the kettle boil again, I need the hot water for washing up.” But either he didn’t hear or didn’t want to.

“So when can you start, Kate?” said Alan. “When? Tomorrow? Oh please do?”

Kate said nothing, but she was smiling agreement. She knew she might burst into tears. She felt as if every support had been pulled out from under her. She felt—to use a metaphor she had been using, indeed, developing, in her own thought, and for some time now—as if suddenly a very cold wind had started to blow, straight towards her, from the future.

She said, “Of course I’d like to. Can I do the washing up first?”

They laughed, she laughed. Alan then said, “Well, if somebody else could do the washing up while you telephone?” He gave her a name, a number, and escorted her into the house, using a pleasant formality, like an intimacy that is so easy it is almost impersonal: she recognised this as the air of the life she was about to enter. It was both supporting and relaxing, this manner of his; he stood by her while she telephoned, mouthing at her words she should use—words that would not have come easily to her, because they had the ring of committees. All that finished, he kissed her on both cheeks, and with his arm around her, led her back to the tree on the lawn. He was a good-looking man, of about their age—Michael’s and hers—a family man, with a wife and growing or grown children, a man who earned a great deal of money and spent all his life travelling from conference to conference to talk about food with people from dozens of countries. She liked him. She was thinking that after all it would be a release and a relief to breathe that easy impersonal air for a while. She really did like everything about him, including the way he dressed and presented himself: she had not been much liking the way her husband was dressing these days, nor the way he cut his hair. But better not to think about that, for after all it wasn’t important.

The reason she felt as if she were falling through the air was because if Tim were not going to be here, there was no point at all in keeping the house open.

Back under the tree, the hot Sunday afternoon proceeded towards evening, while the men were talking about some medical problem in Iran.

The question of the letting of the house had been dealt with in a dozen words.

In the past great discussions had gone on about the letting or the non-letting of the house, everyone having strong opinions about it. They had gone on for days, weeks.

Now she said, “Well, we’ve never let it before, have we?”

“What of it?” said Michael. “Some visiting family will take it and be glad to, even if we do leave things in the cupboards.”

“But what are the children going to use as headquarters if they happen to be in London on their way to somewhere?”

“They can use somebody else’s house for once, and about time too.”

“But I don’t really think …”

“I’ll ring the agent in the morning,” said Dr. Michael Brown, shaming Kate, since he worked from dawn to dusk and would be no less busy than she at her committee.

But the point was, she was feeling dismissed, belittled, because the problem of the house was being considered so unimportant.

And when her committee was over, what would she do? It was being taken for granted she would fit herself in somewhere—how very flexible she was being, just as always, ever since the children were born. Looking back over nearly a quarter of a century, she saw that that had been the characteristic of her life—passivity, adaptability to others. Her first child had been born when she was twenty-two. The last was born well before she was thirty. When she offered these facts to others, many envied her; a large number of people, in many countries, knew the Michael Browns as an enviable family.

The small chill wind was blowing very definitely, if
still softly enough: this was the first time in her life that she was not wanted. She was unnecessary. That this time in her life was approaching she had of course known very well for years. She had even made plans for it; she would study this, travel there, take up this or that type of welfare work. It is not possible, after all, to be a woman with any sort of a mind, and not know that in middle age, in the full flood of one’s capacities and energies, one is bound to become that well-documented and much-studied phenomenon, the woman with grown-up children and not enough to do, whose energies must be switched from the said children to less vulnerable targets, for everybody’s sake, her own as well as theirs. So there was nothing surprising about what was happening. Perhaps she ought to have expected it sooner?

She had not expected it this summer. Next summer, or the year after that, yes, but not
now
. What she had set herself to face had been all in the future. But it was
now
that it was happening. Only temporarily, of course, for the house would become their family house again in September, would again be the welcoming base for these “children” all now at home less and less often. But there was her husband to consider, a man who much appreciated his home and everything that went with it. When had all the family last been together, with everyone back from university, or various holidays and trips and excursions, at the same time? A very long time ago, when you came to think of it.

But the fact was that she, this kingpin, was to be at a loose end from June to late September. With not so much as a room of her own. A very curious feeling that was, as if a warm covering had been stripped off her, as if she were an animal being flayed.

She and Michael had, of course, discussed this question of her future; talked over her feelings, and his. Discussing everything was the root and prop of their marriage. They believed, always had, that things left unsaid festered, things brought out into the open lost their force. Their relationship had been conducted on this principle from the start.