Michael Frayn - Sweet Dreams

Gayle was pretty, too.

“But Bill Mishkin,” shouts Howard, “said specifically that it doesn’t have to be all sex and violence.”

Shouting is one of the useful skills he is learning. This is several days later.

“Bill Mishkin,” says Bill Saltman, “is a simple Russian boy from way out in the sticks who went through law school and inherited a couple of million from his uncle in the garment trade and couldn’t add two and two together and get more than four.”

“Bill Mishkin’s just made New Canaan, Connecticut, March 1 to April 14, without so much as a single shooting, beating, or naked buttock from one end to the other! Just whites being nice to blacks, and parents smoking a little sympathetic pot with their kids!”

“Right! So who’s ever seen it? Who’s ever heard of it? New Canaan, Connecticut, March 1 to April 14, has just sunk like a stone, disappeared without trace!”

“Look, I’m not arguing about the rapes. I see we need those. I admit that. And the burning alive bits, and the flagellation, and the cannibalism. All I’m saying is that we’ll overdo it if we have the …”

The phone rings.

“Hello?” says Bill. “Oh no, not again! But this is the third time she’s escaped! What are the guards for …?”

He puts his hand over the mouthpiece.

“It’s family business,” he says to Howard. “Could you come back at about ten o’clock tonight …?”

“Oh God, it’s going to be a terrible place!” cries Howard to his fellow-guests around the Chases’ dinner table, holding his head and rocking it from side to side in humorous de-spair.

“You know Howard’s writing the scenario for the New Jerusalem, don’t you?” Prue reminds them all.

“The New Jerusalem!” cries Howard. “More like the New Disneyland, by the time we’ve finished! I can’t tell you the dreck we’re going to have in it. I shall never be able to look anyone in the eye again. Would you believe gladiator shows? And public hangings?”

They all laugh — but with a tinge of envy and respect.

“It sounds like a real Howard Baker story,” says Barratt Kessell. But he’s impressed, Howard can tell, by the casual use of expressions like “dreck” and “would you believe?”

“If it ever gets made,” says Howard. “Because I don’t think it’s ever going to get off the ground. You wouldn’t believe the wheeling and dealing that’s going on.“

“Tell us anyway,” says Charles Aught.

“Well,” says Howard, “it turns out that Mishkin doesn’t actually have any money himself. He’s simply trying to put a package together to sell to one of the big corporations — Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh or Zebaot International. To do that, of course, he has to have some bankable names to star in it. Like Joan of Arc and Saint Francis of Assissi. Don’t laugh — I’m serious. But of course Joan’s tied up in the Hundred Years War, and Frank’s got involved in some great animal epic. And while we’re waiting for them , Bill Saltman’s gone off to direct the establishment of white slavery in South America Still, I’m learning the general principles of the business. In five words: Grab the money and run.“

They all avoid his eye, they are so awed. He is developing morally, this is the point. He is learning to enjoy a new range of sour and bitter flavours, of gamy meat and dungy cheese, to set off the wholesome bread of his daily life. For the basic fabric of his life has not changed at all. He obstinately continues to love his wife and children, to be moved to tears by music, and to be disturbed by the sun breaking between banks of cloud, low in the sky over flat muddy fields on a winter’s afternoon.

And there could scarcely be anything more difficult and fine-textured than the affair he is having with a woman called Rose. She is dark and serious. She has creases at the corners of her eyes, and when she lowers her head to avoid Howard’s serious gaze she has a fold of flesh under her jaw.

She lives in a comfortable shabby house covered in crumbling stucco, with an overgrown garden full of great elms and sycamores, which fill the house with a soft green light. There are three cats. She plays the piano a lot. The whole house has a rather appalling familiarity about it.

She can’t see Howard often, because of her husband, whom she loves, and her children. Even when they do meet, on flat overcast weekday afternoons at her house, it’s often hopeless. She moves restlessly back and forth between living-room and kitchen, feeding the cats, picking up children’s boots, looking for a letter she was writing. He trails after her, making dramatic declarations of a sort he never has the occasion to make to Felicity.

“I love you!” he cries. “Can’t you understand that? I want you! I need you! But you don’t love me at all! Do you?”

“Of course I do,” she says, making a little kissing sound. “I must just finish this letter. It’s to my cousin.”

That’s the sort of woman she is — the sort of woman who has cousins. She also has an aunt who as a girl in Oxford knew several famous philosophers.

It’s extremely improbable that someone who is working with people like Bill Mishkin and Bill Saltman should be having an affair with someone like Rose. He tries to explain this to her. He tries to convey to her the vital importance that their complex relationship has to him as a counterpoint to his work on the New Jerusalem. She sits curled up in the corner of the sofa with her feet tucked under her and her half-written letter to her cousin waiting in her lap. Long wisps of dark hair fall across her face. She pushes them away, gazing at Howard sombrely.

“My work,” he says, “depends upon my having some kind of … depth . Some kind of moral complexity and ambiguity. Our whole involvement in the world is devious. It has to be devious. We’re working in a complex and difficult medium. That’s why I need you.“

She yawns.

“Oh God,” says Howard.

“Sorry,” says Rose. “I was thinking about my cousin, not about you.”

She writes her letter. The cover on the sofa is rumpled. Next to Rose there is a muddle of books and mending, and a flute, and one of the cats. The pattern on the carpet is worn threadbare. An old clock ticks slowly. On the mantelpiece letters and invitations and bills are stuffed behind little Staffordshire pots.

He loves the opacity of her life, its completeness without him. But it’s exactly that completeness which makes him suffer so. Suffering in love is one of the new bitter flavours he has learnt to appreciate. How he suffers! He suffers so much he wants to weep.

So, hell, he weeps.

Why not? After all, nothing is a joke here, as it is at home with Felicity. Every moment he grows deeper.

He goes out to the kitchen to hide his tears.

“Put some coffee on,” calls Rose.

The enamel coffeepot is chipped. There is an old coffee-grinder on the wall with a camellia lacquered on it, and a loose, rusty handle.

Slowly the water comes to the boil. The clock ticks. How sad life is! How deep and sad!

When Howard comes tragically back with the coffee, Rose is no longer alone. There is a man sitting in the rocking-chair opposite her, hunched over a book. A bespectacled man with stand-up hair, who has taken his shoes off and hung his feet over the arm of the chair. There is a hole in his right sock.

“Phil!” cries Howard, in astonishment.

Phil looks up briefly.

“Black for me, please,” he says.

Howard struggles not to feel appalled. But, really, what’s Rose going to make of this? She’ll think he invited Phil! Told him to look in any time — just to walk in, sit down, take his shoes off, and make himself at home! She’ll think he’s presuming upon their relationship. As if the situation weren’t difficult enough anyway!