Free The Summer Before the Dark by Doris Lessing

very soon these same four would visit a village fifty miles off where there were some interesting antiquities newly discovered. It had been, they all agreed, as they parted in the foyer for the night, a particularly pleasant evening: they spoke like the connoisseurs they were. They then went to bed early—that is, before one in the morning—since the conference would start tomorrow.
    Kate did have time before she slept to think of her Michael in—she believed—Chicago, where he was spending a few days with an old colleague who had emigrated to the States. She thought, too, of her four children. She noted that the pang that came with them was at once assuaged: she knew that she was already blooming, expanding, enlarging—she was wanted, needed; she was going to be in demand all day and most of the night.
    And now, for the few minutes she had free every day she noted the slow rise of her euphoria—she watched it drily enough. And, since she was too busy to think for long, she could allow thoughts to enter which would have been too painful if there was time for them to invade: how delighted her family had been when she had said that she was busy with her conference in London and would not have time to pack and organise and arrange—and there had been the relief in Tim’s voice when she had said, Oh darling, are you all right for Norway? I’m sorry, I am simply too busy to …
    The fact was, the picture or image of herself as the warm centre of the family, the source of invisible emanations like a queen termite, was two or three years out of date. (Was there something wrong with her memory perhaps? It was seeming more and more as if she had several sets of memory, each contradicting the others.) The truth was that she had been starved for two years, three, more—at any rate, since the children had grown up. The fact that this had taken some time, that it had been a process, that there had never been a moment when she could have said:
now
, they’re grown, it’s done—was it because of this her memories were turning out to be liars? Of course it had not been the “real” Kate who had been starved. That personage had remained, as always—or at least in her better moments—quietly offstage, in observation that was more often than not humorous. But it had been painful enough, that deprivation; she had sat often alone in her room, raging under a knowledge of intolerable unfairness. Injustice, the pain of it, had been waiting for her all these last years. But she had
not
allowed herself to feel it, or not for long. She had instead carefully tended the image of the marriage (could it be called, perhaps, The Tenth Phase? The Fifteenth Phase?) that was the result of intelligent discussions with her husband. She had not allowed herself to get much closer to what she had been feeling than the humorous grimace. She could not bear to let it all assault her now. Some time she was going to have to! But now, luckily, she was too busy; how very flatteringly busy. Here she was, being smiled upon by chambermaids and waiters, by the hotel manager and the floor managers, by taxi men, and interpreters—and particularly by Ahmed, who adored her. Just as she adored him. Their relationship was that of two eunuchs in a harem. He supported her, understood everything, provided everything: she was unfailingly the one person able to copewith all the problems and needs of these difficult, talented, spoiled, used-to-being-waited-on children, the international administrators, the new elite: she, with her twin Ahmed. While the conference went on, she was in a room nearby, waiting to be of use; and when necessary she was in her little booth, ready at a gesture to switch from French, Italian, English, converting them into Portuguese—all the Portuguese speakers had come to her, congratulating her on her absolute fidelity to the spirit of their language. At coffee and drink breaks, at mealtimes, everywhere, at all hours of the day and night, there