The Summer Before the Dark Read online

  Now she said, “Well, we’ve never let it before, have we?”

  “What of it?” said Michael. “Some visiting family will take it and be glad to, even if we do leave things in the cupboards.”

  “But what are the children going to use as headquarters if they happen to be in London on their way to somewhere?”

  “They can use somebody else’s house for once, and about time too.”

  “But I don’t really think …”

  “I’ll ring the agent in the morning,” said Dr. Michael Brown, shaming Kate, since he worked from dawn to dusk and would be no less busy than she at her committee.

  But the point was, she was feeling dismissed, belittled, because the problem of the house was being considered so unimportant.

  And when her committee was over, what would she do? It was being taken for granted she would fit herself in somewhere—how very flexible she was being, just as always, ever since the children were born. Looking back over nearly a quarter of a century, she saw that that had been the characteristic of her life—passivity, adaptability to others. Her first child had been born when she was twenty-two. The last was born well before she was thirty. When she offered these facts to others, many envied her; a large number of people, in many countries, knew the Michael Browns as an enviable family.

  The small chill wind was blowing very definitely, if still softly enough: this was the first time in her life that she was not wanted. She was unnecessary. That this time in her life was approaching she had of course known very well for years. She had even made plans for it; she would study this, travel there, take up this or that type of welfare work. It is not possible, after all, to be a woman with any sort of a mind, and not know that in middle age, in the full flood of one’s capacities and energies, one is bound to become that well-documented and much-studied phenomenon, the woman with grown-up children and not enough to do, whose energies must be switched from the said children to less vulnerable targets, for everybody’s sake, her own as well as theirs. So there was nothing surprising about what was happening. Perhaps she ought to have expected it sooner?

  She had not expected it this summer. Next summer, or the year after that, yes, but not now. What she had set herself to face had been all in the future. But it was now that it was happening. Only temporarily, of course, for the house would become their family house again in September, would again be the welcoming base for these “children” all now at home less and less often. But there was her husband to consider, a man who much appreciated his home and everything that went with it. When had all the family last been together, with everyone back from university, or various holidays and trips and excursions, at the same time? A very long time ago, when you came to think of it.

  But the fact was that she, this kingpin, was to be at a loose end from June to late September. With not so much as a room of her own. A very curious feeling that was, as if a warm covering had been stripped off her, as if she were an animal being flayed.

  She and Michael had, of course, discussed this question of her future; talked over her feelings, and his. Discussing everything was the root and prop of their marriage. They believed, always had, that things left unsaid festered, things brought out into the open lost their force. Their relationship had been conducted on this principle from the start.

  A great deal of intelligent insight had gone into their view of themselves and this marriage. They had not been wrong about much.

  For instance, in their joint bedroom, were two books, side by side, one by Bertrand Russell called The Conquest of Happiness, and one by Van der Velde, Ideal Marriage. From Kate to Michael—Russell; and from Michael to Kate—Van der Velde. Both inscriptions read: “For The First Phase. With all my love.” This commemorated that fact that a phase had ended when their delicious love affair had to end, and they married. They had known that things must change, that the deliciousness must abate, and their long discussions about it all were summed up by these friendly books, From Kate to Michael, From Michael to Kate, For The First Phase. Now, picking up these books and opening them on the inscription page, both might have been caught out in a humorous grimace, had been caught out by each other, which led to frank and certainly healthy laughter. (Laughter is by definition healthy.) The point was, why the humorous grimace at all? They had been so utterly right, about what had been finishing, and what was beginning—the solid, demanding, satisfactory marriage. There was no room for a humorous grimace. What were they being humorous, ironical, about? And similarly, with certain other long frank open discussions about changes and turning points. Neither would have relinquished these. But Kate had certainly caught herself thinking that perhaps these blueprints of psychological observation, or if you like, manifestos, that accompanied stages or “phases” of the marriage, were perhaps not all they should be?

  The discussion, for instance, about the cold wind from the future. Which had taken place three years before: but things had happened since which had not been blueprinted or made into statements of account … For the Ninth—or Nineteenth—Phase.

  What had happened was that Michael’s mouth tightened when Tim was mentioned, as now when he said, “I’ll ring the agent in the morning.” Putting her into perspective, laying her aside. So she felt it. That is what she had been feeling, regardless of the dozen or so mental attitudes, garments taken down off a rack, the words she used to describe her situation.

  Whatever that situation was, whatever it really was, by the end of that summer evening a hundred strands in Kate’s life seemed to be pulled together. This was manifested in many telephone numbers scribbled on bits of paper, on addresses of all sorts, and in a conscious effort to win back memories of her grandfather sitting on the verandah of a stone house in a deep garden full of flame trees and lilies. “Catherine! The way to learn a language is to breathe it in. Soak it up! Live it!”

  Faced with an interview to judge her ability to translate at speed from English, French, and Italian into Portuguese and back again, she sat up all night, having cleared away the day’s disorder of dirty dishes and scraps of food and grease—luckily the power came on again at about ten in the evening—rereading the novel she had herself translated, reliving in her mind walks and talks, meals with her grandfather. By the morning her immersion in the other language was such that if she had jostled someone in the street she would have apologised in Portuguese.

  Global Food

  But all this, and her anxious choosing of a suitable dress for the interview, her worry over her hair—really very suburban, and she knew it—her inner adjustments of manner away from being Mrs. Michael Brown, all turned out to be unnecessary. As she walked into the office of a Mr. Charlie Cooper, he said, “Mrs. Brown? Thank God you have been able to find the time. You are starting today, aren’t you—good.”

  She had been described by the friend and intermediary, Alan Post, as the formidably highly equipped woman-with-a-family, who had been pressed into abandoning the said family, and into relieving the embarrassment of this great international organisation. From the first she was in a special category, the amateur, made to feel as if she were doing a favour.

  It appeared that of the four replacements to the original team of four skilled translators, two had again fallen out for family and health reasons.

  “This whole thing is jinxed, it is doomed!” cried Charlie Cooper, “but I am sure our luck will turn with you.” And he hurried her along a wide passage that gleamed and shone and was many-windowed, and into a lift that was large and had a picture of a dark-skinned woman smiling agreeably while picking coffee beans off a very green bush, and along another impressive passage, passing a committee on butter, and another on sugar; and into a very large long room, in the middle of which was a gleaming oval table of the size which makes one think at once of the factory there must be somewhere whose whole business it is to create immense tables, long or oval or round, for the use of international conferences.

  A committee was in progress. The table had on it glasses
of water, pencils, stylos, sheets of scribbled and doodled paper. But the chairs were awry, and empty; the delegates were all downstairs drinking—presumably coffee—and engaged in that most common of contemporary conversations, the one about the total inefficiency and incompetence of any public service or occasion, which conversation will of course get more frequent and more ill-tempered as the numbers of people everywhere multiply and the services, by the law of inertia, fall even further behind demand. Only now did the tactful Charlie Cooper tell Kate that she had been expected that morning at ten, to start her day with the beginning of the first session, and not at twelve, which it now was—but of course, she had not been told, it was not her fault, things were always thus—yes, he could believe it, she had been told to “drop in some time that morning”?—typical!

  But could she start now, yes, this very moment, or rather, when the delegates had returned from their enforced coffee break—there was on duty that day, apart from herself, precisely one properly qualified simultaneous translator for the Portuguese language.

  Kate had thought this would be a preliminary interview, and had told various interested people that she would be back to arrange food for lunch and attend to the laundry. But if she could go and make a telephone call then … Charlie Cooper’s face became agonised—the delegates would be back upstairs in one minute, they had been called back because of her, Kate’s arrival. With a great screaming wrench, Kate’s years of conditioning for itemised responsibility ripped off her. Charlie Cooper would telephone for her, he would simply announce that Mrs. Brown was otherwise occupied. It was to Eileen that this announcement would be made: suppressing an impulse to send her daughter messages of love and support, Kate allowed herself to be handed over to a young woman who was going to give her instruction into her duties. At each place around the table was machinery for receiving languages not one’s own translated into one’s own: sound transformed in its passage from speaker to hearer. By Kate, among others. There were switches, each one a door into a foreign tongue. There were headphones. In glass-walled cubicles at either end of the room were more switches, receiving apparatus, headphones. It would be Kate’s task to sit in one of these cubicles, to listen to speeches made in English, French, and Italian, and to translate them as she listened into Portuguese, which she would speak aloud into a transmitter connected with the ears of the Portuguese speakers—mostly Brazilian, who did not speak English, or who did, but preferred, nevertheless, their own tongue. She would be like a kind of machine herself: into her ears would flow one language, and from her mouth would flow another.

  She would not, of course, be alone all day in her cubicle, even with the shortage of translators. There would be frequent changes and rests and chances for replenishing of vital energies during this extremely taxing task—as Charlie Cooper kept emphasising it was; for he had returned from telephoning her family, an errand he regarded as of so little importance that he did not report on it. She was in the cubicle with him; she had the headphones on; she was turning switches off and on, with his aid. While he instructed her, he was scribbling a message on a memorandum block saying that the organisation offered sincere and remorseful apologies for the shortage of translators, and implored the delegates’ tolerance and patience. With this in his hand he hurried out, to find a typist to copy it. Through the glass of the cubicle Kate—alone now, left to herself—was able to see that the conference room, viewed from this small height, was very pleasant. It had high windows. The walls were covered in a copper-coloured wood that was much grained and whorled and patterned. The floors were deep in dark-blue carpet.

  In this room were decided the fates and fortunes of millions of little people, what crops they were going to grow, what they would eat, and wear—and think.

  While Charlie Cooper was still laying a sheet of paper—the apology, miraculously multiplied in this brief space of a few minutes—in each place around the table, the delegates came in, laughing and talking. What an extraordinarily attractive lot they were! Such a collection of many-coloured, many-nationed handsome men and women would be what a film producer would try to shoot to make a scene from some idealised picture of united nations. But would the actors have been able to convey such a perfection of casual authority, such assurance? For that was the impression they made. The difference between them and their assistants and secretaries and the attendants of various kinds could be seen by that quality alone. Each man or woman strolled to his or her chair, seated himself, continued to talk and to laugh with a perfection of ease that shouted the one word: Power. Every gesture, each look, conveyed conviction of usefulness, the weight of what they represented.

  Some of the clothes worn were national costume: there were half a dozen men and women from somewhere in Africa who made all the others look members of inferior races, so tall and graceful and majestically dressed were they: the folds of their robes, their earrings, the turn of a head—each knew its role. And what authority even the creases in a suit can convey, worn by a man whose decisions are of importance to people hauling sacks of coffee on a hillside thousands of miles away.

  The proceedings had begun; and Kate found that her brain, that machine, was doing its work smoothly. A few moments of panic, a feeling that her mind was blank and would be forever, had been dispelled by hearing her own words come out, quite sensibly ordered, and by watching the faces of the people who listened. No one seemed upset by what they heard; everything was as it should be.

  And in an incredibly short time—it turned out that it had been two hours—she was relieved by a colleague, was sent off to relax and have a good lunch. She returned to her cubicle with confidence; and by five o’clock that afternoon felt as much a part of this organisation as she did of her family. To which she returned too late for the evening meal, to find that her daughter had cooked it, and that everything was going on quite comfortably.

  By the end of that week Kate was initiated into the complexities of that bitter and fragrant herb the world drinks so much of; she could hardly think of anything else. And her house had been tidied and put ready for letting. Then it had been let, until the end of September, and the family had departed to its various destinations without any help from her. All she had said was, in a voice which only a week before would have been anxious, but now was in-different, “Someone has got to see to it, because I haven’t got the time.” She had kissed her husband, and her three sons and her daughter goodbye, but had not yet had time to feel any particular emotion.

  She was in a room in a flat rented by one of her colleagues; a woman who had translated, but who had been promoted: she now organised conferences. This move from Kate’s home into this room, with all the necessities for some months, had taken half an hour, and the act of flinging some clothes into a suitcase.

  None of the clothes were any use, anyway. At some point during that week she rushed out to buy the dresses that would admit her, like a passport, to this way of life. Mrs. Michael Brown could not have been called ill-dressed; but it was not Mrs. Michael Brown who was being employed by Global Food.

  Before going shopping she had asked Charlie Cooper what she was going to earn. His round, humorous, harassed face—his permanent expression, because of being male nanny to so many committees—became agonised with remorse.

  “My dear!” he said. “Accept my apologies! Oh, I don’t see how you can—it was really too awful of me! I should have talked about that before anything else. But it’s been such a week—really, if you only knew what a godsend you’ve been!” And he mentioned a sum which she stopped herself exclaiming at. It was in this casual, positively gentlemanly way, as if the world of trade unions, of bitterly contested wages, poverty, the anguish of hunger, did not exist, that the salaries of these international officials, these indispensable fortunates, could be arranged.

  She had bought her dresses, half a dozen of them, thinking that at the end of her two weeks with Global Food, she would have a wardrobe fit for an elegant holiday somewhere. But her plans were only for, perhap
s, visiting an old friend in Sussex, or an aunt in Scotland. She had not really thought of what she was going to do.

  The second week was less pressured. Her work had become something she did as easily as she had run a home—unbelievably, only a few days ago. She did it automatically. In between the sessions in the cubicles, she spent her time in the coffee rooms, watching. She was, after all, an outsider, did not feel that she was entitled to join this privileged throng. She was a migrant; it would all be over in a week. But she sat as if she felt she had a right to it all—her new dresses made this much easier; she drank the superb coffee, she watched. It was like a market. Or like a long, gay, permanently continuing party.

  A woman sat in a public room, relaxed but observant, an official in a public organisation, dressed like one, holding herself like one; but letting her life—or the words that represented her thoughts about her life—flow through her mind. Was it that for twenty-five years she had been part of that knot of tension, the family, and had forgotten that ordinary life, life for everyone not in the family, was so agreeable, so undemanding? How well-dressed everyone was. How everybody’s skin glowed and shone. And how easy the way a man or a woman would come in here, glance around, find smiles and pleasant looks waiting for them, then wave and sit down by themselves, with a gesture that said: I need a moment’s solitude—which wish was of course respected. Or casually, almost insolently, look over the room to see which group he or she would join. There seemed never a sign of the tension that you would find after five minutes in any street outside this sheltered place. In any street, or shop, or home the currents flowed and crossed and made new currents. Outside this great public building the conflicts went on. But here? Had these easy well-turned creatures, each burnished and polished by money, ever suffered? Ever wept in the dark? Ever wanted something they could not get? Of course they had, they must have—but there was not a sign of it. Had they ever—but perhaps this was not the right question to ask—had they ever been hungry?