The Sweetest Dream (30 page)

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's so
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.