The Sweetest Dream

  ‘Because once you agree to shelters then it assumes war is inevitable.’

  ‘But that is simply not logical,’ said Julia.

  ‘Not to an ordinary mind,’ said Rupert.

  Sylvia said, ‘It amounts to this, Johnny. No government in this country could even suggest protecting the people, even to the minor extent of fall-out shelters, because of you and your lot. The Campaign for Unilateral Nuclear Disarmament–it has such power that the government is afraid of it.’

  ‘That’s righ’,’ said James. ‘That’s how i’ ough’a be.’

  ‘Why do you talk in that ugly way?’ said Julia. ‘That isn’t how you need to speak.’

  ‘If you don’t talk ugly then you’re posh,’ said Colin, talking posh. ‘And you don’t get work in this free country. Another tyranny.’

  Johnny and James showed signs of leaving.

  ‘I’m going back to the hospital,’ said Sylvia. ‘At least I can have an intelligent conversation there.’

  ‘I want to see the letter you are talking about,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Why?’ asked Sylvia. ‘You aren’t even prepared to discuss what it says.’

  ‘Obviously,’ said Andrew, ‘he wants to inform the Soviet Embassy here of its contents. So that it can be traced, and the writers can be sent to labour camps or shot.’

  ‘Labour camps do not exist,’ said Johnny. ‘And if they did once–to a certain extent–they have been exaggerated–then they don’t exist now.’

  ‘Oh, Lord,’ said Andrew. ‘You really are a bore, Johnny.’

  ‘A bore isn’t dangerous,’ said Julia. ‘Johnny and his kind are dangerous.’

  ‘That is very true,’ said Wilhelm, politely, as ever, to Johnny. ‘You are very dangerous people. Do you realise, if there is a nuclear accident here, in this country, or if a bomb is dropped by some madman, let alone if there is a war, then millions of people could die because of you?’

  ‘Well, thanks for the snack,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Thanks for nothing,’ said Sylvia, almost in tears. ‘I should have known there was no point even in trying.’

  The two men left. Andrew and Sophie left, their arms around each other. Colin’s sardonic smile at the sight did not go unnoticed by them or by anybody.

  Sylvia said, ‘Anyway, there’s a committee. So far it’s all doctors, but we are going to expand.’

  ‘Enrol us all,’ said Colin, ‘but expect to find glass in your wine and frogs through the letterbox.’

  Sylvia embraced Julia, and left.

  ‘Don’t you think it is strange that stupid people should have such power?’ said Julia, almost weeping, because of Sylvia’s careless farewell.

  ‘No,’ said Colin.

  ‘No,’ said Frances.

  ‘No,’ said Wilhelm Stein.

  ‘No,’ said Rupert.

  ‘But this is England, this is England . . .’ said Julia.

  Wilhelm put his arm around her, and led her out and up the stairs.

  There were left Frances and Rupert, Colin and the dog. A little situation: Rupert wanted to stay the night, and Frances wanted him to, but she was afraid–she could not help it–of Colin’s reaction.

  ‘Well, you two,’ said Colin, and it was an effort for him, ‘bedtime, I think.’ Giving them permission. He began teasing the dog until it barked.

  ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘He always has the last word.’

  • • •

  A couple of weeks later Frances with Rupert, Julia and Wilhelm, Colin, were at a meeting called by the young doctors. There were about two hundred there. Sylvia opened the meeting, speaking well. Other doctors, and then more people followed. Members of the opposition had got wind of the meeting, and there were a group of thirty, who kept up a steady shouting, whistling, and shouts of Fascists! War mongers! CIA! Some were from the staff of The Defender. As our group left, some youths waiting at the exit caught hold of Wilhelm Stein and threw him against railings. Colin at once laid into them and put them to flight. Wilhelm was shaken, it was thought no more than that, but he had cracked ribs and he was taken to Julia’s house and put to bed there.

  ‘And so, my dear,’ he said, in a voice that was wheezy, and old. ‘And so, Julia, I have achieved the impossible: I am living with you at last.’ This was the first the others had heard Wilhelm wanted to move in.

  He was put into the room that had been Andrew’s and Julia proved a devoted if fussy nurse. Wilhelm hated it, having seen himself always as Julia’s cavalier, her beau. And Colin too, that abrasive young man, surprised the others, and perhaps himself, by a charming attentiveness to the old man. He sat with him, and told him stories about ‘my dangerous life on the Heath, and in the Hampstead pubs’, in which Vicious figured as something not far off the Hound of the Baskervilles. Wilhelm laughed, and begged Colin to desist, because his ribs hurt. Doctor Lehman came, and told Frances and Julia and Colin that the old man was on his way out. ‘These falls are not good at his age.’ He prescribed sedatives for Wilhelm and a variety of pills for Julia whom he was at last permitting to think of herself as old.

  Frances and Rupert at The Defender demanded their right to put an opposing view to that of the unilateral disarmament people, and wrote an article, which earned dozens of letters nearly all furiously opposing, or abusive. The Defender offices seethed and Frances and Rupert found curt or angry notes on their desks, some anonymous. They realised this rage was too deep in some part of the collective unconscious to be reasoned with. It was not about protecting or not protecting the population: they had no idea what it was really about. It was very unpleasant at The Defender. They decided to leave, well before it suited either of them financially. They were simply in the wrong place. Always had been, Frances decided. And all those long well-reasoned articles on social issues? Anyone could have written them, Frances said. Rupert almost at once got another job on a newspaper described as fascist by a typical Defender addict, but as Tory, by the populace. ‘I suppose I must be a Tory,’ said Rupert, ‘if we are going to take these old labels seriously.’

  The week they resigned a parcel of faeces was pushed through the door of Julia’s house, but not the front door, the one into Phyllida’s flat from the outside steps to the basement. A death-threat arrived, anonymous, to Frances. And Rupert too was sent a death-threat, together with some photographs of Hiroshima after the bomb. Phyllida came up–the first time for months–to say she objected to being drawn into this ‘ridiculous debate’. She was not prepared to deal with shit, not on any level. She was leaving. She was going to share a flat with another woman. And then she was gone.

  As for the poisonous debates over protecting or not protecting the population, soon it would be generally agreed that war had been prevented for so long because the possibly belligerent nations had nuclear weapons and did not use them. There remained, however, questions that this admission did not answer. Accidents at nuclear installations might happen and often did, and were usually hushed up. In the Soviet Union there had been accidents that had poisoned whole districts. There were madmen in the world who would not hesitate to drop ‘the bomb’, or several, but it was at least strange that this threat was usually referred to in the singular. The population remained unprotected, but the violence, the poison, the rage of the debates, simply fizzled out–stopped. If there ever had been a threat, it existed now. But the hysteria evaporated. ‘A strange thing,’ said Julia, in her new, sorrowful, slow voice.

  Wilhelm was still at Julia’s, and his big luxurious flat was empty. He kept saying that he was going to bring all his books over, and put an end to this ‘amazingly absurd situation’, with him neither living with Julia, nor not. He kept making dates with the movers, and cancelling them. He was not himself. He had to be humoured. Julia was as distressed. The two of them together were now like sick people who wanted to be responsible for each other, but their own weakness forbade it. Julia had succumbed to pneumonia, and for a while the two invalids were on different floors, sending notes to each other
. Then Wilhelm insisted on getting up to visit her. She saw this old man shuffling into her room, holding on to the edges of doors, and chair tops, and thought he looked like an old tortoise. He was in a dark jacket, wore a small dark cap, for his head was always cold, and he poked his head forward. And she–he was shocked by her, the bones of her face prominent, her arms like sticks of bone.

  Both were so sad, so distressed. Like people in a severe depression, the grey landscape that lay about them now seemed to be the only truth. ‘It seems I am an old man, Julia,’ he jested, trying to revive in him the courtly gent who kissed her hand and stood between her and all difficulties. That had been the convention. But he had been nothing of the sort, he now perceived, only a lonely old thing dependent on Julia for, well, everything. And she, the benevolent gracious lady, whose house had sheltered so many, though she had grumbled about it often enough, without him would have been an emotionally indigent old fool, besotted with a girl who was not even her granddaughter. So they seemed to each other and themselves, on their bad days, like shadows a bare branch lays on the earth, a thin and empty tracery, no warmth of flesh anywhere, and kisses and embraces are tentative, ghosts trying to meet.

  Johnny heard that Wilhelm was living in Julia’s house and came to say that he hoped there was no question of Wilhelm being left money. ‘That has nothing to do with you,’ Julia said. ‘I shall not discuss it. And since you are here I shall tell you that I have had to support your abandoned wives and children and so I am not leaving you anything. Why don’t you ask your precious communist party to give you a pension?’

  The house had been left to Colin and to Andrew, and both Phyllida and Frances were provisioned with decent if not lavish pensions. Sylvia had said, ‘Oh, Julia, please don’t, I don’t need money.’ But Julia left Sylvia’s name in her will; Sylvia might not need it, but Julia needed to do it.

  Sylvia was about to leave Britain, probably for a long time. She was going to Africa, to a mission station in the bush, in Zimlia. When Julia heard this she said, ‘Then I shall not see you again.’

  Sylvia went to say goodbye to her mother, having telephoned first. ‘Kind of you to let me know,’ said Phyllida.

  The flat was a large mansion block in Highgate, and the entry-phone said that here were to be found Doctor Phyllida Lennox and Mary Constable, Physiotherapist. A little lift ground up through the lower floors like a biddable birdcage. Sylvia rang, heard a shout, was admitted, not by her mother, but by a large and cheery lady on her way out. ‘I’ll leave you two to it,’ said Mary Constable, revealing that there had been confidences. The little hall had an ecclesiastical aspect which, examined, turned out to be due to a large stained-glass panel, in boiled-sweet colours, showing Saint Frances with his birds–certainly modern. It was propped on a chair, like a signboard to spirituality. The door opened to show a large room whose main feature was a commodious chair draped with some kind of oriental rug, and a couch, inspired by Freud’s in Maresfield Gardens, rigorous and uncomfortable. Phyllida was now a stout woman with greying hair in thick plaits on either side of a matronly face. She wore a kaftan of many colours, and multiple beads, earrings, bracelets. Sylvia, who had been carrying in her mind a limp, weepy, flabby female, had to adjust to this hearty woman, who clearly had acquired confidence.

  ‘Sit down,’ said Phyllida, indicating a chair not in the therapeutic part of the room. Sylvia sat carefully on its very edge. A spicy provocative smell . . . had Phyllida taken to wearing perfume? No, it was incense, emanating from the next room, whose door was open. Sylvia sneezed. Phyllida shut the door, and sat herself in her confessor’s chair.

  ‘And so, Tilly, I hear you are going to convert the heathen?’

  ‘I am going to a hospital, as a doctor. It is a mission hospital. I shall be the only doctor in the area.’

  The big strong woman, and the wisp of a girl–so she still seemed–were being made conscious of their differences. Phyllida said, ‘What a pasty-face! You’re like your father, a proper weed he was. I used to call him Comrade Lily. His middle name was Lillie, after some old Cromwell revolutionary. Well, I had to keep my end up somehow, when he came the commissar at me. He was worse even than Johnny, if you can believe that. Nag, nag, nag. That bloody Revolution of theirs, it was just an excuse to nag at people. Your father used to make me learn revolutionary texts by heart. I am sure I could recite the Communist Manifesto for you even now. But with you it’s back to the Bible.’

  ‘Why back to?’

  ‘My father was a clergyman. In Bethnal Green.’

  ‘So what were they like, my grandparents?’

  ‘I don’t know. Hardly saw them after they sent me away. I didn’t want to see them. I went to live with my aunt. Obviously they didn’t want to see me, sending me away like that for five years, so why should I want to see them?’

  ‘Do you have any photographs of them?’

  ‘I tore them up.’

  ‘I would have liked to see them.’

  ‘Why should you care? Now you are going away. Just as far away as you can get, I suppose. A little thing like you. They must be mad, sending you.’

  ‘However that may be. But I’ve come to say something important. And what is this Doctor on your nameplate?’

  ‘I am a Doctor of Philosophy, aren’t I? I took Philosophy at university.’

  ‘But we don’t use Doctor like that in his country. Only the Germans do.’

  ‘No one can say I am not a doctor.’

  ‘You’ll get into trouble.’

  ‘No one has complained yet.’

  ‘That is what I’ve come to see you about . . . mother, this therapy you’re doing. I know you don’t need any kind of training for it but . . .’

  ‘I’m learning on the job. Believe me, it’s an education.’

  ‘I know. People have said you have helped them.’

  Phyllida seemed to turn into someone else: she flushed, she sat forward clasping her hands, was smiling and confused with pleasure. ‘They did? You’ve heard good things?’

  ‘Yes, I have. But what I want to suggest is, why not actually take a course? There are some good ones.’

  ‘I’m doing all right as I am.’

  ‘Tea and sympathy are all very well . . .’

  ‘I can tell you, there have been times I could have done with tea and sympathy . . .’ and her voice was sliding into the knell of her complaint. Sylvia’s muscles were already propelling her upwards, when Phyllida said, ‘No, no, sit down, Tilly.’

  Sylvia sat, and pulled from a briefcase a stack of paper, which she handed to her mother. ‘I’ve made a list of the good ones. One of these days someone is going to say they have a headache or a stomachache and you’ll say it’s psychosomatic, but it’s cancer or a tumour. Then you’ll blame yourself.’

  Phyllida sat silent, holding the papers. In came Mary Constable, all confidential smiles.

  ‘Come and meet Tilly,’ said Phyllida.

  ‘How are you, Tilly?’ said Mary, actually embracing the reluctant Sylvia.

  ‘Are you a psychotherapist too?’

  ‘I’m physio,’ said Phyllida’s companion . . . lover? Who knew, these days? ‘I train physio students. We say that between us we deal with the whole person,’ said cheerful Mary, radiating a persuasive intimacy and faint aromas of incense.

  ‘I must go,’ said Sylvia.

  ‘But you’ve just come,’ said Phyllida, with satisfaction that Sylvia was behaving as she had expected she would.

  ‘I’ve got a meeting,’ said Sylvia.

  ‘Said just like Comrade Johnny.’

  ‘I hope not,’ said Sylvia.

  ‘Then, goodbye. Send me a postcard from your tropical paradise.’

  ‘They have just finished a rather nasty war,’ said Sylvia.

  • • •

  Sylvia rang Andrew in New York, was told he was in Paris, then from there, that he was in Kenya. From Nairobi she heard his voice, crackly and faint.

  ‘Andrew, it’s me.’

>   ‘It’s who? Damn this line. Well, we won’t get a better. Third World tech,’ he shouted.

  ‘It’s Sylvia.’

  Even through the crackles she heard his voice change. ‘Oh, darling Sylvia, where are you?’

  ‘I was thinking of you, Andrew.’

  She had been, needing his calming, confident voice, but this distant ghost was discommoding her, like a message of how little he could do for her. But what had she expected?

  ‘I thought you were in Zimlia,’ he shouted.

  ‘Next week. Oh, Andrew, I feel as if I am jumping over a cliff.’

  She had had a letter, from Father Kevin McGuire, of St Luke’s Mission, forcing her to look steadily at a future she had not envisaged at all, until that moment. Attached to the letter was a list of things she must bring. Medical supplies she had taken for granted, as basic as syringes, aspirin, antibiotics, antiseptics, needles for suturing, a stethoscope, on and on. ‘And certain things ladies need, because you won’t find them easily here.’ Nail scissors, knitting needles, crochet hooks, knitting wool. ‘And humour this old man, who loves his Oxford marmalade.’ Batteries for a radio. A small radio. A good jersey, size 10, for Rebecca. ‘She is the house girl. She has a cough.’ A recent issue of the Irish Times. One of The Observer. Some tins of sardines, ‘If you can slip them into a corner somewhere.’ With greetings, Kevin McGuire. ‘P.S. And do not forget the books. As many as you can. There is a need for them.’

  ‘It was a bit rough out there,’ she had been told.

  ‘Andrew, I’m in a panic–I think.’

  ‘It’s not so bad. Nairobi’s not so bad. A bit gimcrack.’

  ‘I’ll be a hundred miles from Senga.’

  ‘Look, Sylvia, I’ll drop in to London on my way back and see you.’

  ‘What are you doing there?’

  ‘Distributing largesse.’

  ‘Oh, yes, they said. Global Money.’

  ‘I’m financing a dam, a silo, irrigation . . . you name it.’

  ‘You are?’

  ‘I wave my magic wand, and the desert blooms.’