The Sweetest Dream (10 page)

Sophie had sat down beside Colin and the pair had their arms
around each other, like orphans. Soon they went off to catch a
train back to school, and Colin gave her an apologetic smile before
he left. Sophie embraced her. ‘Oh, Frances, I don't know what
I'd do if I couldn't come here.'

And now Frances had to write her article.

She put aside the letters about shoplifting and took up another
theme, ‘Dear Aunt Vera, I am so worried I don't know what to
do.' Her daughter, aged fifteen, was having sex with a boy of
eighteen. ‘These young people they think they are the Virgin
Mary and it can't happen to them.' She advised the anxious mother
to get contraception for her daughter. ‘Go to the family doctor,'
she wrote. ‘Young people are beginning sexual relations much
earlier than we did. You could ask about the new contraceptive
pill. There will be problems. Not all teenagers are responsible
beings, and this new pill must be taken regularly, every day.'

Thus it was that Frances's first article evoked storms of moral
outrage. Letters arrived in bundles from frightened parents, and
Frances expected the sack, but Julie Hackett was pleased. Frances
was doing what she had been hired to do, as could have been
expected from a being brave enough to say that Carnaby Street
was a shoddy illusion.

 • • •

The waves of refugees who washed into London, escaping from
Hitler, and then from Stalin, were bone-poor, often threadbare,
and lived as they could on a translation here, a book review,
language lessons. They worked as hospital porters, on building
sites, did housework. There were a few cafés and restaurants as
poor as they were, catering for their nostalgic need to sit and
drink coffee and talk politics and literature. They were from
universities all over Europe, and were intellectuals, a word guaranteed
to incite waves of suspicion in the breasts of the xenophobic
philistine British, who did not necessarily think it a commendation
when they admitted that these newcomers were so much better
educated than they were. One café in particular served goulash
and dumplings and heavy soups and other filling items to these
storm-tossed immigrants who would soon would be adding value
and lustre in so many ways to native culture. By the late Fifties,
early Sixties, they were editors, writers, journalists, artists, a Nobel
Prize winner, and a stranger walking into the Cosmo would judge
that this must be the trendiest place in north London, for everyone
was in the current uniform of non-conformity, polo necks and
expensive jeans, Mao jackets and leather jackets, shaggy hair or
the ever-popular Roman Emperor haircut. There were women
there, a few, in mini-skirts, mostly girlfriends, absorbing attractive
foreign ways as they drank the best coffee in London and ate
cream cakes inspired by Vienna.

Frances had taken to dropping in to the Cosmo, to work. In
the layer of the house she had thought of as hers, safe from
invasion, she now sat listening for Julia's footsteps, or Andrew's,
for they both visited Sylvia, to give her cups of this or that, and
insisted that her door must be kept open because the girl feared
a door that was shut on her. And Rose crept about the house.
Once Frances had found her nosing through papers on her desk,
and Rose had giggled and said brightly, ‘Oh, Frances,' and run
out. She had been caught in Julia's rooms, by Julia. She did not
steal, or not much, but she was by nature a spy. Julia told Andrew
that Rose should be asked to leave; Andrew told Frances that
this was what Julia had said; and Frances, relieved, because she
disliked the girl, told Rose that it was time she returned to her
family. Collapse of Rose. Reports were brought up from the
basement where Rose hung out (‘It's my
pad
') that Rose was in
bed crying, and that she seemed to be ill. Things had drifted,
and Rose appeared again at the supper table, defiant, angry, and
placatory.

It could be argued that to complain about these minor
disruptions at home, and then choose to sit in a corner at the
Cosmo, which always reverberated with debate and discussion
was–surely–a little perverse. Particularly as the overheard talk
was bound to be revolutionary. All these people were types of
revolutionary, even if the results of revolution were what they
had fled from. They were mostly representatives of some phase
of the Dream, and might argue for hours about what happened
in such and such a meeting in 1905 in Russia, or in 1917, or in
Berchtesgaden, or when German troops invaded the Soviet
Union, or the state of affairs in the Rumanian oilfields in 1940.
They argued about Freud, and Jung, about Trotsky, Bukarin,
about Arthur Koestler and the Spanish Civil War. And Frances,
whose ears shut tight when Johnny began on one of his harangues,
found it all rather restful, though she did not actively listen. It is
true that a noisy café full of cigarette smoke (then an indispensable
accompaniment to intellectual activity) is more private than a
home where individuals drop in for a chat. Andrew liked it there.
So did Colin: they said it had good energy, not to mention positive
vibes.

Johnny used it a lot, but then he was in Cuba, so she was
safe.

Frances was not the only one from
The Defender
. A man was
there who wrote political articles, to whom she had been
introduced by Julie Hackett thus, ‘This is our chief politico, Rupert
Boland. He's an egghead but he's not a bad sort of person, even
if he is a man.'

He was not a person you would notice at once, normally, but
here he did stand out, because he wore a rather dull brown suit
and a tie. He had a pleasant face. He was writing, or making
notes, with a biro, just as she was. They smiled and nodded, and
at that moment she saw a tall man in a Mao jacket stand up
to leave. Good Lord, it was Johnny. He shrugged on a long
Afghan coat, dyed blue, the last word in Carnaby Street, and went
out. And there a few tables away, in a corner, obviously trying
not to be seen (probably by Johnny) was Julia. She was in
conversation with . . . he was certainly an intimate friend. Her
boyfriend? Frances had recently been acknowledging that Julia was
not much over sixty. But no, Julia could not have an affair (the
word she would use was probably
liaison
) in a house crammed
with ever-watching youngsters. It was as ludicrous as that Frances
could.

Giving up the theatre, which probably she had done for ever,
Frances had felt she was slamming a door on romance, or serious
love.

And Julia . . . Frances was thinking that Julia must be pretty
lonely, by herself at the top of that crammed noisy house, where
the young ones called her the old woman or, even, the old fascist.
She listened to classical music on the radio, and read. But she did
go out sometimes, and it seemed she came here.

Julia was wearing a misty-blue costume and a mauveish hat
with–of course–a tiny net veil. Her gloves lay on the table.
Her gentleman friend, grey haired, well-kept, was as elegant and
old-fashioned as she was. He got up, bent over Julia's hand, where
his lips met in the air over it. She smiled, and nodded, and he
went out. Her face, when he left, composed itself into a look
Frances understood was stoicism. Julia had enjoyed an hour off
her leash, and would now go home, or perhaps do some frugal
shopping. Who was keeping an eye on Sylvia? That meant Andrew
must be at home. Frances had not again been in his room, but
she believed that he was spending long hours alone there, smoking
and reading.

It was Friday. That evening she could expect the supper table
to have chairs fitted close all around it. It would be an occasion
and everyone knew it, the St Joseph crowd too, because Frances
had telephoned Colin to say Sylvia was coming down to supper,
and could he make sure everyone called her Sylvia. ‘And ask them
to be tactful, Colin.' ‘Thanks for having so little confidence in
us,' he had replied.

Meanwhile his protective care of Sophie had become love,
and the two were acknowledged as a couple at St Joseph's. ‘A
couple of lovebirds,' Geoffrey had said, being magnanimous, since
he was bound to be jealous. Of Geoffrey one could expect
gentlemanly behaviour, even if he did shoplift . . . even if he was a thief.
Which was more than one could say of Rose, whose jealousy of
Sophie shone from her eyes and spiteful face.

Dear Aunt Vera. Our two children say they won't go back to school.
Our son is fifteen. The girl is sixteen. They were playing truant for
months before we knew it. Then the police told us they were spending
the time with some bad types. Now they hardly come home at all. What
shall we do?

Sophie had said she wasn't going back to school after
Christmas, but perhaps she would change her mind to be with Colin.
But he said he was doing badly, and didn't want to take his final
exams, due this coming summer. He was eighteen. He said exams
were stupid, and he was too old for school. Rose–
not
her
responsibility–had ‘dropped out'. So had James. Sylvia hadn't been to
school in months. Geoffrey did well, always had, and it looked
as if he would be the only one who would actually sit the exams.
Daniel would because Geoffrey did, but he wasn't clever, like his
idol. Jill was more often here than at school. Lucy, from
Dartington, would sit exams and do brilliantly, that was evident.

Frances herself, obedient girl, had gone to school, was
punctual, sat exams, and would have gone to university if the war and
Johnny had not intervened. She could not understand what the
problem was. She had not much enjoyed school, but had seen
the process as something that had to be undergone. She would
have to earn her living, that was the point. These youngsters never
seemed to think about that.

Now she wrote down the letter she would like to send, but
of course would not.

Dear Mrs Jackson, I haven't the faintest idea what to advise. We
seem to have bred a generation that expects food simply to fall into their
mouths without their working for it. With sincere regrets, Aunt Vera.

Julia was getting up. She gathered up her bag, her gloves, a
newspaper, and as she came past Frances, nodded. Frances, too
late, got up to push a chair towards her, but Julia was already
gone. If she had handled it properly, Julia would have sat down–there had been a little moment of hesitation. And then at last
she might have become friends with her mother-in-law.

Frances sat on, ordered more coffee, then soup. Andrew had
said that if one was lucky with one's timing and ordered goulash
soup, you got the thick part at the bottom of the pot, like stew,
very good. Her goulash when it came was evidently from the
middle of the pot.

She did not know what to write for her third piece. The
second had been on marijuana, and it was easy. The article had
been cool and informative, that was all, and many letters came in
response.

What an attractive crowd this was, the Cosmo crowd, these
people from all over Europe, and of course, by now, the kind of
British attracted by them. Many of them Jews. Not all.

Julia had remarked, in front of ‘the kids' when one of them
asked if she had been a refugee, ‘I am in the unfortunate situation
of being a German who is not a Jew.'

Shock and outrage. Julia's fascist status had been confirmed:
though they all used the word fascist as easily as they said fuck,
or shit, not necessarily meaning much more than this was
somebody they disapproved of.

Sophie had wailed that Julia gave her the creeps, all Germans
did.

Of Sophie, Julia had remarked, ‘She has the Jewish young
girl's beauty, but she'll end up an old hag, just like the rest of us.'

If Sylvia–Tilly was coming down to supper then the food had
to be right for her. She could not be given a dish different from
the others, and yet she did not eat anything but potato. Very well,
Frances would cook a big shepherd's pie, and the girls who were
slimming could leave the mash and eat the rest. There would
be vegetables. Rose would not eat vegetables, but would salad.
Geoffrey never ate fish or vegetables: she had been worrying
about Geoffrey's diet for years, and he was not even her child.
What did his parents think, when he hardly ever went home, was
always coming to them–rather, to Colin? She asked him and he
said that they were quite pleased he had somewhere to go. It
seemed they both worked hard. Quakers. Religious. A dull
household, it seemed. She had become fond of Geoffrey but was
damned if she was going to spend time worrying about Rose.
Careful, Frances: if there was one thing she had learned, it was
not to say what one will accept or refuse from Fate, which had
its own ideas.

But perhaps one's fate is just one's temperament, invisibly
attracting people and events. There are people who (probably
unconsciously, when young, until it is forced on them that this
is their character) use a certain passivity towards life, watching to
see what will arrive on their plate, or drop in their lap, or stare
them in the face–‘What's wrong with you? Are you blind?'–and then, try not so much to grasp it as wait, allowing the thing
to develop, show itself. Then the task is to do your best with it,
do what you can.

Would she have believed, aged nineteen, marrying Johnny
when there was no reason to expect anything ever but war and
bad times, that she would find herself a kind of house-mother–but ‘earth-mother' was the current term. Where along the road
should she have said (if she had been determined to avert this
fate) ‘No, I won't.' She had fought against Julia's house, but
probably it would have been better if she had succumbed much
earlier, saying yes, yes, to what was happening, and consciously
saying it, accepting what had arrived in front of her, as was now
her philosophy. Saying no is often like those people who divorce
one partner only to marry another exactly the same in looks and
character: we carry invisible templates as ineluctably ourselves as
fingerprints, but we don't know about them until we look around
us and see them mirrored.