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The Sweetest Dream
Doris Lessing
Nobel Prize for Literature winner Doris Lessing tackles the 1960s and their legacy head-on in one of her most involving, personal, political novels.It’s the morning of the 1960s and it’s suppertime at Freedom Hall, the most welcoming household in north London. Frances Lennox stands at her stove, preparing another feast before ladling it out to the youthful crew assembled around her hospitable table – here are her two sons, smarting at their upbringing but beginning to absorb their mother’s lessons. Around them are ranged their schoolfriends and girlfriends and ex-friends and new friends fresh off the street. The feast begins. Wine and talk flow. Everything is being changed and being challenged.But what is being tolerated? And where will it end? Over there in the corner is Frances’s ex-husband, Comrade Johnny, who delivers his rousing tirades, then laps up the adolescent adulation before disappearing into the night to evade the clutches of his responsibilities. Upstairs sits Johnny’s exiled mother, funding all, but finding she can embrace only one lost little girl – Sylvia, who has to travel to Africa, to newly independent Zimlia, to find out who she is and what she wants. And what of the Africans, what will they tolerate?These are the people dreaming the 1960s into being, and the people who, on the morning after all that dreaming, woke to find they were the ones who had to clear up and make good.



THE
SWEETEST
DREAM


DORIS LESSING




Copyright (#ulink_914dbec1-463d-5e75-8653-8d868572e732)
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
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First published in Great Britain by Flamingo 2001
This edition published by Harper Perennial 2004
Copyright © Doris Lessing 2001
Doris Lessing asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006552307
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2013 ISBN: 9780007322770
Version: 2017-02-13

Praise (#ulink_649c6acc-0924-5fc2-81b7-f6c343f3845e)
Praise for The Sweetest Dream:
‘She has an extraordinary feeling for the peculiar vulnerabilities of the young, elderly and mentally unstable. And her portraits of sympathetic human relationships are of quite staggering beauty. Lessing illuminates the passing of the 20th century’s anti-capitalist dream: looking back, it seems extraordinary that the dream went on for so long: and looking forward, it is far too early to tell what its failure really means.’
RUTH SCURR, The Times
‘Thank goodness for Doris Lessing. While the rest of us flounder about noisily in the muddy waters of life, she never fails to expose with startling clarity the essential folly of our dreams and good intentions. Despite Lessing’s scathing exposé of pompous self-interest and futile idealism, her book is pervaded by what she would describe as “a layer of energetic optimism.”’
KATE CHISHOLM, Evening Standard
‘This book brings with it a rare kind of literary pleasure – the kind you might have in suddenly coming upon a long lost novel by George Eliot or Balzac. Six pages in, and you know that you have entered a fictional world which is already indelibly imprinted on your imagination, and which has in some measure shaped you. The characters are your familiars. You recognise their terrors and desires, the houses, landscape and politics they inhabit. Simultaneously, everything has shifted and is new. The haunting brilliance of her characters, whom one feels one knows rather better than one’s friend, the passion of her ideas and vision, remain undiminished. She’s up there in the pantheon with Balzac and George Eliot. We’re lucky she’s still writing.’
LISA APPIGNANESI, Independent
‘A startling, burningly committed book which contains a marvellous sense of possibilities opening as the fiction progresses, an enriching and absorbing conviction of change and growth.’
PHILIP HENSHER, Spectator
‘Lessing demonstrates that the realist novel is still possessed of a range and authority that makes all the clever antics of post-modernism seem like the giggling of naughty schoolchildren … Because Lessing is a humanist, in the end – though she spares us no revelation of selfishness, nastiness and stupidity – goodness prevails. She is one of the few writers who does not hesitate to offer up some characters for admiration, and who has no time for those who are cheap.’
ALLAN MASSIE, Scotsman
‘Lessing has always been a generous writer, and one who is determined to get to the bottom of things, and she effortlessly captures what is quintessential in each of her charming characters. She has claimed that her quest for the truth propelled her into becoming a writer. No doubt it is the same impetus that has produced a volume that speaks so loudly to the present. In its critique of mass-produced thinking and the long-term personal effects of war, The Sweetest Dream approaches a universal truth: both damage people’s capacity to give and receive love. Something to mull over in these troubled times.’
JUSTINE ETTLER, Observer
‘Lessing’s power is in her awareness of detail, commitment to truth and human dignity, strengths that hold the book together. The fate of her characters and the indignation of the author towards unfeeling humanity keep the work gripping and rewarding.’
JOHN F DEANE Irish Independent
‘Comrade Johnny, a figure of near-Dickensian hypocrisy, pomposity and selfishness, is the comic masterpiece of the novel, a flawless caricature of the career revolutionary, who speaks in formulas and clichés, lives parasitically and well on others, and blithely abandons his wives and children with the motto that “the struggle must come before family obligations.”’
ELAINE SHOW ALTER, TLS
‘Doris Lessing appears more and more as some Olympian figure, surveying from her mountain-top the chaotic, fumbling, ludicrous human panorama beneath. Here her panoramic sweep is worthy of a 19th century doorstopper: she casts her cool eye over whole decades (1960s to 1990s); entire ideological systems (shiny new Marxism, second-hand feminism, rusty old family values); large messy families, complete with neurotic ex-spouses and teenagers other people seem to have mislaid; drugs; anorexia; big chunks of Africa; Aids, Catholicism. It’s a beautifully made novel, with full-blooded virtues, both fictional and moral. Her portrait of Africa’s miseries, although devastatingly vivid, still manages to allow a few rather feeble rays of goodness to glimmer through.’
JAN DALLEY, Financial Times
With gratitude to my editor at Flamingo, Philip Gwyn Jones, and to my agent Jonathan Clowes, for good advice and criticism, and to Antony Chennells, for help with the Roman Catholic parts of the book.
‘And people leave who were warm children.’

Contents
Cover (#u0a2cb253-cd08-555a-ae03-602b72919496)
Title Page (#u922b1442-c749-5424-a98b-3ed4e45b1773)
Copyright (#ulink_746676b8-8cb8-5718-a1fa-86859eb6531f)
Praise (#ulink_87dbc4e2-0291-5d4b-bce5-b7fae019db83)
Dedication (#ulink_ea5d95ce-15ee-5f36-8747-a9c67d5471ea)
The Sweetest Dream (#ulink_2e2e914a-409e-5285-88af-575ff61e5a00)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

The Sweetest Dream (#ulink_1068c7c7-2a32-59a5-a9ca-b09cbffd3895)
AN EARLY EVENING in autumn, and the street below was a scene of small yellow lights that suggested intimacy, and people already bundled up for winter. Behind her the room was filling with a chilly dark, but nothing could dismay her: she was floating, as high as a summer cloud, as happy as a child who had just learned to walk. The reason for this uncharacteristic lightness of heart was a telegram from her former husband, Johnny Lennox – Comrade Johnny – three days ago. SIGNED CONTRACT FOR FIDEL FILM ALL ARREARS AND CURRENT PAYMENT TO YOU SUNDAY. Today was Sunday. The ‘all arrears’ had been due, she knew, to something like the fever of elation she was feeling now: there was no question of his paying ‘all’ which by now must amount to so much money she no longer bothered to keep an account. But he surely must be expecting a really big sum to sound so confident. Here a little breeze – apprehension? – did reach her. Confidence was his – no, she must not say stock-in-trade, even if she had often in her life felt that, but could she remember him ever being outfaced by circumstances, even discomfited?
On a desk behind her two letters lay side by side, like a lesson in life’s improbable but so frequent dramatic juxtapositions. One offered her a part in a play. Frances Lennox was a minor, steady, reliable actress, and had never been asked for anything more. This part was in a brilliant new play, a two-hander, and the male part would be taken by Tony Wilde who until now had seemed so far above her she would never have had the ambition to think of her name and his side by side on a poster. And he had asked for her to be offered the part. Two years ago they had been in the same play, she as usual in a serviceable smaller role. At the end of a short run – the play had not been a success – she had heard on the closing night as they tripped back and forth taking curtain calls, ‘Well done, that was very good.’ Smiles from Olympus, she had thought that, while knowing he had shown signs of being interested in her. But now she had been watching herself burst into all kinds of feverish dreams, not exactly taking herself by surprise, since she knew only too well how battened down she was, how well under control was her erotic self, but she could not prevent herself imagining her talent for fun (she supposed she still had it?) even for reckless enjoyment, being given room, while at the same time showing what she could do on the stage, if given a chance. But she would not be earning much money, in a small theatre, with a play that was a gamble. Without that telegram from Johnny she could not have afforded to say yes.
The other letter offered her a niche as Agony Aunt (name still to be chosen) on The Defender, well paid, and safe. This would be a continuation of the other strand of her professional life as a freelance journalist, which is where she earned money.
She had been writing on all kinds of subjects for years. At first she had tried her wings in local papers and broadsheets, any place that would pay her a little money. Then she found she was doing research for serious articles, and they were in the national newspapers. She had a name for solid balanced articles that often shone an unexpected and original light on a current scene.
She would do it well. What else had her experience fitted her for, if not to cast a cool eye on the problems of others? But saying yes to that work would have no pleasure in it, no feeling she would be trying new wings. Rather, she would have to steady her shoulders with the inner stiffening of resolve that is like a suppressed yawn.
How weary she was of all the problems, the bruised souls, the waifs and strays, how delightful it would be to say, ‘Right, you can look after yourselves for a bit, I am going to be in the theatre every evening and most of the day too.’ (Here was another little cold nudge: have you taken leave of your senses? Yes, and she was loving every minute.)
The top of a tree still in its summer leaf, but a bit ragged now, was glistening: light from two storeys up, from the old woman’s rooms, had snatched it from dark into lively movement, almost green: colour was implied. Julia was in, then. Readmitting her mother-in-law – her ex-mother-in-law – to her mind brought a familiar apprehension, because of the weight of disapproval sifting down through the house to reach her, but there was something else she had only recently become aware of. Julia had had to go to hospital, could have died, and Frances had to acknowledge at last how much she relied on her. Suppose there was no Julia, what would she do, what would they all do?
Meanwhile, everyone referred to her as the old woman, she too until recently. Not Andrew, though. And she had noticed that Colin had begun to call her Julia. The three rooms above hers, over where she stood now, below Julia’s, were inhabited by Andrew the elder son, and Colin the younger, her and Johnny Lennox’s sons.
She had three rooms, bedroom and study and another, always needed for someone staying the night, and she had heard Rose Trimble say, ‘What does she need three rooms for, she’s just selfish.’
No one said, Why does Julia need four rooms? The house was hers. This rackety over-full house, people coming and going, sleeping on floors, bringing friends whose names she often did not know, had at its top an alien zone, which was all order, where the air seemed gently mauve, scented with violets, with cupboards holding decades-old hats that had veils and rhinestones and flowers, and suits of a cut and material not to be bought anywhere now. Julia Lennox descended the stairs, walked down the street, her back straight, her hands in gloves – there were drawers of them – wore perfect shoes, hats, coats, in violet or grey or mauve, and around her was an aura of flower essences. ‘Where does she get those clothes?’ Rose had demanded before she had taken in that truth from the past, that clothes could be kept for years, and not discarded a week after buying them.
Below Frances’s slice of the house was a sitting-room that went from back to front of the house, and there, usually on a huge red sofa, took place the intense confidences of teenagers, two by two; or if she opened the door cautiously, she might see on it anything up to half a dozen of ‘the kids’, cuddled together like a litter of puppies.
The room was not used enough to justify taking such a big slice out of the centre of the house. The life of the house went on in the kitchen. Only if there was a party did this room come into its own, but parties were few because the youngsters went to discos and pop concerts; though it seemed hard for them to tear themselves away from the kitchen, and from a very large table that Julia had once used, one leaf folded down, for dinner parties when she had ‘entertained’. As she put it.
Now the table was always at full stretch with sometimes sixteen or twenty chairs and stools around it.
The basement flat was large and often Frances did not know who was camping out there. Sleeping bags and duvets littered the floor like detritus after a storm. She felt like a spy going down there. Apart from insisting they kept it clean and tidy – they were taken by occasional fits of ‘tidying up’ which it was hard to see made much difference – she did not interfere. Julia had no such inhibitions, and would descend the little stairs and stand surveying the scene of sleepers, sometimes still in their beds at midday or later, the dirty cups on the floors, the piles of records, the radios, clothes lying about in tangles, and then turn herself around slowly, a severe figure in spite of the little veils and gloves that might have a rose pinned at a wrist, and, having seen from the rigidity of a back, or a nervously raised head that her presence had been noted, she would go slowly up the stairs, leaving behind her on the stale air the odours of flowers and expensive face powder.
Frances leaned out of the window to see if light was spilling down the steps from the kitchen: yes, they were all there then, and waiting for supper. Who, tonight? She would soon find out. At that moment Johnny’s little Beetle appeared from around the corner, parked itself neatly, and out stepped Johnny. And, at once, three days of foolish dreams dissolved, while she thought, I’ve been mad, I’ve been crazy. What made me imagine anything was going to change? If there was in fact a film, then there wouldn’t be any money for her and the boys, as usual … but he had said the contract was signed?
In the time it took her to walk slowly, stopping at the desk to look at the two fateful letters, reaching the door, still taking her time, beginning to descend the stairs, it was as if the last three days had not happened. She was not going to be in the play, not enjoy the dangerous intimacy of the theatre with Tony Wilde, and she was pretty sure that tomorrow she would write to The Defender and accept their job.
Slowly, collecting herself, down the stairs, and then, smiling, she stood in the open door of the kitchen. Against the window, standing with his arms spread to take his weight on the sill, stood Johnny, all bravado and – though he was not aware of that – apology. Around the table sat an assortment of youngsters, and Andrew and Colin were both there. All were looking towards Johnny, who had been holding forth about something, and all admiringly, except for his sons. They smiled, like the others, but the smiles were anxious. They, like herself, knew that the money promised for today had vanished into the land of dreams. (Why on earth had she told them? Surely she knew better!) It had all happened before. And they knew, like her, that he had come here now, when the kitchen would be full of young people, so he could not be greeted by rage, tears, reproaches – but that was the past, long ago.
Johnny spread out his arms, palms towards her, smiling painfully, and said, ‘The film’s off … the CIA …’ At her look he desisted, and was silent, looking nervously at his two boys.
‘Don’t bother,’ said Frances. ‘I really didn’t expect anything else.’ At which the boys turned their eyes to her; their concern for her made her even more self-reproachful.
She stood by the oven where various dishes were shortly to reach their moments of truth. Johnny, as if her back absolved him, began an old speech about the CIA whose machinations this time had been responsible for the film falling through.
Colin, needing some sort of anchor of fact, interrupted to ask, ‘But, Dad, I thought the contract …’
Johnny said quickly, ‘Too many hassles. You wouldn’t understand … what the CIA wants, the CIA gets.’
A cautious glance over her shoulder showed Colin’s face a knot of anger, bewilderment, resentment. Andrew, as always, seemed insouciant, even amused, though she knew how very far he was from that. This scene or something like it had been repeated throughout their childhoods.
In the year the war began, 1939, two youngsters, hopeful and ignorant – like those around the table tonight – had fallen in love, like millions of others in the warring countries, and put their arms around each other for comfort in the cruel world. But there was excitement in it too, war’s most dangerous symptom. Johnny Lennox introduced her to the Young Communist League just as he was leaving it to be a grown-up, if not yet a soldier. He was a bit of a star, Comrade Johnny, and needed her to know it. She had sat in the back rows of crowded halls to hear him explain that it was an imperialist war, and the progressive and democratic forces should boycott it. Soon, however, he was in uniform and in the same halls, to the same audiences, exhorting them to do their bit, for now it was a war against fascism, because the attack by the Germans on the Soviet Union had made it so. There were barrackers and protesters, as well as the faithful; there were boos and loud raucous laughter. Johnny was mocked for standing up there tranquilly explaining the new Party Line just as if he had not been saying the exact opposite until recently. Frances was impressed by his calm; accepting – even provoking – hostility by his pose, arms out, palms forward, suffering for the hard necessities of the times. He was in the RAF uniform. He had wanted to be a pilot, but his eyes were not up to it, so he was a corporal, having refused on ideological grounds to be an officer. He would be in administration.
So that had been Frances’s introduction to politics, or rather, to Johnny’s politics. Something of an achievement, perhaps, to be young in the late Thirties and to care nothing about politics, but so it was. She was a solicitor’s daughter from Kent. The theatre had been her window into glamour, adventure, the great world, first in school plays, then in amateur dramatics. She had always played leading roles, but was typecast for her English-rose looks. But now she was in uniform too, one of the young women attached to the War Ministry, mostly driving senior officers around. Attractive young women in uniform in her kind of job had a good time, though this aspect of war tends to be played down from tact, and perhaps even shame, towards the dead. She danced a good deal, she dined, she mildly lost her heart to glamorous Frenchmen, Poles, Americans, but did not forget Johnny, or their anguished passionate nights of love that rehearsed their later longing for each other.
Meanwhile he was in Canada attending to the RAF fliers being trained there. By now he was an officer, and doing well, as his letters made clear; then he came home, an aide to some bigwig, and he was a captain. He was so handsome in his uniform, and she so attractive in hers. In that week they married and Andrew was conceived, and that was the end of her good times, because she was in a room with a baby and was lonely, and frightened, because of the bombing. She had acquired a mother-in-law, the fearsome Julia, who, looking like a society lady in a nineteen-thirties fashion magazine, descended from her house in Hampstead – this house – to show shock at what Frances was living in, and to offer her space in her house. Frances refused. She may not have been political, but with every fibre she shared her generation’s fervent desire for independence. When she left her home, it was for a furnished room. And now, having been reduced to little more than Johnny’s wife and a baby’s mother, she was independent, and could define herself with that thought, holding on to it. Not much, but her own.
And the days and nights dragged by, and she was as far from the glamorous life she had been enjoying as if she had never left her parents’ home in Kent. The last two years of the war were hard, poor, frightening. The food was bad. Bombs that seemed to have been designed to wreck people’s nerves affected hers. Clothes were hard to find, and ugly. She had no friends, only met other mothers of small children. She was afraid above all that when Johnny came home he would be disappointed in her, an overweight tired young mother, nothing like the smart girl in uniform he had been madly in love with. And that is what happened.
Johnny had done well in the war, and had been noticed. No one could say he wasn’t clever and quick, and his politics were unremarkable for that time. He was offered good jobs in the London reshaping itself after the war. He refused them. He wasn’t going to be bought by the capitalist system: not by an iota had he changed his mind, his faith. Comrade Johnny Lennox, back in civvies, was preoccupied only by The Revolution.
Colin was born in 1945. Two small children, in a wretched flat in Notting Hill, then a run-down and poor part of London. Johnny was not often at home. He was working for the Party. By now it is necessary to explain that by the Party was meant the Communist Party, and what was meant to be heard was THE PARTY. When two strangers met it might go like this: ‘Are you in the Party too?’ ‘Yes, of course.’ I thought you must be.’ Meaning: You are a good person, I like you, and so you must, like me, be in the Party.
Frances did not join the Party, though Johnny told her to. It was bad for him, he said, to have a wife who would not join.
‘But who would know?’ enquired Frances, adding to his contempt for her, because she had no feeling for politics and never would.
‘The Party knows,’ said Johnny.
‘Too bad,’ said Frances.
They were definitely not getting on, and the Party was the least of it, though a great irritation for Frances. They were living in real hardship, not to say squalor. He saw this as a sign of inner grace. Returning from a weekend seminar, ‘Johnny Lennox on the Threat of American Aggression’, he would find her hanging up the children’s clothes to dry on rickety arrangements of pulleys and racks screwed precariously to the wall outside the kitchen window, or returning, one child dragging on her hand, the other in a pushchair, from the park. The well of the chair would be full of groceries, and tucked behind the child was a book she had been hoping to read while the children played. ‘You are a real working woman, Fran,’ he would compliment her.
If he was delighted, his mother was not. When she came, always having written first, on thick white paper you could cut yourself with, she sat with distaste on the edge of a chair which probably had residues of smeared biscuit or orange on it. She would announce, ‘Johnny, this cannot go on.’
‘And why not, Mutti?’
He called her Mutti because she hated it.
‘Your grandchildren,’ he would instruct her, ‘will be a credit to the People’s Britain.’
Frances would not let her eyes meet Julia’s at such moments, because she was not going to be disloyal. She felt that her life, all of it, and herself in it, was dowdy, ugly, exhausting, and Johnny’s nonsense was just a part of it. It would all end, she was sure of it. It would have to.
And it did, because Johnny announced that he had fallen in love with a real comrade, a Party member, and he was moving in with her.
‘And how am I going to live?’ asked Frances, already knowing what to expect.
‘I’ll pay maintenance, of course,’ said Johnny, but never did.
She found a council nursery, and got a small job in a business making theatre sets and costumes. It was badly paid, but she managed. Julia arrived to complain that the children were being neglected and their clothes were a disgrace.
‘Perhaps you should talk to your son?’ said Frances. ‘He owes me a year’s maintenance.’ Then it was two years, three years.
Julia asked whether if she got a decent allowance from the family would she give up her job and look after the boys?
Frances said no.
‘But I wouldn’t interfere with you,’ said Julia. ‘I promise you that.’
‘You don’t understand,’ said Frances.
‘No, I do not. And perhaps you would explain it to me?’
Johnny left Comrade Maureen and returned to her, Frances, saying that he had made a mistake. She took him back. She was lonely, knew the boys needed a father, was sex-starved.
He left again for another real, genuine comrade. When he again returned to Frances, she said to him: ‘Out.’
She was working full time in a theatre, earning not much but enough. The boys were by then ten and eight. There was trouble all the time at the schools, and they were not doing well.
‘What do you expect?’ said Julia.
‘I never expect anything,’ said Frances.
Then things changed, dramatically. Frances was amazed to hear that Comrade Johnny had agreed that Andrew should go to a good school. Julia said Eton, because her husband had gone there. Frances was waiting to hear that Johnny had refused Eton, and then was told that Johnny had been there, and had managed to conceal this damaging fact all these years. Julia did not mention it because his Eton career had hardly covered him or them with glory. He had gone for three years, but dropped out to go to the Spanish Civil War.
‘You mean to say you are happy for Andrew to go to that school?’ Frances said to him, on the telephone.
‘Well, you at least get a good education,’ said Johnny airily, and she could hear the unspoken: Look what it did for me.
So – Julia paying – Andrew took off from the poor rooms his mother and brother were living in, for Eton, and spent his holidays with schoolfriends, and became a polite stranger.
Frances went to an end-of-term at Eton, in an outfit bought to fit what she imagined would suit the occasion, and the first hat she had ever worn. She did all right, she thought, and could see Andrew was relieved when he saw her.
Then people came to ask after Julia, Philip’s widow, and the daughter-in-law of Philip’s father: an old man remembered him, as a small boy. It seemed the Lennoxes went to Eton as a matter of course. Johnny, or Jolyon, was enquired after. ‘Interesting said a man who had been Johnny’s teacher. ‘An interesting choice of career.’
Thereafter Julia went to the formal occasions, where she was made much of, and was surprised at it: visiting Eton in those brief three years of Jolyon’s attendance there, she had seen herself as Philip’s wife, and of not much account.
Colin refused Eton, because of a deep, complicated loyalty to his mother whom he had watched struggling all these years. This did not mean he did not quarrel with her, fight her, argue, and did so badly at school Frances was secretly convinced he was doing it on purpose to hurt her. But he was cold and angry with his father, when Johnny did blow in to say that he was so terribly sorry, but he really did not have the money to give them. He agreed to go to a progressive school, St Joseph’s, Julia paying for everything.
Johnny then came up with a suggestion that Frances at last did not refuse. Julia would let her and the boys have the lower part of her house. She did not need all that room, it was ridiculous …
Frances thought of Andrew, returning to various squalid addresses, or not returning, certainly never bringing friends home. She thought of Colin who made no secret of how much he hated how they were living. She said yes to Johnny, yes to Julia, and found herself in the great house that was Julia’s and always would be.
Only she knew what it cost her. She had kept her independence all this time, paid for herself and the boys, and not accepted money from Julia, nor from her parents who would have been happy to help. Now here she was, and it was a final capitulation: what to other people was ‘such a sensible arrangement’ was defeat. She was no longer herself, she was an appendage of the Lennox family.
As far as Johnny was concerned, he had done as much as could be expected of him. When his mother told him he should support his sons, get a job that paid him a salary, he shouted at her that she was a typical member of an exploiting class, thinking only of money, while he was working for the future of the whole world. They quarrelled, frequently and noisily. Listening, Colin would go white, silent, and leave the house for hours or for days. Andrew preserved his airy, amused smile, his poise. He was often at home these days, and even brought friends.
Meanwhile Johnny and Frances had divorced because he had married properly, and formally, with a wedding that the comrades attended, and Julia too. Her name was Phyllida, and she was not a comrade, but he said she was good material and he would make a communist of her.
This little history was the reason why Frances was keeping her back to the others, stirring a stew that didn’t really need a stir. Delayed reaction: her knees trembled, her mouth seemed full of acid, for now her body was taking in the bad news, rather later than her mind. She was angry, she knew, and had the right to be, but she was angrier with herself than with Johnny. If she had allowed herself to spend three days inside a lunatic dream, fair enough – but how could she have involved the boys? Yet it was Andrew who had brought the telegram, waited until she showed it to him, and said, ‘Frances, your errant husband is at last going to do the right thing.’ He had sat lightly on the edge of a chair, a fair, attractive youth, looking more than ever like a bird just about to take off. He was tall and that made him seem even thinner, his jeans loose on long legs, and with long elegant bony hands lying palms up on his knees. He was smiling at her, and she knew it was meant kindly. They were trying hard to get on, but she was still nervous of him, because of those years of him rejecting her. He had said ‘your husband’, he had not said ‘my father’. He was friendly with Johnny’s new wife, Phyllida, while reporting back that she was on the whole a bit of a drag.
He had congratulated her on her part in the new play and had made graceful fun of agony aunts.
And Colin, too, had been affectionate, a rare thing for him, and had telephoned friends about the new play.
It was all so bad for them both, it was all terrible, but after all only another little blow in years and years of them – as she was telling herself, waiting for her knees to get back their strength, while she gripped the edge of a drawer with one hand and stirred with the other, eyes closed.
Behind her Johnny was holding forth about the capitalist press and its lies about the Soviet Union, about Fidel Castro, and how he was being misrepresented.
That Frances had been scarcely touched by years of Johnny’s strictures, or his lexicon, was shown by the way, after a recent lecture, she had murmured, ‘He seems quite an interesting person.’ Johnny had snapped at her, ‘I don’t think I’ve managed to teach you anything, Frances, you are unteachable.’
‘Yes, I know, I’m stupid.’ That had been a repetition of the great, primal, but at the same time final, moment, when Johnny had returned to her for the second time, expecting her to take him in: he had shouted that she was a political cretin, a lumpen petite bourgeois, a class enemy, and she had said, ‘That’s right, I’m stupid, now get out.’
She could not go on standing here, knowing that the boys were watching her, nervously, hurt because of her, even if the others were gazing at Johnny with eyes shining with love and admiration.
She said, ‘Sophie, give me a hand.’
At once willing hands appeared, Sophie’s and, it seemed, everyone’s, and dishes were being set down the centre of the table. There were wonderful smells as the covers came off.
They sat down at the head of the table, glad to sit, not looking at Johnny. All the chairs were full, but others stood by the wall, and, if he wanted, he could bring one up and sit down himself. Was he going to do this? He often did, infuriating her, though he believed, it was obvious, that it was a compliment. No, tonight, having made an impression, and got his fill of admiration (if he ever did) he was going to leave – surely? He was not leaving. The wine glasses were full, all around the table. Johnny had brought two bottles of wine: open-handed Johnny, who never entered a room without offerings of wine … she was unable to prevent this bile, these bitter words, arriving unwanted on her tongue. Just go away, she was mentally urging him. Just leave.
She had cooked a large, filling, winter stew of beef and chestnuts, from a recipe of Elizabeth David, whose French Country Cooking was lying open somewhere in the kitchen. (Years later she would say, Good Lord, I was part of a culinary revolution and didn’t know it.) She was convinced that these youngsters did not eat ‘properly’ unless it was at this table. Andrew was dispensing mashed potatoes flavoured with celeriac. Sophie ladled out stew. Creamed spinach and buttered carrots were being allotted by Colin. Johnny stood watching, silenced for the moment because no one was looking at him.
Why didn’t he leave?
Around the table this evening were what she thought of as the regulars: or at least some of them. On her left was Andrew, who had served himself generously, but now sat looking down at the food as if he didn’t recognise it. Next to him was Geoffrey Bone, Colin’s schoolfriend, who had spent all his holidays with them since she could remember. He did not get on with his parents, Colin said. (But who did, after all?) Beside him Colin had already turned his round flushed face towards his father, all accusing anguish, while his knife and fork rested in his hands. Next to Colin, was Rose Trimble, who had been Andrew’s girlfriend, if briefly: an obligatory flutter with Marxism had taken him to a weekend seminar entitled, ‘Africa Bursts Its Chains!’, and there Rose had been. Their affair (had it been that? – she was sixteen) had ended, but Rose still came here, seemed in fact to have moved in. Opposite Rose was Sophie, a Jewish girl in the full bloom of her beauty, slender, black gleaming eyes, black gleaming hair, and people seeing her had to be afflicted with thoughts of the intrinsic unfairness of Fate, and then of the imperatives of Beauty and its claims. Colin was in love with her. So was Andrew. So was Geoffrey. Next to Sophie, and the very opposite, in every way, of Geoffrey, who was so correctly good-looking, English, polite, well-behaved, was stormy and suffering Daniel, who had just been threatened with expulsion from St Joseph’s for shoplifting. He was deputy head boy, and Geoffrey was head boy, and had had to convey to Daniel that he must reform or else – an empty threat, certainly, made for the sake of impressing the others with the seriousness of what they all did. This little event, ironically discussed by these worldly-wise children, was confirmation, if any was needed, of the inherent unfairness of the world, since Geoffrey shoplifted all the time, but it was hard to associate that open eagerly-polite face with wrongdoing. And there was another ingredient here: Daniel worshipped Geoffrey, always had, and to be admonished by his hero was more than he could bear.
Next to Daniel was a girl Frances had not seen before, but she expected to be enlightened in good time. She was a fair well-washed well-presented girl whose name appeared to be Jill. On Frances’s right was Lucy, not from St Joseph’s: she was Daniel’s girlfriend from Dartington, often here. Lucy, who at an ordinary school would certainly have been prefect, being decisive, clever, responsible and born to rule, said that progressive schools, or at least Dartington, suited some people well, but others needed discipline, and she wished she was at an ordinary school with rules and regulations and exams one had to work for. Daniel said that St Joseph’s was hypocritical shit, preaching freedom but when it came to the point clamping down with morality. ‘I wouldn’t say clamping down,’ explained Geoffrey pleasantly to everyone, protecting his acolyte, ‘it was more indicating the limits.’ ‘For some,’ said Daniel. ‘Unfair, I’ll grant you,’ said Geoffrey.
Sophie said she adored St Joseph’s and adored Sam (the headmaster). The boys tried to look indifferent at this news.
Colin continued to do so badly at exams that his unthreatened life was a tribute to the school’s famous tolerance.
Of Rose’s many grievances against life, she complained most that she had not been sent to a progressive school, and when their virtues or otherwise were discussed, which happened frequently and noisily, she would sit silent, her always rubicund face ever redder with anger. Her shitty horrible parents had sent her to a normal girls’ school in Sheffield, but though she had apparently ‘dropped out’, and appeared to be living here, her accusations against it did not lessen, and she tended to burst into tears, crying out that they didn’t know how lucky they were. Andrew had actually met Rose’s parents, who were both officials in the local council. ‘And what is wrong with them?’ Frances had enquired, hoping to hear well of them, because she wanted Rose to go, since she did not like the girl. (And why did she not tell Rose to leave? That would not have been in the spirit of the times.) ‘I am afraid they are just ordinary,’ replied Andrew, smiling. ‘They are conventional small-town people, and I do think they are a bit out of their depth with Rose.’
‘Ah,’ said Frances, seeing the possibility of Rose’s returning home recede. And there was something else here too. Had she not said of her parents that they were boring and conventional? Not that they were shitty fascists, but perhaps she would have described them thus had the epithets been as available to her as they were to Rose. How could she criticise the girl for wanting to leave parents who did not understand her?
Second helpings were already being piled on to plates – all except Andrew’s. He had hardly touched his food. Frances pretended not to notice.
Andrew was in trouble, but how bad it was hard to say.
He had done pretty well at Eton, had made friends, which she gathered was what they were meant to do, and was going to Cambridge next year. This year, he said, he was loafing. And he certainly was. He slept sometimes until four or five in the afternoon, looked ill, and concealed – what? – behind his charm, his social competence.
Frances knew he was unhappy – but it was not news that her sons were unhappy. Something should be done. It was Julia who came down to her layer of the house to say, ‘Frances, have you been inside Andrew’s room?’
‘I wouldn’t dare go into his room without asking.’
‘You are his mother, I believe.’
The gulfs between them illumined by this exchange caused Frances, as always, to stare helplessly at her mother-in-law. She did not know what to say. Julia, an immaculate figure, stood there like Judgement, waiting, and Frances felt herself to be a schoolgirl, wanting to shift from foot to foot.
‘You can hardly see across the room for the smoke,’ said Julia.
‘Oh, I see, you mean pot – marijuana? But Julia, a lot of them smoke it.’ She did not dare say she had tried it herself.
‘So, to you it’s nothing? It’s not important?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘He sleeps all day, he fuddles himself with that smoke, he doesn’t eat.’
‘Julia, what do you want me to do?’
‘Talk to him.’
‘I can’t … I couldn’t … he wouldn’t listen to me.’
‘Then I will talk to him.’ And Julia went, turning on a crisp little heel, leaving the scent of roses behind her.
Julia and Andrew did talk. Soon Andrew took to visiting Julia in her rooms, which no one had dared to do, and returned often with information meant to smooth paths and oil wheels.
‘She’s not as bad as you think. In fact, she’s rather a poppet.’
‘Not the word that would immediately come to my mind.’
‘Well, I like her.’
‘I wish she’d come downstairs sometimes. She might eat with us?’
‘She wouldn’t come. She doesn’t approve of us,’ said Colin.
‘She might reform us,’ – Frances attempted humour.
‘Ha! Ha! But why don’t you invite her?’
‘I’m scared of Julia,’ said Frances, admitting it for the first time.
‘She’s frightened of you!’ said Andrew.
Oh, but that’s absurd. I am sure she’s never been frightened of anyone.’
‘Look, mother, you don’t understand. She has had such a sheltered life. She’s not used to our rackety ways. You forget that until grandfather died I don’t think she boiled an egg for herself. And you cope with hungry hordes and speak their language. Don’t you see?’ He had said their not our.
‘All I know is she sits up there eating a finger of smoked herring and two inches of bread and drinking one glass of wine while we sit down here guzzling great meals. We could send up a tray, perhaps.’
‘I’ll ask her,’ Andrew said, and presumably did, but nothing changed.
Frances made herself go up the stairs to his room. Six o’clock, and already getting dark. This had been a couple of weeks ago. She knocked, though her legs had nearly taken her downstairs again.
After quite a wait, she heard, ‘Come in.’
Frances went in. Andrew lay dressed on the bed, smoking. The window beyond him showed a blur of cold rain.
‘It’s six o’clock,’ she said.
‘I know it is six o’clock.’
Frances sat down, without the invitation she needed. The room was a big one, furnished with old solid furniture and some beautiful Chinese lamps. Andrew seemed the wrong inhabitant for it, and Frances could not help bringing to mind Julia’s husband, the diplomat, who would certainly be at home here.
‘Have you come to lecture me? Don’t bother, Julia already has done her bit.’
‘I’m worried,’ said Frances, her voice trembled; years, decades of worry were crowding into her throat.
Andrew lifted his head off the pillow to inspect her. Not with enmity, but rather with weariness. ‘I alarm myself,’ he said. ‘But I think I am about to take myself in hand.’
‘Are you, Andrew? Are you?’
‘After all, it is not as if it were heroin, or coke, or … after all, there are no caches of empty bottles rolling about under the bed.’
There were in fact some little blue pills scattered there.
‘What are those little blue pills then?’
‘Ah, the little blue pills. Amphetamines. Don’t worry about them.’
‘And,’ said Frances, quoting, meaning to sound ironical and fading, ‘it’s non-addictive, and you can give it up at any time.’
‘I don’t know about that. I think I’m addicted – to pot, though. It certainly takes the edge off reality. Why don’t you try it?’
‘I did try it. It doesn’t do anything for me.’
‘Too bad,’ said Andrew. ‘I would say that you have more reality than you can cope with.’
He did not say anything more, and so she waited a little, and got up to leave and heard as she closed the door on him, ‘Thanks for coming, Mother. Drop in again.’
Was it possible he wanted her ‘interference’ – had been waiting for her to visit him, wanted to talk?
On this particular evening she could feel the bonds between herself and her two sons, but it was all terrible – the three of them were close tonight because of disappointment, a blow falling where it had before.
Sophie was talking. ‘Did you know about Frances’s wonderful new part?’ she said to Johnny. ‘She’s going to be a star. It’s so wonderful. Have you read the play?’
‘Sophie,’ said Frances, ‘I’m not doing the play after all.’
Sophie stared at her, her great eyes already full of tears. ‘What do you mean? You can’t … it’s not … it can’t be true.’
‘I’m not doing it, Sophie.’
Both sons were looking at Sophie, probably even kicking her under the table: shut up.
Oh,’ gasped the lovely girl, and buried her face in her hands.
‘Things have changed,’ said Frances. ‘I can’t explain.’
Now both boys were looking, full of accusation, at their father. He shifted a bit, seemed to shrug, suppressed that, smiled and then suddenly came out with: ‘There’s something else I’ve come to say, Frances.’
And so that was why he hadn’t left, but had stood uncomfortably there, not sitting down: he had something more to say.
Frances braced herself and saw that Colin and Andrew did the same.
‘I have a big favour to ask of you,’ said Johnny, direct to his betrayed wife.
‘And what is that?’
‘You know about Tilly, of course … you know, Phyllida’s girl?’
‘Of course I know about her.’
Andrew, visiting Phyllida, had allowed it to be understood that it was not a harmonious household and that the child was giving a lot of trouble.
‘Phyllida doesn’t seem able to cope with Tilly.’
At this, Frances laughed loudly, for she already knew what was bound to come. She said, ‘No, it’s simply not possible, it isn’t on.’
‘Yes, Frances, think about it. They don’t get on. Phyllida’s at her wit’s end. And so am I. I want you to have Tilly here. You are so good with …’
Frances was breathless with anger, saw that the two boys were white with it; the three were sitting silent, looking at each other.
Sophie was exclaiming, ‘Oh, Frances, and you are so kind, it’s so wonderful. ‘
Geoffrey, who had after all been so long visiting this house that he could with justice be described as a member of the household, followed Sophie with, ‘What a groovy idea.’
‘Just a minute, Johnny,’ said Frances. ‘You are asking me to take on your second wife’s daughter because you two can’t cope with her?’
‘That’s about it,’ admitted Johnny, smiling.
There was a long, long pause. It had occurred to enthusiastic Sophie and Geoffrey that Frances was not taking this in the spirit of universal liberal idealism they had at first assumed she would: that spirit of everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, which would one day be shorthand for ‘The Sixties’.
Frances managed to bring out: ‘You are perhaps planning to contribute something to her support?’ – and realised that, saying this, she was agreeing.
At this Johnny glanced around the young faces, judging if they were as shocked by her pettiness as he was. ‘Money,’ he said loftily, ‘is really not the point here.’
Frances was again silenced. She got up, went to the working surface near the stove, stood with her back to the room.
‘I want to bring Tilly here,’ said Johnny. ‘And in fact she’s here. She’s in the car.’
Colin and Andrew both got up and went to their mother, standing on either side of her. This enabled her to turn around and face Johnny across the room. She could not speak. And Johnny, seeing his former wife flanked by their sons, three angry people with white accusing faces, was also, but just for the moment, silenced.
Then he rallied, stretched out his arms, palms towards them, and said, ‘From each according to their capacity, to each according to their need.’ And let his arms drop.
‘Oh, that is so beautiful,’ said Rose.
‘Groovy,’ said Geoffrey.
The newcomer, Jill, breathed, ‘Oh, it’s lovely.’
All eyes were now on Johnny, a situation he was well used to. He stood, receiving rays of criticism, beams of love, and smiled at them. He was a tall man, Comrade Johnny, with already greying hair cut like a Roman’s, at your service always, and he wore tight black jeans, a black leather Mao jacket especially made for him by an admiring comrade in the rag trade. Severity was his preferred style, smiling or not, for a smile could never be more than a temporary concession, but he was smiling boldly now.
‘Do you mean to say,’ said Andrew, ‘that Tilly’s been out there in the car waiting, all this time?’
‘Good God,’ said Colin. ‘Typical.’
‘I’ll go and bring her in,’ said Johnny, and marched out, brushing past his ex-wife and Colin and Andrew, not looking at them.
No one moved. Frances thought if her sons had not been so close, enveloping her with their support, she would have fallen. All the faces around the table were turned towards them: that this was a very bad moment, they had at last understood.
They heard the front door open – Johnny of course had a key to his mother’s house – and then in the doorway to this room, the kitchen, stood a little frightened figure, in a big duffel-coat, trembling with cold, trying to smile, but instead out of her burst a great wail, as she looked at Frances, who she had been told was kind and would look after her, ‘until we get things straightened out’. She was a little bird blown by a storm, and Frances was across the room to her, and had her arms round her, saying, ‘It’s all right, shhh, it’s all right.’ Then she remembered this was not a child, but a girl of fourteen or so, and her impulse, to sit down and hold this waif on her lap was out of order. Meanwhile Johnny, just behind the girl, was saying, ‘I think bed is indicated,’ and then, generally around the room, ‘I’ll be off’ But did not go.
The girl was looking in appeal at Andrew, whom after all she did know, among all these strangers.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll deal with it.’ He put his arm round Tilly, and turned to go out of the room.
‘I’ll put her down in the basement,’ he said. ‘It’s nice and warm down there.’
‘Oh, no, no, no, please,’ cried the girl. ‘Don’t, I cannot be alone, I can’t, don’t make me.’
‘Of course not, if you don’t want to,’ said Andrew. Then, to his mother, ‘I’ll put a bed in with me for tonight.’ And he led her out. They all sat quiet, listening to how he coaxed her up the stairs.
Johnny was face to face with Frances, who said to him, low, hoping it would not be heard by the others, ‘Go away, Johnny. Just get out.’
He tried an appealing smile around, caught Rose’s eyes, who did smile back, but she was doubtful, withstood passionate reproach from Sophie, nodded sternly at Geoffrey, whom he had known for years. And left. The front door shut. The car door slammed.
Now Colin was hovering behind Frances, touching her arm, her shoulder, not knowing what to do.
‘Come on,’ he said, ‘come on upstairs.’ They went out together. Frances began swearing as she climbed the stairs, first softly, so as not to be heard by the young, then loudly, ‘Fuck him, fuck him, fuck, the shit, the absolute shit.’ In her sitting-room she sat crying, while Colin, at a loss, at last thought of getting her tissues and then a glass of water.
Meanwhile Julia had been told by Andrew what was going on. She came down, opened Frances’s door without knocking, and marched in. ‘Please explain it to me,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand. Why do you let him behave like this?’
Julia von Arne was born in a particularly charming part of Germany, near Stuttgart, a region of hills, streams and vineyards. She was the only girl, the third child in a genial gentle family. Her father was a diplomat, her mother a musician. In July 1914 came visiting Philip Lennox, a promising Third Secretary from the embassy in Berlin. That fourteen-year-old Julia should fall in love with handsome Philip – he was twenty-five – was not surprising, but he fell in love with her. She was pretty, tiny, with golden ringlets, and wore frocks the romantic man told her were like flowers. She had been brought up strictly, by governesses, English and French, and to him it seemed that every gesture she made, every smile, every turn of her head, was formal, prescribed, as if she moved in a dance. Like all girls taught to be conscious of their bodies, because of the frightful dangers of immodesty, her eyes spoke for her, could strike to the heart with a glance, and when she lowered delicate eyelids over blue invitations to love he felt he was being rejected. He had sisters, whom he had seen a few days ago in Sussex, jolly tomboys enjoying the exemplary summer that has been celebrated in so many memoirs and novels. A sister’s friend, Betty, had been teased because she came to supper with solid brown arms where white scratches showed how she had been playing in the hay with the dogs. His family had watched him to see if he fancied this girl, who would make a suitable wife, and he had been prepared to consider her. This little German miss seemed to him as glamorous as a beauty glimpsed in a harem, all promise and hidden bliss, and he fancied that if a sunbeam did strike her she would melt like a snowflake. She gave him a red rose from the garden, and he knew she was offering him her heart. He declared his love in the moonlight, and next day spoke to her father. Yes, he knew that fourteen was too young, but he was asking for formal permission to propose when she was sixteen. And so they parted, in 1914, while war was coming to a boil, but like many liberal well-adjusted people it seemed to both the von Arnes and the Lennoxes that it was ridiculous Germany and England could go to war. When war was declared, Philip had left his love in tears just two weeks before. In those days governments seemed compelled to announce that wars must be over by Christmas, and the lovers were sure they would see each other soon.
Almost at once xenophobia was poisoning Julia’s love. Her family did not mind her loving her Englishman – did not their respective Emperors call themselves cousins? – but the neighbours commented, and servants whispered and gossiped. During the years of the war rumours followed Julia and her family too. Her three brothers were fighting in the Trenches, her father was in the War Office, and her mother did war work, but those few days of fever in July 1914 marked them all for comment and suspicion. Julia never lost her faith in her love and in Philip. He was wounded, twice, and in devious ways she heard about it and wept for him. It did not matter, cried Julia’s heart, how badly he was wounded, she would love him for ever. He was demobbed in 1919. She was waiting for him, knowing he was coming to claim her, when into the room where five years before they had flirted came a man she felt she ought to know. An empty sleeve was pinned up on his chest, and his face was taut and lined. She was now nearly twenty. He saw a tall young woman – she had grown some inches – with fair hair piled on top of her head, held with a big jet arrow, and wearing heavy black for two dead brothers. A third brother, a boy – he was not yet twenty – had been wounded and sat, still in his uniform, a stiff leg propped before him on a stool. The two so recent enemies, stared at each other. Then Philip, not smiling, went forward with an outstretched hand. The youth made an involuntary movement of turning away, with a grimace, but he recovered himself and civilisation was reinstated as he smiled, and the two men shook hands. This scene, which after all has repeated itself in various forms since then, did not then have as much weight on it as it would now. Irony, which celebrates that element which we persist in excluding from our vision of things, would have been too much for them to bear: we have become coarser-fibred.
And now these two lovers who would not have recognised each other passing in a street, had to decide whether their dreams of each other for all those terrible years were strong enough to carry them through into marriage. Nothing was left of the enchanting prim little girl, nor of the sentimental man who had, until it crumbled away, carried a dead red rose next to his heart. The great blue eyes were sad, and he tended to lapse into silences, just like her younger brother, when remembering things that could be understood only by other soldiers.
These two married quietly: hardly the time for a big German-English wedding. In London war fever was abating, though people still talked about the Boche and the Hun. People were polite to Julia. For the first time she wondered if choosing Philip had not been a mistake, yet she believed they loved each other, and both were pretending they were serious people by nature and not saddened beyond curing. And yet the war did recede and the worst of the war hatreds passed. Julia, who had suffered in Germany for her English love, now tried to become English, in an act of will. She had spoken English well enough, but took lessons again, and soon spoke as no English person ever did, an exquisite perfect English, every word separate. She knew her manners were formal, and tried to become more casual. Her clothes: they were perfect too, but after all, she was a diplomat’s wife and had to keep up appearances. As the English put it.
They started married life in a little house in Mayfair, and there she entertained, as was expected of her, with the aid of a cook and a maid, and achieved something like the standards she remembered from her home. Meanwhile Philip had discovered that to marry a German woman had not been the best prescription for an unclouded career. Discussions with his superiors revealed that certain posts would be barred to him, in Germany, for instance, and he might find himself edged out of the straight highway to the top, and find himself in places like South Africa or Argentina. He decided to avoid disappointments, and switched to administration. He would have a fine career, but nothing of the glamour of foreign ministries. Sometimes he met in a sister’s house the Betty whom he could have married – and who was still unwed, because of so many men being killed – and wondered how different life could have been.
When Jolyon Meredith Wilhelm Lennox was born in 1920 he had a nurse and then a nanny. He was a long thin child, with golden curls and combative critical blue eyes, often directed at his mother. He had soon learned from his nanny that he was a German: he had a little tantrum and was difficult for a few days. He was taken to visit his German family, but this was not a success: he disliked the place, and the different manners – he was expected to sit at mealtimes with his hands beside him on either side of his plate when not actually eating, speak when spoken to, and to click his heels when he made a request. He refused to go back. Julia argued with Philip about her child being sent off at seven to school. This is not unusual now, but then Julia was being brave. Philip told her that everyone of their class did this, and anyway look at him! – he had gone to boarding school at seven. Yes, he did remember he had been a bit homesick … never mind, it wore off. That argument, ‘Look at me!’, expected to cast down opposition because of the speaker’s conviction of his superiority or at least lightness, did not convince Julia. In Philip there was a place forever barred to her, a reserve, a coldness, which at first she ascribed to the war, the trenches, the soldier’s hidden psychological scars. But then she had begun to doubt: she had never achieved intimacy enough with the wives of her husband’s colleagues to ask if they too experienced this forbidden place in their men, the area marked VERBOTEN, NO Entrance – but she did observe, she noticed a good deal. No, she thought, if you are going to take a child from its mother so young … She lost the fight, and lost her son; who thereafter was polite, affable, if often impatient.
As far as she could see he did well in his first school, but Eton did not go well. His reports were not good. ‘He does not make friends easily.’ ‘A bit of a loner.’
She asked him one holidays, manoeuvring him into a position where he could not escape easily, for he did evade direct questions and situations, ‘Tell me, Jolyon, has my being German made problems for you?’
His eyes seemed to flicker, wanted to evade, but he faced her with his wide polite smile, and said, ‘No, mother, why should it?’
‘I wondered, that’s all.’
She asked Philip if he would ‘talk’ to Jolyon, meaning, of course, Please change him, he’s breaking my heart.
‘He plays his cards pretty close to his chest,’ was her husband’s reply.
Her worries were in fact soothed by the mere feet of Eton, the fact and the weight of it, a purveyor of excellence and a guarantee of success. She had surrendered her son – her only child – to the English educational system, and expected a quid pro quo, that Jolyon would turn out well, like his father, and in due course walk in his footsteps, probably as a diplomat.
When Philip’s father died, and then, soon after, his mother, he wanted to move into the big house in Hampstead. It was the family house, and he, the son, would live in it. Julia liked the little house in Mayfair, so easy to run and keep clean and did not want to live in the big house with its many rooms. But that was what she found herself doing. She did not ever set her will against Philip’s. They did not quarrel. They got along because she did not insist on her preferences. She behaved as she had seen her mother do, giving way to her father. Well, one side had to give way, the way Julia saw it, and it did not much matter which. Peace in the family was the important thing.
The furniture of the little house, most of it from the home in Germany, was absorbed quite easily into the Hampstead house where in fact Julia did not seem to do nearly as much entertaining, though there was so much space for everything. For one thing, Philip was not really a sociable man: he had one or two close friends and saw them, often by himself. And Julia supposed she must be getting old and boring, because she did not enjoy parties as much as she had. But there were dinner parties and, often, important people, and she was pleased she did it all so well, and that Philip was proud of her.
She went home to Germany for visits. Her parents, who were getting old, were so glad to see their daughter, and she liked her brother, now her only brother. But going home was troubling, even frightening. Poverty and unemployment, and the communists and then the Nazis were everywhere, and gangs roamed the streets. Then there was Hider. The von Ames despised in equal measure the communists and Hider, and believed that both unpleasant phenomena would simply go away. This was not their Germany, they said. It was certainly not what Julia remembered as her Germany, that is, of course, if she forgot the vicious rumour-mongering during the war. A spy, they had said she was. Not serious people, of course, not educated people … well, yes, there were one or two. She decided she did not much like visiting Germany these days, and it was easier not to, when her parents died.
The English were sensible people, after all, she had to agree to that. One couldn’t imagine allowing battles between communists and fascists in the streets – well, there were some scuffles, but one mustn’t exaggerate, there was nothing like Hider.
A letter arrived from Eton saying that Jolyon had disappeared, leaving behind a note saying that he was off to the Spanish Civil War, signed, Comrade Johnny Lennox.
Philip used every influence to find out where their son was. The International Brigade? Madrid? Catalonia? No one seemed to know. Julia tended to sympathise with her son, for she had been shocked at the treatment of the elected government in Spain, by Britain and the French. Her husband, who was a diplomat after all, defended his government and his country but alone with her said he was ashamed. He did not admire the policies he was defending and conducting.
Months passed. Then a telegram arrived from their son, asking for money: address, a house in the East End of London. Julia at once saw this meant he was wanting them to visit him, otherwise he would have designated a bank where he could pick up the money. Together she and Philip went to a house in a poor street, and found Jolyon being nursed by a decent sort of woman of the kind Julia at once thought of as a possible servant. He was in an upstairs room, ill with hepatitis, caught, presumably, in Spain. Then talking with this woman, who called herself Comrade Mary, it slowly became evident she knew nothing of Spain, and then that Jolyon had not been in Spain, but had been here, in this house, ill.
‘Took me a bit of time to see he was having a bit of a breakdown,’ said Comrade Mary.
These were poor people. Philip wrote out a fair-sized cheque, and was told, politely enough, that they did not have a bank account, with the only just sarcastic implication that bank accounts were for the well off. Since they did not have that kind of money on them, Philip said that money would be delivered, next day, and it was. Jolyon, but he was insisting on being called Johnny, was so thin the bones of his face suggested the skeleton, and while he kept saying that Comrade Mary and her family were the salt of the earth, easily agreed to come home.
That was the last his parents heard of Spain, but in the Young Communist League, where he now became a star, he was a Spanish Civil War hero.
Johnny had a room, and then a floor, in the big house, and there many people came who disturbed the parents, and made Julia actively miserable. They were all communists, usually very young, and always taking Johnny off to meetings, rallies, weekend schools, marches. She said to Johnny that if he had seen the streets in Germany full of rival gangs he would have nothing to do with such people, and as a result of the quarrel that followed he simply left. He anticipated later patterns of behaviour by living in comrades’ houses, sleeping on floors or anywhere there was a corner for him, and asked his parents for money. ‘After all, I suppose you don’t want me to starve even if I am a communist.’
Julia and Philip did not know about Frances, not until Johnny married her when he came on leave, though Julia was familiar enough with what she described as ‘that type of girl’. She had been observing the smart cheeky flirty girls who looked after the senior officials – some were attached to her husband’s department. She had asked herself, ‘Is it right to be having such a good time in the middle of this terrible war?’ Well, at least no one could say they were hypocrites. (An ancient lady, standing to spray white curls with a fixative and peering at herself mournfully in a mirror, said, decades later: ‘Oh, we had such a good time, such a good time – it was so glamorous – do you understand?’)
Julia’s war could have been really terrible. Her name had been on a list of those Germans who were sent off to the internment camp on the Isle of Man. Philip told her: ‘There was never a question of your being interned, it was just an administrative error.’ But error or not, it had taken Philip’s intervention to get her name removed. This war afflicted Julia with memories of the last one, and she could not believe that yet again countries meant to be friends should be at war. She was not well, slept badly, wept. Philip was kind – he was always a kind man. He held Julia in his arms and rocked her, ‘There now, my dear, there now.’ He was able to hold Julia because he had one of the new clever artificial arms, which could do everything. Well, nearly everything. At night he took the arm off and hung it on its stand. Now he could only partially hold Julia, and she tended to hold him.
The parent Lennoxes were not asked to the wedding of their son Jolyon with Frances. They were told about it, in a telegram, just as he was off again to Canada. At first Julia could not believe he was treating them like this. Philip held her and said, ‘You don’t understand, Julia.’ ‘No, I don’t, I don’t understand anything.’ With humour that made his voice grate, he said, ‘We’re class enemies, don’t you see? No, don’t cry Julia, he’ll grow up, I expect.’ But he was staring over her shoulder with a face set in the dismay that was what she felt – and felt more often and more strongly every day. A weeping, generalised, drizzling dismay, and she could not shake it off.
They knew that Johnny was ‘doing well’ in Canada. What did doing well mean in this context? Soon after he had returned there, a letter arrived with a photograph of him and Frances on the steps of the register office. They were both in uniform, hers as right as a corset, and she was a bright, apparently giggling, blonde. ‘Silly girl,’ judged Julia, putting the letter and photograph away. The letter had a censor’s stamp on it, as if it were out of bounds – which is what she felt. Then Johnny wrote a note to say, ‘You might drop in to see how Frances is doing. She is pregnant.’
Julia did not go. Then came an airletter, saying a baby had been born, a boy, and he felt the least Julia could do was to visit her. ‘His name is Andrew,’ said the postscript, an afterthought, apparently; and Julia remembered the announcements of Jolyon’s birth, sent out in a large white thick envelopes, on a card like thin china, and the elegant black script that said, Jolyon Meredith Wilhelm Lennox. None of the recipients could have doubted that here was an important new addition to the human race.
She supposed she should go and see her daughter-in-law, put it off, and when she reached the address Johnny had provided, found Frances gone. It was a dreary street that had a house sagging to its knees in ruins, because of a bomb. Julia was glad she did not have to enter any house there, but she was directed to another that seemed even worse. It was in Notting Hill; she was let in by a slatternly woman who did not smile, and she was told to knock on that door there, the one with the cracked skylight.
She knocked, and an irritated voice called, ‘Wait a minute, okay, come in.’ The room was large, badly ht, and the windows were dirty. Faded green sateen curtains and frayed rugs. In the greenish half-dark sat a large young woman, her unstockinged legs apart, and her baby sprawled across her chest. She held a book in her hand, above the baby’s head; a rhythmically working little head, the spread-out hands opening and shutting on naked flesh. The exposed breast, large and lolling, exuded milk in sympathy.
Julia’s first thought was that she had come to the wrong house, because this young woman could not be the one in the photograph. While she stood there forcing herself to admit that she was indeed looking at Frances, Jolyon Meredith Wilhelm’s wife, the young woman said, ‘Do sit down.’ She sounded as if having to say this, even to contemplate Julia’s being there, was the last straw. She frowned as she eased her breast out of a discomfort, the baby’s mouth popped off the nipple, and milky liquid ran down over the breast to a sagging waist. Frances eased the nipple back, the infant let out a choking cry and then fastened itself again on the nipple with a little shaking movement of its head Julia had observed in puppies ranged along the teats of a nursing bitch, her little pet dachshund, from long ago. Frances put a piece of cloth Julia could swear was a nappy over the resting breast.
The women stared at each other, with dislike.
Julia did not sit. There was a chair, but the seat was suspiciously stained. She could sit on the bed, which was unmade, but did not care to. She said, ‘Johnny wrote to ask me to find out how you are.’
The cool, light, almost drawling voice, modulated according to some measure or scale known only to Julia, caused the young woman to stare again, and then she laughed.
‘I am as you see, Julia,’ said Frances.
Julia was filling with panic. She thought this place horrible, a lower depth of squalor. The house she and Philip had found Johnny in at the time of the Spanish Civil War misadventure had been a poor one, thin-walled, temporary in feel, but it had been clean, and Mary the landlady was a decent sort of woman. In this place Julia felt trapped in a nightmare. That shameless young woman half-naked there, with her great oozing breasts, the baby’s noisy sucking, a faint smell of sick, or of nappies … Julia felt that Frances was forcing her, most brutally, to look directly at an unclean unseemly fount of life that she had never had to acknowledge. Her own baby had been presented to her as a well-washed bundle after he had been fed by the nurse. Julia had refused to breastfeed; too near the animal, she felt, but did not dare say. Doctors and nurses had tactfully agreed that she was not able to nurse … her health … Julia had often played with the little boy who arrived in the drawing-room with toys, and she actually sat on the floor with him, and enjoyed a play hour, measured by the nanny to the minute. She remembered the smell of soap, and baby powder. She remembered sniffing at Jolyon’s little head with such pleasure …
Frances was thinking, It’s unbelievable. She is unbelievable, and derision was in danger of making her burst out in raucous laughter.
Julia stood there in the middle of the room, in her neat wool crêpe grey suit, that had not a wrinkle, not a bulge. It was buttoned up to her throat where a silk scarf provided a hint of mauve. Her hands were in dove-grey kid gloves, and even though thoroughly protected from the unwashed surfaces around her, were making anxious little movements of rejection, and fussy disapproval. Her shoes were like shiny blackbirds, with brass buckles that seemed to Frances to be locks, as if making sure those feet couldn’t fly off, or even to begin to try out a few prim dance steps. Her grey hat was fenced with a little net veil that did not conceal her horrified eyes, and it, too, was caught with a metal buckle. She was a woman in a cage, and to Frances, under such pressures of loneliness, poverty, anxiety, her appearance in that room, which she loathed, and wished only to escape from, was like a deliberate taunting, an insult.
‘What am I to tell Jolyon?’
‘Who? – oh, yes. But …’ And now Frances energetically sat herself up, one hand cupping the baby’s head, the other holding the cloth over her exposed breast. ‘Don’t tell me Johnny asked you to come here?’
‘Well, yes, he did.’
Now the two women shared a moment: it was incredulity, and their eyes actually did engage, in a query. When Julia had read the letter which commanded her to visit his wife, she said to Philip, ‘But I thought he hated us? If we weren’t good enough to see him married, then why is he ordering me to visit Frances?’
Philip replied, dry enough, but remote too, because as always he was absorbed in his duties with the war, ‘I see that you are expecting consistency. Usually a mistake, in my view.’
As for Frances, she had never heard Johnny refer to his parents as anything other than fascists, exploiters, at the best reactionaries. Then how could he be …
‘Frances, I would like very much to help you with some money.’ An envelope appeared from her handbag.
‘Oh, no, I am sure Johnny wouldn’t like that. He’d never take money from …’
‘I think you’ll find that he can and he will.’
‘Oh, no, no, Julia, please not.’
‘Very well then, goodbye.’
Julia did not set eyes on Frances again until after Johnny had returned from the war, and Philip, who was by then ill and would shortly die, said he was worried about Frances and the children. Her memories of that visit caused Julia to protest that she was sure Frances did not want to see her, but Philip said, ‘Please, Julia. To set my mind at rest.’
Julia went to the flat in Notting Hill, which she was convinced had been chosen because of the area’s seediness and ugliness. There were two children now. The one she had seen before, Andrew, was a noisy and energetic toddler, and there was a baby, Colin. Again, Frances was breastfeeding. She was large, shapeless, slatternly, and the flat, Julia was convinced, was a health hazard. On the wall was a food safe, and in it could be glimpsed a bottle of milk and some cheese. The wire net of the safe had been painted, the paint had clogged: air therefore could not circulate properly. Babies’ clothes were strung on fragile wooden contraptions that seemed about to collapse. No, Frances said, in a voice cold with hostility and criticism. No, she didn’t want any money, no, thank you.
Julia stood there unconsciously all appeal, hands a-flutter, eyes full of tears.
‘But, Frances, think of the children.’
It was as if Julia had deliberately touched an already sore place with acid. Oh, yes, Frances thought often enough of how her own parents, let alone Johnny’s, must see her and how she lived, with the children. She said in a voice stiff with anger, ‘It seems to me that I never think of anything else but the children.’ Her tone said, How dare you!
‘Please let me help you, please – Johnny’s always so wrong-headed, he always has been, and it’s not fair on the children.’
The trouble was, by now Frances agreed unreservedly about Johnny’s wrong-headedness. Any shreds of illusion had dissolved away, leaving a residue of unresolvable exasperation about him, the comrades, the Revolution, Stalin, Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. But what was in question here was not Johnny, it was herself, a small, threatened sense of identity and of independence. That was why Julia’s Think of the children went home like a poisoned bullet. What right did she, Frances, have to fight for her independence, her own self at the cost of … but they were not suffering, they were not. She knew they were not.
Julia went away, reported back to Philip, and tried not to think of those rooms in Notting Hill.
Later, when Julia heard that Frances had gone to work in a theatre, Julia thought, A theatre! Of course, it would be! Then Frances was acting and Julia thought, Is she acting servants’ parts then?
She went to the theatre, sat well back where she could not be seen, she hoped, and watched Frances in a small part in a quite nice little comedy. Frances was thinner, though still solid, and her fair hair was in frilly waves. She was a hotel owner, in Brighton. Julia could not see anything of that pre-war giggler in her tight uniform, but still, she was doing the part well enough, and Julia felt encouraged. Frances knew that Julia had been to watch her, because it was a small theatre, and Julia was wearing one of her inimitable hats, with a veil, and her gloved hands were on her lap. Not another woman in the audience wore a hat. Those gloves, oh those gloves, what a laugh.
All through the war, particularly at bad moments, Philip had kept the memory of a certain little glove, in Swiss muslin, and those dots, white on white, and the tiny frill at the wrist, seemed to him a delicious frivolity, laughing at itself, and a promise that civilisation would return.
Soon Philip died of a heart attack, and Julia was not surprised. The war had been hard on him. He had worked to all hours and brought home work at nights. She knew he had been involved in all kinds of daring and dangerous ventures, and that he grieved for men he had sent into danger, sometimes to their deaths. He had become an old man, during the war. And, like her, this war was forcing him to relive the last one: she knew this, from the small dry remarks he did allow himself to drop. These two people, who had been so fatally in love, had lived always in patient tenderness, as if they had decided to protect their memories, like a bruise, from any harsh touch, refusing ever to look too closely at them.
Now there was Julia alone in the big house, and Johnny came and said he wanted the house, and she should move out into a flat. For the first time in her life Julia stood her ground and said No. She was going to live here, and she did not expect Johnny or anyone else to understand her. Her own home, the von Arne house, had been lost. Her young brother had been killed in the Second World War. The house had been sold and the proceeds had come to her. This house, where she had been so reluctant to live, was now her home, the only link with that Julia who had a home, who expected to have one, who was defined by a place, with memories. She was Julia Lennox, and this was her home.
‘You are selfish and greedy, like all your class,’ said Johnny.
‘You and Frances may come and live here, but I shall be here.’
‘Thank you so much, Mutti, but we shall decline.’
‘Why Mutti? You never called me that when you were a child.’
‘Are you trying to conceal the fact that you are a German, Mutti?’
‘No, I don’t think I am doing that.’
‘I do. Hypocritical. It’s what we expect from people like you.’
He was really furious. His father had not left him anything, it had all gone to Julia. He had planned to live in this house and to fill it with comrades needing a home. Everyone was poor, living from hand to mouth, after the war, and he was subsisting on the proceeds of work for the Party, some of it illegal. He had been furious with Frances for refusing to accept an allowance from Julia. When Frances had said, ‘But, Johnny, I don’t understand, how can you want to take money from the class enemy?’ Johnny had hit her, for the only time in their lives. She hit him back, harder. She had not meant her question as a taunt or a criticism, she genuinely wanted to have it explained to her.
Julia was well off, but not rich. Paying for the two lots of school fees, Andrew’s and Colin’s, was within her scope, but if Frances had not agreed to move in, she had planned to let part of the house. Now she was economising in ways that would have made Frances laugh, if she had known. Julia did not buy new clothes. She dismissed the housekeeper who had been living in the basement, depended on a woman who came in twice a week, and did a good bit of her own housework. (This woman, Mrs Philby, had to be coaxed and flattered and given presents to go on working when Frances and her ill-bred ways arrived.) She no longer bought food at Fortnum’s, but she discovered now, when Philip was dead, that her own tastes were frugal, and that the standards required of a wife married to a Foreign Office official had never really been hers.
When Frances arrived, to take over all the house except for Julia’s top floor, it was a relief to Julia. She still did not like Frances, who seemed determined to shock her, but she loved the boys, and intended to shield them from their parents. In fact, they were afraid of her, at least to start with, but she never found this out. She thought Frances was keeping her from them, did not know that Frances urged them to visit their grandmother. ‘Please, she’s so good to us. And she’d love it if you did.’ Oh, no, it’s too much, do we have to?’
Frances visited the newspaper to establish her job, and she knew how right she had been to prefer the theatre. As a freelance she had had little experience of institutions, and did not look forward to a communal working life. As soon as she set foot in the building that housed The Defender, she recognised there an atmosphere: this was an esprit de corps all right. The Defender’s venerable history, going back into the nineteenth century, as a fighter for any number of good causes, was being continued, so it was generally felt, and most particularly by the people who worked for it; this period, the Sixties, was able to stand up to any of the great times of the past. Frances was being welcomed into the fold by one Julie Hackett. She was a soft, not to say womanly woman, with bundles of strong black hair fastened here and there with a variety of combs and pins, a resolutely unfashionable figure, because she saw fashion as an enslaver of women. She observed everything around her with a view to correcting errors of fact and belief, and she criticised men in every sentence, taking it for granted, as believers tend to do, that Frances agreed with her in everything. She had been keeping an eye on Frances, had seen articles by her here and there, and in The Defender too, but one article had decided her to get her on to the staff. It was a satirical, but good-natured piece about Carnaby Street, which was in the process of becoming a symbol for trendy Britain, and attracting youngsters, not to mention the young in heart, from all over the world. Frances had said that they must all be suffering from some sort of collective hallucination, since the street was grubby, tatty, and if the clothes were attractive – some of them – they were no better than others in streets that did not have the magic syllables Carnaby attached to them. Heresy! A brave heresy, judged Julie Hackett, seeing Frances as a kindred soul.
Frances was shown an office where a secretary was sorting through letters addressed to Aunt Vera, and putting them in heaps, since even the nastiest predicaments of humanity must fall into easily recognised categories. My husband is unfaithful, an alcoholic, beats me, won’t give me enough money, is leaving me for his secretary, prefers his mates in the pub to me. My son is alcoholic, a druggie, has got a girl pregnant, won’t leave home, is living rough in London, earns money but won’t contribute to the household. My daughter … Pensions, benefits, the behaviour of officials, medical problems … but a doctor answered those. These more common letters were dealt with by this secretary, signing Aunt Vera, and it was a flourishing new department of The Defender. Frances’s job was to scan these letters, and find a theme or concern that predominated, and then use it for a serious article, a long one, which would have a prominent place in the paper. Frances could write her articles and do her research at home. She would be of The Defender but not in it, and for this she was grateful.
When she got out of the Underground, coming home from the newspaper, she bought food, and walked down the hill, laden.
Julia was standing at her high window, looking down, when she saw Frances approaching. At least this smart coat was an improvement, not the usual duffel-coat: perhaps one could look forward to her wearing something other than the eternal jeans and jerseys? She was walking heavily, making Julia think of a donkey with panniers. Near the house she stopped, and Julia could see that Frances’s hair had been done, the blondish hair falling straight as straw on either side of a parting, as was the mode.
From some of the houses she had passed, the music pounded and beat, as loud as an angry heart, but Julia had said she would not tolerate loud music, she could not bear it, so while music was played, it was soft. From Andrew’s room usually came the muted tones of Palestrina or Vivaldi, from Colin’s traditional jazz, from the sitting-room where the television was, broken music and voices, from the basement, the throb, throb, throb, that ‘the kids’ needed.
The whole big house was ht up, not a dark window, and it seemed to shed light from walls as well as windows: it exuded light and music.
Frances saw Johnny’s shadow on the kitchen curtains, and at once her spirits took a fall. He was in the middle of a harangue, she could see, from gesticulating arms, and when she reached the kitchen, he was in full flood. Cuba, again. Around the table was an assortment of youngsters, but she did not have time to see who was there. Andrew, yes, Rose, yes … the telephone was ringing. She dropped the heavy bags, took up the receiver, and it was Colin from his school. ‘Mother, have you heard the news?’ ‘No, what news, are you all right, Colin, you just went off this morning …’ ‘Yes, yes, listen, we’ve just heard, it’s on the news. Kennedy’s dead.’ ‘Who?’ ‘President Kennedy.’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘They shot him. Switch on the telly.’
Over her shoulder she said, ‘President Kennedy is dead. He’s been shot.’ A silence, while she reached for the radio, switched it on. Nothing on the radio. She turned to see every face blank with shock, Johnny’s too. He was being kept silent by the need to find a correct formulation, and in a moment was able to bring out, ‘We must evaluate the situation …’ but could not go on.
‘The television,’ said Geoffrey Bone, and as one ‘the kids’ rose from the table and went out of the room and up the stairs to the sitting-room.
Andrew said, calling after them, ‘Careful, Tilly’s watching.’ Then he ran after them.
Frances and Johnny were alone, facing each other.
‘I take it you came to enquire after your stepdaughter?’ she asked.
Johnny fidgeted: he wanted badly to go up and watch the Six O’clock News, but he planned to say something, and she stood, leaning back against the shelves by the stove, thinking, Well now, let me guess … And as she had expected, he came out with, ‘It’s Phyllida, I am afraid.’
‘Yes?’
‘She’s not well.’
‘So I heard from Andrew.’
‘I’m going to Cuba in a couple of days.’
‘Best if you take her with you, then.’
‘I am afraid the funds wouldn’t run to it and …’
‘Who is paying?’
Here appeared the irritated what-can-you-expect look from which she was always able to judge her degree of stupidity.
‘You should know better than to ask, comrade.’
Once she would have collapsed into a morass of inadequacy and guilt – how easily, then, he had been able to make her feel an idiot.
‘I am asking. You seem to forget, I’ve got reason to be interested in your finances.’
‘And how much are you being paid in this new job of yours?’
She smiled at him. ‘Not enough to support your sons and now your stepdaughter as well.’
‘And feed Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and anyone who turns up expecting a free meal.’
‘What? You wouldn’t have me turn away potential material for the Revolution?’
‘They’re layabouts and junkies,’ he said. ‘Riff-raff’ But he decided not to go on, and changed his tune to a comradely appeal to her better nature. ‘Phyllida really isn’t well.’
‘And what am I expected to do about it?’
‘I want you to keep an eye on her.’
‘No, Johnny.’
‘Then Andrew can. He’s got nothing better to do.’
‘He’s busy looking after Tilly. She is really ill, you know.’
‘A lot of it is just playing for sympathy.’
‘Then why did you dump her on us?’
‘Oh … fuck it,’ said Comrade Johnny. ‘Psychological disorders are not my line, they’re yours.’
‘She’s ill. She’s really ill. And how long are you going for?’
He looked down, frowned. ‘I said I’d go for six weeks. But with this new crisis …’ Reminded of the crisis, he said, ‘I’m going to catch the news.’ And he ran out of the kitchen.
Frances heated soup, a chicken stew, garlic bread, made a salad, piled fruit on a dish, arranged cheeses. She was thinking about the poor child, Tilly. The day after the girl had arrived, Andrew had come to where she was working in her study, and said, ‘Mother, can I put Tilly into the spare room? She really can’t sleep in my room, even though that’s what I think she’d like.’
Frances had been expecting this: her floor really had four rooms, her bedroom, her study, a sitting-room, and a small room which, when Julia ran the house, had been a spare room. Frances felt that this floor was hers, a safe place, where she was free from all the pressures, all the people. Now Tilly and her illness would be across a small landing. And the bathroom … ‘Very well, Andrew. But I can’t look after her. Not the way she needs.’
‘No. I’ll look after her. I’ll clear the room for her.’ Then, as he turned to run up the stairs, he said quietly, urgently, ‘She really is in a bad way.’
‘Yes, I know she is.’
‘She’s afraid we are going to put her in a loony bin.’
‘But of course not, she’s not crazy.’
‘No,’ he said, with a twisted smile, more of an appeal than he knew, ‘But perhaps I am?’
‘I don’t think so.’
She heard Andrew bring the girl down from his room, and the two went into the spare room. Silence. She knew what was happening. The girl was lying curled on the bed, or on the floor, and Andrew was cradling her, soothing her, even singing to her – she had heard him do that.
And that morning, she had observed this scene. She was preparing food for this evening, while Andrew sat at the table with Tilly, who was wrapped in a baby’s shawl, which she had found in a chest, and appropriated. In front of her was a bowl of milk and cornflakes, and another was before Andrew. He was playing the nursery game. ‘One for Andrew … now one for Tilly … one for Andrew …’
At ‘one for Tilly’ she opened her mouth, while the great anguished blue eyes stared at Andrew. It seemed she did not know how to blink. Andrew tilted in the spoon, and she sat with her lips closed, but not swallowing. Andrew made himself swallow his mouthful, and started again. ‘One for Tilly … one for Andrew …’ Minute amounts of food arrived in Tilly’s mouth, but at least Andrew was getting something down him.
Andrew said to her, ‘Tilly doesn’t eat. No, no, it’s much worse than me. She doesn’t eat at all.’
That was before anorexia was a household word, like sex, and AIDS.
‘Why doesn’t she? Do you know?’ Meaning, please tell me why you find it so hard to eat.
‘In her case I would say it’s her mother.’
‘Not in your case, then?’
‘No, I would say that in my case it’s my father.’ The humorous deprecation, the winning ways of that personality that Eton had created in him, seemed at this moment to have slipped out of alignment with his real self, and become a series of grotesqueries, like out-of-place masks. His eyes stared, sombre, anxious, all appeal.
‘What are we going to do?’ said Frances, as desperate as he was.
‘Just wait, wait a bit, that’s all, it’ll be all right.’
When ‘the kids’ – she really must stop using the phrase – came crowding down to sit around the table, waiting for food, Johnny was not with them. Everyone sat listening to the quarrel that was going on at the top of the house. Shouts, imprecations – words could not be distinguished.
Andrew said, ‘He wants Julia to go and live in his flat and look after Phyllida while he is in Cuba.’
They looked at her, to see her reaction. She was laughing. ‘Oh, my God,’ she said. ‘He’s really not possible.’
Now they glanced at each other – disapproval. All, that is, except Andrew. They admired him, and thought Frances bitter. Andrew said to them, seriously, ‘It simply isn’t on. It’s not fair to ask Julia.’
The top’ of the house, where Julia had her being, was often a subject for mockery, and Julia had been referred to as ‘the old woman’. But since Andrew had been home, and had become friends with Julia, they were having to take their cue from him.
‘Why should she look after Phyllida?’ said Andrew. ‘She’s got her hands full with us.’
This new view of the situation caused a thoughtful silence.
‘She doesn’t like Phyllida,’ said Frances, supporting Andrew. And she suppressed: and she doesn’t like me. She has never liked Johnny’s women.
‘Who could?’ said Geoffrey, and Frances looked at him enquiringly: there was something new here.
‘Phyllida came here this afternoon,’ said Geoffrey.
‘She was looking for you,’ said Andrew.
‘Here? Phyllida?’
‘She’s nuts,’ said Rose. ‘I was here. She’s bonkers. Round the twist.’ And she giggled.
‘What did she want?’ said Frances.
‘I sent her off,’ said Andrew. ‘I told her she shouldn’t be here.’
Upstairs doors were slamming, Johnny was shouting, and he came leaping down the stairs followed by the single word from Julia, ‘Imbecile!’
He arrived, sparking off anger.
‘Old bitch,’ he said, ‘fascist bitch.’
‘The kids’ looked for guidance to Andrew. He was pale, seemed ill. Loud voices – quarrelling – too much for him.
‘Too much,’ said Rose, in admiration of the general unpleasantness.
Andrew said, ‘Tilly’ll be upset again.’ He half rose and Frances appealed, afraid that he would find this an excuse not to eat, ‘Please sit down, Andrew.’ He did, and she was surprised that he obeyed her.
‘Did you know that your … that Phyllida was here?’ said Rose to Johnny, giggling. Her face was flushed, her little black eyes sparkled.
‘What?’ said Johnny, sharp, with a quick glance at Frances. ‘She was here?’
No one said anything.
‘I’ll speak to her,’ said Johnny.
‘Has she got parents?’ asked Frances. ‘She could go home while you’re in Cuba.’
‘She hates them. With good reason. They’re lumpen scum.’
Rose had the back of her hand against her mouth, pressing back more hilarity.
Meanwhile Frances was looking around, taking in who was here this evening. Apart from Geoffrey – well, of course, and Andrew, and Rose, there was Jill, there was Sophie, and she was crying. There was also a boy unknown to her.
At this moment the telephone rang and it was Colin again. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said. ‘Is Sophie there? She must be terribly upset. Let me speak to her.’
This reminded everyone that Sophie had to be upset, because her father had died of cancer last year, and the reason why she was here most evenings was because in her own home her mother wept, and claimed Sophie for grief. Kennedy’s death would of course …
At the telephone Sophie sobbed, and they heard, ‘Oh, Colin, thank you, oh, thank you, you understand, Colin, oh, I knew you would, oh, you are coming, oh, thank you, thank you.’
She returned to her place at the table, saying, ‘Colin’ll catch the last train tonight.’ She buried her face in her hands, long elegant hands pink-tipped in the shade prescribed that week by the fashion arbiters of St Joseph’s, of whom she was one. Long glistening black hair fell to the table, like the thought made visible that she would never ever have to sorrow alone for long.
Rose said sourly, ‘We’re all sorry about Kennedy, aren’t we?’
Shouldn’t Jill be at school? But from St Joseph’s pupils came and went, with little regard for time, tables or exams. When teachers suggested a more disciplined approach, they might be reminded of the principles that had established the school, self-development being the main one. Colin had gone off to school this morning, and was on his way back. Geoffrey had said he might go tomorrow: yes, he was remembering he was head boy. Had Sophie ‘dropped out’ altogether? She certainly seemed to be more often here than there. Jill had been down in the basement with her sleeping bag, coming up for meals. She had told Colin who had told Frances that she needed a break. Daniel had gone back to school, but could be expected to return, if Colin did: any excuse would do. She knew they believed that the moment they turned their backs all kinds of delightfully dramatic events occurred.
There was a new face, at the end of the table, smiling placatingly at her, waiting for her to say, ‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’ But she only put a plate of soup in front of him, and smiled. ‘I’m James,’ he said, flushing. ‘Well, hello James,’ she said. ‘Help yourself to bread – or anything else.’ A large embarrassed hand reached out to take a thick hunk of (healthy) wholemeal. He sat with it in his hand, staring about him with evident delight.
‘James is my friend, well he’s my cousin actually,’ said Rose, managing to be both nervous and aggressive. ‘I said it would be all right if he came … I mean, for supper, I mean …’
Frances saw that here was another refugee from a shitty family, and was mentally checking food she would need to buy tomorrow.
Tonight there were only seven at the table, with herself. Johnny was standing, as stiff as a soldier, at the window. He wanted to be asked to sit down. There was an empty place. She was damned if she was going to ask him, did not care that her reputation with ‘the kids’ would suffer.
‘Before you go,’ she said, ‘tell us, who killed Kennedy.’
Johnny shrugged, for once at a loss.
‘Perhaps it was the Soviets?’ suggested the newcomer, daring to claim his place with them.
‘That is nonsense,’ said Johnny. ‘The Soviet comrades do not go in for terrorism.’
Poor James was abashed.
‘Perhaps it was Castro?’ said Jill. Johnny was already staring coldly at her. ‘I mean, the Bay of Pigs, I mean …’
‘He doesn’t go in for terrorism either,’ said Johnny.
‘Do give me a ring before you leave,’ said Frances. ‘A couple of days, you said?’
But he still wasn’t leaving.
‘It was a loony,’ said Rose. ‘Some loony shot him.’
‘Who paid the loony?’ said James, having recovered again, though he was flushed with the effort of asserting himself.
‘We should not rule out the CIA,’ said Johnny.
‘We should never rule them out,’ said James, and earned approval from Johnny in a smile and a nod. He was a large young man, bulky, and surely older than Rose, older than any of them, except perhaps Andrew? Rose saw Frances’s inspection of James, and reacted at once: she was always on the alert for criticism. She said, ‘James is into politics. He is my elder brother’s friend. He is a drop-out.’
‘Well blow me down,’ said Frances, ‘what a surprise.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Rose, frantic, angry. ‘Why did you say that?’
‘Oh, Rose, it’s just a joke.’
‘She makes jokes,’ said Andrew, interpreting his mother, as it were vouching for her.
‘And talking about jokes,’ said Frances. When they had all run upstairs to watch the television news, she had seen on the floor two large carrier bags filled with books. She now indicated these to Geoffrey, who could not suppress a proud smile. ‘A good haul today I see?’ she said.
Everyone laughed. Most of them shoplifted in an impulsive way, but Geoffrey made a business of it. He went regularly around bookshops, pilfering. School textbooks when he could, but anything he could get away with. He called it ‘liberating’ them. It was a Second World War joke, and a wistful link with his father, who had been a bomber pilot. Geoffrey had told Colin that he thought his father had not really noticed anything since the end of that war. ‘Certainly not my mother or me.’ His father might just as well have died in that war for all the good his family got of him. ‘Join the club,’ was what Colin had said. ‘The War, the Revolution, what’s the difference?’
‘God bless Foyle’s,’ said Geoffrey. ‘I’ve liberated more there than anywhere else in London. A benefactor to humankind, is Foyle’s.’ But he was glancing nervously at Frances. He said, ‘Frances doesn’t approve.’
They knew Frances didn’t approve. She often said, ‘It’s my unfortunate upbringing. I was brought up to think stealing is wrong.’ Now, whenever she or anyone else criticised or did not go along with the others, they would chant, ‘It’s your unfortunate upbringing.’ Then Andrew had said, ‘That joke’s getting a bit tired.’
There had been a wild half-hour of variations on tired jokes with unfortunate upbringings.
Now Johnny began on his familiar lecture, ‘That’s right, you take anything you can get from the capitalists. They’ve stolen it all from you in the first place.’
‘Surely not from us?’ – Andrew challenged his father.
‘Stolen from the working people. The ordinary people. Take them for what you can get, the bastards.’
Andrew had never shoplifted, thought it inferior behaviour fit only for oiks, and said in a direct challenge, ‘Shouldn’t you be getting back to Phyllida?’
Frances could be ignored, but his son’s rebuke took Johnny to the door. ‘Never forget,’ he admonished them generally, ‘you should be checking everything you do, every word, every thought, against the needs of the Revolution.’
‘So what did you get today?’ Rose asked Geoffrey. She admired him almost as much as she did Johnny.
Geoffrey took books out of the carrier bags and made a tower of them on the table.
They clapped. Not Frances, not Andrew.
Frances took from her briefcase one of the letters to the newspaper which she had brought home. She read out, ‘“Dear Aunt Vera” … that’s me …”Dear Aunt Vera, I have three children, all at school. Every evening they come home with stolen stuff, mostly sweets and biscuits …” ‘Here the company groaned. ‘“But it can be anything, school books too …” ‘They clapped. ‘ “But today my oldest, the boy, came back with a very expensive pair of jeans.’” They clapped again. “? don’t know what to do. When the door bell rings I think, That’s the police.”’ Frances gave them time for a groan. ‘ “And I am afraid for them. I would very much value your advice, Aunt Vera. I am at my wits’ end.” ‘
She inserted the letter back in its place.
‘And what are you going to advise?’ enquired Andrew.
‘Perhaps you should tell me what to say, Geoffrey. After all, a head boy should be well up in these things.’
‘Oh, don’t be like that, Frances,’ said Rose.
‘Oh,’ groaned Geoffrey, his head in his hands, making his shoulders heave as if with sobs, ‘she takes it seriously.’
‘I do take it seriously,’ said Frances. ‘It’s stealing. You are thieves,’ she said to Geoffrey, with the freedom licensed by his practically living with them, for years. ‘You are a thief. That’s all. I’m not Johnny,’ she said.
Now a real dismayed silence. Rose giggled. The newcomer’s, James’s, scarlet face was as good as a confession.
Sophie cried out, ‘But, Frances, I didn’t know you disapproved of us so much.’
‘Well, I do,’ said Frances, her face and voice softening, because it was Sophie. ‘So now you know.’
‘It’s her unfortunate upbringing …’ began Rose, but desisted, on a look from Andrew.
‘And now I’m going to catch the news, and I have to work.’ She went out, saying, ‘Sleep well, everyone.’ Giving permission, in this way, to anyone, James for instance, who might be hoping to stay the night.
She did catch the news, briefly. It seemed that some madman had shot Kennedy. As far as she was concerned, another public man was dead. He probably deserved it. She would never have allowed herself to voice this thought, so very far from the spirit of the times. It sometimes seemed to her that the one useful thing she had learned in her long association with Johnny, was how to keep quiet about what she thought.
Before settling down to work which, this evening, would be going through a hundred or so letters she had brought home, she opened the door to the spare room. Silence and dark. She tiptoed to the bed and bent over a shape under the bedclothes that could have been a child’s. And, yes, Tilly had her thumb in her mouth.
‘I’m not asleep,’ said a little voice.
‘I’m worried about you,’ said Frances, and heard her voice shake: she had promised herself not to get emotionally involved, because what good would that do? ‘If I made you a cup of hot chocolate, would you like that?’
‘I’ll try.’
Frances made chocolate in her study, where she had a kettle and basic supplies, and took it to the girl, who said, ‘I don’t want you to think I’m not grateful.’
‘Shall I put the light on? Do you want to try drinking it now?’
‘Put it on the floor.’
Frances did so, knowing that most likely the cup would be there, untouched, in the morning.
She worked until late. She heard Colin come in, and then he and Sophie went to the big sofa, where they sat talking – she could hear them, or at least their voices, just below hers: the old red sofa was immediately under her desk. Immediately over it was Colin’s bed. She heard their lowered voices, and then careful footsteps just above her. Well, she was sure Colin knew how to be careful: he had said so, loudly, to his brother, who lectured him on these matters.
Sophie was sixteen. Frances wanted to put her arms around the girl and protect her. Well, she never felt anything like that about Rose, Jill, Lucy, or the other young females who drifted in and out of this house. So why Sophie? She was so beautiful, that was it: that was what she wanted to guard and keep safe. And what nonsense that was – she, Frances, should be ashamed. She was ashamed about a good deal, this evening. She opened the door, and listened. Down in the kitchen, there seemed to be more than Andrew, Rose, James … she would find out tomorrow.
She slept restlessly, twice went across the landing to see how Tilly was doing; on one occasion found a very dark room, stillness, and the faint stuffy smell of chocolate. Once she saw Andrew retreating upstairs from a similar mission, and went back to bed. She lay awake. The trouble was, the shoplifting. When Colin first went to St Joseph’s after his not very good comprehensive, articles she knew were not his began appearing, nothing much, a T-shirt, packets of biros, a record. She remembered being impressed that he had stolen an anthology of verse. She remonstrated. He complained that everyone did it and she was a square. Do not imagine the issue rested there. This was a progressive school! One of the first wave of schoolfriends, who came and went, but much less freely, since after all they were younger, a girl called Petula, informed Frances that Colin was stealing love: the housemaster had said so. This was discussed noisily at the supper table. No, not the love of her parents, but that of the headmaster, who had ticked off Colin for something or other. Geoffrey, already more or less a fixture then, five years ago, more, was proud of what he garnered from the shops. She had been shocked, but had not said more than, Well, then, don’t get caught. If she had not said, Don’t do it, that was because she would not have been obeyed, but also because she had no idea then of how prevalent it would become, shoplifting. And, too, and that was what now kept her awake, she had liked being one of them, the trendy youngsters who were the new arbiters of modes and morals. There was – had been – undoubtedly a feeling of we against them. Petula, that sparky girl (now in a school for diplomats’ children in Hong Kong) had said that stealing without being caught was an initiation rite, and adults should understand that.
Today Frances was going to have to write a solid, long, and balanced article on this very subject. She was actually regretting she had ever said yes to this new job. She was going to have to take a stand on any number of issues, and it was her nature to see opposing points of view, and refuse to say more than, ‘Yes, it’s all very difficult.’
Recently she had come to see stealing as very definitely wrong, and not because of her unfortunate upbringing, but because of listening for years to Johnny urging all kinds of anti-social behaviour, rather like a guerilla leader: hit and run. One day a simple truth had arrived in her mind. He wanted to pull everything down about his ears, like Samson. That was what it was all about. ‘The Revolution’ which he and his mates never stopped talking about would be like directing a flame-thrower over everything, leaving scorched earth, and then – well, simple – he and the mates would rebuild the world in their image. Once seen it was obvious, but the thought then had to be faced: how could people unable to organise their own lives, who lived in permanent disarray, build anything worthwhile? This seditious thought – and it was years in advance of its time, at least in any circles she had been introduced to – lived side by side with an emotion she hardly knew was there. She thought Johnny was … no need to spell that out … she had become very clear about what she thought, but at the same time she relied on an aura of hopeful optimism that surrounded him, the comrades, everything they did. She did believe – but hardly knew she did – that the world was going to get better and better, that they were all on an escalator of Progress, and that present ills would slowly dissolve away, and everyone in the world would find themselves in a happy healthy time. And when she stood in the kitchen, producing dishes of food for ‘the kids’, seeing all those young faces, listening to their irreverent confident voices, she felt that she was guaranteeing this future for them, in a silent promise. Where had this promise originated? From Johnny, she had absorbed it from Comrade Johnny, and while her mind was set in criticising him, more and more every day, she relied emotionally without knowing it on Johnny and his brave sweet new worlds.
In a few hours she would sit down and write her article and say what?
If she had not taken a stand against stealing, in her own home, and even when she had come most strongly to disapprove, then what right had she to tell other people what to do?
And how confused these poor children were. As she had left the kitchen last night she had heard them laughing, but uneasily; had heard James’s voice louder than the others, because he wanted so much to be accepted by all these free spirits. Poor boy, he had fled from boringly provincial parents (as she had) to the delights of Swinging London, and a house described by Rose as Freedom Hall – she loved the phrase – where he had heard exactly the same condemnation – he was bound to be stealing, they all did – as he had from his parents.
It was nine o’clock by now, late for her. She must get up. She opened the door on to the landing and saw Andrew sitting on the floor where he could look across at the door of the room where the girl was. It was open. He mouthed up at her: Look, just look.
Pale November sun fell into the room opposite, where a slight erect figure with an aureole of fair hair, in an old-fashioned pink garment – a housecoat? – was perched on a high stool. If Philip were to see this vision now, how easily he could have been persuaded that this was the girl Julia, his long-ago love. On the bed, wrapped tight in her baby’s shawl, Tilly was held up by pillows, and staring with her unblinking gaze at the old woman.
‘No,’ came Julia’s cool precise voice, ‘no, your name is not Tilly. That is a very foolish name. What is your real name?’
‘Sylvia,’ lisped the girl.
‘So, why do you call yourself Tilly?’
‘I couldn’t say Sylvia when I was little, so I said Tilly.’ These were more words than any of them had heard from her, at one time.
‘Very well. I shall call you Sylvia.’
Julia had in her hand a mug of something with a spoon in it. Now she carefully, beautifully, caused an appropriate amount of the mug’s contents – there was a smell of soup – to fill the spoon, which she held to Tilly’s, or Sylvia’s, lips. Which were tight shut.
‘Now, listen carefully to me. I am not going to let you kill yourself because you are foolish. I won’t allow it. And now you must open your mouth and begin eating.’
The pale lips trembled a little, but opened, and all the while the girl was staring at Julia, apparently hypnotised. The spoon was inserted, and its contents disappeared. The watchers waited, breathless, to see if there was a swallowing movement. There was.
Frances glanced down at her son and saw that he was swallowing in sympathy.
‘You see,’ Julia was going on, while the spoon was again being recharged, ‘I am your step-grandmother. I do not allow my children and grandchildren to behave so foolishly. You must understand me, Sylvia …’ In went the spoon – a swallow. And again Andrew made a swallowing movement. ‘You are a very pretty clever girl …’
‘I’m horrible,’ came from the pillows.
‘I don’t think you are. But if you have decided to be horrible then you will be, and I won’t allow that.’
The spoon went in, a swallow.
‘First, I shall make you well again, and then you will go to school and take your examinations. After that you will go to university and be a doctor. Now I am sorry I wasn’t a doctor, but you can be a doctor in my place.’
‘I can’t. I can’t. I can’t go back to school.’
‘Why can’t you? Andrew has told me that you were clever at your lessons, before you became foolish. And now take this cup and drink the rest by yourself.’
The observers hardly breathed, at this moment of – surely? – crisis. Suppose Tilly-Sylvia refused the cup with its life-giving soup, and put that thumb back in her mouth? Suppose she shut her lips tight? Julia was holding the mug against the hand that was not clutching the shawl around her. ‘Take it.’ The hand trembled, but opened. Julia put the mug carefully into the hand, and held the hand around the cup. The hand did lift, the cup reached the lips and over it came the whisper, ‘But it’s so hard.’
‘I know it’s hard.’
The trembling hand was holding the cup to her lips, while Julia steadied it. The girl took a sip, swallowed. ‘I’m going to be sick,’ she whispered.
‘No, you are not. Stop it, Sylvia.’
Again Frances and her son waited, holding their breaths. Sylvia wasn’t sick, though she had to conquer retching, when Julia said, ‘Stop it.’
Meanwhile, down the stairs from the ‘boys’ floor’ came Colin, and behind him, Sophie. The two stopped. Colin was blushing bright red, and Sophie was half laughing, half crying, and seemed about to run back upstairs, but instead came to Frances, put her arms around her, and said, ‘Dear, dear Frances,’ and ran off down the stairs, laughing.
‘It’s not what you think,’ said Colin.
‘I’m not thinking anything,’ said Frances.
Andrew merely smiled, keeping his counsel.
Now Colin saw the little scene through the door, took it in, and said, ‘Good for Grandma,’ and went off down the stairs in big leaps.
Julia who had taken no notice of her audience, got down from the stool, and smoothed down her skirts. She took the mug from the girl. ‘I’m going to come back in an hour and see how you are,’ she said. ‘And then I’ll take you up to my bathroom, and you can put on clean clothes. You’ll be better in no time, you’ll see.’
She picked up the cup of cold chocolate left last night by Frances, and came out of the room and handed it to her. ‘I think this is yours,’ she said. And then, to Andrew, ‘And you can stop being foolish too.’ She left the door into the room open, and went up the stairs, holding up her pink skirt, which rustled, with one hand.
‘So that’s all right,’ said Andrew to his mother. ‘Well done, Sylvia,’ he called to the girl, who smiled, if weakly. He ran upstairs. Frances heard one door shut, Julia’s and then another, Andrew’s. In the room opposite a blotch of sunlight lay on a pillow, and Sylvia, for there is no doubt that this was who she was now, held her hand in it, turning it back and forth, examining it.
At this moment there was a banging on the front door, the bell rang repeatedly, and a woman’s voice was shouting. The girl sitting in the sun on her bed let out a cry, and dived under the bedclothes.
As the door opened, the shout of ‘Let me in’ could be heard through the house. A hoarse hysterical voice, ‘Let me in, let me in.’
in:
Andrew’s door opened with a bang, and he came leaping down the stairs saying, ‘Leave this to me, oh, Christ, shut Tilly’s door.’ Frances shut the door, as Julia called down, ‘What is it, who is it?’ Andrew called up to her, but softly, ‘Her mother, Tilly’s mother.’
‘Then I am sorry to say that Sylvia will have a setback,’ said Julia, and continued to stand there, on guard.
Frances was still in her nightdress, and she went into her room, and dragged on jeans and a jersey and ran down the stairs towards voices in altercation.
‘Where is she? I want Frances,’ shouted Phyllida, while Andrew was saying quietly, ‘Hush, don’t shout, I’ll get her.’
‘I’m here,’ said Frances.
Phyllida was a tall woman, thin as a bone, with a mass of badly dyed reddish hair, and long needle nails, painted bright purple. She pointed a large angry hand at Frances and said, ‘I want my daughter. You have stolen my daughter.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Andrew, hovering about the hysterical woman like an insect trying to decide where it should dart in. He laid a calming hand on Phyllida’s shoulder but she shook it off, and Andrew shouted at her, suddenly out of control and surprised at himself. ‘Stop it.’ He leaned back against a wall, composing himself. He was trembling.
‘And what about me?’ demanded Phyllida. ‘Who is going to look after me?’
Frances found that she was trembling too; her heart thumped, her breathing was tight: she and Andrew were being affected by this dynamo of emotional energy. And in fact Phyllida, whose eyes stared blankly like a ship’s figurehead’s, who stood there erect and triumphant, seemed calmer than they were.
‘It’s not fair,’ announced Phyllida, pointing her purple talons at Frances. ‘Why should she come to live here and not me?’
Andrew had recovered. ‘Now, Phyllida,’ he said, and the humorous smile that protected him was back in place, ‘Phyllida, you really can’t do this, you know.’
‘Why shouldn’t I? she asked, turning her attention to him. ‘Why should she have a home and not me?’
‘But you have a home,’ said Andrew. ‘I’ve visited you there, don’t you remember?’
‘But he’s going away and leaving me.’ Then, shrieking, ‘He’s going away and leaving me alone.’ Then, more calmly, to Frances, ‘Did you know that? Well, did you? He’s going to leave me the way he left you.’
This rational remark seemed to prove to Frances how thoroughly the hysteria had transferred itself to her: she was shaking and her knees were weak.
‘Well, why don’t you say something?’
‘I don’t know what to say,’ Frances brought out. ‘I don’t know why you are here.’
‘Why? You actually have the nerve to ask why?’ And she began shouting, ‘Tilly, Tilly, where are you?’
‘Leave her alone,’ said Andrew. ‘You always complain you can’t handle her, so let us have a shot at it.’
‘But she’s here. She’s here. And what about me? Who is going to look after me?’
This cycle was likely to continue.
Andrew said quietly, but his voice was shaking, ‘You can’t expect Frances to look after you. Why should she?’
‘But what about me? What about me?’ Now it was more of a grumble, and for the first time those angry eyes seemed actually to see Frances. ‘It’s not as if you’re Brigitte Bardot, are you? So why does he come here all the time?’
This threw an unexpected light on things. Frances was unable to speak.
Andrew said, ‘He comes here because we are here, Phyllida. We are his sons, remember? Colin and I – have you forgotten us?’
It seemed she had. And suddenly, having stood there for a few moments, she lowered that outstretched accusing finger, and stood blinking, apparently coming awake. Then she turned and slammed out of the door.
Frances felt her whole self go loose. She was shaking so she had to lean against the wall. Andrew stood limply there, pitifully smiling. She thought, But he’s too young to cope with this sort of thing. She staggered to the kitchen door, held on to it while she went in, and saw Colin and Sophie at the table, eating toast.
Colin, she could see, was in his mood of disapproving of her. Sophie had been crying again.
‘Well,’ said Colin, coldly furious, ‘what do you expect?’
‘What do you mean?’ said Frances, absurdly, but she was trying to gain time. She slid into her chair and sat with her head in her arms. She knew what he meant. It was a general accusation: that she and his father had screwed things up, that she was not a conventional comfortable mother, like other mothers, and there was this bohemian household, which he had moods of violently resenting, while admitting he enjoyed it.
‘She just comes here,’ said Colin, ‘she just turns up and makes a scene and now we have to look after Tilly.’
‘She wants to be called Sylvia,’ said Andrew, who had come in and was at the table.
‘I don’t care what she’s called,’ said Colin. ‘Why is she here?’
And now he was tearful, and looked like a ruffled little owl, with his black-rimmed spectacles. If Andrew was all length and leanness, then Colin was round, with a soft open face, which was at this moment puffy with crying. Now Frances understood that all last night these two, Colin and Sophie, had probably lain in each other’s arms weeping, she for her dead father, and he for his misery over – well, everything.
Andrew, who like Frances was still cold and shaking, said, ‘But why take it out on Mother? It’s not her fault.’
If something were not done the brothers would start quarrelling; they often did, always because Andrew took Frances’s side, while Colin accused her.
Frances said, ‘Sophie, please make me a cup of tea – and I am sure Andrew could do with one.’
‘God, could I,’ said Andrew.
Sophie jumped up, pleased at being asked. Colin, having lost the support of her being there, just opposite him, sat blinking vaguely about, so unhappy that Frances wanted to take him in her arms … but he would never tolerate that.
Andrew said, ‘I’ll go and see Phyllida later. She’ll have calmed down. She’s not so bad when she’s not in a state.’ And then he jumped up. ‘Christ, I’d forgotten Tilly, I mean Sylvia, and she’ll have heard. She goes to pieces when her mother starts in on her.’
‘And I am certainly in pieces,’ said Frances. ‘I can’t stop shaking.’
Andrew ran out of the room, but did not return. Julia had descended to sit with Sylvia, who hid beneath the clothes, wailing, ‘Keep her away, keep her away,’ while Julia said over and over again, ‘Shhhh, be quiet. She’ll go in a minute.’
Frances drank tea in silence while her shaking subsided. If she had read in a book that hysteria was contagious she would have said, Well, yes, that makes sense! But she had not experienced it. She was thinking, If that’s what Tilly has been living with, no wonder she’s in a mess.
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 Hider, 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 hen, 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. AJI 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 riming 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.
‘We know what we are …’ (Oh, no, we don’t!) ‘… but not what we may be.’
Once she would have found it hard to believe that she could live chaste, without a man in prospect … but she still cherished fantasies about a man in her life who would not be a mad egotist, like Johnny. But what man would want to take on a tribe of youngsters all ‘disturbed’ for one reason or another. Here they were, congratulated on living in Swinging London, promised everything the advertisers of at least two continents could think up, yet if ‘the kids’ did swing – and they did, they were off to the big jazz concert on Saturday, tomorrow – then they were screwed up, and two of them, her sons, because of her and Johnny. And the war, of course.
Frances took up her burden, heavily loaded carrier bags, paid her bill, went home up the hill.
A pearly post-Clean Air Act fog floated outside the windows and bedewed the hair and eyelashes of ‘the kids’ who came into the house laughing and embracing each other like survivors. Damp duffel-coats loaded the banisters, and all the chairs around the table except two on Frances’s left, were occupied. Colin had sat down by Sophie, saw that he would be next to his brother in the third empty chair, and quickly moved to the end where he stood by Geoffrey, who sat opposite Frances, and now Colin claimed the important chair by pushing Geoffrey out with a thrust of his buttocks. A schoolboy moment, rough and raw, too young for their almost adult status. Geoffrey then came to sit on Frances’s right, without looking at Colin. Sophie suffered from any discord, and she got up to go to Colin, bent to slide an arm around him, and kissed his cheek. He did not permit himself to smile, but then could not prevent a weak and loving smile at her which then included everyone. They all laughed. Rose … James … Jill – these three seemed to be ensconced in the basement; Daniel was next to Geoffrey, head boy and his deputy. Lucy was next to Daniel, having come up from Dartington to spend the weekend with him, here. Twelve places. They were all waiting, ravenously eating bread, sniffing the smells that came from the stove. At last Andrew came in, his arm around Sylvia. She was still inside the baby shawl, but wore clean jeans, that were loose on her, and a jersey of Andrew’s. Her pale wispy hair had been brushed up, making her look even more infantile. But she was smiling, though her lips trembled.
Colin, who resented her being here at all, got up, smiling, and made her a little bow. ‘Welcome, Sylvia,’ he said, and tears came into her eyes at their chorus of ‘Hello, Sylvia.’
She sat down next to Frances, and Andrew was next to her. The meal could begin. In a moment dishes filled all the space down the table. Colin got up to pour wine, forestalling Geoffrey, who was about to do it, while Frances put food on to plates. A moment of crisis: she had reached Andrew, and next would be Sylvia. Andrew said, ‘Let me,’ and there began a little play. On to his plate he put a single carrot, and on to Sylvia’s, a carrot. He was solemn, frowning, judicious, and already Sylvia was beginning to laugh, though her lips still made nervous painful little movements. On to his plate, a little spoon of cabbage, and one for her, ignoring the hand that had gone up instinctively to stop him. For him, a mere sample of the mince, and the same for her. And then, with an air of recklessness, a rather big lump of potato for her, and for him. They were all laughing. Sylvia sat looking at her plate, but Andrew, with a determined let’s-get-this-over look, had taken up a spoon of potato and waited for her to do the same. She did – and swallowed.
Now, trying not to watch what went on, as Andrew and Sylvia fought with themselves, Frances raised her glass of Rioja – seven shillings a bottle, for this pleasant wine had yet to be ‘discovered’ – and drank a toast to Progressive Education, an old joke which they all enjoyed.
‘Where’s Julia?’ came Sylvia’s little voice.
An anxious silence. Then Andrew said, ‘She doesn’t come to meals with us.’
‘Why doesn’t she? Why not? It’s so lovely with you.’
This was a moment of real breakthrough, as Andrew described it later to Julia – ‘We’ve won, Julia, yes, we really have.’ Frances was gratified: she actually had tears in her eyes. Andrew put his arm around Sylvia and, smiling at his mother, said, ‘Yes, it is. But Julia prefers to be up there by herself.’
Having unwittingly created a picture of what must be loneliness, it struck him, and he jumped up and said, ‘I’ll go and ask her again.’ This was partly to relieve him of the burden and the challenge of his still scarcely touched plate. As he went out and up the stairs, Sylvia put down her spoon.
In a moment Andrew returned, and sat down with, ‘She says perhaps she’ll drop in later.’
This caused a moment not far from panic. In spite of Andrew’s efforts on his grandmother’s behalf, they all tended to see Julia as a kind of old witch, to be laughed at. The St Joseph’s contingent could not know how Julia had wrestled for a week, two, with Sylvia’s illness, sitting with her, bathing her, making her take mouthfuls of this and sips of that. Julia had hardly slept. And here was her reward, Sylvia, picking up her spoon again, watching Andrew lift his, as if she had forgotten how to use one.
The difficult moment passed, the kids appeased their teenage appetites, and Frances ate more than she usually would, to be an example to the two on her left. It was a wonderful evening, with an undertone of tenderness because of Sylvia and their concern for her. It was as if they were collectively putting their arms around her, while she got down one mouthful after another. Andrew too.
And then they saw she had gone white and was shaking. ‘My father …’ she whispered. ‘I mean, it’s my stepfather …’
‘Oh, no,’ said Colin, ‘it’s all right, he’s gone to Cuba.’
‘I’m afraid not,’ said Andrew, and leaped up to intercept Johnny, who was in the hall outside the kitchen. Andrew shut the door, but everyone could hear Johnny’s bluff, reasonable, confident voice, and Andrew: ‘No, father, no, you can’t come in, I’ll explain later.’
Voices loud, then low, and Andrew returned, leaving the door open, and slid down again beside Sylvia. He was red and angry, and he clutched his fork like a weapon.
‘But why isn’t he in Cuba?’ asked Colin, petulantly, like a child.
The brothers looked at each other, suddenly as one, exchanging understandings.
Andrew said, ‘He hasn’t left, but I expect he will.’ He added, still angry, ‘Actually, I think he’s going to Zanzibar – or Kenya.’ A pause, while the brothers communed, with their eyes and angry smiles. ‘He’s not alone, he’s got a black man … a man from there … an African comrade.’ These adjustments to the spirit of the times were followed carefully by the company. They had taken Africa into their hearts and consciences, the progressive schools had seen to that, and even Rose at a far from progressive school chose her words with, ‘We’ve got to be nice to dark-skinned people, that’s what I think.’
Sylvia had not recovered. Her spoon hung listless in her thin hand.
And now James, who was understandably at a loss, said, ‘Why is he going to Africa instead of Cuba?’
At this the brothers laughed, together, and it was not pleasant, while Frances prevented herself from joining in, though she would have liked to. She had always tried never to criticise Johnny in public.
Colin said, like an orator, ‘Keep them guessing,’ and Frances, hearing the quote, had to laugh. ‘That’s it,’ said Andrew, ‘keep them guessing.’
‘Why are you laughing?’ asked Sylvia, ‘what’s funny?’
Andrew at once stopped his mockery, and picked up his spoon again. But it was over, their meal, his and Sylvia’s. ‘Johnny’s coming,’ he said to her. ‘He’s just getting something from the car. If you want to get out of the way …’
‘Oh, yes, I do, yes, please,’ said Johnny’s stepdaughter, and up she got, supported by Andrew’s arm. The two went out. At least they had both eaten something.
Frances called after them, ‘Tell Julia not to come down, otherwise they’ll quarrel again.’
The meal continued, subdued.
The St Joseph contingent were talking about a book Daniel had stolen from a secondhand bookstall, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. He had read it, said it was groovy, and the tyrannical father was just like his. He recommended it to Geoffrey who pleased him by saying it was great, and then the novel migrated to Sophie who said it was the best book she had ever read, it made her cry. Now Colin was reading it. Rose said, ‘Why can’t I read it? It isn’t fair.’
‘It’s not the only copy in the world,’ said Colin.
‘I’ve got a copy, I’ll lend it to you,’ said Frances.
‘Oh, Frances, thank you, you’re so sweet to me.’
This meant, as everyone knew, I hope you are going to go on being sweet to me.
Frances said, ‘I’ll get it,’ to have an excuse to go out of that room which so soon would swirl with discordant currents. And everything had been so nice until now … She went up to the room just over the kitchen, the sitting-room, found The Ordeal of Richard Feverel in a wall of books, turned and saw that Julia was sitting there alone in the half dark. Not since Frances had taken over the lower part of the house had she found Julia in this room. Now, ideally, she should sit down and try to make friends with Julia, but as always, she was in a hurry.
‘I was on my way down to you all,’ said Julia, ‘but I hear Johnny has arrived.’
‘I don’t see how I can stop him coming,’ said Frances. She was listening downwards, to the kitchen – were they all right there, no quarrels? Upwards … was Sylvia all right?
Julia said, ‘He has a home. It seems to me that he is not often in it.’
‘Well,’ said Frances, ‘if Phyllida is in it, who can blame him?’
She had hoped that this might make Julia at least smile, but instead she was going on, ‘I must say this …’ And Frances waited for what she was sure would be a dose of disapproval. ‘You are so weak with Johnny. He has treated you abominably.’
Frances was thinking, Then why give him the key to the house? – though she knew the mother could hardly say to the son that he couldn’t have a key to a house he thought of as his own. Besides, what about the boys? She said, trying to joke a little, ‘Perhaps we could have the locks changed?’
But Julia took it seriously with, ‘I would see to it if I did not think you would at once give him a new key.’ She got up, and Frances, who had been planning to sit down, saw another opportunity slide away.
‘Julia,’ said Frances, ‘you always criticise me, but you don’t support me.’ And what did she mean by that, except that Julia made her feel like a schoolgirl deficient in everything.
‘What are you saying?’ said Julia. ‘I do not understand.’ She was furious, and hurt.
‘I don’t mean … you have been so good … you are always so generous … no, all I meant was …’
‘I do not believe that I have been lacking in my responsibilities to the family,’ said Julia, and Frances heard, incredulously, that Julia might easily cry. She had hurt Julia, and it was the fact that this was possible that made her stammer, ‘Julia … but Julia … you are wrong, I didn’t mean …’ And then, ‘Oh, Julia,’ in a different tone, which made Julia stop on her way out of the room to examine her, as if she was prepared to be touched, reached: even to reach out herself.
But downstairs a door slammed, and Frances exclaimed, in despair, ‘There he is, it’s Johnny.’
‘Yes, it’s Comrade Johnny,’ said Julia, departing upstairs.
Frances went down into the kitchen and found Johnny in his usual position, standing back to the window, and with him was a handsome black man wearing clothes more expensive than anyone else’s, smiling as Johnny introduced him, ‘This is Comrade Mo, from East Africa.’
Frances sat, pushing the novel across the table at Rose, but she was staring in admiration at Comrade Mo, and at Johnny, who resumed his lecture to impress Comrade Mo, on the history of East Africa and the Arabs.
And now Frances was in a dilemma. She did not want to ask Johnny to sit down. She had asked him – though Julia would never believe this – not to drop in at mealtimes, and to telephone before he came. But here was this guest and of course she must …
‘Would you like something to eat?’ she asked, and Comrade Mo rubbed his hands together and laughed and said he was starving, and at once sat down in the chair next to her. Johnny, invited to sit, said he would just have a glass of wine – he had brought a bottle. Where Andrew and Sylvia had sat, minutes before, now sat Comrades Mo and Johnny, and the two men put on their plates all that was left of the pie, and the vegetables.
Frances was angry to the point where one is dispirited with it: what was the point, ever, of being angry with Johnny? It was obvious he had not eaten for days, he was cramming in bread, taking great mouthfuls of wine, refilling his glass and Comrade Mo’s, in between forkfuls from his plate. The youngsters were seeing appetites even greater than their own.
‘I’ll serve the pudding,’ said Frances, her voice dull with rage.
On to the table now went plates of sticky delights from the Cypriot shops, concoctions of honey and nuts and filo pastry, and dishes of fruit, and her chocolate pudding, made especially for ‘the kids’.
Colin, having stared at his father, and then at his mother: Why did you let him sit down? Why do you let him … ? now got up, scraping back his chair, and pushing it back against the wall with a bang. He went out.
‘I feel this is a real home from home,’ said Comrade Mo, consuming chocolate pudding. ‘And I do not know these cakes? Are they like some cakes we have from the Arab cuisine?’
‘Cypriot,’ said Johnny, ‘almost certainly influenced from the East …’ and began a lecture on the cuisines of the Mediterranean.
They were all listening, fascinated: no one could say that Johnny was dull when not talking about politics, but it was too good to last. Soon he was on to Kennedy’s murder, and the probable roles of the CIA and the FBI. From there he went on to the American plans to take over Africa, and in proof told them that Comrade Mo had been propositioned by the CIA offering vast sums of money. All his teeth and gums showing, Comrade Mo confirmed this, with pride. An agent of the CIA in Nairobi had approached him with offers to finance his party, in return for information. ‘And how did you know he was CIA?’James wanted to know, and Comrade Mo said that ‘everyone knew’ the CIA roamed around Africa, like a lion seeking its prey. He laughed, delightedly, looking around for approval. ‘You should all come and visit us. Come and see for yourself and have a good time,’ he said, having little idea he was describing a glorious future. ‘Johnny has promised to come.’
‘Oh, I thought he was going now – at once?’ said James, and now Comrade Mo’s eyes rolled in enquiry to Johnny, while he said, ‘Comrade Johnny’s welcome any time.’
‘So, you didn’t tell Andrew you were going to Africa?’ asked Frances, to elicit the reply, ‘Keep them guessing.’ And Johnny smiled and offered them the aphorism, ‘Always keep them guessing.’
‘Who?’ Rose wanted to know.
‘Obviously, Rose, the CIA,’ said Frances.
‘Oh, yes, the CIA,’ said James, ‘of course.’ He was absorbing information, as was his talent and his intention.
‘Keep them guessing,’ said Johnny. And, in his severest manner to his willing disciple, James, ‘In politics you should never let your left hand know what your right hand does.’
‘Or perhaps,’ said Frances, ‘what your left hand does.’
Ignoring her: ‘You should always cover your tracks, Comrade James. You should never make things easy for the enemy.’
‘Perhaps I shall come to Cuba too?’ said Mo. ‘Comrade Fidel is encouraging links with the liberated African countries.’
‘And even the non-liberated ones,’ said Johnny, letting them all in on secrets of policy.
‘What are you going to Cuba for?’ asked Daniel, really wanting to know, confronting Johnny across the table with his inflammatory red hair, his freckles, and eyes always strained by the knowledge that he was not worthy to lick the boots of – for instance, Geoffrey. Or Johnny.
James said to him, ‘One should not ask that kind of question,’ and looked to Johnny for approval.
‘Exactly,’ said Johnny. He got up, and resumed his lecturer’s position, back to the window, at ease, but on the alert.
‘I want to see a country that has known only slavery and subjection build freedom, build a new society. Fidel has done miracles in five years, but the next five years will show a real change. I am looking forward to taking Andrew and Colin, taking my sons, to see for themselves … Where are they, by the way?’ For he had not noticed their absence until now.
‘Andrew is with Sylvia,’ said Frances. ‘We are going to have to call her that now.’
‘Why, has she changed her name?’
‘That is her name,’ said Rose, sullen: she continually said she hated her name and wanted to be called Marilyn.
‘I have only really known her as Tilly,’ said Johnny, with a whimsical air that momentarily recalled Andrew. ‘Well, then, where’s Colin?’
‘Doing homework,’ said Frances. A likely story, though Johnny would not know that.
Johnny was fidgeting. His sons were his favourite audience, and he did not know what a critical one it was.
‘Can you go to Cuba, just like that, as a tourist?’ asked James, evidently disapproving of tourists and their frivolity.
‘He’s not going as a tourist,’ said Comrade Mo. Feeling out of place at the table, while his comrade-in-arms stood in front of them, he got up and lounged there by Johnny. ‘Fidel invited him.’
This was the first Frances had heard of it.
‘And he invited you too,’ said Comrade Mo.
Johnny was clearly displeased: he had not wanted this to be revealed.
Comrade Mo said, ‘A friend of Fidel’s is in Kenya for the Independence celebrations, and he told me that Fidel wants to invite Johnny and Johnny’s wife.’
‘He must mean Phyllida.’
‘No, it was you. He said Comrade Johnny and Comrade Frances.’
Johnny was furious. ‘Comrade Fidel is clearly unaware of Frances’s indifference to world affairs.’
‘No,’ said Comrade Mo, not noticing apparently that Johnny was about to explode, just at his elbow. ‘He said he had heard she is a famous actress, and she is welcome to start a theatre group in Havana. And I’ll add our invitation to that. You could start a revolutionary theatre in Nairobi.’
‘Oh, Frances,’ breathed Sophie, clasping her hands together, her eyes melting with pleasure, ‘how wonderful, how absolutely wonderful.’
‘Frances’s line seems rather more, to be advice on family problems,’ said Johnny, and, firmly putting an end to this nonsense, raised his voice, addressing the young ones, ‘You are a fortunate generation,’ he told them. ‘You will be building a new world, you young comrades. You have the capacity to see through all the old shams, the lies, the delusions – you can overturn the past, destroy it, build anew … this country has two main aspects. On the one hand it is rich, with a solid and established infrastructure, while on the other, it is full of old-fashioned and stultifying attitudes. That will be the problem. Your problem. I can see the Britain of the future, free, rich, poverty gone, injustice a memory …’
He went on like this for some time, repeating the exhortations that sounded like promises. You will transform the world … it is your generation on whose shoulders the responsibility will fall … the future is in your hands … you will live to see the world a better place, a glorious place, and know that it was your efforts … what a wonderful thing to be your age, now, with everything in your hands …
Young faces, young eyes, shone, adored him and what he was saying. Johnny was in his element, absorbing admiration. He was standing like Lenin, one hand pointing forward into the future, while the other was clenched on his heart.
‘He is a great man,’ he concluded in a soft, reverential voice, gazing severely at them. ‘Fidel is a genuinely great man. He is pointing us all the way into the future.’
One face there showed an incorrect alignment to Johnny: James, who admired Johnny as much as Johnny could possibly wish, was in the grip of a need for instruction.
‘But, Comrade Johnny …’ he said, raising his hand as if in class.
‘And now goodnight,’ said Johnny. ‘I have a meeting. And so has Comrade Mo here.’
His unsmiling but comradely nod excluded Frances, to whom he directed a cold glance. Out he went, followed by Comrade Mo, who said to Frances, ‘Thanks, Comrade. You’ve saved my life. I was really hungry. And now it seems I have a meeting.’
They sat silent, listening to Johnny’s Beetle start up, and leave.
‘Perhaps you could all do the washing-up,’ said Frances. ‘I’ve got to work. Goodnight.’
She lingered to see who would take up this invitation. Geoffrey of course, the good little boy; Jill, who was clearly in love with handsome Geoffrey; Daniel because he was in love with Geoffrey but probably didn’t know it; Lucy … well, all of them, really. Rose?
Rose sat on: she was fucked if she was going to be made use of.
The influences of Christmas Day, that contumacious festival, were spreading dismay as early as the evening of the 12th of December when, to Frances’s surprise, she found she was drinking to the independence of Kenya. James lifted his glass, brimming with Rioja, and said, ‘To Kenyatta, to Kenya, to Freedom.’ As always, his warm friendly, if public, face under the tumbling locks of black hair, sent messages all around of unlimited reservoirs of largesse of feeling. Excited eyes, fervent faces: Johnny’s recent harangues were still reverberating in them.
A vast meal had been consumed, a little of it by Sylvia, who was as always by Frances’s left elbow. In her glass was a stain of red: Andrew had said she must drink a little, it was good for her, and Julia had supported him. The cigarette smoke was denser than usual; it seemed that everyone was smoking tonight, because of the liberation of Kenya. Not Colin, he was batting away waves of smoke as they reached his face. ‘Your lungs wall rot,’ he said. ‘Well, it’s just tonight,’ said Andrew.
‘I’m going to Nairobi for Christmas,’ James announced, looking around, proud but uneasy.
Oh, are your parents going?’ Frances unthinkingly asked, and a silence rebuked her.
‘Is it likely?’ sneered Rose, stubbing out her cigarette and furiously lighting another.
James rebuked her with, ‘My father was fighting in Kenya. He was a soldier. He says it’s a good place.’
‘Oh, so your parents are living there? Or planning to? Are you visiting them?’
‘No, they aren’t living there,’ said Rose. ‘His father is an income tax inspector in Leeds.’
‘So, is that a crime?’ enquired Geoffrey.
‘They are such squares,’ said Rose. ‘You wouldn’t believe it.’
‘They aren’t so bad,’ said James, not liking this. ‘But we have to make allowances for people who are not yet politically conscious.’
‘Oh, so you are going to make your parents politically conscious – don’t make me laugh,’ said Rose.
‘I didn’t say so,’ said James, turning away from his cousin, and towards Frances. ‘I’ve seen Dad’s photographs of Nairobi. It’s groovy. That’s why I’m going.’
Frances understood that there was no need to say anything as crass as, Have you got a passport? A visa? How are you going to pay for it? And you are only seventeen.
James was floating in the arms of a teenage dream, which was not underpinned by boring realities. He would find himself as if by magic in Nairobi’s main street … there he would run into Comrade Mo … be one of a group of loving comrades where he would soon be a leader, making fiery speeches. And, since he was seventeen, there would be a girl. How did he imagine this girl? Black? White? She had no idea. James went on talking about his father’s memories of Kenya. The grim truths of war had been erased, and all that remained were high blue skies, and all that space and a good chap (corrected to a good type) who had saved his father’s life. A black man. An Askari, risking his life for the British soldier.
What had been Frances’s equivalent dream at, not sixteen, she had been a busy schoolgirl; but nineteen? Yes, she was pretty sure she had had fantasies, because of Johnny’s immersion in the Spanish Civil War, of nursing soldiers. Where? In a rocky landscape, with wine, and olives. But where? Teenage dreams do not need map points.
‘You can’t go to Kenya,’ said Rose. ‘Your parents will stop you.’
Brought down, James reached for his glass and emptied it.
‘Since the subject has come up,’ said Frances, ‘I want to talk about Christmas?’ Faced with already apprehensive faces, Frances found herself unable to go on. They knew what they were going to hear, because Andrew had already warned them.
Now he said, ‘You see, there isn’t going to be a Christmas here this year. I am going to Phyllida for Christmas lunch. She rang me and said she hasn’t heard from my … from Johnny, and she says she dreads Christmas.’
‘Who doesn’t?’ said Colin.
‘Oh, Colin,’ said Sophie, ‘don’t be like that.’
Colin said, not looking at anyone, ‘I am going to Sophie’s because of her mother. She can’t be alone on Christmas Day.’
‘But I thought you were Jewish,’ said Rose to Sophie.
‘We have always done Christmas,’ said Sophie. ‘When Daddy was alive …’ She went silent, biting her lips, her eyes filling.
‘And Sylvia here is going with Julia to Julia’s friend,’ said Andrew.
‘And I,’ said Frances, ‘propose to ignore Christmas altogether.’
‘But, Frances,’ said Sophie, ‘that’s awful, you can’t.’
‘Not awful. Wonderful,’ said Frances. ‘And now, Geoffrey, don’t you think you should go home for Christmas? You really should, you know.’
Geoffrey’s polite face, ever attentive to what might be expected of him, smiled agreement. ‘Yes, Frances. I know. You are right. I will go home. And my grandmother is dying,’ he added, in the same tone.
‘Then, I’ll go home too,’ said Daniel. His red hair flamed, and his face went even redder, as he said, ‘I’ll come and visit you, then.’
‘As you like,’ said Geoffrey revealing by this ungraciousness that perhaps he had been looking forward to a Daniel-free hols.
‘James,’ said Frances, ‘please go home.’
‘Are you throwing me out?’ he said, good-humouredly. ‘I don’t blame you. Have I outstayed my welcome?’
‘For now, yes,’ said Frances, who was by nature unable to throw anyone out permanently. ‘But what about school, James? Aren’t you going to finish school?’
‘Of course he is,’ said Andrew, revealing that admonitions must have occurred. His four years seniority gave him the right. ‘It’s ridiculous, James,’ he went on, talking direct to James. ‘You’ve only got a year to go to A-levels. It won’t kill you.’
‘You don’t know my school,’ said James, but desperation had entered the equation. ‘If you did …’
‘Anyone can suffer for a year,’ said Andrew. ‘Or even three. Or four,’ he said, glancing guiltily at his mother: he was making revelations.
‘Okay,’ said James. ‘I will. But …’ and here he looked at Frances, ‘without the liberating airs of Frances’s house I don’t think I could survive.’
‘You can visit,’ said Frances. ‘There’s always weekends.’
There were left now Rose and the dark horse Jill, the always well-brushed, well-washed, polite, blonde girl, who hardly ever spoke, but listened, how she did listen.
‘I’m not going home,’ said Rose. ‘I won’t go.’
Frances said, ‘You do realise that your parents could sue me for alienating your affections – well, that kind of thing.’
‘They don’t care about me,’ declared Rose. ‘They don’t give a fuck.’
‘That’s not true,’ said Andrew. ‘You may not like them but they certainly care about you. They wrote to me. They seem to think I am a good influence.’
‘That’s a joke,’ said Rose.
The hinterlands behind this tiny exchange were acknowledged as glances were exchanged among the others.
‘I said I am not going,’ said Rose. She was darting trapped glances around at them all: they might have been her enemies.
‘Listen, Rose,’ said Frances, with the intention of keeping her dislike of the girl out of her voice, ‘Liberty Hall is closing down over Christmas.’ She had not specified for how long.
‘I can stay in the basement flat, can’t I? I won’t be in the way.’
‘And how are you going to …’ but Frances stopped.
Andrew had an allowance and he had been giving money to Rose. ‘She could claim that I treated her badly,’ said Andrew. ‘Well, she does complain, she tells everyone how I wronged her. Like the wicked squire and the milkmaid. The trouble was, she was all for me, but I wasn’t for her.’ Frances had thought, Or all for the glamorous Eton boy and his connections? Andrew had said, ‘I think that coming here was what did it. It was such a revelation to her. It’s a pretty limited set-up – her parents are very nice …’
‘And are you – and Julia – going to keep her indefinitely?’
‘No,’ said Andrew. ‘I’ve said, enough. After all, she’s done very well out of a kiss or two in the moonlight. ‘
But now they were faced with a guest who would not leave.
Rose looked as if she were being threatened with imprisonment, with torture. An animal in a too small cage could look like that, glaring out, glaring around.
It was all out of proportion, ridiculous … Frances persisted, though the girl’s violence was making her own heart beat, ‘Rose, just go home for Christmas, that’s all. Just do that. They must be worried sick about you. And you have to talk to them about school …’ At this Rose exploded up out of the chair, and said, ‘Oh, shit, it just needed that …’ and she ran out of the room, howling, tears scattering. They listened to her thud down the stairs to the basement flat.
‘Well,’ said Geoffrey gracefully, ‘what a carry-on.’
Sylvia said, ‘But her school must be horrible if she hates it so much.’ She had agreed to go back to school, while she lived here, ‘with Julia,’ as she put it. And she had said yes, she would stick it out and study to be a doctor.
What was burning Rose up, consuming her with the acid of envy, was that Sylvia – ‘And she isn’t even related, she’s just Johnny’s stepchild’ – was in this house, as a right, and that Julia was paying for her. It seemed Rose believed that justice would make Julia pay for her, Rose, to go to a progressive school, and keep her here for as long as she liked.
Colin had said to her, ‘Do you think my grandmother’s made of money? It’s a lot for her to take on Sylvia. She’s already paying for me and for Andrew.’
‘It isn’t fair,’ had been Rose’s answer. ‘I don’t see why she should have everything.’
There now remained Jill, who had not said a word. Finding them all looking at her, she said, ‘I’m not going home. But I’ll go to my cousin in Exeter for Christmas.’
Next morning Frances found Jill in the kitchen, boiling a kettle for tea. Since there was plenty of everything in the basement kitchen, this might mean Jill had hoped for a chat.
‘Let’s sit down and have tea,’ said Frances, and sat down.
Jill joined her, at the end of the table. This was obviously not going to be like an encounter with Rose. The girl was watching Frances, not with hostility, but was sad, serious, and sat holding her arms around herself, as if she were cold.
Frances said, ‘Jill, you do see that I am in an impossible position with your parents.’
The girl said, ‘Oh, I thought you were going to say you didn’t see why you should keep me. Fair enough. But …’
‘I wasn’t going to say that. But don’t you really see that your parents must be going mad with worry?’
‘I told them where I was. I said I was here.’
‘Are you thinking of not going back to school?’
‘I don’t see the point of it.’
She wasn’t doing well at school, but at St Joseph’s this was not a final argument.
‘And don’t you see that I must be worrying about you?’
At this the girl seemed to come alive, leave behind her cold apprehension, and she leaned forward and said, ‘Oh, Frances, no, you mustn’t. It’s so nice here. I feel so safe.’
‘And don’t you feel safe at home?’
‘It’s not that. They just … don’t like me.’ And she retreated back inside her shell, hugging herself, rubbing her arms as if she were really cold.
Frances noted that this morning Jill had painted great black lines around her eyes. A new thing, on this neat little girl. And she was wearing one of Rose’s mini-dresses.
Frances would have liked to put her arms around the child and hold her. She had never had such an impulse with Rose: she wished Rose would simply take herself off. So, she liked Jill, but did not like Rose. And so what difference could that make, when she treated them exactly the same?
Frances sat alone in the kitchen, and the table which she had wiped and waxed shone like a pool. Really, it was a very nice table, she thought, now that you can see it. Not a plate or a cup, and no people. It was Christmas Day and she had shouted goodbye to Colin and Sophie first, both dressed for Christmas lunch, even Colin, who despised clothes. Then it was Julia, in a grey velvet suit and a sort of bonnety thing with a rose on it, and a blueish veil. Sylvia was wearing a dress bought for her by Julia, which made Frances glad the jeans and T-shirt wearers had not seen it: she didn’t want them laughing at Sylvia, who could have gone to church fifty years ago in that blue dress. She had refused to wear a hat, though. Then off went Andrew, to console Phyllida. He had put his head around the door to say, ‘We all envy you, Frances. Well, all except Julia, she’s upset that you will be alone. And you must expect a little present. She was too shy to tell you.’
Frances sat alone. All over this country women laboured over the stove, basting several million turkeys, while Christmas puddings steamed. Brussels sprouts sent out sulphuric fumes. Fields of potatoes were jammed around the birds. Bad temper reigned, but she, Frances, was sitting like a queen, alone. Only people who have known the pressure of exorbitant teenagers, or emotional dependants who suck and feed and demand, can know the pure pleasure of being free, even for an hour. Frances felt herself relax, all through her body, she was like a balloon ready to float up and away. And it was quiet. In other houses Christmas music exulted or pounded, but here, in this house, no television, not even a radio … but wait, was that something downstairs – was that Rose down there? But she had said she was going with Jill to the cousins. The music must be coming from next door.
So, on the whole, silence. She breathed in, she breathed out, oh happiness, she had absolutely nothing to worry about, even think about, for several hours. The doorbell rang. Cursing, she went to find a smiling young man, in decorative gear, red, for Christmas, and he handed her, with a bow, a tray enclosed in white muslin, that was twisted up in the centre and held with a red bow. ‘Merry Christmas,’ he said, and then ‘Bon appetit.’ Off he went, whistling ‘Good King Wenceslas’.
Frances put the tray in the centre of the table. It had a card on it announcing it was from an elegant restaurant, of the serious kind, and when the muslin was opened, there was revealed a little feast, with another card, ‘Best wishes from Julia.’ Best wishes. It was clearly Frances’s fault that Julia could not say With Love, but never mind, she was not going to worry about that today.
It was all so pretty she did not want to disturb it.
A white china bowl held a green soup, very cold, with shaved ice on it, that a testing finger announced was a blend of velvety unctuousness and tartness – what was it? Sorrel? A blue plate decorated with frills of bright green lettuce pretending to be seaweed held scallop shells and in them sliced scallops, with mushrooms. Two quails sat side by side on a bed of sauteed celery. By it a card said, ‘Please heat for ten minutes.’ A little Christmas pudding was made of chocolate and decorated with holly. There was a dish of fruit Frances had not tasted and scarcely knew the names of, Cape gooseberries, lychees, passion fruit, guavas. There was a slice of Stilton. Little bottles of champagne, burgundy and port fenced the feast. These days there would be nothing remarkable in the witty little spread, which paid homage to the Christmas meal, while it mocked, but then it was a glimpse of a vision from celestial fields, a swallow visiting from the plenitudes of the future. Frances could not eat it, it would be a crime. She sat down and looked at it and thought that Julia must care for her, after all.
Frances wept. At Christmas one weeps. It is obligatory. She wept because of her mother-in-law’s kindness to her and to her sons, and because of the charm of the meal, sparking off its invitations, and because of her incredulity at what she had managed to live through, and then, really getting down to it, she wept at the miseries of Christmases past. Oh my God, those Christmases when the boys were small, and they were in those dreadful rooms, and everything so ugly, and they were often cold.
Then she dried her eyes and sat on, alone. An hour, two hours. Not a soul in the house … that radio was downstairs, not next door, but she chose to ignore it. It might have been left on, after all. Four o’clock. The gas boards and electricity would be relieved that once again they had coped with the national Christmas lunch. Tired and cross women from Land’s End to the Orkneys would be sitting down and saying, ‘Now, you wash up.’ Well, good luck to them.
In armchairs and in sofas people would be dozing off and the Queen’s speech would be intermittently heard, interrupted by the results of over-eating. It was getting dark. Frances got up, pulled the curtains tight shut, switched on lights. She sat down again. She was getting hungry but could not bring herself to spoil the pretty feast. She ate a piece of bread and butter. She poured herself a glass of Tio Pepe. In Cuba Johnny would be lecturing whoever he was with on something: probably conditions in Britain.
She might go upstairs and have a nap, after all, she didn’t often get the chance of one. The door into the hall from outside opened, and then the door into the kitchen and in came Andrew.
‘You’ve been crying,’ he announced, sitting down, near her.
‘Yes, I have. A little. It was nice.’
‘I don’t like crying,’ he remarked. ‘It scares me, because I am afraid I might never stop.’
Now he went red, and said, ‘Oh my God …’
‘Oh, Andrew,’ said Frances, ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘What for? Damn it, how could you think …’
‘Everything could have been done differently, I suppose.’
‘What? What could? Oh, God.’
He poured out wine, he sat hunched into himself, not unlike Jill, a few days ago.
‘It’s Christmas,’ said Frances. ‘That’s all. The great provoker of miserable memories.’
He as it were warded this thought off, with a hand that said, Enough, don’t go on. And leaned forward to inspect Julia’s present. As Frances had done, he dipped a finger into the soup: an appreciative grimace. He sampled a slice of scallop.
‘I’m feeling a terrible hypocrite, Andrew. I’ve sent everyone off, like good children, but I hardly went home after I left it. I’d go home for Christmas Day and leave the next morning or even that afternoon.’
‘I wonder if they went home for Christmas – your parents?’
‘Your grandparents.’
‘Oh, yes, I suppose they must be. Have been.’
‘I don’t know. I know so little about them. There was the war, like a sort of chasm across my life, and on the other side, that life. And now they are dead. When I left home I thought about them as little as I could. I simply couldn’t cope with them. And so I didn’t see them and now I’m hard on Rose when she doesn’t want to go home.’
‘I take it you weren’t fifteen when you left home?’
‘No, eighteen.’
‘There you are, you’re in the clear.’
This absurdity made them laugh. A wonderful understanding: how well she was getting on with her elder son. Well, this had been true since he grew up – not all that long ago, in fact. What a pleasure it was, what a consolation for …
‘And Julia, she didn’t do much going home for Christmas, did she?’
‘But how could she, when she was here?’
‘How old was she when she came to London?’
‘Twenty, I think.’
‘What?’ He actually brought his hands up to cover his mouth and lower face, and let them drop to say, ‘Twenty. That’s what I am. And sometimes I think I haven’t learned to tie my shoelaces yet.’
In silence they contemplated a very young Julia.
She said, ‘There’s a photograph. I’ve seen it. A wedding photo. She’s wearing a hat so loaded with flowers you can hardly see her face.’
‘No veil?’
‘No veil.’
‘My God, coming over here, all by herself to us cold English. What was grandfather like?’
‘I didn’t meet him. They weren’t approving of Johnny much. And certainly not of me.’ Trying to find reasons for the enormity of it all, she went on, ‘You see, it was the Cold War.’
He now had his arms folded on the table, supporting him, and he was frowning, staring at her, trying to understand. ‘The Cold War,’ he said.
‘Good Lord,’ she said, struck, ‘of course, I’d forgotten, my parents didn’t approve of Johnny. They actually wrote me a letter saying that I was an enemy of my country. A traitor – yes, I think they said that. Then they had second thoughts and came to see me – you and Colin were tiny then. Johnny was there and he called them rejects of history.’ She seemed on the verge of tears, but it was from remembered exasperation.
Up went his brows, his face struggled with laughter, lost and he sat waving his arms about, as if to cancel the laughter. ‘It’s so funny,’ he tried to apologise.
‘I suppose it’s funny, yes.’
He dropped his head on his arms, sighed, stayed there a long minute. Through his arms came the words, ‘I just don’t think I’ve got the energy for …’
‘What? Energy for what?’
‘Where did you lot get it from, all that confidence? Believe me, I’m a very frail thing in comparison. Perhaps I am a reject of history?’
‘What? What do you mean?’
He lifted up his face. It was red, and there were tears. ‘Well, never mind.’ He waved his hands again, dispersing bad thoughts. ‘Do you know, I might easily have a little taste of your feast.’
‘Didn’t you get any Christmas dinner?’
‘Phyllida was in a state. She was crying and screaming and fainting in coils. You know she really is rather mad. I mean, really.’
‘Well, yes.’
‘Julia says it was because they sent her off – Phyllida – to Canada, at the beginning of the war. Apparently she was unlucky, it wasn’t a very nice family. She hated it all. And when she got home she was a changeling, her parents said. They hardly recognised each other. She was ten when she left. Nearly fifteen when she got back.’
‘Then I suppose, poor Phyllida.’
‘I think so. And look what a bargain she’s got with Comrade Johnny.’ He pulled the tray towards him, got up to fetch a spoon, knife and fork, sat down, and had just dipped the spoon into the soup when the outer door banged, and the door behind them noisily opened and Colin came in, bringing cold air with him, a sense of the dark outside, and, like an accusation against them both, his unhappy face.
‘Do I see food? Actually, food?’
He sat down, and using the spoon Andrew had just brought, began on the soup.
‘Didn’t you get any Christmas lunch?’
‘No. Sophie’s ma has gone all Jewish on her and says what has Christmas got to do with her? But they’ve always had Christmas.’ He had finished the soup. ‘Why don’t you cook food like this?’ he accused Frances. ‘Now that’s a soup.’
‘How many quails do you think I’d have to cook for each of you, with your appetites?’
‘Hang on a minute,’ said Andrew. ‘Fair’s fair.’ He brought a plate to the table, then another, for Colin, and another knife and fork. He put a quail on to his plate.
‘You are supposed to heat those up for ten minutes,’ said Frances.
‘Who cares? Delicious.’
They were eating in competition with each other. And having reached the end of the quails, their spoons hovered together over the pudding. And that vanished, in a couple of mouthfuls.
‘No Christmas pudding?’ said Colin. ‘No Christmas pudding at Christmas?’
Frances got up, fetched a can of Christmas pudding from the high shelf where it had been quietly maturing, and in a moment had it steaming on the stove.
‘How long will that take?’ asked Colin.
‘An hour.’
She put loaves of bread on the table, then butter, cheese, plates. They polished off the Stilton, and began serious eating, the vandalised tray pushed aside.
‘Mother,’ said Colin, ‘we’ve got to ask Sophie to come and live here.’
‘But she is practically living here.’
‘No – properly. It’s got nothing to do with me … I mean, I’m not saying Sophie and me are a fixture, that isn’t it. She can’t go on at home. You wouldn’t believe what she’s like, Sophie’s mother. She cries and grabs Sophie and says they must jump off a bridge together, or take poison. Imagine living with that?’ It sounded as if he were accusing her, Frances, and, hearing that he did, said differently, even apologetically, ‘If you could just get a taste of that house, it’s like walking into the Black Hole of Calcutta.’
‘You know how much I like Sophie. But I don’t really see Sophie going down into the basement to share with Rose and whoever turns up. I take it you aren’t expecting her to move in with you?’
‘Well … no, it’s not … that’s not on. But she could camp in the living-room, we hardly ever use it.’
‘If you’ve packed up with Sophie, do I have your permission to take my chance?’ enquired Andrew. ‘I’m madly in love with Sophie, as everyone must know.’
‘I didn’t say …’
And now these two young men reverted to the condition schoolboy, began jostling each other, elbow to elbow, knee to knee.
‘Happy Christmas,’ said Frances, and they desisted.
‘Talking of Rose, where is she?’ said Andrew. ‘Did she go home.’
‘Of course not,’ said Colin. ‘She’s downstairs, alternately sobbing her heart out and making up her face.’
‘How do you know?’ asked Andrew.
‘You forget the advantages of a progressive school. I know all about women.’
‘I wish I did. While my education is in every way better than yours, I fail continually in the human department.’
‘You’re doing pretty well with Sylvia,’ said Frances.
‘Yes, but she isn’t a woman, is she? More the ghost of a little child someone has murdered.’
‘That’s awful,’ said Frances.
‘But how true,’ said Colin.
‘If Rose is really downstairs, I suppose we had better ask her up,’ said Frances.
‘Do we have to?’ said Andrew. ‘It’s so nice en famille for once.’
‘I’ll ask her,’ said Colin, ‘or she’ll be taking an overdose and then saying it’s our fault.’
He leaped up and off down the stairs. The two who remained said nothing, only looked at each other, as they heard the wail from beneath, presumably of welcome, Colin’s loud commonsensical voice, and then Rose came in, propelled by Colin.
She was heavily made up, her eyes pencilled in black, false black eyelashes, purple eye-shadow. She was angry, accusing, appealing, and was evidently about to cry.
‘There’ll be some Christmas pudding,’ said Frances.
But Rose had seen the fruit on the tray and was picking it over. ‘What’s this?’ she demanded aggressively, ‘What is it?’ She held up a lychee.
‘You must have tasted that, you get it after a Chinese meal, for pudding,’ said Andrew.
‘What Chinese meal? I never get Chinese meals.’
‘Let me.’ Colin peeled the lychee, the crisp fragments of delicately indented shell exposing the pearly, lucent fruit, like a little moon egg, which, having removed the shiny black pip he handed to Rose who swallowed it, and said, ‘That’s nothing much, it’s not worth the fuss.’
‘You should let it he on your tongue, you should let its inwardness speak to your inwardness,’ said Colin. He allowed himself his most owlish expression, and looked like an apprentice judge who lacked only the wig, as he cracked open another lychee, and handed it to Rose, delicately, between forefinger and thumb. She sat with it in her mouth, like a child refusing to swallow, then did, and said, ‘It’s a con.’
At once the brothers swept the plate of fruit towards them, and divided it between them. Rose sat with her mouth open, staring, and now she really was going to cry. ‘Ohhhhh,’ she wailed, ‘you are so horrible. It’s not my fault I’ve never had a Chinese meal.’
‘Well, you’ve had Christmas pudding and that’s what you are going to get next,’ said Frances.
‘I’m so hungry,’ wept Rose.
‘Then eat some bread and cheese.’
‘Bread and cheese at Christmas?’
‘That’s all I had,’ said Frances. ‘Now shut up, Rose.’
Rose stopped mid-wail, stared incredulously at Frances, and allowed to develop the full gamut of the adolescent misunderstood: flashing eyes and pouring lips, and heaving bosom.
Andrew cut a piece of bread, loaded it with butter, then cheese. ‘Here,’ he said.
‘I’ll get fat, eating all that butter.’
Andrew took his offering back and began eating it himself. Rose sat swelling with outrage and tears. No one looked at her. Then she reached for the loaf, cut a thin slice, smeared on a little butter, put on a few crumbs of cheese. She didn’t eat however, but sat staring at it: Look at my Christmas dinner.
‘I shall sing a Christmas carol,’ said Andrew, ‘to fill in the time before the pudding.’
He began on ‘Silent Night’, and Colin said, ‘Shut up, Andrew, it’s more than I can bear, it really is.’
‘The pudding is probably eatable already,’ said Frances.
The great glistening dark mass of pudding was set on a very fine blue plate. She put out plates, spoons, and poured more wine. She stuck the sprig of holly from Julia’s offering on to the pudding. She found a tin of custard.
They ate.
Soon the telephone rang. Sophie, in tears, and so Colin went up a floor to talk to her, at length, at very great length, and then came down to say he would return to Sophie’s, to stay the night there, poor Sophie couldn’t cope. Or perhaps he would bring her back here.
Then Julia’s taxi was heard outside, and in came Sylvia, flushed, smiling, a pretty girl: who would have thought that possible, a few weeks ago? She dropped a curtsy to them in her good-girl’s dress, both liking it and amused at the lace collar, lace cuffs and embroidery. Julia came in behind her. Frances said, ‘Oh, Julia, do please sit down.’
But Julia had seen Rose, who was like a clown now that her make-up had smeared with crying, and was cramming in Christmas pudding.
‘Another time,’ said Julia.
It could be seen that Sylvia would have stayed with Andrew, but she went up after Julia.
‘Stupid dress,’ said Rose.
‘You’re right,’ said Andrew. ‘Not your style at all.’
Then Frances remembered she had not thanked Julia and, shocked at herself, ran up the stain. She caught Julia up on the top landing. Now she should embrace Julia. She should simply put her arms around this stiff, critical old woman and kiss her. She could not, her arms simply would not lift, would not go out to hold Julia.
‘Thank you,’ said Frances. ‘That was such a lovely thing to do. You have no idea what it did for me …’
‘I am glad you liked it,’ said Julia, turning to go in her door, and Frances said after her, feeling futile, ridiculous, ‘Thank you, thank you so much.’ Sylvia had no difficulty in kissing Julia, allowing herself to be kissed and held, and she even sat on Julia’s knee.
It was May, and the windows were open on to a jolly spring evening, the birds hard at it, louder than the traffic. A light rain sparkled on leaves and spring flowers.
The company around the table looked like a chorus for a musical, because they were all wearing tunics striped horizontally in blue and white, over tight black legs. Frances wore black and white stripes, f eeling that this might do something to assert a difference. The boys wore the same stripes over jeans. Their hair was, had to be, well below their ears, a statement of their independence, and the girls all had Evansky haircuts. An Evansky haircut, that was the heart’s desire of every with-it girl, and by hook, or most likely by crook, they had achieved it. This cut was between a 1920s bob, and the shingle, with a fringe to the eyebrows. Straight, it went without saying. Curly hair out. Even Rose’s hair, the mass of crinkly black, was Evansky. Little neat heads, little-ickle cutesy girls, little bitsey things and the boys like shaggy ponies, and all in the blue and white stripes that had originated in matelot shirts, matching the blue and white mugs they used for breakfast. When the geist speaks, the zeit must obey. Here they were, the girls and the boys of the sexual revolution, though they didn’t know yet that was what they would be famed for.
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 Trotskyism 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 flim. ‘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 rime 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 he.
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.’
‘Now that sounds familiar.’
‘What sort of guarantee can you give me that I won’t have these girls up in front of me in a week or so?’
‘I can’t,’ said Frances. ‘No guarantee. Both are quarrelling with parents and they’ve landed on me. Both are school drop-outs, but I expect they will go back.’
‘I understand. A friend of my son’s – a schoolfriend – is with us more often than he goes home.’
‘Does he say his parents are shits?’
‘They don’t understand him, he says. But I don’t either. Tell me, did you have to do a lot of research for your article?’
‘A good bit.’
‘But you didn’t provide any answers.’
‘I don’t know the answers. Can you tell me why a girl – I’m referring to the dark girl out there, Rose Trimble – who has just had all her difficulties sorted out, should choose just that moment to do something she knows might spoil everything?’
‘I call it brink-walking,’ said Mrs Kent. ‘They like to test limits. They walk out on a tightrope but hope someone’ll catch them. And you are catching them, aren’t you?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘You’d be surprised how often I hear the same story.’
The two women stood close together at the window, linked by a sort of despair.
‘I wish I knew what was going on,’ said Mrs Kent.
‘Don’t we all.’
They went back into the office where the girls, who had been giggling and laughing at the older women’s expense, resumed their silence and their sulky looks.
Mrs Kent said, ‘I’m going to give you another chance. Mrs Lennox says she will help you. But in fact I am exceeding my brief; I hope you both understand that you have had a very narrow escape. You are both fortunate girls, to have a friend in Mrs Lennox.’ This last remark was a mistake, though Mrs Kent could not know that. Frances could positively hear the seethe of resentment in the girls, in Rose at least, that they could owe anyone anything.
Outside the building, on the pavement, they said they would go off shopping.
‘If I told you not to shoplift,’ said Frances, ‘would you take any notice?’
But they went off without looking at her.
That night they announced at supper that they had nicked the two Biba, or Biba-type dresses they were wearing, both so short they could only have been chosen with the intention of inviting shock or criticism.
And Sylvia did say she thought they were too short, in an effort that cost her a good deal to assert herself.
‘Too short for what?’ jeered Rose. She had not looked at Frances once, all evening, and this morning’s crisis might never have happened. Jill, though, did say in a hurried mutter that combined politeness with aggression, ‘Thanks, Frances, thanks a million.’
Andrew told the girls they were bloody lucky to have got off, and Geoffrey, the accomplished shoplifter, told them it was easy not to get caught if you were careful.
‘You can’t be careful on the Underground,’ said Daniel, who did not buy tickets, in emulation of his idol, Geoffrey. ‘It’s luck. You either get caught or you don’t.’
‘Then don’t travel on the Underground without a ticket,’ said Geoffrey. ‘Not more than twice. It’s stupid.’
Daniel, publicly criticised by Geoffrey, went red and said he had travelled ‘for years’ without a ticket and had only been caught twice.
‘And the third time?’ said Geoffrey, instructing him.
‘Third time unlucky,’ chorused the company.
That was the week that Jill allowed herself to get pregnant, no, invited it.
All these dramas had played themselves out in the four months since Christmas and, as if nothing had happened, here were the protagonists, here were the boys and girls, sitting around the table on that spring evening making plans for the summer.
Geoffrey said he would go to the States and join the fighters for racial equality ‘on the barricades’. A useful experience for Politics and Economics at the LSE.
Andrew said he would stay here and read.
‘Not The Ordeal of Richard Feverel,’ said Rose. ‘What crap.’
‘That too,’ said Andrew.
Sylvia, invited to go with Jill to her cousins in Exeter (‘It’s a groovy place, they’ve got horses’) said no, she would stay here and read too. ‘Julia says I should read more. I did read some of Johnny’s books. You’d never believe it, but until I got to this house I didn’t know there were books that weren’t about politics.’ This meant, as everyone knew, that Sylvia could not leave Julia: she felt too frail to stand on her own.
Colin said he might go and pick grapes in France, or perhaps try his hand at a novel: at this there was a general groan.
‘Why shouldn’t he write a novel?’ said Sophie, who always stuck up for Colin because he had hurt her so terribly.
‘Perhaps I shall write a novel about St Joseph’s,’ said Colin. ‘I shall put us all in.’
‘That isn’t fair,’ said Rose at once. ‘You can’t put me in because I’m not at St Joseph’s.’
‘How very true that is,’ said Andrew.
‘Or perhaps I could write a novel all about you,’ said Colin. ‘“The Ordeals of a Rose.” How about that?’
Rose stared at him, then, suspiciously around. They all stared solemnly at her. Baiting Rose had become a far too frequent sport, and Frances tried to defuse the moment, which threatened tears, by asking, ‘And what are your plans, Rose?’
‘I’ll go and stay with Jill’s cousin. Or I might hitchhike in Devon. Or I might stay here,’ she added, facing Frances with a challenge. She knew Frances would be pleased to have her gone, but did not believe this was because of any unpleasant qualities in herself. She did not know she was unlikeable. She was usually disliked, and thought that this was because of the general unfairness of the world: not that she would have used the word dislike or even have thought it: people picked on her, they put their shit on her. People who are kind or good-looking or charming or all three; people who trust others, never have any idea of the little hells inhabited by someone like Rose.
James said he was going to a summer camp, recommended by Johnny, to study the senescence of capitalism and the inner contradictions of imperialism.
Daniel said forlornly that he supposed he would have to go home, and Geoffrey said kindly, ‘Never mind, the summer won’t be for ever.’
‘Yes, it will,’ said Daniel, his face flaming with misery.
Roland Shattock said he was going to take Sophie on a walking tour in Cornwall. Noting signs of misgiving on certain faces – Frances’s, Andrew’s – he said, ‘Oh, don’t panic, she’ll be safe with me, I think I’m gay.’
This announcement which now would be met by nothing much more than, ‘Really?’, or perhaps sighs from the women, was too casual then to be tactful, and there was general discomfort.
Sophie at once cried out that she didn’t care about that, she just liked being with Roland. Andrew looked gracefully rueful, and could almost be heard thinking that he wasn’t queer.
‘Oh, well, perhaps I’m not,’ amended Roland. ‘After all, Sophie, I’m crazy about you. But have no fear, Frances, I’m not one to abduct minors.’
‘I’m nearly sixteen,’ said Sophie indignantly.
‘I thought you were much older when I saw you dreaming so beautifully in the park.’
‘I am much older,’ said Sophie, truthfully: she meant her mother’s illness, her father’s death, and then Colin’s ill-treatment of her.
‘Beautiful dreamer,’ said Roland, kissing her hand, but in a parody of the continental hand kiss that salutes the air above a glove, or, as in this case, knuckles ever so slightly odorous from the chicken stew she had been stirring, to help Frances. ‘But if I do go to prison, it will have been worth it.’
As for Frances, she expected peaceful and productive weeks.
The incendiary letter came addressed to ‘J … indecipherable … Lennox’, and was opened by Julia, who, having seen it was for Johnny, Dear Comrade Johnny Lennox, and that the first sentence was, ‘I want you to help me open people’s eyes to the truth’, read it, then again, and, having let her thoughts settle, telephoned her son.
‘I have a letter here from Israel, a man called Reuben Sachs, for you.’
‘A good type,’ said Johnny. ‘He has maintained a consistently progressive position as a non-aligned Marxist, advocating peaceful relations with the Soviet Union.’
‘However that is, he wants you to call a gathering of your friends and comrades to hear him speak about his experiences in a Czech prison.’
‘There must have been a good reason for him to be there.’
‘He was arrested as a Zionist spy for American imperialism.’ Johnny was silent. ‘He was inside for four years, tortured and brutally treated and finally released … I would take it as a favour if you did not say, Unfortunately mistakes have sometimes been made.’
‘What do you want, Mutti?’
‘I think you should do as he asks. He says he would like to open people’s eyes to the truth about the methods used by the Soviet Union. Please do not say that he is some kind of provocateur.’
‘I am afraid I don’t see why it would be useful.’
‘In that case I shall call a meeting myself. After all, Johnny, I am in the happy position of knowing who your associates are.’
‘Why do you think they would come to a meeting called by you, Mutti?’
‘I shall send everyone a copy of his letter. Shall I read it to you?’
‘No, I know the kind of lies that are being spread.’
‘He will be here in two weeks’ time, and he is coming to London just for that – to address the comrades. He is also going to Paris. Shall I suggest a date?’
‘If you like.’
‘But it must be one convenient for you. I don’t think he would be pleased if you didn’t attend.’
‘I’ll telephone you with a date. But I must make it clear that I shall disassociate myself from any anti-Soviet propaganda.’
On the evening in question the big sitting-room received an unusual collection of guests. Johnny had invited colleagues and comrades, and Julia had asked people that she thought Johnny should have invited, but had not. There were people still in the Party, some who had left over various crisis points – the Hider– Stalin Pact, the Berlin Rising, Prague, Hungary, even one or two who went back to the attack on Finland. About fifty people; and the room was crammed tight with chairs, and people standing around the walls. All described themselves as Marxists.
Andrew and Colin were present, having first complained that it was all so boring. ‘Why are you doing this?’ Colin asked his grandmother. ‘It’s not your kind of thing, is it?’
‘I am hoping, though I am probably just a foolish old woman, that Johnny might be made to see some sense.’
The St Joseph’s contingent were taking exams. James had left for America. The girls downstairs had made a point of going to a disco: politics were just shit.
Reuben Sachs had supper with Julia, alone: Frances could have agreed with the girls, and even their choice of language. He was a round little man, desperate, and earnest and could not stop talking about what had happened to him, and the meeting, when it began, was only a continuation of what he had been telling Julia, who having informed him that she had never been a communist and did not need his persuasions, kept quiet, since it was evident that what he needed was to talk while she – or anyone at all – listened.
He had maintained for years a difficult political position in Israel, as a socialist, but rejecting communism and asking that the non-aligned socialists of the world should support peaceful relations with the Soviet Union: this meant that they would necessarily be in an unhappy situation with their own governments. He had been reviled as a communist throughout the Cold War. His temperament was not suited by nature to being permanently out on a limb, being shot at from all sides. This could be seen by his agitated, fervent discourses, his pleading and angry eyes, while the words that repeated themselves like a refrain were, ‘I have never compromised with my beliefs.’
He had been on a fraternal visit to Prague, on a Peace and Goodwill Mission, when he had been arrested as a Cosmopolitan Zionist spy for American Imperialism. In the police car he addressed his captors thus, ‘How can you, representatives of a Workers’ State, sully your hands with such work as this?’ and when they hit him and went on hitting him, he continued to use these words. As he did in prison. The warders were brutes, and the interrogators too, but he continued to address them as civilised beings. He knew six languages, but they insisted on interrogating him in a language he did not know, Romanian, which meant that at first he did not know what he was being accused of, which was every sort of anti-Soviet and anti-Czech activity. But: ‘I am good at languages, I have to explain …’ He learned enough Romanian during the interrogation to follow, and then to argue his case. For days, months, years, he was beaten up, reviled, kept for long periods without food, kept without sleep – tortured in all the ways beloved by sadists. For four years. And he went on insisting on his innocence, and explained to his interrogators and his jailers that in doing this kind of work they were dirtying the honour of the people, of the Workers’ State. It took a long time for him to realise that his case was not unique, and that the prison was full of people like him, who tapped out messages on the walls to say they were as surprised to find themselves in prison as he was. They also explained that, ‘Idealism is not appropriate in these circumstances, comrade.’ The scales fell from his eyes, as he said. Just about the time he stopped appealing to the better natures and class situation of his tormentors, having lost faith in the long-term possibilities of the Soviet Revolution, he was released in one of the new dawns in the Soviet Empire. And found he was still a man with a mission, but now it was to open the eyes of the comrades who were still deluded about the nature of communism.
Frances had decided she did not want to listen to ‘revelations’ that she had absorbed decades ago, but crept into the back of the room when it was full, and found herself sitting next to a man she did seem to remember but who obviously remembered her well, from his greeting. Johnny was in a comer, listening without prejudice. His sons sat with Julia across the room, and did not look at their father. On their faces was the strained unhappy look she had been seeing there for years now. If they avoided their father’s eyes, they did send supportive smiles to her, which were too miserable to be convincing as irony, which is what they had intended. In that room were people who had been around through their early childhoods, some whose children they had played with.
When Reuben began his tale with, ‘I have come to tell you the truth of the situation, as it is my duty to do …’ the room was silent, and he could not have complained that his audience was not attentive. But those faces … they were not the expressions usually seen at a meeting, responding to what is said, with smiles, nods, agreement, dissent. They were polite, kept blank. Some were still communists, had been communists all their lives and would never change: there are people who cannot change once their minds are made up. Some had been communists, might criticise the Soviet Union, and even passionately, but all were socialists, and kept a belief in progress, the ever-upwards-reaching escalator to a happier world. And the Soviet Union had been so strongly a symbol of this faith, that – as it was put decades later by people who had been immersed in dreams – ‘The Soviet Union is our mother, and we do not insult our mothers.’
They were sitting here listening to a man who had done four years’ hard labour in a communist prison, been brutally treated, a painfully emotional tale, so that at times Reuben Sachs wept, explaining that it was because of ‘the sullying and dirtying of the great dream of humankind’, but what was being appealed to was their reason.
And that was why the faces of the people who had come to this evening’s meeting, ‘to hear the truth’, were expressionless, or even stunned, listening as if the tale did not concern them. For an hour and a half the emissary from ‘the truth of the situation’ talked, and then ended with a passionate appeal for questions, but no one said anything. As if nothing at all had been said, the meeting ended because people were getting up and having thanked Frances, under the impression that she was the hostess, and nodded to Johnny, drifted out. Nothing was said. And when they began talking to each other it was on other subjects.
Reuben Sachs sat on, waiting for what he had come to London for, but he might have been talking about conditions in medieval Europe or even Stone Age Man. He could not believe what he was seeing, what had happened.
Julia continued to sit in her place, watching, sardonic, a little bitter, and Andrew and Colin were openly derisive. Johnny went off, with some others, not looking at his sons or his mother.
The man next to Frances had not moved. She felt she had been right not to have wanted to come: she was being attacked by ancient unhappinesses, and needed to compose herself.
‘Frances,’ he said, trying to get her attention, ‘that was not pleasant hearing.’
She smiled more vaguely than he liked, but then saw his face and thought that there was one person there at least who had taken in what had been said.
‘I’m Harold Holman,’ he said. ‘But you don’t seem to remember me? I was around a lot with Johnny in the old days … I came to your place when all our kids were small – I was married to Jane then.’

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Дорис Лессинг

Тип: электронная книга

Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература

Язык: на английском языке

Издательство: HarperCollins

Дата публикации: 16.04.2024

Отзывы: Пока нет Добавить отзыв

О книге: Nobel Prize for Literature winner Doris Lessing tackles the 1960s and their legacy head-on in one of her most involving, personal, political novels.It’s the morning of the 1960s and it’s suppertime at Freedom Hall, the most welcoming household in north London. Frances Lennox stands at her stove, preparing another feast before ladling it out to the youthful crew assembled around her hospitable table – here are her two sons, smarting at their upbringing but beginning to absorb their mother’s lessons. Around them are ranged their schoolfriends and girlfriends and ex-friends and new friends fresh off the street. The feast begins. Wine and talk flow. Everything is being changed and being challenged.But what is being tolerated? And where will it end? Over there in the corner is Frances’s ex-husband, Comrade Johnny, who delivers his rousing tirades, then laps up the adolescent adulation before disappearing into the night to evade the clutches of his responsibilities. Upstairs sits Johnny’s exiled mother, funding all, but finding she can embrace only one lost little girl – Sylvia, who has to travel to Africa, to newly independent Zimlia, to find out who she is and what she wants. And what of the Africans, what will they tolerate?These are the people dreaming the 1960s into being, and the people who, on the morning after all that dreaming, woke to find they were the ones who had to clear up and make good.

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