The Sweetest Dream. Doris Lessing

a fringe to the eyebrows. Straight, it went without saying. Curly hair out. Even Rose’s hair, the mass of crinkly black, was Evansky. Little neat heads, little-ickle cutesy girls, little bitsey things and the boys like shaggy ponies, and all in the blue and white stripes that had originated in matelot shirts, matching the blue and white mugs they used for breakfast. When the geist speaks, the zeit must obey. Here they were, the girls and the boys of the sexual revolution, though they didn’t know yet that was what they would be famed for.

      There was one exception to the Evansky imperative, every bit as strong as Vidal Sassoon’s. Mrs Evansky, a decided lady, had refused to cut Sophie’s hair. She had stood behind the girl, lifting those satiny black masses, letting them slide through her fingers, and then had pronounced: ‘I am sorry, I can’t do it.’ And then, as Sophie protested, ‘Besides you’ve a long face. It wouldn’t do anything for you.’ Sophie had sat, rejected, cast out, and then Mrs Evansky had said, ‘Go away and think about it, and if you insist – but it would kill me: cutting this off’

      And so, alone among the girls, Sophie sat with her sparkling black tresses intact, and felt she was some kind of freak.

      The whirligigs of the time had done pretty well for four months. What was four months? – nothing, and yet everything had changed.

      First, Sylvia. She too had achieved full uniformity. Her haircut, begged from Julia, did not really suit her, but everyone knew it was important for her to feel normal and like the others. She was eating, if not well, and obeyed Julia in everything. The old woman and the very young girl would sit together for hours in Julia’s sitting-room, while Julia made Sylvia little treats, fed her chocolates given her by her admirer Wilhelm Stein, and told her stories about pre-war Germany – pre-First-World-War Germany. Sylvia did once ask, gently, for she would have died rather than hurt Julia, ‘Didn’t anything bad ever happen, then?’ Julia was taken aback and then she laughed. ‘I’m not going to admit it, even if bad things did happen.’ But she genuinely could not remember bad things. Her girlhood seemed to her, in that house full of music and kind people, like a paradise. And was there anything like that now, anywhere?

      Andrew had promised his mother and his grandmother that he would go to Cambridge in the autumn, but meanwhile he hardly left the house. He loafed about and read, and smoked in his room. Sylvia visited him, knocking formally, and tidied his room, and scolded him. ‘If I can do it, so can you.’ Meaning, now, smoking pot. For her, who had frayed so badly apart, and come together with such difficulty, anything was a threat – alcohol, tobacco, pot, loud voices, and people quarrelling sent her back under her bedclothes with her fingers in her ears. She was going to school, and already doing well. Julia sat with her over her homework every evening.

      Geoffrey, who was clever, would do well in his exams, and then go to the London School of Economics to do – well, of course – Politics and Economics. He said he wouldn’t bother with Philosophy. Daniel, Geoffrey’s shadow, said he would go to the LSE too, and take the same.

      Jill had had an abortion, and was in her usual place, apparently untouched by the experience. The impressive thing was that ‘the kids’ had managed it all, without the adults. Neither Frances nor Julia had been told, and not Andrew, who was apparently considered too adult and a possible enemy. It was Colin who had gone to the girl’s parents – she was afraid to go – and told them she was pregnant. They believed that Colin was the father, and would not accept his denials. Who was? No one knew, or would ever know, though Geoffrey was accused: he was always blamed for broken hearts and broken faith, being so good-looking.

      Colin got the money for the abortion out of Jill’s parents, and he went to the family doctor, who did at last suggest an appropriate telephone number. Afterwards, when Jill was safely back in the basement flat, Julia, Frances and Andrew were told. But the parents said Jill could not return to St Joseph’s, if that was the kind of thing that could happen there.

      Sophie and Colin had separated. Sophie, who would never in her life do anything by halves, had been too much for Colin: she loved him to death, or at least into something like an illness. ‘Go away,’ he had actually shouted at her at last, ‘leave me alone.’ And would not come out of his room for some days. Then he went to Sophie’s house and said he was sorry, it was all his fault, he was just ‘a little screwed up’, and please come back to our house, please, we all miss you, and Frances keeps saying, Where’s Sophie? And when Sophie did return, all apology, as if it were her fault, Frances hugged her and said, ‘Sophie, you and Colin is one thing, but your coming here when you like is another.’

      At weekends Sophie came down to London with the St Joseph’s contingent, spent Friday evenings with them, went home to her mother whom she claimed was better. ‘Though she doesn’t look it. She just slumps around and looks awful.’ Depression, let alone clinical depression, had not entered the general vocabulary and consciousness. People were still saying, ‘Oh, God, I’m so depressed,’ meaning they were in a bad mood. Sophie, a good daughter as far as she could bear to be, went home for Saturday nights but was not there in the daytime. Saturday and Sunday evenings she was in her place at the big table.

      Something wonderful had happened to her. She often walked down the hill to Primrose Hill and then through Regent’s Park, to dancing and singing lessons. There in a grassy glade full of flowerbeds is a statue of a young woman, with a little goat, and it is called ‘The Protector of the Defenceless’. This girl in stone drew Sophie to her. She found herself laying a leaf on the pedestal, then a flower, then a little posy. Soon she would bring a bit of biscuit, and stood back to watch sparrows or a blackbird fly up to the statue’s feet to carry off crumbs. Once she put a wreath around the little goat’s head. Then, one day on the pedestal, was a booklet called The Language of Flowers, and tied to it with a ribbon was a bouquet of lilac and red roses. She could not see anyone likely nearby, only some people strolling in the garden. She was alarmed, knowing she had been watched. At the supper table she told the story, laughing at herself because of her love for the stone girl, and produced The Language of Flowers for everyone to pass around and look. at. Lilac meant First Emotions of Love, and a red rose, Love.

      ‘You’re not going to answer him?’ demanded Rose, furious.

      ‘Lovely Rose,’ said Colin, ‘of course she’s going to answer.’

      And they all pored over the book to work out a suitable message. But what Sophie wanted to say was, ‘Yes, I am interested but don’t jump to conclusions.’ Nothing in the book seemed suitable. In the end they all decided on snowdrops, for Hope – but they had already come and gone, and periwinkle, Early Friendship. Sophie said she thought there were some in her mother’s garden. And what else?

      ‘Oh, go on,’ said Geoffrey. ‘Live dangerously. Lily of the valley – Return of Happiness. And phlox – Agreement.’

      Sophie put her posy on the pedestal, and lingered; went away, came back, and found her flowers gone. But someone else might have taken them? No, for when she went there the next day there was a young man who said he had been watching her ‘for ages’ and had been too shy to approach her without the language of flowers. A likely story, for shy he was not. He was an actor, studying at the Academy where she planned to go in the autumn. This was Roland Shattock, haggardly handsome and dramatic in everything and he was some kind of Trotskyism He came often to the supper table and was here tonight. Older than the others, a year older even than Andrew, he wore a worldly-wise look, and a suede jacket dyed purple with fringes, and his presence was felt as a visitation from the adult world, and something like an entrance ticket to it. If he did not regard them as ‘kids’, then … It never crossed their idealistic minds that he was often in need of a good meal.

      When Roland was there Colin tended to be silent, and even went upstairs early, particularly when Johnny dropped in, for the arguments between the young Trotskyist and the old Stalinist were loud, and fierce and often ugly. Sylvia fled upstairs too, and went to Julia.

      Johnny had been in Cuba, and had arranged to make a little flim. ‘But it won’t bring in much money, I am afraid, Frances.’ Meanwhile he had gone to visit independent Zambia, with Comrade Mo.

      Now Rose: there were difficulties all the way,