The Sweetest Dream

  ‘Do sit down, Julia.’

  Julia sat, first removing a pair of Frances’s tights.

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ said Frances, and Julia accepted the apology with a tight little smile.

  ‘What is all this about Colin and psychoanalysis?’

  This is what Frances had dreaded: conversations had already taken place between the school and herself and between Colin and herself, and Sophie, too, had been involved. ‘Oh, lovely, Colin, that’d be so good.’

  ‘It was described to me by the headmaster as Colin having someone to talk to.’

  ‘They can call it what they like. It would cost thousands, thousands, every year.’

  ‘Look, Julia, I know you don’t approve of any of these psycho things. But have you thought, he’ll have a man to talk to. Well, I hope it’s a man. This is such a female house, and Johnny . . .’

  ‘He has a brother, he has Andrew.’

  ‘But they don’t get on.’

  ‘Get on? What’s that?’ And now there was a pause, while Julia stretched out and then clenched the fingers that lay on her knees. ‘My older brothers, they quarrelled sometimes. It is normal for brothers to quarrel.’

  Now, Frances did know that Julia had had brothers, and that they had been killed in that old war. Julia’s painfully working fingers brought them into this room, Julia’s past . . . dead brothers. Julia’s eyes had tears in them, Frances could swear, though she sat with her back to the light.

  ‘I said yes to Colin talking to someone because . . . he’s very unhappy, Julia.’

  Frances was still not sure whether Colin would say yes. What he had actually said was, ‘Yes, I know, Sam told me.’ The headmaster. ‘I said to him it’s my father who should be analysed.’ ‘That would be the day,’ Frances had said. He said, ‘Yes, and why not you? I am sure you could do with a good talking to.’ ‘Talking with.’ ‘I don’t see that I’m madder than anyone else.’ ‘I’d agree with that.’

  Now Julia got up and said, ‘I think that there are some things we are not likely to agree on. But that is not what I came to say. Even without the stupid analysis I can’t pay for Colin. I thought he would be leaving school now, and then I hear he’s going on for another year.’

  ‘He agreed to try for the exams again.’

  ‘But I cannot pay for him and for Andrew, and for Sylvia too. I will see them both through university until they are independent. But Colin–I am not able to do it. And you are earning money now, I hope it will be enough.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Julia. I’m so sorry all this has fallen on you.’

  ‘And I suppose it is no use asking Johnny. He must have money, he’s always on some trip somewhere.’

  ‘He gets paid for.’

  ‘Why is that? Why do they pay for him?’

  ‘Oh, Comrade Johnny, you know. He’s a bit of a star, Julia.’

  ‘He’s a fool,’ said Johnny’s mother. ‘Why is that? I do not think I am a fool. And his father was certainly not a fool. But Johnny is an idiot.’ Julia stood by the door, giving an expert glance around the room which had once been her own private little sitting-room. She knew Frances did not care for this furniture–such good furniture; nor the curtains, which would last another fifty years, if properly looked after. Julia suspected the curtains harboured dust and probably moths. The old carpet, which had come from the house in Germany, was threadbare in patches.

  ‘And I suppose you are going to defend Johnny, you always do.’

  ‘I defend him? When have I ever ever defended his politics?’

  ‘His politics! That’s not politics, that’s such–stupidity.’

  ‘The politics of half the world, Julia.’

  ‘It’s still stupidity. Well, Frances, I do not like to see you more worried, with so much on your back, but I cannot help it. If you really are unable to pay for Colin then we could mortgage the house.’

  ‘No, no, no . . . absolutely not.’

  ‘Well, tell me if there are difficulties.’ She went out.

  There would be difficulties. Colin’s school was very expensive, and he had agreed to do the full year. He was too old, nearly nineteen, and that was an embarrassment. The bill for the Maystock Clinic, the ‘talking to’–it would be thousands. She would have to find more work. She would ask for a rise. She knew her articles had raised the circulation of The Defender. She could write for other newspapers, but under another name. These problems had been discussed with, of all people, Rupert Boland, in the Cosmo. He had financial problems too, unspecified. He would have liked to leave The Defender, which he claimed was no place for a man, but he was paid well. He was earning extra by doing research for television and radio: she could too. Even so, she would need more, she would need a lot. Johnny: she could perhaps ask him again? Julia was right, he lived the life of a–today’s equivalent of a rajah, he went on delegations and good-will missions, always in the best hotels, all expenses paid, conveying comradely greetings from one part of the world to another. He must be getting money from somewhere: who was paying his rent? He didn’t actually work, ever.

  With that autumn began a bizarre situation. Colin came up by train twice a week from St Joseph’s to go to the Maystock Clinic, where he had appointments with a Doctor David. A man: Frances was delighted. Colin would have a man to talk to, a man outside his family situation. (‘If that’s what he needs,’ said Julia, ‘why not Wilhelm? He likes Colin.’ ‘But Julia, don’t you see, he’s too close, he’s part of our world.’ ‘No, I don’t see.’) The trouble was that pursuing some psychoanalytic theory or other, Doctor David did not speak at all. He said good afternoon, sat himself in his chair, after a brisk handshake, and thereafter spoke not one word for the whole hour. Not a word. ‘He just smiles,’ reported Colin. ‘I say something and he smiles. And then he says, The time is up, I’ll see you on Thursday.’

  Colin came straight home after the Maystock, and to wherever his mother was in the house. There he addressed to her all that he had not been able to say to Doctor David. It came pouring out, the complaints, the miseries, the angers that Frances had hoped he was at last able to unload on to the professional shoulders of Doctor David. Who only sat silent, so Colin sat silent, frustrated and angry. He shouted at his mother that Doctor David was torturing him, and it was all the school’s fault for making him go to the Maystock Clinic. And it was her fault he was in such a mess. Why had she married Johnny?–he shouted at her. That communist, everyone knew about communism but she had married him, Johnny was just a fascist commissar, and she, Frances, had married him and all that shit was landed on him and on Andrew. So he shouted, as he stood in the middle of her room, but it was at Doctor David he was shouting, because it was all pent up in him, it had to come out somewhere. All the way up to London in the little slow train, he rehearsed his accusations of life, his father, his mother, to tell Doctor David, but Doctor David only smiled. And so it had to come bursting out, and it was focused on his mother. And look, he shouted, on visit after visit, look at this house, full of people who have no right to be here. Why was Sylvia here? She wasn’t their family. She took everything, they all took everything and Geoffrey had been leeching off them for years. Had Frances ever actually worked out what had been spent on Geoffrey over the years? They could have bought another house the size of Julia’s with it. Why had Geoffrey always been here? Everyone said Geoffrey was his friend, but he had never liked Geoffrey much, the school had decided Geoffrey was his friend, Sam had decided they were complementary, in other words they didn’t have a fucking thing in common, but it would be good for them, well it hadn’t been good for him, Colin, and Frances connived with the school, she always had, sometimes he thought Geoffrey was more Frances’s son than he was, and look at Andrew, he had lain on his bed for a whole year and smoked pot, and did Frances know, he had tried cocaine, well, she didn’t know that? If not, why not? Frances never knew about anything, she just let everything go on, and how about Rose, what was Rose doing in this house at all, living at our expense, taking
everything, he didn’t want Rose here, he hated Rose, did Frances know that no one liked Rose, yet here she was downstairs and she had taken over the flat and if anyone else even put their heads around the door she shouted at them to get out. It was all Frances’s fault, sometimes he thought he was the only sane person in the house, but it was he who had to go to the Maystock to be tortured by Doctor David.

  Listening to Colin, as he stood and orated, taking his heavy black-rimmed glasses off, putting them back on, waving his hands about, stamping around, she was hearing what no human being should ever have to hear–another person’s uncensored thoughts. (No one except Doctor David and his ilk, that is.) They were thoughts not dissimilar probably to many people’s, when hot and lava-like. Just as well people were not able to hear what people thought of them, as she now had to, with Colin. The tirade of misery went on for an hour, the time he would have spent with Doctor David. Then he would say, in a quite friendly, normal voice, ‘Now I have to go and catch my train.’ Or, ‘I’ll stay the night and catch the first train in the morning.’ And the Colin she knew was back, even smiling, though in a puzzled, frustrated sort of way. He must be absolutely exhausted after that outpouring.

  ‘You don’t have to go to the Maystock,’ she reminded him. ‘You can say no. Do you want me to tell them you’ve decided not to?’

  But Colin did not want to stop coming to London twice a week, to the Maystock Clinic, to her, she knew, because without the frustration of the hour with the analyst he would not be able to shout and rave at her, to say what he had been thinking so long but had not said, never been able to let out.

  After an hour of being shouted at, Frances was so tired that she went off to bed, or sat slumped in a chair. One evening, sitting there in the dark, Julia knocked, opened the door, saw the room was dark, and then that Frances was there. Julia turned on the light. She had heard Colin shouting at his mother, and had been disturbed by it but that was not what had brought her down.

  ‘Did you know that Sylvia has not come home?’

  ‘It’s only ten o’clock.’

  ‘May I sit down?’ And Julia sat, her hands demolishing the little handkerchief in her lap. ‘She’s too young to be out so late, with a bad crowd of people.’

  Sylvia sometimes after school went to a certain flat in Camden Town where Jake and his cronies were most afternoons and evenings. They were all fortune tellers, one or two professionally, or wrote horoscopes for newspapers, were initiates of rites, mostly invented by themselves, went in for table-turning, evoked spirits, and drank mysterious substances called Soul Balm, or Mind Mix, or Essence of Truth–usually not much more than herbal blends, or spices, and generally lived in a world of meaning and significance far removed from most people’s. Sylvia was a great success with them. She was their pet, the neophyte those possessed with knowledge yearn for, and she was duly entrusted with secrets of higher meaning. She liked these people because they liked her, and she was always welcome. She never behaved irresponsibly, always telephoned to say she would be back later than usual, and if she stayed with them longer than she had said, telephoned Julia again.

  ‘If you must be with such people, Sylvia, what can I say?’

  Frances did not like it, but knew the girl would grow out of it.

  For Julia it was a tragedy, her little lamb lost to her, enticed away by sick lunatics.

  ‘These people are not normal, Frances,’ she said tonight, distressed and ready to cry.

  Frances did not jest, ‘Who is?’–Julia would have embarked on definitions. Frances knew Julia had come down for more than her anxiety over Sylvia, and waited.

  ‘And how is it that a son may talk to his mother as Colin does to you?’

  ‘He has to say it to someone.’

  ‘But it is ridiculous, the things he says . . . I can hear it all, the whole house can hear.’

  ‘He can’t say it to Johnny, and so he says it to me.’

  ‘It is so astonishing to me,’ said Julia, ‘that they are allowed to behave like this? Why are they?’

  ‘They’re screwed up,’ said Frances. ‘Isn’t it odd, Julia, don’t you think it is strange?’

  ‘It is very strange how they behave,’ said Julia.

  ‘No, listen, I think about this. They are all so privileged, they have everything, they have more than any of us ever had–well, you might have been different.’

  ‘No, I did not have a new dress every week. And I did not steal.’ Julia’s voice rose. ‘That thieves’ kitchen of yours, Frances, they are all thieves and they have no morals. If they want something they go and steal it.’

  ‘Andrew doesn’t. Colin doesn’t. I don’t think Sophie ever did.’

  ‘The house is full of . . . you allow them here, they take advantage of you and they are thieves and liars. This was an honourable house. Our family was honourable, and we were respected by everyone.’

  ‘Yes, and I wonder why they are like that. They all have so much, they have more than any generation ever had, and yet they are all . . .’

  ‘They are screwed up,’ said Julia, getting up to go. Then she stood in front of Frances, hands apart, as if holding there an invisible thing–a person?–which she was wringing, like a cloth. ‘It’s a good expression, that: screwed up. I know why they are. Disturbed, did you say Colin was? They’re all war children, that is why. Two terrible wars and this is the result. They are children of war. Do you think there can be wars like that, terrible terrible wars and then you can say, All right, that’s over, now back to normal. Nothing’s normal now. The children aren’t normal. And you too . . .’ but she stopped herself, and Frances was not to hear what Julia thought of her. ‘And now Sylvia, with those spiritualists, they call themselves, did you know they turn out the lights and sit holding hands and some idiot woman pretends to be talking to a ghost?’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘And yet you sit there, you always just listen, but you don’t stop them.’

  Frances said, as the old woman went out, ‘Julia, we can’t stop them.’

  ‘I shall stop Sylvia. I shall tell her she can go back home to her mother, if she wants to run around with those people.’

  The door shut and Frances said aloud into the empty room, ‘No, Julia, you will not do that, you are merely muttering to yourself like an old witch, to let off steam.’

  On that same evening, when Julia’s ‘This was an honourable house’ still sounded in Frances’s ears, the doorbell rang, late, and Frances went down. On the doorstep were two girls, of about fifteen, and their hostile but demanding looks warned Frances of what she would hear which was, ‘Let us in. Rose is expecting us.’

  ‘I wasn’t expecting you. Who are you?’

  ‘Rose says we can live here,’ said one, apparently about to push her way in past Frances.

  ‘It isn’t for Rose to say who can live here and who can’t,’ said Frances, quite amazed at herself for standing her ground. Then, as the girls stood hesitating, she said, ‘If you want to see Rose then come tomorrow at a reasonable time. I think she’ll be asleep by now.’

  ‘No, she isn’t.’ And Frances looked down to the window of the basement flat, to see Rose energetically gesticulating to her friends. She heard, ‘I told you she’s an old cow.’

  The girls went off, with what can you expect gestures to Rose. One said loudly over her shoulder, ‘When we’ve won the R evolution you’ll be laughing on the other side of your face.’

  Frances went straight down to Rose, who stood waiting, quivering with rage. Her black hair, no longer tamed by the Evansky haircut, seemed to bristle, her face was red, and she actually seemed to be on the point of physically attacking Frances.

  ‘What the hell do you mean by telling people they can come and live here?’

  ‘It’s my flat, isn’t it? I can do what I like in my own flat.’

  ‘It’s not your flat. We are allowing you to stay in it until you’ve finished school. But if there are other people who need it, they’ll be using the sec
ond room.’

  ‘I’m going to let that room,’ said Rose.

  And now Frances was startled into silence, because of the impossibility of what was happening, hardly an unfamiliar situation with Rose. Then she saw that Rose stood triumphant, because she had not been contradicted, and she said, ‘We’re not charging you to live here. You live here absolutely free, so how can you imagine for a moment that you could let out a room?’

  ‘I have to,’ shouted Rose. ‘I can’t live on what my parents are giving me. It’s just peanuts. They’re so mean.’

  ‘Why should you need more when you’re not paying anything at all for living here, and you eat with us, and your school’s all paid for?’

  But now Rose was on a roll of rage, out of control. ‘Shits, all of you, that’s all you are. And you don’t care about my friends. They have nowhere to go. They’ve been sleeping on a bench at King’s Cross. I suppose that’s what you want me to do.’

  ‘If that’s what you want, then off you go,’ said Frances. ‘I’m not stopping you.’

  Rose shouted, ‘Your precious Andrew knocks me up and then you throw me out like a dog.’

  This did take Frances aback, but she reminded herself it was not true . . . and then she had to remember that Jill’s abortion had been arranged without her knowing anything about it. This hesitation gave Rose the advantage, and she screamed, ‘And look at Jill, you made her have an abortion when she didn’t want one.’

  ‘I didn’t know she was pregnant. I didn’t know anything about it,’ said Frances, and understood she was arguing with Rose, which no sane person would do.