Michael Frayn - Sweet Dreams

Now he understands what he is doing aged twenty-two. He walks back across the town, drifting off the ground at every other step, floating the length of whole streets. He looks down into the gardens hidden everywhere behind the patched and crumbling walls. A warm night breeze rustles in the dark trees, and bears him along. Somewhere a diffident bell begins to sound midnight, and from all over town, far and near, other bells join in.

He is transfigured. Every cell in his body is charged and polarized. Like a laser beam, he could pass through solid objects. And indeed, watched curiously by a solitary policeman below, he passes right through a library (**) by Hawksmoor, and emerges on the other side coughing slightly from the dust in the books.

“There’s a gentleman waiting to see you,” says the porter, when he gets back to the hotel. He indicates a figure sitting in a corner of the darkened, empty lobby. Howard goes across to the man curiously, since he doesn’t know anyone in this city. But long before he reaches him he recognizes him — from the way he’s sitting, sprawled back in an armchair with his feet on a coffee-table, reading an ancient Amazing Science Fiction; from his spectacles and rumpled hair; from the fact that he’s taken his shoes and socks off to cool his feet, and tossed them down on the coffee-table; from the way he doesn’t look up, even as Howard comes right up to him, goggling head leading the way, unable to believe his eyes.

“Phil!” he cries. “Phil Schaffer!”

“Hi,” says Phil, without interest, looking up briefly from his magazine.

“What are you doing here?”

“Putting a curse on your old toenail clippings,” says Phil, licking his finger and turning the page. “Didn’t you get my message?”

“No? What message?”

“I left a note on the electric sign opposite.”

“Oh. That was you?”

“Of course it was me. Who else do you know who’d leave a note on an electric newscaster?”

Howard sits down, staring at him, unable to take it in. Whenever Phil’s there Howard can’t take things in.

“You didn’t say anything about coming here,” he says. “I mean, it’s thousands of miles …”

“How did you think you were going to get by without me to explain everything to you?” asks Phil reasonably. “Have you got any idea how this city works? What have you been doing all day — walking round with the Michelin, looking at churches?”

Howard laughs. He looks at Phil affectionately, unable to think of anything to say. Phil continues to read Amazing Science Fiction .

“The only times you ever make any effort to think,” says Phil, “are when you’re trying to understand what I’m saying. You don’t want to give up thinking, do you? It’s your thinking that got you into this place!”

“Yes, well …” says Howard slowly. He always speaks slowly to Phil.

“You’ve got to have someone to make a fool of you. You’d be unbearable otherwise. You wouldn’t be able to stand the sight or sound of yourself after a week.”

“No, well …”

“Anyway, I’ve obviously got to be here if you’re going to be leading the good life, since I’m a major component of it.”

Howard rubs his forehead.

“But what I don’t understand,” he says, “is exactly how it all… fits together. Do we both just happen to share the same good life?”

Phil lowers Amazing Science Fiction .

“Christ!” he cries. “This isn’t my idea of the good life! What? Some bloody great luxury hotel, with waiters in dickeys, and bellhops covered in buttons?”

“Oh, come on, Phil! Be fair! It’s not that sort of hotel at all. It’s a rather, well, a rather joky old family establishment, with, I don’t know, lots of different levels everywhere, and ancient baths…. Honestly, they’re very friendly here. They really seem to enjoy running a hotel — I had a long talk with the porter…. And the food is first class.”

“Howard,” says Phil sadly, “you are the collective imagination of the middle classes compressed into one pair of trousers.”

He gazes at the ceiling for some time.

“If this were my life,” he says softly, “I’d be living in a hotel made of chocolate spongecake and organ music. I’d be eating fried X-rays for breakfast.”

“I haven’t done so badly,” says Howard. “I’ve learned to fly. Look”

He pushes himself out of his armchair, and shoots rather awkwardly upwards, catching his foot against an overhead light. Phil watches him expressionlessly.

“I can get older and younger, too,” calls Howard down to him. “At the moment I’m thirty-seven, right? Now, watch.” But with Phil looking at him he somehow can’t get below thirty-five. Phil picks up his magazine again.

“Jesus wept,” he says. “If it had been me I’d have learned to be transmitted as microwaves by now, and bounced off Jupiter. I’d have given birth to twins, and discovered what song the Sirens sang, and vapourized and condensed and fallen as snow all over central Calcutta.”

Howard sinks back into his chair. The world feels very stable and familiar, with Phil there to insult him. They will go about the city in the weeks to come, and Phil will point out things behind doorways and up courtyards that he’d never noticed, and explain how the whole setup of the city is really a conspiracy, and read out public notices in a voice that makes them suddenly ridiculous, and persuade him to believe preposterous stories.

“I can see what your idea is,” says Phil, with sudden gloom. “I’m to be slightly too clever, the hare to your tortoise, so that you can plod past me half-way round the course and make me look a fool.”

Howard laughs guiltily. The idea was just about to occur to him.

The last glowing embers in the fireplace knock as they settle among the ash. Somewhere a clock has struck two, or three. Howard and Phil are both half-asleep.

“I didn’t really expect it to be like this,” says Howard. “I mean, I didn’t really expect anything . I never thought about it. But if I had expected anything, I should have expected something a little more … I don’t know … abstract. I thought that what went on here was more sort of … contemplation. More sort of… oneness with the infinite, sort of thing.”

“Howard,” says Phil “how long do you think you could have sat here being at one with the infinite before you’d felt your bottom aching and your scalp itching?”

Howard imagines himself at one with the infinite.

“I didn’t think I’d have a bottom or a scalp,” he says.

“No bottom? What would you have sat on? No scalp? What would have kept your brains from falling out?”

“Well …”

“Don’t tell me you didn’t think you were going to have any brains!”

“Well …”

“Howard, without brains you’d have gone out of your mind! After all, what do you actually like? What do you actually enjoy? Not con-templation, Howard. Not being in touch with the infinite. What you like is prawn biriani and apple crumble; getting up late on Sunday and reading the papers in your dressing-gown; looking at your insurance policies; being taken for an academic; picking food out from between your teeth with a sharpened matchstick.”

“I thought I’d be different here.”

“Would you like to be different?” Howard thinks, picking food out from between his teeth with a sharpened matchstick.

“No,” he says finally.

“Well, then.”

They’re all here, it turns out, all his friends. The Chases, the Waylands, the Chyldes, the Esplins — they’ve all found old houses in the south-western and northern suburbs of the city, and done them up, and rung to invite Howard to dinner. Luci Hayter is here, whose husband went off with the girl in market research. So is Charles Aught, that rather camp man in advertising, who writes poems and art criticism, and whose correspondence with his fellow-critic Elwyn West was auctioned at Sotheby’s and fetched twenty-five pounds. Bill Goody has arrived (the Labour M.P., who will almost certainly get a junior ministry next time round). Even Francis Fairlie, the man they all joke about because he can never make up his mind to marry or to start a serious career or to buy a house or to do anything else that may define and announce his character to the world — even Francis Fairlie has managed to get himself here!