‘Was it so bad?' Frances asked, afraid of his answer which was, ‘Yes, it was, I don't think you realise... I don't see how he could have been a worse father, do you?'
' He didn't beat you,’ said Frances feebly, trawling for something to make the history better.
Andrew said that there are worse things than beating.
But when it was decided to have a little dinner to celebrate The Stepson, Colin himself added his father's name to the list.
So the big table would again have 'everyone' around it. 'I've asked everyone,' said Colin. Sophie was the first to be asked and to accept. Geoffrey and Daniel and James, all habituesof Johnny's place, said they would come but would be late – a meeting. Johnny said the same. Jill, met by Colin in the street, said she would come. Julia said that no one wanted a boring old woman, and Wilhelm told her, ‘My dear one, you are talking foolishly. ' Sylvia said she would try to come, if her hours permitted.
The table was laid for eleven. Wilhelm had donated a wondrous and most un-English cake, in shape a plump blunt spiral, with a surface like crisp glistening tulle – cream and meringue, in fact. It was sprinkled with tiny gold flakes. Sophie said it should be worn, not eaten.
They sat down to eat with half the places unoccupied, and then Sophie rushed in, with Roland. The handsome young actor, extending potent charm to each one of them, said, ‘No, no I'm not going to sit down, I've just come to congratulate you, Colin. As you know, I am an inveterate social climber, and if you are going to be an important writer, then I have to be in on the act. ' He kissed Frances, then Andrew – who looked humorous, shook Colin's hand, bowed over Julia's, and directed a sweeping bow at Wilhelm. ' See you later, my darling, ' he said to Sophie, and then, ‘I have to be on stage in twenty minutes. ‘And they sat listening to the car go roaring away.
Sophie and Colin, seated next to each other, were kissing, embracing, rubbing their cheeks together. Everyone permitted themselves thoughts of how Sophie would at last leave Roland, who made her so unhappy and that Colin and she might...
Toasts were drunk. The food was served. The meal was halfway through when Sylvia came in. She was as always these days, only half herself: she was ready to drop and they knew she soon would. She had brought with her a young colleague whom she described as a fellow victim of the system. Both sat down, accepted glasses of wine, allowed food to be put on their plates, but they were drifting off to sleep as they sat. Frances said, 'You'd better be off to bed,' and they rose like ghosts and stumbled out and up.
' A very strange system, ' came Julia's harsh voice, which these days sounded threatening, and sorrowful. ‘How is it they can treat these young people so badly?'
Jill arrived late, and apologetic. She was now a large young woman with her hair in a wide frizz of yellow, and clothes designed to make her look public and competent – understood when she said she was going to stand as councillor in the next municipal election. She was effusive, kept saying how wonderful it was to be here again: she lived a quarter of a mile away. She volunteered, when no one asked, that Rose was a freelance journalist and ' politically very active' .
Julia enquired, ‘And may I ask what cause is claiming her attention?'
Not understanding the question, since of course there was only one possible cause, Revolution, Jill said that Rose was involved ' with everything' .
Towards the end of a cheerful meal, Johnny came in. These days he was even more military, stern, unsmiling. He was wearing a war surplus camouflage jacket, and under it a tight black polo-neck and black jeans. His grey hair was half-inch stubble. He shot out his hand to Colin, nodded, said, ' Congratulations' , and to his mother, ' Mutti, I hope you are well. ' 'Well enough,’ said Julia. To Wilhelm, ‘Ah, so you are here too. Excellent. ' He nodded at Frances. To Andrew he said, 'I am glad you are doing international law. That ought to come in useful.' He remembered Sophie, for he did give her a little bow, and Jill, whom he knew well, got a comradely salute.
He sat down and Frances filled his plate. Wilhelm poured wine for him, and Comrade Johnny lifted his glass to the workers of the world, and then continued with a speech he had just been making to the meeting he had left. First, though, apologies from Geoffrey, James and Daniel, who were sure that everyone would understand the Struggle must come first. American imperialism... the military-industrial machine... Britain's role as lackey... the Vietnam War...
But Julia was miserable about the Vietnam War, and stopped him by asking, 'Johnny, could you please give more details ... I would really like to know about it. I simply do not understand why it is, this war. '
'Why? Surely you don't have to ask, Mutti. Because of profit of course. ‘And he went on with his speech, interrupting it to push in mouthfuls of food.
Colin stopped him with, ' Just a minute. Just stop for one minute. Did you read my book? You haven't said.'
Johnny laid down his knife and fork and looked severely at his son. ‘Yes, I have read it. '
'Then, what do you think of it?'
This folly caused Frances, Andrew in particular, Julia too, incredulity, as if Colin had decided to poke an up-till-now unprovoked lion with a stick. And what they feared happened. Johnny said, 'Colin, if you are genuinely interested in my opinion, then I shall give it. But I must return to principles. I am not interested in the by-products of a rotten system. That is what your book is. It is subjective, it is personal, there is no attempt to set events in a political perspective. All this class of writing, so-called literature, is the detritus of capitalism, and writers like you are bourgeois lackeys.'
‘Oh, do shut up,’ said Frances. ' Just behave like a human being for once. '
'Really? How you do give yourself away, Frances. A human being. And what do you think I and all the other comrades are working for, if not humanity?'
' Father,’ said Colin, who was already white, and suffering, ‘I’d like to know, leaving all the propaganda aside, what did you think of the book?'
The father and son were leaning towards each other across the table. Colin was like someone threatened with a beating, his father was triumphant and in the right. Had he recognised himself in the book? Probably not.
'I told you. I read the book. I am telling you what I think. If there is one class of person I despise, it is a liberal. And that is what you are, all of you. You are the hacks spawned by the decaying capitalist system.'
Colin got up and walked out of the kitchen. They heard him go blundering up the stairs.
Julia said, ‘And now Johnny, leave. Just go. '
Johnny sat, apparently in thought: it might be occurring to him that he could have behaved differently? He quickly shovelled in what remained on his plate, tipped what was in his wine glass down his throat, and said, ' Very well, Mutti. You are throwing me out of my house. ' He got up, and in a moment they heard the front door slam.
Sophie was in tears. She went out to follow Colin, saying, 'Oh, that was so awful.'
Jill said into the silence, ‘But he's such a great man, he'sso wonderful...’ She looked around, saw nothing but distress and anger, and said, ‘I should go, I think. ‘No one stopped her. She went saying, ' Thank you so much for asking me. '
Frances showed signs of cutting the cake, but Julia was rising, aided by Wilhelm. ‘I am so ashamed,’ she said. ‘I am so ashamed. ‘And, weeping, she went up the stairs, with Wilhelm.
There remained Andrew and his mother.
Frances suddenly began beating her fists on the table, her face raised, eyes streaming. 'I'll kill him,' she said. 'One of these days I'll kill him. How could he do that? I cannot understand how he could do it. '
Andrew said, ' Mother, just listen...’
But Frances was going on, and now she was actually tugging at her hair, as if wanting to pull it out. ‘I will kill him. How could he hurt Colin like that? Colin would've been happy with just one little kind word. '
' Mother, do listen to me. Just stop. Listen. '
Frances let her hands drop, rested her fists on
the table, sat waiting.
'Do you know what you've never understood? I don't know why you haven't. Johnny is stupid. He is a stupid man. How is it you've never seen it?'
Frances said, ' Stupid. ' She felt as if weights and balances were shifting in her mind. Well, of course he was stupid. But she had never admitted it. And that was because of the great dream. After all she had taken from him, all the shit, she had never been able to say to herself, simply, that Johnny was stupid.
She persisted, ' It's the unkindness. That was such a brutal thing...’
‘But, Mother, what are they if not brutal? Why do they admire all that, if they aren't brutal people?'
And then, a surprise to herself, Frances laid her head down on her arms, on the table, among all the dishes. She sobbed. Andrew waited, noting the freshets of tears that renewed themselves every time he thought she had recovered. He was white too now, shaken. He had never seen his mother cry, never heard her criticise his father in this way. He had understood that not attacking Johnny had been to shield him and Colin from the worst of it, but he had not really understood what an ocean of angry tears had remained unshed. At least, not shed where he or Colin could know about them. And she had done well, he was now thinking, not to weep and rage in front of them. He was feeling sick. After all, Johnny was his father... and Andrew knew that in some ways he resembled his father. Johnny was never to achieve even a grain of the self-understanding his son had. Andrew was doomed to live always with a critical eye focused on himself: a debonair, even humorous regard – but a judgement nevertheless.
Andrew sat on, turning his wine glass between his fingers, while his mother wept. Then he swallowed his wine, and stood up and put his hand on his mother's shoulder.
' Mother, leave all this stuff. We'll deal with it in the morning. And go to bed. It's no good, you know. He'll always be like this. '
And he went out. He knocked on his grandmother's door, and Wilhelm opened it and said in a loud voice, 'Julia's taken a valium. She's very upset.'
He hesitated outside Colin's door, heard Sophie singing: she was singing to Colin.
Then he glanced in at Sylvia. She had fallen asleep in her bed, dressed, and the young man was on the floor, his head on a cushion. It didn't look comfortable, but he was clearly beyond that.
Andrew went to his room, and lit a joint: he used pot for emotional emergencies, and listened to traditional jazz, mostly the blues. Classical music was for good moods. Or he recited to himself all the poems he knew – a good many – to make sure they remained there, intact. Or he read Montaigne, but about this he was secretive, for he felt this to be an old man's solace, not a young one's.
Julia had been left by Wilhelm tucked up in her big chair, with a rug, insisting she was not sleepy. But she did doze a little, then woke, the valium outwitted by anxiety. She shook off the rug irritably, listening to the dog, which she could hear making a nuisance of itself just below her. She also heard Sophie singing, but thought it was the radio. There was a light under Andrew's door. She crept down the stairs, hesitating whether to go in to him, but instead descended another flight, and was on the landing outside Sylvia's room. A crack of light showed that Frances was still awake. The old woman felt she ought to go in to Frances and say something, find the right words, sit with her, do something ... what words?
Julia gently turned the handle of Sylvia's door and stepped in to a room where moonlight lay across Sylvia and just reached the young man on the floor. She had forgotten him, and now her heart reminded her of her terrible, inadmissible unhappiness. Wilhelm had told her, not so long ago, that Sylvia would marry, and that she, Julia, mustn't mind it. So that's all he thinks of me, Julia had complained – to herself, but knew he was right. Sylvia must marry, though probably not this man. Otherwise wouldn't he be beside her on the bed? It seemed to Julia terrible that any young man, 'a colleague', should come home with Sylvia and sleep in her room. They are like puppies in a basket, Julia thought, they lick each other and fall off to sleep just anyhow. It should matter that a man was in a young woman's room. It should mean something. Julia sat herself carefully in the chair where – but that seemed an age ago – she had coaxed little Sylvia to eat. Now she could see Sylvia's face clearly, and as the moonlight moved over the floor, the young man's. Well, if it wasn't going to be him, this quite pleasant-looking youth, it would be another one.
It seemed to her that she had never cared for anyone in her life but Sylvia, that the girl had been the great passion of her life – oh, yes, she knew she loved Sylvia because she had not been allowed to love Johnny. But that was nonsense, because she knew – with her mind – how much she had longed for Philip all through that old war, and then how much she had loved him. The beams of light on the bed and the floor resembled the arbitrariness of memory, emphasising this and then that. When she looked back along the path of her life, periods of years that had had a sharp and distinct flavour of their own reduced themselves to something like a formula: that was the five years of the First World War. That little slice there was the Second World War. But, immersed in those five years, loyal in her mind and emotions to an enemy soldier, they were endless. The Second World War, which was now like an uneasy shadow in her memory, when she had lost her husband to his fatigue and to the fact he could tell her nothing of what he did, was an awful time and she had often thought that she could not bear it. She had lain at nights beside a man who was preoccupied with how to destroy her country, and she had to be glad it was being destroyed – and she was, but sometimes it seemed the bombs were tearing at her own heart. And yet now she could say to Wilhelm, who had been a refugee from that monstrous regime which she refused to think of as German, 'That was during the war – no, the second one.' As if talking about an item on a list that had to be kept up to date and accurate, events one after another, or perhaps like moonlight and shadows falling across a path, each having a sharp validity as you moved through them, but then when you looked back there was a dark streak through a forest with splashes of thin light across it. Ich habe gelebt und geliebt, she murmured, the fragment of Schiller that still stayed in her mind after sixty-five years, but it was a question: Have I lived and loved?
The moonlight had reached Julia's feet. She had been sitting here for some time, then. Not once had Sylvia so much as stirred. They seemed not to breathe: she could easily believe them lying there dead. She found herself thinking, If you were dead, Sylvia, then you' d not be missing much, you'll only end up like me, an old woman with my life behind me, dwindling into a mess of memories, that hurt. Julia dozed off, the valium at last sinking her into a sleep so deep that she was limp in the hands of Sylvia, who was shaking her.
Sylvia had woken, her mouth dry, to reach out for water, and saw a little ghost sitting there in the moonlight, whom she expected to vanish as she came fully awake. But Julia did not vanish. Sylvia went to her, held her, rocked her as the old woman whimpered, a desolate heart-wrenching sound.
'Julia, Julia,' whispered Sylvia, thinking of the young man who needed his sleep. 'Wake up, it's me.'
‘Oh, Sylvia, I don't know what to do, I'm not myself. '
' Get up, darling, please, you must go to bed. '
Julia got up, unsteadily, and Sylvia, also unsteady, since she was half-asleep, took her out of the room and up the stairs. Now there was no light under Frances's door, not under Andrew's, but yes, there was under Colin's.
Sylvia laid Julia down on her bed and pulled up a cover.
‘I think I'm ill, Sylvia. I must be ill. '
This cry went straight to Sylvia's professional self, and she said, ‘I’m going to look after you. Please don't be so sad. '
Julia was asleep. Sylvia, falling asleep, wrenched herself up and crept across the room supporting herself on backs of chairs, and got down at last to her own room where she found her colleague sitting up. 'Is it morning?' 'No, no, go to sleep.' 'Thank God for that.' He collapsed back and she fell on her bed.
And now they were all asleep except for
Colin, who lay with his arms around Sophie, who was asleep, the little dog on her hip, dozing, though its wisp of a tail sometimes fluttered.
He was not thinking of beautiful Sophie, in his arms. Like his mother earlier he was insanely promising: ‘I’ll kill him, I swear I will. ‘Now here's a knot! If Johnny had recognised himself in the poisonous word-spinner, then he was being asked for the heights of dispassionate judgement: only the standards of literary excellence should fuel his thoughts, 'Is this a good novel or isn't it?' — the memories perhaps of those novels he had read when he had been a well-read person, before he had succumbed to the simple charms of socialist realism. As when the victim of a savage cartoon is expected to say, ‘Oh, well done! What a talent you have! In short, from Comrade Johnny was being demanded conduct that his family had long ago agreed he was incapable of. On the other hand, if he had not recognised himself, then he was to blame for suspecting nothing of how at least one of his sons saw him.
Julia grieving, grieving, though she could not have said for what if it wasn't Sylvia, or her whole life, studied newspapers, flung them down, tried again, and when Wilhelm walked her to the Cosmo, she tried to take in what was being said around her. The Vietnam War, that was what they talked about. Sometimes Johnny came in, with his entourage, dramatic, forceful, and he might nod at her, or even give her the clenched fist salute. Often, Geoffrey was with him, whom she knew so well, a handsome young man, like Lochinvar from the West, as she said scornfully to Wilhelm. Or Daniel, with his red hair, like a beacon. Or James, who came to her saying, ‘I am James, do you remember me? But she remembered no one with a cockney accent.
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