The Sweetest Dream

by Doris Lessing Little Dorrit

  Colin, needing some sort of anchor of fact, interrupted to ask, ‘But, Dad, I thought the contract...’

  Johnny said quickly, 'Too many hassles. You wouldn't understand... what the C I A wants, the C I A gets. '

  A cautious glance over her shoulder showed Colin’s face a knot of anger, bewilderment, resentment. Andrew, as always, seemed insouciant, even amused, though she knew how very far he was from that. This scene or something like it had been repeated throughout their childhoods.

  In the year the war began, 1939, two youngsters, hopeful and ignorant – like those around the table tonight – had fallen in love, like millions of others in the warring countries, and put their arms around each other for comfort in the cruel world. But there was excitement in it too, war’s most dangerous symptom. Johnny Lennox introduced her to the Young Communist League just as he was leaving it to be a grown-up, if not yet a soldier. He was a bit of a star, Comrade Johnny, and needed her to know it. She had sat in the back rows of crowded halls to hear him explain that it was an imperialist war, and the progressive and democratic forces should boycott it. Soon, however, he was in uniform and in the same halls, to the same audiences, exhorting them to do their bit, for now it was a war against fascism, because the attack by the Germans on the Soviet Union had made it so. There were barrackers and protesters, as well as the faithful; there were boos and loud raucous laughter. Johnny was mocked for standing up there tranquilly explaining the new Party Line just as if he had not been saying the exact opposite until recently. Frances was impressed by his calm; accepting – even provoking – hostility by his pose, arms out, palms forward, suffering for the hard necessities of the times. He was in the RAF uniform. He had wanted to be a pilot, but his eyes were not up to it, so he was a corporal, having refused on ideological grounds to be an officer. He would be in administration.

  So that had been Frances's introduction to politics, or rather, to Johnny's politics. Something of an achievement, perhaps, to be young in the late Thirties and to care nothing about politics, but so it was. She was a solicitor's daughter from Kent. The theatre had been her window into glamour, adventure, the great world, first in school plays, then in amateur dramatics. She had always played leading roles, but was typecast for her English-rose looks. But now she was in uniform too, one of the young women attached to the War Ministry, mostly driving senior officers around. Attractive young women in uniform in her kind of job had a good time, though this aspect of war tends to be played down from tact, and perhaps even shame, towards the dead. She danced a good deal, she dined, she mildly lost her heart to glamorous Frenchmen, Poles, Americans, but did not forget Johnny, or their anguished passionate nights of love and that rehearsed their later longing for each other.

  Meanwhile he was in Canada attending to the RAF fliers being trained there. By now he was an officer, and doing well, as his letters made clear; then he came home, an aide to some bigwig, and he was a captain. He was so handsome in his uniform, and she so attractive in hers. In that week they married and Andrew was conceived, and that was the end of her good times, because she was in a room with a baby and was lonely, and frightened, because of the bombing. She had acquired a mother-in-law, the fearsome Julia, who, looking like a society lady in a nineteen-thirties fashion magazine, descended from her house in Hampstead – this house – to show shock at what Frances was living in, and to offer her space in her house. Frances refused. She may not have been political, but with every fibre she shared her generation's fervent desire for independence. When she left her home, it was for a furnished room. And now, having been reduced to little more than Johnny’s wife and a baby’s mother, she was independent, and could define herself with that thought, holding on to it. Not much, but her own.

  And the days and nights dragged by, and she was as far from the glamorous life she had been enjoying as ifshe had never left her parents' home in Kent. The last two years of the war were hard, poor, frightening. The food was bad. Bombs that seemed to have been designed to wreck people’s nerves affected hers. Clothes were hard to find, and ugly. She had no friends, only met other mothers of small children. She was afraid above all that when Johnny came home he would be disappointed in her, an overweight tired young mother, nothing like the smart girl in uniform he had been madly in love with. And that is what happened.

  Johnny had done well in the war, and had been noticed. No one could say he wasn't clever and quick, and his politics were unremarkable for that time. He was offered good jobs in the London reshaping itself after the war. He refused them. He wasn't going to be bought by the capitalist system: not by an iota had he changed his mind, his faith. Comrade Johnny Lennox, back in civvies, was preoccupied only by The Revolution.

  Colin was born in 1945. Two small children, in a wretched flat in Notting Hill, then a run-down and poor part of London. Johnny was not often at home. He was working for the Party. By now it is necessary to explain that by the Party was meant the Communist Party, and what was meant to be heard was the party. When two strangers met it might go like this: 'Are you in the Party too?' 'Yes, of course.’I thought you must be.' Meaning: You are a good person, I like you, and so you must, like me, be in the Party.

  Frances did not join the Party, though Johnny told her to. It was bad for him, he said, to have a wife who would not join.

  'But who would know?' enquired Frances, adding to his contempt for her, because she had no feeling for politics and never would.

  'The Party knows,' said Johnny.

  'Too bad, ' said Frances.

  They were definitely not getting on, and the Party was the least of it, though a great irritation for Frances. They were living in real hardship, not to say squalor. He saw this as a sign of inner grace. Returning from a weekend seminar, 'Johnny Lennox on the Threat of American Aggression', he would find her hanging up the children's clothes to dry on rickety arrangements of pulleys and racks screwed precariously to the wall outside the kitchen window, or returning, one child dragging on her hand, the other in a pushchair, from the park. The well of the chair would be full of groceries, and tucked behind the child was a book she had been hoping to read while the children played. ‘You are a real working woman, Fran, ' he would compliment her.

  If he was delighted, his mother was not. When she came, always having written first, on thick white paper you could cut yourself with, she sat with distaste on the edge of a chair which probably had residues of smeared biscuit or orange on it. She would announce, 'Johnny, this cannot go on.' ‘And why not, Mutti?' He called her Mutti because she hated it. ‘Your grandchildren, ' he would instruct her, ' will be a credit to the People’s Britain. '

  Frances would not let her eyes meet Julia’s at such moments, because she was not going to be disloyal. She felt that her life, all of it, and herself in it, was dowdy, ugly, exhausting, and Johnny’s nonsense was just a part of it. It would all end, she was sure of it. It would have to.

  And it did, because Johnny announced that he had fallen in love with a real comrade, a Party member, and he was moving in with her.

  'And how am I going to live?' asked Frances, already knowing what to expect.

  ‘I’ll pay maintenance, of course, ' said Johnny, but never did.

  She found a council nursery, and got a small job in a business making theatre sets and costumes. It was badly paid, but she managed. Julia arrived to complain that the children were being neglected and their clothes were a disgrace.

  ' Perhaps you should talk to your son?' said Frances. ' He owes me a year’s maintenance. ' Then it was two years, three years.

  Julia asked whether if she got a decent allowance from the family would she give up her job and look after the boys?

  Frances said no.

  ‘But I wouldn't interfere with you, ' said Julia. ‘I promise you that.'

  ‘You don't understand, ' said Frances.

  ‘No, I do not. And perhaps you would explain it to me?'

  Johnny left Comrade Maureen and returned to her, Frances, saying that h
e had made a mistake. She took him back. She was lonely, knew the boys needed a father, was sex-starved.

  He left again for another real, genuine comrade. When he again returned to Frances, she said to him: ' Out. '

  She was working full time in a theatre, earning not much but enough. The boys were by then ten and eight. There was trouble all the time at the schools, and they were not doing well.

  ‘What do you expect?' said Julia.

  ‘I never expect anything, ' said Frances.

  Then things changed, dramatically. Frances was amazed to hear that Comrade Johnny had agreed that Andrew should go to a good school. Julia said Eton, because her husband had gone there. Frances was waiting to hear that Johnny had refused Eton, and then was told that Johnny had been there, and had managed to conceal this damaging fact all these years. Julia did not mention it because his Eton career had hardly covered him or them with glory. He had gone for three years, but dropped out to go to the Spanish Civil War.

  'You mean to say you are happy for Andrew to go to that school?' Frances said to him, on the telephone.

  'Well, you at least get a good education,' said Johnny airily, and she could hear the unspoken: Look what it did for me.

  So – Julia paying – Andrew took off from the poor rooms his mother and brother were living in, for Eton, and spent his holidays with schoolfriends, and became a polite stranger.

  Frances went to an end-of-term at Eton, in an outfit bought to fit what she imagined would suit the occasion, and the first hat she had ever worn. She did all right, she thought, and could see Andrew was relieved when he saw her.

  Then people came to ask after Julia, Philip's widow, and the daughter-in-law of Philip's father: an old man remembered him, as a small boy. It seemed the Lennoxes went to Eton as a matter of course. Johnny, or Jolyon, was enquired after. ' Interesting...’said a man who had been Johnny's teacher. ' An interesting choice of career.'

  Thereafter Julia went to the formal occasions, where she was made much of, and was surprised at it: visiting Eton in those brief three years of Jolyon's attendance there, she had seen herself as Philip's wife, and of not much account.

  Colin refused Eton, because of a deep, complicated loyalty to his mother whom he had watched struggling all these years. This did not mean he did not quarrel with her, fight her, argue, and did so badly at school Frances was secretly convinced he was doing it on purpose to hurt her. But he was cold and angry with his father, when Johnny did blow in to say that he was so terribly sorry, but he really did not have the money to give them. He agreed to go to a progressive school, St Joseph's, Julia paying for everything.

  Johnny then came up with a suggestion that Frances at last did not refuse. Julia would let her and the boys have the lower part of her house. She did not need all that room, it was ridiculous...

  Frances thought of Andrew, returning to various squalid addresses, or not returning, certainly never bringing friends home.

  She thought of Colin who made no secret of how much he hated how they were living. She said yes to Johnny, yes to Julia, and found herself in the great house that was Julia's and always would be.

  Only she knew what it cost her. She had kept her independence all this time, paid for herself and the boys, and not accepted money from Julia, nor from her parents who would have been happy to help. Now here she was, and it was a final capitulation: what to other people was 'such a sensible arrangement' was defeat. She was no longer herself, she was an appendage of the Lennox family.

  As far as Johnny was concerned, he had done as much as could be expected of him. When his mother told him he should support his sons, get a job that paid him a salary, he shouted at her that she was a typical member of an exploiting class, thinking only of money, while he was working for the future of the whole world. They quarrelled, frequently and noisily. Listening, Colin would go white, silent, and leave the house for hours or for days. Andrew preserved his airy, amused smile, his poise. He was often at home these days, and even brought friends.

  Meanwhile Johnny and Frances had divorced because he had married properly, and formally, with a wedding that the comrades attended, and Julia too. Her name was Phyllida, and she was not a comrade, but he said she was good material and he would make a communist of her.

  This little history was the reason why Frances was keeping her back to the others, stirring a stew that didn't really need a stir. Delayed reaction: her knees trembled, her mouth seemed full of acid, for now her body was taking in the bad news, rather later than her mind. She was angry, she knew, and had the right to be, but she was angrier with herself than with Johnny. If she had allowed herself to spend three days inside a lunatic dream, fair enough – but how could she have involved the boys? Yet it was

  Andrew who had brought the telegram, waited until she showed it to him, and said, 'Frances, your errant husband is at last going to do the right thing.' He had sat lightly on the edge of a chair, a fair, attractive youth, looking more than ever like a bird just about to take off. He was tall and that made him seem even thinner, his jeans loose on long legs, and with long elegant bony hands lying palms up on his knees. He was smiling at her, and she knew it was meant kindly. They were trying hard to get on, but she was still nervous of him, because of those years of him rejecting her. He had said ' your husband' , he had not said ' my father' . He was friendly with Johnny's new wife, Phyllida, while reporting back that she was on the whole a bit of a drag.

  He had congratulated her on her part in the new play and had made graceful fun of agony aunts.

  And Colin, too, had been affectionate, a rare thing for him, and had telephoned friends about the new play.

  It was all so bad for them both, it was all terrible, but after all only another little blow in years and years of them – as she was telling herself, waiting for her knees to get back their strength, while she gripped the edge of a drawer with one hand and stirred with the other, eyes closed.

  Behind her Johnny was holding forth about the capitalist press and its lies about the Soviet Union, about Fidel Castro, and how he was being misrepresented.

  That Frances had been scarcely touched by years of Johnny's strictures, or his lexicon, was shown by the way, after a recent lecture, she had murmured, ' He seems quite an interesting person. ' Johnny had snapped at her, ‘I don't think I've managed to teach you anything, Frances, you are unteachable. '

  'Yes, I know, I'm stupid.' That had been a repetition of the great, primal, but at the same time final, moment, when Johnny had returned to her for the second time, expecting her to take him in: he had shouted that she was a political cretin, a lumpen petite bourgeois, a class enemy, and she had said, ' That's right, I'm stupid, now get out. '

  She could not go on standing here, knowing that the boys were watching her, nervously, hurt because of her, even if the others were gazing at Johnny with eyes shining with love and admiration.

  She said, 'Sophie, give me a hand.'

  At once willing hands appeared, Sophie's and, it seemed, everyone's, and dishes were being set down the centre of the table. There were wonderful smells as the covers came off.

  They sat down at the head of the table, glad to sit, not looking at Johnny. All the chairs were full, but others stood by the wall, and, if he wanted, he could bring one up and sit down himself. Was he going to do this? He often did, infuriating her, though he believed, it was obvious, that it was a compliment. No, tonight, having made an impression, and got his fill of admiration (if he ever did) he was going to leave – surely? He was not leaving. The wine glasses were full, all around the table. Johnny had brought two bottles of wine: open-handed Johnny, who never entered a room without offerings of wine... she was unable to prevent this bile, these bitter words, arriving unwanted on her tongue. Just go away, she was mentally urging him. Just leave.

  She had cooked a large, filling, winter stew of beef and chestnuts, from a recipe of Elizabeth David, whose French Country Cooking was lying open somewhere in the kitchen. (Years later she would s
ay, Good Lord, I was part of a culinary revolution and didn't know it.) She was convinced that these youngsters did not eat 'properly' unless it was at this table. Andrew was dispensing mashed potatoes flavoured with celeriac. Sophie ladled out stew. Creamed spinach and buttered carrots were being allotted by Colin. Johnny stood watching, silenced for the moment because no one was looking at him.

  Why didn't he leave?

  Around the table this evening were what she thought of as the regulars: or at least some of them. On her left was Andrew, who had served himself generously, but now sat looking down at the food as if he didn't recognise it. Next to him was Geoffrey

  Bone, Colin's schoolfriend, who had spent all his holidays with them since she could remember. He did not get on with his parents, Colin said. (But who did, after all?) Beside him Colin had already turned his round flushed face towards his father, all accusing anguish, while his knife and fork rested in his hands. Next to Colin, was Rose Trimble, who had been Andrew's girlfriend, if briefly: an obligatory flutter with Marxism had taken him to a weekend seminar entitled, 'Africa Bursts Its Chains!', and there Rose had been. Their affair (had it been that? – she was sixteen) had ended, but Rose still came here, seemed in fact to have moved in. Opposite Rose was Sophie, a Jewish girl in the full bloom of her beauty, slender, black gleaming eyes, black gleaming hair, and people seeing her had to be afflicted with thoughts of the intrinsic unfairness of Fate, and then of the imperatives of Beauty and its claims. Colin was in love with her. So was Andrew. So was Geoffrey. Next to Sophie, and the very opposite, in every way, of Geoffrey, who was so correctly good-looking, English, polite, well-behaved, was stormy and suffering Daniel, who had just been threatened with expulsion from St Joseph's for shoplifting. He was deputy head boy, and Geoffrey was head boy, and had had to convey to Daniel that he must reform or else – an empty threat, certainly, made for the sake of impressing the others with the seriousness of what they all did. This little event, ironically discussed by these worldly-wise children, was confirmation, if any was needed, of the inherent unfairness of the world, since Geoffrey shoplifted all the time, but it was hard to associate that open eagerly-polite face with wrongdoing. And there was another ingredient here: Daniel worshipped Geoffrey, always had, and to be admonished by his hero was more than he could bear.