Sweet Dreams

~ ~ ~

It’s Miriam Bernstein who tracks them down.

“Don’t hesitate to offer me a large drink!” she squeaks, as she climbs out of her car one sultry afternoon, and they all emerge from the house, astonished, Howard and the boys stripped to the waist. “I had to phone fourteen different estate agents before I found the one you’d dealt with…. My God, but you’re so brown and sinewy!”

It’s irritating to see her there, all nervy and squeaky, in her clothes for motoring out to the country in; but oddly touching and pleasing that she should have come.

“Why didn’t you tell anyone you were leaving? Well, obviously, because you wanted to get away from us all…. But when you never answered the phone, and Prue went round to your house, and found carriage lamps outside the front door, and some dreadful people with poodles inside, it was a terrible shock. The poodle people said you’d given everything up and gone off to live in a shack in the country…. I say, what a super house — I’m only just taking it in…. And I thought, what a smashing idea for a television programme! Someone terribly successful and important and super like you turning your back on it all. What’s wrong with our society? kind of thing…. Oh, I suppose you haven’t heard: I’ve gone into television, now all the children are at school. Bill Goody knew someone who knew someone. I’m afraid in the office they think I’m rather an idiot. So if I could go back and say, ‘Hurrah! I’ve found Howard Baker! I’ve persuaded him to let us film an exclusive interview with him in his secret retreat!’ it would be a colossal boost for me. You will say yes, won’t you, Howard? For me? If I flutter my eyelashes at you, and promise to bake you one of my apple crumbles?”

Howard smiles, and frowns, and thinks about it seriously as they all have tea in the orchard, and Miriam, in her dark glasses and clothes for motoring out to the country in, smokes furiously to keep away the insects, and chatters on about what happened when they went to dinner with the Chases the previous week, and Michael Wayland forgot Prue’s name!

How shallow, how futile, how desperate that world sounds now, on the scythed grass, beneath the trees where the fruit they will conserve for the winter is ripening.

All the same, he can scarcely refuse to help Miriam in her career, it seems to him, just because he himself has turned his back on that world and its career-making.

Besides, it will be an opportunity to expound the ideas he has been developing.

“And visually,” says Miriam, “with all these trees and sheep and things, and the children running about, it should be an absolute riot.”

“I warn you — I’m not going to pull any punches,” Howard tells Miriam when she comes back the following week with the film crew. “It’s going to be straight revolutionary stuff.”

“Super,” says Miriam. “The wilder the better, as far as we’re concerned.”

A dozen men move back and forth, putting up lights in the living-room, shifting all the furniture round, and accepting trays of tea from Felicity in the kitchen.

“I’m not going to turn myself into a performing monkey,” warns Howard. “I’m not going to do anything I don’t genuinely do in my everyday life here.”

“Of course not,” says Miriam. “That’s the whole point of the programme.”

They sit him in the rocking-chair in front of the hearth, to rock himself back and forth as he muses out loud about the enslavement of man by natural technology.

“I don’t want to fuss,” he says, “but the rocking-chair is usually over by the wall, not in front of the hearth.”

“Don’t worry,” says the director. “It’s just that we have to see the hearth if we’re to know you’re in an old farmhouse. If we shoot you against a blank wall you might be in the middle of the city, or in the studio, or anywhere. That’s why I’ve moved the bookcase behind your head. If we can’t see The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the shot it doesn’t exist.”

“I see,” says Howard reasonably.

Later they go outside, and the camera tracks in front of him as he walks about the property, prodding a pig here and shearing a sheep there, explaining how, left to themselves, people logically cannot fail to humanize the universe.

All the while the cameraman is walking backwards the assistant cameraman walks behind him, holding him by the waist and steering him round children’s bicycles and feed-troughs.

When Howard leans on a gate, talking about the rottenness of the society he has rejected, his children are in frame as well, rather small in the background, playing tag next to his left ear.

He is standing on a box to bring his head into line with them.

The children are allowed to sit up and watch the programme when it finally goes out (Howard has bought a small portable television set for the occasion). As soon as it’s over the phone rings (they’ve had a phone put in so that they can get bread and groceries delivered, and feel less cut off from doctors and fire services).

It’s Prue.

“Prue!” exclaims Howard, very pleased to hear the familiar impossible voice at such a moment, when he is feeling so raw and exposed from watching himself, and so uncertain whether he is a great man or a great fool.

“Miriam and Jack are here,” says Prue, “and the Waylands, and the Kessels, and Luci Hayter, and we all thought you were lovely.”

A grateful warmth spreads out through Howard’s head from his telephone ear.

“Did you really think it was all right, Prue? Only it’s so difficult judging what kind of impression one’s making, out here on one’s own.”

“You were perfect. We’ve all been congratulating Miriam. The real vintage Howard. We’ve all missed you dreadfully. We’ve all talked about nothing else, ever since you went. It’s cast a terrible gloom over everything.”

He realizes as she says it how much he’s been missing her and all the rest of them. He makes haste to tell her so.

“Oh, nonsense,” she cries. “You’re having a marvellous time out there. You’ve just been telling us all what a relief it was to get out of the city.”

Good heavens, she doesn’t think …!

“Prue!” he says anxiously. “I hope you didn’t think I was getting at you and Roy. I mean with all that stuff about little coteries, and cosy dinner parties, and so on….”

“Dear Howard — please don’t worry about it. We were all really rather impressed. We all felt that you’d managed to express some of the muddled worries we’d had about things ourselves.”

Howard walks back to the living-room smiling to himself. How pleasantly embarrassing to think of them all, sitting round the set at the Chases, making affectionately malicious remarks about his appearance and mannerisms!

But he has time to walk up and down the room only five times, telling Felicity what Prue said, before the phone rings again.

This time it’s Bill Goody.

“I’ve just got your number from Prue,” he says. “I thought I’d ring and congratulate you on managing at last to see what some of us have been going on about for all these years.”

This is an extraordinary compliment, coming from Bill, who is systematically sceptical and rude to almost everyone.

The next time the phone rings it’s Charles Aught. Also in agreement. Charles Aught!

“But Charles,” says Howard, bewildered. “I thought you were completely cynical about the whole thing. Don’t you remember that lunch we had, where I lost my temper? That was what set me thinking in the first place.”

“Howard love, all I get the tiniest bit cynical about is the way everyone closes his eyes to the truth. I was only teasing you because I thought you were just like the rest of them. I obviously got you wrong.”

“No, at that time you were right — I had got my eyes closed. I clearly got you wrong.”

“Oh, I’ve always been a bit of a subversive. I don’t know whether you saw any of the rather naughty stuff I put old Percy Bysshe up to?”

So he is not alone in his views, after all. Here and there in that hard, shining city there are individuals who think the same way as he does. Moles burrowing away underground, out of sight of each other, but with a common purpose. A group apart, the links between them welded by the sheer weight of society pressing down upon them.

He walks up and down for a while outside, unable to settle to the prospect of going to bed. The house gleams in the moonlight; the roses he has planted, now flooding the night with perfume, appear jet black and pure white.

Perhaps, in their reorganized solar system, they will keep the moon.

Even Phil phones.

“The bit I liked best,” says Phil, “was when you prodded the pig and told it about the unfairness of microorganisms. I thought you had the best of that particular discussion.”

Which, thinks Howard, may not sound much like a compliment — but which sounds considerably more like a compliment than anything else Phil has ever said.