The Summer Before the Dark Page 5

  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.)

  Well of course it was ridiculous to expect her, Kate, to turn herself into an old woman just because … Soon she discovered that if she wanted to be alone, she should sit badly, in a huddled or discouraged posture, and allow her legs to angle themselves unbecomingly. If she did this men did not see her. She could swear they did not. Sitting neatly, alertly, with her legs sleekly disposed, she made a signal. Sagging and slumped, it was only when all the seats in the coffee room were taken that someone came to sit near her. At which time it was enough to let her face droop to gain her privacy again, and very soon.

  It was really extraordinary! There she sat, Kate Brown, just as she had always been, her self, her mind, her awareness, watching the world from behind a façade only very slightly different from the one she had maintained since she was sixteen. It was a matter only of a bad posture, breasts allowed to droop, and a look of “Yes, if you have to …” and people did not see her. It gave her a dislocated feeling, as if something had slipped out of alignment. For she was conscious, very conscious, as alert to it as if this was the most important fact of her life, that the person who sat there watching, shunned or ignored by men who otherwise would have been attracted to her, was not in the slightest degree different from the person who could bring them all on again towards her by adjusting the picture of herself—lips, a set of facial muscles, eye movements, angle of back and shoulders. This is what it must feel to be an actor, an actress—how very taxing that must be, a sense of self kept burning behind so many different phantasms.

  A long way off she saw Kate Ferreira, in her thin white embroidered linen dress, standing against the pillar of a verandah on which were tubs full of white lilies. This girl was smiling at some young men. She smiled at their faces, but their eyes were all over her. Through the windows that opened on to the verandah from the living room, she could see old Maria, her grandfather’s housekeeper, who sat crocheting in a position which would enable her to watch Kate and the men. That day she had said to her, “You should not sit with your skirt so high.” The skirt had slipped above her knee. The day before Kate had worn scarlet shorts for tennis, and Maria had said she looked lovely. Last winter Kate had observed this scene with her own daughter: Eileen had been wearing a short skirt all day, halfway up her thighs. That night she had on a long dress, to her ankles. As she sat on the floor she noticed a man look at her ankles: instinctively she pulled the skirt down over her ankles, and shot the man a resentful glance.

  That girl on the verandah, had she been “sympathetic,” “a warm personality”?

  Probably not. Hadn’t those qualities been created by the interminable disciplines of being wife, mother, housekeeper?

  When she was in Turkey, if she were to behave as if she were invisible, with not only the thermostat switched to low, but with her “sympathy” switched off too, if she refused to be a tribal mother, what would happen then? Yet the really interesting thing was that she could swear the people who had engaged her had not any idea of why they were engaging her, why they were so very set on having her. This although Charlie Cooper, a man, provided exactly the same quality. So that meant he did not know why he was in his job?

  One of the translators whose leaving had caused the crisis that had brought her, Kate, to sit here, was a middle-aged woman who, Charlie said, was “worth her weight in gold.” Trying to elicit exactly what her qualities were, Kate could get out of him only that “older women have much more patience than young ones.”

  At the committee for which Kate had translated there had been a woman delegate, a black woman, from North Africa. She was tall, elegant, witty, chic, cool, distinguished. Her clothes were sometimes the robes of her own country that made her look like a gorgeous bird, and sometimes from Paris: she was different from Kate; both women would have said they had nothing in common. Yet it was noticeable that when she was absent from the committee, things did not go smoothly. Her manner—so indifferent, so sharp, so smilingly unsympathetic and not in any way dedicated to oiling the wheels—had nothing to do with it? She had supplied to that committee the same quality as Kate did for its organisation and peripheral problems.

  If she, Kate Brown, were to become a permanent employee of this organisation, what would her real function be? Well of course, for one thing, she would spend inordinate amounts of time talking to Charlie Cooper and drinking coffee with him, and in conference with men talking about how to organise this or that. Working.

  If she did stay, then it was likely she would soon inherit Charlie’s job, while he, as seemed to be the law, would be promoted upwards. She would fit his job; but he, higher, probably would be uncomfortable, at a loss, feel out of place, but never know why this was so.

  What he was good at was to be the supplier of some kind of invisible fluid, or emanation, like a queen termite, whose spirit (or some such word—electricity) filled the nest, making a whole of individuals who could have no other connection.

  This is what women did in families—it was Kate’s role in life. And she had performed this function, together with the beautiful young woman from Africa, for the committee that was now over. She was going to fill the role again in Turkey. It was a habit she had got into. She was beginning to see that she could accept a job in this organisation, or another like it, for no other reason than that she was unable to switch herself out of the role of provider of invisible manna, consolation, warmth, “sympathy.” Not because she needed a job, or wanted to do one. She had been set like a machine by twenty-odd years of being a wife and a mother.

  In a corner of a restless noisy room sat a collected figure, female, holding in well-tended but overcompetent hands that day’s newspaper, her eyes lowered, her shoulders rather hunched: they were set to withstand the sort of cold a living animal must feel if its skin is ripped off, or the cold a new lamb feels emerging from the wet warmth of a belly, dropping onto frozen ground in a sleety wind.

  It would be easy to hold the cold wind off, of course: she could do it indefinitely. It would be easy for years yet. All she had to do was to say to her family—news that they would greet, she knew, with relief—that she had decided to take a job. And then find the right kind of job. Here, probably, why not? What could be more useful than to work for Global Food? Then she would nourish and nurture in herself that person which was all warmth and charm, that personality which had nothing to do with her, nothing with what she really was, the individual who sat and watched and noted from behind the warm brown eyes, the cared-for skin, the heavy curves of her
dark-red hair.

  But for three weeks, a month, she would be far too busy to think of these things: she would be caring for others. And by this time tomorrow—so she reflected on the eve of her departure to Istanbul—what she was feeling and thinking now, the results of three days’ carefully guarded solitude, would seem pretty remote. The best she could do there, very likely, would be to remember that she had come to these conclusions, essential ones, and hold on to them. Even if she was not able to remember this for more than a snatched few minutes in every overfull day.

  That night the dream came into her sleep again—the continuation of the dream about the seal. Now, because it had appeared twice, it was announcing its importance to her. She had half-forgotten the first instalment; now she must remember it … so she was worrying, even while the second part unfolded.

  The seal was heavy, and slippery. It was hard to keep it in her arms. She was staggering among the sharp rocks. Where was the water, where was the sea? How could she be sure of going in the right direction? Panic that this was not the right direction made her swerve off to the right along a level place on the hillside, and she went on for a while, but the seal began to make restless movements, and she realised that she had been going in the right direction in the first place. Again she set herself to go north. The poor seal had scars on its sides: it had been humping overland to reach the sea, and had torn itself on rocks and on stony soil. She was worrying that she did not have any ointment for these wounds, some of which were fresh, and bleeding. There were many scars, too, of old wounds. Perhaps some of the low bitter shrubs that grew from the stones had medicinal properties. She carefully laid down the seal, who put its head on her feet, off the stones, and she reached down and sideways and pulled some ends of a shrub. There was no way to pulp this green, so she chewed it, and spat the liquid from her mouth on to the seal’s wounds. It seemed to her that these were already healing, but she could not stop to do any more, and she again picked up the seal and struggled on with it.