‘Is she with someone?'
‘Yes, but we don't know who. '
' Poor Sophie. '
'But poor Sylvia first. Why don't we hear about you and some fantastically lucky chap?'
She could have shrunk away from him, but he held her.
‘I’m just — unlucky. '
‘Are you in love with Father Jack?'
And now she did sit up, pushing him away. ‘No, how can you...’ but seeing his face, which was sympathetic, she said, ‘Yes, I was. '
' Nuns are always in love with their priests, ' he murmured.
She did not know if he meant to be cruel.
‘I’m not a nun. '
' Come back here. ‘And he drew her close again.
And now she said in a tiny voice he remembered from little Sylvia, ‘I think there is something wrong with me. I did go to bed with someone, a doctor at the hospital, and... that's the trouble, you see, Andrew. I don't like sex.’And she sobbed, while he held her.
'Well, I think I'm not as proficient in that department as I might be. Sophie made it very clear that compared to Roland I'm a dead loss' .
‘Oh, poor Andrew. '
'And poor Sylvia.'
They cried themselves to sleep, like children.
They were visited, while they slept, first by Colin, because the little dog's uneasiness said there was someone in the house who shouldn't be. The room was in twilight. Colin stood for a while looking at the two, holding the dog's jaws closed, to prevent it from barking.
‘You' re a good little creature, ' he told Vicious, now a shabby old dog, as he went down the stairs.
Later Frances came in. The room was dark. She switched on a tiny light, which had once been Sylvia's night-light, because of her fear of the dark, and stood, as Colin had done, looking down at what she could see, only their heads and faces. Sylvia and Andrew – oh, no, no, Frances was thinking, like a mother, as it were crossing her fingers to avert evil. It would be a disaster. Both needed – surely? – something more robust? But when were her sons going to get themselves settled, and safe – (safe? she was certainly thinking like a mother, apparently one can't avoid it) -they were both well into their thirties. All our fault... she was thinking: meaning all of them, the older generation. Then, to console herself, Perhaps it will take them as long as it has taken me, to be happy. So I mustn't give up hope.
Much later still, Julia came down the stairs. She thought there was no one in the room, though Frances had told her the two were still there, lost to the world. Then, by the glimmer of the tiny light, she saw the faces, Sylvia's below Andrew's, on his shoulder. So pale, so tired – she could see that even in this light. All around them a deep black, for the red sofa was intensifying the dark, as when a painter uses a crimson undercoat and the black intensifies and glows. At either end of the great room windows admitted enough light to grey the dark, no more. It was a cloudy night, without moon or stars. Julia was thinking, surely they are too young to look like that, so washed out. The two faces were like ashes spilled on the dark.
She stood there a long time, looking down at Sylvia, fixing that face on her memory. And in fact Julia did not see her again. There was a muddle over the time of the flight departure and a call from Sylvia, 'Julia, oh, Julia, I'm so sorry. But I'm sure I'll be back in London soon.'
Wilhelm died. There was a funeral with a couple of hundred people. Everyone who had ever drunk a cup of coffee in the Cosmo must have come, people were saying. Colin and Andrew, with Frances, stood together supporting Julia, who was mute and tearless, and seemed as if cut out of paper. ' Good God, everyone in the book trade must be here, ' they heard from all around them. They had had no idea of Wilhelm Stein's popularity, or of how he was seen by his compeers. There was a general feeling that in burying the courteous, kind, and erudite old book dealer they were saying goodbye to a past much better than was possible now. ' The end of an epoch, ' people were whispering, and some were weeping because of it. The two sons, who had flown in that morning from the States, thanked the Lennoxes politely for any trouble they had incurred, over the funeral, and said that they would now take over: Wilhelm was leaving a good bit of money.
Julia took to her bed, and of course people said that Wilhelm's death had done for her, but there was something else, an appalling thing, a blow to her heart that none of the family understood.
When Colin's second novel came out, it was clear that Sick Death would not do as well as his first. And it was not as good, being virtually a tract about a criminally irresponsible government neglecting to protect its people from nuclear fall-out, bombs, and so on. An efficient propaganda campaign, inspired by agents of a foreign enemy power, created a hysterical atmosphere which made this government, concerned about its popularity, ignore its responsibilities. This novel evoked roars of indignation from the various movements concerning themselves with the Bomb. Some reviews were malignant, among them Rose Trimble's. Her profile of President Matthew Mungozi had put her on the map, she had all kinds of opportunities afforded to her, but she was now working on the Daily Post, famous for its virulence, and was at home there. She used Colin's novel as a starting point for an attack on those who wanted to build shelters, and in particular the young doctors, and most particularly Sylvia Lennox. As for Colin, 'It should be known that he has a Nazi background. His grandmother Julia Lennox was a member of the Hitler Youth. ' Rose felt safe. For one thing the Daily Post was a newspaper that expected to pay out – often – compensation for libel, and for another she knew that Julia would not deign to notice such an attack. ' Nasty old bitch, ' Rose muttered.
Wilhelm had been shown this article by a friend in the Cosmo. He debated whether to tell Julia, decided that he should: and it was just as well, because a well-wisher sent her the cutting anonymously. ' Take no notice,’ she had said to Wilhelm. ' They are nothing but shit. I think I am justified in using their favourite word?' 'My dear Julia,’Wilhelm had said, amused, but shocked, too, at this word from her.
Julia sat up against the pillows, nurses coming and going, not expecting to sleep, with the cutting in her bedside table. So now, she, Julia von Arne, was a Nazi. What hurt was the carelessness of it. Of course that woman – Julia remembered an unlikeable girl – had not known what she was doing. They all used words like fascist all the time, anyone they might be having a tiff with was a fascist. They were so ignorant they did not know there had been real fascists, who had brought Italy low. And Nazi... there were newspaper articles, radio programmes, television, about them, which she watched because she felt so directly concerned, but obviously none of these young people had taken it in. They did not seem to know that fascist, Nazi, were words that meant people had been imprisoned, been tortured, had died in millions in that war. It was the ignorance, the carelessness, that filled Julia's eyes with angry tears. She felt cancelled out, obliterated: her history, and Philip's too, reduced to epithets used by an ambitious young journalist in a gutter newspaper. Julia sat sleepless (she quietly disposed of her sleeping pills when the nurses weren't looking), poisoned by her helplessness. Of course she would not sue, or even write a letter: why dignify that canaille by even noticing them? Wilhelm had brought her a drafted letter, saying the von Arnes were an old German family which had never had connections with the Nazis. She asked him to forget it, not to send it. She was wrong: it should have been sent, to ease her heart, if nothing else. And she was wrong, too, about Rose Trimble. Carelessness and indifference to history – yes, she was like her generation, but it was an immediate hatred of the Lennoxes that inspired her, the need to 'get back at them'. She had forgotten what had brought her to their house in the first place, or that she had ever claimed Andrew had made her pregnant. No, it was that house, the ease of it, the way they took everything for granted, and looked after each other. Sylvia, that prissy little bitch; Frances, the shitty old queen bee, wasp, rather; Julia bossing everyone. And the men, complacent bastards. Her article had been written from the wells of bile and malice that forever c
hurned and seethed inside Rose, which could be mollified if only temporarily, when she was able to write words directed straight to the hearts of her victims. She imagined, as she wrote, how they gasped and writhed as they read. She imagined them crying out in pain. That was why Julia was dying before her time. She felt she had suddenly been attacked by malignity. She sat against her pillows in a room where light fell from the window, and moved from floor to bed to wall, and back around the walls to the window, such a feeble answer to the dark that was descending from invisible inimical forces, and which enclosed her. She had been running away from them all her life, she felt, but now she was being swallowed by a monster of stupidity and ugliness and vulgarity. Everything was distorted and spoiled. And so she stayed in bed, and went back in her mind to her girlhood when everything had been beautiful, so schon, schon, schon, but into that paradise had come that old war, and the world was full of uniforms. At night, when the tiny light that had been Sylvia's and had been brought up from the sitting-room to her room, was the only illumination in the dark, her brothers and Philip, handsome brave young men, stood about her bed, in smart uniforms that had not a spot nor spatter nor stain on them. She cried to them to stay with her, not to go off and leave her.
She talked softly in German, and in English, and in her comme-il-faut French, and Colin sat with her, sometimes for hours, holding the bundle of little bones that was her hand. He was unhappy, remorseful, thinking that he had never really heard about Ernst and Frederich and Max; he had scarcely heard of his grandfather. Behind him was a chasm or gulf into which normality had fallen, ordinary family life had taken a fall, and here he sat, a grandson, but he had not met his grandfather, nor Julia's German family. But it was his family too... He bent close to Julia and said, 'Julia, please, tell me about your brothers, about your father and mother, did you have grandparents? Tell me about them. ' She came out of her dream and said, ‘Who? Who did you say? They are dead. They were killed. There is no family now. There is no house now. There is nothing left now. It is terrible, terrible...’
She did not like being called back out of her memories, or dreams. She did not like the present, all medicines, pills and nurses, and she hated the ancient yellowish body that was revealed when they washed her. Above all, she had a persistent diarrhoea, which meant that no matter how often her bed was changed, and her nightdress, or how much they cleaned her, there was a smell in her room. She demanded that cologne be splashed about, and she rubbed it into her hands and face, but the odour of faeces was there, and she was ashamed and miserable. ' Terrible, terrible, terrible,' she muttered, a fierce old crone, who sometimes wept angry tears.
She died, and Frances found the cutting in her bedside table, saying that Julia had been a Nazi. She showed it to Colin and they laughed, because of the absurdity. Colin said that if he met Rose Trimble he might consider beating her up, but Frances, like Julia, said they were not worth bothering about, these people.
Julia's funeral was not as heartwarming as Wilhelm's.
It seemed that she was or had been some kind of a Catholic, but she had not asked for a priest in her last illness, nor was there anything about her funeral in her will. They decided on a non-committally interdenominational service, but it seemed so bleak, that they remembered she had liked poetry. Poems should be read. What poems? Andrew looked about on her shelves, and then found in her bedside drawer a copy of Gerard Manley Hopkins. It had been much read and some poems were underlined. They were the 'terrible' poems. Andrew said no, too painful to read those.
'No worst there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief..."
No.
He chose The Caged Skylark, which she had liked, for there was a pencil line beside it, and then the poem Spring and Fall , to a young child, beginning,
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
This had a line beside it too, but it was the dark poems that had the double, triple heavy black lines beside them, and jagged exclamation marks too.
So the family felt they were betraying Julia, choosing the softer poems. And, too, they had to tell themselves that they had not known Julia, could never have guessed at those deep black lines beside
I wake and feel the fell ofdark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent...
There ought to be some German poetry but Wilhelm was not there to advise.
Andrew read the poems. His voice was light, but strong enough for the occasion: there were few people there, apart from the family. Mrs Philby stood well away from them, in blackest black, from her hat, kept for funerals, to her boots, that shone, a reproach to them: she continued in her role which was to shame the sloppy ways of the family. None of them was in black, only her. Her face was vindictive with righteousness. She wept, though, at the end. 'Mrs Lennox was my oldest friend,' she told Frances, in severe reproach. 'I shall not be coming to you again. I only came because of her. '
Halfway through the proceedings a gaunt figure, his white locks and loose clothes fluttering in a wind that blew through the gravestones, appeared and wandered uncertainly towards the funeral group. It was Johnny, sombre, unhappy, and looking much older than he should. He stood well apart from any of them, half turned away, as if ready to run off. The words of the service were an affront to him, it was evident. At the end his sons and Frances went towards him, to ask him back to the house, but he only nodded, and stalked off. At the limits of the graveyard he turned and gave them a salute with his open right hand, palm towards them, at shoulder level.
Sylvia was not at the funeral. The telephone lines to St Luke's Mission were down, because of a bad storm.
Meanwhile Frances's life with Rupert was not going as they had expected. She was virtually living in his place, though her books and papers were at Julia's. It was not a big flat. The sitting-room, which was also where they ate, with a tiny kitchen through a hatch, was a third of the size of Julia's. The big bedroom was adequate. The two small rooms were for the two children, Margaret and William, who came at weekends. When Meriel had gone off to live with a new man, Jaspar, there had been plans to buy something bigger. Frances liked the children well enough and believed they did not dislike her: they were polite and obedient. From their mother's flat they went off to school, and with their mother and Jaspar went for holidays. Then one weekend they were strained, silent, and said that their mother wasn't well. And no, Jaspar wasn't there. The children did not look at each other, imparting this information but it was as if they exchanged looks full of dread.
It was at this moment that real life caught up with her again: that was how Frances felt it. In the months – no, years now -she had spent with Rupert she had become a different person, slowly learning to take happiness for granted. Good Lord, just imagine, if there had been no Rupert she would have gone on in the same dull willed routine of duty, and without love, sex, intimacy.
Rupert went off with the children to their mother's and found what he had dreaded. Years ago, after the birth of Margaret, she had suffered a depression, a real one. He had seen her through it, she had got better, but lived in terror that it might recur. It had. Meriel sat curled up in the corner of a sofa, staring at nothing, in a dirty dressing-gown, her hair unwashed and uncombed. The children stood on either side of their father, staring at their mother, then pressed close to him so he could put his arms around them.
'Where is Jaspar?' he asked the silent woman, who was evidently a long way off, inside the dreadful suffering of the depressive.
After a time he repeated the question, and she said, irritated at the interruption, ' Gone. '
‘Is he coming back?'
'No.'
That seemed to be all he was going to get out of her, but then she said, in a thick indifferent mutter, not moving, not turning her head, ' Better take the kids. They'll get nothing here. '
Rupert collected up books, toys, clothes, school gear, under the direction of Margaret and William, and then back to Meriel. 'What are you going to
do?' he asked. A long silence. She shook her head, meaning, Leave me alone, and then when the three were already at the door, she said in the same tone, ' Get me into hospital. Any hospital. I don't care. '
The children were installed again in their old rooms, and at once the whole flat was awash with their possessions. They were frightened, and silent.
Rupert rang their doctor, who would arrange for Meriel to go into a psychiatric ward. He tried to ring Jaspar, but his call was not returned.
Frances was having hard, cool thoughts. She knew that Jaspar was not likely to come back to Meriel, if he had gone off in fright at the experience of being with a depressive. He was ten years younger, was an ornament of the fashion world, designing sports clothes and making money. His name was often in the newspapers. Why had he taken on a woman with two half-grown children? Rupert had said he believed the young man had enjoyed seeing himself as mature and responsible, proving that he was a serious person. He had the reputation of being too trendy for his own good, drugs, wild parties – all that. To which scene he had presumably returned. That meant that Meriel was without a man, and would very likely want her husband back. And here were two children in emotional shock, and here she was, a mother substitute. And yes, she was suffering that awed and appalled feeling that comes when life recurs, in a familiar pattern. She thought, I am in danger of being landed with these kids – no, I have been landed with them. Do I want that?
Margaret was twelve, William was ten. They would soon be adolescent. She was not afraid that Rupert would let her down, relinquish responsibility to her, but that their intimacy would not only suffer – it would have to – and it might disappear, sucked into the insensate demands of teenagers. But she liked Rupert so much... she did so like him... she loved the man. She could say, seriously, she had not loved till now – yes, she would say yes to whatever turned up. And after all, even depressions take themselves off, and then the children would want to be with their mother.
The Sweetest Dream Page 28