The Sweetest Dream

by Doris Lessing

  On the evening after Sylvia returned from London, standing exactly in the same spot, she looked down at her hospital and was attacked by that failing of the heart and purpose that so often afflicts people just back from Europe. What she saw down there, the assemblage of poor huts or sheds, was tolerable only if she did not think of London, or Julia’s house, with its solidity, its safety, its permanence, each room so full of things that had an exact purpose, serving a need among a multiplicity of needs, so that every day any person in it was supported as if by so many silent servitors with utensils, tools, appliances, gadgets, surfaces to sit on or to put things on–an intricacy of always multiplying things.

  In the early mornings Joshua rolled from his place near the log that burned in the middle of the hut, reached for the pot where last night’s porridge congealed, dug out from it with the stirring stick some lumps which he ate swiftly, supplying his stomach with its necessity, drank water from a tin jug that stood on the ledge that ran around the hut, then walked a few steps into the bush, urinated, perhaps squatted to shit, took up his stick that was made from bush wood, and walked the mile to the hospital, where he slid his back down the tree, to sit there, all day.

  Surely she, a ‘religious’ as Rebecca called her–‘I told them in the village that you are a religious’–should be admiring this evidence of the poor in wealth, and probably of spirit, though she did not see herself as equipped to judge that. That great heap of a city, covering so many square miles, so rich, so rich–and then this group of paltry sheds and huts: Africa, beautiful Africa, which oppressed her spirits with its need, wanting everything, lacking everything, and everywhere people white and black working so hard to–well, what? To put a little plaster on an old weeping wound. And that was what she was doing.

  Sylvia felt as if her own real self, her substance, the stuff of belief, was leaking away as she stood there. A sunset, a rainy season’s going down of the sun . . . from a black cloud low on the red horizon shot heavy thick rays like spikes of gold that radiate around a saint’s head. She felt mocked, as if a clever thief were stealing from her and laughing as he did it. What was she doing here? And what good did she really do? And above all where was that innocence of faith that had sustained her when she first came? What did she believe in, really? God, yes, she could say that, if no one pressed for definitions. She had suffered a conversion, as classic in its symptoms as an attack of malaria, to The Faith–which is what Father McGuire called it, and she knew that it had begun because of ascetic Father Jack, with whom she had been in love, though at the time she would have said it was God she loved. Nothing was left of all that brave certainty, and she knew only that she must do her duty here, in this hospital, because Fate had set her down here.

  The state of her mind could also be described clinically: it was, in a hundred religious textbooks. The doctors of her Faith would say to her, Disregard it, it is nothing, seasons of dryness come to us all.

  But she didn’t need these experts on the soul, she did not need Father McGuire, she could diagnose herself. So why then did she need a spiritual mentor at all, if she was not going to tell him, simply because she knew what he would say?

  But the real question was, why would it be so easy for Father McGuire to say ‘a season of dryness’, but for her it was like a sentence of self-excommunication? What she had brought to her conversion was a hungry needful heart, and anger too, though she had not recognised that until recently. She could see herself, as she had been then, in Joshua, where anger burned always, forced out of him in bitter accusations and demands. Who was she ever to criticise Joshua? She had known what it was to be angry to the point she was poisoned by it, though at the time she had thought she was wanting comforting arms, Julia’s. And now was she criticising Julia, because her love had not been enough to still that wanting, so that she had gone on to Father Jack? What had stilled the wanting? Work, always, and only, work. And so there she was, on a dry hillside in Africa, feeling that everything she did or might ever do was as effective as pouring water from a (tin) cup into the dust on a hot day.

  She thought: There is no person in Europe (if they have not been here and seen) who could comprehend this level of absolute need, a lack of everything, in people who had been promised everything by their rulers, and that was the point where a quiet horror seemed to seep into her. It was like the horror of AIDS, the silent secretive disease that had come from nowhere–monkeys, it was said, perhaps even the monkeys that sometimes played about in the trees here. The thief that comes in the night–that was how she thought of AIDS.

  Her heart hurt her . . . she must tell Zebedee and Clever to tell the builders that there must be another good brick building here and she would say yes to the demands from the village for more classes.

  Father McGuire heard that there would be more classes and said that she looked tired, she must look after herself.

  Here was where she could have mentioned her season of dryness and even joked about it, but instead she said he must remember to take his vitamins and why was he not taking his nap? He listened to her strictures patiently, smiling, just as she listened to him.

  • • •

  Colin had been appealed to by Sylvia to ‘do something for Africa’–he saw how he had described this to himself and mocked–himself. ‘Africa!’ As if he didn’t know better. There was that continent down there, imaged in most people’s minds by a child holding out a begging bowl. But what Sylvia had said was not Africa, but Zimlia. It was his duty to help with Zimlia. And how often had he joked that Dickens’s Mrs Jellaby summed it all up, people fussing over Africa when they might be attending to local needs. Why Africa? Why not Liverpool? The Left in Europe as usual concerning itself with events elsewhere: it had identified itself with the Soviet Union and as a result had done itself in. Now there was Africa, India, China, you name it, but particularly Africa. It was his duty to do something about it. Lies–Sylvia had said. Lies were being told. Well, what’s new? What did anyone expect? So Colin muttered and grumbled, a caged bear in rooms that were too small now that the baby was born, a bit drunk, but not much, because he had taken Sylvia’s strictures to heart. And what made her think he was equipped to write about Africa? Or that he knew people who would care? He knew no one in that world, newspapers, journals, television; he stuck pretty close to his last, writing his books . . . but wait, he knew just the person, yes, he did.

  During that long time when he had frequented pubs and talked to people on park benches, with the little dog, he had acquired a crony, a boon companion. The Seventies: Fred Cope was spending his young life as was de rigueur then, demonstrating, assaulting policemen, shouting slogans and generally making himself noticed but when with Colin, who despised all that, could be persuaded at least sometimes to criticise it too. Both young men knew that the other was an aspect of himself kept on a leash. After all, if his judgement had not forbidden, Colin’s temperament was one to enjoy noisy confrontation. As for Fred Cope, he discovered responsibility and sobriety in the Eighties. He married. He had a house. Ten years before he had mocked Colin for living in Hampstead: the word was being used as a pejorative by anyone aspiring to be in tune with the times. The Hampstead socialists, the Hampstead novel, Hampstead as a place, these were always good for a sneer, but as soon as they could afford it, these critics bought houses in Hampstead. And so had Fred Cope. He was now the editor of a newspaper, The Monitor, and sometimes the two met for a drink.

  Has there ever been a generation that has not watched, amazed–though surely by now it has to be expected?–the roustabouts and delinquents and rebels of their youth becoming mouthpieces of considered judgement? Colin telephoned Fred Cope reminding himself that the possessors of considered judgement often found it hard to remember past follies. The two met in a pub, on a Sunday, and Colin plunged in. ‘I have a sister–well, a kind of sister, who is working in Zimlia, and she came to see me to say we are all talking nonsense about dear Comrade President Matthew: he’s really a bit of a crook.’


  ‘Aren’t they all?’ murmured Fred Cope, back in his former role of practised sceptic about any kind of authority, but added, ‘Surely he is one of the good ones?’

  ‘I’m in a false position,’ said Colin. ‘This is the voice of Colin, but they are the words of Sylvia. She came to see me. She was in a state. I think it might be worth your while to . . . get a second opinion.’

  The editor smiled. ‘The trouble is, it doesn’t do to judge them by our standards. Their difficulties are immense. And it’s a completely different culture.’

  ‘Why doesn’t it do? That’s surely patronising. And haven’t we had our bellies full of not judging others by our standards?’

  ‘Yeeeees,’ said the editor. ‘I see your point. Well, I’ll look into it.’

  Having got over what both felt as an awkwardness, they tried to regain the glorious irresponsibility of their earlier times, when Colin’s views had been such that he had scarcely dared voice them outside the safety of his home, and Fred’s young life now seemed to him like a prolonged festival of licence and anarchy. But it was no good. Fred was expecting a second baby. Colin as usual was thinking only of the novel he was writing. He knew he probably ought to be doing more about Sylvia, but when has being in the middle of a novel not been the best of excuses? Besides, he always felt guilty about her and did not understand why he did. He had forgotten how much he had resented her coming to Julia’s house, and how he had railed at his mother. He looked back on that time with pride now: he and Sophie, both, and anyone else who had come and gone then, might talk affectionately about what fun it had all been. But he did know he had always envied his brother’s ease with Sylvia. Now he found her religion and what he saw as her neurotic need for self-sacrifice irritating. And this last visit of hers which had ended in his scooping her up to sit on his knee–what embarrassment for both of them! And yet he was fond of her, yes he was, and he had been bound to do something about Africa and he had done it.

  But wait, there was Rupert, who heard him out, and said like Fred Cope that they (meaning Africa, all of it?) shouldn’t be judged by our standards. ‘But what about the truth?’ said Colin, knowing, from such long and painful experience that truth was always going to be a poor relation. Now, Rupert was not one of Comrade Johnny’s spiritual heirs: if he had been, then he might have found aiding and abetting the truth a bit of a clarion call. Although ‘the truth’ had not yet emerged more than in drips and drops from the Soviet Union, compared to the great dollops of it that would be available in ten years’ time; although that great empire still existed (though no one even vaguely on the left would dream of even thinking of describing it as an empire), enough had come out, was coming out, to be a perpetual goad and reminder that truth ought to be on everyone’s agenda. But Rupert had never been anything but a good liberal and now he said, ‘Wouldn’t you say that telling the truth sometimes does more harm than good?’

  ‘No, I most certainly would not,’ said Colin.

  Then Colin forgot Sylvia’s appeal in the business of moving his work down to the basement flat, Meriel having taken herself off. He had to get this new book done: after all, the money Julia had left was not so much that any of them could slack, take things easy.

  Fred Cope summoned up from his newspaper’s and other archives, articles about Zimlia and concluded that it was true, Zimlia was always being given the benefit of any doubt. One of the experts whose name was often on articles about Zimlia was Rose Trimble. Well, she had never been critical, so who else? The Monitor had a stringer in Senga, and he was invited to write an article, ‘Zimlia’s first decade’. The article that arrived was more critical than most, while reminding readers that Africa was not to be judged by European standards. Fred Cope sent a copy of this article to Colin. ‘I hope this is more on the lines of what you suggest?’ And then, a postscript. ‘How would you fancy writing a piece about whether Proudhon’s “All property is theft” has been responsible for the corruption and collapse of modern society? I would be the first to admit that my thoughts on the subject have been prompted by the fact our house has been burgled three times in two years.’

  The article in The Monitor was noticed by the editor of a newspaper for whom Rose Trimble had regularly written about Zimlia and Comrade President Matthew, and now she was invited to return to Zimlia and see if what she found there supported the critical article in The Monitor.

  Rose was by now a name in the newspaper world. She had owed this to her timely praise for Zimlia but that had been only her start. Everything had gone right for her. She could easily have said, ‘God be thanked who has matched me with His hour,’–if she had ever read a line of poetry or could use the word God without a smirk. Living in Julia’s house she had felt inferior, but once out of it, it was they who seemed inferior. She was matched with the Eighties. Her qualities were what were needed now, in the time when getting on, getting rich, doing down your fellows, were officially applauded. She was ruthless, she was acquisitive, she was by instinct contemptuous of others. While she kept a connection with the comparatively serious newspaper for which she wrote her pieces on Zimlia, she had found her niche in World Scandals, where her task was to hunt out weaknesses, or rumours, and then hound some victim day and night until she could triumphantly come up with an exposé. The higher this unfortunate was in public life the better. She camped on people’s doorsteps, rummaged in rubbish bins, bribed relatives and friends to reveal or invent damaging facts: she was good at this scavenger’s work, and she was feared. She was particularly famous for her ‘portraits’, bringing journalism to new heights of vindictiveness, and found the work easy because she was genuinely incapable of seeing good in anyone: she knew that the truth about them had to be discreditable, and that it was in the unpleasant that the real essence of a person lies. This kind of jeering, derision, this ridicule, came from her deepest self, and matched a generation of similar people. It was as if something ugly and cruel had been exposed in England, something that had been hidden before, but was now like a beggar pulling aside rags to show ulcers. What had been respected was now scorned; decency, a respect for others, was now ridiculous. The world was being presented to readers through a coarse screen that got rid of anything pleasant or likeable: the tone was set by Rose Trimble and her kind who could never believe that anyone did anything except for self-interest. Rose hated most of all people who read books, or who pretended to–it was only a pretence; loathed the arts, denigrated particularly the theatre–she boasted she had invented the word ‘luvvies’ for theatre people; and liked violent and cruel films. She met only people like herself, frequenting certain pubs and clubs, and they had no idea that they were a new phenomenon, something that earlier generations would have despised, and dismissed as the gutter press, fit only for the lowest depths of society. But the phrase now seemed to her something vaguely complimentary, a guarantee of bravery in the pursuit of truth. But how could she, or they, know? They scorned history because they had learned none. Only once in her life she had written with approval, admiration, it was about Comrade President Matthew Mungozi, and then, more recently, Comrade Gloria, whom she adored because of her ruthlessness. Only once had her pen not dripped poison. And she read the article by The Monitor’s stringer with fury, and, too, with something like the beginnings of fear.

  Meeting a journalist who worked on The Monitor she heard that it was Colin Lennox who had prompted it. And who the hell was Colin to have an opinion about Africa?

  She hated Colin. She had always seen novelists and poets as something like counterfeiters, making something out of nothing and getting away with it. She had been too early on the scene for his first novel, but she had rubbished his second and the Lennoxes, and his third had caused her paroxysms of rage. It was about two people, apparently unlike each other, who had for each other a tender and almost freakish love–that it continued at all seemed to both of them a jest of Fate. While involved with other partners, other adventures, they met like conspirators, to share this feeling they had
, that they understood each other as no one else ever could. Reviewers on the whole liked it and said it was poetic and evocative. One said it was ‘elliptical’, a word that goaded Rose to extra frenzy: she had to look it up in the dictionary. She read the novel, or tried to: but really she could not read anything more difficult than a newspaper article. Of course it was about Sophie, that stuck-up bitch. Well, let them both watch out, that’s all. Rose had a file on the Lennoxes, all kinds of bits and pieces, some stolen from them long ago, when she went sniffing about the house for what she could find. She planned to ‘get them’ one day. She would sit leafing through the file, a rather fat woman now, her face permanently set in a malicious smile which, when she knew she had found the word or phrase that could really hurt, became a jeering laugh.

  On the plane to Senga she was next to a bulky man who took up too much room. She asked for a change of seat, but the plane was full. He shifted about in his seat in a way that she decided was aggressive and against her, and he gave her sideways looks full of male dishonesty. His arm was on the rest between them, no room for hers. She put her forearm beside his, to claim her rights, but he did not budge, and to keep her arm there meant she had to concentrate, or it would slide off. He did remove it when he demanded from the attendant who was offering drinks a whisky, threw it to the back of his throat at once, asked for another. Rose admired his authoritative handling of the attendant, whose smiles were false, Rose knew. She asked for a whisky and took it in a swallow, not to be outdone, and sat with the glass in her hand, waiting for a refill.