Sweet Dreams

~ ~ ~

“Oh God, it’s going to be a terrible place!” cries Howard to his fellow-guests around the Chases’ dinner table, holding his head and rocking it from side to side in humorous de-spair.

“You know Howard’s writing the scenario for the New Jerusalem, don’t you?” Prue reminds them all.

“The New Jerusalem!” cries Howard. “More like the New Disneyland, by the time we’ve finished! I can’t tell you the dreck we’re going to have in it. I shall never be able to look anyone in the eye again. Would you believe gladiator shows? And public hangings?”

They all laugh — but with a tinge of envy and respect.

“It sounds like a real Howard Baker story,” says Barratt Kessell. But he’s impressed, Howard can tell, by the casual use of expressions like “dreck” and “would you believe?”

“If it ever gets made,” says Howard. “Because I don’t think it’s ever going to get off the ground. You wouldn’t believe the wheeling and dealing that’s going on.“

“Tell us anyway,” says Charles Aught.

“Well,” says Howard, “it turns out that Mishkin doesn’t actually have any money himself. He’s simply trying to put a package together to sell to one of the big corporations — Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh or Zebaot International. To do that, of course, he has to have some bankable names to star in it. Like Joan of Arc and Saint Francis of Assissi. Don’t laugh — I’m serious. But of course Joan’s tied up in the Hundred Years War, and Frank’s got involved in some great animal epic. And while we’re waiting for them, Bill Saltman’s gone off to direct the establishment of white slavery in South America Still, I’m learning the general principles of the business. In five words: Grab the money and run.“

They all avoid his eye, they are so awed. He is developing morally, this is the point. He is learning to enjoy a new range of sour and bitter flavours, of gamy meat and dungy cheese, to set off the wholesome bread of his daily life. For the basic fabric of his life has not changed at all. He obstinately continues to love his wife and children, to be moved to tears by music, and to be disturbed by the sun breaking between banks of cloud, low in the sky over flat muddy fields on a winter’s afternoon.

And there could scarcely be anything more difficult and fine-textured than the affair he is having with a woman called Rose. She is dark and serious. She has creases at the corners of her eyes, and when she lowers her head to avoid Howard’s serious gaze she has a fold of flesh under her jaw.

She lives in a comfortable shabby house covered in crumbling stucco, with an overgrown garden full of great elms and sycamores, which fill the house with a soft green light. There are three cats. She plays the piano a lot. The whole house has a rather appalling familiarity about it.

She can’t see Howard often, because of her husband, whom she loves, and her children. Even when they do meet, on flat overcast weekday afternoons at her house, it’s often hopeless. She moves restlessly back and forth between living-room and kitchen, feeding the cats, picking up children’s boots, looking for a letter she was writing. He trails after her, making dramatic declarations of a sort he never has the occasion to make to Felicity.

“I love you!” he cries. “Can’t you understand that? I want you! I need you! But you don’t love me at all! Do you?”

“Of course I do,” she says, making a little kissing sound. “I must just finish this letter. It’s to my cousin.”

That’s the sort of woman she is — the sort of woman who has cousins. She also has an aunt who as a girl in Oxford knew several famous philosophers.

It’s extremely improbable that someone who is working with people like Bill Mishkin and Bill Saltman should be having an affair with someone like Rose. He tries to explain this to her. He tries to convey to her the vital importance that their complex relationship has to him as a counterpoint to his work on the New Jerusalem. She sits curled up in the corner of the sofa with her feet tucked under her and her half-written letter to her cousin waiting in her lap. Long wisps of dark hair fall across her face. She pushes them away, gazing at Howard sombrely.

“My work,” he says, “depends upon my having some kind of … depth. Some kind of moral complexity and ambiguity. Our whole involvement in the world is devious. It has to be devious. We’re working in a complex and difficult medium. That’s why I need you.“

She yawns.

“Oh God,” says Howard.

“Sorry,” says Rose. “I was thinking about my cousin, not about you.”

She writes her letter. The cover on the sofa is rumpled. Next to Rose there is a muddle of books and mending, and a flute, and one of the cats. The pattern on the carpet is worn threadbare. An old clock ticks slowly. On the mantelpiece letters and invitations and bills are stuffed behind little Staffordshire pots.

He loves the opacity of her life, its completeness without him. But it’s exactly that completeness which makes him suffer so. Suffering in love is one of the new bitter flavours he has learnt to appreciate. How he suffers! He suffers so much he wants to weep.

So, hell, he weeps.

Why not? After all, nothing is a joke here, as it is at home with Felicity. Every moment he grows deeper.

He goes out to the kitchen to hide his tears.

“Put some coffee on,” calls Rose.

The enamel coffeepot is chipped. There is an old coffee-grinder on the wall with a camellia lacquered on it, and a loose, rusty handle.

Slowly the water comes to the boil. The clock ticks. How sad life is! How deep and sad!

When Howard comes tragically back with the coffee, Rose is no longer alone. There is a man sitting in the rocking-chair opposite her, hunched over a book. A bespectacled man with stand-up hair, who has taken his shoes off and hung his feet over the arm of the chair. There is a hole in his right sock.

“Phil!” cries Howard, in astonishment.

Phil looks up briefly.

“Black for me, please,” he says.

Howard struggles not to feel appalled. But, really, what’s Rose going to make of this? She’ll think he invited Phil! Told him to look in any time — just to walk in, sit down, take his shoes off, and make himself at home! She’ll think he’s presuming upon their relationship. As if the situation weren’t difficult enough anyway!

“I’m sorry,” he says to Rose. “I didn’t know Phil was coming.”

“I must just finish this letter,” says Rose.

Howard pours the coffee, trying to feel that the whole situation is normal.

“But what I don’t understand,” he says to Phil, smiling conversationally, “is what you’re doing here.”

“Reading Jeremiah,” says Phil.

“It’s a waste of time name-dropping with me,” says Howard easily, as he fetches another coffee mug from the dresser. “I don’t know who you’re talking about. Jeremiah who?”

Phil turns back the pages of his book, frowning.

“That’s funny,” he murmurs. “It doesn’t say.”

“Oh, Jeremiah!” says Howard. He laughs, entirely at his ease, and puts seven lumps of sugar into his coffee.

“I’m always making a Phil of myself with fool,” he explains to Rose. He fishes the seven lumps of sugar out of his coffee. Then he puts two of them back.

Rose remains bent over her letter, Phil over Jeremiah. What an odd situation! Howard gets up and walks about the room with his coffee, smiling, and taking care not to fall over the furniture. Actually he is rather pleased that Rose should see he has friends as eccentrically impressive as Phil, and that Phil should see he is having an affair with someone as solid and opaque as Rose, whose aunt as a girl in Oxford knew several famous philosophers.

But why are they too shy to look at each other?

He leans back against the mantlepiece with his coffee, mastering the situation, a man of the world entertaining his oldest friend in his mistress’s house.

“I think we must get that husband of yours to lop a few branches off outside the window before you go blind,” he says to Rose, to demonstrate the terms he is on with her. To Phil he says, “I saw quite a number of the men you’re doing when I was in London. I got the impression you had problems. A lot of the models I saw had snags you hadn’t really got ironed out. I thought.”

Which tells Rose the kind of terms he is on with Phil.

“Yes,” says Phil, without looking up, “I read your report.”

“I tried to play it down in the report.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

“I couldn’t suppress it entirely, of course.”

“No.”

“I mean, we have problems, too, with the New Jerusalem.”

“Yes.”

All the same, there is something irritating about the way Phil sits there taking everything so much for granted — his presence in the house, Howard’s discretion in the report, even the coffee.

“Well,” says Howard pointedly, looking at his watch, “we must talk about it some time.”

“Talk about it now, if you like,” says Phil.

“I mean,” says Howard quite bluntly, “it’s probably time to go, isn’t it?”

“Not at all,” says Phil. “Stay as long as you like. Have an apple. Have two apples. Stay to dinner.”

Howard stares at him, then at Rose. His perspective of them changes as he stares. It’s like one of those cube patterns which pop inside out, from convex to concave, in front of your eyes.

“I see,” he says heavily. “I see. I suppose I’ve been making a fool of myself. I should have guessed that something like this was going on. Well, well, well. I think I’m entitled to feel rather bitter.”

He feels justifiably bitter for some minutes.

The door opens and a boy enters. He has spectacles and stand-up hair, and is trailing a satchel on the floor behind him. “Mum,” he says to Rose, “I had a fight with James Dunn today, and guess who won? Is it teatime yet?”

“Dad,” he says to Phil, “if one side had hydrogen bombs and the other side didn’t, but they had about, say, a trillion ordinary bombs, well, which side would win?”

“Not yet,” says Rose.

“I don’t know,” says Phil.

“Can I watch television?” says the boy.

He goes out, leaving his satchel on the floor. Howard gazes after him, flabbergasted.

“You mean,” says Howard, “you’re married?”

“Didn’t you get an invitation?” asks Phil. “Deckle-edged? With silver bells on the front? About eleven years ago? Don’t say we forgot to send you one.“

“Me!” cries Howard, walking about the upper roof garden of his converted dungeon. “Having an affair with the wife of my oldest friend!”

Felicity, lying back with her eyes closed in the late afternoon sun, smiles.

“I always thought Rose was deeper than you gave her credit for,” she says.

“I knew I knew the house! I knew I knew the telephone number!”

“You are a fool,” says Felicity tenderly.

“But that it should happen to me! This is the kind of situation other people get into!”

“You always underestimate yourself so,” says Felicity. “If other people can get themselves into these situations, so can you.”

He sits down. His elbows rest on his knees. He gazes at the ground.

“You don’t understand,” he groans. “I’ve shouted at her. I’ve burst into tears. Shouted and wept at someone else’s wife!”

She puts her hand on his.

“I knew I wasn’t the only person in the world you’d got the courage to shout at,” she says.

Howard sighs.

“But imagine if Phil came round here and shouted at you,” he says.

She laughs.

“That’s the difference between you,” she says. “He wouldn’t. He couldn’t.”

Howard puts his face in his hands.

“Don’t be silly,” says Felicity. “This is a completely new departure for you. You can’t go on forever just playing with the children and telling self-deprecating stories about yourself at the Chases’ dinner-parties. Just at the moment other men are beginning to wonder if they’ve come to the end of themselves, and if this is all that life has to offer, you discover a complete new range of abilities in yourself. You find you can betray your friends, and suffer, and inflict suffering on others. You’ve unearthed a completely new range of possibilities in your character.”

“That may be true,” says Howard, looking away with tragic restraint. “But there’s much more to it than that. What I feel goes much deeper than that. You don’t understand.”

“You mean,” says Felicity, “it makes you think that this whole society is morally ambiguous. You see that we’re all implicated in deception and betrayal. It’s a real crisis in your life.”

He says nothing.

“I understand you very well, you see,” she says.

“Then why do you let the children leave their bicycles in the cloister?” he shouts. “I’ve told you about it a thousand times.”