The Sweetest Dream

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?