Read The Summer Before the Dark for Free Online

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 easywell-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?
    One could not easily believe it. And what problems they had now seemed so extremely small, almost ridiculous, when you remembered the purpose of this building, the reason for its being continuously full of conferring people. For Kate was involved in these problems. Things had already changed; she was no longer “the woman who replaced the translators who had those accidents and who got ill.” She was Kate Brown, greeted in corridors by smiles and warm faces; she was stopped increasingly often for advice and information. Where to buy this or that face cream; or that special foodstuff; how to find the restaurant, the hotel, a dress shop, or the right place for British woollen goods or whisky.
    In her first week, she had only had time to think, as she flopped exhausted into bed, that she had become a function, she had become, she
was
language for a couple of dozen international civil servants. This week, lying awake later since she was not exhausted, she thought that her first function, that of being a skilled parrot, was being supplanted, and very fast, by one she was used to. How did one do this and do that, find this or that?—they asked
her
, the newcomer! But of course, she was already an old hand, since most people flitted in and out of this building for a few days at a time.
    She had become what she was: a nurse, or a nanny, like Charlie Cooper. A mother. Never mind, in a few days she would be free of it all. She would no longer be a parrotwith the ability to be sympathetic about minor and unimportant obsessions; she would be free … Kate noted that the thought brought with it a small shiver. She noted that she reacted with:
I
wish I had gone with Michael to America
. She caught herself thinking, “When I visit Rose I’ll be able to help her with the children.” Rose was the friend in Sussex whom she might visit.
    But she did not want to spend the summer in another family, that was just cowardice. In her room, before going to sleep, she looked at its neatness, its indifference to her, and thought that yes, this was much better than her large family house, than Rose’s house, full, crammed, jostling with objects every one of which had associations, histories, belonged to this person or that, mattered, were important. This small box of a room, that had in it a bed, a chair, a chest of drawers, a mirror—yes, this is what she would choose, if she could choose … she dreamed. Later, when this night’s dream had fallen into place in the