Sweet Dreams

~ ~ ~

They’re all here, it turns out, all his friends. The Chases, the Waylands, the Chyldes, the Esplins — they’ve all found old houses in the south-western and northern suburbs of the city, and done them up, and rung to invite Howard to dinner. Luci Hayter is here, whose husband went off with the girl in market research. So is Charles Aught, that rather camp man in advertising, who writes poems and art criticism, and whose correspondence with his fellow-critic Elwyn West was auctioned at Sotheby’s and fetched twenty-five pounds. Bill Goody has arrived (the Labour M.P., who will almost certainly get a junior ministry next time round). Even Francis Fairlie, the man they all joke about because he can never make up his mind to marry or to start a serious career or to buy a house or to do anything else that may define and announce his character to the world — even Francis Fairlie has managed to get himself here!

“We couldn’t leave you here on your own,” says Prue Chase, as Howard kisses her and hands a bottle of wine to Roy, her husband. “We knew you’d get all lonely and homesick.”

“Oh God!” says Howard. “You didn’t all move here just because of me?”

“When we heard you were here we thought what fun it would be,” says Roy urbanely. “We’re very grateful to you.”

“Dear Howard!” says Prue. “It is lovely to see you!”

She is a small, pious, affectionate girl of sharp intelligence, all of it devoted to the cherishing and advancement of her friends. Howard hugs her, and has to look away for a moment, he is so moved.

“Come and have a quick tour of the house,” she says, taking his arm, “before we go in and meet the others.”

The house moves him, too, its style is so familiar in spite of its strangeness. When the Chases found it, it was a home for unmarried mothers. Now the walls are white and the floors sealed. Carpets and cushions glow in warm colours against the white paintwork and the pale yellow wood, and little pools of lamplight draw the eye to books and magazines, and flowers, and elegant chromium toys illustrating the Law of the Diffusion of Gases and the Uncertainty Principle.

“You can just see the sea from the nursery,” explains Prue, “and if you stand on the loo and look out of that little window you can see all those cloverleaf intersections you drove over on the way in. You’re not going to believe this, but we got this place for three hundred and ninety-nine million!”

When she takes him into the living-room there is a kind of roar, and a man emerges from the background of people and easy chairs and advances upon Howard, his arms outstretched, his deep, dark eyes raking back and forth over Howard’s face, soaking it in with eager amazement. This is Michael Wayland, who appears on television a lot, and who as a consequence can never remember anything unless it’s written on the Teleprompter, or held up beside the lens in front of him. He won’t remember Howard’s name, for instance.

“Howard!” he cries. He has! But this is the most flattering thing that has ever happened to Howard!

“Well done,” murmurs Prue.

Michael holds Howard by the upper arms, to take in his corporeal presence through his finger-tips, and to keep him at the right distance for gazing at in astonishment.

“But, Howard, this is extraordinary!” he says. “That you should be over here too!”

A shout of laughter goes up from the room. Michael looks round at them all.

“Oh God,” he says. “Have I done it again?”

“I don’t believe it!” gasps Prue. “Michael, the reason we all moved here was that Howard was here already!”

“Oh Christ,” says Michael, smiling, pleased with himself.

“You don’t realize,” says Myra, Michael’s wife, from the far end of the sofa, “the fantastic thing is that we went through all this scene twenty minutes ago, in the car on the way here. ‘Don’t forget,’ I said, ‘that Howard Baker’s going to be there.’ ‘Howard Baker’s over here?’ he shouted. He almost ran us into the back of a streetcar.”

Michael laughs. Howard laughs. Prue and Roy laugh. They are all happy that nothing has changed. Even the other two guests laugh — a woman called Pattie whose husband has just left her, and a man whose name Howard doesn’t quite catch. “He lives just down the road,” explains Prue. “We thought you’d like to meet one of the natives, in case you haven’t already. As a matter of fact he was at Cambridge just after us.”

Howard is deeply moved. There is always a woman at the Chases’ dinner parties whose husband has just left her. There is always a man from just down the road, or the basement flat, or the office, whose name Howard doesn’t quite catch, and who was up at Cambridge just after all the rest of them.

The meal starts with taramasalata.

“I’m sorry,” says Prue. “I always serve taramasalata.”

“Yes,” says Howard, contentedly.

The next course is gigot aux haricots.

“I think you’ve had this at our house, too, haven’t you?” says Prue.

“Yes,” says Howard, sighing. “Many, many times.”

They eat. They drink. They talk. Howard can hear his own voice, talking smilingly, deeply, effortlessly, about secondary education and the nature of human happiness and the price of houses. A sense of well-being, of transformation and enlightenment, penetrates to the very marrow of his bones. He has a mystical experience. Each of his friends around the table, he realizes, is surrounded with a kind of aura. Their faces emanate a radiance, though whether he actually sees this with his eyes or knows it by some sort of deductive process he is not entirely sure. The radiance is the manifestation of their virtues; of their industriousness, their honesty, their interest in the appearance of the world, their pleasure in life, their unchanging-ness, their being who they are.

Even the man whose name Howard didn’t catch, and who was at Cambridge just after him, is glowing faintly.

Prue is almost incandescent.

When people speak, their words emerge in illuminated manuscript, glowing with gold and angelic blue, tangled with flowers and tiny peasants labouring in the yellow corn.

“You must have been up with the famous Ord Gaunt?” says the man whose name Howard didn’t quite catch, and the dense Middle English blackletter in which the words are uttered exactly matches their resonant profundity.

“Yes, we were,” says Prue, “and he wore luminous green socks even then.”

The words “luminous green socks” are luminous, green, socklike.

They all laugh at the sight. Each laugh, observes Howard, looking chiefly at the laughter emerging from himself, is rounded and polished, as if cast in weathered bronze. Their shoulders shake, hingeing up and down on well-oiled ball-and-socket joints made of stainless steel.

They have apple crumble, of course. Then Howard sits back and tells them about the terrible balls-up he made of his arrival in the city. He is famous for the balls-ups that seem to happen around him, and for the modest, humorous accounts he gives of them. They all listen with smiles beaten out of soft gold already on their lips.

As soon as he looked out of the window on the morning after he arrived (he tells them) and saw what the place was like, he realized that it was based on the tutorial system. Somewhere there would be a tutor waiting to see him — some easy-going, amiable man, not old, but a few years older than himself, with whom he could drink sherry on slightly deferential terms, and to whom he could apply for permission to hold parties, keep a car, and ride to hounds. Clearly his first task was to call on him and announce his arrival.

It wasn’t easy to find out who this tutor was supposed to be. He walked all over the city, looking for windswept gateways and corridors with notice-boards in them. Every time he found one he held all the flapping notices down one by one, and read through lists of hockey teams, and announcements of meetings to be held by religious societies. At last he found a neatly typed sheet of crested notepaper which said: “Mr. Brice will see freshmen in C4 between 11:00 A.M. and 1:00 P.M.”

Mr. Brice, it turned out when he got to C4, was not older than himself at all. In fact he was about ten years younger — a chubby young man with a very smoothly shaven pink face, bulging urbanely under the jaw. He was married, with two children, Howard discovered later, but was on bad terms with his wife, a French girl whom he had met when she was at one of the English-language schools in the city. He often put his pupils off from tutorials because he was at the television studios, smilingly outlining rather shocking views about constitutional history, and the role of the trade unions. All this was by the way, however, except that it lent background and depth to the smile he gave Howard as he shook hands.

“My name’s Bill,” he said. “I’m the chap you come and see if you get pregnant, or whatever. Now, to more serious business.”

And with that he turned towards the window and sank to his knees.

Now, this was Howard’s first day in the place (he reminded the Chases and their guests, preparing them dramatically for what was to come), and he had some vague impression at the back of his mind, left over perhaps from books he had read and films he had seen, that it was at bottom some kind of ecclesiastical institution. So as soon as he saw Bill Brice sink chubbily to his knees, he jumped to the conclusion that some brief word of informal prayer was going to be said.

Had this been any other occasion, he would have lowered his head respectfully and more or less closed his eyes, watching Bill Brice out of the corner of them so as to know when to open them again, and murmuring amen where appropriate. He had a genuine respect for religious feeling. He had even experienced it himself once or twice, particularly while doing the outline plans for a church he had designed as part of a new mixed-density, mixed-income neighbourhood scheme, which had been well reviewed in the journals.

But since it was his first day in the place, he was particularly anxious to make a good impression, and to demonstrate his eagerness to accept the spirit of the institution. Also there was something decidedly impressive about the sight of Bill Brice kneeling there — so young, so overweight, so ambitious, on such premature bad terms with his wife, and yet so humble and submissive, with the toecaps of his suede desert boots turned over, and a drawing-pin sticking disarmingly in the heel of one of them.

So he got down on his knees, too, and rested his elbows on Bill Brice’s coffee-table, and closed his eyes completely.

This was the sight that Bill Brice saw when he smilingly turned round, holding the fresh bottle of sherry which he had been kneeling to get out from under the window-seat.

Oh God, thought Bill Brice (said Howard), a religious nut! And smilingly he remained kneeling, as a mark of genuine respect for Howard’s beliefs. Genuine respect, in his experience, was the only way of dealing with one’s students’ more repellent religious and political enthusiasms.

His intention was to remain on his knees for about ten or fifteen seconds, and then to rise, saying smilingly, “Well, then …” or words to that effect. But the appearance of Howard when he came into the room must have impressed him in spite of himself — the bulging clear blue eyes, the eager lean of the body forward, the anxiety on the face to understand the world around him. Because when, after seven or eight long seconds of genuine respect, he saw Howard looking at him out of the corner of his eye, he hastily hid the bottle of sherry behind his back and bowed his head.

They remained like this for a long time.

They were still like it when Sid Cornish, the Professor of Artificial Intelligence, put his head round the door to ask Bill Brice whom he should see about getting on television.

“I do beg your pardon,” he said, and withdrew.

The interruption gave the two kneeling men a chance to look up, and to see each other looking up. They got to their feet, drank their sherry, smiling a lot, and never went near each other again.

But Sid Cornish, who was a serious atheist, could not get the sight of the two kneeling men out of his mind. What? Bill Brice? The television iconoclast? The smiler with the sherry bottle? Now glimpsed at prayer with a pupil? He told everyone he met, pulling a maliciously funny face to represent Bill Brice’s holy expression. A week later he was in the chair at a meeting of the Humanist Society when he suddenly had a vision of Bill Brice looking down at him from the moulding in the corner of the ceiling with a crown of thorns on his head, and a look of sweet forgivingness on his face; whereupon he stood up and made a long, confused speech about the hunger for God that gnawed inside each of us, however stiff-necked and jeering we might be; which caused great embarrassment to all those present, and even greater embarrassment later to progressive theologians on the staff, who felt that such old-fashioned emotive conversions could only undo all their good work.

But eventually it led to several notable improvements in the arrangements for the early detection of mental ill-health among faculty members.

Everyone round the table listens intently to the story — the Chases, the Waylands, the Chyldes, the Kessels, the Bernsteins, Charles Aught, Luci Hayter, Rayner Keat, and Francis Fairlie, who is still hesitating about what life to commit himself to — a great audience stretching back into the dim recesses of the room, a densely cultivated field growing faces. They are absolutely silent in the dramatic passages. They roar with laughter at the funny bits. They love the way the story trails away into the postscript about improvements to the mental health service.

“That’s a real Howard Baker story!” they cry, when he has finished. “It would happen to Howard! Only Howard could turn a glass of sherry into a religious revival!”

Howard looks down at his plate, grinning, and pressing a few crumbs of cheese onto his finger to nibble. He is emanating quite a powerful golden light himself, he notices.

“There’s a certain special sort of Howard Baker modesty,” says Roy Chase.

“A kind of innocence,” says Charles Aught.

“You just have to look at him,” says Luci Hayter, “and you know he’s going to leap with modest eagerness to the wrong conclusion.”

“As a matter of fact,” says Howard suddenly, “when you think about it, I can’t really have known what was going on in Bill Brice’s mind — or in Professor Cornish’s. I think, to be absolutely honest, I must have made all those bits up. And I believe the meeting of the Humanist Society which Cornish is chairing isn’t until next Tuesday.”

Everyone rocks with laughter at this admission. He can see them, all down the table, leaning forward over their plates, then back in their chairs, an irregular series of nodding heads like a shop window full of sipping chicken toys. He grins at the effect he has produced, and picks up more cheese crumbs on his finger.

“Isn’t that just like Howard,” says Barratt Kessell, “to blurt out that sort of confession? If any of the rest of us realized we’d improved a story we’d been telling, we’d just keep quiet about it.”

With a shock Howard now suddenly sees another shortcoming in his story. They don’t have tutors in this place; it’s not that kind of place at all. He must have made the whole thing up from start to finish. He now recalls seeing a painter on his knees in a shop doorway and thinking, wouldn’t it be funny if I, as a newcomer to this city, misunderstood the situation, and, anxious to please, knelt beside him …? What he has done is to supply himself with a ridiculous experience by the telling of which he could entertain several hundred people, without having to undergo the dispiriting strain of suffering it first. For a moment he feels worried about the ethics of this. But then he asks himself if people would have enjoyed the story any more had it been true, and if they would have achieved any greater insight into themselves and their destinies. Of course not. In any case, they don’t know it wasn’t true. Howard realizes that he has hit upon a radical solution to one of the main problems in enjoying a satisfactory life-style. He has discovered how to enjoy his life without being seen to.

He stands up and taps on the table for silence, intending to announce this new discovery, in the hope that it will cause yet more laughter, and increase his reputation for honesty still further.

Everyone round the table falls silent and looks at him, poised to laugh again.

“Why don’t we have coffee next door?” he says, and leads the way, amidst laughter and applause.

For he has realized something else, in the moment of inspiration between standing up and beginning to speak: that the aesthetic effect of honesty depends upon restraint in its application.

“Barratt was just telling us the other night at the Goodys’,” says Prue, as she pours coffee in the living-room, “about how he had lunch with God the other day.”

“Oh, really?” says Howard, intrigued.

“Do tell Howard about it,” Prue urges.

“There’s honestly nothing to tell,” says Barratt Kessel, embarrassed. “You make it sound as if there was just me. There were ten of us, altogether. I was sitting between the principal of a college for policewomen and a rather saucy lady novelist.”

“This was at the Palace?”

“Yes. It was just one of these regular lunch-parties he has so that he can keep in touch with people he wouldn’t otherwise meet. It wasn’t anything special.”

“I thought he didn’t in fact live in the Palace?” objects Francis Fairlie. “Someone in television told me he lived in an ordinary flat by the Park, with nothing but a secret-service man lurking in the lobby.”

“Oh, nonsense, Francis,” says Charles Aught. “He lives on the sixteenth floor of the RCA building. He’s got the whole floor. He gives terrible parties up there — I know a girl who’s been to them. All white sofas and Kokoschkas and rather smart young men who write rock shows.”

“Well, I don’t know,” says Barratt. “This lunch thing was at the Palace.”

They all wait for him to go on, while appearing as if they do not care whether he goes on or not.

“Well, go on,” says Howard. “What was he like?”

Barratt sighs.

“I know you’re all going to take the piss out of me if I tell you what I honestly thought.”

“Don’t be silly,” says everyone.

“Well,” says Barratt heavily, “I thought he was very nice.”

Everyone at once begins to take the piss out of him.

“Well, I’m sorry,” says Barratt irritably, “but he was.”

“Of course he was,” says Charles Aught soothingly. “That’s his job. But what else was he? This girl I know thinks he’s rather camp.”

Barratt makes a helpless gesture, as if trying to catch a word out of the air.

“I don’t know,” he says. “He was very relaxed and friendly. He told some quite funny stories. He was … well, he was nice.”

They all burst out laughing.

“For a start he got my name right.”

Applause.

“Well, plenty of people don’t,” says Barratt. “Also he knew all about the work I was doing. And all about my row with Fred Hattersley.”

“And whose side was he on?” asks Bill Goody. “Yours or Fred’s?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake! He wasn’t on anyone’s side. He just looked at me and said something like, ‘How’s my friend Mr. Hattersley, then?’ sort of thing. And he had a kind of little smile on his face as he said it.”

They all have little smiles on their faces.

“Barratt,” says Bill Goody, “you’re a pushover. Here you are, the great founder of housing trusts, the great battler for the homeless, the great righter of wrongs, the only humanist saint we know. We send you in to do battle with the enemy, and what happens? You come out with a moist look in your eyes, saying, ‘He knew my name!’ ”

Barratt jiggles his foot, looking anywhere but at Bill.

“It hasn’t changed my opinions,” he says. “I’m still a humanist.”

“At this rate,” says Bill, grinning, “we’re still going to have a theocracy here a hundred years from now.”

“Well,” insists Barratt stiffly, “I can’t help admiring someone who really does his homework. If we all did our jobs as well as that perhaps it wouldn’t matter about it’s being a theocracy.”

They all look down into their brandy, embarrassed at the turn the conversation has taken.

“This girl I know,” says Charles Aught, trying to be cheerful, “thinks it’s really a woman dressed up.”