The Summer Before the Dark Read Free Page A

full of her best china. Having handed them coffee and chocolate wafers, she set an attentive smile on her face, like a sentinel, behind which she could cultivate her own thoughts. In fact she was thinking of her husband.
    Whenever she saw him like this, with a colleague, particularly those from overseas, it was as if he had walked away from her. This was not because he was one of the people whose manner alters depending on whom they are with—not at all, but with Alan Post it seemed that a larger, finer air blew around him, he was expanding, he looked as if he were about to take wing … last year, in the States, when she had been with him, she had felt part of the expansion, the enlarging; she had felt as if for all these years of marriage this man had been keeping in reserve some potential that could never find growing room inside the family: they had discussed what she felt, of course. She had half hoped he might say that he had sometimes felt the same about her, but he didn’t. Now she thought that thisyear he would be without his wife, only intermittently with his daughter, for four months: the appropriate smile, dry, ironic, was on her face again. She knew it was there; she had as they say “worked” on that smile, or on the emotions it represented. If this had been the right occasion for it—a younger woman’s question for instance (not a woman her own age, she realised, not Mary Finchley)—she might have leaned back in her chair, allowed her eyes to hood themselves in irony, and said: Perhaps we all make too much fuss of this kind of thing when we are young—the little affairs, you know, they are of no importance in a real marriage! Self-congratulation accompanied this smile that was half a grimace, she knew that; also relief, that of a person successfully negotiating a trap, a danger point … Sitting under the summery tree, holding up the coffee pot to indicate to the men that there was plenty more in it, smiling, she was hearing herself think: I’m telling myself the most dreadful lies! Awful! Why do I do it? There’s something here that I simply will not let myself look at. Sometimes with Mary I get near to it, but never with anyone else.
Now
, look at it all, try and get hold of it, don’t go on making up all these attitudes, these stories—stop taking down the same old dresses off the rack … She was listening, properly now, to what the men were saying: it seemed that it concerned her in some way, that the conversation had concerned her for some minutes, but she hadn’t been listening.
    The conference Alan Post had come to London to attend was in difficulties. Or rather, a committee of that conference: the organisation under whose umbrella the conferrings and committeeings were going on was called Global Food, and its business was what mankind ate. Or did not eat. Due to a series of mischances—flu, a brokenhip, the death of a man in Lisbon—when the members of the committee were already sitting around their table waiting to start their deliberations, it was discovered that there were no translators. Now, nothing was easier than to find fluent translators in French, German, Spanish, but it was harder to find people who spoke fluent Portuguese as well as English and who were educated enough for this demanding work. Portuguese it had to be, for this subcommittee was to do with coffee; and Brazil, the world’s leading coffee country, used Portuguese. The committee had adjourned so that Portuguese translators could be engaged. Two had been found, two more were needed: Alan Post and Michael were both looking at Kate, waiting for her to say that she would be happy to be a third. Three years before Kate had typed out, as a favour to a friend whose typing was bad, a book for popular consumption on the growing and marketing of coffee. Because of this, she knew a great deal about that commodity. More: she had always been good at languages. Her knowledge of French and Italian was good; her Portuguese