The Sweetest Dream

  ‘I think I must discuss this situation with Mr Mandizi.’

  ‘That is a good idea.’

  ‘But he is not well. Mr Mandizi is not well and I think we shall soon have a replacement.’ He got up, not looking at Rebecca, whose house he knew he ought to be investigating. Off he went, his bike roaring and coughing through the peaceful bush.

  Meanwhile Sylvia was supposed to be closing down her hospital.

  There were patients in the beds, and Clever and Zebedee were doling out medicines.

  She said to the priest, ‘I am going in to Senga to see Comrade Minister Franklin. He was a friend. He came to us for holidays. He was Colin’s friend.’

  ‘Ah. Nothing more annoying than the people who knew you before you were Comrade Minister.’

  ‘But I’m going to try.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you perhaps think to put on a nice clean dress?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ She went into her room and emerged in her going-to-town outfit, in green linen.

  ‘And perhaps you should take a nightdress or whatever you need for the night?’

  Again she went into her room and emerged with a hold-all.

  ‘And now shall I ring the Pynes and ask if they plan a trip to Senga?’

  Edna Pyne said she would be glad of an excuse to get away from the bloody farm, and was over in half an hour. Sylvia jumped into the seat beside her, waved at Father McGuire, ‘See you tomorrow.’ And so did Sylvia leave for what would be an absence of weeks.

  Edna kept up her complaints all the way into town, and then said she had something shocking to tell, she shouldn’t be mentioning it but she had to. Cedric had been approached by one of those crooks to say that in return for giving up his farms ‘now-now’ a sum amounting to a third of their value would arrive in his bank account in London.

  Sylvia took this in, and laughed.

  ‘Exactly, laugh. That’s all we can do. I tell Cedric, just take it, and let’s get out. He says he’s not accepting a third of the value. He wants to stick out for the full value. He says the new dam alone will put up the value of the new farm by a half. I just want to get out. What I can’t stand, is the bloody hypocrisy. They make me sick.’ And so Edna Pyne chattered all the way in to Senga where she dropped Sylvia outside the government offices.

  When Franklin was told that Sylvia Lennox wanted to see him he panicked. While he had thought she ‘might try something on’, he did not expect it so soon. He had signed the order to close the hospital a week ago. He temporised: ‘Tell her I am in a meeting.’ He sat behind his desk, his hands palms down in front of him, staring dolefully at the wall which had on it the portrait of the Leader which adorned all the offices in Zimlia.

  When he thought of that house he had gone to for his holidays, in north London, it was as if he had touched some blessed place, like a shady tree, that had no connection with anything before or since. It had been home when he felt homeless, kindness when he had longed for it. As for the old woman, he had seen her, like an old secretary bird going in and out, but he had scarcely noticed her, this terrible Nazi. But he had never heard any Nazi talk in that house, surely? And there had been little Sylvia, with her shining wisps of gold hair, and her angel’s face. As for Rose Trimble, when he thought of her he found himself grinning; a proper little crook, well he had benefited, so he shouldn’t complain. And now she had written that nasty piece . . . surely she had been a guest in that house, like him? Yet she had been there much longer than he had, and so what she wrote had to be taken seriously. But what he remembered was welcome, laughter, good food, and Frances, in particular, like a mother. Later, when it was Johnny’s place he stayed at, now that was a different thing. It wasn’t a large flat, nothing like that great house where Colin had been so kind, yet it was always crammed with people from everywhere, Americans, Cubans, other countries in South America, Africa . . . It was an education in revolution, Johnny’s flat. He remembered at least two black men (with false names) from this country who were training in Moscow for guerilla war. And the guerilla war had been won, and he owed his sitting here, behind this desk, a senior Minister, to men like those. While he kept an eye out for them, at rallies and big meetings, he had never seen them since. Presumably they were dead. Now something confusing was happening. He knew what was being said about the Soviet Union, he was not one of the innocents who never left Zimlia. The word communist was becoming something like a curse: elsewhere, not here, where you had only to say Marxism to feel you were getting a good mark from the ancestors. (And where were they in all this?) A funny thing: he felt that that house in London had more in common with the ease and warmth of his grandparents’ huts in the village (as it happened not all that far from St Luke’s Mission) than anything since. And yet in the file on his desk was that nasty piece. He was feeling with every minute deeper resentment–against Sylvia. Why had she done those bad things? She had stolen goods from the new hospital, she had done operations when she shouldn’t, and she had killed a patient. What did she expect him to do now? Well what did she expect? That hospital of hers, it had never had any real legal existence. The Mission decides to start a hospital, brings in a doctor, nothing in the files recorded permissions being asked or given . . . these white people, they come here, they do as they like, they haven’t changed, they still . . .

  He sent out for sandwiches for lunch, in case Sylvia was hanging about somewhere waiting to catch him, and when Sylvia’s second request arrived, ‘Please, Franklin, I must see you’, scribbled on an envelope–who did she think she was, treating him like this–he ordered that she must be told he had been called away on urgent business.

  He went to the window, and lifted the slats of the blind and there was Sylvia walking down there. Passionate accusations which he might reasonably have directed against Life Itself were focused on Sylvia’s back with an intensity that surely she should have felt: little Sylvia, that little angel, as fresh and bright in his memory as a saint on a Holy Card, but she was a middle-aged woman with dry dull hair tied by black ribbon, no different from any of these white wrinkled madams whom he tried not to look at, he disliked them so much. He felt Sylvia had betrayed him. He actually wept a little, standing there holding up the slat and watching the green blob that was Sylvia merge into the pavement crowd.

  Sylvia walked straight into a tall distinguished gentleman who took her in his arms and said, ‘Darling Sylvia’. It was Andrew, and he was with a girl in dark glasses with a very red mouth, smiling at her. Italian? Spanish?

  ‘This is Mona,’ said Andrew. ‘We’ve got married. And I am afraid the ramshackle streets of Senga are a shock to her.’

  ‘Nonsense, darling, I think it’s cute.’

  ‘American,’ said Andrew. ‘And she’s a famous model. And as beautiful as the day, as you can see.’

  ‘Only when I have all my paint on,’ said Mona and excused herself saying she must lie down, she was sure they had a lot to talk about.

  ‘The altitude is getting to her,’ said Andrew, solicitously kissing her and waving her off into Butler’s Hotel, a few steps away.

  Sylvia was surprised to hear that 6,000 feet was considered altitude, but did not care: this was her Andrew and now she was going to sit and talk to him, so he said, in that café there. And there they went, and held hands, while fizzy drinks arrived and Andrew demanded to know everything about her.

  She had opened her mouth to begin, thinking that here was one of the important men in the world, and that surely the little matter of the closing of the hospital at St Luke’s could be reversed by a word from him, when a group of very well-dressed people filled the café, and he greeted them and they him and a lot of badinage began about this conference they were all attending here, in Senga. ‘It’s quite the coolest new place for conferences, but it’s not exactly Bermuda,’ someone said.

  Sylvia did know that Senga was being touted as just the place for any sort of international get together, and, seeing these bright clever smart people, understood how much she had slid aw
ay, in the stark exigencies of Kwadere, from being able to take part in this talk.

  Andrew continued to hold her hand, smiled at her often, then said perhaps this was not the place to have a chat. More delegates crowded in, joking at the café’s smallness, which was somehow being equated with Zimlia’s lack of sophistication, and these experts on absolutely everything you can think of, in this particular case, ‘The Ethics of International Aid’, sounded rather like children comparing the merits of parties their respective parents had recently given. There was so much noise, laughter and enjoyment that Sylvia begged Andrew to be allowed to leave. But he said she must come to the dinner tonight: ‘There’s the big end of conference dinner, and you must come.’

  ‘I don’t have a dress.’

  He gave her a frank once-over, making allowances, and said, ‘But it’s not evening dress, you’ll do.’

  And now she had to find somewhere to spend the night. She had come away without enough money: had come away, she saw now, inefficiently, in an unplanned and foolish way. It was all a bit of a haze: she remembered Father McGuire taking command. Had she been a bit sick, perhaps? Was she now? She didn’t feel herself, whatever that meant, for if she was not the Doctor Sylvia everyone knew at her hospital, who was she?

  She rang Sister Molly, who was in, and asked to stay the night. Sylvia took a taxi there, was welcomed, and heard a good deal of on the whole good-natured mockery of the conference on the Ethics of International Aid, and all similar conferences.

  ‘They talk,’ said Sister Molly. ‘They get paid to travel to some beauty spot and talk nonsense you’d not believe.’

  ‘I’d hardly call Senga a beauty spot.’

  ‘That is true, but they are off every day to see the lions and the giraffes and the dear little monkeys and I don’t think they notice that the land is perishing from the drought.’

  Sylvia told Molly about the dinner, said she had only what she had on, heard that it was a pity Molly was at least four sizes larger than Sylvia, who could otherwise borrow her one and only dress but as it was she personally would see to it that the suit was cleaned and ready by six o’clock. Having forgotten these amenities of real civilisation, Sylvia was perhaps disproportionately moved, and took off her suit, lay down on her little iron bed, just like the one she had at the Mission, and was asleep. Sister Molly stood over her for a while, the green suit folded over her arm, her face shedding beams of benevolent enquiry, judicious and experienced: after all, she did spend her life assessing people and situations from one end of Zimlia to the other. She did not like what she saw. Bending closer she checked up on this and that feature, sweaty brow, dry lips, flushed face, and lifted Sylvia’s hand to look at the wrist where visibly pounded an intemperate pulse.

  When Sylvia woke, her suit, nicely pinned and presented, hung on the door. On the chair was a selection of knickers, and a silk slip. ‘I got too fat for these ages ago.’ Also some smart shoes. Sylvia washed dust out of her hair, got dressed, put on the shoes, hoping she could still manage heels, and took a taxi to Butler’s. She suspected she was feverish, but because it would be so inconvenient to be ill, decided she wasn’t.

  Outside Butler’s the international crowd stood chatting, waving to each other, resuming conversations that might have been interrupted in Bogota or Benares. Andrew was waiting for Sylvia, on the steps. Mona was beside him in a pink floaty dress that made her look like one of the species tulips, jagged petals, that seemed cut out of crystallised light. Sylvia knew Andrew was anxious about how she might look, for if evening dress was not obligatory then none of the women was less smart than Mona. But his smile said, You’re all right, and he took her arm. The three went to the staircase which was grand enough for a film set, though in the best possible taste. It delivered them to a terrace where little flowering trees and a fountain filled the dusk with freshness. Lights from inside picked out a face, the dazzle of a white suit, the flash of a necklace. People greeted Andrew: how popular he was, this handsome and distinguished grey-haired gentleman, who must deserve the glamorous girl with him, since the fait accompli of the marriage proved he did.

  When they went into dinner it was a private room, but large enough for the hundred or so guests, and what a delightful room it was, achieving what its designers had intended, that the privileged people who used it would not be able to say whether they were in Benares or Bogota or Senga.

  Sylvia knew some faces from this morning in the café, but at others she had to look and look again . . . yes, Good Lord, there was Geoffrey Bone, as handsome as ever, and beside him the incendiary head, now subdued to a well-brushed russet, of Daniel, his shadow. And there was James Patton. For some people you have to wait decades before understanding what Nature has intended for them all along: in this case he had reached his culmination as man of the people, affable and amiable, comfily rotund, his right hand ever at the ready to reach out and clasp whatever flesh presented itself. There he was, a Member of Parliament in a safe Labour seat, and on this occasion a guest of Caring International, at Geoffrey’s invitation. And Jill . . . yes, Jill, a large woman with a greyish coiffure, senior councillor in a London borough notorious for its mismanagement of funds, though the word corrupt could never, surely, be associated with this solid citizen whose police-bashing, rioting, American-Embassy-storming days were so long behind one could be pretty sure she had forgotten them or was murmuring, Oh, yes, I was a bit of a Red once.

  Sylvia had not been put next to Andrew who was at the head of the table, flanked by two important South Americans, but beside Mona, some places away. Sylvia knew she was as invisible as an anonymous little brown bird next to a displaying peacock, for people looked so often at Mona whose name everyone knew if they followed fashion at all. And why was Mona here? She said to Sylvia that she was attending the conference as Andrew’s personal assistant, and congratulated Sylvia, giggling, on her new status as Andrew’s assistant secretary, which is how she was being described when introduced. Sylvia was able to sit quietly and observe, and imagine how Clever and Zebedee would look in these attractive uniforms, scarlet and white and so striking on the black skins of the smiling waiters. She knew, very well, how these youths had had to work, intrigue, beg for these jobs, and how their parents had sacrificed for them, so they could serve these international stars with food most of them had never heard of until coming to this hotel.

  Sylvia was offered the choice of crocodile tails, in pink mayonnaise, and palm hearts imported from South East Asia, and all the time her heart was weeping, yes it was, a quiet wailing went on inside her, as she sat there beside Andrew’s beautiful bride. It would not last, this marriage, you had only to look how they presented themselves, with the sleek complacency of well-fed cats, to know that she had said yes to Andrew probably for no better reason than she enjoyed saying, ‘I have always liked older men,’ to annoy younger ones, and he, who had not been married and had had to suffer the usual rumours, although he had been the ‘friend’ of a dozen well-known women, had finally needed to show his colours and make his statement, and he had, for here she was, his child bride.

  Sylvia looked around, and despaired, and thought of her hospital, closed while people in the village were ill or had broken limbs or . . . there were never less than thirty or forty people a day needing help; she thought of the lack of water, the dust, the AIDS, she could not prevent all these stale old thoughts, which have been thought too often, and to no purpose. She imagined Clever and Zebedee’s faces, disconsolate because they had dreamed of being doctors . . . how badly she had managed everything, she must have, for it all to end like this.

  Mona was chatting to the man on her left about her poverty-stricken origins in a slum in Quito: she had been noticed by a visiting delate to a conference on the Costumes of the World. She was confiding to him that Zimlia was the pits, she saw too much on the streets to remind her of what she had escaped from. ‘Basically, what I like is Manhattan. It has everything, hasn’t it? I don’t see why anyone should ever leave it.’


  Now everyone was talking about the annual conference due soon, with two hundred delegates from all over the world, which would last a week, with a keynote speech on ‘The Perspectives and Implications of Poverty’. Where should it be held? The delegate from India, a handsome woman in a scarlet sari, suggested Sri Lanka, though they would have to be careful because of the terrorists, but there was no more beautiful place in the world. Geoffrey Bone said he had spent three nights in Rio for a conference on the World’s Threatened Ecostructure, and there was a hotel there . . . but, said a Japanese gentleman, the last annual conference had been in South America, and there was a fine hotel in Bali, that part of the world should have the honour. Talk about hotels and their attractions went on for most of the meal, and the consensus was it was time they favoured Europe, how about Italy, though probably strict policing would be essential, because they were all of them luscious targets for kidnappers.

  In the event, they were all to go to Cape Town, because South Africa’s apartheid was just about to disappear, and they wished to show their approval of Mandela.

  Coffee was served in an adjacent room, where Andrew made a speech as it were dismissing them all, but saying how much he looked forward to seeing them again next month in New York–a conference; and then Geoffrey, Daniel, Jill and James came to Sylvia to say they had not recognised her, and how lovely it was to see her. The smiling faces told Sylvia how shocked they were at what they saw. ‘You were such a beautiful little thing,’ Jill confided. ‘Oh, no, I’m not saying . . . but I used to think you were like a little fairy.’

  ‘And look at me now.’

  ‘And look at me. Well, conferences don’t do much for one’s figure.’

  ‘You could try dieting,’ said Geoffrey, who was as thin as ever.

  ‘Or a health farm,’ said James. ‘I go to a health farm every year. I have to. Too many temptations in the House of Commons.’

  ‘Our bourgeois forebears went to Baden Baden or Marienbad to lose the fat accumulated in a year of over-eating,’ said Geoffrey.