The Sweetest Dream

  The boys’ grief was terrible, it was inordinate, it was frightening their new friends, who agreed that everything had been too much: after all, these children–and that was all they were–had been torn from what they had known, then thrust into . . . but ‘culture shock’ was hardly appropriate when that useful phrase may describe an agreeable dislocation felt travelling from London to Paris. No, it was not possible to imagine what depths of shock Clever and Zebedee had suffered, and therefore no notice should be taken of faces like tragic masks and tragic eyes. Haunted eyes?

  There was something that the new friends had no conception of, and could not have understood: the boys knew that Sylvia had died because of Joshua’s curse. Had she been there to laugh at them, and to say, ‘Oh, how can you think such nonsense?’ they might not have believed her, but the guilt would have been less. As it was, they were being crushed by guilt, and they could not bear it. And so, as we all do with the worst and deepest pain, they began to forget.

  Clear in their minds was every minute of the long days while they waited for Sylvia to return from Senga to rescue them, while Rebecca died and Joshua lay waiting to die until Sylvia came. The long agony of anxiety–they did not forget that, nor that moment when Sylvia reappeared like a little white ghost, to embrace them and whisk them away with her. After that the blur began, Joshua’s bony grip on Sylvia’s wrist and his murderous words, the frightening aeroplane, the arrival in this strange house, Sylvia’s death . . . no, all that dimmed and soon Sylvia had become a friendly protective presence whom they remembered kneeling in the dust to splint up a leg, or sitting on the edge of the verandah between them, teaching them to read.

  Meanwhile Frances kept waking, her stomach clenched with anxiety, and Colin said he was sleeping badly too. Rupert told them that not enough thought had gone into this decision, that was the trouble.

  Frances, waking with a start and a cry, found herself held by Rupert, ‘Come on downstairs. I’ll make you some tea.’ And when they reached the kitchen, Colin was already at the table, a bottle of wine in front of him.

  Outside the window was the dark of 4 o’clock on a winter’s night. Rupert drew the curtains, sat by Frances, put his arm around her. ‘Now, you two, you’ve got to decide. And whatever it is you do decide, then you’ve got to put the other choice clean out of your minds. Otherwise you’ll both be ill.’

  ‘Right,’ said Colin, and shakily reached for the wine bottle.

  Rupert said, ‘Now look, old son, don’t drink any more, there’s a good chap.’

  Frances felt that apprehension a woman may feel when her man, not her son’s father, takes the father’s role: Rupert had spoken as if it were William sitting there.

  Colin pushed away the bottle. ‘This is a bloody impossible situation.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ said Frances. ‘What are we taking on? Do you realise, I’ll be dead by the time they qualify?’

  Rupert’s arm tightened around her shoulder.

  ‘But we have to keep them,’ said Colin, aggressive, tearful, pleading with them. ‘If a couple of kittens try to crawl out of the bucket they’re being drowned in, you don’t push them back in.’ The Colin who was speaking then Frances had not seen or heard of for years: Rupert had not met that passionate youth. ‘You just don’t do it,’ said Colin, leaning forward, his eyes holding his mother’s, then Rupert’s. ‘You don’t just push them back in.’ A howl broke out of him: a long time since Frances had heard that howl. He dropped his head down on to his arms on the table. Rupert and Frances communed, silently.

  ‘I think,’ said Rupert, ‘that there is only one way you can decide.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Colin, lifting his head.

  ‘Yes,’ said Frances.

  ‘Then, that’s it. And now put the other out of your heads. Now.’

  ‘I suppose once a Sixties’ household, then always a Sixties’ household,’ said Colin. ‘No, that’s not my little aperçu, it is Sophie’s. She thinks it’s all lovely. I did point out that it was not she who would be doing the work. She said she would muck in–with everything, she said.’ He laughed.

  Back in bed Rupert said, ‘I don’t think I could bear it if you died. But luckily women live longer than men.’

  ‘And I can’t imagine not being with you.’

  These two people of the word had hardly ever said more than this kind of thing. ‘We don’t do too badly, do we?’ was about the limit. To be so thoroughly out of phase with one’s time does take a certain bravado: a man and a woman daring to love each other so thoroughly–well, it was hardly to be confessed, even to each other.

  Now he said, ‘What was all that about the kittens?’

  ‘I have no idea. Not in this house, and I am sure not at his school. Progressive schools don’t drown kittens. Well, not so their pupils can see.’

  ‘Wherever it happened, it went deep.’

  ‘And he’s never mentioned it before.’

  ‘When I was a boy I saw a gang of kids torturing a sick dog. That taught me more about the nature of the world than anything else ever has.’

  • • •

  Lessons began. Rupert tutored Clever and Zebedee in maths: beyond knowing their multiplication tables they were as blank sheets, he said, but they were so quick, they could catch up. Frances found that their reading had been extraordinary: their memories retained whole tracts of Mowgli and Enid Blyton, and Animal Farm and Hardy, but they had not heard of Shakespeare. This deficiency she proposed to remedy; they were already reading everything on the shelves in the sitting-room. Colin came in with geography and history. Sylvia’s little atlas had done good service, the boys’ knowledge of the world was wide, if not deep; as for history, they did not know much beyond The Renaissance Popes–this being a book on Father McGuire’s shelves. Sophie would take them to the theatre. And then, without being asked, William began teaching them from old textbooks, and it was this that really did them good.

  William said he was unnerved by their application: he himself had to do well, but compared to them . . . ‘You’d think their lives depended on it,’ and added, making the discovery for himself, ‘I suppose their lives do depend on it. After all, I can always go and be . . .’ ‘What?’ enquired the adults, grasping at this opportunity to glimpse what really went on in his mind. ‘A gardener. I could be a gardener at Kew,’ said William gravely. ‘Yes, that’s what I’d really like. Or I could be like Thoreau and live by myself, near a lake and write about Nature.’

  Sylvia had died intestate, and so, the lawyers said, her money would go to her mother, as the next of kin. A good sum it was, well able to see the boys through their education. Andrew was appealed to, as Phyllida’s old mate, and, dropping into or through London, he went to see Phyllida, where this conversation ensued.

  ‘Sylvia would have wanted her money to educate the two African boys she seems to have adopted.’

  ‘Oh yes, the black boys, I have heard about them.’

  ‘I’m here formally to ask you to relinquish that money, because we are sure that is what she would have wished.’

  ‘I don’t remember her saying anything to me about it.’

  ‘But, Phyllida, how could she?’

  Phyllida gave a little toss of her head, with a small triumphant smile, that was amused, too, like someone applauding the vagaries of Fate, having won a fortune in the sweepstake, perhaps. ‘Finders keepers,’ she said. ‘And anyhow, something nice is owed to me, that’s how I see it.’

  There was a family discussion.

  Rupert, though a senior editor in his newspaper, and adequately paid, knew that even when he had finished paying for Margaret’s school fees (Frances now paid for William) he would have to keep Meriel.

  Colin’s intelligent novels, described by Rose Trimble as ‘elite novels for the chattering classes’, were not going to provide for more than the child, and Sophie, who as an actress was often resting. He spent so little on himself he hardly counted.

  Frances found herself in a familiar situation. S
he had been offered a job helping to run a small experimental theatre: her heart’s desire, a lot of fun but not much money. Her reliable and serious books, bought by every library in the land, brought in good money. She would have to say no to the theatre and write books. She said she would be responsible for Clever, and Andrew would pay for Zebedee.

  Andrew proposed to start a family, but he earned so well he was sure he could manage Zebedee. Things did not turn out as he expected. The marriage was already in trouble, would soon dissolve, after not much more than a year, though Mona was pregnant. Years of legal wrangling would follow, but when Andrew did wrest time with his child from the jealous mother, the little girl was mostly with her cousin Celia, sharing whatever au pair was around, and Celia’s daddy’s attention. Colin, as Sophie often wailed, was such a wonderful father, and she was such a rotten mother. (‘Never mind,’ prattled Celia, when Sophie said this, ‘you are such a pretty yummy mummy we don’t care.’)

  Where was everyone going to fit in?

  Clever would have Andrew’s old room, Zebedee Colin’s. Colin would use the sitting-room to work in. William was in a room on Frances’s and his father’s floor. The au pair used Sylvia’s old room.

  And the basement flat? Someone was in it. Johnny was in it.

  Frances had been on her way to a bus stop when she heard hurrying steps behind her and, ‘Frances, Frances Lennox.’ She turned to see a woman whose white hair was being blown about while she tried to keep a scarf in place. Frances did not know her . . . yes, she did, just: it was Comrade Jinny, from the old days, and she was chattering, ‘Oh, I wasn’t sure, but yes it’s you, well we’re all getting on aren’t we, oh dear, I simply had to . . . it’s your husband you see, I’m so worried about him.’

  ‘I left my husband fit and well not five minutes ago.’

  ‘Oh dear, oh dear, silly me, I meant Johnny, Comrade Johnny, if only you two knew what you meant to me when I was young, such an inspiration, Comrades Johnny and Frances Lennox . . .’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry, but . . .’

  ‘I hope I’m not speaking out of turn.’

  ‘Just tell me, what is it?’

  ‘He’s so old now, poor old thing . . .’

  ‘He’s my age.’

  ‘Yes, but some people wear better than others. I just felt you ought to know,’ said she, running off and sending back scared but aggressive waves of the hand.

  Frances told Colin who said that as far as he was concerned his father could sink or swim. And Frances said that she was damned if she was going to pick up Johnny’s pieces for him. That left Andrew, who dropped over from Rome for the afternoon. He found Johnny in a quite pleasant room, in Highgate, in the house of a woman he described as the salt of the earth. He was a frail old man with fans of silvery hair around a shiny white pate, all pathos and vulnerability. He was pleased to see Andrew but he wasn’t going to show it. ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘I’m sure Sister Meg will make us all some tea.’ But Andrew remained upright, and said, ‘I’ve come because we hear you’ve fallen on hard times.’

  ‘Which is more than you have done, so I’m told.’

  ‘I’m glad to say what you hear is all true.’

  Not many people in the world would see Johnny’s lot as a hard one, but after all, he had spent probably two-thirds of his life in comradely luxury hotels in the Soviet Union, Poland, China, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia; in Chile and Angola and Cuba–wherever there had been a comradely conference, Johnny had been there, the world his barrel of oysters, his honeypot, his ever-open jar of Beluga caviar, and here he was, in one room–a nice room, but one room. On his old-age pension. ‘And of course the senior bus pass helps.’

  ‘A good member of the proletariat at last,’ said Andrew, smiling benevolently from the windows of his gravy train at his dispossessed father.

  ‘And you got married, I hear. I was beginning to think you must be a queer.’

  ‘Who knows these days? But never mind all that, we thought you might like to come and live in the bottom flat?’

  ‘It’s my house anyway, so don’t make a favour out of it.’

  But there were two good rooms, and everything paid for, and he was pleased.

  Colin went down to help settle him in and said that he mustn’t expect Frances to wait on him.

  ‘It’s news to me that she ever did. She was always a lousy housekeeper.’

  But Johnny was far from dependent on his family for company. His visitors brought him gifts and flowers as if to a shrine. Johnny was in the process of becoming a holy man, the follower of a senior Indian holy man, and was now often heard to remark, ‘Yes, I was a bit of a Red once.’ He would sit cross-legged on his pillows on his bed, and his old gesture, palms extended outwards as if offering himself to an audience, fitted in nicely with this new persona. He had disciples, and taught meditation and the Fourfold Sacred Way. In return they kept his rooms clean for him and cooked dishes in which lentils played a leading role.

  But this was his new self, perhaps one could describe it as a role, in a play where Sisters and Brothers and Holy Mothers replaced the comrades. His older self did sometimes resurface, when other visitors, old comrades, came around to reminisce as if the great failure of the Soviet Union had never happened, as if that Empire was still marching on. Old men, old women, whose lives had been illumined by the great dream, sat about drinking wine in an atmosphere not unlike that of those far-off combative evenings, except for one thing: they did not smoke now, whereas once it would have been hard to see across a room for the smoke that had been through their lungs.

  Late, before the guests left, Johnny would lower his voice and lift his glass, and propose a toast, ‘To Him.’

  And with tender admiration they drank to possibly the cruellest murderer who has ever lived.

  They say that for decades after Napoleon’s death old soldiers met in taverns and bars and, secretly, in each other’s hovels, raised their glasses to The Other: they were the few survivors of the Grand Armée (whose heroic feats had achieved precisely nothing, except the destruction of a generation), crippled men, whose health had gone and who had survived unspeakable sufferings. But so what, it is always The Dream that counts.

  Johnny had another visitor, Celia, who would descend on the hand of Marusha or Bertha or Chantal and run to Johnny. ‘Poor little Johnny.’

  ‘But that’s your grandfather! You can’t call him that.’

  The faery child took no notice, stroked the old chastened head, kissed it, and sang her little song, ‘That’s my little grandfather, that’s my poor little Johnny.’

  The conjunction of Colin and Sophie had produced a rare being: everyone felt it. The big lads, William and Clever and Zebedee, played with her delicately, almost humbly, as if this was a privilege, a favour she was doing them.

  Or they all sat around the table, Rupert and Frances, Colin and William, Clever and Zebedee, and quite often Sophie too, at the evening meal that might go on and on, and the child came running in, evading bedtime. She wanted to be near them, but not to be picked up, held, or sat on a knee. She was deep inside her game, or play, talking softly to herself confidentially, in voices they learned to recognise. ‘Celia’s here, yes she is, this is Celia, and there is my Frances and there is my Clever . . .’ The tiny child, in her scrap of a coloured dress, chattering there, but to herself, perhaps using a bit of cloth, or a flower, or a toy to stand in for some person or character or imagined playmate–she was so perfectly beautiful that she silenced them, they sat watching, charmed, awed . . . ‘And there’s my William . . .’ she reached out to touch him, to be sure of him, but she was not looking at him, perhaps at the flower or toy, ‘and my Zebedee . . .’ Colin got up, the big clumsy man, so coarse and heavy beside her, and stood looking down. ‘And there–my Colin, yes, it’s my daddy . . .’ Colin, tears running, bent down to her in something like an obeisance of his whole being, holding out his hands with a groan, ‘Oh Frances, oh Sophie, did you ever see anything so . . .’

&nbs
p; But the little girl did not want to be gathered in and held, she spun around on herself, singing for herself and to herself, ‘Yes, my Colin, yes, my Sophie, yes, and there’s my poor little Johnny . . .’

  What Has Been, Can Be Again

  Upon Receiving the 2001 Prince of Asturias Prize in Literature in Madrid

  Once upon a time, and it seems a long time ago, there was a respected figure, the Educated Person. He — it was usually he, but then increasingly often she — was educated in a way that differed little from country to country — I am of course talking about Europe — but was different from what we know now. William Hazlitt, our great essayist, went to a school, in the late eighteenth century, whose curriculum was four times more comprehensive than that of a comparable school now, a mix of the bases of language, law, art, religion, mathematics. It was taken for granted that this already dense and deep education was only one aspect of development, for the pupils were expected to read, and they did.

  This kind of education, the humanist education is vanishing. Increasingly governments — our British government among them — encourage citizens to acquire vocational skills, while education as a development of the whole person is not seen as useful to the modern society.

  The older education would have had Greek and Latin literature and history, and the Bible, as a foundation for everything else. He — or she — read the classics of their own countries, perhaps one or two from Asia, and the best known writers of other European countries: Goethe, Shakespeare, Cervantes, the great Russians, Rousseau. An educated person from Argentina would meet a similar person from Spain, one from St. Petersburg meet his counterpart in Norway, a traveler from France spend time with one from Britain, and they would understand each other: they shared a culture, could refer to the same books, plays, poems, pictures, in a web of reference and information that was like a shared history of the best the human mind has thought, said, written.