The Summer Before the Dark by Doris Lessing Read Free Book Online

perfectly well before the invention of the airplane, hadn’t they? Yes, but—you had to admit that the airplane and the international conference went together, they fitted.
    The typhoid scare flared up again. Charlie Cooper and Kate Brown took to the telephone to arrange a three weeks’ conference under the aegis of Global Food in Istanbul. The delegates, all still in their countries, were informed at unbelievable expense on the telephone that Turkey was to have the honour of welcoming them and not London.
    Kate’s empty summer was now filled until mid-July; if things delayed even more, perhaps until later. She was feeling that she ought not to have let this happen. She ought to have been thinking, perhaps, about her condition, about the cold wind. She ought to be examining the violent and uncontrollable swings in her emotions about her husband, her children—particularly her husband. For now that she had so much time—she felt as if she was doing nothing, or very little; her days were emptier than they had been for years—she was conscious of her emotional apparatus working away in a vacuum: the objects of her emotions were all elsewhere, they were not present to react with or against her. What was the sense of loving, hating, wanting, resenting, needing, rejecting—and sometimes all in the space of an hour—when she was here, by herself, free; it was like talking to yourself, it was insane … it was just as well she was going to be occupied. At least for another month. She went out and bought some more dresses. Then she bought the things to go with them. No, it was not really that these commodities were so different from those she normally wore. It was more, really, of how she would wear them. “The spirit of the thing,” as her grandfather would have said.
    A woman stood in front of large mirrors in many shops, looking with a cool, not entirely friendly curiosity at a woman in her early forties who was still the same shape she had been all her adult life, give or take an inch or so; who had pretty chestnut hair—tinted of course, because the grey was coming in fast. A cool curiosity, but it easily became an eye-to-eye woman-to-woman collusion that was first cousin to that so very undermining “humorous” grimace,undermining because it seemed to nullify her official or daylight view of herself. Yes, better to avoid the long interchange of eye pressures, which threatened all the time to start off a roar of laughter: yes, she knew it, what was waiting for her was ribald laughter at the whole damned business … the kind of laughter that she and Mary Finchley enjoyed (indulged in? used as a prophylactic?) on the occasions when they were together, alone, without husbands, families, guests.
    No, she must step back, look at herself as a whole, and confirm that there stood in front of her a pleasant-looking fashionable woman on the verge of middle age. Still on the verge—she had not chosen to enter the state. She could say, as she looked dispassionately at her image, that her
shape
, her attributes, limbs, waist, breasts, mouth, hair, neck, were not different from the equipment with which she had attracted a dozen young men nearly a quarter of a century ago, with which she had married her husband. No different; perhaps even better; since so much chemistry and medication and dieting and attention to hair, teeth, and eyes had gone into this artifact—what would she look like now if, for instance, she had been born into a slum in Brazil?
    What was different was—nothing tangible. It was a question again of an atmosphere, something she carried invisibly with her. The reason why, as a young woman, this same assortment of appurtenances, teeth, eyes, hips, and so on, had attracted, whereas now they did not, or not more than any woman of her age (of the minority who have not set themselves outside the business of attraction from a pretty early age, and for a variety of reasons, poverty being the first of them), was