The Summer Before the Dark (10 page)

It was Goethe, or rather Goethe as interpreted by his alter ego Thomas Mann, who said that the kiss was the essence of love. He had “wormed it” enough in his time, he said; but it was the kiss that was the thing.

One has to be a married woman of thirty-five with a husband and watchful children around every minute of the day and the night to achieve the circumstances where a kiss has to be enough. No, there had in fact been a delicious weekend, achieved at the cost of God knows what organisation, and arranging and lying, but looking back, it was certainly not sex that had been the thing. For apart from anything else, no sane woman goes to a boy for sex, an area where ripeness is all: her sex life with her Michael was everything fantasy would choose. Or it had been … what was it now, then? Physically admirable, of course. Emotionally? But why should that matter? Mary would have yelled with laughter at the suggestion that it should. (She was thinking more of Mary now than she did when she lived opposite to her.) The fact was, sex with her husband, these days, now that she knew that his sexual realities were in the so-carefully-planned-for adventures with girls, was
something that—not bored her, no, but which certainly she was becoming more and more reluctant to have at all. It was like being faced with a heavy meal when you aren’t hungry … it was not that her sexual appetites were less—or were they? If they were, why did she feel as if to admit it would be confessing failure? But what she did have an appetite for was something in the past, that time when she and the marriage—what he still found in marriage and in married sex—had been his need, his aim: what he was then making sure he would get, despite children, the weight of household management and care, in spite of everything. Once upon a time she had known that her husband’s life had been sustained by her, by what they found together, and the centre of that was bed.

This affair, staring her in the face, certainly would not be a question of delicate emotions and rare anguish. This youth was too old. He was too worldly. He was too self-critical.

But she liked him. And he was so very amusing, particularly when being consciously tormented by the multiplicity of his choices of life style, by the texture of ordinary life, by this vale of tears.

But that night, they separated by mutual consent: his demand to come up to her room was being postponed to the following night.

She went to bed alone, thinking that in rooms all around her delegates were saying goodbye to each other, after weeks of pleasant sexual or other companionship: delightful goodbyes no doubt, as she would have been doing too, had she been like Mary … Jeffrey was too young for her; no, too old; at any rate, he was not the right age. Twenty to twenty-five—yes, he would be “young man” still, to her twilight condition. From thirty-five on, he
would be nearing her status “agewise,” to use his jargon. But thirty-two … should one judge people by the attitudes expected of them by virtue of the years they had lived, their phase or stage as mammals, or as items in society? Well, that is how most people have to be judged; only a few people are more than that. He, at thirty-two, according to the laws of his society, ought to be obsessed by “making his way in the world,” by making a satisfactory marriage if he had not done that already, by starting a family. He was doing none of these things, but he was not free of what was expected of him. And he was seeing it as a straight choice, an either, or: “Either I take a proper job and get married and make a home and have children, or I go on drifting about. Half my friends have jobs and wives and children; the others have no responsibilities and refuse to acquire them. Which shall I be? Freedom or the gins and traps of commerce”—there was something old-fashioned about him, about his dilemma. This was because he could have a job if he chose: he did not have to be among the legions of the unemployed. And he had a private income still.

But she certainly did like him.

She ought to go straight back to England, ask for a room in a friend’s house … or rent a room for herself—of course, that was it, in friends’ houses she would be occupied again, every minute of her time, helping and nannying—and sit quietly and let the cold wind blow as hard as it would.

She was feeling dragged, as if by an undertow—this was something to do with her husband, but why blame him? She could not go on blaming him for what she was, what she had become—she ought not to go to Spain with Jeffrey, she ought not to go to bed with him. She already
knew that Jeffrey Merton, in retrospect, when she looked back, would seem to her all dryness and repetition. But she did not seem able to summon up the effort to return to London, find a room, and stay there quietly by herself.

She dreamed as soon as she went to sleep. She was sitting in a cinema. She was looking at a film she had seen before—had, in waking life, seen twice. She was watching that sequence of the poor turtle who, on the island in the Pacific which had been atom-bombed, had lost its sense of direction and instead of returning to the sea after it had laid its eggs, as nature ordinarily directed, was setting its course inwards into a waterless land where it would die. She sat in the dark of the cinema and watched the poor beast drag quietly away from the sea, towards death, and she thought: Oh the seal, my poor seal, that is my responsibility, that is what I have to do, where is the seal? As she thought this she knew she was dreaming, and in the dream searched about, as it were, for the other dream, the dream of the seal; for while she could do nothing for the turtle, who was going to die, she must save the seal, but exactly as if she had strayed into the wrong room in a house, she was in the wrong dream, and could not open the door on the right one … where was the seal? Was it lying abandoned among dry rocks waiting for her, looking for her with its dark eyes?

The next day she spent helping delegates with the business of returning to their families; she did not really have to do it, her time was up, but her nature demanded that she should. On the night after everyone had scattered across the world, she joined that class of hotel guests who slip from their own rooms into others; returning discreetly before the sun rises and the corridors admit the maids in to work.

She spent the night with Jeffrey, and agreed to go with him to Spain for the month of August. Madness of course to go to Spain in August; but then it was madness to move around Europe in August at all. Sensible people did their travelling in adjacent months. But it would be easy to go into the interior of Spain, avoiding the coasts. There they would find waiting the
real
Spain, which was indestructible, according to Jeffrey, who knew it well.

On the 31st of July she walked out of the tall, gleaming, multinational hotel in Istanbul, thus leaving, in one step, the world of international organisation and planning, of conferences, of great Organisations—the atmosphere of money, invisible but so plentiful it is not important. The coffee and cakes she had eaten before leaving the hotel had cost two pounds, but she had never thought of asking the price. On the pavement, she was already in energetic altercation in three languages with the taxi driver, who showed signs of wanting to overcharge her by a few pence.

She had with her one suitcase, for she was adept at packing in small spaces, because she had spent so many years buying and packing for four children of that class
of the world’s citizens who have the best of everything, and from all over the world, available on the counters of their local High Streets. She had given some of her new smart dresses to Ahmed for his wife, having ascertained they were the same size: from the trembling incredulity with which he handled these garments, mixed with only just-controlled resentment—not at her, she hoped, but against circumstances—she saw how much tact and self-control had gone into Ahmed’s working with her for the past month.

She stepped onto the aircraft wearing a shocking-pink dress that was in discord to just the right degree with her dark-red hair, and with a white skin that could not tan—already provocative where everyone was brown by nature, or getting brown as fast as possible. She carried
Paris Match, Oggi, The Guardian, Time, Le Monde
. Jeffrey had
The Paris Tribune, The International Times, The Christian Science Monitor
.

By the time they had read their own and each other’s newspapers, they were in Gibraltar, and in a couple of hours were sipping apéritifs in Málaga.

Again her ears were painfully reproached, by the Spanish much more than by the Turkish, since she knew the language closest to it. All around her were languages being spoken that found their way easily into her understanding: outside this central stage of drinkers and waiters was Spanish, but in offstage mutters again; the Spanish were extras and bit players on their own coasts.

Ever since early June that sun-loud coast had been filling. It was now so loaded that one could easily imagine that if seen from the air the peninsula must seem pressed down and the waters rising around it—the blue of the Mediterranean on one side, the grey of the Atlantic on the
other. Soon these millions would submerge with their coloured clothes, their umbrellas, their sunglasses; their hotels, nightclubs, and restaurants.

At a table between a tall hibiscus bush and some plumbago that was moth-grey and not blue in the artificial light, a couple who were turned away from the crowd, and demonstrating their preference not to watch it, from time to time touched hands, even held hands. Once or twice they even kissed; but lightly, even humorously, certainly decorously. They might have been observed, too, giving many glances and indeed long looks away from each other, not into the crowd of which they were a part, but away and down on to a beach where flocks of many-nationed young people were playing. Not
in
the sea, no; that, alas, had become too problematical a pleasure; the waters that glittered so appropriately with moonlight held too many questions. Flesh was being withheld from it. Or almost. One or two did swim there, making their statement of confidence, or of indifference: to submit one’s body to the waters of these coasts had become a manifesto; one could deduce people’s attitudes to the future by what they chose off a menu, or by whether they decided to swim, or to let the children put their feet into the sea. In a restaurant a man would order a dish of local fish with exactly the same largeness of manner and a glance which circled the room,
I am feeling reckless tonight
, that once would have gone with an order for champagne in a restaurant that didn’t take champagne for granted. A girl who walked into the sea on a warm morning would draw glances and grimaces and shrugs:
She isn’t afraid, that one. But not for me. I wouldn’t take the risk
. But if bodies were being withheld from these warm waters where once people had swum and played half the night, now the youth of a dozen countries
danced to guitars for hundreds of miles along their shores.

The glances of this couple were definitely wistful; he because he wished he was part of the scene, she because she was thinking of her children. She also watched the man, in the way one does watch someone else’s longing—only too ready to offer ointment and comfort, if one felt that could help.

He was a slightly built young man, good-looking but not remarkable, for his colouring classed him with the natives of this coast, brown eyes, sleek dark hair, olive skin. It did, that is, until he spoke.

The woman, older than he, was the more striking because he fitted so unobtrusively into the scene. She was category Redhead. She had dead-white skin. Her eyes were brown, like grapes or raisins. Her face was humorous and likeable, and around it her hair that was so beautifully cut and shaped and brushed lay in a solid sculpted curve, so thick that looking at it put a weight of reminiscent sensation in the palms of one’s hands. Rather, that is what the amorist might have felt; the waiters knew what that haircut had cost, what her clothes had cost, and were automatically extending their expectations to a large tip.

This couple might have been observed … this couple were indeed being observed, closely, expertly. They had been minutely observed at the airport, when they descended from the plane, and then on the little bus where they had sat side by side among their fellow passengers from the plane, and then from the moment they booked in at the hotel. Their room had been reserved by telephone from Turkey by Global Food. They had been examined, ticketed, categorised, docketed, by experts whose business during the summer months was to do nothing but observe and weigh their visitors.

Which visitors fell, roughly, into three categories. First the package tours, the groups that had been parcelled up in their home countries—Britain, France, Holland, Germany, Finland—had travelled as a unit by coach or plane, lived as a unit while here, and would return as a parcel. These were the most predictable, financially and personally. It was enough for a hotel manager or waiter to give such a group five minutes’ skilled attention to understand, and “place” each individual in it. Then came the category
international youth
, who moved up and down the coast in flocks and herds, like birds or animals, in an atmosphere of fierce self-sufficiency, of self-approval. These were decorative, always provocative of violent emotions—envy, disapproval, admiration, and so on—but on the whole pretty nonrewarding financially: they could, however, be counted on to grow older and join groups one, or three. The third and smallest class was that which once all travellers had been—the lone wolves, or couples, or families travelling together and making their own arrangements, their passionately individual arrangements. These, for those experts in the tourist industry with the temperaments of philosophers or gamblers, were the most rewarding, because they might turn out to be anything, rich or poor, eccentric, criminal, solitary. It was among these, of course, that occurred most of the love-couples—that is, if you discounted “the youth” who were by definition bound to be in a state of love, or sex. And, of course, the couples who travelled together without being married were more numerous than they had been. Just as, not much more than five or ten years ago, bikinis or even bare knees or bare shoulders had been banned, and by public notice and order at that, even on beaches and terraces—the
guardia civile
marching about to make sure these orders were being
obeyed—and now all these don’ts and can’ts and prohibitions had melted away under the pressure of Money, so too had dissolved that silent
NO
which had made it difficult for unmarried couples travelling together to simply enter a hotel and order a room. It had been possible; it had been done, but with much discretion and often deception on the part of the unwed. Now, up and down that red-hot coast, during the months of bacchanalia, while “the children” frolicked and loved on the sands—or, if they were gamblers by temperament, in the warm, treacherous, increasingly odiferous waters, sometimes copulating as openly as cats and dogs—it had become normal for a hotel manager, a good Catholic and a good family man, who would in his own life, from his own choice, refuse to speak to a woman suspected of such a crime, throw his own daughter out if she dishonoured him by making love unwed—this man welcomed into his clean and honourable premises, his beds, his bars, women with men not their husbands, would smile, bow, chat, wish them good day and goodnight and a good appetite, with never an inflection of disapproval, not a shadow of reproach—well, just the slightest shadow perhaps, a
soupçon
, enough to suggest that the pressures of economics might be forcing this on him, but at least he (the manager) was still aware that it was immorality, even while he was housing and feeding it. So much honour and propriety remained to him—all this he might convey, in nuances so slight the couple could choose not to notice it at all.