The Sweetest Dream

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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