Sweet Dreams

~ ~ ~

All his friends know that it was Howard who did the Matterhorn, in spite of his modesty, because Prue Chase makes a point of telling everyone.

“You know Howard, don’t you?” she says, as she levers him into conversations at parties. “He did the design for the Matterhorn, though he modestly lets Harry Fischer take all the credit for it.”

Or else she turns to him in the middle of dinner and asks, “What’s happening about the Matterhorn, Howard? They are going ahead with it, aren’t they? It won’t be affected by the credit squeeze …? Shirley, you know it was really Howard who designed it, don’t you?”

Prue handles the public relations for all her friends in this way. It’s her assiduity which enables them all to be so modest about their success — and they all are pretty successful, one way or another.

Charles Aught is doing terribly well in inspiration, for example.

“The last time we saw you,” Prue says to him, as she ladles the haricots around his gigot, “you were just desperately trying to find a second line to put after ‘Goe, and catch a falling starre.’ Did you have any luck?”

“Prue, love!” cries Charles Aught, pleased. “How clever of you to remember! Yes, as a matter of fact I did. ‘Goe, and catch a falling starre/Get with child a mandrake roote.’”

“Charles, that’s brilliant!” cries Prue.

“Brilliant!” says Roy, her husband, from the other end of the table.

“I thought that would really zonk him,” says Charles.

“They’ve put Charles onto inspiring Donne,” explains Prue to the people around the middle of the table, “because he did so fantastically well with Yeats.”

“Well, either you get on with someone or you don’t,” says Charles. “And with John I do. He’s really rather a honey. As a matter of fact I usually just give him the first line or two and leave him to get on with it. He’s quite literate. Unlike some I’ve worked with.”

Bill Goody is trying to stop the laws of logic being passed.

“How’s your truly heroic battle against the Law of Excluded Middle going?” asks Prue. “You know, Charles, don’t you, that the Government’s trying to steamroller a law through to say that everything either is the case or isn’t the case?”

“Oh, we’ve done a deal on Excluded Middle,” says Bill. “We’ve called our campaign off as a quid pro quo for their accepting the need for legislation to control the conservation of energy.”

Simon Winter has raised two people from the dead.

“Are they both all right still?” asks Prue. “Bill, you know it was Simon who brought those two people back to life.”

“One’s popped off again, I’m afraid,” says Simon. “The other’s jogging along all right. Bit brain-damaged, that’s all.”

Roy Chase himself is very big in counselling, though Prue out of conjugal modesty always makes his efforts sound ridiculous. “Poor Roy!” she says. “The only people who seem to get put through to him are little girls who want ponies for Christmas and wives who want their husbands dead.”

Roy grins.

“More apple crumble, anyone?” he says.

And everyone knows that really he is advising medieval kings and nineteenth-century prime ministers.

There’s room for them all to do well in this place, that’s the thing. There’s plenty of demand for their talents. Because here they are, right at the centre of things, with the whole universe to plan and control and advise and entertain. And they have the satisfaction of knowing that they are indispensable. For what would the universe be without this concentration of moral and intellectual power in the metropolis? Mere chaos. Undifferentiated interstellar gas. Nothing.

And there is room for them all to do better than each other.

“I mean,” says Howard to a girl called Rose he meets at a party, as they sit on the stairs around two in the morning, talking seriously, her dark eyes looking up seriously into his, “I’m the best mountain-designer in the universe. It sounds ridiculous — it is ridiculous — it’s one of those huge ridiculous facts that one tries to close one’s eyes to, they’re so absurd — and I’m only mentioning it because it’s two o’clock in the morning, and I feel I can say anything to you. And this would be an insupportable thing to know about oneself, if one thought that this implied some superiority over the people around one. But in this society it doesn’t! Because the people around one are all the best at something else in the universe. Charles Aught has the best working relations with Donne, Roy Chase is the best at helping people, and so on. You might say, what about the other mountain-designers I work with? How can they be best at mountain-designing if I am? And that’s a very good question. But the answer is, each one secretly thinks he’s the best. And the more obvious it is that I’m the best, the more convinced they are that under the surface, in some subtler way that only a more discriminating critic would appreciate, they are…. This is what we’ve achieved by extreme centralization and extreme specialization — a society so complex that everyone in it is winning the race. Do you see what I mean?“

Rose runs her finger slowly round the rim of her glass.

“What about me?” she says. “What am I best at?”

Howard takes her hand emotionally.

“What you’re best at,” he says, “is sitting here on these particular stairs at this particular hour of the night with that particular way of looking, and then saying ‘What am I best at?’ ”

What astonishes Howard, though, is why he should be allowed to be who he is, and live in such a perfectly organized society.

“Why me?” he asks Phil Schaffer, as the two of them sit late in Indian restaurants, eating blazing vindaloos after watching old Humphrey Bogart movies at cinemas beyond the railway sidings, on autumn nights when each sodium light has a yellow halo in the foggy air. “What have I ever done to deserve this?”

“What do you mean?” says Phil shortly (he makes a point of trying to keep Howard’s modesty within reasonable bounds). “You passed the exam to get into the place, didn’t you? What do you expect?”

The exam! Of course! Howard has entirely forgotten about it. He came up on the train for a few days, very nervous, wearing his best suit. He remembers sitting on a hard seat, among a hundred other candidates in a large, impressively ancient room, scribbling a General Essay paper for three hours on EITHER Political Necessity OR “Enrichissez-vous!” not at all sure what the examiners would be looking for in the answers — their ideas or his ideas, or the former subtly disguised as the latter, or the latter masquerading as the former.

In the end he boldly put down his own ideas, without any thought as to whether the examiners would find them palatable or not. He set forth an idealistic view of a society in which all privilege would be done away with, and in which wealth and power would be fairly shared, on the basis of competitive public examinations with General Essay papers on EITHER Natural Justice OR “Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”

And passed. So the foundations of his existence in this society are absolutely secure.

Phil has an incredibly good job, too. He is creating man.

Or at any rate, he is with one of the research teams working on the man project. Half the university departments and industries in the city are involved. The end product, as everyone knows from all the projections and mock-ups they keep making public to try to justify the wildly escalating costs, will have two arms and two legs, a language capability, and a fairly sophisticated emotional and moral response. The general idea is to build something pretty much in their own image.

“As a matter of fact,” Phil tells Howard one day, as they walk along the street eating fish and chips from a Greek newspaper, “I think it’s probably going to be the spit and image of you.”

“What?” says Howard, frowning.

“I sit there in the laboratory,” says Phil, “trying to think how people go, and I can’t remember. Do they really physically raise a sardonic eyebrow, and make a long face, or only metaphorically? What expression do they have when they’re thinking black thoughts about someone they’re trying to ingratiate themselves with, or when they’re being praised for qualities they’re aware they don’t possess? I think of all the people I know, and I can’t remember how any of them behave. The only person I can ever think of is you. I always know what you’d do. I can always imagine what you’d think, and how you’d look. So bit by bit you’re being written into the programme and fed into the computer. I hope you’re flattered.”

Howard is flattered. But he doesn’t like to let Phil see this. So he adopts a humorous apelike shamble, knees bent and feet turned out.

“Ferkin ell,” he says, in a special humorous artificial voice which he uses from time to time with Phil, to ward off jokes he has not entirely understood.

“I must get that down,” says Phil. “When told that man is being created in his image, he bends knees, turns feet out, and utters a small trisyllabic croak from the bottom of the larynx.”

For Christmas Howard buys his children a complete working model of their family and its life. There, on the playroom floor on Christmas morning, are their house, the children’s school, the great towers of the city…. Switch on and move the appropriate levers on the banks of controllers, and the children come running out of the house, little pink-cheeked creatures half an inch high, who turn to wave at Felicity as she comes out on the terrace to see them off to school. Cars purr back and forth along the expressways, bearing the Bernsteins to dinner with the Chases, the Chases to the Waylands, the Waylands for a Christmas-morning drink with the Bakers. And there’s Howard himself, three-quarters of an inch high, and a little too freshly complexioned to be true, climbing into his car, running upstairs to his office, ushering Felicity through lighted front doors, shaking hands, kissing cheeks….

The children play with it for half an hour, then run outside with their new toboggan instead. But Howard can’t tear himself away from it. Late that night, after the children have finally gone to bed, Felicity finds him lying full-length on the playroom floor once again, still absorbed.

“Look,” he says, “here are the Waylands coming up the Parkway to call on Charles Aught…. There you are, taking the children out to tea with Ann Keat….”

He glances up and sees her expression.

“Sorry,” he says. “I’m just coming. But you can actually see it all! That’s what gets me about it. You can really get hold of it all. And it all does work, that’s the amazing thing. It all does in fact make sense.”

“I suppose so. But doesn’t it get rather boring after a bit?”

He moves some more levers, thinking about this. The children come running home from school. The Kessels pick up the Chases, and drive into town to go to the theatre.

“I think perhaps that’s what I like most of all about it,” he says.

A great joke — Howard and Felicity are invited to a reception at the Palace!

Howard sits at the breakfast table with the card in his hand, giggling over it.

“You’ll have to buy a hat!” he says.

“What?” says Felicity, astonished. “You’re not thinking of going?”

“Of course!” says Howard. “Why not? We’re scarcely going to feel we’ve sold our souls for a plate of strawberries and cream, are we?”

“You’ll have to rent a morning suit. You realize that?”

“Sure. It’ll be an absolute riot. I’ll go in being about fifty, with grizzled hair and a rather lined face.”

“I don’t want to be fifty!”

“No, you be thirty-five, and rather sunburned. We’ll cut a real swathe through them. It’ll be a hoot.”

A hoot it is, too. Several thousand people standing about in a series of large rooms surrounded by mirrors, so that the entire world appears to be peopled with morning suits and ladies’ hats sipping champagne. A band plays selections from Fiddler on the Roof. Howard and Felicity move slowly about with their champagne, like everybody else, trying to look as if they are heading somewhere purposeful, and quietly making little humorous comments on the proceedings to each other as they go. “Hel-lo!” squeaks one of the ladies’ hats suddenly — and there are the Bernsteins.

“Thank heavens!” cries Felicity.

“It was worth coming just for the relief of finding you here,” says Jack Bernstein.

“Isn’t it ghastly?” murmurs Howard.

“Isn’t it just?” squeaks Miriam Bernstein.

“It’s exactly like a Jewish wedding,” says Jack, “except they’ve forgotten to invite Uncle Hymie and Auntie Rae, the ones who never made it.”

They gaze round over each other’s shoulders, very pleased with themselves.

“It’s fantastic when you think that a lot of people reckon this whole society’s evil from top to bottom,” says Jack.

Howard laughs.

“No, seriously,” says Jack.

Howard’s laughter fades uncomprehendingly away.

“How do you mean?” he says.

“Oh,” says Miriam, “Jack met some rather hairy young man at a party, that’s all.“

“He told me that half the bacteria I’m developing are lethal,” says Jack. “Going to kill people off like flies.”

“No!” cries Felicity.

“Yes!” squeaks Miriam. “He said Jack was just part of the system!”

“System?” demands Howard, looking from one to the other, not understanding any of this. “What system?”

“Don’t you know?” says Miriam dramatically. “We’re all together in a gigantic conspiracy to dominate the world!”

Howard looks round the room, half-believing for a moment that the game he and Phil used to play might be coming to life after all. But at the sight of all those senior conspirators standing uncomfortably around in rented tailcoats he can’t help laughing.

“The whole set-up’s a joke!” he whispers.

“It’s an awfully long joke,” says Miriam. “What I want to know is where God’s supposed to be.”

They thread their way among the morning suits, looking. There’s a crush over by the door in one of the rooms, with flashbulbs going off every few seconds, but it’s impossible to get near enough to see.

“I’ve half a mind to take off, and have a look from the ceiling,” whispers Howard.

“Go on, then,” urges Miriam.

“We ought to,” says Jack. “What’s the use of being able to fly if you never use it?”

“Up you go,” says Felicity.

They hesitate.

“Supposing everyone started doing it?” says Howard.

“I’d do it if I were younger,” says Jack.

“Oh, so would I. Like a shot.”

“I wouldn’t give a damn what anyone thought.”

“Jack’s put on ten years specially,” explains Miriam.

“So’s Howard,” says Felicity. “But they could be eighteen for a few moments. No one would notice.”

Howard and Jack look at each other.

“I’d feel a fool, frankly, being eighteen in a morning suit,” says Jack.

So they never see God at all.

“Well?” Bill Goody asks Howard at the Chases’ next day. “What was he like? Irresistible, was he? Called you Howard and knew all about the Matterhorn?”

“We never saw him,” says Howard.

The remark is a great success. Everyone laughs and bangs on the table.

“Only Howard Baker could manage to be in the same room as God and not to notice him!” cries Rayner Keat.

“The Bernsteins didn’t see him either!” protests Howard.

But on second thoughts he erases the remark, and replaces it with a slight smile.

“You didn’t see God?” cries Phil Schaffer in exasperation, when Howard smilingly repeats his successful remark to him. “Why are you messing around trying to see him? Why don’t you be God? You can do anything you like here! Don’t you understand that yet? You’re free! You control your own destiny!”

“No rush,” says Howard wisely. “There’s plenty of time to do everything. I’m going to take it steadily, step by step, and enjoy each step.”

But what’s Charles Aught up to? What strange discontent has gone into him? He seems to have been meeting extremists at parties, as well.

Howard’s always found him slightly unsettling, it’s true. It’s something about the contrast between his appearance and his manner. He looks like a rather reliable young man who remembers his aunts’ birthdays, with his thick turtle-neck sweaters and his glowing complexion and mild blue eyes. His eyes gaze steadfastly into yours as you talk. Too steadfastly, seeing too much of you. His voice is soothing. Too soothing, setting you too much at your ease. He knows slightly too many people who happen to be rich.

And there’s some nihilistic glint in the depths of those blue eyes.

He invites Howard to lunch one day (sandwiches, in the garden of a pub down by the river, at a battered green table with a hole in the middle for an umbrella). He wants to talk about getting some of his poets to work on the Alps — he’s looking after one or two of the Romantics for a few months, while a colleague of his is sitting on a commission of inquiry.

“They seem to have rather a thing about, I don’t know, nature,” he tells Howard. “I thought if we could get their nature thing together with your Alps thing, we might both do ourselves a bit of good. What’s the angle, do you think? [He said in his film producer’s voice.] What could I tempt them with?”

“Well,” says Howard, “I think they might be quite interested in the way we’re bringing up great sedimentary land masses from the south, and driving them up and over the geosynclinal rocks in their path.”

Charles makes a face.

“I don’t think most of these loves would know a sedimentary land mass from a steak-and-kidney pudding,” he says. “Cottages with roses round the door are more their line. And waterfalls. A little bit of sex slipped in somewhere, if at all possible. Could we get a little discreet sexual interest in, do you think? Chaste virgins of the snow, waiting to be ravished? Great icy tits sticking up into the sky? Or how about this? ‘O Jungfrau, hear my piteous cries /As I ascend thy snow-white thighs.’”

“Well…” says Howard, smiling awkwardly down into his beer. He hates this kind of talk.

“Oh dear,” cries Charles, gazing at Howard with a concerned look. “I’ve said the wrong thing. I’ve upset you.”

“No, no …” says Howard, smiling.

“I can see you’ve got some deep unspoken faith in poets. Unacknowledged legislators, and all that.”

“No … well …”

“I’m afraid you get a bit cynical when you’re actually dealing with them. Most of them are in it just for the by-lines and the booze, you know. They use the handouts you give them — but half the time they put some snide twist on the story. And one doesn’t expect thanks, of course, but when they use the handout — and then turn round and start blaspheming, you really do want to chuck the whole business up, and go and become a monk, or something.”

“Well …” says Howard. It’s true — he does have some sneaking faith in poets as being fundamentally decent people. He has some kind of innocence which Charles has lost.

“I mean,” he says, “I suppose I think that writers do a … well … a pretty good job, really. It can’t be all that easy — I mean, if you’ve ever tried to write anything yourself … and often they’re badly paid … and so on …”

Charles stops looking at Howard. He looks down at the table, smiling, and draws a face by running his finger through a ring of beer.

“Oh, sure,” he says gently. “Admirable sentiments. Lovely thoughts.”

“No, I mean,” says Howard, waving his arms about, “I mean, isn’t it perhaps just that the writers you deal with sort of live down to sort of your expectations? Don’t they behave badly just because they sort of feel that you, that we, sort of make use of them, sort of exploit them?”

“Ah,” murmurs Charles smoothly, “what would we all do without your idealism?”

Howard feels very strange. It’s as if he has been drawn outside himself by indignation; transcended himself; literally risen into the air above his own head, so that he can see beyond the confines of his own life. He sees clearly how things stand, and the words come to him with which to describe them.

“It’s not a question of idealism,” he says. “It’s just a practical, a practical, a practical thing, a thing of sort of, well, here we are, we’ve got into this place, and we’ve got a certain, a certain, a, a, a certain job to do. We’ve got to sort of create the world, and so forth, and sort of run it, and so on, and, well, try to make some kind of, of, of sort of viable proposition of it, and all the rest of it, and it just seems to me that we can get better results if we treat the, if we treat the sort of, well, for want of a better word, the local inhabitants with a certain amount of, of, of respect and, and, and trust, and, and, if we help them, and, and guide them, to the point where they can become sort of independent and sort of self-governing, within the framework of the free, well, of the free, sort of, well, of the, yes, free kind of system that we enjoy ourselves.”

He moves heavily about in his chair, frowning, and fiddling with his glass of beer. It slips out of his fingers and turns over. A stream of beer runs across the table and drips onto his trouser leg. He feels priggish and preposterous.

And in the right.