The Summer Before the Dark (11 page)

This couple had been classified as an immoral one by these experts in the social condition.

They had also been classed as that time-honoured pair, older woman, younger man. The desk clerk at the hotel had been surprised at the large difference in age, when he
had taken in the passports, to write down details for the police files. They were not a frivolous or an embarrassing couple; they behaved with taste and discretion. But there are conventions in love, and one is that this particular sub-classification—older woman, younger man—should be desperate and romantic. Or at least tenderly painful. Perhaps—so those unwritten but tyrannical values of the emotional code suggest—a passionate anguish can be the only justification for this relationship, which is socially so sterile. Could it be tolerated at all in this form, which was almost casual, positively humorous—as if these two were laughing at themselves? They were indifferent to each other? Surely not! For their propriety was due to much more than good manners—so decided these experts, whose eyes were underlined with the experiences of a dozen summers, enabling them to flick a glance over such a couple just once, taking in details of class, sexual temperature, money. Perhaps this was after all not a pair of lovers? They could not be mother and son—no, impossible. Brother and sister? No, one could not believe that a single womb had produced two such dissimilar human types. They were an unlikely marriage? No, their being together lacked the congruence of mood and movement by which one recognises the married—and then, there were the documents, at the desk. There was nothing else, they must be lovers.

So they were judged, as being in a category which demanded the utmost in tolerance from this country, whose own standards were still strict—men still owning women’s sexuality, and as eccentrics within that category. They seemed to be non-loving lovers, though they did seem to pay homage to their condition by holding hands, or with a light kiss. It was this that caused the slight chilliness, the reproach, of the waiters—(who were, of course, unaware that they showed these reactions)—which was
exacting from the lovers much larger tips than were necessary.

Jeffrey had been in Spain three times before. Once, at twenty, playing along the coast as were now playing “the children” whom he was watching with such wistfulness that she, this mother with a quarter of a century of being attuned to other people’s moods, felt it almost as her own. She watched him watch the very young girls, all beautiful, or seeming to be so because of the magicking light and the setting of highly tinted foliage, the sounding sea, visible as a solid moving glitter under the moon—all the atmosphere of the summer coast that was more poignant because of the general feeling that this coast life, the migrations, the sun-worshipping, the sea-tasting was doomed, soon to be ended, and for good. She watched him as he longed for what he had lost—the young ones’ freedom, their irresponsibility: and felt the pressures of his dilemma in herself. He could no longer be one with them. Last summer he had been—in Holland. But last summer he was already feeling wrongly placed, out of it. Because of last summer he knew he could not step down off this terrace and approach the singing, dancing group as he had “when he was young”—as he was already putting it, though of course making fun of himself as he did so. But he was longing to do it, to dissolve himself into that friendly whole where so few demands are made. He was thinking, and saying, in his humorously self-demolishing way that was beginning to be painful, that perhaps he should decide to be a “middle-aged hippie”—why not? One was bound to be ridiculous, out of place, whatever one did, so why not be a misfit in a way which he would enjoy? But of course he would not enjoy it. His upbringing would see to that. “My conditioning, damn it, it’s hanging me up!”

At twenty-five he had come to Spain having finished
college and had lived up the coast in a cheap
pensión
for the long warm months, May to November, with a girl called Stephanie. They had been very happy, then less happy, then she had gone off with a German boy she met on the beach, and wrote to him that he was irresponsible, selfish, non-caring, conservative. After that she had married a man in her father’s legal office in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

He had come here two years ago for a summer and spent all the time in Córdoba and Seville, listening to and watching flamenco, for which he had a passion. He had dreamed of becoming a flamenco dancer, as some people dream of becoming bullfighters. Some do in fact become bullfighters; he had the build and—he was convinced—the temperament, for flamenco. But a sense of the ridiculous or of the appropriate (or his conditioning, which could be described, particularly by him in bad moments, as cowardice) had stopped him. “I can just see my parents! They’d turn up, and demand to be taken to the nearest gipsies. ‘Take me to the gipsies—they have stolen my little boy away!’ ”

And now he was here, for the fourth time, and in August—which was in itself enough to make him feel a foreigner, a greenhorn. For like everyone who has spent more than a month in a country, on his own steam, without much money, he felt like a native; and it was humiliating for him to be here at a time when every native—very properly, of course—had only one thought, that his country was not his, was temporarily sold to tourism.

The country was corrupted, ruined, debased, compared with when he had first come here.

They discussed this at length, watching the golden boys and girls playing on the verges of the tainted sea.

When he had first come here, at the beginning of the
sixties, there had been a pride, a dignity; there had been a readiness to proffer small services, unasked, without wanting money; there had been a dimension in the Spaniards, even on the already developed coasts, which went far beyond commercialism. There was a humanity in … a stature … a depth … He began to laugh at himself, when she did. There were tears in his eyes, certainly not for the Spaniards.

As for her, she had come by car with her husband and the four children, for a prolonged camping holiday—she found this hard to say, but made herself—getting on for twenty years before. They had been among the very first tides of tourists. Along this coast, now loaded with hotels and holiday camps, had been nothing—nothing at all. Sand in which some thin grass grew stretched from headland to headland; camping under the pines, they had seen no one for days at a time. She too had memories of all sorts of spontaneous kindnesses from the natives—she was more than able to match his words—dignity, pride, and so on and so forth.

She started to tell how, in those days, when the rare foreign car came into a town, an army of young men and boys would fight to earn sixpence for keeping watch on it for the night; how, when the Browns ate their frugal-enough meals in restaurants there would be a dozen hungry faces pressed to the glass, so that the Brown children had their fairy tales illustrated for them—those where the poor little boy gazes in at riches, but is noticed, and is brought inside by the kind family, or compensated by a fairy godmother—sometimes by being taken away altogether from his poor streets into heaven. She was telling him of children in rags and without shoes, children with sores and with flies crawling on their faces and into their eyes, children
with the swollen bellies of malnutrition. But as she talked she was thinking how once and not so long ago these things had seemed like surface symptoms, soon to be corrected by the use of a general common sense, they had not yet presented themselves as the general condition of man which would soon worsen and darken everywhere. She was thinking how once talk of this kind sounded almost like a blueprint for a better world, or like a statement of concern. Now it sounded like callousness. In a moment they, Jeffrey and she, would be outbidding in each other in that most common of middle-class verbal games: which of them had acquired more grace by being close to other people’s sufferings.

That was not her own thought: it was her son James’s. He got into a fury whenever poor people anywhere were mentioned—usually by Eileen, or by Tim, who engaged themselves in welfare work of different kinds. James saw the solution as simple: it was revolution. Anything less was insulting to the suffering poor, and a waste of time. The classic revolution—like Castro’s.

But the four children had all evolved their own positions, quite different from each other’s. They had evolved, too, individual attitudes towards tourism, towards travelling so indefatigably in so many countries.

Stephen the oldest was in advance—it was a way of looking at it—of them all. His attitude that all governments were equally reactionary left him free to travel everywhere, exactly like the selfish and the indifferent, whom he spent much of his time attacking. Eileen, uninterested in politics, travelled without scruples of conscience, like Stephen. James had a more difficult time than any: for instance, he would not have visited Greece, but had visited Spain last year because he was, he had said, adding to his
political education, regarded Israel as too fascist to enter, but had travelled with equanimity through the military dictatorships of the Near and Middle East. Tim believed the end of civilisation was close, and that we should shortly be looking back from a worldwide barbarism formalised into a world-bureaucracy to the present, which would from that nasty place in time seem like a vanished golden age: he made journeys like someone tasting the last bottle of a rare vintage.

As for their mother, here she sat with (there was no other word for it, she supposed) a young lover, drinking apéritifs on a terrace in Spain: they were going to a bullfight tomorrow because he adored them. For aesthetic reasons.

Before the two went to their room they descended to the beach along paths scented with oleander, sun oil, and urine, and stood on the same level as the throng of youngsters, their feet in churned sand. It being late, and the half moon standing up high over the sea, and the crowds much thinner along the terraces, some of the young ones had put themselves to bed for the night and lay in each other’s arms—anywhere, in the shelter of a rock, on a stretched towel, on sleeping bags. Reed mats had been laid on the sand, and on these some still danced, their hair flowing, their eyes gleaming and drowsy. Near the sea’s edge a group sang to a guitar played by a girl who sat on a rock like a mermaid.

Kate was now careful not to look at her companion; she knew that he would certainly, in the state of emotional sensitivity he was in, resent it: already she was making comparisons with her own children’s reactions. But she was remembering—not her youth, no, that was too far off and too different to be matched with this context. She was
thinking of that time ten years ago when she had been in love with that boy.
That
pain, a longing after something beyond a barrier of time, matched with what he was now feeling. She had lived through and out the other side—well, she had had no alternative. So, of course, would he. But despite what people said about the poignancy of that class of experience, and what she said herself, she did not like remembering that time. It had been false memory again, she had dolled it up in her mind, making something presentable of it to fit the convention “older woman, younger man.” But really it had been humiliating. Yes, looking at all these beautiful young creatures, all moving, or lolling, or sleeping in their postures of instant grace, she said to herself that that time had been horribly humiliating. The reason had been simple, and why old Goethe (or Mann) had talked of “worming it.” Long marriage, long, gratifying sex, had absorbed sex, the physical, into the ordinary and easy expression of emotion, a language of feeling. But the boy had had practically no sexual experience, understood only fantasy, the romantic. Her sexuality for him had been horrifying—or would have been; she had, of course, damped it, learning that the conversations of the flesh were for the mature, learning, with the first inklings of unease, of her dependence on this long married conversation. She had felt when with him as if she had a secret or a wound that she must conceal. Young, as that girl in a white dress (another convention, like an old-fashioned portrait: “Girl in a White Dress with Lilies”), a kiss had seemed a gateway into a world which had in fact turned out everything she had imagined—until she had had to look at it through the eyes of a twenty-year-old from public school and English university, a virgin as far as women were concerned.

She knew that she ought not to add to her companion’s
wild misery, which was mixed with so much animal shame—like her own with that boy—by letting him know how easily she was able to share what he felt.

As they stood there, not twelve paces from the young ones, but absolutely separated from them, a girl went past, smiling to herself, and dragging naked feet in the sand for the pleasure of the sensation. She glanced at Jeffrey; the smile was blotted out while she presented to him a blank face, and went on, smiling. Kate recognised that face: it was what one shows to someone outside one’s own pack, herd, or group. She tried to put herself in the girl’s place—she was about seventeen, with thin brown arms and legs and long black hair and what seemed like an absolute self-sufficiency—in order to see Jeffrey as a man old enough to be so looked at. She managed it with difficulty. So she herself had looked at men over twenty-five when she had been that age. She could just remember that the godlike creatures had had above all the glamour of responsibility, or power in the adult world. Returning herself to her own stage or stratum in the human community, she could see only a young man whose strength was all going into recognising his own weakness and not collapsing under it. He turned to her and said, “Good thing you are here or I’d be dragged back into it again.”

At this most frank statement of why she was here, with him, her heart did give an obligatory gulp, or grimace of pain—but nothing much, for it was much too occupied with painful reminiscence for small considerations: the official memories of all kinds were wearing thin, were almost transparent. If she had been asked, let us say in late May, on that afternoon when her husband’s casually met acquaintance had come to her garden—when the series of chances which had brought her here had begun?—if she
had been asked then what scene or set of circumstances would be best calculated to bring home to her a situation, a stage in life that she
must
recognise, no matter how painful, then she might have chosen this: to stand on the edge of a mile of soiled and scuffed sand that glittered with banal moonlight, watching a hundred or so young people, some younger than her own children, beside a young man who—it was no use pretending otherwise—made her feel maternal. Almost she could have said: There, there, it will be better soon, and hugged him. She was actually thinking, like a mother, Off you go then, you’ll have to live through this, much better if I am not anywhere around—except, of course, that I have to be watching and guiding from somewhere just out of sight.…