The Summer Before the Dark (2 page)

She took the kettle in one hand, the coffee pot in the other, and left the back garden for the kitchen.

I’ve been in the crucible, I’ve been ground fine in the mills.…
Not without a certain satisfaction were these things said, or felt. Surely that was an extraordinary fact? The sense of achievement was extraordinary? For after all, it was felt as much by people who were among the (comparatively small) numbers of the world’s inhabitants who were dedicated to the proposition that a life is no more
important than a beetle’s, as by those who held the old view, that it matters what we do because we are important in the eyes of a God. Or Gods. But why should anyone care that he, she, has changed, has learned, matured, grown, if he or she, is a beetle? Or even a butterfly? For there is no doubt at all that there does persist the feeling, and it is probably the deepest one we have, that what matters most is that we learn through living. This feeling should be attributed to habit, a hangover from earlier, more primitive times? To the beetle’s self-importance? But it was there, there was no doubt of that, “God” having been banished, or pronounced dead, or not. To whom is a beetle expected to present its accounts?

We are what we learn.

It often takes a long and painful time.

Unfortunately, there was no doubt, too, that a lot of time, a lot of pain, went into learning very little.…

She was really feeling that? Yes, she was.

Because she was depressed? Was she depressed? Probably. She was something, she was feeling something pretty strongly that she couldn’t put her finger on.…

The woman put the coffee pot on a tray already laid with cups and saucers and spoons and sugar and strainer, and picked up the tray: before carrying it out of the room she looked back at a table on which dirty dishes from the midday meal were piled. There were dishes there from breakfast, too. Perhaps she could ask Tim to build up the fire again, reboil the kettle, and then call her in when there was enough water to do all the washing up? No, better not, not in the mood he was in; it would be better to do it all herself later.

A woman walked out of a side door over a lawn that needed cutting and was attractively dotted with daisies towards
a tree in her garden. This woman was Kate Brown; to be accurate Catherine Brown, or Mrs. Michael Brown. She carefully carried her tray, and she was thinking about the washing up while she continued her private stocktaking, her accounts-making … she was wishing that whatever stage of her life she was in now could be got through quickly, for it was seeming to her interminable. If life had to be looked at in terms of high moments, or peaks, then nothing had “happened” to her for a long time; and she could look forward to nothing much but a dwindling away from full household activity into getting old.

Sometimes, if you are lucky, a process, or a stage, does get concentrated. It was going to turn out for Kate that that summer would be such a shortened, heightened, concentrated time.

What was she going to experience? Nothing much more than, simply, she grew old: that successor and repetition of the act of growing up. It happens to everyone, of course … 
Ah me, time flies! … Before you know it, life has gone past … Ripeness is all
. And so on. But in Kate’s case it would not at all be a process lasting a decade or two, hardly to be noticed while it went on except in desperate attempts to hold the flood—tinting her hair, keeping her weight down, following the fashions carefully so that she would be smart but not mutton dressed as lamb. Growing old for nearly everybody, unless struck by disaster, the earth sliding away from under one’s feet, water flooding a city, bombs destroying one’s children and striking one’s own heart into an indifference to living—growing old is a matter of years. You are young, and then you are middle-aged, but it is hard to tell the moment of passage from one state to the next. Then you are old, but you hardly know when it happened. Changes have taken place—oh yes, vital
ones—in your attitudes to those around you, but you are hardly aware of them, because the ice has ground so slowly down the valley. It is something like that for most people:
I’m afraid I am not as young as I once was
. But Kate Brown was going to get the whole thing over with in a few months. Because while everything seemed so personal, and aimed at her—her patience, her good humour, her time—in fact it would be pressures from the other, the public, sphere pressing on her small life that would give what she experienced its urgency? However that might be, the summer’s events were not going to be shaped through any virtues or capacities of her own.

By the time it was all over with, she would certainly not have chosen to have had it differently: yet she could not have chosen it for herself in advance, for she did not have the experience to choose, or the imagination. No, she could not
want
what was going to happen, although she did stand under her tree, the tray in her hands, thinking: It does go on and on! That’s what’s wrong: there must be something I could be seeing now, something I could be understanding
now
, some course of action I could choose …

Choose? When do I ever choose? Have I ever chosen?

A woman, as she might have done any time during the past several hundred years, stood under a tree, holding a crowded tray. She put the tray down on a garden table made of some substance invented in the last decade. The table looked like iron, was so light it could be lifted with two fingers, was balanced so that it did not blow over if a weight was put on one side.

She did not regard that table as a choice; it was chosen for her, like the plastic of the cups, which looked so like china.

She walked back into the middle of the lawn and, before
taking in a breath to call up to the upper windows of the house, was conscious of what would be seen when her husband looked out to say: “Coming!”

A woman in a white dress, white shoes, a pink scarf around her neck, standing on grass.

Now here was an area of choice, conscious, deliberate: her appearance was choice, all exquisite tact, for it was appropriate for this middle-class suburb and her position in it as her husband’s wife. And, of course, as the mother of her children.

The dress came off a rail marked
Jolie Madame
, and was becoming and discreet. She wore shoes and stockings. Her hair—and now we reach the place where most energy had gone into choice—was done in large soft waves around a face where a few freckles had been allowed to remain on the bridge of her nose and her upper cheeks. Her husband always said he liked them there. The hair was reddish—not too dramatically so. She was a pretty, healthy, serviceable woman.

She stood on the grass, shaded her eyes, and called up, “Michael, Michael! Coffee!”

An indistinct face from behind panes that dazzled with sunlight shouted, “Coming!”

A woman dressed suitably for a family afternoon walked back across the lawn, but with care so that the grass did not mark her shoes. Her own choice would have been to go barefooted, to discard her stockings, and to wear something like a muu-muu or a sari or a sarong—something of that sort—with her hair straight to her shoulders.

She did not allow her appearance to bloom, because she had observed early in the children’s adolescence how much they disliked her giving rein to her own nature. Mary Finchley opposite dressed as she would have done if she
had no children and was unmarried: her children hated it, and showed this in a hundred ways.

Although Kate always agreed with Mary when she said, “Why should we scale ourselves down, children shouldn’t be allowed to be tyrants”—in fact she always did, always had, scaled herself down. But she could not see that her children were any better than Mary Finchley’s for it.

Kate sat under the tree in such a way that her body was in the shade, and her legs were stretched into the sun as if they were stockingless. She was examining her large square house in its large garden. She did this like someone saying goodbye, but that was only because she and her husband had recently been saying that now the children would soon be altogether grown up, it might be time to start thinking of getting themselves something smaller? A flat? They could buy a house in the country and share it with friends—perhaps the Finchleys.

Kate often thought about this, but as of something that was years off.

Meanwhile it was May, the English summer fitful and shallow, and, looking ahead to autumn, there was a hiatus in the life of the family, that organism which pulsed quietly in South London: Blackheath, to be exact. From this suburb every year, increasingly as the children became adults, it was as if that unit, or creature, or organism, exploded outwards, scattering further and further over the globe. It was like a yearly breathing out that began in late spring, with an inhalation in September.

Last year Michael, who was a neurologist of some standing, had gone in July to America for a conference, had taken the opportunity to work for three months in a Boston hospital, had returned only in October. Kate had
gone with her husband to the conference, had returned for family reasons, had visited him again in September—her movements always fitting in with those of the children, as of course they had to do. They were coming and going to and from various parts of Europe all summer.

This year Michael was to visit the same hospital in Boston for four months, on exchange with a colleague. The oldest son, Stephen, now twenty-three and in his last year at university, was going on a four months’ trip through Morocco and Algeria with friends. Eileen, twenty-two, was accompanying her father, to visit friends made on a camping trip the year before last in Spain. The second son, James, had been invited on an archaeological “dig” in the Sudan, before beginning university that autumn. As for herself, she had decided not to go to the States again. This was partly because she did not want to cramp her daughter’s style, which she knew she would. Also, it would be so expensive if three people went. Also, there was the question whether she would be cramping her husband’s style … to go with this thought there was an appropriate smile, almost a grimace, suitable perhaps for the words:
There has to be give and take in any marriage;
she was quite aware that she was disinclined to examine this area too closely.

For another thing, Tim, although now nineteen, and much encouraged by everyone to be independent, had no plans to travel anywhere. He was, always had been, the “difficult” or problematical one. The house in South London would therefore be kept running for his benefit. She, the mother, would run it. For her, the coming months stretched ahead as they had done for many past summers. She would be a base for members of the family coming home from university, or dropping in for a day or a week
on their way somewhere else; she would housekeep for them, their friends, their friends’ friends. She would be available, at everyone’s disposal.

She was looking forward to it: not only to the many people, but the managing, the being conscious of her efficiency; she looked forward, too, to a summer’s expert gardening. When they—she and Michael—did leave this house as a couple retiring from an active scene, it wouldn’t be the house that would be missed, but the garden, which was as lovely as an English garden is after twenty or so years of devotion. It looked as if man had not planted it, but as if it had chosen to grow into lawns and clumps of lilies, rose arbours and herb patches. The birds sang in it all the year. The wind blew tenderly in it. There was not a crumb of earth that Kate did not feel she knew personally, had not made—of course with the aid of earthworms and the frost.

She sat taking in breaths of rose, lavender, thyme, and watched her husband come out of the house with their guest.

He was Alan Post, and had nothing to do with medicine, but was a civil servant of the international variety: he worked for one of the bodies associated with the United Nations. He and Dr. Michael Brown had met in the airport lounge at Los Angeles when their aircraft was delayed by fog. They had played chess, drunk whisky, exchanged invitations. A week ago the two men had bumped into each other in Goodge Street, and then lunched together. Michael had invited Alan to a family Sunday lunch.

If there had not been the power cuts, the Browns would have provided the traditional British Sunday meal, not for their own benefit, since they no longer used the old patterns, but for their guest’s: the family had often enough
joked that when they entertained their many foreign friends, they served traditional dishes like peasants dependent on the tourist trade. But Eileen had cooked the meal today, with Tim’s help, before rushing off somewhere. She had made a Turkish cucumber soup—cold; shish kebab over the fire, and an apricot water ice—the refrigerator ran on gas. They had drunk a great deal of sangria, the recipe for which had been acquired by the second son last year in Spain.

Michael and Alan Post sat down and continued the conversation they had enjoyed throughout lunch, and afterwards upstairs in the study. She poured the coffee into the pretty plastic cups she had used in the garden ever since next door’s dog had bounced through in pursuit of another dog and had smashed a whole tray full of her best china. Having handed them coffee and chocolate wafers, she set an attentive smile on her face, like a sentinel, behind which she could cultivate her own thoughts. In fact she was thinking of her husband.

Whenever she saw him like this, with a colleague, particularly those from overseas, it was as if he had walked away from her. This was not because he was one of the people whose manner alters depending on whom they are with—not at all, but with Alan Post it seemed that a larger, finer air blew around him, he was expanding, he looked as if he were about to take wing … last year, in the States, when she had been with him, she had felt part of the expansion, the enlarging; she had felt as if for all these years of marriage this man had been keeping in reserve some potential that could never find growing room inside the family: they had discussed what she felt, of course. She had half hoped he might say that he had sometimes felt the same about her, but he didn’t. Now she thought that this
year he would be without his wife, only intermittently with his daughter, for four months: the appropriate smile, dry, ironic, was on her face again. She knew it was there; she had as they say “worked” on that smile, or on the emotions it represented. If this had been the right occasion for it—a younger woman’s question for instance (not a woman her own age, she realised, not Mary Finchley)—she might have leaned back in her chair, allowed her eyes to hood themselves in irony, and said: Perhaps we all make too much fuss of this kind of thing when we are young—the little affairs, you know, they are of no importance in a real marriage! Self-congratulation accompanied this smile that was half a grimace, she knew that; also relief, that of a person successfully negotiating a trap, a danger point … Sitting under the summery tree, holding up the coffee pot to indicate to the men that there was plenty more in it, smiling, she was hearing herself think: I’m telling myself the most dreadful lies! Awful! Why do I do it? There’s something here that I simply will not let myself look at. Sometimes with Mary I get near to it, but never with anyone else.
Now
, look at it all, try and get hold of it, don’t go on making up all these attitudes, these stories—stop taking down the same old dresses off the rack … She was listening, properly now, to what the men were saying: it seemed that it concerned her in some way, that the conversation had concerned her for some minutes, but she hadn’t been listening.