The Summer Before the Dark Read Free Page B

was perfect, for on one side she was Portuguese. It had happened that she finished school early, since she was clever, with a gap of three years before she was to go to university—to which, in the end, she did not go, having decided to marry Michael instead. She spent a year in Lourenço Marques with her grandfather, who was a scholar. There she spoke only Portuguese. As the daughter of John Ferreira, an English-naturalized Portuguese who taught Portuguese literature at Oxford, she had never been more than gratefully conscious that her background contained treasures: it was her grandfather who had introduced them to her, so that she became soaked in Portuguese literature, Portuguese poetry, soaked in “the spirit of the language.”
    What else had she learned during that year in the city on the edge of the Indian Ocean, a year devoted entirely to pleasure? For one thing, her grandfather was old-fashioned, and his attitudes towards women strict. Kate had never dreamed of fighting an old man whom she loved; and besides, why bother?—she was only there for such a short time. But for that time she was never alone with a man, was shielded from unpleasant experience, literary or in life, and tasted a not unpleasant (for a short time) atmosphere compounded of elements so foreign to her that she had had to identify each one separately. She was sheltered and distrusted. She was precious and despised. She was flattered by deference to her every wish—but knew that she, the female thing, occupied a carefully defined minor part of her grandfather’s life, as his wife had done, and his daughters. Her image of herself during that period: a girl as fragile as a camellia with a dead-white skin and heavy dark-red hair, wearing a white embroidered linen dress designed to expose and conceal throat and shoulders, sat on a verandah in a swing chair, that she slowly pushed back and forth with a foot which she was conscious of being an object so sexual the young men present couldn’t keep their eyes and fantasies away from it. She fanned herself with an embroidered silk fan, using a turn of the wrist taught her by the old nurse, while these young men, all of whom had asked her grandfather’s permission to speak to her at all, sat in a half circle in grass armchairs, paying her compliments. The year was 1948. She was a great success in Lourenço Marques, partly because after all she was British, and not all her good intentions could keep her within what her grandfather approved; partly because the combination of short red hair and brown eyes were rare in a country full of señoritas; partly because the strictness of her grand-fatherwas excessive even in this colony, so that on more than one count Kate’s behaviour, her position, seemed like a wilful or whimsical play acting, probably undertaken with the intention of being provocative.
    When she returned to England, she looked back into a steamy place, full of half-concealed things, one of them being her own wistful longing to be like her own grandmother who—unless this was her grandfather’s false memory—might never have left Portugal at all, for all the difference it had made to her way of life. A beautiful woman, so everyone said she had been; a wonderful mother, a cook for the angels, a marvellous, marvellous being, all warmth and kindness, with not a fault in her—yes, well, however all that might have been, the propaganda had its predictable reverse effect, and Kate returned from Portuguese East Africa more than ready to go to university, where she was going to study Romance languages and literature. She actually did get herself up to Oxford, and into residence. Then she met Michael, who after ten years of war and crammed training was just beginning his career. She moved into his lodgings and they started delightfully on what they called The First Phase.
    If she had not married, she would probably have become something special in her field? A lecturer perhaps? Women did not seem