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

this delicate business of “the spirit.” Surely the wrong word; but what was the right one—State? condition? presence? She did not walk inside, like the fine almost unseeable envelope of a candle flame, that emanation of attractiveness:
I
am available, come and sniff and taste
. In her case it was because she was, and had been for so long, a wife and a mother who had not been interested—or not often, and then not for long—in attracting men other than her husband.
    All this had of course been discussed fully and frankly between husband and wife. It would have had to be. For this area of marriage, so difficult, risky, and embattled, they had had from the start what amounted to a blueprint. And it had all been kept up to date, not allowed to lapse … Kate was nevertheless aware that what was taken for granted between herself and Mary Finchley in the encounters they described as “cow sessions” contradicted the marital blueprints everywhere. Why was she thinking so much about Mary? In fact she had been annoyed by her old friend’s reaction to the news of this new job. It had been the jolly laugh which had always seemed to Kate crude, and, “Well thank God for that. And about time too!”
    At any rate, it was in order for her now to face herself in so many different mirrors, and to light a flame, to set certain currents running. No, not as she had on the brief occasions of uncontrollable attraction during her marriage (referred to by Mary critically, as
the world well lost for lust)
when she had been directed towards a particular man. Now she was doing something very different. Exactly as a young girl does, suddenly conscious of her powers of generalised attractions, so now with Kate: an internal thermostat was differently set, saying not: You over there, yes you, come and get me! but: Ah, how infinitely desirable you all are; if I wished I could be available, but it is up to you, and really it is much more exciting to be like this,floating in the air of general appreciation and approval; it would be an awful bore to confine myself to one.
    This is something no married woman does. (Except Mary!) But look what her family went through because of it—no, she was not to be envied, not copied; she probably ought not even to be listened to, let alone enjoyed for roaring sessions of laughter and old wives’ talk. Never mind about Mary. No
really
married woman sets the thermostat for Tom, Dick, and Harry. (In discussions on this theme with Michael both were pretty definite on what being
really
married meant.) Not if she wishes to stay married. (Or doesn’t mind being like Mary, whose life for the fifteen years Kate had known her had been like a French farce—toned down, of course, for the mild airs of South London.) For what Kate did know, did indeed know, was that not every marriage was a real marriage, and that such marriages were getting rarer and rarer. She was lucky in hers. If you wished to use words like “luck” instead of giving yourself credit for being, and continuing to be (despite Mary) the sort of woman who is really married to a real husband. Being a partner in this sort of marriage means that one cannot adjust the thermostat in any way but one. Except of course for those brief and unimportant occasions that Mary so derided, because she said they provided the maximum amount of misery with the minimum of pleasure … if she was not able to think seriously about her marriage without Mary Finchley coming in at every moment, then she had better stop thinking altogether.
    Before calling the rearrangement of herself complete, she went to a very expensive hairdresser, who allowed his hands to rest sympathetically on her two shoulders, while he looked over her head into the mirror at her image, just as she was doing. They looked at raw material for his art;and then he enquired if her hair had always been that shade of red? Of course he was right; but she had been afraid that the very dark red that had been