The Sweetest Dream (38 page)

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 churned 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
scho¨n
,
scho¨n
,
scho¨n
, 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,

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

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.