Sweet Dreams

~ ~ ~

Charles draws another face in beer. The face is smiling a tiny smile.

“At least I don’t go round killing the poor buggers,” he says.

Howard looks up at him sharply.

“What do you mean?” he demands. “Killing them? Who’s killing them?”

“Well, you are.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Killing people?”

“Well, I don’t know,” says Charles, “but I met this girl in television the other evening, and she said people are going to be dropping off your Matterhorn thing like fleas off a dog.”

For a moment Howard just gapes at him, unable to grasp the enormousness of the misunderstanding.

“According to this girl,” says Charles, “huge avalanches are going to come sliding down the mountains, burying people by the dozen.”

A great gasping laugh bursts out of Howard.

“This is fantastic!” he shouts. “No one’s going to go up the mountains! No one’s going to go near them! Why on earth should they want to? There’s nothing but snow and ice and rock up there!”

To soldier doggedly on in the right — and then to crown the campaign with such a clear-cut black-and-white knockdown victory in argument! A sense of exhilaration sweeps through him.

“Well,” says Charles, the lumpish one now, “that’s what this girl told me.”

A delicately ludicrous picture comes into Howard’s mind, of an enthusiastic little hiker with a rucksack on his back, trying to walk up the side of the Matterhorn, and tumbling back with an astonished look on his face.

Howard can’t stop himself from laughing. He hides his face in his hands.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s rude of me, but…”

But he has to behave a little badly. To be in the right — and right about it! It’s a pleasure too sweet to be enjoyed without a little sharpness in it.

But when Howard thinks seriously about the kind of rumours that are being spread around, he sees that it really isn’t funny. It’s terrible that the society they live in should be undermined like that. He feels real anger running in his veins — a generous fury that honourable people should be so traduced.

“I don’t care for myself,” he tells Felicity, walking up and down the kitchen as she prepares dinner. “But it’s so unfair on people like Harry Fischer. His whole life’s work twisted against him in one poisonous little rumour. And how about Jack? Where would the world be without bacteria? I mean, we all know the world’s not perfect. But we’re all doing our best to help people. Providing them with decent mountains to look at, and bacteria to, to, to, to make cheese with.”

He walks back and forth, transported with outrage.

“It’s so unfair on you,” he says, with a broad gesture.

“Me?” says Felicity.

“When I think of all the hours you spend trying to help people with their problems….”

For Felicity does voluntary social work, like everybody’s wife.

“Oh …” she says, shrugging.

“No, come on!” says Howard. “Don’t let yourself be put down like this! Hours you spend on that phone, listening to people pour out their problems!”

“Yes,” says Felicity doubtfully. “But I’m not sure I actually help them very much….”

“Well, you listen to them!”

“Oh, I listen to them. But … ”

“But that’s what they need! You listen — and you casework them.”

Felicity sighs.

“What most of them need is money, more than anything else,” she says.

“Oh, sure!” cries Howard, his heart full of love for her. “And there’d be nothing easier than popping a cheque in the post to them, or sending them some cast-off woollies, or ladling some soup into them, or offering them advice. But you’re too good at your job to give in to that kind of temptation. You know they’ve got to learn to confront their own problems, and work out their own solutions.”

“Well …” says Felicity.

“No, you keep quiet! I’m not having you running yourself down all the time! So — you listen in silence; and you casework them; and you set up case-conferences about them; and you refer them to other agencies; and you work up your notes on case-handling for the journals.”

Howard stops walking up and down, and looks out of the window. He has just seen that the ultimate aim of the caseworker must not be to casework at all, but to get his cases to face up to caseworking themselves. He has a vision of the caseworker as becoming increasingly abstract, first not commenting, then not even uttering sympathetic noises, finally not even listening; merely a benign presence disposing to good.

Howard is becoming something of an expert on the theory of social work, in fact; Rose is doing it, too. She never stops doing it. She’s always nervously brushing the hair out of her eyes and saying that she can’t come out with Howard because she has to go and see a client.

“To hell with the client,” says Howard, catching her hand and smiling at her. (They are standing on some windy street corner, say.)

“No, I have to,” says Rose, taking her hand away and frowning.

He catches her other hand.

“He’s appearing in court tomorrow,” she says. “Honest.”

“Which one’s this?” asks Howard, taking a strand of her hair and wrapping it round his finger. “The one who chopped up his wife and married her sister? Or is this the lady with the subnormal twins by her paternal grandfather?”

“I hate your making a joke of it,” says Rose, pulling her hair away.

Howard makes a series of appalling little kissing noises.

“It’s someone who’s lost his job,” says Rose, “and he hasn’t got anywhere to live.”

He leans forward and kisses her cheek. She leans her elbow against his shoulder, and her head on her fist, and inspects his face from a distance of twelve inches, frowning. (They’re sitting at the corner of a teashop table, say.) She runs her finger slowly along his chin, as if inspecting it for dust.

“He’s nowhere to sleep tonight,” she says.

“How terrible!” says Howard, brushing his knuckles gently against her eyebrows.

“It is terrible.”

“Ghastly.”

“I must ring round and …”

He kisses her lips.

“This isn’t right,” she says.

“No …”

“We’re behaving badly.”

“Yes …”

The intimately invading pressure of another body against one’s own, from neck down to knees! (Because they are standing just inside the door of her room, say.)

“But this really is bad,” she says. “When my client has nowhere to … and other people are …”

Heaping handfuls of flesh; scooping handfuls of each other, seized libidinously just anywhere, just anyhow! (Because they are stumbling backwards over a precipitation of hasty, inside-out clothes, say.)

“Wouldn’t it be terrible to be bad?” he says to her right hip. “You’d never know what a relief it was to stop being good.”