Michael Frayn - Sweet Dreams

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” says Howard. “It’s just the principle of the thing that struck me.”

He saves his monthly salary slips, and his bank statements and cheque stubs, and reads through them all each time he adds another item, entranced by the complex passage of money through his hands.

His intention is to form a complete collection, covering the whole of his working life, so that he will have a real store of memories to look back upon in his old age.

He likes the work itself, too.

He likes the sense of working against limitations, of seeing what kind of mountain shape can be developed given certain unalterable geological and meteorological data. And then the sudden lurching shift of perspective, the falling through the bottom of things, when you discover that these constants have been or could be altered after all.

He likes the way they suddenly drop the whole interlocking tangle of folding and faulting and erosion, and stroll round for lunch in the pub they’ve adopted.

He likes the smell of dust in the office, and the smell of clean white shirts as the sweat begins to come through the armpits.

He likes days when nothing seems to happen, and rain runs down the windows, and through somebody else’s windows on the other side of the airshaft you can see girls with piles of lacquered hair laughing and making sudden small self-conscious movements, as they flirt with young men in Italian-cut suits, silent behind the layers of glass.

He likes the endless consultations and conferences. The reaching for cigarettes from packs open on the table. The sinking of heads upon hands. The sudden impossible inspirations — “Look, just a minute, why don’t we simply scrap the Triassic strata altogether, and to hell with it?” — “Because that’s what’s holding up Mont Blanc.” — “Oh, yes.”

He likes the crises. The afternoon when they discover that they have to have a complete outline plan of the Dolomites ready for the Minister by nine o’clock the following morning, and all stay working into the small hours, until their backs are aching and their eyes closing, and they all love each other and are united in extremity against the entire world. And the other afternoon — crises are always in the afternoon — when Harry, back from an official lunch, comes out of his office and announces, “Gentlemen, I thought you might be interested to know that the location of the Alps has been shifted to Central Africa.” Lightheaded, laughing despair. Mutinous abandonment of work. Discussion of mass resignation and letters to the papers. Wanderings out to buy shirts and more cigarettes. A holiday atmosphere.

One morning Harry summons Howard into his office.

“Shut the door,” he says. “Sit down.”

He hoists his braces up, tips his chair back, and begins to sharpen a matchstick into a toothpick. He is in his fatherly mood.

“How long have you been in the office?” he asks.

“Five months,” says Howard.

“How are the moraines coming along?”

“Fine. I’ve finished the production drawings for three of them now.”

Harry curls up his lip, and picks at his gold-filled teeth with the matchstick. He has given half the designers in the business their start; survived two famous resignations on principle; been in prison and concentration camp; outlived one wife and divorced another.

“Take a rest from moraines for a bit,” he says. “I’ll tell you what I want you to do. I want you to design a trade-mark for the Alps.”

“A trade-mark?” says Howard, not understanding. “How do you mean?”

Harry takes the matchstick out of his mouth and points it at Howard.

“If I knew how I meant I shouldn’t be asking you to design it, because that’s what design is, knowing how you mean. What I want is something, I don’t know what, but when you see it it means the Alps. That’s how you stay in front in this business, Howard. You do a good piece of work. Then you put a good big handle on it, so that everyone can get hold of it and pick it up. Go and design me a good big handle, Howard.”

Howard sits tensely at his drawing-board, his mouth tight shut, his eyes gazing unseeing at the paper, rigid with anxiety to produce a good big handle. Impossible ideas crowd through his brain. He tries to follow the line of Harry’s thought, but all he can think of is Harry’s accent. Harry’s accent makes him think of Vienna, and Vienna of E. H. Gombrich. Gombrich makes him think of the readiness with which the eye recognizes the features of the human face. He sketches out a domed mountain with a pair of high corries and ledges that seem to form eyes and eyebrows, and a vertical crest of rock running down between them, passing a snowfield on either side…. He scribbles the absurdity out. He tries again with a vast seated figure like a Henry Moore, in which a hanging valley forms a kind of lap…. His mind wanders. He thinks about girls he might meet, and the evolution of the brassiere. And then suddenly, for no reason at all, he finds he is thinking of the Pyramids. With a jolt of excitement, as if his heart has stopped for a moment, his mind leaps to the image of a pyramid-shaped mountain. A mountain that weirdly echoes the shape not of the human face, but a human artifact! A mountain that looks as if it was designed by the ancient Egyptians, instead of by God and his advisers! Just made dramatically steeper, like this, and then subtly twisted out of alignment, like that ….

An hour and a half later he has finished a rough plan and elevation. It’s exactly as he conceived it, except that instead of twisting it he has knocked the top slightly cock-eyed, like the cow with the crumpled horn.

He goes into Harry’s office, and without a word puts the drawings on the desk in front of him. For some moments Harry gazes at them in silence, slowly plucking the left-hand strap of his braces away from the shoulder, and letting it snap back against the shirt. Howard can feel the muscles of his face trembling slightly, as they tense for a self-deprecating smile at Harry’s appreciation. His head makes little involuntary movements, the first beginnings of the small pleasurable movements which his whole body will make as a kind of modest disclaimer in the face of Harry’s approval.

Harry’s appreciation is even more wholehearted than he expects. He begins to laugh. He laughs violently, excitedly, hammering his hand up and down on the desk. People come drifting into the room to see what’s up. They look over Harry’s shoulder, and slowly begin to smile. They glance up at Howard, looking at him in a new way. “This your idea?” they ask curiously.

Howard twitches. He runs a hand across his mouth, as if to keep wiping off his smile. He leans against the wall, and pushes himself off, and leans against it once more. His whole body is full of a genial electric warmth.

In just six and a half hours he has produced the Matterhorn.

It’s a real young man’s mountain, of course. He never does anything quite so bold again, or quite so fast.

But people in the office regard him differently now. They still mock the slow way he speaks. “Urm,” they all boom ponderously, on varying notes, when he fails to answer a question at once. They still mock his eagerness, and mimic the keen forward inclination with which he walks, as if he can’t wait to get where he is going. But he can see from their eyes that they look upon him now as someone who will transcend the collective and desert it. So he is able to become even more modest than before. He speaks more slowly, leans more eagerly, so as to offer more opportunity to the mimics; smiles more disarmingly at the result. He knows he is behaving well, that his behaviour slots precisely, with a well-oiled click, into the space in the universe that’s waiting for it.