The Summer Before the Dark

by Doris Lessing

  “Jeffrey!”

  “What do you want?”

  “You need a doctor.”

  He turned his face over to one side, like a soldier ordered to look Right! and lay with his arms down at his sides, rigid. Then he flung his body over, dragging the sheet up over him as he did so. He was fully dressed still, even to his shoes. As for her, she was asleep at once, having slept so little the night before.

  She woke early; he was up, throwing the pills the chemist had given him into his mouth in handfuls. At seven she was confronted by an efficient young man who said, “We’ll go inland to Granada. We’re close.”

  She agreed, of course.

  But while she drank coffee and ate sugared rolls, and watched the wasps at work in apricot jam, he was avoiding the dining room, was standing with a glass of soda water in his hand conferring with Reception. No bus left here direct for Granada. They would have to return to Almeria, and find another bus. A full day would be needed for the journey.

  He came to the door of the dining room to call her out: he was, she could see, protecting all his senses from the presence of food. He had decided to go on up the coast. There was a good place further on; he remembered it well. Obviously, the effort of returning to Almeria in one bus, and then hanging about to wait for another, and then a day’s journey inland—all this was too much. Yet he had to be in movement. That was what he needed, she could see.

  “We’ll go to Granada later,” he announced, and carried her suitcase and his to the bus that stood waiting to go north, up to Alicante, which city it would reach about three in the afternoon. But they would not actually get to Alicante, for the village he remembered came before Alicante.

  This bus was full of the country’s inhabitants, not of tourists, though there were one or two young people from the coasts, travelling cheap. It was a gay companionable busload; people talked and exchanged news, though of course she could not understand, she understood nothing. It really was the oddest experience, odder even than the absurd situation she was in with this young man whom she could not leave because he was ill, or breaking down or something, and who was obviously determined to go on riding north indefinitely along the garlanded summer coast: for weeks, a period which had ended two days ago, as she had to keep reminding herself, since it seemed such a long time ago, she had been like a multilingual machine, and all the languages, or most of them, spoken around her had been like doors or panes of glass. Before she had arrived in Spain she had even imagined that the competence of the world of conferences would follow her, would have imbued her in some way, so that she would find herself effortlessly speaking Spanish; but she was like someone waking from a dream in which she has been flying, unable to believe that in reality she can’t just step into the air and soar off and away. It seemed almost as if she did understand it; as if she had at one time understood, and was suffering temporary amnesia. On a smile from a woman across the aisle of the bus, or when the driver came around to collect fares, she opened her mouth to speak—her brain shuffled the phrases of other languages to find a useful one, her tongue was useless in her mouth. She had to stretch the muscles that moved her lips into a smile to communicate willingness to love and share. And she sat listening, listening, to the heavy sounds that would not give up their meaning—until she turned to look, taking in meaning as it was easy to do, from gesture, and from the set of a head, a shoulder. Meanwhile, as she sat like an invisible person in this chattering and laughing crowd, Jeffrey, who had gone to sleep again at once, slid down in his seat and lay heavy against her.

  At midday the bus allowed a longer pause than usual so that passengers could get a drink or a sandwich. She left him lying there, found herself lemonade, smoked a cigarette, and returned to find the driver examining the sleeping young man. He pointed down at him, indicating his sick look. She nodded, and smiled, her tongue paralysed, her ears almost receiving. With a final shake of the head the driver went back and started the bus. It was abominably hot now. Everything shimmered and dazzled and both she and Jeffrey were soaking. His sweat had a sallow smell to it, and he was very pale, with a yellow tinge. Jaundice? But with his colouring he would be bound to look yellow in illness.

  They reached Alicante in mid-afternoon and Jeffrey woke. He was wet with sweat, and shivering. But he was determined to continue north. She took him by both shoulders and said, “You are sick. Do you hear me? You are ill. You’ve got to let me put you into bed and get you a doctor.”

  He pulled himself away, as if she were a spider web he had walked into, or a snag of wood he had caught a sleeve on. He walked to a bus that stood nearby and got into it, without looking to see where it was going. She stood wondering whether she should call for help—who? The police?

  Instead she lifted the suitcases that now stood on the curb, their bus having turned itself around to return along the way they had come, and carried them to the second bus. The fact that this super-polite American had let her carry heavy suitcases and had not even noticed it said everything about his state.

  The bus had a board which had a name on it; she had no idea where it was going, or how far. But did it matter? She bought soda water from the café and took it to the bus. Jeffrey drank the liquid, but in the now familiar way of someone with a connection arrested in his brain, like an animal at the same time very hungry and conditioned to find food disgusting or dangerous. He kept bringing the glass up to his lips in a frantic thirsty way, swallowing without thought—then holding the water in his mouth with a look of agonised suspicion. He swallowed the water as if trying to remember what he had been told about it—something terrible!—then his hand took the glass up to his lips again, fast, desperate. In this way the soda water got drunk, and he did not bring it up. So he wouldn’t collapse of dehydration, that was something. He fell back into the seat. It was even hotter now. The streets were empty, for it was siesta time; the cafés, and the benches around a dusty square, were full of somnolent people. The town was crushed by the weight of heat, and when the bus started it was almost empty.

  Now Jeffrey sat limply jerking and sliding with the movements of the bus. It had resumed a northwards progress, but after half an hour, it turned inwards from the coast. It seemed that he did not notice the Mediterranean no longer accompanied them. But after a time he said with a pleased smile, “Oh yes, this is the way, I remember, the village is here.” The bus was driving through flattish land which was lightly cultivated. Then it began to climb through low hills. Now that they were lifted up the sea appeared behind them, a distant blue plain. Then it was gone, the hills concealed it. They were on a rough unmade road on the side of a hill, winding up. Jeffrey sat jogging, jerking, dozing. She kept her arm around him to keep him upright. Once he woke, not out of the sullen personality of a sick man, but having returned in sleep to an earlier one, who had chosen her as a companion. He smiled delightfully into her face and said, “Kate! Isn’t this just great? Isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t it just …” But he drooped off to sleep again.

  The sun was coming into the front part of the bus. What passengers there were moved back, and the driver was trying to keep his head shaded by lifting it and holding it back in the shade under the roof, his chin up: he looked as if he were holding it out to receive a blow.

  The sun went behind a range of hills, much higher than those they were driving through. It was already early evening. At a village that looked as if it might be in North Africa—poverty-cracked houses, poverty-shaped people—the bus stopped, dropped a wire cage with some thirst-crazed fowls, a barrel of sardines in oil, a crate of oranges. It picked up two nuns, who looked fatigued to the point of illness by the heat, and waited for Kate to return from a café with more soda water for Jeffrey. Then it drove on into the interior.

  Kate was now quite passive. Quite soon, clearly, this awful journey would end. Not because Jeffrey wanted it to end: he needed to move, to be going somewhere, to be travelling—she could feel that, understand it. But he was by now a bit lightheaded: he kept waking into
moments of gaiety, he chattered, he giggled, then fell abruptly into a doze. Even he would soon be forced to see that he was ill and must stop. Or some driver would refuse to take them on any farther. At eight in the evening, with a moon swelling towards full flooding everything, they stopped in a village square. It was a small place. There was a fountain trickling some dispirited water into a basin that had a cracked white china cup, lying on its edge. There were some dusty trees. A building across the square looked as if it might be a café; there was a large window covered across from inside by some material, to exclude the sun, and two tables stood outside where men sat drinking. There was also a solid-looking old-fashioned building that said it was a hotel. She found the village on her map. They were about fifty miles inland.

  She left Jeffrey sitting in the bus neither asleep nor waking, and went into the hotel. The manager came out of the dining room where he had been at table; she indicated in various languages that she was travelling with her husband, who was ill. French released her, and Señor Martinez came with her to the bus, and helped her pull Jeffrey out. It was like handling a bundle of clothes damp from the washing machine: he was so wet that his hands were slippery and his hair was soaked to his head. They supported him upstairs—there was no lift—and laid him on a small bed in a room of the kind common anywhere in Europe. It had a double bed for mamma and papa, and three smaller ones, for the children.

  Señor Martinez went out and returned in a moment with a bottle of mineral water: a good family man, he did not have to be told that this young man was in danger of dehydration. He supported Jeffrey, and she held glass after glass of liquid to his lips. He drank avidly, but with a look of furious distaste.

  Señor Martinez departed to say he would try and reach a doctor.

  “But you must understand, madame, il faut que vous comprenez, oui? This is a small village, it is a place without resources, we do not have a doctor here—pas de medicin, oui?—he comes from twenty miles away and perhaps he is on holiday, I do not know. But I will do my best.”

  He descended to the office and she sat on a hard chair by a window through which again she watched a wide starry sky and roofs and trees white with moonlight from a hot and stuffy room. Jeffrey spoke sternly of the necessity of getting onto another bus at once, then laughed at something funny he remembered from the day’s bus ride, but which he did not succeed in telling her about before he fell asleep again. Señor Martinez returned to say that the doctor’s aunt reported he would be back in three days: if affairs were urgent, it would be best to contact the nuns.

  “This is a small place, you understand? They are poor people. When the doctor comes it is for a serious illness. The nuns at the convent attend to small sicknesses.”

  They stood on either side of the bed, and looked down at the invalid, whose clothes were sticking to him, whose skull was shaped by dank strands of hair.

  Señor Martinez, the Spaniard, at fifty or so was what Jeffrey would look like. He was all sloping prominences: sloping bald skull, small sloping shoulders, an unexercised sloping stomach. Jeffrey, the American of German immigrant parents, must have in him a gene or two from these shores, for Señor Martinez could easily be his father.

  But how ill was he?

  Kate was thinking that if this were her son, she would not be worried at all, she would diagnose that condition of opting out: there is a temperature or a cold or a lowering of vitality that merits a doctor’s visit and some days in bed, but the point is the days in bed. Why, she used the evasion herself, quite consciously, when life got too much of a good thing. It is a state of affairs like winter for the earth: it feels as if all heat has retreated inwards, the fire is deeply hidden under rock, the sun is too far away. One lies huddled or sprawled, according to one’s temperament, far away, behind surfaces of flesh, hair, eyes that do not seem to have much to do with one, like a dog lying in the sun to get winter warmth.

  Señor Martinez, father of children, did not seem more perturbed than she was. Yet on the face of it Jeffrey was ill enough not to see them; he stared past or through them, and he shivered convulsively in great spasms that seemed self-consciously dramatic. Señor Martinez, his lively dark eyes full of support and warmth, said, “Alors, ça va mieux demain, oui oui, madame, j’en suis certain,” as if he were a doctor and she a worried mother. He went off saying that she would find a meal in the dining room but of course this was not a fashionable hotel like the ones they were used to; she must take what she found.

  The dining room was no larger than one for a bourgeois family, which was probably what it had once been. There was heavy dark furniture, heavy white tablecloths. The meal was bread soup, a piece of fried meat, fruit. She was served by a girl who cleaned rooms as well as waited at table and helped in the kitchen. This hotel was used by visiting government officials, by the police, whose local headquarters was some miles away, and by the priests who came to confess the nuns and serve them sacraments.

  She went to bed quietly. This was the first silent place since she had left her large garden in Blackheath. The Spanish coasts, Istanbul, Global Food in London—all had rung, hammered, shouted, or chattered with noise. Here, towards midnight, she woke to hear a horse or a mule clop past under the windows. But Jeffrey was wakened too, and just as if he had not for so many hours been not there, been absent from ordinary life, he sat up and demanded in a normal voice what he could have to eat—and where were they?

  She explained. They enjoyed a normal moment of reunion in the silent hotel in the village where now nothing was moving. He said, “I must have been sick, then?” She confirmed it, and went downstairs in her robe, as if in her own house, to see if she could find something to eat in the dining room, for she knew that the maid and Señor Martinez—whose wife and children were away visiting relatives in Barcelona—were in bed and asleep. She found a loaf of bread and some butter, covered against flies, on the great sideboard, and brought slices of bread and butter and some fruit up to the room. And there was Jeffrey, who had in the interval plunged in and out of a bath, had combed and dressed, demanding that they should go out and find a café or a restaurant. He seemed full of energy—suspiciously so. His extreme irritation, his restlessness, were a warning. She explained again that in this village everyone must now be asleep; that they were far from tourist country; that in the morning they could leave. He devoured the food as if he hated it, and was sick again, just as he was demanding to go out for a walk and enjoy the moonlight.

  He held on to the bottom of the bed, swaying, yellow, saying that he was quite recovered. He crawled back onto the bed, lay down, slept.

  He would probably be better in the morning.

  And indeed he woke early, and they descended together to the hotel dining room, where Señor Martinez was drinking coffee. She confessed her theft of the night; but of course he had already noticed it and understood it. He was charming, but she noted the change in his manner. She had left the passports on the hotel desk the night before: the fuss over Jeffrey’s sickness had prevented Señor Martinez taking down the details for his records. This morning he had done this. Last night she and Señor Martinez had been like parents conferring over a sick child’s bed; now he had to think that his guests were in some sort of scandalous relation. He was exuding reproach, sadness. As it were a philosophical reproach. While his kind, fine eyes rested on the lovers, it was as if he said, We are poor people here. We cannot afford such things.

  But he made the girl bring them good fresh coffee, and heavy bread, toasted in the English manner—he knew all about this custom, oh yes, for his younger brother had been a waiter in a restaurant in Manchester; and he said over and over again, as a nervous person repeats himself, that he was sorry there would be no bus until tomorrow: his nervousness, if it was that, said what he was too polite to say, that he wished their sinfulness and irregularity could be removed from his hotel earlier.

  What his courtesy said was that he regretted the limited resources of this place: for of course these two were on h
oliday, and it was unfortunate that such experienced and travelled people were confined to a village that had so little to offer of what they were used to.

  And so he went on; while Kate sat silent, knowing she was putting this nice man in a false position, but hoping that the shadiness of the room was hiding her embarrassment. Señor Martinez continued to speak French, and to her; by now he knew that Jeffrey understood a few words of Spanish, but he was ignoring him. His disapproval was directed at the man, then? He felt none for the woman? He did not like Jeffrey, but did like Kate in spite of her immorality?

  When the meal was over, they went out into the little square. It was empty. A dog lay in some shade. Already as hot as it would be at midday, the August sun whitened the sky. The fountain trickled silently. The large rectangle of screened glass opposite drew them towards it; the door stood open to admit air. It was a café, but it was for the people in the evenings: no one here had time to sit about in the day. There was no one in the café, not even a waiter. They walked into a street off the square, passing a blacksmith’s and a shop. This was the village shop. It sold onions, coarse sausage, olive oil from barrels, sardines that had lost all individuality, being crushed together with salt crusted on them, large greenish-red tomatoes that smelled strongly of the vine and the fields, enormous loaves of pale bread, green peppers. There were, perhaps, a hundred families in the place; and after a few yards the fields began, where maize stood turning yellow among olive trees and stones.

  They returned in silence to the square. Señor Martinez had observed their attempts to reach the amenities of the café, and had set a wooden table under a tree outside the hotel’s main door. He waved them towards it, and brought them glasses of mineral water with slices of lemon. There they sat, and knew they were being watched. The few houses of this village had shuttered windows, and the shutters had eyes behind them. Once or twice a farmer, or a labourer, walked through the square, wishing them Good Day. These men were full of dignity and reserve. Just as Jeffrey remembered. Here it was, what he had been looking for, in the withdrawn reproachfulness of Señor Martinez—who nonetheless was at this moment in the kitchen conferring with the cook to produce a meal more the style of the visitors than that of the village—and in the women who sat or stood behind windows, not showing themselves, in the men, who as the morning passed, came to cup water from the fountain.