The Summer Before the Dark Read Free

exchange with a colleague. The oldest son, Stephen, now twenty-three and in his last year at university, was going on a four months’ trip through Morocco and Algeria with friends. Eileen, twenty-two, was accompanying her father, to visit friends made on a camping trip the year before last in Spain. The second son, James, had been invited on an archaeological “dig” in the Sudan, before beginning university that autumn. As for herself, she had decided not to go to the States again. This was partly because she did not want to cramp her daughter’s style, which she knew she would. Also, it would be so expensive if three people went. Also, there was the question whether she would be cramping her husband’s style … to go with this thought there was an appropriate smile, almost a grimace, suitable perhaps for the words:
There has to be give and take in any marriage;
she was quite aware that she was disinclined to examine this area too closely.
    For another thing, Tim, although now nineteen, and much encouraged by everyone to be independent, had no plans to travel anywhere. He was, always had been, the “difficult” or problematical one. The house in South London would therefore be kept running for his benefit. She, the mother, would run it. For her, the coming months stretched ahead as they had done for many past summers. She would be a base for members of the family coming home from university, or dropping in for a day or a weekon their way somewhere else; she would housekeep for them, their friends, their friends’ friends. She would be available, at everyone’s disposal.
    She was looking forward to it: not only to the many people, but the managing, the being conscious of her efficiency; she looked forward, too, to a summer’s expert gardening. When they—she and Michael—did leave this house as a couple retiring from an active scene, it wouldn’t be the house that would be missed, but the garden, which was as lovely as an English garden is after twenty or so years of devotion. It looked as if man had not planted it, but as if it had chosen to grow into lawns and clumps of lilies, rose arbours and herb patches. The birds sang in it all the year. The wind blew tenderly in it. There was not a crumb of earth that Kate did not feel she knew personally, had not made—of course with the aid of earthworms and the frost.
    She sat taking in breaths of rose, lavender, thyme, and watched her husband come out of the house with their guest.
    He was Alan Post, and had nothing to do with medicine, but was a civil servant of the international variety: he worked for one of the bodies associated with the United Nations. He and Dr. Michael Brown had met in the airport lounge at Los Angeles when their aircraft was delayed by fog. They had played chess, drunk whisky, exchanged invitations. A week ago the two men had bumped into each other in Goodge Street, and then lunched together. Michael had invited Alan to a family Sunday lunch.
    If there had not been the power cuts, the Browns would have provided the traditional British Sunday meal, not for their own benefit, since they no longer used the old patterns, but for their guest’s: the family had often enoughjoked that when they entertained their many foreign friends, they served traditional dishes like peasants dependent on the tourist trade. But Eileen had cooked the meal today, with Tim’s help, before rushing off somewhere. She had made a Turkish cucumber soup—cold; shish kebab over the fire, and an apricot water ice—the refrigerator ran on gas. They had drunk a great deal of sangria, the recipe for which had been acquired by the second son last year in Spain.
    Michael and Alan Post sat down and continued the conversation they had enjoyed throughout lunch, and afterwards upstairs in the study. She poured the coffee into the pretty plastic cups she had used in the garden ever since next door’s dog had bounced through in pursuit of another dog and had smashed a whole tray