The Sweetest Dream (2 page)

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 and 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.