The Summer Before the Dark (6 page)

All this had of course been discussed fully and frankly between husband and wife. It would have had to be. For this area of marriage, so difficult, risky, and embattled, they had had from the start what amounted to a blueprint. And it had all been kept up to date, not allowed to lapse … Kate was nevertheless aware that what was taken for granted between herself and Mary Finchley in the encounters they described as “cow sessions” contradicted the marital blueprints everywhere. Why was she thinking so much about Mary? In fact she had been annoyed by her old friend’s reaction to the news of this new job. It had been the jolly laugh which had always seemed to Kate crude, and, “Well thank God for that. And about time too!”

At any rate, it was in order for her now to face herself in so many different mirrors, and to light a flame, to set certain currents running. No, not as she had on the brief occasions of uncontrollable attraction during her marriage (referred to by Mary critically, as
the world well lost for lust)
when she had been directed towards a particular man. Now she was doing something very different. Exactly as a young girl does, suddenly conscious of her powers of generalised attractions, so now with Kate: an internal thermostat was differently set, saying not: You over there, yes you, come and get me! but: Ah, how infinitely desirable you all are; if I wished I could be available, but it is up to you, and really it is much more exciting to be like this,
floating in the air of general appreciation and approval; it would be an awful bore to confine myself to one.

This is something no married woman does. (Except Mary!) But look what her family went through because of it—no, she was not to be envied, not copied; she probably ought not even to be listened to, let alone enjoyed for roaring sessions of laughter and old wives’ talk. Never mind about Mary. No
really
married woman sets the thermostat for Tom, Dick, and Harry. (In discussions on this theme with Michael both were pretty definite on what being
really
married meant.) Not if she wishes to stay married. (Or doesn’t mind being like Mary, whose life for the fifteen years Kate had known her had been like a French farce—toned down, of course, for the mild airs of South London.) For what Kate did know, did indeed know, was that not every marriage was a real marriage, and that such marriages were getting rarer and rarer. She was lucky in hers. If you wished to use words like “luck” instead of giving yourself credit for being, and continuing to be (despite Mary) the sort of woman who is really married to a real husband. Being a partner in this sort of marriage means that one cannot adjust the thermostat in any way but one. Except of course for those brief and unimportant occasions that Mary so derided, because she said they provided the maximum amount of misery with the minimum of pleasure … if she was not able to think seriously about her marriage without Mary Finchley coming in at every moment, then she had better stop thinking altogether.

Before calling the rearrangement of herself complete, she went to a very expensive hairdresser, who allowed his hands to rest sympathetically on her two shoulders, while he looked over her head into the mirror at her image, just as she was doing. They looked at raw material for his art;
and then he enquired if her hair had always been that shade of red? Of course he was right; but she had been afraid that the very dark red that had been hers by right was too startling for a woman of her age. He said to that, Nonsense; and sent her out with very dark red hair cut so that it felt like a weight of heavy silk swinging against her cheeks as she turned her head. As she remembered very well it had once done always.

It was disturbing, this evocation of her young self. She found herself overemotional. She wished her Michael were there to enjoy her; then, as violently, was pleased he was far away in Boston. What were these swings of emotion, what caused them? In the course of a single hour, her thoughts about Michael were contradictory enough for a madwoman. Why? Surely the truth couldn’t be that she was always like this, and was only just beginning to see it? Well, at least she could be sure that she was glad her children could not see her—oh no, no young person likes to see dear mother all glossy and gleaming and silky.

But they were by now scattered over the world, in Norway and the Sudan, in Morocco and New England; just like the delegates she had so recently been looking after, like the delegates who were at that very moment in so many different countries packing suitcases and saying goodbye to wives and children and, in a few cases, husbands.

There were three days left before she had to fly off to Turkey—if the air strike ended in time, for if not she would have to go by train. Three days. There was nothing to do until the conference began. The guilt that she did nothing while being paid so much made her hint to Charlie Cooper that perhaps she ought to be given other work for that time—she could help the translators for instance. For
the first time she saw Charlie Cooper irritated. He repeated his many remarks about her value—yet what was she doing? She drank a good deal of coffee with him in his office; she talked to him, she sat twice a day with him and the man who was head of their department, discussing arrangements. This was work? Good God, if she could have the reorganising of this department—more, this building, with its swarms and swarms of highly paid—she must stop this, and besides, it was nothing to do with her. Probably her criticisms were because she lacked the experience to—
Nonsense, it was all nonsense; this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick; it was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money
.

It was not the slightest use thinking on these lines; if she was being paid to sit in coffee rooms thinking, then she would sit in coffee rooms thinking. After all, how many years had it been since she had had time to think—nearly twenty-five years. In fact, the last time she had been enabled to sit relaxed, prettily on show, smiling, was that year when she had visited her grandfather. Then, too, in her shockingly seductive white dress, one foot put loose to one side, like a bird’s broken wing, while the other, pushing her rhythmically in her swing chair, sent waves of sexual attraction in every direction—then too she had thought, considered, had allowed the words that represented the ideas she had of her life flow through her mind while she looked at them … Had she then been subject to this seesaw of feeling? If so, she could not remember it. Perhaps the white dress, which she had never even been able to put on without feeling sly, dishonest, overexcited, had visibly represented one side of a balance, and what she had been thinking another? Thought was not the right word? What she
had watched move through her mind had been pretty violent, yes, she could remember, she had been critical, a seethe of impatience behind that slow sweet smile for which she had been, was still so often, commended.

By Charlie Cooper, for one. She had brought with her to this organisation the atmosphere of loving sympathy which was the oil of her function in her home. Had she done this—unconsciously of course—because of the cold wind? She had been frightened to be only a capable translator, arriving at nine thirty, leaving at five, and in between doing exactly what she had been paid for? She had felt that to be not enough? It had been enough for the other translators, four men and a woman. But they were still at it, translating, using their skills, while she, Kate, had been promoted: because she had allowed herself to emanate an atmosphere of sympathetic readiness, which had been “picked up” by the bureaucracy of the organisation? Were they conscious why they had chosen her to be a group mother in Turkey? “A warm personality” is what they said. “Sympathetic.” Simpatica.

This large public room filled with tables—but it was not overcrowded, there was plenty of room—was the best of places to sit quietly; how extraordinary that such a busy place could be so private. Much more so than her room in the flat in Burke Street, where her colleague wished to chat when she came in at night, and offered tea and toast in the mornings. Who, in short, was lonely. She, too, found Kate Brown sympathetic.

But here—of course, privacy was already diminishing, for the place was beginning to show patterns, many patterns. Before, coming in hurriedly between sessions of translating, dropping in for a sandwich, needing the coffee, the food, it had all looked random. This was because she
had been dazzled by it. But now she was getting used to it, it was hard not to sit there and drift into gratified contemplation of the attractiveness of this new class, the international servants, all young, or youngish, or, if middle-aged, then middle-aged in the modern way with old age an enemy kept well at bay. It was easy to lose any detachment in admiration of the clothes, the cosmetics, the dramatic contrast of so many brown and pink and yellow skins. How harmonious! How consoling it all was: this was certainly how the future would be, assemblies of highly civilised beings all friendly and non-combative, amiably attentive to each other even if, during the actual sessions around the committee tables, they were locked in national combat.

The sexual patterns were, of course, the easiest to see—as always; the casual couplings and friendships that go with international conferences and committees.

The girls that worked in this place were middle-class, or upper-middle-class—“debby girls” as the phrase goes, as the phrase went, in fact. “We have all these debby girls,” Charlie Cooper would say. “Absolute loves, they all are, what would we do without them?” They were here not to find husbands—heaven forbid, they would marry their own kind in due course—but to enjoy “interesting work.” This meant the company of attractive men—and women, of course—from dozens of different countries and the possibility of being invited to work in one or more of these countries. As Charlie Cooper amiably complained, “Really, I sometimes think that what we are running here is a high-class employment bureau.” It meant covetable escorts if not active affairs. As for the delegates who surged through this building in predictable and highly organised tides, these girls offered the possibility of the best kind of dinner and theatre companion, affairs without strings, the choice of
secretaries of the most enviable kind to take back home (briefly, before Emma or Jane decided it was time to re-acclimatise) to their offices in New York, or Lagos, or Buenos Aires.

To sit here quietly, as invisible as she could make herself—it was like the theatre.

A new committee was to begin sitting tomorrow—Synthetic Foodstuffs for the Third World. This was to be an altogether more modest affair than the big thing in Turkey, but the delegates were arriving by every boat from the continent. And behold, by eleven in the morning, all the secretaries and P.R. girls were arranged around the room, by themselves, or in couples, not looking at the doors through which would come their partners in sex or friendship for the next month or so. The delegates, of all sizes, colours, shapes, and degrees of good looks, arrived—mostly by themselves. The two teams (it was hard not to see them in sporting teams—
on your marks, get set, go!)
eyed each other. A skilled process this; age, degree of physical fitness, dress sense, probable sexual capacity, all judged in a few glances. Then began the process of intermingling.

“May I sit here? I am Fred Wanaker from New York.”

“Miss Hanover? I am Hesukia, Ghana.”

By the end of the first day, the couples had already separated off, or it was possible to see how they were going to.

As good as the theatre—better, since she was one of the players.

Even though she didn’t want to be, for she was off to Istanbul, where she would be working too hard to have time to think; and she did not now want her attention distracted—she knew now, she was almost certain, that she should have said
no
to Charlie Cooper and all the money
and arranged to stay in London, in a room, quietly, by herself. Absolutely alone.

Meanwhile, though her thermostat was set
low
, she parried offers. The frequency with which some man, black, brown, olive-skinned, or pink, offered himself with: “Is this seat free?” made her switch a sight on herself from across the room, as these men were seeing her. She saw, as she had in so many mirrors, a woman with startling dark-red hair, a very white skin, and the sympathetic eyes of a loving spaniel. (Dislike of her need to love and give made her call herself dog, or slave; she was aware that this was a new thing for her, or she thought it was.) Yet this woman, to whom so many men made their way, was twenty years older than some of the girls. This meant that she did not at first sight (across a room and so much coming and going of people in between) look her forty-odd years. She was in that state of eternal youth, to which such a large part of the time and effort of womanhood is directed (or rather, as she was thinking more and more often, was becoming obsessed by, the womanhood of the well-off nations of the world, who did not look old at thirty). If she observed carefully, unblinded by personal vanity or prejudice, it was noticeable that this approaching man, whatever age he was, hesitated almost imperceptibly as he saw she was not (which she must look from a distance) a fresh thirty. But, having hesitated, having given her that skilled, professional inspection (like a tart’s, or a photographer’s) with which we sum each other up in such encounters of the sexual and professional mart, he always sat down and seemed pleased enough with what he found: which was an amiable companion for the coffee table. So it seemed that after all her internal thermostat was obeying her orders.

But she was not here for this sort of pleasure—though
it was certainly pleasurable. She wanted to sit quietly, to relax, to think … She must do more than to regulate the flame so that men, having joined her, found her companionable. But what? Surely she did not have to leave off make-up, and wear old woman’s clothes, and make herself ugly? (Kate was in one version of that female dilemma exemplified at its most extreme by the young girl who has shortened her skirt to top-thigh level, left all but two buttons of her blouse undone, and spent two hours making herself up: “That
disgusting man
, he keeps staring at me, who does he think he is?” Or the fashionable woman who has plunged her décolletage down to her waist and left her back bare: she gives the man who examines her delights a cold stare. “You are a boor,” her eyelashes state.)