The Summer Before the Dark Read Online Free

often to become professors. But these were not frequent thoughts: she had not found children boring. Besides it was not as if her husband cut her off from his interests, from interesting people. She sometimes did translating for him or his colleagues. She had once even translated a Portuguese novel, which earned her little money, but much praise. She met people from all over the world, particularly since the children started growing up, and brought home all their globally scattered friends.
    If she had not married—but good God, she would have been mad not to marry, mad to choose Romance languages and literature.… Michael and Alan Post were helping themselves to coffee, and waiting for her. What she was feeling was a kind of panic. Knowing this made it worse. It was stupid and irrational to feel frightened. What of? This was not something she could have confessed to anyone, not even Michael—that when actually faced with a job, quite an ordinary sort of job after all, well within her powers, and obviously only for a short time, she felt like a long-term prisoner who knows she is going to have to face freedom in the morning.
    “But I don’t see how I can,” she said. “Tim is going to be here on and off all summer.”
    She observed the tightening of her husband’s mouth: frequent discussion about Tim had not resolved disagreement. Michael thought his youngest son was overprotected. She, while agreeing that he might have been, could not believe that the way to put things right was to “throw him out and be done with it.” How, throw him out? Where to? And why was what the boy doing so bad that he needed such dramatic cure: he sulked, he threatened, he hated, but so had all the children in their different ways. Kate believed that if she favoured Tim, it was because her husband was unfair to him: she was aware that this area was too emotional to be looked at straight; she had attitudes about it, which were known to be hers and which she defended, inside the family and out.
    “But the committee won’t be going on for longer than—how long did you say?” Michael asked Alan.
    By now Alan had understood that there was a problem between husband and wife, and he said, looking at neither, but away over towards the house, where a youngboy was emerging and coming towards them, “Not more than a month at most.”
    “There
is
Tim,” said Kate; meaning
Not in front of the children
.
    When Tim arrived under the tree, it was clear that he was older than his slight build and light walk made him seem from a distance. He was sulky now. Looking hard at his mother he said, “I’m awfully sorry mother but I’ve changed my mind. The Fergusons have asked me to go to Norway. They’re going climbing. I’ll go if you don’t mind.”
    “No, of course not darling,” said Kate automatically. “Of course you should go.” She was delighted that he was not going to be excluded from the summer’s pleasures, as delighted as if she were going to Norway; but the boy had already glanced at his father, who nodded at him. He then smiled formally at the guest, momentarily appearing a completely different person, the responsible man he would become, turned back into a sulky child in his look at his mother as he said, “That’s all right then, I’ll be off to pack now. I’m going tonight.” And he ran off to the house as if escaping.
    She shouted after him, “Tim, before you go, see if you can make the kettle boil again, I need the hot water for washing up.” But either he didn’t hear or didn’t want to.
    “So when can you start, Kate?” said Alan. “When? Tomorrow? Oh please do?”
    Kate said nothing, but she was smiling agreement. She knew she might burst into tears. She felt as if every support had been pulled out from under her. She felt—to use a metaphor she had been using, indeed, developing, in her own thought, and for some time now—as if suddenly a very cold wind had started to blow, straight towards her, from the