Doris Lessing - The Sweetest Dream

But in the morning Jill had gone, had disappeared into wild and dangerous London. And Rose, when asked where she thought Jill might be, replied that she was not Jill's keeper.

Nervousness on Franklin's account was in order, sharing space with Rose. They were afraid she harboured racial prejudices, 'coming from that background' – Andrew's evasion of the class situation. But it turned out otherwise: Rose was 'nice' to Franklin. 'She's being really nice,' reported Colin. 'He thinks she's great.'

He did. She was. An apparently improbable friendship was growing between the good-humoured kindly black youth and the rancorous girl, whose rage bubbled and boiled as reliably as the red spot on Jupiter.

Frances, her sons, marvelled that one could not think of two more different people, but in fact they inhabited a similar moral landscape. Rose and Franklin were never to know how much they had in common.

Since Rose had first come into this house she had been possessed by a quiet fury that these people could call it theirs, as of a right. This great house, its furnishings, like something out of a film, their money... but all that was only the foundation for a deeper anguish, for it was that, a bitter burning that never left her. It was their ease with it all, what they took for granted, what they knew. Never had she mentioned a book – and she had a period of testing them out with books no sane person could have heard of – that they hadn't read, or hadn't heard of. She would stand in that sitting-room, with two walls all books from ceiling to floor, and know that they had read them. 'Frances,' she challenged, being found there, hands on hips, glaring at the books, ' have you actually read all these books?' 'Well, yes, yes, I believe I have. ' 'When did you? Did you have books in your house when you were growing up?' 'Yes, we had the classics. I think everyone did in those days.' 'Everybody, everybody! Who's everybody?' 'The middle classes,' said Frances, determined not to be bullied. 'And a good proportion of the working class as well.' 'Oh! Who said so?' 'Check it,' said Frances. 'Not difficult to find out this sort of thing. ' 'And when did you have time to read?' 'Let me see...’ Frances was remembering herself, mostly alone, with two small children, her boredom alleviated by reading. She remembered Johnny nagging at her to read this, read that...’ Johnny was a good influence,' she told Rose, insisting to herself that one must be fair. ' He's very well read, you know. The communists usually are, it's funny isn't it, but they are. He made me read. '

' All these books, ' Rose said. ‘Well, we didn't have books. '

'Easy enough to catch up if you want to,' said Frances. 'Borrow what you like. '

But the casualness of it made Rose clench her fists. Anything mentioned, they seemed to know it; an idea, or a bit of history. They were in possession of some bank of knowledge: it didn't matter what one asked, they knew it all.

Rose had taken books off the shelves, but she did not enjoy them. It was not that she read slowly, she did: but she was nothing if not persevering, and she stuck at it. A kind of rage filled her as she read, getting between her and the story or the facts she was trying to absorb. It was because these people had all this as a kind of inheritance, and she, Rose...

When Franklin had arrived, and found himself in the complex richnesses of London, he had had days of panic, wishing he had said no to the scholarship. It was too much to expect of him. His father had been a teacher of the lower grades in a Catholic mission school. The priests, seeing that the boy was clever, had encouraged and supported, and the point came when they asked a rich person – Franklin would never know who it was – if he would add this promising boy to his list of beneficiaries. An expensive undertaking: two years at St Joseph's and then, with luck, university.

When Franklin went from his mission school back to the village, he was secretly ashamed of what his parents' background had been. Still was. A few grass huts in the bush, no electricity, no telephone, no running water, no toilet. The shop was five miles away. In comparison the mission school with its amenities had seemed a rich place. Now, in London, there was a violent dislocation: he was surrounded by such wealth, such wonders, that the mission had to seem paltry, poor. He had stayed for the first days in London with a kindly priest, a friend of those at the mission, who knew that the boy would be in a state of shock, and took him on buses, on the Underground, to the parks, to the markets, to the big shops, the supermarkets, the bank, to eat in restaurants. All this to accustom him, but then he had to go to St Joseph's, a place that seemed like heaven, buildings like illustrations in a picture book scattered about in green fields, and the boys and girls, all white except for two Nigerians who were as strange to him as the whites were, and the teachers, quite different from the Catholic fathers, all so friendly, so kind... he had not had kindness from white people outside the mission school. Colin was in a room along the corridor two doors from his own. To Franklin the little room was fitted out with everything anyone could wish for, including a telephone. It was a little paradise, but he had heard Colin complaining that it was too small. The food – the variety of it, the plenty, every meal like a feast, but he had heard grumbles that the food was monotonous. At the mission he had had little to eat but maize porridge and relishes.

Slowly grew inside him a powerful feeling that sometimes threatened to come hot out ofhis mouth in insults and accusations, while he smiled and was pleasant and compliant. It's not fair, it's not right, why do you have so much and you take it all for granted. It was that which ached in him, hurt, stung: they had no idea at all of their good fortune. And when he came home with Colin to the big house that seemed to him must be a palace (so he thought at first), it was crammed with beautiful things, and he found himself sitting in silence while they all joked and teased.

He watched the older brother, Andrew, and his tenderness to the girl who had been sick, and in his mind he was in her place, sitting there between Frances and Andrew, both so kind to her, so gentle. After that first visit it was the same as when he first heard about the scholarship. He couldn't cope with it, he was not up to it, half the time he didn't even know what things were for – a bit of kitchen equipment, or furniture. But he did go back and back, and found himself being treated like a son in that house. Johnny was a difficulty, at first. Franklin had been exposed to Johnny's doctrines, his kind of talk, before, and he had resolved he did not want to have anything to do with these politics, that frightened him. Politicos had exhorted him to kill all the whites, but his experience of good had been through the white priests at the mission even though they were stern, and through an unknown white protector, and now these kindly people at the new school and in this house. And yet he burned, he ached, he suffered: it was envy and it was poisoning him. I want. I want it. I want. I want...

He knew that most of what he thought he could not say. The thoughts that crammed his head were dangerous and could not be allowed out. And with Rose they were not let out either. Neither Rose nor Franklin ever let the other into the lurid poisonous scenes in their minds. But they liked to be with each other.

It took him a long time to sort out what people were to each other, their relationships, and if they were related. It was not surprising to him that so many sat around that table to eat, though he had to go back for a comparison, to his village, where he was familiar with people being made welcome, expecting to be fed, given a place to sleep. In his father's and mother's little house at the mission, not much more than a meagre room and a kitchen, there was no room for the kind of casual hospitality of the village. When Franklin stayed with his grandparents for the school holidays, around the great log that smouldered all night in the middle of the hut, people lay wrapped in blankets to sleep whom he had not known before and might never see again: distant relatives passing through. Or relations down on their luck came for refuge. Yet this kindly warmth went with a poverty that he was ashamed of and – worse – could no longer understand. When he went back home after all this, would he be able to bear it? – he thought, seeing Rose's clothes heaped on her bed, seeing what the children at school had: there was no end to what they possessed, what they expected to have. And he had a few carefully guarded clothes, which had cost his parents so much to buy for him.