‘Oh, do shut up,’ said Frances. ' Just behave like a human being for once. '
'Really? How you do give yourself away, Frances. A human being. And what do you think I and all the other comrades are working for, if not humanity?'
' Father,’ said Colin, who was already white, and suffering, ‘I’d like to know, leaving all the propaganda aside, what did you think of the book?'
The father and son were leaning towards each other across the table. Colin was like someone threatened with a beating, his father was triumphant and in the right. Had he recognised himself in the book? Probably not.
'I told you. I read the book. I am telling you what I think. If there is one class of person I despise, it is a liberal. And that is what you are, all of you. You are the hacks spawned by the decaying capitalist system.'
Colin got up and walked out of the kitchen. They heard him go blundering up the stairs.
Julia said, ‘And now Johnny, leave. Just go. '
Johnny sat, apparently in thought: it might be occurring to him that he could have behaved differently? He quickly shovelled in what remained on his plate, tipped what was in his wine glass down his throat, and said, ' Very well, Mutti. You are throwing me out of my house. ' He got up, and in a moment they heard the front door slam.
Sophie was in tears. She went out to follow Colin, saying, 'Oh, that was so awful.'
Jill said into the silence, ‘But he's such a great man, he'sso wonderful...’ She looked around, saw nothing but distress and anger, and said, ‘I should go, I think. ‘No one stopped her. She went saying, ' Thank you so much for asking me. '
Frances showed signs of cutting the cake, but Julia was rising, aided by Wilhelm. ‘I am so ashamed,’ she said. ‘I am so ashamed. ‘And, weeping, she went up the stairs, with Wilhelm.
There remained Andrew and his mother.
Frances suddenly began beating her fists on the table, her face raised, eyes streaming. 'I'll kill him,' she said. 'One of these days I'll kill him. How could he do that? I cannot understand how he could do it. '
Andrew said, ' Mother, just listen...’
But Frances was going on, and now she was actually tugging at her hair, as if wanting to pull it out. ‘I will kill him. How could he hurt Colin like that? Colin would've been happy with just one little kind word. '
' Mother, do listen to me. Just stop. Listen. '
Frances let her hands drop, rested her fists on the table, sat waiting.
'Do you know what you've never understood? I don't know why you haven't. Johnny is stupid. He is a stupid man. How is it you've never seen it?'
Frances said, ' Stupid. ' She felt as if weights and balances were shifting in her mind. Well, of course he was stupid. But she had never admitted it. And that was because of the great dream. After all she had taken from him, all the shit, she had never been able to say to herself, simply, that Johnny was stupid.
She persisted, ' It's the unkindness. That was such a brutal thing...’
‘But, Mother, what are they if not brutal? Why do they admire all that, if they aren't brutal people?'
And then, a surprise to herself, Frances laid her head down on her arms, on the table, among all the dishes. She sobbed. Andrew waited, noting the freshets of tears that renewed themselves every time he thought she had recovered. He was white too now, shaken. He had never seen his mother cry, never heard her criticise his father in this way. He had understood that not attacking Johnny had been to shield him and Colin from the worst of it, but he had not really understood what an ocean of angry tears had remained unshed. At least, not shed where he or Colin could know about them. And she had done well, he was now thinking, not to weep and rage in front of them. He was feeling sick. After all, Johnny was his father... and Andrew knew that in some ways he resembled his father. Johnny was never to achieve even a grain of the self-understanding his son had. Andrew was doomed to live always with a critical eye focused on himself: a debonair, even humorous regard – but a judgement nevertheless.
Andrew sat on, turning his wine glass between his fingers, while his mother wept. Then he swallowed his wine, and stood up and put his hand on his mother's shoulder.
' Mother, leave all this stuff. We'll deal with it in the morning. And go to bed. It's no good, you know. He'll always be like this. '
And he went out. He knocked on his grandmother's door, and Wilhelm opened it and said in a loud voice, 'Julia's taken a valium. She's very upset.'
He hesitated outside Colin's door, heard Sophie singing: she was singing to Colin.
Then he glanced in at Sylvia. She had fallen asleep in her bed, dressed, and the young man was on the floor, his head on a cushion. It didn't look comfortable, but he was clearly beyond that.
Andrew went to his room, and lit a joint: he used pot for emotional emergencies, and listened to traditional jazz, mostly the blues. Classical music was for good moods. Or he recited to himself all the poems he knew – a good many – to make sure they remained there, intact. Or he read Montaigne, but about this he was secretive, for he felt this to be an old man's solace, not a young one's.
Julia had been left by Wilhelm tucked up in her big chair, with a rug, insisting she was not sleepy. But she did doze a little, then woke, the valium outwitted by anxiety. She shook off the rug irritably, listening to the dog, which she could hear making a nuisance of itself just below her. She also heard Sophie singing, but thought it was the radio. There was a light under Andrew's door. She crept down the stairs, hesitating whether to go in to him, but instead descended another flight, and was on the landing outside Sylvia's room. A crack of light showed that Frances was still awake. The old woman felt she ought to go in to Frances and say something, find the right words, sit with her, do something ... what words?
Julia gently turned the handle of Sylvia's door and stepped in to a room where moonlight lay across Sylvia and just reached the young man on the floor. She had forgotten him, and now her heart reminded her of her terrible, inadmissible unhappiness. Wilhelm had told her, not so long ago, that Sylvia would marry, and that she, Julia, mustn't mind it. So that's all he thinks of me, Julia had complained – to herself, but knew he was right. Sylvia must marry, though probably not this man. Otherwise wouldn't he be beside her on the bed? It seemed to Julia terrible that any young man, 'a colleague', should come home with Sylvia and sleep in her room. They are like puppies in a basket, Julia thought, they lick each other and fall off to sleep just anyhow. It should matter that a man was in a young woman's room. It should mean something. Julia sat herself carefully in the chair where – but that seemed an age ago – she had coaxed little Sylvia to eat. Now she could see Sylvia's face clearly, and as the moonlight moved over the floor, the young man's. Well, if it wasn't going to be him, this quite pleasant-looking youth, it would be another one.
It seemed to her that she had never cared for anyone in her life but Sylvia, that the girl had been the great passion of her life – oh, yes, she knew she loved Sylvia because she had not been allowed to love Johnny. But that was nonsense, because she knew – with her mind – how much she had longed for Philip all through that old war, and then how much she had loved him. The beams of light on the bed and the floor resembled the arbitrariness of memory, emphasising this and then that. When she looked back along the path of her life, periods of years that had had a sharp and distinct flavour of their own reduced themselves to something like a formula: that was the five years of the First World War. That little slice there was the Second World War. But, immersed in those five years, loyal in her mind and emotions to an enemy soldier, they were endless. The Second World War, which was now like an uneasy shadow in her memory, when she had lost her husband to his fatigue and to the fact he could tell her nothing of what he did, was an awful time and she had often thought that she could not bear it. She had lain at nights beside a man who was preoccupied with how to destroy her country, and she had to be glad it was being destroyed – and she was, but sometimes it seemed the bombs were tearing at her own heart. And yet now she could say to Wilhelm, who had been a refugee from that monstrous regime which she refused to think of as German, 'That was during the war – no, the second one.' As if talking about an item on a list that had to be kept up to date and accurate, events one after another, or perhaps like moonlight and shadows falling across a path, each having a sharp validity as you moved through them, but then when you looked back there was a dark streak through a forest with splashes of thin light across it. Ich habe gelebt und geliebt, she murmured, the fragment of Schiller that still stayed in her mind after sixty-five years, but it was a question: Have I lived and loved?