The Summer Before the Dark (12 page)

Their hotel was not in the glittering strip along the luxurious part of the little town. It was set back in the older part which in normal months was inhabited only by Spaniards. But they entered a foyer as lit and as lively as in day, for this was holiday month and sleep could be postponed. Couples of all nations sat about drinking. The dining room was open, and people were still at dinner—it was past one o’clock. The desk clerk handed the key over to Mr. Jeffrey Merton and Mrs. Catherine Brown without any dimming of his smile, but his body expressed offended disapproval without knowing that it did.

They ascended to a bedroom which was not the best the hotel had: she had a lot of money because of the highly paid job, but was scaled down to him, who was making sure that his grandmamma’s money would continue to preserve his independence for him—none of it was invested, he had insisted on putting it into jewellery and pictures, which were in a bank’s keeping. It was the kind of hotel she and her family might have chosen: unpretentious, old
fashioned. The room had a balcony, which overlooked a little public garden; from it came a gay churning music, the sound of voices. She went to stand on the balcony. He joined her. They kissed, expert lovers. He departed to the bathroom. Down in the moon-whitened street people sat on doorsteps, talking. Their children, even small ones, sat with them, or played nearby. It was warm and soft and the small isolated music intensified a general stillness. People had slept all afternoon and would not go to bed until the sky lightened. The town felt more awake, more flowing and alert than it ever did in the day. In the cities of southern Spain, at night, in the biting summer, another vitality awakes, holding together in a web of sociability that runs from street to alley to garden the cries of children, the barking of a dog, music, gossip. This is the time for sitting and watching, for talk, for living. From everywhere in the quiet dark, from the pools of light where the street was lit, arose voices.

Jeffrey had come back into the room. She left the balcony and went towards the bed to turn it back as he pitched forward on to it, prone. At first, her femininity rose and shouted that this was an insult: they had made love only once, and they were supposed to be lovers. Next, she found herself laying two fingers on his pulse and a hand on his shoulder, to assess his condition and his temperature. His flesh was hot, but then the air was. He looked exhausted. What she could see of his face was a beaded scarlet. His pulse was slow. She used all her strength to turn him over, to lay him in bed, to pull the sheet up. The flush was rapidly draining from his face: now he was pale, sallow. He might not have a temperature but he certainly wasn’t well.

While her femininity continued to shout, or rather, to
make formal complaint, that it was outraged, and that she ought to feel insulted, she returned to the balcony, on the whole with relief. She fetched a straight chair from the room which seemed stuffy as well as unwholesomely dark compared with this light airy night over a street that still moved and laughed, and she put the chair in the corner of the balcony, and sat herself there. She wore a white cotton robe that left her arms and neck bare to receive what breezes there were. There she sat, in that most familiar of all situations—alert, vigilant, while a creature slept who was younger than herself. The block of moonlight on the balcony soon shifted. She moved her chair out of it, in such a way that her legs and arms might lie in it but her head would stay in the shadow—exactly as if the moon were a sun.

Some fifty feet down, on the opposite pavement, two men were talking. They were two papas, stout men, in creased light summer suits that from here looked dazzling—like the sand on the beach in moonlight. The creases showed black. Beyond them boughs waved: the square where the music had stopped. Occasional cars went past, noisy, saying that the music had been louder than it had seemed. In the intervals between the roarings and hootings she could hear the men’s voices quite clearly. The Spanish was coming into her ears in lumps or blocks—unassimilable. It was a veil between herself and Spain which she could not pull aside. But it was a semitransparent veil, unlike the Turkish of only that morning. It had moments of transparence. The Portuguese that was in her, like an open door to half that peninsular, a large part of Africa, and a large part of South America, sometimes fitted over the sounds she was listening to, sometimes not. A language she knew nothing of, like German, was all thick and impenetrable.
But this listening to the Spanish was like seeing something through trees off a road one is rushing along. The conversation nagged, on the edge of meaning. When she leaned right over the balcony, receiving moonlight all over her, in a cool splash of white, so that she felt so prominent and self-displaying she could not prevent herself glancing this way and that along the face of this hotel—no, she was the only person out on the balconies—when she leaned right over so that she could see the gestures, the poses, the positions of the two portly bodies, then she was able to understand much more. A set of the fat shoulders, or a flinging open of a palm added to the messages sent out by the intonation—
almost
she was understanding Spanish. They were talking about business, that was clear. Yet she had not heard one word that told her this. Their voices were those of men talking about money; their bodies talked risk and gain. The shriek of a passing car swallowed the talk, spat it out again: it was a near intelligibility, like windows paned with sheets of quartz instead of glass. The voices stopped. A smell of tobacco. She looked over and saw them lighting cigars. The smoke drifted away in small mists and sank into leaves. One fat man went away; the other lingered, looking about as if the night might offer him a postponement of sleep; then he went too. In a few minutes they would be in striped pyjamas. The pale suits would be heaped on a tiled bathroom floor ready to be picked up by their wives and put into the wash. The men would be sliding into bed beside two fat pale women.

Darling! Chéri! Carissimo! Caro!

She inspected the bedroom, so dark because of this blaze of cold light outside. On the bed, her lover lay sprawled. She could hear his breathing. She did not like the sound of it. If he had been one of her sons, she would
be thinking about calling the doctor in tomorrow—
she must stop this at once!

It was getting on for four. At last the streets were emptying, though in the square people still reposed on benches, breathing in the night, dreaming, smoking. The steps below were empty now. But two children played quietly against the hotel wall, while their father sat by them on a stool, his back against bricks which were probably still warm. The mother came out and said the children should go to bed, and they set up a wailing protest; one did not need Spanish to understand what everyone was saying while papa was being stern, mamma exclamatory, the children clutching at the life their parents wished to bury in sleep. Then mamma brought out a chair and sat by her husband; one child sat on her lap, the other on his. The children were drooping in sleep; the parents talked quietly: hotel employees, from the kitchens perhaps? The cars were few now. The town was as quiet as it could be in these frenetic months of the tourist.

Kate was far from sleep.

She was tempted to slide into the big bed and sleep simply to avoid—what she had to do, at some point.

Besides, she was still able to savour moments like these, without pressures of any kind, after the years of living inside the timetable of other people’s needs. She could still hug to herself the thought: If I don’t go to bed until the sun rises it doesn’t matter. I needn’t get up till midday if I don’t choose.

It had not been until three years ago that this freedom had been regained by her—of course, that was where she was going to have to look, at the time of the children’s growing up. But she could have claimed the right to freedom years before. Years before. What about Mary Finchley
for instance? If she felt like staying in bed till mid-afternoon she did, and shouted at the children to bring her food or tea. In between Kate the girl who had married Michael, and Kate of three years ago which was when she had become conscious there was something to examine, the rot had set in.

The climactic moment of three years ago had been when Tim, then a tumultuous sixteen, had turned on her at the supper table and screamed that she was suffocating him. This had been wrenched from his guts, it was easy to see that. All the family were present, everyone was shocked—oh yes, they had understood that this was an event of a new quality, destructive, which announced a threat to that unit which they were; all had rallied into tact, smoothing this moment of real misery and fright for both herself and the boy. For it
had
been wrung out of him, and he was shocked at the hatred he had shown. Normally, in this well-tempered family—so they had thought of themselves, well-adjusted, with effort spent to keep them so—such conflicts were out in the open, discussed, bantered away. Sometimes brutally. It could be said that the spirit of the young couple’s “Phase Two”—discussion to soften the painful limits of “Phase One”—had been taken into use by their growing family, years later. No one could have said—who? Kate was imagining some sort of critic, a welfare worker perhaps—that this was a family in which things were smothered, hidden, and had to go underground.

Yet that the boy had had to crack himself open in that way, before them all, and under pressure, showed that perhaps all the banter and psychologising and criticism was not the healthy and therapeutic frankness she had imagined, they all had imagined, but a form of self-deception? A family
folie
, like the madness that encloses lovers who destroy
themselves. If there is a
folie à deux
then there is certainly a
folie à
—as many as you like!

Looking back at a typical family scene, during the adolescence of her four, she saw herself at one end of the table, tender and swollen like a goose’s fattening liver with the frightful pressure of four battling and expanding egos that were all in one way or another in conflict or confluence with herself, a focus, a balancing point; and her husband at the other end, being tolerant, humorous—a little weary. But not really implicated, not involved, for he worked so hard, had so little emotional energy left over to give to the family, to the four children—monsters. They called themselves so: we four monsters. Five monsters: she had been so involved with their growing, the continual crises, their drive up and out from herself, all the emotions, that she had found it hard to separate herself from them. She still did. Yet the monsters’ pressure on her, the insistent demands, had ended. Well, nearly, except for the youngest, Tim.

On that particular occasion she had retired from the table as soon as she could without it seeming as if she were a little girl going off to sulk or weep. Even so she had been like a cat or a dog that has been kicked inadvertently by a friend. She knew that as she went. She was conscious of five pairs of eyes deliberately
not
looking at her. She had gone to her room while the boy fled in shame because he had shouted, having kept his head down over his plate to finish his pudding.

In her room she had sat and thought, had tried to think, while emotions rioted. She had felt nearly crazy under the pressure of her old feeling: It’s not fair, what do they expect of me?

It was her fault that Tim was very hard, on himself,
on the others—on her? The three others had stepped imperceptibly from being “children” into being adolescents. All stormy and problematical, certainly, but Tim’s explosion into adolescence shook everybody. Everybody discussed, understood; much verbal display went on among these clever modern children. Tim was judged by them all to be more monstrous than any; and Kate as his victim. But the one thing that had
not
happened—she had to come back to this point again and again—was evasion, secrecy. During those years when she felt as if she were locked for ever in a large box with four perpetually exploding egos, she had consoled herself with: But nothing’s being hidden, everything’s being said. And she had contrasted her own family with others—not with the Finchleys, they were beyond comparison, they had their own laws—and all families with adolescents were like this. At the hub of each was a mother, a woman, sparks flying off her in all directions as the psyches ground together like pebbles on a beach in a storm. She had been overanxious about dominating, controlling, keeping them younger than they should be? She had been as anxious about giving them too much freedom, treating them like adults too soon—but perhaps that was the fault, and Mary was right, who never gave a thought to
how
she should behave—she simply followed her mood. But it wasn’t a question of domination or not, it was all to do with involvement. She had been too involved with everything, had sunk herself into it too far, so that the children had not had some strong fixed point to rely on? But surely the man, the father should be that? Perhaps after all Michael had been right all the time, she had been wrong in criticising him: his degree of involvement had been the right one. For why should it be necessary for a mother to be there like a grindstone at the heart
of everything? Looking back it seemed as if she had been at everybody’s beck and call, always available, always criticised, always being bled to feed these—monsters. Looking back at her own adolescence she could see nothing similar. Of course, she had had a close, a very close, intimacy with her mother until she died, the year before the trip to Lourenço Marques; and her father had been away for most of the war, leaving the two, mother and daughter, together; but she could not believe it had been the same thing at all.

But what was the use of her sitting here balancing and sifting—making excuses? For Tim had cracked, shouting that she smothered him, she had made him into a baby, and the fact that this had not been just routine “love talk”—the family’s own name for their criticisms of each other—was shown by everyone’s reactions.

Very well, then, she had been too dominant with him.