The Summer Before the Dark by Doris Lessing
One could not easily believe it. And what problems they had now seemed so extremely small, almost ridiculous, when you remembered the purpose of this building, the reason for its being continuously full of conferring people. For Kate was involved in these problems. Things had already changed; she was no longer “the woman who replaced the translators who had those accidents and who got ill.” She was Kate Brown, greeted in corridors by smiles and warm faces; she was stopped increasingly often for advice and information. Where to buy this or that face cream; or that special foodstuff; how to find the restaurant, the hotel, a dress shop, or the right place for British woollen goods or whisky.
In her first week, she had only had time to think, as she flopped exhausted into bed, that she had become a function, she had become, she was language for a couple of dozen international civil servants. This week, lying awake later since she was not exhausted, she thought that her first function, that of being a skilled parrot, was being supplanted, and very fast, by one she was used to. How did one do this and do that, find this or that?—they asked her, the newcomer! But of course, she was already an old hand, since most people flitted in and out of this building for a few days at a time.
She had become what she was: a nurse, or a nanny, like Charlie Cooper. A mother. Never mind, in a few days she would be free of it all. She would no longer be a parrot with the ability to be sympathetic about minor and unimportant obsessions; she would be free … Kate noted that the thought brought with it a small shiver. She noted that she reacted with: I wish I had gone with Michael to America. She caught herself thinking, “When I visit Rose I’ll be able to help her with the children.” Rose was the friend in Sussex whom she might visit.
But she did not want to spend the summer in another family, that was just cowardice. In her room, before going to sleep, she looked at its neatness, its indifference to her, and thought that yes, this was much better than her large family house, than Rose’s house, full, crammed, jostling with objects every one of which had associations, histories, belonged to this person or that, mattered, were important. This small box of a room, that had in it a bed, a chair, a chest of drawers, a mirror—yes, this is what she would choose, if she could choose … she dreamed. Later, when this night’s dream had fallen into place in the pattern, had become the first instalment of the story or the journey that she followed in her sleep, she tried to remember more of it, more of the detail. But while she was sure of its atmosphere, the feel—which mixed anxiety and joy in a way that could never happen in waking life—the details had gone. The dream had become by morning—she had woken in the dark to try and grab the tail of the dream before it slid off and away—like the start of an epic, simple and direct.
She came down a hillside in a landscape that was northern, and unknown to her. Someone said, “Look, what is that strange thing, look, something dark is lying there.” She thought, A slug? Surely it can’t be, no slug is as large as that. But it was a seal, lying stranded and helpless among dry rocks high on a cold hillside. It was moaning. She picked it up. It was heavy. She asked if it were all right, if she could help it. It moaned, and she knew she had to get it to water. She started to carry the seal in her arms down the hill.
On the day before her two weeks were up, she was invited by Charlie Cooper to meet him over a coffee. She did so, and was asked if she would be free to continue this work for another month. This particular committee was ending, but another was due to start.
“I’ve been all right, then?” Kate asked. She knew she had, as far as the actual translating went; but she could tell from the warmth of this permanent official’s manner that there was more he wanted to say. Charm, from him, one could count on. It was what had earned him this job? But charm had to be put to one side, if one wanted to understand what he really meant, or wanted: “Oh, my dear Mrs. Brown, I should think so. We are absolutely delighted to have found you. What luck for us! And how kind of you to spare us the time.” (How delightful, this game, that she was working for them as a favour, instead of for such a very large salary—how unexpected, to find this courtly behaviour, these gentlemanly manners, here, in this newest of modern growths, the international civil services.) “Really, believe me Kate—but we may call each other Kate and Charlie now? Particularly as you are going to be so kind as to go on working for us a little longer—for a long, long time, if I had my way. But perhaps we could discuss that another time? But I must confess it is not your really remarkable skill at your job, really remarkable, since you came straight into it—some people need weeks of training before they can do it at all but you, no—it is more than that. Everyone is saying how marvellously helpful you have been in every way. I mean it. Mrs. Kingsmead, she’s the lady from the American delegation, she was saying only this morning she didn’t know how she would have managed without all your good advice. I suppose it is because of your large family? Alan Post was telling me about all those attractive young people and how smoothly it all goes along … but, well, this is the point. I suppose if a person is good at one thing then she is at another, but if you could stay with us another month, and switch to the organisational side, it would be the luckiest thing. To waste your incredible talents as a translator—it is a crime. But your other capacities are as good. In a way it is all rather awful, asking you to stop doing what you are so good at. Your salary will of course be higher if you accept. A month—if we could just count on a month?”
Of course she would accept. For one thing there was the money: she could not believe it. She had not been able to prevent herself feeling guilty that the rate at which she had been paid for being an exceedingly intelligent and fluent parrot with maternal inclinations had been nearly as high as what her husband, a doctor with so many years of training, and so many more of experience, was earning as a consultant neurologist. (In Britain, not in the States, of course; there he earned much more.) But now it would seem even worse; it was ridiculous. But she simply had to accept the fact that inside this world ordinary rules, values, standards, did not apply. As for leaving her special skills behind—her feelings about this were mixed. What was she actually going to do?
Well, she was doing very much what she did in her home. She started to organise things, to spend much time on the telephone, to see that people and places and things coincided at the right times … then, suddenly, there was a hitch. There was a typhoid scare. The usual conflict between the needs of tourism and those of public health confused everything for some days; there was a threat that all unnecessary travel in and out of these islands would be stopped altogether. The epidemic was brought under control, but almost at once there was a strike at the airport. It would be a long strike, the newspapers said. Then it was discovered that due to various oversights, hotel rooms had not been booked far enough in advance for the forty incoming delegates—here was more of the inevitable incompetence everyone delights in deploring. There were flurries of discussion at high levels: telephone calls and telegrams from and to New York, London, Australia, Canada … it was being decided that there was no law which said this conference should take place in London. It was to be a general conference, on the endemic theme of how to get food from places which grew too much to places which had too little. There were plenty of attractive and suitable cities—Paris? No, no, in July madness, crammed to the brim … the difficulties of getting this conference started were postponing the starting date; it was already nearly halfway through June. One European city after another was thought of and discussed and dismissed: Rome, Barcelona, Zurich. Kate kept thinking, like a housewife, of the telephone bills for all these postponings and suggestings and mind-changes; what was being spent on telephoning alone would be enough to feed thousands for weeks: but she was not being paid to think like a housewife, something less was being asked of her. What was it? She seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time talking about these problems, with Charlie Cooper and other officials. She felt as if she was stuck in something, an organisational marsh; nothing moved, everything delayed and dawd
The typhoid scare flared up again. Charlie Cooper and Kate Brown took to the telephone to arrange a three weeks’ conference under the aegis of Global Food in Istanbul. The delegates, all still in their countries, were informed at un believable expense on the telephone that Turkey was to have the honour of welcoming them and not London.
Kate’s empty summer was now filled until mid-July; if things delayed even more, perhaps until later. She was feeling that she ought not to have let this happen. She ought to have been thinking, perhaps, about her condition, about the cold wind. She ought to be examining the violent and uncontrollable swings in her emotions about her husband, her children—particularly her husband. For now that she had so much time—she felt as if she was doing nothing, or very little; her days were emptier than they had been for years—she was conscious of her emotional apparatus working away in a vacuum: the objects of her emotions were all elsewhere, they were not present to react with or against her. What was the sense of loving, hating, wanting, resenting, needing, rejecting—and sometimes all in the space of an hour—when she was here, by herself, free; it was like talking to yourself, it was insane … it was just as well she was going to be occupied. At least for another month. She went out and bought some more dresses. Then she bought the things to go with them. No, it was not really that these commodities were so different from those she normally wore. It was more, really, of how she would wear them. “The spirit of the thing,” as her grandfather would have said.
A woman stood in front of large mirrors in many shops, looking with a cool, not entirely friendly curiosity at a woman in her early forties who was still the same shape she had been all her adult life, give or take an inch or so; who had pretty chestnut hair—tinted of course, because the grey was coming in fast. A cool curiosity, but it easily became an eye-to-eye woman-to-woman collusion that was first cousin to that so very undermining “humorous” grimace, undermining because it seemed to nullify her official or daylight view of herself. Yes, better to avoid the long interchange of eye pressures, which threatened all the time to start off a roar of laughter: yes, she knew it, what was waiting for her was ribald laughter at the whole damned business … the kind of laughter that she and Mary Finchley enjoyed (indulged in? used as a prophylactic?) on the occasions when they were together, alone, without husbands, families, guests.
No, she must step back, look at herself as a whole, and confirm that there stood in front of her a pleasant-looking fashionable woman on the verge of middle age. Still on the verge—she had not chosen to enter the state. She could say, as she looked dispassionately at her image, that her shape, her attributes, limbs, waist, breasts, mouth, hair, neck, were not different from the equipment with which she had attracted a dozen young men nearly a quarter of a century ago, with which she had married her husband. No different; perhaps even better; since so much chemistry and medication and dieting and attention to hair, teeth, and eyes had gone into this artifact—what would she look like now if, for instance, she had been born into a slum in Brazil?
What was different was—nothing tangible. It was a question again of an atmosphere, something she carried invisibly with her. The reason why, as a young woman, this same assortment of appurtenances, teeth, eyes, hips, and so on, had attracted, whereas now they did not, or not more than any woman of her age (of the minority who have not set themselves outside the business of attraction from a pretty early age, and for a variety of reasons, poverty being the first of them), was this delicate business of “the spirit.” Surely the wrong word; but what was the right one—State? condition? presence? She did not walk inside, like the fine almost unseeable envelope of a candle flame, that emanation of attractiveness: I am available, come and sniff and taste. In her case it was because she was, and had been for so long, a wife and a mother who had not been interested—or not often, and then not for long—in attracting men other than her husband.
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
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.