The Sweetest Dream (22 page)

Franklin came again, and again, and Colin said he was fed up
with the Maystock. He had actually caught Doctor David asleep,
while he sat fidgeting in his patient's chair, hoping that the great
man would at last say something.

‘What's he being paid?' he asked.

Frances told him.

‘Nice work if you can get it,' said Colin. But was he bottling
everything up again? Had he spent all his anger in those evenings
of accusation with her? She had no idea. But he was doing badly
at school still, and wanted to leave.

It was Franklin who told him it was silly. ‘That would be a
bad move,' said he, at the supper table. ‘You'll be sorry when
you're older.'

This last was a direct quote. In any company of young people,
sayings, admonition, advice, that have emanated from the mouths
of parents can be heard coming from theirs, in joke, in mockery,
or in seriousness. ‘You'll be sorry when you're older,' had been
said by Franklin's grandmother, in firelight–a log burned in the
centre of the hut–in a village where a goat might push into open
doorways hoping to find something to steal. An anxious black
woman, whom Franklin had told he did not want to take up his
scholarship to St Joseph's–he was in a funk–had said, ‘You'll
be sorry when you're older.'

‘I am older,' said Colin.

***

It was November again, dark with drizzle. Because it was a
weekend, everyone was here. At Frances's left sat Sylvia, and the others
were careful not to notice that she was struggling with her food.
She had left the magic circle of people who could never say
anything without meaningful looks and voices heavy with import,
saying, just as Julia might have done, ‘They aren't very nice
people.' Jake had turned up, asked to see Frances, and was clearly
anxious. ‘There's a problem here, Frances. It's cultural. I think
we're more uninhibited in the States than you are here.'

‘I'm afraid you have me at a disadvantage,' said Frances. ‘Sylvia
has said nothing to us about why she . . .'

‘But there was nothing to tell, you must believe me.'

Sylvia confided to Andrew that what had ‘upset' her was not
wild Satanic rites that the others had imagined and even joked
about, while she told them they were just silly, or seances that
had gone wrong–or right, depending on how you looked at it,
bringing noisy apparitions with something urgent to impart, such
as that Sylvia should always wear blue and a turquoise amulet, but
that Jake had kissed her and told her she was too old to be a
virgin. She had slapped him, hard, and told him he was a dirty
old man. To Andrew it was clear that Jake had been offering
arcane sexual delights, but Sylvia said, ‘He's old enough to be my
grandfather.' He was, too. Just.

Andrew was here for the weekend, because Colin had
telephoned to say that Sylvia was having a setback. It was Colin who
rang: so what did his wild ravings about Sylvia's being here at all
amount to, then? ‘You've got to come, Andrew. You always
know what to do.' And Julia?–did she not know what to do?
Apparently not any longer. Julia, hearing that Sylvia was in her
room again, and not out night after night, had said in the heavily
sorrowful voice that now seemed to be permanently hers, ‘Yes,
Sylvia, and that's what you can expect when you mix with such
people.'

‘But nothing happened, Julia,' Sylvia had whispered, and had
tried to embrace her. Julia's arms, that had so recently easily
embraced her, did hold her, but not as they had, and Sylvia cried
in her room, because of those stiff old arms, that reproached her.

Sylvia was sitting, fork in hand, turning over a fragment of
potato done in cream, cooked because she liked it.

Andrew was next to Sylvia. Colin was next to Andrew, and
beside him, Rose. Not a word or a look did they exchange.
James was there from his school, and he would also sleep on the
living-room floor. Opposite Rose was Franklin, who had had a
little too much to drink. Bottles of wine stood about the table
brought by Johnny who was at his post by the window. Next to
Franklin was Geoffrey, in his first term at the LSE. He looked
like a guerilla fighter, in army surplus. He was there because he
had run into Johnny at the Cosmo, had heard that he would be
coming that evening. Sophie was not here, but she had visited
that afternoon, to see darling Frances. She was finding life hard,
not because of acting school where she was doing brilliantly,
but because of Roland Shattock. Tonight she was with him at a
disco. Next to Frances was Jill, who had reappeared that afternoon.
She asked timidly if she could stay to supper. She had a bandage
on her left wrist and looked pretty bad. Rose had greeted her
with, ‘Oh, so what do you think you're doing here?' Jill waited
until there was laughter and noise enough, and said to Frances,
‘Can I come and live in the other room downstairs? It's for you
to say who can be there, isn't it?' The trouble was, Colin had
said that he wanted Franklin to have the use of that room, and
to be invited for Christmas. And, obviously, Jill and Rose could
not be together.

‘Are you planning to go back to school?' asked Frances.

‘I don't know if they'll have me,' said Jill, with a timid pleading
look at Frances, that meant, Will you ask them if they'll have me
back?

But where was she going to live?

‘Have you been in hospital?'

The girl nodded. Then, still in a whisper, ‘I've been in there
a month.' That meant, a psychiatric ward, and Frances was
intended to understand this. ‘Couldn't I just sleep in the
sitting-room?'

Andrew, apparently absorbed in Sylvia, encouraging her,
laughing with her when she made a joke about her difficulties,
was also listening to the exchange between his mother and Jill,
and now he caught Frances's eye and shook his head. The
thumbs-down could not have been more clear, though it was only a little
no
, meant to be unobserved. But Jill had seen it. She sat silent,
eyes kept down, lips trembling.

‘The trouble is, where are we going to put you?' Frances said.
And Jill probably would not be able to cope with school, even if
Frances could get her admitted. What was to be done?

This sad little drama was going on at Frances's end of the
table; at the other it was all noisy good humour. Johnny was
telling them about his trip with a delegation of librarians to the
Soviet Union, and the jokes were at the expense of the non-Party
members, who had made one gaffe after another. One had
demanded to be reassured–at a meeting in the Union of Soviet
Writers–that there was no censorship in the Soviet Union.
Another had wanted to know if the Soviet Union, ‘like the
Vatican', kept an index of forbidden books. ‘I mean,' said Johnny,
‘that is really an unforgivable level of political naivety.'

Then, there was the recent election that had returned the
Labour Party. Johnny had been active: a tricky business, because
while on the one hand obviously the Labour Party was a greater
threat to the working masses than the Tories (confusing minds
with incorrect formulations), on the other, tactical considerations
had ordained that it should be supported. James was listening to
the ins and outs of this as if to favourite music. Johnny had greeted
him with a comradely nod and a hand laid on his shoulder, but
now he was concentrating on the newcomer, still to be won,
Franklin. He delivered a short history of the colonial policy
towards Zimlia, recounted the crimes of colonial policy in Kenya,
with particular relish for whenever Britain had behaved badly,
and began exhorting Franklin to fight for the freedom of Zimlia.
‘The nationalist movements of Zimlia are not as developed as the
Mau Mau, but it is up to young people like you to free your
people from oppression.' Johnny had a glass in one hand, the left,
and was leaning forward, eyes holding Franklin's, while he shook
the forefinger of his right hand at him, as if targeting him with a
revolver. Franklin was shifting about, smiling uncomfortably, and
then he said, ‘Excuse me,' and went out–to the toilet as it
happened, but it looked like running away, and when he came
back he smiled, and handed his plate to Frances for a second
helping, and did not look at Johnny, who had been waiting for
him to return. ‘Your generation in Africa has more responsibility
laid on your shoulders by history than any other has had. How I
wish I was young again, how I wish I had it all in front of me.'

And for once his features, usually set into a martial authority,
were softened into wistfulness. Johnny was getting on, an ageing
fighter now, and how he must hate it, Frances thought, for with
every day came news of new younger avatars of the Revolution.
Poor Johnny was on the shelf. At the same moment Franklin lifted
his glass, in a wild gesture that looked like parody, and said, ‘To
the Revolution in Africa,' and fell forward on to the table, out,
while Jill got up from the table and said, ‘Excuse me, excuse me,
I'll go now.'

‘Do you want to sleep here tonight? There's the sitting-room.
James and you can keep each other company.'

Jill stood shaking her head, supporting herself with a hand–as it happened–on Frances's arm, and then fainted away, at
Frances's feet.

‘Here's a carry-on,' said Johnny heartily, and watched while
Geoffrey and Colin roused Franklin, and held a glass of water to
his lips, and Frances lifted up Jill. Rose sat on, eating as if nothing
was happening. Sylvia whispered that she wanted to go to bed,
and Andrew took her up.

Franklin was assisted downstairs to the second room in the
basement flat, and Jill was put into a sleeping bag in the
sitting-room. James said he would look after her, but he went straight
off to sleep. Frances came down in the night to have a look at
Jill, and found them both asleep. In the dim light from the door
on to the landing, Jill looked terrible. She needed looking after.
Obviously the girl's parents must be rung and told the situation:
they probably did not know it. And in the morning Jill must be
asked to go home.

But in the morning Jill had gone, had disappeared into wild
and dangerous London. And Rose, when asked where she thought
Jill might be, replied that she was not Jill's keeper.

Nervousness on Franklin's account was in order, sharing space
with Rose. They were afraid she harboured racial prejudices,
‘coming from that background'–Andrew's evasion of the class
situation. But it turned out otherwise: Rose was ‘nice' to Franklin.
‘She's being really nice,' reported Colin. ‘He thinks she's great.'

He did. She was. An apparently improbable friendship was
growing between the good-humoured kindly black youth and the
rancorous girl, whose rage bubbled and boiled as reliably as the
red spot on Jupiter.

Frances, her sons, marvelled that one could not think of two
more different people, but in fact they inhabited a similar moral
landscape. Rose and Franklin were never to know how much
they had in common.

Since Rose had first come into this house she had been
possessed by a quiet fury that these people could call it theirs, as of
a right. This great house, its furnishings, like something out of a
film, their money . . . but all that was only the foundation for a
deeper anguish, for it was that, a bitter burning that never left
her. It was their ease with it all, what they took for granted, what
they knew. Never had she mentioned a book–and she had a
period of testing them out with books no sane person could have
heard of–that they hadn't read, or hadn't heard of. She would
stand in that sitting-room, with two walls all books from ceiling to
floor, and know that they had read them. ‘Frances,' she challenged,
being found there, hands on hips, glaring at the books, ‘have you
actually read all these books?' ‘Well, yes, yes, I believe I have.'
‘When did you? Did you have books in your house when you
were growing up?' ‘Yes, we had the classics. I think everyone did
in those days.' ‘Everybody, everybody! Who's everybody?' ‘The
middle classes,' said Frances, determined not to be bullied. ‘And
a good proportion of the working class as well.' ‘Oh! Who said
so?' ‘Check it,' said Frances. ‘Not difficult to find out this sort of
thing.' ‘And when did you have time to read?' ‘Let me see . . .'
Frances was remembering herself, mostly alone, with two small
children, her boredom alleviated by reading. She remembered
Johnny nagging at her to read this, read that . . . ‘Johnny was a
good influence,' she told Rose, insisting to herself that one must
be fair. ‘He's very well read, you know. The communists usually
are, it's funny isn't it, but they are. He made me read.'

‘All these books,' Rose said. ‘Well, we didn't have books.'

‘Easy enough to catch up if you want to,' said Frances. ‘Borrow
what you like.'

But the casualness of it made Rose clench her fists. Anything
mentioned, they seemed to know it; an idea, or a bit of history.
They were in possession of some bank of knowledge: it didn't
matter what one asked, they knew it all.

Rose had taken books off the shelves, but she did not enjoy
them. It was not that she read slowly, she did: but she was nothing
if not persevering, and she stuck at it. A kind of rage filled her as
she read, getting between her and the story or the facts she was
trying to absorb. It was because these people had all this as a kind
of inheritance, and she, Rose . . .

When Franklin had arrived, and found himself in the complex
richnesses of London, he had had days of panic, wishing he had
said no to the scholarship. It was too much to expect of him. His
father had been a teacher of the lower grades in a Catholic mission
school. The priests, seeing that the boy was clever, had encouraged
and supported, and the point came when they asked a rich person–Franklin would never know who it was–if he would add this
promising boy to his list of beneficiaries. An expensive
undertaking: two years at St Joseph's and then, with luck, university.