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

hers by right was too startling for a woman of her age. He said to that, Nonsense; and sent her out with very dark red hair cut so that it felt like a weight of heavy silk swinging against her cheeks as she turned her head. As she remembered very well it had once done always.
    It was disturbing, this evocation of her young self. She found herself overemotional. She wished her Michael were there to enjoy her; then, as violently, was pleased he was far away in Boston. What were these swings of emotion, what caused them? In the course of a single hour, her thoughts about Michael were contradictory enough for a madwoman. Why? Surely the truth couldn’t be that she was always like this, and was only just beginning to see it? Well, at least she could be sure that she was glad her children could not see her—oh no, no young person likes to see dear mother all glossy and gleaming and silky.
    But they were by now scattered over the world, in Norway and the Sudan, in Morocco and New England; just like the delegates she had so recently been looking after, like the delegates who were at that very moment in so many different countries packing suitcases and saying goodbye to wives and children and, in a few cases, husbands.
    There were three days left before she had to fly off to Turkey—if the air strike ended in time, for if not she would have to go by train. Three days. There was nothing to do until the conference began. The guilt that she did nothing while being paid so much made her hint to Charlie Cooper that perhaps she ought to be given other work for that time—she could help the translators for instance. Forthe first time she saw Charlie Cooper irritated. He repeated his many remarks about her value—yet what was she doing? She drank a good deal of coffee with him in his office; she talked to him, she sat twice a day with him and the man who was head of their department, discussing arrangements. This was work? Good God, if she could have the reorganising of this department—more, this building, with its swarms and swarms of highly paid—she must stop this, and besides, it was nothing to do with her. Probably her criticisms were because she lacked the experience to—
Nonsense, it was all nonsense; this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick; it was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money
.
    It was not the slightest use thinking on these lines; if she was being paid to sit in coffee rooms thinking, then she would sit in coffee rooms thinking. After all, how many years had it been since she had had time to think—nearly twenty-five years. In fact, the last time she had been enabled to sit relaxed, prettily on show, smiling, was that year when she had visited her grandfather. Then, too, in her shockingly seductive white dress, one foot put loose to one side, like a bird’s broken wing, while the other, pushing her rhythmically in her swing chair, sent waves of sexual attraction in every direction—then too she had thought, considered, had allowed the words that represented the ideas she had of her life flow through her mind while she looked at them … Had she then been subject to this seesaw of feeling? If so, she could not remember it. Perhaps the white dress, which she had never even been able to put on without feeling sly, dishonest, overexcited, had visibly represented one side of a balance, and what she had been thinking another? Thought was not the right word? What shehad watched move through her mind had been pretty violent, yes, she could remember, she had been critical, a seethe of impatience behind that slow sweet smile for which she had been, was still so often, commended.
    By Charlie Cooper, for one. She had brought with her to this organisation the atmosphere of loving sympathy which was the oil of her function in her home. Had she done this—unconsciously of course—because of the cold wind? She had