Free The Summer Before the Dark by Doris Lessing Page B

making her feel like a top that has been whipped and whipped—and left to spin there for ever. She cannot have been introspective or self-aware; for such a girl must necessarily be naive, to be prepared to do such work at all. Never during her entire life has this thought come near her: the monstrousness of putting up a girl to be a target for public love—drum majorette, airline advertisement, hostess—for months, or for years. She marries because to get married young is to prove herself; and then it must be as if she has inside her an organ capable of absorbing and giving off thousands of watts of Love, Attention, Flattery, and this organ has been working at full capacity, but she can’t switch the thing off. What is the matter with her? She has no idea. Why does she feel so irritable, why can’t she relax, rest, sleep? She is like a child the grownups have been admiring but now they have got bored with her, they have turned away and started talking and forgotten her, and no matter how she dances, and smiles and poses and shouts, Look at me! Look at me! they seem not to hear. At last they say, “Be quiet. Run along and play.”
    She has headaches. She is frigid and then makes frenetic love to a man who feels as if he has a rival. Soon there is a divorce. Probably she enquires for her old job, but she is too old. She has lost her easy puppy vitality, and her place has been taken by a girl just out of college.
    It would soon be the middle of July. The conference would end in a couple of days, when the delegates would scatter while others came in: the hotel was to accommodate a conference on cholera.
    Kate was smiling, smiling, in the beam of other people’s appreciation, turning the beam of her own readiness outwards to warm everybody else; the thought that soon now she would be alone caused her reactions to become exaggerated. She knew it. It was panic. The smiling beam was too strong. Or perhaps that was not it: she was offering what she had available, as she had been doing since the start of the conference, but now it was too strong for a situation where they were all thinking about how they must pack up and go. She saw herself, through the reactions of Ahmed, as an efficient, high-powered, smiling woman, but spinning around and around on herself like a machine that someone should have switched off. He offered her cachets for headache, confessed that he suffered himself—at the end of such an event as this, he could not sleep, and his wife complained. Kate showed him pictures of her family; he showed her a quiet well-arranged woman with a stiff little girl on her knee; the taking of that photograph had been an occasion, Kate could see. This scene took place in an interval of work at the top of some stairs, standing up at a window. For Ahmed could not sit down, like a guest, as she could; just as she accompanied the delegates everywhere for meals and excursions, but of course Ahmed could not. So now she stood, with Ahmed beside her, and listened to how if she went to bed early tonight havingtaken this medicine, she would be less nervous in the morning.
    Kate thought that this would not be true: what was waiting for her, the moment she gave it a chance, was not going to be patted and pushed out of sight by sedatives. She was going to have to return to London, to be alone somewhere for two months, and to look, in solitude, at her life. Of course, she had been invited to various countries by various men and women whose good friend she had become—friendship in the style of this way of living, casual, non-demanding, tolerant, friendship that was in fact all negation. It did
not
criticise. It did
not
make demands. It took no notice of national or racial differences which, inside these enchanted circles, seemed only for the purposes of agreeable titillation. And it was sexually democratic. Hearts did not get broken. Of course not, careers were more important than love, or sex: probably this was the sexuality of the