The Sweetest Dream

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 …