The Sweetest Dream (33 page)

‘Poor Andrew.'

‘Poor Sophie. Well, she's a masochist. You should understand
that.'

‘Is that what I am?'

‘You do have a certain talent for long-suffering, wouldn't you
agree?'

‘Not now. Not for a long time now.'

He hesitated. This scene might have ended there, but he leaped
up, put another teabag in his cup, poured on water that was not
boiling, saw his error, fished out the teabag and threw it into the
sink, swore, picked it out to drop it into the rubbish bin, caused
the kettle to boil, chose another teabag, poured on boiling water–all this in clumsy haste that told Frances that he was not enjoying
this encounter. He came back, he put down his cup. He got up
and gave the little dog a hasty stroke, and sat down.

‘It's not personal,' he said. ‘But I've been thinking. It's your
generation. It's all of you.'

‘Ah,' said Frances, relieved that they had chosen the familiar
ground of abstract principles.

‘Saving the world. Paradise on every new agenda.'

‘You are confusing me with your father.' Then she decided
to go on the attack herself. ‘I do get fed up with this. I am always
implicated in Johnny's crimes.' She contemplated the word. ‘Yes,
crimes. You could call them that by now.'

‘When could we not have called them that? And do you know
what? I actually read in
The Times
that he said, Yes, mistakes have
been made.'

‘Yes. But I did not commit the crimes, nor condone them.'

‘No, but you're a world saver, all the same. Just like him. The
whole lot of you. What conceit you all have. Do you know that?
You must be the most conceited hubristic generation there has
ever been.' He smiled still: he was enjoying this attack, but was
feeling guilty too. ‘Johnny for ever making speeches and you
filling the house with waifs and strays.'

Ah, now they were at the nub of it. She said, ‘I'm sorry, but
I don't see what that has got to do with it. I don't remember him
ever helping anybody.'

‘Helping? Is that what you call it. Well, his place is full all the
time of Americans dodging the draft–not that I've got anything
against that–and
comrades
from everywhere.'

‘It's not the same thing.'

‘Has it ever occurred to you to ask yourself, what would have
happened to them if you hadn't taken in Uncle Tom Cobbleigh
and all?'

‘One of them was your Sophie.'

‘She never actually moved in.'

‘She was practically living here. And how about Franklin? He
was here for over a year. He was your friend.'

‘And that bloody Geoffrey. I had him day and night at school
and then all the holidays here, for years and years.'

‘But I never knew you disliked him so much. Why didn't
you say? Why don't children ever say when they're unhappy
about something.'

‘There you are–you didn't even have enough insight to see
it.'

‘Oh, Colin. And you're going to say we shouldn't have let
Sylvia stay here.'

‘I'd never say that.'

‘You may not now but you certainly used to. You've made
my life a misery with your complaints. Anyway, I'm fed up with
this. It's a long time ago.'

‘The results are not a long time ago. Did you know that little
bitch Rose is going around saying that Julia is a lush and you are
a nymphomaniac?'

Frances laughed. It was angry, but genuine. Colin hated that
laugh: his stare at her was all miserable accusation. ‘Colin, if you
only knew what a chaste life I'd led . . .' But now, summoning
the spirit of these times, she said, ‘And anyway, if I had a new
man every weekend, it was my right, why not? You'd have no
right to say a bloody word.'

The absurdity of this showed itself at once. Colin went white,
and sat silent. ‘Colin, for God's sake, you know perfectly well . . .'
The dog intervened. ‘Yap, yap,' it went, ‘yap, yap.'

Frances collapsed laughing. Colin smiled, bitterly.

The fact was, the weight of his main accusation lay there
between them, a poisoned thing.

‘Where did you get all that confidence? Father saving the
world, a few million dead here, a few million dead there and you,
Do come in and make yourself at home, I'll just kiss the sore
places and make them better.' He sounded beaten into the earth
by years of his miserable childhood, and he actually looked like
a little boy, eyes full, lips trembling. And Vicious, leaving his
chair, came to his master, leaped up on to his knee and began
licking his face. Colin put his face–as much of it as would go–into the tiny dog's back, to hide it. Then he lifted it to say, ‘Just
where did you get it all from, you lot? Who the bloody hell
are
you–world-savers every one, and making deserts . . . Do you
realise? We're all screwed up. Did you know Sophie dreams of
gas chambers and none of her family was anywhere near them?'
And he got up, cuddling the dog.

‘Wait a minute, Colin . . .'

‘We've dealt with the main item on the agenda–Sophie. She
is unhappy. She will go on being unhappy. She will make Andrew
unhappy. Then she will find someone else and go on being
unhappy.'

He ran out of the room and up the stairs, the little dog barking
in his arms, its high absurd yap, yap, yap.

***

Something was going on in Julia's house that none of the family
knew about. Wilhelm and Julia wanted to get married, or at least,
for Wilhelm to move in. He complained, humorously at first, that
he was being forced to live like a teenager, with little assignations
to meet his love at the Cosmo, or for visits to restaurants; he
might spend all day and half the night with Julia, but then had to
go home. Julia fended off the situation, with jokes to the effect
that at least they were not yearning like teenagers for a bed. To
which he replied that there was more to a bed than sex. He
seemed to remember cuddles, and conversations in the dark, about
the ways of the world. Julia did wonder about sharing a bed after
so many years as a widow, but increasingly saw his point. She
always felt bad, staying comfortably in her room, when he had
to go home, through whatever weather there was. His home was
a very large flat, where once his wife, who was dead long ago,
and two children, now in America, had lived. He was hardly ever
in this flat. He was not a poor man, but it was not sensible,
keeping up his flat with its doorman and the little garden, while
there was this big house of Julia's. They discussed, then argued,
then bickered about how things could be arranged.

For Wilhelm to live with Julia in the four little rooms that
were enough for her–out of the question. And what would he
do with his books? He had thousands of them, some of them part
of his stock as a book dealer. Colin had taken over the floor
beneath Julia, had colonised Andrew's room. He could not be
asked to move–why should he? Of all the people in this house,
except Julia herself, he needed most his place, his little secure
place in the world. Below Colin was Frances in two good rooms
and a little one. And on that floor was the room that was Sylvia's,
even if she only came back to it once a month. It was her home
and must remain so.

But why should Frances not be asked to move?–Wilhelm
wanted to know. She earned enough money these days, didn't
she? But Julia refused. She saw Frances as a woman used by the
Lennox family to do the job of bringing up two sons, and now
–out. Julia had never forgotten how Johnny had demanded that
she should go away, into some little flat or other, when Philip
died.

Beneath Frances was the big sitting-room that stretched from
front to back of the house. It might take more shelves for
Wilhelm's books? But Wilhelm knew Julia did not want this room
to be sacrificed. There remained Phyllida. She could now well
afford to find her own place. She had the money Sylvia had
assured her and she earned steady money as a psychic and fortune
teller, and–increasingly–a therapist. When the family heard that
Phyllida was now a therapist, the jokes, all on the lines of ‘but
herself she cannot save', were unending. But she was attracting
patients. To get rid of Phyllida and her persistent customers–no
one in the house would object. Yes, one, Sylvia, whose attitude
towards her mother was now maternal. She worried about her.
And to what end would be Phyllida's moving out? Only useful
if Frances would move down, or if Colin did. Why should they?
And there was something else, very strong, which Wilhelm only
guessed at. Julia's dream was that when Sylvia married or found
‘a partner'–a silly phrase Julia thought–that she would move
in to the house. Where? Well, Phyllida could leave the basement,
and then . . .

Wilhelm began saying that he had at last understood: Julia did
not really want him there. ‘I have always loved you more than
you have loved me.' Julia had never thought about this love to
weigh and measure it. Simply, it was what she relied on. Wilhelm
was her support and her stay, and now she was getting old (which
she felt she was, despite Doctor Lehman), she knew she could
not manage without him. Did she not love him then? Well,
certainly not, compared with Philip. How uncomfortable this line
of thought was, she did not want to go on with it, nor to hear
Wilhelm's reproaches. She would have liked him to move in, if
things hadn't been so difficult, if only to soothe her conscience
over that big under-used place of his. She was even prepared
to contemplate cuddles and bedtime conversations in her once
connubial bed. But she had only shared her bed with one man
in her long life: too much was being asked of her–wasn't it?
Wilhelm's reproaches became accusations and Julia cried and
Wilhelm was remorseful.

 • • •

Frances was planning to leave Julia's. At last she would have her
own place. Now that there were no school or university fees, she
was actually saving money. Her own place, not Johnny's, or Julia's.
And it would have to accommodate all her research materials and
her books, now divided between
The Defender
and Julia's. A large
flat. What a pleasant thing it is to have a regular salary: only
someone who has not enjoyed one can say this with the heartfelt
feeling it deserves. Frances remembered freelancing and precarious
little jobs in the theatre. But when she had achieved enough
money for the substantial down-payment, then she would resign
from what she felt as an increasingly false position at
The Defender
,
and that would be the end of regular sums arriving in her bank
account.

She had always done most of her work at home, had never
felt herself to be part of the newspaper. That she just came and
went was her colleagues' complaint about her, as if her behaviour
was a criticism of
The Defender
. It was. She was an outsider in an
institution that saw itself as beleaguered, and by hostile hordes,
reactionary forces, as if nothing had changed from the great days
of the last century when
The Defender
stood almost alone as a
bastion of wholesome open-hearted values: there had been no
honest good cause
The Defender
had not defended. These days the
newspaper championed the insulted and the injured, but behaved
as if these were minority issues, instead of–on the whole–‘received opinions'.

Frances was no longer Aunt Vera (My little boy wets his bed,
what shall I do?), but wrote solid, well-researched articles on issues
like the discrepancy between women's pay and men's, unequal
employment possibilities, nursery schools: nearly everything she
wrote was to do with the difference between men's situation and
women's.

The women journalists of
The Defender
were known in some
quarters, mostly male (who saw themselves increasingly as
beleaguered by hostile female hordes), as a kind of mafia, heavy,
humourless, obsessed, but worthy. Frances was certainly worthy:
all her articles had a second life as pamphlets and even as books,
third lives as radio or television programmes. She secretly
concurred with the view that her female colleagues were heavy-going,
but suspected she could be accused of the same. She certainly felt
heavy, weighed down with the wrongs of the world: Colin's
accusation had been true enough: she did believe in progress, and
that a stubborn application in attacking unfairness would put things
right. Well, didn't it? At least sometimes? She had small triumphs
to be proud of. But at least she had never flown off into the windy
skies of the so fashionable feminism: she had never been capable,
like Julie Hackett, of a fit of tearful rage when hearing on the
radio that it was the female mosquito that is responsible for malaria.
‘The shits. The bloody fascist
shits
.' When at last persuaded by
Frances that this was a fact and not a slander invented by male
scientists to put down the female sex–‘Sorry, gender'–she
quietened into hysterical tears and said, ‘It's all so bloody
unfair
.'
Julie Hackett continued dedicated to
The Defender
. At home she
wore
The Defender
aprons, drank from
The Defender
mugs, used
The Defender
drying-up cloths. She was capable of angry tears if
someone criticised her newspaper. She knew Frances was not as
committed
–a word she was fond of–as she was, and often delivered
little homilies designed to improve her thinking. Frances found
her infinitely tedious. Aficionados of the prankish tricks life gets
up to will have already recognised this figure, which so often
accompanies us, turning up at all times and places, a shadow we
could do without, but there she is, he is, a mocking caricature of
oneself, but oh yes, a salutary reminder. After all, Frances had
fallen for Johnny's windy rhetoric, been charmed out of her wits
by the great dream, and her life had been set by it ever since. She
simply had not been able to get free. And now she was working
for two or three days a week with a woman for whom
The
Defender
played the same role as the Party had done for her parents,
who were still orthodox communists and proud of it.