The Sweetest Dream. Doris Lessing

the child was a book she had been hoping to read while the children played. ‘You are a real working woman, Fran,’ he would compliment her.

      If he was delighted, his mother was not. When she came, always having written first, on thick white paper you could cut yourself with, she sat with distaste on the edge of a chair which probably had residues of smeared biscuit or orange on it. She would announce, ‘Johnny, this cannot go on.’

      ‘And why not, Mutti?’

      He called her Mutti because she hated it.

      ‘Your grandchildren,’ he would instruct her, ‘will be a credit to the People’s Britain.’

      Frances would not let her eyes meet Julia’s at such moments, because she was not going to be disloyal. She felt that her life, all of it, and herself in it, was dowdy, ugly, exhausting, and Johnny’s nonsense was just a part of it. It would all end, she was sure of it. It would have to.

      And it did, because Johnny announced that he had fallen in love with a real comrade, a Party member, and he was moving in with her.

      ‘And how am I going to live?’ asked Frances, already knowing what to expect.

      ‘I’ll pay maintenance, of course,’ said Johnny, but never did.

      She found a council nursery, and got a small job in a business making theatre sets and costumes. It was badly paid, but she managed. Julia arrived to complain that the children were being neglected and their clothes were a disgrace.

      ‘Perhaps you should talk to your son?’ said Frances. ‘He owes me a year’s maintenance.’ Then it was two years, three years.

      Julia asked whether if she got a decent allowance from the family would she give up her job and look after the boys?

      Frances said no.

      ‘But I wouldn’t interfere with you,’ said Julia. ‘I promise you that.’

      ‘You don’t understand,’ said Frances.

      ‘No, I do not. And perhaps you would explain it to me?’

      Johnny left Comrade Maureen and returned to her, Frances, saying that he had made a mistake. She took him back. She was lonely, knew the boys needed a father, was sex-starved.

      He left again for another real, genuine comrade. When he again returned to Frances, she said to him: ‘Out.’

      She was working full time in a theatre, earning not much but enough. The boys were by then ten and eight. There was trouble all the time at the schools, and they were not doing well.

      ‘What do you expect?’ said Julia.

      ‘I never expect anything,’ said Frances.

      Then things changed, dramatically. Frances was amazed to hear that Comrade Johnny had agreed that Andrew should go to a good school. Julia said Eton, because her husband had gone there. Frances was waiting to hear that Johnny had refused Eton, and then was told that Johnny had been there, and had managed to conceal this damaging fact all these years. Julia did not mention it because his Eton career had hardly covered him or them with glory. He had gone for three years, but dropped out to go to the Spanish Civil War.

      ‘You mean to say you are happy for Andrew to go to that school?’ Frances said to him, on the telephone.

      ‘Well, you at least get a good education,’ said Johnny airily, and she could hear the unspoken: Look what it did for me.

      So – Julia paying – Andrew took off from the poor rooms his mother and brother were living in, for Eton, and spent his holidays with schoolfriends, and became a polite stranger.

      Frances went to an end-of-term at Eton, in an outfit bought to fit what she imagined would suit the occasion, and the first hat she had ever worn. She did all right, she thought, and could see Andrew was relieved when he saw her.

      Then people came to ask after Julia, Philip’s widow, and the daughter-in-law of Philip’s father: an old man remembered him, as a small boy. It seemed the Lennoxes went to Eton as a matter of course. Johnny, or Jolyon, was enquired after. ‘Interesting said a man who had been Johnny’s teacher. ‘An interesting choice of career.’

      Thereafter Julia went to the formal occasions, where she was made much of, and was surprised at it: visiting Eton in those brief three years of Jolyon’s attendance there, she had seen herself as Philip’s wife, and of not much account.

      Colin refused Eton, because of a deep, complicated loyalty to his mother whom he had watched struggling all these years. This did not mean he did not quarrel with her, fight her, argue, and did so badly at school Frances was secretly convinced he was doing it on purpose to hurt her. But he was cold and angry with his father, when Johnny did blow in to say that he was so terribly sorry, but he really did not have the money to give them. He agreed to go to a progressive school, St Joseph’s, Julia paying for everything.

      Johnny then came up with a suggestion that Frances at last did not refuse. Julia would let her and the boys have the lower part of her house. She did not need all that room, it was ridiculous …

      Frances thought of Andrew, returning to various squalid addresses, or not returning, certainly never bringing friends home. She thought of Colin who made no secret of how much he hated how they were living. She said yes to Johnny, yes to Julia, and found herself in the great house that was Julia’s and always would be.

      Only she knew what it cost her. She had kept her independence all this time, paid for herself and the boys, and not accepted money from Julia, nor from her parents who would have been happy to help. Now here she was, and it was a final capitulation: what to other people was ‘such a sensible arrangement’ was defeat. She was no longer herself, she was an appendage of the Lennox family.

      As far as Johnny was concerned, he had done as much as could be expected of him. When his mother told him he should support his sons, get a job that paid him a salary, he shouted at her that she was a typical member of an exploiting class, thinking only of money, while he was working for the future of the whole world. They quarrelled, frequently and noisily. Listening, Colin would go white, silent, and leave the house for hours or for days. Andrew preserved his airy, amused smile, his poise. He was often at home these days, and even brought friends.

      Meanwhile Johnny and Frances had divorced because he had married properly, and formally, with a wedding that the comrades attended, and Julia too. Her name was Phyllida, and she was not a comrade, but he said she was good material and he would make a communist of her.

      This little history was the reason why Frances was keeping her back to the others, stirring a stew that didn’t really need a stir. Delayed reaction: her knees trembled, her mouth seemed full of acid, for now her body was taking in the bad news, rather later than her mind. She was angry, she knew, and had the right to be, but she was angrier with herself than with Johnny. If she had allowed herself to spend three days inside a lunatic dream, fair enough – but how could she have involved the boys? Yet it was Andrew who had brought the telegram, waited until she showed it to him, and said, ‘Frances, your errant husband is at last going to do the right thing.’ He had sat lightly on the edge of a chair, a fair, attractive youth, looking more than ever like a bird just about to take off. He was tall and that made him seem even thinner, his jeans loose on long legs, and with long elegant bony hands lying palms up on his knees. He was smiling at her, and she knew it was meant kindly. They were trying hard to get on, but she was still nervous of him, because of those years of him rejecting her. He had said ‘your husband’, he had not said ‘my father’. He was friendly with Johnny’s new wife, Phyllida, while reporting back that she was on the whole a bit of a drag.

      He had congratulated her on her part in the new play and had made graceful fun of agony aunts.

      And Colin, too, had been affectionate, a rare thing for him, and had telephoned friends about the new play.

      It was all so bad for them both, it was all terrible, but after all only another little blow in years and years of them – as she was telling herself, waiting for her knees to get back their