Michael Frayn - Sweet Dreams

“Don’t worry,” says the porter. “It’s okay here. You don’t have to worry.”

He leads Howard across little courtyards full of hibiscus, where you can hear fountains playing, and people laughing softly; along candlelit cloisters; straight across lawns with metal labels stuck in them saying “Fellows only.”

Howard feels a great need to talk in Spanish.

“Quale sono le questione politiche le piu importance in questo momenta?” he asks effortlessly. “But this is fantastic! I’ve never been able to speak Spanish before, apart from a few odd phrases like spaghetti bolognese and virtuosi di Roma! And here I am just doing it, like that!”

“You can do anything here,” says the porter. “You want to sing? Then sing! You want to dance? So dance! This is the golden land of opportunity. If I wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer, I could be one tomorrow. Just like that. Just by snapping my fingers. I could have one of the finest practices in the city. Sometimes I’ve thought of going into business. I could do that. No trouble. I could buy up this hotel tomorrow. I could buy up the whole block. Ride up and down in a chauffeur-driven limousine, smoking big cigars. Only one thing stops me.”

“What’s that?” asks Howard.

“I don’t want to. I’m happy the way I am. Why fool around with money, or taking teeth out, when I might not enjoy it as much? This is what I’m used to — carrying gentlemen’s bags up, turning on the lights and the air-conditioner, taking a look round to make sure everything’s just so. This is the way I am, and I figure why be different? But you, you could do anything. You’ve got ambition, you’ve got drive, you’re open to new experience. Have you ever thought of becoming a hotel porter, for instance?”

“No?” says Howard, astonished.

“Because remember — in this place anything’s possible. Look, make a little experiment.”

He stops, and puts down Howard’s bags. They are in a lobby surrounded by staircases and landings.

“Bend your knees slightly,” he tells Howard.

“What?”

“Look, like this. Now, up on tiptoe. Then — push off.”

Howard pushes off. He drifts slowly up into the air.

“This is fantastic!” he says.

He drifts back towards the floor.

“Now, bounce!” cries the porter. “Kick out hard! Time it right!”

This time Howard goes shooting right past the chandelier, up to the level of the first floor.

“I knew it was possible!” he calls back to the porter. “But before I could never do it! I knew it was just a matter of getting the knack!”

“Push off from the banisters. Do frog kicks. Force the air away underneath you with your hands.”

Howard is enchanted by the slowness with which he can move, and the smallness of the gestures which are needed to change course and height. He steers himself into the current of warm air rising above the chandelier, and is carried effortlessly upwards, past floors where people are sitting at little tables and eating icecream out of metal goblets. Some of them smile at him, and wave.

“This is fantastic!” he shouts back at the porter, now several floors below him. “This is staggering! It’s amazing! It’s … well, it’s fantastic!”

“Mind your head on the ceiling,” shouts the porter.

“Why don’t you take off and come up here, too?”

The porter shrugs.

“Why should I?” he says. “I’m happy where I am.”

“But it’s fantastic up here!”

“It’s fantastic down here.”

Howard laughs. A ridiculous thought has just occurred to him. He glides downwards, vertiginously, holding his breath at the emptiness beneath him.

“I’m sorry,” he says, as he sets foot to floor. “That wasn’t Spanish I was talking to you in. That was Italian.”

“Italian — Spanish,” says the porter, shrugging. “Who cares? Here you speak any language you please, and they’ll all come running.”

There’s always a bad moment, Howard knows, after the porter’s unlocked your room, switched everything on, drawn the curtains, and gone away with a huge tip because you had only a folder of fresh bank-notes in your pocket, when you sit down helplessly and think, well, here we are, this is it, I’ve arrived. Now what? Shall I go down and eat in the hotel restaurant, or shall I go out? And if you’re not careful you sit there blankly in the one armchair, with the curtains drawn and your bag on the stand, until it’s too late to do anything.

But just before this moment arrives, as soon as the door closes on the porter, Howard notices the writing table, and all the little giveaways which the management has arranged under the lamp — books of matches, a long-stemmed rose in water, writing paper, and picture postcards of the hotel. The postcards absorb him at once. They show (for instance) guests dining in the hotel’s famous Oak Room, with the celebrated choice of one hundred and forty-two dishes from all over the world, to the accompaniment of a three-piece mariachi band. If you tilt the card back and forth a little, the picture appears to move. The hands of the mariachi players strum their guitars. The forks of the diners flash from plate to mouth and back. Sommeliers reach discreetly forward to refill glasses. The waiters’ spoons dig up down, up down in the great trifle on the world-famous dessert trolley. Gentlemen’s jaws chomp. Ladies’ smiles flash. A couple in one corner kiss discreetly over the brandy.

Howard tilts the card back and forth until he has seen the couple in the corner leave, and the manager discreetly coping with a customer who refuses to pay the bill, then puts it carefully into his pocket to save for his children, who love this kind of toy. He puts four books of matches into his pocket as well. These are for his wife, who smokes. For himself he will take a handful of the pencils they always leave out for you…. But here he makes a surprising discovery. At the top of the blotter, where the pencils should be, is a pencil- case . It’s made of red plastic, and there’s something familiar about it which he can’t quite identify; something about the feel of its grained texture, and of the shiny red popper button on the flap…. He pulls it open. There’s something even more familiar about the satisfying little reluctance with which the popper gives, and something yet more familiar still about the contrast between the grained texture on the outside, and the red smoothness of the inside.

Then for some reason he smells it — and at once he knows. It’s his first pencil-case, that he had for his sixth birthday. For nearly thirty years it’s been lost. And now it’s been lovingly found again by the management of the hotel to welcome him. It has its new smell still — the perfect red plastic smell, the smell of writing numbers in arithmetic books ruled in squares; the smell it had before it got mixed up in the dust and plasticine and tangled electric cord in the toy-drawer.

And inside the pencil-case the management has placed something even more astonishing: a propelling pencil with four different colours in it. The colours appear at little windows in the side, glimpses into the worlds of heartrending blueness and greenness, unattainable redness and blackness, that lie hidden inside the smooth nickel barrel. On the outside of the barrel, to be turned to the colour you want and slid down to push the lead into the tip, is an outer sleeve; heavy, thick, graspable, with eight shining nickel facets, alternately smooth and cross-hatched. Howard moves his fingers over the smoothness of the smooth facets, the complex texture of the hatched ones, scarcely able to absorb the pleasure that their alternation gives him. This is not a relic of his sixth birthday, or any other birthday. This is the pencil he never had — the pencil he longed for. This is the pencil that his kindergarten teacher possessed; the pencil that made the blue ticks and the red crosses in the register; the pencil that he wept for, that his mother went all over town to find, and failed to find, because they were all gone, or not made any more, or kept for teachers, or only imagined; the pencil which he knew would make him happy, if only he possessed it, forevermore.