Sweet Dreams

~ ~ ~

“What?” says the woman, frowning. She has long dark hair over her shoulders, and thick dark eyebrows. She is a little alarmed.

“I feel like an ice-cream,” says Howard. He has just noticed people eating ice-cream on a cafe terrace across the street.

“I’m waiting for someone,” says the woman, looking round anxiously.

“Well, then, you could have coffee.”

“It gets dark at about eight,” she says, pulling nervously at her hair.

“You could watch out for them from across the street,” replies Howard.

“I suppose I could have coffee …” she suggests doubtfully.

“God, I did that well!” he cries, as they sit on the cafe terrace sipping vermouth. “Has anyone ever come up to you and introduced himself like that before?”

She shakes her head, looking at him curiously.

“No,” she says. “Not in those words, at any rate.”

He laughs.

“‘When is lighting-up time?’” he says. “That was an inspiration! It just came out! Honestly, I hadn’t the slightest idea what I was going to say as I walked up to you. It was just seeing you like that. I knew at once that I could do it. I knew at once that I could just walk up to you and we could start talking, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. I knew you wanted me to talk to you. Perhaps you didn’t know that yourself. Perhaps you didn’t want me to talk to you. But I knew that you wanted me to talk to you whether you wanted me to or not! Do you see what I mean? And at once I could do it.”

She smiles slightly, and looks down at her hand as she runs a finger round the steel rim of the little marble-topped table. It is apparent to him that she has a difficult nature, at once placid and turbulent, bold and reserved. He tells her this.

“Ah,” she says.

“But the effect you have on me is extraordinary! I mean, that I should be sitting here telling you that you’ve got a passionate nature, within ten minutes of meeting you …! I don’t even know your name. Or perhaps I do. Let me guess. Is it … Rose?”

It is. Later he remembers something.

“Aren’t you waiting for someone?”

“I was,” she says. He puts his hand over hers on the table.

Later still they stroll a little, among the other strolling couples in the dusk.

“Or perhaps it’s this city,” he says. “Because here I feel I can do anything at all. Do you know you can fly here? Look!”

He bends his knees, pushes off, and drifts above the heads of the passers-by.

“You just bend your knees,” he calls down to Rose. She nods, smiling.

“Come on up, then! It’s fantastic!”

She pushes off and lets herself drift a few feet above the ground, holding her skirt round her knees.

“This is silly,” she says, frowning. “Only children do this.”

“But why? It’s so enjoyable!”

“Is that all you think about?” she asks disapprovingly.

They touch down, and he pushes off again, taking her arm so that she glides up with him in spite of herself. Like this they bound slowly down the boulevard, with him laughing and kicking people’s hats awry as they come arcing back onto the pavement at the end of each step.

“This is a ridiculous way to behave,” she says.

“Absurd!”

“Supposing everyone went down the street like this. There’d be chaos.”

At the end of the boulevard is a square where the traffic is jammed solid. They bound out over the jam, bouncing off the roofs of cars with a hollow metallic booming noise.

“What an astonishing city this is!” he shouts to her, over the noise of the hooting beneath. “I have a feeling of sudden spiritual growth here. I feel I’ve developed morally to become capable of things I could never have dreamed of before. If I’d met you earlier the fact that I’m married would have made it impossible for me to take off and fly with you like this. But morally I’ve grown up downwards. I was thirty-seven when I arrived. Now I’m about thirty-two or thirty-one. So all this is five or six years ago. And since Felicity — that’s my wife — can’t now experience what’s happening five years ago — because it’s receding faster than the speed of light, and the speed of light is a constant which, as we know from Einsteinian physics, cannot be exceeded … Do you see what I mean?”

She smiles.

Later they have dinner together. He tells her about the pencil-case and the four-colour propelling pencil. He tells her, too, about the toy-drawer in which the pencil-case was originally lost, and the characteristic choking dusty smell it would develop as the toys in it became mixed up with each other to form a kind of solid pudding, which had to be taken out at the end of each school holidays, and separated once again into its components. He describes the toy-drawer exactly, from the rubber sealing rings out of old tobacco tins, kept to make catapults (which, with the string and the electric cord, were the principal binding agents in the mass), to the leaking paper bag of salpetre (which may have accounted for the choking smell). The words to describe these difficult memories of confusion came to him magically — not without effort, not without searching for them, but with the assurance that each word is right, and calls forth its object exactly. She listens to him silently, sometimes looking down at his hand on the table, and lightly running her middle finger over it, from the wrist to the tip of the index finger, sometimes looking straight into his eyes. Sometimes he falls silent, too. At these moments he looks closely at each inch of her face, like a valuer frowningly examining some precious object. The skin of her face is soft and lived-in, with little wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, and beneath the lobes of her ears. She is as old as he is, and has had lovers and sadnesses, and difficulties of her own making. She tells him about her father — about how he stood on the cliffs in a flapping raincoat when she was a child and sang the whole of “O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion” over the roar of the wind and surf, and about how later she could not speak to him without irritation in spite of her love for him. Exactly like himself and his own father! She tells him about the street she was brought up in, its granular asphalt pavements ridged with long wavering bulges where they had beer dug up to get at the gas and water mains, and overhung by waterfalls of laburnum, with front gardens marked off by low walls, some of them in crenellated brickwork, some in pebble-dash with decorative chains dipping above them that you could set swinging, one after another, as you walked by. He knows exactly what she means — he was brought up in a street that might have been just round the corner. She tells him how she discovered Keats and Mozart and Goethe and Monet, and began to hate the laburnum and the grass verges and the swinging chains in front of the rose-beds. Just as he did. How she had a close friend at school who slept with men from the age of sixteen; how she first went to France with this friend; how she hated her first few terms at university; how she went through a wild phase of drunken parties and desperate affairs; how she plays the spinet late at night, when no one can hear, and fills the tired darkness with thin plunking antique counterpoint. He lives her life with her, year by year, seeing her become what she is. But at the same time he has an acute sense of her as being more than the object of his perception, as being another subjectivity, a self which is not his own self. He is amazed by the complex destiny which has put them before each other like this, two solid independent creatures face to face, two selves, with a common background and a common source of reference in Goethe’s Faust.

He opens his mouth to tell her this, but she puts her finger on his lips to silence him.

“Now I must go,” she says.

And, appallingly, goes.

She hurries along the street, looking straight in front of her. He has to almost run to keep up.

“You don’t really have to go, do you?” he asks her anxiously. “Who is it? Let them wait for once. Is it the person you were waiting for earlier …? But we’ve only just met…! Surely we’ve got time to sit down somewhere and have coffee …?”

“I’m sorry,” she says, hurrying on.

This is terrible. He is now twenty-two. He understands nothing. Women are self-contained universes, mysterious dark radio stars which work on laws entirely different from our own.

They are in a quiet part of the city, an old quarter where there are brass kicking-plates on the thresholds of the closed shops, their cross-hatchings worn almost smooth by years of polishing. In the dark shop windows snuff and hand-rolled cigarettes are discreetly displayed. They are almost the only people about. Their footsteps echo between the ancient stone buildings. From behind high walls the warm scent of flowers comes and goes; from an open window the sound of a cello.

“When shall I see you again?” he asks, hopelessly.

“I don’t know.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Perhaps. Possibly.”

But how can this be? In this city where everything is possible, and he cuts such a figure in his light suit and striped silk tie, and is thirty-two and full of self-confidence, and can walk up to a girl he has never seen before and with a disarming smile ask her when lighting-up time is — how can he be wearing a maroon crew-necked sweater, and cavalry twill trousers with cuffs, and be twenty-two, and find himself running after a girl and being told that she may or may not see him tomorrow? What kind of holiday is that?

They stop outside an archway closed by a heavy wooden gate. Rose pulls at a handle, and somewhere a bell dances.

“What time tomorrow, then?” he asks. “Shall we meet at the same place? Or shall I come here?”

“Tomorrow’s a bit awkward,” she says, twisting her shoe back and forth on the ground. “Perhaps one day next week?”

Next week …? He gazes at her, hating the way she twists her foot, hating the way she brushes awkwardly at her hair, hating the way her jaw is just too square and her eyebrows are just too thick.

“But I love you,” he says, in a low, unsuccessful voice, with the words all swallowed.

“What did you say?”

“I said, how about the day after tomorrow, then?”

Slow footsteps approach on the other side of the door. A bolt rattles. She comes quickly up to him and smiles into his face.

“Tomorrow, then,” she says. “Perhaps.”

She takes his face between her hands and kisses him on the lips. A picket opens in the gate, and an old man waits impassively while she runs inside, into the light. The picket shuts.

Now he understands what he is doing aged twenty-two. He walks back across the town, drifting off the ground at every other step, floating the length of whole streets. He looks down into the gardens hidden everywhere behind the patched and crumbling walls. A warm night breeze rustles in the dark trees, and bears him along. Somewhere a diffident bell begins to sound midnight, and from all over town, far and near, other bells join in.

He is transfigured. Every cell in his body is charged and polarized. Like a laser beam, he could pass through solid objects. And indeed, watched curiously by a solitary policeman below, he passes right through a library (**) by Hawksmoor, and emerges on the other side coughing slightly from the dust in the books.