The Summer Before the Dark (7 page)

Well of course it was ridiculous to expect her, Kate, to turn herself into an old woman just because … Soon she discovered that if she wanted to be alone, she should sit badly, in a huddled or discouraged posture, and allow her legs to angle themselves unbecomingly. If she did this men did not see her. She could swear they did not. Sitting neatly, alertly, with her legs sleekly disposed, she made a signal. Sagging and slumped, it was only when all the seats in the coffee room were taken that someone came to sit near her. At which time it was enough to let her face droop to gain her privacy again, and very soon.

It was really extraordinary! There she sat, Kate Brown, just as she had always been,
her
self,
her
mind,
her
awareness, watching the world from behind a façade only very slightly different from the one she had maintained since she was sixteen. It was a matter only of a bad posture, breasts allowed to droop, and a look of “Yes, if you
have
to …” and people did not see her. It gave her a dislocated feeling, as if something had slipped out of alignment. For
she was conscious, very conscious, as alert to it as if this was the most important fact of her life, that the person who sat there watching, shunned or ignored by men who otherwise would have been attracted to her, was not in the slightest degree different from the person who could bring them all on again towards her by adjusting the picture of herself—lips, a set of facial muscles, eye movements, angle of back and shoulders. This is what it must feel to be an actor, an actress—how very taxing that must be, a sense of self kept burning behind so many different phantasms.

A long way off she saw Kate Ferreira, in her thin white embroidered linen dress, standing against the pillar of a verandah on which were tubs full of white lilies. This girl was smiling at some young men. She smiled at their faces, but their eyes were all over her. Through the windows that opened on to the verandah from the living room, she could see old Maria, her grandfather’s housekeeper, who sat crocheting in a position which would enable her to watch Kate and the men. That day she had said to her, “You should not sit with your skirt so high.” The skirt had slipped above her knee. The day before Kate had worn scarlet shorts for tennis, and Maria had said she looked lovely. Last winter Kate had observed this scene with her own daughter: Eileen had been wearing a short skirt all day, halfway up her thighs. That night she had on a long dress, to her ankles. As she sat on the floor she noticed a man look at her ankles: instinctively she pulled the skirt down over her ankles, and shot the man a resentful glance.

That girl on the verandah, had she been “sympathetic,” “a warm personality”?

Probably not. Hadn’t those qualities been created by the interminable disciplines of being wife, mother, housekeeper?

When she was in Turkey, if she were to behave as if she were invisible, with not only the thermostat switched to low, but with her “sympathy” switched off too, if she refused to be a tribal mother, what would happen then? Yet the really interesting thing was that she could swear the people who had engaged her had not any idea of why they were engaging her, why they were so very set on having her. This although Charlie Cooper, a man, provided exactly the same quality. So that meant he did not know why he was in his job?

One of the translators whose leaving had caused the crisis that had brought her, Kate, to sit here, was a middle-aged woman who, Charlie said, was “worth her weight in gold.” Trying to elicit exactly what her qualities were, Kate could get out of him only that “older women have much more patience than young ones.”

At the committee for which Kate had translated there had been a woman delegate, a black woman, from North Africa. She was tall, elegant, witty, chic, cool, distinguished. Her clothes were sometimes the robes of her own country that made her look like a gorgeous bird, and sometimes from Paris: she was different from Kate; both women would have said they had nothing in common. Yet it was noticeable that when she was absent from the committee, things did not go smoothly. Her manner—so indifferent, so sharp, so smilingly unsympathetic and not in any way dedicated to oiling the wheels—had nothing to do with it? She had supplied to that committee the same quality as Kate did for its organisation and peripheral problems.

If she, Kate Brown, were to become a permanent employee of this organisation, what would her real function be? Well of course, for one thing, she would spend inordinate amounts of time talking to Charlie Cooper and drinking
coffee with him, and in conference with men talking about how to organise this or that. Working.

If she did stay, then it was likely she would soon inherit Charlie’s job, while he, as seemed to be the law, would be promoted upwards. She would fit his job; but he, higher, probably would be uncomfortable, at a loss, feel out of place, but never know why this was so.

What he was good at was to be the supplier of some kind of invisible fluid, or emanation, like a queen termite, whose spirit (or some such word—electricity) filled the nest, making a whole of individuals who could have no other connection.

This is what women did in families—it was Kate’s role in life. And she had performed this function, together with the beautiful young woman from Africa, for the committee that was now over. She was going to fill the role again in Turkey. It was a habit she had got into. She was beginning to see that she could accept a job in this organisation, or another like it, for no other reason than that she was unable to switch herself out of the role of provider of invisible manna, consolation, warmth, “sympathy.” Not because she needed a job, or wanted to do one. She had been set like a machine by twenty-odd years of being a wife and a mother.

In a corner of a restless noisy room sat a collected figure, female, holding in well-tended but overcompetent hands that day’s newspaper, her eyes lowered, her shoulders rather hunched: they were set to withstand the sort of cold a living animal must feel if its skin is ripped off, or the cold a new lamb feels emerging from the wet warmth of a belly, dropping onto frozen ground in a sleety wind.

It would be easy to hold the cold wind off, of course: she could do it indefinitely. It would be easy for years yet. All she had to do was to say to her family—news that they
would greet, she knew, with relief—that she had decided to take a job. And then find the right kind of job. Here, probably, why not? What could be more useful than to work for Global Food? Then she would nourish and nurture in herself that person which was all warmth and charm, that personality which had nothing to do with her, nothing with what she really was, the individual who sat and watched and noted from behind the warm brown eyes, the cared-for skin, the heavy curves of her dark-red hair.

But for three weeks, a month, she would be far too busy to think of these things: she would be caring for others. And by this time tomorrow—so she reflected on the eve of her departure to Istanbul—what she was feeling and thinking now, the results of three days’ carefully guarded solitude, would seem pretty remote. The best she could do there, very likely, would be to remember that she
had
come to these conclusions, essential ones, and hold on to them. Even if she was not able to remember this for more than a snatched few minutes in every overfull day.

That night the dream came into her sleep again—the continuation of the dream about the seal. Now, because it had appeared twice, it was announcing its importance to her. She had half-forgotten the first instalment; now she must remember it … so she was worrying, even while the second part unfolded.

The seal was heavy, and slippery. It was hard to keep it in her arms. She was staggering among the sharp rocks. Where was the water, where was the sea? How could she be sure of going in the right direction? Panic that this was not the right direction made her swerve off to the right along a level place on the hillside, and she went on for a while, but the seal began to make restless movements, and she realised that she had been going in the right direction in
the first place. Again she set herself to go north. The poor seal had scars on its sides: it had been humping overland to reach the sea, and had torn itself on rocks and on stony soil. She was worrying that she did not have any ointment for these wounds, some of which were fresh, and bleeding. There were many scars, too, of old wounds. Perhaps some of the low bitter shrubs that grew from the stones had medicinal properties. She carefully laid down the seal, who put its head on her feet, off the stones, and she reached down and sideways and pulled some ends of a shrub. There was no way to pulp this green, so she chewed it, and spat the liquid from her mouth on to the seal’s wounds. It seemed to her that these were already healing, but she could not stop to do any more, and she again picked up the seal and struggled on with it.

Kate knew of course that she was about to be flipped from one suave impersonal Organisation into another, in a matter of hours, by means of a suave impersonal Airline. She was, like us all, acquainted by radio, television, films, with the international civil service and their manner of life. But it did not happen like that. On the eve of her departure the strike was definitely called off, and she was sure of her flight; by next morning there was another, of the administrative staff. Kate took the train to Paris where she expected to take a plane to Rome. In Paris she was told the roads to the airport were blocked that day by a demonstration of alien workers, mostly Spanish and Italian—she would be unlikely to get off the ground that day. She took the train to Rome. There it was a question of leaving one circuit of machinery—railways, to link with the other, air travel. There were traffic jams, muddles, all kinds of delay, but she was able at last to make the switch; rather late, however. In Turkey her surroundings were as she had expected:
a sleek car took her, by herself, through people who could never expect to sit in such a car, unless their job was to drive or maintain it, and, shielded from her surroundings in every way but through her eyes, she talked French with the chauffeur. The hotel was like, in spirit and style, the building for Global Food. Her room was like the undemanding box she had left. But because she was late, having been so much delayed, she arrived at the same time as the incoming delegates—a thousand small necessary things had not been done, and they were a translator short. She did no more than see her luggage to her room, then presented herself: irritation focussed on her; she was now personifying the spirit of inefficiency about which all over this vast hotel the delegates were complaining—just as she had been complaining yesterday and the day before, in London, Paris, and Rome.

A whole floor had been given to the conference. The large room in which the deliberations would be held was like the one which she had just left, and which she was almost thinking of as “home.” It was fleshed in shining wood from ceiling to the floor, which, however, was not thick carpet, but tiles, whose pattern was copied from a mosque. In the middle of this room was a vast table, this time rectangular, set with headphones, switches, and buttons. It was now her task to see that each place was equipped with paper, for doodling and scribbling during fits of boredom when delegates spoke too long, and with pencils, and biros, and water. Or rather, she did not do this herself: she was making sure that the hotel employee whose responsibility it was had not forgotten. His name was Ahmed, a young man, fattish and pale, invincibly agreeable and smiling, her counterpart, her ally, her brother. He spoke French and German and English; was happy she had what he lacked—
Italian and Portuguese; he knew everything about the hotel trade, but had not before assisted at a Conference—or rather, while he knew business conferences, expected this one would be different. They conferred in this language or that. When a boy in braid and buttons came up to Ahmed, Kate heard Turkish in an order being given and taken. She had not heard that language spoken since she had arrived in the country. Sitting and talking with Ahmed, standing and talking, walking and talking, making plans for other people’s comfort, she heard Turkish, as it were, out of the corners of her ears—noises offstage, no more. All around her, outside this hotel, was a world where her ears, when they were actually and at last exposed to it, would be suddenly dulled and uncomprehending: the language she did not know was around her like panes of badly cleaned glass, opaque, painful; her ears, as if rebuked, would strain after the exchange of two maids in a corridor—they felt they ought to understand, and if they did not, it was their fault … without Ahmed, she would be like a bit of useless machinery.

He had the necessary experience of night life, restaurants, dancing girls, mosques, churches, and suitable short trips out of Istanbul—useful in that order. The city, viewed from hundreds of feet in its air, but in brief glimpses, was all an enticing glitter of roofs and silvery water, and streets which were, like the Turkish language itself, far away, and energetic with a life she felt she ought to be reaching after, understanding … a bird flew past at eye level as she stood at a window. It was one she had not seen before. She felt that subtle approaches were being made to her from an unknown world and she watched the bird cross the water fed from the Black Sea to spires and domes on another shore, while Ahmed waited beside her for an answer to a question
about eating preferences. By the time the last of the delegates had descended from the skies, entertainments, excursions, cultural delights of all kinds, not to mention the great dishes of a dozen nations, were waiting. And already being enjoyed, for these men and women seemed minimally fatigued, so experienced were they all in this business of crossing continents, arriving delightfully dressed and nonchalant, chattering together in a score of languages. It was clear that this was going to be a good-humored, well-tempered conference. They were liking each other. After all, they always did, these administrators, these so bland antagonists, these tactful interpreters of national interest. For no matter how much they expressed disagreement when sitting around vast tables, and how forcefully they pressed their own country’s claims, or even accused each other of double-dealing—
It was Nation X who put the beetle in that season’s crop to ruin our trade!—No, it is obvious to the whole world that your crop got the beetle because you weren’t growing it properly—You won’t allow anybody but your own country to benefit—you always hog everything!—On the contrary, we want to help our unfortunate brothers in the poor countries
—yes, exactly like so many quarrelling children; but no matter how much and how often all this went on, afterwards in the lounges and the bars and the coffee rooms and the restaurants, not to mention the beds, all was understanding and fraternity. Of course; for these people did the same job, spent their lives in exactly the same way—they had everything in common.