The Sweetest Dream

by Doris Lessing

  ‘And I suppose you didn’t know about me either? All this lovey-dovey be nice to Rose, but you’re covering up for Andrew.’

  Frances said, ‘You are lying. I know when you are lying.’ And then was shocked again: Colin said she never knew anything that went on: suppose Rose had been pregnant? But, no, Andrew would have told her.

  ‘And I’m not going to go on living here when you’re so horrible to me. I know when I’m not wanted.’

  The grotesqueness of this last statement actually made Frances laugh but it was also from relief at the thought that Rose might actually go. The degree of relief told her just how great a burden the presence of Rose was. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Well, Rose, I agree with you. It is obviously better for you to leave, when you feel like that.’

  And she went up the stairs, in a silence like the one they say lies at the heart of a storm. A glance showed Rose’s face lifted up in what seemed to be a prayer–but then she howled.

  Frances shut the door on her, ran up to her room, and flung herself on her bed. Oh, my God, to get rid of Rose, just to get rid of Rose: but commonsense crept back with, But of course she won’t go.

  She heard Rose thundering past up the stairs, heard the hammering on Andrew’s door. She was up there a good long time. Frances–indeed, the whole house–could hear the sobs, the cries, the threats.

  Then, well past midnight, she crept back down past Frances’s rooms, and there was silence.

  A knock on the door: there was Andrew. He was white with exhaustion.

  ‘May I sit down?’ He sat. ‘You have no idea how diverting it always is,’ he said, preserving his poise in spite of everything, ‘to see you in this improbable setting.’

  Frances saw herself in well-worn jeans, an old jersey, with bare feet, and then Julia’s furniture which probably should be in a museum. She managed a smile and a shake of her head which meant, It’s all too much.

  ‘She says you are throwing her out.’

  ‘If only we could. She says she is leaving.’

  ‘I’m afraid no such luck.’

  ‘She says you got her pregnant.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘So she claims.’

  ‘Penetration did not take place,’ he said. ‘We snogged–more of a lark than anything. Perhaps for an hour. It is amazing how these left-wing summer schools seem to. . .’ He hummed, ‘. . . every little breeze seems to whisper, Please, sex, sex, sex.’

  ‘What are we going to do? Why don’t we just throw her out, my God, why don’t we?’

  ‘But if we do she’ll be on the streets. She won’t go home.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘It’s only a year. We’ll have to stick it out.’

  ‘Colin is very angry because she’s here.’

  ‘I know. You forget we can all hear his complaints about life. And about Sylvia. Probably me as well.’

  ‘Me, most of all.’

  ‘And now I’m going right down to tell her that if she ever again says I made her pregnant . . . wait, I suppose I got her an abortion too?’

  ‘She didn’t say so, but I expect she will.’

  ‘God, what a little bitch.’

  ‘But how effective, being a bitch. No one can stand up to her.’

  ‘You just watch me.’

  ‘So what are you going to do? Call the police? And by the way, where’s Jill? She seems to have disappeared.’

  ‘She and Jill quarrelled. I expect Rose just got rid of her.’

  ‘So where is she? Does anyone know? I’m suppose to be in loco parentis.’

  ‘Loco’s a good word in this context.’ He departed.

  But Frances was learning that while she was seen by ‘the kids’ as a sort of benevolent freak of Nature, and they lucky enough to benefit, she was far from the only one in loco parentis. A letter had come from Spain after the summer, from an Englishwoman living in Seville, saying she had so much enjoyed Colin, Frances’s charming son. (Colin, charming? Well, not in this house he wasn’t.) ‘A very nice crowd this summer. It’s not always such plain sailing. Sometimes they have such problems! I do feel it is an extraordinary thing, the way they go off to other people’s parents. My daughter makes excuses not to come home. She’s got an alternative home in Hampshire with an ex-boyfriend. I suppose we must admit that that is what it amounts to.’

  A letter from North Carolina. ‘Hi there, Frances Lennox! I feel I know you so well. Your Geoffrey Bone was here for weeks, with others from various parts of the world, all to take part in the Struggle for Civic Rights. They come knocking at my door, waifs and strays of the world–no, no, I don’t mean Geoffrey, I’ve never known a cooler young man. But I collect them and so do you, and so does my sister Fran in California. My son Pete will be in Britain this coming summer and I am sure he’ll drop in.’ From Scotland, From Ireland. From France . . . letters that went into a file of similar ones that had been coming for years, from the time when she hardly saw Andrew.

  Thus did the house-mothers, the earth-mothers, who proliferated everywhere in the Sixties slowly become aware of each other’s presence out there, and understand that they were part of a phenomenon: the geist was at it again. They networked, before the term had become part of the language. They were a network of nurturers. Of neurotic nurturers. As ‘the kids’ had explained, Frances was working out some guilt or other, rooted in her childhood. (Frances had said she wouldn’t be at all surprised.) As for Sylvia, she had a different ‘line’. (Origin of ‘line’–jargon of the Party.) Sylvia had learned from her groovy mystical mates that Frances was working on her karma, damaged in a previous life.

  • • •

  On one of Colin’s visits home to shout at his mother, he brought with him Franklin Tichafa, from Zimlia, a British colony that, so Johnny said, was about to go the way of Kenya. All the newspapers were saying it too. Franklin was a round, smiling black boy. Colin told his mother that one could not use the word boy because of its bad connotations, but Frances said, ‘He’s not a young man, is he. If a sixteen-year-old can’t be described as a boy, who can?’

  ‘She does it on purpose,’ said Andrew. ‘She does it to annoy.’

  This was partly true. Johnny had long ago complained that Frances was sometimes deliberately politically obtuse, to embarrass him in front of the comrades, and indeed she had sometimes done it on purpose, and did now.

  Everyone liked Franklin, who was named after Franklin Roosevelt, ‘taking’ literature at St Joseph’s to please his parents, but planning to study economics and politics at university.

  ‘That’s what you are all studying,’ said Frances. ‘Politics and economics. What is so extraordinary is that anyone should want to, when they never get it right, particularly the economists.’

  This remark was so far in advance of its time that it was allowed to pass, was probably not even heard.

  The evening when Franklin first came, Colin did not drop down to Frances’s rooms for the usual session of accusations: he had not gone to the Maystock. Franklin was in his room on the floor in a sleeping bag. Frances could hear them just over her head, talking, laughing . . . her much-overused heart seemed to breathe easier, and she felt that all Colin really needed was a good friend, someone who laughed a lot: they larked about and as young men (or boys) will, went in for a lot of buffeting, pummelling and horseplay.

  Franklin came again, and again, and Colin said he was fed up with the Maystock. He had actually caught Doctor David asleep, while he sat fidgeting in his patient’s chair, hoping that the great man would at last say something.

  ‘What’s he being paid?’ he asked.

  Frances told him.

  ‘Nice work if you can get it,’ said Colin. But was he bottling everything up again? Had he spent all his anger in those evenings of accusation with her? She had no idea. But he was doing badly at school still, and wanted to leave.

  It was Franklin who told him it was silly. ‘That would be a bad move,’ said he, at the supper table. ‘You’ll be sorry when
you’re older.’

  This last was a direct quote. In any company of young people, sayings, admonition, advice, that have emanated from the mouths of parents can be heard coming from theirs, in joke, in mockery, or in seriousness. ‘You’ll be sorry when you’re older,’ had been said by Franklin’s grandmother, in firelight–a log burned in the centre of the hut–in a village where a goat might push into open doorways hoping to find something to steal. An anxious black woman, whom Franklin had told he did not want to take up his scholarship to St Joseph’s–he was in a funk–had said, ‘You’ll be sorry when you’re older.’

  ‘I am older,’ said Colin.

  ***

  It was November again, dark with drizzle. Because it was a weekend, everyone was here. At Frances’s left sat Sylvia, and the others were careful not to notice that she was struggling with her food. She had left the magic circle of people who could never say anything without meaningful looks and voices heavy with import, saying, just as Julia might have done, ‘They aren’t very nice people.’ Jake had turned up, asked to see Frances, and was clearly anxious. ‘There’s a problem here, Frances. It’s cultural. I think we’re more uninhibited in the States than you are here.’

  ‘I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage,’ said Frances. ‘Sylvia has said nothing to us about why she . . .’

  ‘But there was nothing to tell, you must believe me.’

  Sylvia confided to Andrew that what had ‘upset’ her was not wild Satanic rites that the others had imagined and even joked about, while she told them they were just silly, or seances that had gone wrong–or right, depending on how you looked at it, bringing noisy apparitions with something urgent to impart, such as that Sylvia should always wear blue and a turquoise amulet, but that Jake had kissed her and told her she was too old to be a virgin. She had slapped him, hard, and told him he was a dirty old man. To Andrew it was clear that Jake had been offering arcane sexual delights, but Sylvia said, ‘He’s old enough to be my grandfather.’ He was, too. Just.

  Andrew was here for the weekend, because Colin had telephoned to say that Sylvia was having a setback. It was Colin who rang: so what did his wild ravings about Sylvia’s being here at all amount to, then? ‘You’ve got to come, Andrew. You always know what to do.’ And Julia?–did she not know what to do? Apparently not any longer. Julia, hearing that Sylvia was in her room again, and not out night after night, had said in the heavily sorrowful voice that now seemed to be permanently hers, ‘Yes, Sylvia, and that’s what you can expect when you mix with such people.’

  ‘But nothing happened, Julia,’ Sylvia had whispered, and had tried to embrace her. Julia’s arms, that had so recently easily embraced her, did hold her, but not as they had, and Sylvia cried in her room, because of those stiff old arms, that reproached her.

  Sylvia was sitting, fork in hand, turning over a fragment of potato done in cream, cooked because she liked it.

  Andrew was next to Sylvia. Colin was next to Andrew, and beside him, Rose. Not a word or a look did they exchange. James was there from his school, and he would also sleep on the living-room floor. Opposite Rose was Franklin, who had had a little too much to drink. Bottles of wine stood about the table brought by Johnny who was at his post by the window. Next to Franklin was Geoffrey, in his first term at the LSE. He looked like a guerilla fighter, in army surplus. He was there because he had run into Johnny at the Cosmo, had heard that he would be coming that evening. Sophie was not here, but she had visited that afternoon, to see darling Frances. She was finding life hard, not because of acting school where she was doing brilliantly, but because of Roland Shattock. Tonight she was with him at a disco. Next to Frances was Jill, who had reappeared that afternoon. She asked timidly if she could stay to supper. She had a bandage on her left wrist and looked pretty bad. Rose had greeted her with, ‘Oh, so what do you think you’re doing here?’ Jill waited until there was laughter and noise enough, and said to Frances, ‘Can I come and live in the other room downstairs? It’s for you to say who can be there, isn’t it?’ The trouble was, Colin had said that he wanted Franklin to have the use of that room, and to be invited for Christmas. And, obviously, Jill and Rose could not be together.

  ‘Are you planning to go back to school?’ asked Frances.

  ‘I don’t know if they’ll have me,’ said Jill, with a timid pleading look at Frances, that meant, Will you ask them if they’ll have me back?

  But where was she going to live?

  ‘Have you been in hospital?’

  The girl nodded. Then, still in a whisper, ‘I’ve been in there a month.’ That meant, a psychiatric ward, and Frances was intended to understand this. ‘Couldn’t I just sleep in the sitting-room?’

  Andrew, apparently absorbed in Sylvia, encouraging her, laughing with her when she made a joke about her difficulties, was also listening to the exchange between his mother and Jill, and now he caught Frances’s eye and shook his head. The thumbs-down could not have been more clear, though it was only a little no, meant to be unobserved. But Jill had seen it. She sat silent, eyes kept down, lips trembling.

  ‘The trouble is, where are we going to put you?’ Frances said. And Jill probably would not be able to cope with school, even if Frances could get her admitted. What was to be done?

  This sad little drama was going on at Frances’s end of the table; at the other it was all noisy good humour. Johnny was telling them about his trip with a delegation of librarians to the Soviet Union, and the jokes were at the expense of the non-Party members, who had made one gaffe after another. One had demanded to be reassured–at a meeting in the Union of Soviet Writers–that there was no censorship in the Soviet Union. Another had wanted to know if the Soviet Union, ‘like the Vatican’, kept an index of forbidden books. ‘I mean,’ said Johnny, ‘that is really an unforgivable level of political naivety.’

  Then, there was the recent election that had returned the Labour Party. Johnny had been active: a tricky business, because while on the one hand obviously the Labour Party was a greater threat to the working masses than the Tories (confusing minds with incorrect formulations), on the other, tactical considerations had ordained that it should be supported. James was listening to the ins and outs of this as if to favourite music. Johnny had greeted him with a comradely nod and a hand laid on his shoulder, but now he was concentrating on the newcomer, still to be won, Franklin. He delivered a short history of the colonial policy towards Zimlia, recounted the crimes of colonial policy in Kenya, with particular relish for whenever Britain had behaved badly, and began exhorting Franklin to fight for the freedom of Zimlia. ‘The nationalist movements of Zimlia are not as developed as the Mau Mau, but it is up to young people like you to free your people from oppression.’ Johnny had a glass in one hand, the left, and was leaning forward, eyes holding Franklin’s, while he shook the forefinger of his right hand at him, as if targeting him with a revolver. Franklin was shifting about, smiling uncomfortably, and then he said, ‘Excuse me,’ and went out–to the toilet as it happened, but it looked like running away, and when he came back he smiled, and handed his plate to Frances for a second helping, and did not look at Johnny, who had been waiting for him to return. ‘Your generation in Africa has more responsibility laid on your shoulders by history than any other has had. How I wish I was young again, how I wish I had it all in front of me.’

  And for once his features, usually set into a martial authority, were softened into wistfulness. Johnny was getting on, an ageing fighter now, and how he must hate it, Frances thought, for with every day came news of new younger avatars of the Revolution. Poor Johnny was on the shelf. At the same moment Franklin lifted his glass, in a wild gesture that looked like parody, and said, ‘To the Revolution in Africa,’ and fell forward on to the table, out, while Jill got up from the table and said, ‘Excuse me, excuse me, I’ll go now.’

  ‘Do you want to sleep here tonight? There’s the sitting-room. James and you can keep each other company.’

  Jill stood shaking
her head, supporting herself with a hand–as it happened–on Frances’s arm, and then fainted away, at Frances’s feet.

  ‘Here’s a carry-on,’ said Johnny heartily, and watched while Geoffrey and Colin roused Franklin, and held a glass of water to his lips, and Frances lifted up Jill. Rose sat on, eating as if nothing was happening. Sylvia whispered that she wanted to go to bed, and Andrew took her up.

  Franklin was assisted downstairs to the second room in the basement flat, and Jill was put into a sleeping bag in the sitting-room. James said he would look after her, but he went straight off to sleep. Frances came down in the night to have a look at Jill, and found them both asleep. In the dim light from the door on to the landing, Jill looked terrible. She needed looking after. Obviously the girl’s parents must be rung and told the situation: they probably did not know it. And in the morning Jill must be asked to go home.

  But in the morning Jill had gone, had disappeared into wild and dangerous London. And Rose, when asked where she thought Jill might be, replied that she was not Jill’s keeper.

  Nervousness on Franklin’s account was in order, sharing space with Rose. They were afraid she harboured racial prejudices, ‘coming from that background’–Andrew’s evasion of the class situation. But it turned out otherwise: Rose was ‘nice’ to Franklin. ‘She’s being really nice,’ reported Colin. ‘He thinks she’s great.’

  He did. She was. An apparently improbable friendship was growing between the good-humoured kindly black youth and the rancorous girl, whose rage bubbled and boiled as reliably as the red spot on Jupiter.

  Frances, her sons, marvelled that one could not think of two more different people, but in fact they inhabited a similar moral landscape. Rose and Franklin were never to know how much they had in common.

  Since Rose had first come into this house she had been possessed by a quiet fury that these people could call it theirs, as of a right. This great house, its furnishings, like something out of a film, their money . . . but all that was only the foundation for a deeper anguish, for it was that, a bitter burning that never left her. It was their ease with it all, what they took for granted, what they knew. Never had she mentioned a book–and she had a period of testing them out with books no sane person could have heard of–that they hadn’t read, or hadn’t heard of. She would stand in that sitting-room, with two walls all books from ceiling to floor, and know that they had read them. ‘Frances,’ she challenged, being found there, hands on hips, glaring at the books, ‘have you actually read all these books?’ ‘Well, yes, yes, I believe I have.’ ‘When did you? Did you have books in your house when you were growing up?’ ‘Yes, we had the classics. I think everyone did in those days.’ ‘Everybody, everybody! Who’s everybody?’ ‘The middle classes,’ said Frances, determined not to be bullied. ‘And a good proportion of the working class as well.’ ‘Oh! Who said so?’ ‘Check it,’ said Frances. ‘Not difficult to find out this sort of thing.’ ‘And when did you have time to read?’ ‘Let me see . . .’ Frances was remembering herself, mostly alone, with two small children, her boredom alleviated by reading. She remembered Johnny nagging at her to read this, read that . . . ‘Johnny was a good influence,’ she told Rose, insisting to herself that one must be fair. ‘He’s very well read, you know. The communists usually are, it’s funny isn’t it, but they are. He made me read.’