The Summer Before the Dark Read Online Free PDF

would be back upstairs in one minute, they had been called back because of her, Kate’s arrival. With a great screaming wrench, Kate’s years of conditioning for itemised responsibility ripped off her. Charlie Cooper would telephone for her, he would simply announce that Mrs. Brown was otherwise occupied. It was to Eileen that this announcement would be made: suppressing an impulse to send her daughter messages of love and support, Kate allowed herself to be handed over to a young woman who was going to give her instruction into her duties. At each place around the table was machinery for receiving languages not one’s own translated into one’s own: sound transformed in its passage from speaker to hearer. By Kate, among others. There were switches, each one a door into a foreign tongue. There were headphones. In glass-walled cubicles at either end of the room were more switches, receiving apparatus, headphones. It would be Kate’s task to sit in one of these cubicles, to listen to speeches made in English, French, and Italian, and to translate them as she listened into Portuguese, which she would speak aloud into a transmitter connected with the ears of the Portuguese speakers—mostly Brazilian, who did not speak English, or who did, but preferred, nevertheless, their own tongue. She would be like a kind of machine herself: into her ears would flow one language, and from her mouth would flow another.
    She would not, of course, be alone all day in her cubicle, even with the shortage of translators. There would be frequent changes and rests and chances for replenishing of vital energies during this extremely taxing task—as Charlie Cooper kept emphasising it was; for he had returned from telephoning her family, an errand he regarded as of so little importance that he did not report on it. She was in the cubicle with him; she had the headphones on;she was turning switches off and on, with his aid. While he instructed her, he was scribbling a message on a memorandum block saying that the organisation offered sincere and remorseful apologies for the shortage of translators, and implored the delegates’ tolerance and patience. With this in his hand he hurried out, to find a typist to copy it. Through the glass of the cubicle Kate—alone now, left to herself—was able to see that the conference room, viewed from this small height, was very pleasant. It had high windows. The walls were covered in a copper-coloured wood that was much grained and whorled and patterned. The floors were deep in dark-blue carpet.
    In this room were decided the fates and fortunes of millions of little people, what crops they were going to grow, what they would eat, and wear—and think.
    While Charlie Cooper was still laying a sheet of paper—the apology, miraculously multiplied in this brief space of a few minutes—in each place around the table, the delegates came in, laughing and talking. What an extraordinarily attractive lot they were! Such a collection of many-coloured, many-nationed handsome men and women would be what a film producer would try to shoot to make a scene from some idealised picture of united nations. But would the actors have been able to convey such a perfection of casual authority, such assurance? For that was the impression they made. The difference between them and their assistants and secretaries and the attendants of various kinds could be seen by that quality alone. Each man or woman strolled to his or her chair, seated himself, continued to talk and to laugh with a perfection of ease that shouted the one word:
Power
. Every gesture, each look, conveyed conviction of usefulness, the weight of what they represented.
    Some of the clothes worn were national costume: therewere half a dozen men and women from somewhere in Africa who made all the others look members of inferior races, so tall and graceful and majestically dressed were they: the folds of their robes, their earrings, the turn of a head—each knew its role.