The Summer Before the Dark Read online

  Perhaps she ought to go to Sierra Leone with the charming Madame Phiri? Why not? Or she could stay here; she had not done much more in Turkey than eat very good food in many restaurants and see two mosques and a church. But Turkey is not a place for a woman by herself. If this had been Paris or Rome, then perhaps … She would not be able to drive to inland cities alone here, or rather, she could not, equipped with her kind of personality, that of a long-married woman, without a man beside her.

  She was in the hotel lobby waiting for Madame Phiri, who had asked her to arrange an appointment with a hairdresser. Of course, the hotel staff could have, should have, done this; but dear Kate was so clever at getting things done.

  She stood waiting, while people went past nodding and smiling. Dear Kate. Chère Katherine. Sweet Katya, Katinka, and Kitty. Darling Katy, my own Cationa. Lovely Katlyn, Caterline, Kit, and Catherine. Ekaterina my love, my angel Katy. Karen, I don’t know what I shall do without you.

  I shall miss you, Mrs. Brown.

  She was smiling, smiling, while she was humming, but silently, inside herself, not without hysteria:

  I shall miss you Mrs. Brown!

  How I shall miss you Mrs. Brown!

  You have fed me, you have led me,

  You have given me all I wanted,

  But now you are supplanted

  And I shall miss you Mrs. Brown.…

  She was having to wait considerably longer than she had expected for Madame Phiri, who was saying goodbye to someone many floors above, when she noticed a young man whose face she recognised coming up to her: before she knew it he was inviting her on a trip to Konia with him the next day. He had hired a car.

  They had seen each other first a week before, outside this hotel, on the pavement. He, a slight dark youth in a pale summer suit, was standing with his back to the rush of the traffic, looking up and down the height of this hotel as if measuring it. He looked as if he was a guest of the hotel, even a delegate, for his pale-suited elegance put him beyond the mass of casually clothed summer tourists. Later she had seen him in a café. He was at the next table with a group of young people, and some conversation had been exchanged. Now he was dressed like a tourist, and looked hot. His dark hair, which was cut to be smoothed back, and shining, was in loose locks. And he was not a youth; she had been misled. He was telling her that he was American, was visiting Europe by no means for the first time, and that he planned to go soon to Spain, where he was always at home. She could believe that: he looked Spanish, and in any Latin country he would seem a native.

  He was not staying in this hotel, he said: it was far, far beyond what he could afford. So his asking her to go with him tomorrow could not be an impulse, but something planned? He was saying that having seen her at the café, he had deduced—after all, that was not so difficult!—where she was likely to be, had made enquiries, and here he was. At the same time as he was offering his casual impulsiveness: “It would be so lovely if you did have the time, it would be such a pity to waste the free place in the car,” his eyes engaged hers in mockery—of the situation, of himself—and were not at all anxious. For of course there would be only the two of them in the car. Her duties would be ending this evening—formally, that was; she had no doubt she would be kept busy until the last minute if she allowed herself to be. She said she would like to go with him, even as the image of Mary Finchley suddenly appeared and told her she must be out of her mind. In obedience to Mary, she was about to put limits to her acquaintanceship with this young man—not so young as he looked, just as she did not look as old as she was—but here came Madame Phiri sweeping towards them, all long lithe brown limbs, and immensely long jewelled fingers fluttering her fervent apologies at keeping Kate waiting.

  Kate saw the young man’s scrutiny of the beautiful woman. It was not concealed, or apologetic, or ashamed of itself; it was not aggressive, but an honest appreciation, which she acknowledged by the faintest of amused smiling nods before she swept on and out of the foyer: “Kate, darling, I’m going to be so late …”

  “Very well,” said Kate. “And I don’t know your name yet.”

  It was Jeffrey. And he said he would ring her that night, making a step forward into having claims on her with the same straightforward honest declaration of intentions, or at least desires, given the chance, with which he had gained a smile from Madame Phiri.

  They never got to Konia. The trip (which was hot, uncomfortable and lengthy, because the car broke down twice, and then, finally) brought these two people rapidly “together,” as they say, precisely because of the many discomforts, and then because of wondering whether to get onto a bus and continue, or to hire another car. Which discomforts, or something like them, of course the young man had been counting on, and expecting her to count on, when he had suggested it. He did not mind about not reaching Konia. She did but not much—it was really very hot, very dusty. They sat talking in the back seat while the driver left to organise other transport.

  They talked about him. He was in advertising and publicity, New York, born in Boston. He was good-looking, intelligent, amusing, educated. He also had the attractions of non-conformity: four years ago he had decided to leave what he was only too prepared to mock himself in calling “the mammon of advertising,” thus sending himself up twice, once for being a part of mammon, and once for turning his back on it, which he had done after only three, but highly successful years. It was the success, the ease of it, that had terrified him more than anything. So he had “dropped out.” Not to indigence, and hippiedom, already rather dated, for he had considered himself too old for that. And he had well-off parents. But he had turned his back on a career and a way of life. Since then he had spent much time hitchhiking and tenting around Europe. He was now thirty-two years old.

  It was clear to Kate, listening as she would to one of her sons, that he was full of disquiet and conflict. The “dropping out” had not been a final decision. His decisions were ahead of him. It was all very well to “drop out” at twenty, or at twenty-five. All very well to live with a girl he fancied or who fancied him through a summer on Mount Shasta—he had done that; or in Vermont—he had done that. All very well to live on his dead grandmamma’s money; he hastened to point out that it was “his” money and not his parents’. But he was over thirty. He did not know how he wanted to live: that was the essence of it. Like the Lord only knew how many millions of young people—which did not include, thank goodness, any of hers, or not yet, unless Tim was going to turn out like that—he did not know what to do with himself. Young people, that is, of affluent countries, the rich third of the world. The young people of the uneducated world, the hungry world, did not have choices. They had to grab and steal and starve to live. Not knowing how to live was a prerogative of the rich youth of the world.

  All of these ideas he had elaborated in his dry amusing way during the trip to Konia, and then in the back seat of the car while they watched the traffic swirl past to Konia, and then while they sat on the side of the road—it was too hot in the car. It was not until midafternoon that their driver got a lift for them back to Istanbul in a taxi driven by a friend of his. The taxi was very old. It bumped and jerked. They drove through a settling haze of yellow dust which inflamed an already wonderful sunset. He talked. Then they went to a restaurant. It had to be a cheap one, since he was asking her out, and he was not currently the employee of an Organisation. After the restaurant there was a nightclub, where he ignored belly dancers and singers, and talked, and talked. Kate listened. Above all, she was a skilled listener. While he talked she wondered whether she was going to decide to go to bed with him or not. She exchanged in imagination ribald remarks with Mary. She knew that the men who would have made approaches to Mary, had she been here, would in no way have resembled this young man. Mary would not—she would certainly say this with a rather brutal impatience—have looked at Jeffrey. There you go again, Kate, Kate imagined her saying. What’s wrong with you? For God’s sake, if you are going to get yourself scr
ewed, then do it!

  If Mary had been in this hotel, there would have presented himself in her room late one night a doorman or waiter or porter or perhaps even a fellow guest; they would have noticed each other in a corridor, a lift, a lobby; signals would have been flashed. After a night which Mary would pronounce on favourably—her instincts were infallible—she would not think of him again. Or: “There was that man I saw on the beach at Hastings,” she might say. “I told you, did I? Well, he was all right!”

  Kate was agreeing with the ghost of Mary; she already knew that this lover, if she decided to turn things that way, had chosen—a listener.

  This was the time for thought on a subject she did not think very much about … but here was a lie, another. False memory again. She must consider, honestly, the place infidelity had had in the successful and satisfactory marriage of the Michael Browns.

  The blueprints of their defining conversations had in fact matched with the realities—well, to a point. The small ironical grimace did not have to do with the gap between formula and what happened. Or did it? Kate felt as if one pattern of memory was jostling another out of her mind; meanwhile she persevered with the one she was used to. This was a happy and satisfactory marriage because both she and Michael had understood, and very early on, that the core of discontent, or of hunger, if you like, which is unfailingly part of every modern marriage—of everything, and that is the point—had nothing to do with either partner. Or with marriage. It was fed and heightened by what people were educated to expect of marriage, which was a very great deal because the texture of ordinary life (surely that was a new phrase? It had supplanted an older one? What had they used to say, that life was a vale of tears?) was thin and unsatisfactory. Marriage had had a load heaped on it which it could not sustain. All of this had been thoroughly discussed right back in the beginning. No, not exactly in “Phase One,” dedicated to delight, nor perhaps in “Phase Two” … she was belittling both of them when she mocked their youthful naiveties; they had not reached Phase Three, let alone Phases Ten or Fifteen—they had very soon grown out of such solemnity. Very well then, but it was not long after marriage, to the credit of them both, that they had agreed not to blame each other for not filling the deep hungers. What, then, did they hunger for? They did not know; they were always too busy to ask themselves.

  There was the crisis when Michael had fallen tormentedly in love with a younger colleague at the hospital. By then the marriage had accommodated very many strains and surprises. It was ten years old; the children were born. This affair had been so shattering to the emotions of Michael and Kate, if not to their intelligences, which were quite easily understanding everything that was happening, that it was not repeated. Or rather, not in that form. Later she had understood—he had allowed her to understand—that he was having, occasionally and discreetly, and with every care for her, the wife’s, dignity, affairs with young women who would not be hurt by them: affairs of the kind that blossomed among the delegates and the machinery of conferences in the great Organisations of the world. She had accepted it, and with not more than a tolerable pain. The pain was more what some part of her which she felt she ought not to approve of believed was owed to the situation. But the marriage continued quite well. To the surprise of them both, since they were surrounded by divorcing couples, marriages which had not been able to withstand an infidelity … at this point, the pattern of Kate’s thought, or memories, quite simply dissolved. Some of it was true: they had been right in making sure they did not expect too much from each other, or from marriage. But for the rest—the truth was, she had lost respect for her husband. Why, when he was doing no more than “everyone” did, men in his situation? But she was feeling about him, had felt for some time, rather as if he had a weakness for eating sweets and would not restrain it. He was diminished; there was no doubt about that. She felt maternal about her husband; she had not done so once. To have fallen in love, and painfully—that she could understand, she had done the same herself. But to arrange his life, consciously and purposefully, as he had done, “clearing it” with her, of course, while he did it, so that he might have an infinite series of casual friendly sexual encounters with any young woman who went by—that made him seem trivial to her. And the way he had been dressing and doing his hair—when he came back from abroad somewhere, the first time, having tried to turn the clock back by at least fifteen years—she had suffered a fit of trembling anger and disgust. Soon, of course, she had been persuaded—not least by what Michael was not saying so much as indicating—that she was envious: it was petty of her.

  But from the time she understood that this was what he was doing, and that this was what she could expect until old age did for him—unless, like a granny who dyed her hair and wore short skirts so that people could admire her legs, still unchanged, he would keep on till he died—she felt that her own worth, even her substance, had been assaulted. There was no explaining this, but it was a fact. Because her husband—who was in every possible way a good and responsible husband—had decided to experience an indefinite number of “affairs” that were by definition irresponsible, and would have no point to them but sex, she, Kate, felt diminished. She would have preferred him to confess—no, insist, as his right, on a real emotion—a real bond with some woman, even two or three women, which would deepen and last and demand loyalty—from herself as well. That would not have made her feel as if a wound had been opened in her from which substance and strength drained from her as she sat in her house in South London, knowing him to be (only in the intervals of his real work, his real interests, of course) pursuing this or that sexual titillation. She felt about him—against all reason and what her carefully constructed blueprints told her she could feel—as if he had lost his way, had lost purpose.

  It was stupid to feel like this. It was unworldly, it was unsophisticated, it was ungenerous. She knew what Mary would say if she told her: that it didn’t matter. But she did feel like this. She wasn’t going to pretend she felt anything different. A few days ago she would have said that whatever emotions, or thoughts, or new blueprints of truth were standing offstage waiting for the chance to come on—once she had decided to stop being so busy nannying other people, talking, smiling, smiling, smiling, and now busy in the foothills of a love affair which she already felt she had to climb, like the kind of mountain peak that everyone has to climb who is interested in mountaineering at all—whatever these truths were (and she was so afraid of facing them that she was doing everything possible not to) they surely could have nothing to do with the fact that her Michael had trivial affairs by the dozen with anybody he could? That loss had occurred years ago. But perhaps this is where she should begin (when she gave herself time for it!) her feeling, childish, irrational, but absolutely undeniable, that because of Michael she felt like a doll whose sawdust was slowly trickling away.

  She was feeling like this now, as she watched the young man sitting in front of her, leaning forward in his desperate need to receive from her—from anyone who would give it—whatever it was that kept him talking, talking, and not seeing her at all; after all, she had already done this climb, older woman, younger man!

  Popular wisdom claims that this particular class of love affair is the most poignant, tender, poetic, exquisite one there is, altogether the choicest on the menu. With the possible exception of its counterpart, older man and girl. (If she was going to have this affair, the one in front of her, the one on her plate, was it because of Michael? Her will-less, drifting behaviour, not being able to say no, not being able to do what she would, was because she had been set in motion, like a piece of machinery, by Michael?) Popular wisdom was right. But she had done it already. The ingredients had been perfect: she had been thirty-five, he, twenty. And it had been secret; not a soul had known. It had been marvellously frustrated by circumstances, bittersweet, doomed—the lot.

  It was Goethe, or rather Goethe as interpreted by his alter ego Thomas Mann, who said that the kiss was the essence of love. He
had “wormed it” enough in his time, he said; but it was the kiss that was the thing.

  One has to be a married woman of thirty-five with a husband and watchful children around every minute of the day and the night to achieve the circumstances where a kiss has to be enough. No, there had in fact been a delicious weekend, achieved at the cost of God knows what organisation, and arranging and lying, but looking back, it was certainly not sex that had been the thing. For apart from anything else, no sane woman goes to a boy for sex, an area where ripeness is all: her sex life with her Michael was everything fantasy would choose. Or it had been … what was it now, then? Physically admirable, of course. Emotionally? But why should that matter? Mary would have yelled with laughter at the suggestion that it should. (She was thinking more of Mary now than she did when she lived opposite to her.) The fact was, sex with her husband, these days, now that she knew that his sexual realities were in the so-carefully-planned-for adventures with girls, was something that—not bored her, no, but which certainly she was becoming more and more reluctant to have at all. It was like being faced with a heavy meal when you aren’t hungry … it was not that her sexual appetites were less—or were they? If they were, why did she feel as if to admit it would be confessing failure? But what she did have an appetite for was something in the past, that time when she and the marriage—what he still found in marriage and in married sex—had been his need, his aim: what he was then making sure he would get, despite children, the weight of household management and care, in spite of everything. Once upon a time she had known that her husband’s life had been sustained by her, by what they found together, and the centre of that was bed.

  This affair, staring her in the face, certainly would not be a question of delicate emotions and rare anguish. This youth was too old. He was too worldly. He was too self-critical.