Doris Lessing - The Sweetest Dream

Julia took to her bed, and of course people said that Wilhelm's death had done for her, but there was something else, an appalling thing, a blow to her heart that none of the family understood.

When Colin's second novel came out, it was clear that Sick Death would not do as well as his first. And it was not as good, being virtually a tract about a criminally irresponsible government neglecting to protect its people from nuclear fall-out, bombs, and so on. An efficient propaganda campaign, inspired by agents of a foreign enemy power, created a hysterical atmosphere which made this government, concerned about its popularity, ignore its responsibilities. This novel evoked roars of indignation from the various movements concerning themselves with the Bomb. Some reviews were malignant, among them Rose Trimble's. Her profile of President Matthew Mungozi had put her on the map, she had all kinds of opportunities afforded to her, but she was now working on the Daily Post, famous for its virulence, and was at home there. She used Colin's novel as a starting point for an attack on those who wanted to build shelters, and in particular the young doctors, and most particularly Sylvia Lennox. As for Colin, 'It should be known that he has a Nazi background. His grandmother Julia Lennox was a member of the Hitler Youth. ' Rose felt safe. For one thing the Daily Post was a newspaper that expected to pay out – often – compensation for libel, and for another she knew that Julia would not deign to notice such an attack. ' Nasty old bitch, ' Rose muttered.

Wilhelm had been shown this article by a friend in the Cosmo. He debated whether to tell Julia, decided that he should: and it was just as well, because a well-wisher sent her the cutting anonymously. ' Take no notice,’ she had said to Wilhelm. ' They are nothing but shit. I think I am justified in using their favourite word?' 'My dear Julia,’Wilhelm had said, amused, but shocked, too, at this word from her.

Julia sat up against the pillows, nurses coming and going, not expecting to sleep, with the cutting in her bedside table. So now, she, Julia von Arne, was a Nazi. What hurt was the carelessness of it. Of course that woman – Julia remembered an unlikeable girl – had not known what she was doing. They all used words like fascist all the time, anyone they might be having a tiff with was a fascist. They were so ignorant they did not know there had been real fascists, who had brought Italy low. And Nazi... there were newspaper articles, radio programmes, television, about them, which she watched because she felt so directly concerned, but obviously none of these young people had taken it in. They did not seem to know that fascist, Nazi, were words that meant people had been imprisoned, been tortured, had died in millions in that war. It was the ignorance, the carelessness, that filled Julia's eyes with angry tears. She felt cancelled out, obliterated: her history, and Philip's too, reduced to epithets used by an ambitious young journalist in a gutter newspaper. Julia sat sleepless (she quietly disposed of her sleeping pills when the nurses weren't looking), poisoned by her helplessness. Of course she would not sue, or even write a letter: why dignify that canaille by even noticing them? Wilhelm had brought her a drafted letter, saying the von Arnes were an old German family which had never had connections with the Nazis. She asked him to forget it, not to send it. She was wrong: it should have been sent, to ease her heart, if nothing else. And she was wrong, too, about Rose Trimble. Carelessness and indifference to history – yes, she was like her generation, but it was an immediate hatred of the Lennoxes that inspired her, the need to 'get back at them'. She had forgotten what had brought her to their house in the first place, or that she had ever claimed Andrew had made her pregnant. No, it was that house, the ease of it, the way they took everything for granted, and looked after each other. Sylvia, that prissy little bitch; Frances, the shitty old queen bee, wasp, rather; Julia bossing everyone. And the men, complacent bastards. Her article had been written from the wells of bile and malice that forever churned and seethed inside Rose, which could be mollified if only temporarily, when she was able to write words directed straight to the hearts of her victims. She imagined, as she wrote, how they gasped and writhed as they read. She imagined them crying out in pain. That was why Julia was dying before her time. She felt she had suddenly been attacked by malignity. She sat against her pillows in a room where light fell from the window, and moved from floor to bed to wall, and back around the walls to the window, such a feeble answer to the dark that was descending from invisible inimical forces, and which enclosed her. She had been running away from them all her life, she felt, but now she was being swallowed by a monster of stupidity and ugliness and vulgarity. Everything was distorted and spoiled. And so she stayed in bed, and went back in her mind to her girlhood when everything had been beautiful, so schon, schon, schon, but into that paradise had come that old war, and the world was full of uniforms. At night, when the tiny light that had been Sylvia's and had been brought up from the sitting-room to her room, was the only illumination in the dark, her brothers and Philip, handsome brave young men, stood about her bed, in smart uniforms that had not a spot nor spatter nor stain on them. She cried to them to stay with her, not to go off and leave her.

She talked softly in German, and in English, and in her comme-il-faut French, and Colin sat with her, sometimes for hours, holding the bundle of little bones that was her hand. He was unhappy, remorseful, thinking that he had never really heard about Ernst and Frederich and Max; he had scarcely heard of his grandfather. Behind him was a chasm or gulf into which normality had fallen, ordinary family life had taken a fall, and here he sat, a grandson, but he had not met his grandfather, nor Julia's German family. But it was his family too... He bent close to Julia and said, 'Julia, please, tell me about your brothers, about your father and mother, did you have grandparents? Tell me about them. ' She came out of her dream and said, ‘Who? Who did you say? They are dead. They were killed. There is no family now. There is no house now. There is nothing left now. It is terrible, terrible...’

She did not like being called back out of her memories, or dreams. She did not like the present, all medicines, pills and nurses, and she hated the ancient yellowish body that was revealed when they washed her. Above all, she had a persistent diarrhoea, which meant that no matter how often her bed was changed, and her nightdress, or how much they cleaned her, there was a smell in her room. She demanded that cologne be splashed about, and she rubbed it into her hands and face, but the odour of faeces was there, and she was ashamed and miserable. ' Terrible, terrible, terrible,' she muttered, a fierce old crone, who sometimes wept angry tears.

She died, and Frances found the cutting in her bedside table, saying that Julia had been a Nazi. She showed it to Colin and they laughed, because of the absurdity. Colin said that if he met Rose Trimble he might consider beating her up, but Frances, like Julia, said they were not worth bothering about, these people.

Julia's funeral was not as heartwarming as Wilhelm's.

It seemed that she was or had been some kind of a Catholic, but she had not asked for a priest in her last illness, nor was there anything about her funeral in her will. They decided on a non-committally interdenominational service, but it seemed so bleak, that they remembered she had liked poetry. Poems should be read. What poems? Andrew looked about on her shelves, and then found in her bedside drawer a copy of Gerard Manley Hopkins. It had been much read and some poems were underlined. They were the 'terrible' poems. Andrew said no, too painful to read those.