Michael Frayn - Sweet Dreams

Meanwhile the Matterhorn begins to grow famous. Projections of it are reproduced in the papers. It catches people’s imagination, and becomes, as Harry wanted, a kind of pictogram to represent the whole range. A newspaper refers to Harry in a headline as “Mr. Matterhorn.”

“I should get your lawyers onto that,” says Jimmy Jessop.

“Not at all,” says Howard. “He’s the head of the department. It was his idea, really.”

They all instantly mimic him, pressing their hands together and casting their eyes soulfully upwards.

“Manifest unto us thy holy arse, O Saint Harry, that this thy humble servant Howard may lick it,” chants Jimmy.

But they are very fond of him, underneath it all.

One day Harry comes into the office silently holding up an advance copy of one of the professional journals. It contains the first detailed plans for the Himalayas, which all the big names in the business have been working on for years. Everyone in the office comes crowding round, anxious to see the strength of the opposition. Silently they gaze. Silently Harry turns the pages over.

“Well?” demands Harry.

“Well,” says Brian McDermott cautiously, “they’re very big ….”

They all let their breath out in an explosion of laughter. It’s true. They’re very big, and they’re very expensive, and that’s about all you can say for them. A prestige job, with not a suggestion of the wit and sinew and quirky humanity that informs the stuff they are turning out in Harry’s office. Which means that, unless the Andes group produces any surprises, Harry Fischer’s little bunch of boozers are the best bloody mountain-builders in the world!

Howard would like to put his arms about the whole team, as they crowd round the journal, smelling of shirts, and squeeze them all, and fuse them into one perfect corporate human being.

“You know what the trouble is with these bloody monstrosities?” asks Neil Strachan, turning back the pages of the journal with his disapproving Presbyterian fingers. “In three bloody words?”

They wait.

“No bloody Matterhorn,” says Neil.

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?’ ”