The Sweetest Dream. Doris Lessing

why don’t you say something?’

      ‘I don’t know what to say,’ Frances brought out. ‘I don’t know why you are here.’

      ‘Why? You actually have the nerve to ask why?’ And she began shouting, ‘Tilly, Tilly, where are you?’

      ‘Leave her alone,’ said Andrew. ‘You always complain you can’t handle her, so let us have a shot at it.’

      ‘But she’s here. She’s here. And what about me? Who is going to look after me?’

      This cycle was likely to continue.

      Andrew said quietly, but his voice was shaking, ‘You can’t expect Frances to look after you. Why should she?’

      ‘But what about me? What about me?’ Now it was more of a grumble, and for the first time those angry eyes seemed actually to see Frances. ‘It’s not as if you’re Brigitte Bardot, are you? So why does he come here all the time?’

      This threw an unexpected light on things. Frances was unable to speak.

      Andrew said, ‘He comes here because we are here, Phyllida. We are his sons, remember? Colin and I – have you forgotten us?’

      It seemed she had. And suddenly, having stood there for a few moments, she lowered that outstretched accusing finger, and stood blinking, apparently coming awake. Then she turned and slammed out of the door.

      Frances felt her whole self go loose. She was shaking so she had to lean against the wall. Andrew stood limply there, pitifully smiling. She thought, But he’s too young to cope with this sort of thing. She staggered to the kitchen door, held on to it while she went in, and saw Colin and Sophie at the table, eating toast.

      Colin, she could see, was in his mood of disapproving of her. Sophie had been crying again.

      ‘Well,’ said Colin, coldly furious, ‘what do you expect?’

      ‘What do you mean?’ said Frances, absurdly, but she was trying to gain time. She slid into her chair and sat with her head in her arms. She knew what he meant. It was a general accusation: that she and his father had screwed things up, that she was not a conventional comfortable mother, like other mothers, and there was this bohemian household, which he had moods of violently resenting, while admitting he enjoyed it.

      ‘She just comes here,’ said Colin, ‘she just turns up and makes a scene and now we have to look after Tilly.’

      ‘She wants to be called Sylvia,’ said Andrew, who had come in and was at the table.

      ‘I don’t care what she’s called,’ said Colin. ‘Why is she here?’

      And now he was tearful, and looked like a ruffled little owl, with his black-rimmed spectacles. If Andrew was all length and leanness, then Colin was round, with a soft open face, which was at this moment puffy with crying. Now Frances understood that all last night these two, Colin and Sophie, had probably lain in each other’s arms weeping, she for her dead father, and he for his misery over – well, everything.

      Andrew, who like Frances was still cold and shaking, said, ‘But why take it out on Mother? It’s not her fault.’

      If something were not done the brothers would start quarrelling; they often did, always because Andrew took Frances’s side, while Colin accused her.

      Frances said, ‘Sophie, please make me a cup of tea – and I am sure Andrew could do with one.’

      ‘God, could I,’ said Andrew.

      Sophie jumped up, pleased at being asked. Colin, having lost the support of her being there, just opposite him, sat blinking vaguely about, so unhappy that Frances wanted to take him in her arms … but he would never tolerate that.

      Andrew said, ‘I’ll go and see Phyllida later. She’ll have calmed down. She’s not so bad when she’s not in a state.’ And then he jumped up. ‘Christ, I’d forgotten Tilly, I mean Sylvia, and she’ll have heard. She goes to pieces when her mother starts in on her.’

      ‘And I am certainly in pieces,’ said Frances. ‘I can’t stop shaking.’

      Andrew ran out of the room, but did not return. Julia had descended to sit with Sylvia, who hid beneath the clothes, wailing, ‘Keep her away, keep her away,’ while Julia said over and over again, ‘Shhhh, be quiet. She’ll go in a minute.’

      Frances drank tea in silence while her shaking subsided. If she had read in a book that hysteria was contagious she would have said, Well, yes, that makes sense! But she had not experienced it. She was thinking, If that’s what Tilly has been living with, no wonder she’s in a mess.

      Sophie had sat down beside Colin and the pair had their arms around each other, like orphans. Soon they went off to catch a train back to school, and Colin gave her an apologetic smile before he left. Sophie embraced her. ‘Oh, Frances, I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t come here.’

      And now Frances had to write her article.

      She put aside the letters about shoplifting and took up another theme, ‘Dear Aunt Vera, I am so worried I don’t know what to do.’ Her daughter, aged fifteen, was having sex with a boy of eighteen. ‘These young people they think they are the Virgin Mary and it can’t happen to them.’ She advised the anxious mother to get contraception for her daughter. ‘Go to the family doctor,’ she wrote. ‘Young people are beginning sexual relations much earlier than we did. You could ask about the new contraceptive pill. There will be problems. Not all teenagers are responsible beings, and this new pill must be taken regularly, every day.’

      Thus it was that Frances’s first article evoked storms of moral outrage. Letters arrived in bundles from frightened parents, and Frances expected the sack, but Julie Hackett was pleased. Frances was doing what she had been hired to do, as could have been expected from a being brave enough to say that Carnaby Street was a shoddy illusion.

      The waves of refugees who washed into London, escaping from Hider, and then from Stalin, were bone-poor, often threadbare, and lived as they could on a translation here, a book review, language lessons. They worked as hospital porters, on building sites, did housework. There were a few cafés and restaurants as poor as they were, catering for their nostalgic need to sit and drink coffee and talk politics and literature. They were from universities all over Europe, and were intellectuals, a word guaranteed to incite waves of suspicion in the breasts of the xenophobic philistine British, who did not necessarily think it a commendation when they admitted that these newcomers were so much better educated than they were. One café in particular served goulash and dumplings and heavy soups and other filling items to these storm-tossed immigrants who would soon would be adding value and lustre in so many ways to native culture. By the late Fifties, early Sixties, they were editors, writers, journalists, artists, a Nobel Prize winner, and a stranger walking into the Cosmo would judge that this must be the trendiest place in north London, for everyone was in the current uniform of non-conformity, polo necks and expensive jeans, Mao jackets and leather jackets, shaggy hair or the ever-popular Roman Emperor haircut. There were women there, a few, in mini-skirts, mostly girlfriends, absorbing attractive foreign ways as they drank the best coffee in London and ate cream cakes inspired by Vienna.

      Frances had taken to dropping in to the Cosmo, to work. In the layer of the house she had thought of as hen, safe from invasion, she now sat listening for Julia’s footsteps, or Andrew’s, for they both visited Sylvia, to give her cups of this or that, and insisted that her door must be kept open because the girl feared a door that was shut on her. And Rose crept about the house. Once Frances had found her nosing through papers on her desk, and Rose had giggled and said brightly, Oh, Frances,’ and run out. She had been caught in Julia’s rooms, by Julia. She did not steal, or not much, but she was by nature a spy. Julia told Andrew that Rose should be asked to leave; Andrew told Frances that this was what Julia had said; and Frances, relieved, because she disliked the girl, told Rose that it was time she returned to her family. Collapse of Rose. Reports were brought up from the basement where Rose hung out (‘It’s my pad’)