Michael Frayn - Sweet Dreams

But it’s really not just a closed coterie. Their friends bring their friends down for the weekend. People begin to arrive uninvited, so that Howard and Felicity find themselves keeping more or less open house. The process snowballs, until suddenly everything is happening around their swimming-pool. Agents make deals with producers. Politicians gang up on each other. Love affairs start. People Howard has never heard of pick quarrels and pass out.

One or two ladies from the village come up and help out on these occasions, so that the Spanish couple don’t have to do all the work. They love every minute of it, too, bless their hearts — particularly the scandals.

And Howard strolls benignly among the guests, squeezing an elbow here, kissing a cheek there, making sure that everyone’s got everything he wants.

“On second thoughts,” says Prue, “I don’t mean Garsington. I mean West Egg.”

“West Egg …?” queries Howard.

“Where Gatsby lived.”

Howard smiles. The solution is thickening around him, moment by moment. Soon the last crystal will be dropped in, and transform everything.

It’s Prue herself who finds the crystal.

One Saturday evening she takes Howard by the arm and leads him away from the crowd round the pool and the bar, out of everyone’s earshot.

“Howard,” she says, in a special offhand voice, “Freddie’s here.”

“Oh good,” says Howard smiling and nodding, unable to remember who Freddie is. “I’m glad he could make it.”

“We called at the Barclays on the way down, and he was staying there for the weekend. He said he’d always wanted to meet you, so we brought them all over.”

“I look forward to meeting him,” says Howard urbanely. With all this practice he has become an unshakeably well-mannered host.

Prue steers him discreetly towards the house. He discreetly allows himself to be steered.

“He’s absolutely charming ,” she says. “But he hates crowds — I think he’s really rather shy. So he’s retired into the kitchen, of all places, and we’re having to feed him people to meet one by one, like birds bringing back food for their young.”

As soon as Howard sees him he realizes why Prue is so specially calm and matter-of-fact. It’s Freddie Vigars! The Honourable A. P. J. Vigars, who was at Cambridge two years ahead of Howard; the retiring figure in Trinity of whom all the great men of Howard’s generation were in awe. They were in awe of him because you would never have guessed from meeting him how immensely wealthy he was, and because you would never have guessed from knowing how immensely wealthy he was how immensely clever he was as well, and because he was called Freddie when his initials were A. P. J. You’d catch a glimpse of this tall, stooped figure crossing Trinity Great Court, with one shoulder held slightly higher than the other, and you’d know you were watching one of the world’s great fortunes walking about, plus, on the same two lanky legs, behind the same untidily dangling forelock, one of the world’s great instruments of serious scholarship.

He is sitting on the corner of the big table in the kitchen, nodding his head and nibbling a dry biscuit, as Shirley Esplin, the flautist, explains about her work to him. She is talking rather too volubly, waving her hands. “Yur,” he says, nodding, “Yur … yur …” His head is cocked slightly to one side, as if to reduce his height to Shirley Esplin’s level, and a slight sympathetic smile goes up one side of his face. His benevolent brown eyes are looking at the floor to Shirley’s left, about five feet beyond her, and he appears to be thinking not about the flute as a career, but about the problems and opportunities of kitchen floor tiling.

He has scarcely changed at all. If anything, he looks slightly younger than Howard now. He is wearing a rather old-fashioned three-piece suit, made of a material that’s far too thick for comfort, with cuffs on the trousers. It’s cut rather oddly about the shoulders, so that the collar of his shirt sticks out above it. The knot of his tie has slipped and worked round sideways, revealing a brass collar-stud. One scuffed heavy shoe is braced against the floor, the other dangles in space, with the cuff riding high above it to reveal a thick grey sock crumpled around the ankle.

But the ladies from the village who are helping out look curiously at him, and call him sir when they rescue the spoons he is sitting on.

“Freddie,” says Prue, “this is Howard Baker.”

“We did meet once, as a matter of fact,” says Howard, as they shake hands. “It was in Trinity. I was walking across Great Court with Nick Simpkin. You invited him in for a glass of sherry to ask him if you could borrow his bicycle, and I came too.”

“Oh, really?” says Freddie, bending his lips upwards on one side of his face into a suggestion of general benevolence, but moving them only sparingly for the purposes of articulation. “I’m sorry. I didn’t …”

“Howard Baker,” repeats Prue.

“There’s no reason why you should remember it,” says Howard. “I just happened to be with Nick Simpkin. I don’t suppose you remember him , for that matter….”

But the generalized smile on Freddie’s face has dissolved. The head has moved upright on its mountings, and the eyebrows have risen a half-inch.

“Howard Baker?” he says. “Do forgive me. Crashing in like this. Wanted to meet you for years. Admired all your things. Enormous pleasure.”

Howard is too astonished to say anything. That Freddie Vigars should have heard of him! That Freddie Vigars should be sitting in front of him, shyly brushing the forelock out of his eyes in apparent awe! He brushes the forelock out of his own eyes, no less awed.

“Oh!” he says. “That’s extremely …”

“Absolutely terrific .”

“Well, that is immensely …”

“Really tremendous .”

“That is terrifically …”

“No, no. Enormously …”

“Well, that is immensely …”

Shirley Esplin and Prue, seeing that this is a private conversation, discreetly withdraw.

“Terrific surprise when you meet someone face to face,” says Freddie. “I thought you’d look entirely different.”

“No … no …,” says Howard. “I look pretty much like this.”

“Terrible to think I once had you sipping sherry in my rooms and never realized it. Entertaining angels unawares.”

He laughs — surprisingly loudly, looking straight into Howard’s eyes. It is a curiously uncontrolled, self-revealing laugh, for a man of Freddie Vigars’ background to laugh at a man of Howard’s. Howard is very touched by it. He laughs, too, putting his head back and looking at the ceiling. Really, this is just about the most entertaining and agreeable conversation he has ever taken part in!

“Missed you on television,” says Freddie. “Been following your letters to the editor, though. Great interest. What are you working on at the moment?”

Howard explains, hesitantly, about how he is trying to establish contact, through parties like this, with as wide a cross-section as possible of people who sort of share his views about the world, and to act as a sort of focus of dissent, and as a sort of clearing-house for sort of new ideas. He is afraid that to Freddie it will all sound naively idealistic, and rather nebulous. But not at all. Freddie tilts his head sympathetically and nods sideways at everything.

“This is immensely interesting,” he murmurs from time to time. “Fearfully intriguing. Feel colossally guilty I haven’t done anything like it myself.”

He is so interested in Howard’s doings that Howard almost forgets to return the compliment.