The Sweetest Dream (15 page)

There was one exception to the Evansky imperative, every
bit as strong as Vidal Sassoon's. Mrs Evansky, a decided lady, had
refused to cut Sophie's hair. She had stood behind the girl, lifting
those satiny black masses, letting them slide through her fingers,
and then had pronounced: ‘I am sorry, I can't do it.' And then,
as Sophie protested, ‘Besides you've a long face. It wouldn't do
anything for you.' Sophie had sat, rejected, cast out, and then Mrs
Evansky had said, ‘Go away and think about it, and if you insist–but it would kill me: cutting this off.'

And so, alone among the girls, Sophie sat with her sparkling
black tresses intact, and felt she was some kind of freak.

The whirligigs of the time had done pretty well for four
months. What was four months?–nothing, and yet everything
had changed.

First, Sylvia. She too had achieved full uniformity. Her haircut,
begged from Julia, did not really suit her, but everyone knew it
was important for her to feel normal and like the others. She was
eating, if not well, and obeyed Julia in everything. The old woman
and the very young girl would sit together for hours in Julia's
sitting-room, while Julia made Sylvia little treats, fed her
chocolates given her by her admirer Wilhelm Stein, and told her stories
about pre-war Germany–pre-First-World-War Germany. Sylvia
did once ask, gently, for she would have died rather than hurt
Julia, ‘Didn't anything bad ever happen, then?' Julia was taken
aback and then she laughed. ‘I'm not going to admit it, even if
bad things did happen.' But she genuinely could not remember
bad things. Her girlhood seemed to her, in that house full of music
and kind people, like a paradise. And was there anything like that
now, anywhere?

Andrew had promised his mother and his grandmother that
he would go to Cambridge in the autumn, but meanwhile he
hardly left the house. He loafed about and read, and smoked in
his room. Sylvia visited him, knocking formally, and tidied his
room, and scolded him. ‘If I can do it, so can you.' Meaning,
now, smoking pot. For her, who had frayed so badly apart, and
come together with such difficulty, anything was a threat–alcohol, tobacco, pot, loud voices, and people quarrelling sent her
back under her bedclothes with her fingers in her ears. She was
going to school, and already doing well. Julia sat with her over
her homework every evening.

Geoffrey, who was clever, would do well in his exams, and
then go to the London School of Economics to do–well, of
course–Politics and Economics. He said he wouldn't bother with
Philosophy. Daniel, Geoffrey's shadow, said he would go to the
LSE too, and take the same.

Jill had had an abortion, and was in her usual place, apparently
untouched by the experience. The impressive thing was that ‘the
kids' had managed it all, without the adults. Neither Frances nor
Julia had been told, and not Andrew, who was apparently
considered too adult and a possible enemy. It was Colin who had
gone to the girl's parents–she was afraid to go–and told them
she was pregnant. They believed that Colin was the father, and
would not accept his denials. Who was? No one knew, or would
ever know, though Geoffrey was accused: he was always blamed
for broken hearts and broken faith, being so good-looking.

Colin got the money for the abortion out of Jill's parents, and
he went to the family doctor, who did at last suggest an appropriate
telephone number. Afterwards, when Jill was safely back in the
basement flat, Julia, Frances and Andrew were told. But the parents
said Jill could not return to St Joseph's, if that was the kind of
thing that could happen there.

Sophie and Colin had separated. Sophie, who would never in
her life do anything by halves, had been too much for Colin:
she loved him to death, or at least into something like an illness.
‘Go away,' he had actually shouted at her at last, ‘leave me
alone.' And would not come out of his room for some days. Then
he went to Sophie's house and said he was sorry, it was all his
fault, he was just ‘a little screwed up', and please come back to
our house, please, we all miss you, and Frances keeps saying,
Where's Sophie? And when Sophie did return, all apology, as if
it were her fault, Frances hugged her and said, ‘Sophie, you and
Colin is one thing, but your coming here when you like is
another.'

At weekends Sophie came down to London with the
St Joseph's contingent, spent Friday evenings with them, went
home to her mother whom she claimed was better. ‘Though she
doesn't look it. She just slumps around and looks
awful
.'
Depression, let alone clinical depression, had not entered the
general vocabulary and consciousness. People were still saying, ‘Oh,
God, I'm so depressed,' meaning they were in a bad mood. Sophie,
a good daughter as far as she could bear to be, went home for
Saturday nights but was not there in the daytime. Saturday and
Sunday evenings she was in her place at the big table.

Something wonderful had happened to her. She often walked
down the hill to Primrose Hill and then through Regent's Park,
to dancing and singing lessons. There in a grassy glade full of
flowerbeds is a statue of a young woman, with a little goat, and
it is called ‘The Protector of the Defenceless'. This girl in stone
drew Sophie to her. She found herself laying a leaf on the pedestal,
then a flower, then a little posy. Soon she would bring a bit of
biscuit, and stood back to watch sparrows or a blackbird fly up
to the statue's feet to carry off crumbs. Once she put a wreath
around the little goat's head. Then, one day on the pedestal, was
a booklet called
The Language of Flowers
, and tied to it with a
ribbon was a bouquet of lilac and red roses. She could not see
anyone likely nearby, only some people strolling in the garden.
She was alarmed, knowing she had been watched. At the supper
table she told the story, laughing at herself because of her love
for the stone girl, and produced
The Language of Flowers
for
everyone to pass around and look at. Lilac meant First Emotions of
Love, and a red rose, Love.

‘You're not going to answer him?' demanded Rose, furious.

‘Lovely Rose,' said Colin, ‘of course she's going to answer.'

And they all pored over the book to work out a suitable
message. But what Sophie wanted to say was, ‘Yes, I am interested
but don't jump to conclusions.' Nothing in the book seemed
suitable. In the end they all decided on snowdrops, for Hope–but
they had already come and gone, and periwinkle, Early Friendship.
Sophie said she thought there were some in her mother's garden.
And what else?

‘Oh, go on,' said Geoffrey. ‘Live dangerously. lily of the valley–Return of Happiness. And phlox–Agreement.'

Sophie put her posy on the pedestal, and lingered; went away,
came back, and found her flowers gone. But someone else might
have taken them? No, for when she went there the next day there
was a young man who said he had been watching her ‘for ages'
and had been too shy to approach her without the language of
flowers. A likely story, for shy he was not. He was an actor,
studying at the Academy where she planned to go in the autumn.
This was Roland Shattock, haggardly handsome and dramatic in
everything and he was some kind of Trotskyist. He came often
to the supper table and was here tonight. Older than the others,
a year older even than Andrew, he wore a worldly-wise look,
and a suede jacket dyed purple with fringes, and his presence was
felt as a visitation from the adult world, and something like an
entrance ticket to it. If
he
did not regard them as ‘kids', then . . .
It never crossed their idealistic minds that he was often in need
of a good meal.

When Roland was there Colin tended to be silent, and even
went upstairs early, particularly when Johnny dropped in, for the
arguments between the young Trotskyist and the old Stalinist
were loud, and fierce and often ugly. Sylvia fled upstairs too, and
went to Julia.

Johnny had been in Cuba, and had arranged to make a little
film. ‘But it won't bring in much money, I am afraid, Frances.'
Meanwhile he had gone to visit independent Zambia, with
Comrade Mo.

Now Rose: there were difficulties all the way, for what seemed
like every day of the four months. She would not go back to her
school, and she would not go home. She was prepared to go to
St Joseph's, if she could base herself here, in this house. Andrew
travelled to see her parents again. They believed that this charming,
and so upper-class young man had plans for their daughter, and
this made it easier for them to agree, not to St Joseph's, which
was beyond their means, but to a day school in London. They
would pay the fees for that and give her an allowance for clothes.
But they would not pay for Rose's board and keep. They allowed
it to be understood that it was Andrew's responsibility to pay for
her. That meant Frances, in effect.

Perhaps she could be asked to do something in return, like
housework–for there were always problems with keeping the
place clean, in spite of Julia's Mrs Philby, who would never do
much more than vacuum floors. ‘Don't be silly,' said Andrew.
‘Can you imagine Rose lifting a finger?'

A school of a progressive kind was found in London, and Rose
agreed to everything. ‘If she could just stay here, she wouldn't be
any trouble.' Then Andrew came to Frances to say there was a
big problem. Rose was afraid to tell Frances. And it was Jill, too.
The girls had been caught without tickets on the Underground,
and it was the third time for both of them. They were summoned
to see the juvenile delinquency officer, in the office of the
Transport Police. There would certainly be fines, and Borstal was a real
possibility. Frances was too angry, in her all too familiar way
with Rose, a dull dispirited emotion, like chronic indigestion, to
confront her, but asked Andrew to tell the girls she would go
with them to their interview. On the appointed morning she
came down to find the two sullen girls united in hatred for the
world, in the kitchen, smoking. They were both made up to look
like pandas, with their white eye-paint and black-circled eyes and
black painted nails. They wore little mini-dresses from Biba's,
stolen of course. They could not have found an appearance more
likely to prejudice Authority against them.

Frances said, ‘If you do really care about getting off with just
a lecture, you could wash your faces.' She was wondering if the
girls were determined to make things as difficult as they could,
perhaps even that they were harbouring ambitions to be sent to
Borstal. This would of course serve Frances right: one is not
in
loco parentis
without at some point taking punishment that is in
fact aimed at delinquent parents.

Rose at once said, ‘I don't see why I should.'

Frances waited, curious, for what Jill might reply. This
formerly quiet, good, conforming girl, who might sit through a
whole evening saying nothing, only smiling, was hardly discernible
behind her paint and her anger.

Taking her cue from Rose: ‘I don't see why either.'

They went by Underground, Frances buying tickets for them
all, and noting their sarcastic smiles as she did so. They were soon
in the office where non-payers of fares, juveniles, met their fate
in the person of Mrs Kent, who wore a navy-blue uniform of a
generic kind that suggested the majesty of officialdom. Her face,
however, was kindly, while she kept up a severe look, to inspire
respect.

‘Please sit down,' she said, and Frances sat to one side, while
the girls, having stood, like obstinate horses, for long enough to
make a point, slumped, in a way that was meant to suggest they
had been pushed.

‘It's very simple,' said Mrs Kent, though her sigh, of which
she was certainly unaware, suggested otherwise. ‘You have both
been warned twice. You knew the third time would be the last
time. I could send you to the magistrate, and it would be up to
him if you are taken into care or not, but if you will give guarantees
of good behaviour, you will be let off with a fine, but your parents,
or parent, or guardian will have to take responsibility for you.'
She said this, or something like it, so often that her biro expressed
boredom and exasperation, doodling jagged patterns on a notepad.
Having ended, she smiled at Frances.

‘Are you the parent of either of these two girls?'

‘No. I am not.'

‘A guardian? In some kind of legal capacity?'

‘No, but they are living with me–in our house, and they
will be going to school from there.' While she knew Rose would
be, she didn't know about Jill, and so she was telling a lie.

Mrs Kent was taking a long look at the girls, who sat sulking,
their legs apart, their legs crossed high, knees raised, showing black
tights to the crotch. Frances noted that Jill was trembling: she
would not have believed this cool girl capable of it.

‘Could I have a word with you in private?' Mrs Kent said to
Frances. She got up and said to the girls, ‘We won't be one
minute.' She showed Frances to the door, and followed her in to
a little private room, evidently her refuge from the strain of these
interviews.

She went to the window, and so did Frances. They looked
down over a little garden where two lovers licked at one ice-cream
cone. Mrs Kent said, ‘I liked your article about Juvenile Crime.
I cut it out.'

‘Thank you.'

‘It's beyond me, why they do it. We understand when poor
kids do it, and there's a policy of leniency in hard cases, but they
come in here, boys and girls, dressed up to the nines, and I don't
get it. One of them said the other day–he was at a good school,
mind you–that not paying fares was a question of principle; I
asked what principle and he said he was a Marxist. He wants to
destroy capitalism, he said.'