Michael Frayn - Sweet Dreams

What astonishes Howard, though, is why he should be allowed to be who he is, and live in such a perfectly organized society.

“Why me ?” he asks Phil Schaffer, as the two of them sit late in Indian restaurants, eating blazing vindaloos after watching old Humphrey Bogart movies at cinemas beyond the railway sidings, on autumn nights when each sodium light has a yellow halo in the foggy air. “What have I ever done to deserve this?”

“What do you mean?” says Phil shortly (he makes a point of trying to keep Howard’s modesty within reasonable bounds). “You passed the exam to get into the place, didn’t you? What do you expect?”

The exam! Of course! Howard has entirely forgotten about it. He came up on the train for a few days, very nervous, wearing his best suit. He remembers sitting on a hard seat, among a hundred other candidates in a large, impressively ancient room, scribbling a General Essay paper for three hours on EITHER Political Necessity OR “Enrichissez-vous!” not at all sure what the examiners would be looking for in the answers — their ideas or his ideas, or the former subtly disguised as the latter, or the latter masquerading as the former.

In the end he boldly put down his own ideas, without any thought as to whether the examiners would find them palatable or not. He set forth an idealistic view of a society in which all privilege would be done away with, and in which wealth and power would be fairly shared, on the basis of competitive public examinations with General Essay papers on EITHER Natural Justice OR “Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”

And passed. So the foundations of his existence in this society are absolutely secure.

Phil has an incredibly good job, too. He is creating man.

Or at any rate, he is with one of the research teams working on the man project. Half the university departments and industries in the city are involved. The end product, as everyone knows from all the projections and mock-ups they keep making public to try to justify the wildly escalating costs, will have two arms and two legs, a language capability, and a fairly sophisticated emotional and moral response. The general idea is to build something pretty much in their own image.

“As a matter of fact,” Phil tells Howard one day, as they walk along the street eating fish and chips from a Greek newspaper, “I think it’s probably going to be the spit and image of you .”

“What?” says Howard, frowning.

“I sit there in the laboratory,” says Phil, “trying to think how people go, and I can’t remember. Do they really physically raise a sardonic eyebrow, and make a long face, or only metaphorically? What expression do they have when they’re thinking black thoughts about someone they’re trying to ingratiate themselves with, or when they’re being praised for qualities they’re aware they don’t possess? I think of all the people I know, and I can’t remember how any of them behave. The only person I can ever think of is you. I always know what you’d do. I can always imagine what you’d think, and how you’d look. So bit by bit you’re being written into the programme and fed into the computer. I hope you’re flattered.”

Howard is flattered. But he doesn’t like to let Phil see this. So he adopts a humorous apelike shamble, knees bent and feet turned out.

“Ferkin ell,” he says, in a special humorous artificial voice which he uses from time to time with Phil, to ward off jokes he has not entirely understood.

“I must get that down,” says Phil. “When told that man is being created in his image, he bends knees, turns feet out, and utters a small trisyllabic croak from the bottom of the larynx.”

For Christmas Howard buys his children a complete working model of their family and its life. There, on the playroom floor on Christmas morning, are their house, the children’s school, the great towers of the city…. Switch on and move the appropriate levers on the banks of controllers, and the children come running out of the house, little pink-cheeked creatures half an inch high, who turn to wave at Felicity as she comes out on the terrace to see them off to school. Cars purr back and forth along the expressways, bearing the Bernsteins to dinner with the Chases, the Chases to the Waylands, the Waylands for a Christmas-morning drink with the Bakers. And there’s Howard himself, three-quarters of an inch high, and a little too freshly complexioned to be true, climbing into his car, running upstairs to his office, ushering Felicity through lighted front doors, shaking hands, kissing cheeks….

The children play with it for half an hour, then run outside with their new toboggan instead. But Howard can’t tear himself away from it. Late that night, after the children have finally gone to bed, Felicity finds him lying full-length on the playroom floor once again, still absorbed.

“Look,” he says, “here are the Waylands coming up the Parkway to call on Charles Aught…. There you are, taking the children out to tea with Ann Keat….”

He glances up and sees her expression.

“Sorry,” he says. “I’m just coming. But you can actually see it all! That’s what gets me about it. You can really get hold of it all. And it all does work, that’s the amazing thing. It all does in fact make sense.”

“I suppose so. But doesn’t it get rather boring after a bit?”

He moves some more levers, thinking about this. The children come running home from school. The Kessels pick up the Chases, and drive into town to go to the theatre.

“I think perhaps that’s what I like most of all about it,” he says.

A great joke — Howard and Felicity are invited to a reception at the Palace!

Howard sits at the breakfast table with the card in his hand, giggling over it.

“You’ll have to buy a hat!” he says.

“What?” says Felicity, astonished. “You’re not thinking of going?”

“Of course!” says Howard. “Why not? We’re scarcely going to feel we’ve sold our souls for a plate of strawberries and cream, are we?”

“You’ll have to rent a morning suit. You realize that?”

“Sure. It’ll be an absolute riot. I’ll go in being about fifty, with grizzled hair and a rather lined face.”

“I don’t want to be fifty!”

“No, you be thirty-five, and rather sunburned. We’ll cut a real swathe through them. It’ll be a hoot.”

A hoot it is, too. Several thousand people standing about in a series of large rooms surrounded by mirrors, so that the entire world appears to be peopled with morning suits and ladies’ hats sipping champagne. A band plays selections from Fiddler on the Roof . Howard and Felicity move slowly about with their champagne, like everybody else, trying to look as if they are heading somewhere purposeful, and quietly making little humorous comments on the proceedings to each other as they go. “Hel- lo!” squeaks one of the ladies’ hats suddenly — and there are the Bernsteins.

“Thank heavens!” cries Felicity.

“It was worth coming just for the relief of finding you here,” says Jack Bernstein.

“Isn’t it ghastly?” murmurs Howard.

“Isn’t it just?” squeaks Miriam Bernstein.

“It’s exactly like a Jewish wedding,” says Jack, “except they’ve forgotten to invite Uncle Hymie and Auntie Rae, the ones who never made it.”

They gaze round over each other’s shoulders, very pleased with themselves.

“It’s fantastic when you think that a lot of people reckon this whole society’s evil from top to bottom,” says Jack.

Howard laughs.

“No, seriously,” says Jack.

Howard’s laughter fades uncomprehendingly away.