The Summer Before the Dark

by Doris Lessing

  It was mid-September before she dragged herself out of bed. She had lost more weight. Her hair stuck out around a face all bones, stiff and frizzy, streaked with orange, grey-rooted. She could not get her brush through it. Of course, a little patience over an appointment, and in a couple of hours it could be restored to the heavy sleek silky shape that was “her” style. Or had been, for three months. When she returned home though, she would have to return to “her” style of before that summer, pretty and discreet waves, a total lack of provocation. What was the point of doing either, when her body was all bones: this thought, analysed, turned out to be that she could not face sitting under the dryer.

  She tied her hair back off her face: this was too young for her, but she found she did not have energy to do more. She went out through the noisy lobby that smelled so strongly of perfumes that she felt sick again, into the street where every face was that of a busy tourist, seeking sensation. People stared at her. Seeing herself in a shop window, she could understand why. She saw she should have tied a scarf around her head, and another to make a waist around the sack that dragged from her shoulders. She went into the first shop that sold them, bought a large hat at random, and pulled it down over her face. Now she felt protected from stares, from criticism.

  She found a bus and climbed painfully to the top, and sat rocking slightly from weakness as she was taken the several miles south to her own home. She wanted to look at it. No, not to go in, but just to see it. She had never looked at that house as she would now, when tenanted by other people. It would be like looking in at her own life.

  She got off that bus, changed to another, and was at the end of her street. It was wide and tree-lined. There was nobody about. Mr. Jasper’s spaniel was sitting on the pavement panting. It recognised her, but did not move. Its tongue was shaking off great heat drops. Seeing the overheated dog in its mass of fur, she understood that it was very hot, and that she was sweating.

  She walked slowly down her street. She felt as if only now she had returned home, to England, from abroad. Now she was really home. She had left cosmopolis. Young Mrs. Hatch was in her front garden, digging around her white rosebush. The girl glanced up at Kate who was walking past her garden, looked again, and as Kate was about to greet her, lost interest in the strange female, and went on digging.

  Kate stood under plane trees at the foot of her garden, looking in. The large solid place stood silent under the mid-morning sun. The sky was clear, and the garden seemed overexposed, a bit limp. Things needed watering. A dove was cooing in the tree under which they had sat on that climactic afternoon. The lawn could do with some cutting: the tenants would probably cut it, in the last-minute rush before they expected themselves, the real family, to come back. A deck chair lay on its side on the lawn, looking desolate.

  Kate went on standing there, in the heavy shade. Perhaps someone would come out. But nothing happened. Mrs. Enders was cooking, perhaps? Had gone out shopping? But it was not Kate’s affair. This was how her house, her home, would look very soon when Michael and she had left it to live in a flat somewhere. One says “my house,” “my home.” Nonsense. People flow through houses, which stay the same, adapting themselves only slightly for their occupants. And Kate was not feeling anything at all about this house in which she had lived for nearly a quarter of a century. Nothing. She did feel rather vague and light, as if she might take off somewhere, through lack of substance. Certainly it was foolish to get out of bed so abruptly, after being in it for three weeks and not eating for so long, to come halfway across London. She would go back to bed for that day. She left the shelter of the tree, and on the opposite pavement saw Mary. Mary was wearing a hat and gloves. She hated wearing both; she seldom did; what occasion could she possibly be returning from? Kate’s mouth had stretched into a smile, for the moment when Mary would look at her. But Mary’s frown did not change. Like Iris Hatch, she glanced at the woman standing there, looked again because of the creature’s eccentricity—what was a tramp doing in this respectable street?—and walked on.

  And now Kate did feel emotions, violently. One was fear, another, resentment. How could Mary look straight through her? They had been close friends for years and years? Why, Mary must be drunk or something like that! They had shared crises, domestic and personal, each other’s children—perhaps their husbands? Kate knew that Mary had at one time fancied Michael—being Mary she had said so. And Kate knew that Michael found Mary attractive—well, all men did, even if they did not want to, even when they disapproved of her. Which Michael did. Kate had even been a little jealous—damn it, she was doing it again, using false memory: the truth was she had burned with jealousy, had made herself ill with it. The intensity of her relationship with Mary dated from that time. It was not a memory that she could be proud of, to say the least.

  Kate watched Mary’s retreating back, a straight and competent back, under a straightly set and sensible hat: nothing of what she was seeing now was true of Mary, who was in disguise.

  She realised she was relieved that Mary did not know her. More: she was elated, as if she had been set free of something. She quickly left the shade of the trees, and walked through deep wells of shade along the glaring pavement. She saw that Mary had already flung off her hat, gloves, and shoes, and stood on her lawn, barefooted, her legs planted apart, hands on hips, breasts flopping inside her dress. Her face was screwed up with the glare and she was staring across at Kate’s house.

  The screwed-up eyes made her look puzzled: this was characteristic. More often than not Mary confronted situations with this look of someone needing an interpreter.

  For instance, the occasions they referred to as cow sessions. There had been, in fact, only two of these. The first was about a year ago, and it had followed a visit from Mary’s ten-year-old son’s teacher, who had come to get across to Mary that there was something the boy needed that he wasn’t getting from what the teacher described as “his home environment.”

  It happened that Michael was away that weekend, Mary’s husband working, Kate’s and Mary’s children variously occupied. Having exclaimed several times how remarkable it was that they both found themselves alone at the same time, they found they had created the atmosphere of an occasion, and they drifted to Mary’s bedroom where they were drinking first coffee, then whisky.

  Mary was telling Kate, detail by detail, in her way that sounded conscientious, but was the result of her puzzlement, the teacher’s recommendations for the child’s “better integration.” The phrases followed each other: well-adjusted, typical, normal, integrated, secure, normative; and soon they were smiling, as hilarity mounted in both that was partly the prospect of two days’ perfect freedom, and partly the Scotch.

  Kate, putting in her mite, told Mary how a counsellor had once come on a similar errand about Eileen, then being “difficult” for some reason or another now forgotten. “She said,” said Kate, “that Eileen’s problems would be easily supported and solved in a well-structured family unit like ours.” Mary suddenly let out a snort of laughter. “A unit,” said Kate. “Yes, a unit she said we were. Not only that, a nuclear unit.” They laughed. They began to roar, to peal, to yell with laughter, Mary rolling on her bed, Kate in her chair. Other occasions came to mind, each bringing forth its crop of irresistible words. At each new one, they rolled and yelled afresh. They were deliberately searching for the words that could release the laughter, and soon quite ordinary words were doing this, not the jargon like parent-and-child confrontation, syndrome, stress situation, but even “sound,” “ordered,” “healthy,” and so on. And then they were shrieking at “family,” and “home” and “mother” and “father.”

  But Kate began to feel uncomfortable; and her discomfort—Mary’s instincts were acute—communicated itself; and Mary’s face put on the familiar look of curiosity, of readiness to be instructed: why was Kate now reacting in some sort of disapproval, whereas she had not a moment ago?

  A few days later, in Mary’s kitchen, waiting for
a dish to get itself cooked, they began laughing again, because of a word that had, without Kate’s meaning it to, slipped out of its place in a sentence and been given emphasis. She had been saying that she had walked into her living room and seen her children and her husband playing some game of cards; but the word “husband” had isolated itself and they had to laugh. They could not stop themselves. They began improvising, telling anecdotes or describing situations, in which certain words were bound to come up: wife, husband, man, woman … they laughed and laughed. “The father of my children,” one woman would say; “the breadwinner,” said the other, and they shrieked like harpies.

  It was a ritual, like the stag parties of suburban men in which everything their normal lives are dedicated to upholding is spat on, insulted, belittled.

  It was Kate’s guilt, it goes without saying, that ended this occasion too; and Mary checked herself, quite willingly and promptly, when Kate did, and lit herself a cigarette, and sat smoking it, scattering ash all about the place, and smiling in her usual way: Well, so we have stopped doing that, have we? We’ve gone over the mark, I suppose? What mark? Do tell me, do explain?

  Quite soon the two incidents, unrepeated, had gone into the past and Mary was referring to them like this: “When we laughed, do you remember, Kate? When we had our cow sessions.” And the expression on her face was as it was now while she stared at the house opposite her own, the sun contracting her eye muscles: I don’t understand, but if you say so I suppose I’ll have to accept it, I’m doing my best to fit in with your ideas you know. I always do.

  Mary stood among deck chairs, an outgrown children’s climbing frame, bicycles, a garden table, a bird bath, hydrangeas, a lawn sprinkler, two cats, a watering can, and a small heap of colour lying on the grass that was her handbag, her hat, her gloves, her shoes.

  Kate passed the spaniel that lay stretched out, its pink tongue gathering gravel, its tail lazily moving in greeting.

  On the bus she was thinking, over and over again: Mary did not know me. That girl, Iris Hatch, didn’t know me.

  It being the middle of the day, and the traffic thick, it took over an hour to get back to central London, and all the way Kate was thinking: they didn’t know me, they see me every day of their lives, but they didn’t know me. Only the dog did.

  Dragging herself up the hotel steps, trying to make herself invisible in the lobby, leaning against the wall of the dizzying lift, collapsing into bed in the noisy room, she was repeating: They looked right through me. They didn’t know me. Far from being saddened by it, she was delighted, she felt quite drunk with relief that friendship, ties, “knowing people” were so shallow, easily disproved.

  She slept through a hot afternoon, waking to tell the solicitous Silvia—back again on this floor after her flight into the higher regions of her profession—that she felt much better, yes, she felt fine, yes, she was probably cured. Although it was foolish to get up again—she had still not been able to keep anything down—she got the hotel to book her a ticket for a play.

  She did not care which play. She wanted to see people dressed up in personalities not their own, that was all. Her closest friend had not known her: a loss of weight, a hat put on any how, probably a walk that dragged, the fact that Mary imagined her somewhere on the shores of the Mediterranean—these small things had been enough for Mary not to recognise a woman she had seen every day of her life for years; all that had been needed was that Kate should play a very slightly different role from her usual one.

  The people at the desk were proud that they had got for her a ticket to A Month in the Country: they were able unerringly to choose right for her; that was what they were proud of.

  At eight o’clock she was in her seat in the front row of the stalls. The theatre was packed. Normally this play would be in a smaller theatre for a choicer audience, but it was September, a month almost as much washed in gold as August. Dollars. The audience were mostly American. They had come to see the leading lady, a famous name, in a famous play. This was a high-class and cultural experience; the atmosphere was much too heavy, because of the amount of respect it had to carry.

  A Month in the Country is quite a funny play in its way. Funny in the high-class and lifelike way, a tear behind every second or third wry smile. You have to be in the right mood, though. In the frame of mind, in fact, that Kate had been in when she was here last, four years ago: she had come out, she remembered, as if she had eaten a particularly well-prepared meal.

  Kate and Michael went often to the theatre. If they let time go by before going again, they felt remiss, as if not doing their duty to themselves. They usually came together, or with friends, because their children preferred the cinema. They went as easily to the new kind of play, where audience and actors mingled, or people wore no clothes, or the actors insulted the audience, or old plays, like Shakespeare’s, turned on their heads to illustrate some director’s private vision, as to plays like this, which were like hearing well-known poems beautifully read. In judging the experience: That was rather good, that wasn’t very good, what made the judgment was the feeling of having eaten well or not, of having been filled, sustained, supported, or left hungry and needing some sort of confirmation. Confirmation of what? But this kind of play Kate had always found to be the most filling. Ibsen, Chekhov, Turgenev—the sort of play where one observed people like oneself in their recognisable predicaments.

  “So very Russian,” people around were murmuring. That they did meant this was an audience pretty low down on the scale of sophistication, otherwise they would be saying, “Just like us, isn’t it?”

  And indeed, Kate was thinking that the household of Natalia Petrovna was very like her own. Or, rather, that is what she had been thinking last time she saw the play. Perhaps it was a mistake to come to the theatre when just out of a long stay in bed?

  A woman sat prominently in the front row of the stalls, a woman whom other people were observing. Some were looking at her as much as they did at the play. She seemed quite out of place there, an eccentric to the point of fantasy, with her pink sacklike dress tied abruptly around her by a yellow scarf, her bush of multi-hued hair, her gaunt face that was yellow, and all bones and burning angry eyes. She was muttering, “Oh rubbish! Russian my aunt’s fanny! Oh what nonsense!” while she fidgeted and twisted in her seat.

  Natalia Petrovna said: And what, pray, am I hoping for? Oh God, don’t let me despise myself!—and this distressing creature, who must nevertheless be rich, to be able to afford such a price for her ticket, said out loud, speaking direct to the players in an urgent, and even intimate way, “Oh nonsense, nonsense, why do you say that?”

  She was thinking that there must be something wrong with the way she was seeing things. For although she was so close in to the stage, she seemed a very long way off; and she kept trying to shake herself into a different kind of attention, or participation, for she could remember her usual mood at the theatre, and knew that her present condition was far from that. It really did seem as if she looked at the creatures on the stage through a telescope, so extraordinary and distant did they seem from her in their distance from reality. Yet the last time she had sat here she had said of Natalia Petrovna, that’s me. She had thought, What person, anywhere in the world, would not recognise her at once?

  Well, for a start, not the people in the village in Spain where she had just been with her young lover Jeffrey. Not them. What those women had in common with Natalia Petrovna was that she was supposed to be twenty-nine, or so Turgenev said, but she was behaving and thinking like—was being acted by—a woman of fifty. A woman who thought of herself as getting old, grabbing at youth. Obviously the nineteenth century, like the lives of poor people, aged women fast. You couldn’t imagine a woman of twenty-nine behaving like that now; she wouldn’t regard falling in love with a student as an expense of spirit, far from it.

  In which case what were they all doing here? Well, what? Rubbish, it was all rubbish—oh, not the acting, of course, not the way t
he thing was done, it was all wonderful, wonderful. “You’re marvellous,” she cried out to the actors, feeling as if her powerfully critical thoughts might have damaged them, but they continued regardless, taking no notice of the mad woman a few feet away.

  Yes, wonderful; and four years before she had squirmed, she had felt personally criticised; she had been full of discomfort at the self-deceptions and the vanity of the lovely lady, the mirror of every woman in the audience who has been the centre of attention and now sees her power slip away from her.

  But no matter how she called out Wonderful!—or felt that she ought and refrained, for people were glaring at her and telling her to shush—there was no doubt that what she was paying a lot of money to sit here and look at seemed (it was the mood she was in, that must be it) as if a parcel of well-born maniacs were conducting a private game or ritual, and no one had yet told them they were mad. It was a farce and not at all a high-class and sensitive comedy filled with truths about human nature. The fact was that the things happening in the world, the collapse of everything, was tugging at the shape of events in this play and those like them, and making them farcical. A joke. Like her own life. Farcical.

  But they would go home, these people here, across all those thousands of miles of sea and air and tell their friends they had seen A Month in the Country, and keep the programme in a box full of special memories.

  “Oh do be quiet,” someone was saying. To her. She was still expressing her feelings then? How very bad-mannered of her. Perhaps she ought to slip out and go back to bed.

  I’m standing on the edge of a precipice, save me! cried Natalia Petrovna, and the audience vibrated with her emotion.

  Kate now had her lips tight shut, so that nothing could come out of them; and she was thinking: She’s mad. Nuts. Loony. Allowed to be. More, encouraged to be. She should be locked up. And here we are sitting and watching her. We ought to be throwing rotten fruit at them. At us. Yes, that was it, if she had an apple or two or a banana, rotten if possible—but for God’s sake don’t think of food. Don’t look at the stage either, much better not.