The incendiary letter came addressed to "J . . . indecipherable Lennox", and was opened by Julia, who, having seen it was for Johnny, Dear Comrade Johnny Lennox, and that the first sentence was, "I invite you to help me open people's eyes to the truth," read it, then again, and, having let her thoughts settle, telephoned her son.
"I have a letter here from Israel, a man called Reuben Sachs, for you."
"A good type," said Johnny. "He has maintained a consistently progressive position as a non-aligned Marxist, advocating peaceful relations with the Soviet Union."
"However that is, he wants you to call a gathering of your friends and comrades to hear him speak about his experiences in a Czech prison."
"There must have been a good reason for him to be there."
"He was arrested as a Zionist spy for American imperialism." Johnny was silent. "He was inside for four years, tortured and brutally treated and finally released . . . I would take it as a favour if you did not say, Unfortunately mistakes have sometimes been made."
"What do you want, Mutti?"
"I think you should do as he asks. He says he would like to open people's eyes to the truth about the methods used by the Soviet Union. Please do not say that he is some kind of provocateur."
"I am afraid I don't see why it would be useful."
"In that case I shall call a meeting myself. After all, Johnny, I am in the happy position of knowing who your associates are."
"Why do you think they would come to a meeting called by you, Mutti?"
"No, I know the kind of lies that are being spread."
"He will be here in two weeks time, and he is coming to London just for that - to address the comrades. He is also going to Paris. Shall I suggest a date?"
"If you like."
"But it must be one convenient for you. I don't think I would be pleased if you didn't attend."
"I'll telephone you with a date. But I must make it clear that I shall disassociate myself from any anti-Soviet propaganda."
On the evening in question the big sitting-room received an unusual collection of guests. Johnny had invited colleagues and comrades, and Julia had asked people that she thought Johnny should have invited, but had not. There were people still in the Party, some who had left over various crisis points - the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Berlin Rising, Prague, Hungary, even one or two who went back to the attack on Finland. About 50 people; and the room was crammed tight with chairs, and people standing around the walls. All described themselves as Marxists.
Reuben Sachs had maintained for years a difficult political position in Israel, as a socialist, but rejecting communism and asking that the non-aligned socialists of the world should support peaceful relations with the Soviet Union: this meant that they would necessarily be in an unhappy situation with their own governments. He had been reviled as a communist throughout the Cold War. His temperament was not suited by nature to being permanently out on a limb, being shot at from all sides. This could be seen by his agitated, fervent discourses, his pleading and angry eyes, while the words that repeated themselves like a refrain were, "I have never compromised with my beliefs."
He had been on a fraternal visit to Prague, on a Peace and Goodwill Mission, when he had been arrested as a Cosmopolitan Zionist spy for American Imperialism. In the police car he addressed his captors thus, "How can you, representatives of a Workers' State, sully your hands with such work as this?" and when they hit him and went on hitting him, he continued to use these words. As he did in prison. The warders were brutes, and the interrogators too, but he continued to address them as civilised beings. He knew six languages, but they insisted on interrogating him in a language he did not know, Romanian, which meant that at first he did not know what he was being accused of, which was every sort of anti-Soviet and anti-Czech activity. But: "I am good at languages, I have to explain . . ." He learned enough Romanian during the interrogation to follow, and then to argue his case. For days, months, years, he was beaten up, reviled, kept for long periods without food, kept without sleep, tortured in all the ways beloved by sadists. For four years. And he went on insisting on his innocence, and explained to his interrogators and his jailers that in doing this kind of work they were dirtying the honour of the people, of the Workers' State. It took a long time for him to realise that his case was not unique, and that the prison was full of people like him, who tapped out messages on the walls to say they were as surprised to find themselves in prison as he was. They also explained that, "Idealism is not appropriate in these circumstances, comrade". The scales fell from his eyes, as he said. Just about the time he stopped appealing to the better natures and class situation of his tormentors, having lost faith in the long-term possibilities of the Soviet Revolution, he was released in one of the new dawns in the Soviet Empire. And found he was still a man with a mission, but now it was to open the eyes of the comrades who were still deluded about the nature of communism.
Frances (Johnny's estranged wife) had decided she did not want to listen to "revelations" that she had absorbed decades ago, but crept into the back of the room when it was full, and found herself sitting next to a man she did seem to remember but who obviously remembered her well, from his greeting. Johnny was in a corner, listening without prejudice. His sons, Andrew and Colin, sat with Julia across the room, and did not look at their father. On their faces was the strained unhappy look Frances had been seeing there for years now. If they avoided their father's eyes, they did send supportive smiles to her, which were too miserable to be convincing as irony, which is what they had intended. In that room were people who had been around through their early childhoods, some whose children they had played with.
When Reuben began his tale with, "I have come to tell you the truth of the situation, as it is my duty to do . . .", the room was silent, and he could not have complained that his audience was not attentive. But those faces . . . they were not the expressions usually seen at a meeting, responding to what is said, with smiles, nods, agreement, dissent. They were polite, kept blank. Some were still communists, had been communists all their lives and would never change: there are people who cannot change once their minds are made up. Some had been communists, might criticise the Soviet Union, and even passionately, but all were socialists, and kept a belief in progress, the ever-upwards-reaching escalator to a happier world. And the Soviet Union had been so strongly a symbol of this faith, that - as it was put decades later by people who had been immersed in dreams - "The Soviet Union is our mother, and we do not insult our mothers."
They were sitting here listening to a man who had done four years hard labour in a communist prison, been brutally treated, a painfully emotional tale, so that at times Reuben Sachs wept, explaining that it was because of "the sullying and dirtying of the great dream of humankind", but what was being appealed to was their reason.
And that was why the faces of the people who had come to this evening's meeting, "to hear the truth", were expressionless, or even stunned, listening as if the tale did not concern them. For an hour and a half the emissary from "the truth of the situation" talked, and then ended with a passionate appeal for questions, but no one said anything. As if nothing at all had been said, the meeting ended because people were getting up and having thanked Frances, under the impression that she was the hostess, and nodded to Johnny, drifted out. Nothing was said. And when they began talking to each other, it was on other subjects.
Reuben Sachs sat on, waiting for what he had come to London for, but he might have been talking about conditions in medieval Europe or even Stone Age Man. He could not believe what he was seeing, what had happened.
Julia continued to sit in her place, watching, sardonic, a little bitter, and Andrew and Colin were openly derisive. Johnny went off, with some others, not looking at his sons or his mother.
The man next to Frances had not moved. She felt she had been right not to have wanted to come: she was being attacked by ancient unhappinesses, and needed to compose herself.
"Frances," he said, trying to get her attention, "that was not pleasant hearing."
She smiled more vaguely than he liked, but then saw his face and thought that there was one person there at least who had taken in what had been said.
"I'm Harold Holman," he said. "But you don't seem to remember me? I was around a lot with Johnny in the old days . . . I came to your place when all our kids were small - I was married to Jane then."
"I seem to have blocked it all off."
Meanwhile, Andrew and Colin were watching: the room was nearly empty now, and Julia was taking the miserably disappointed truth-bringer out and up to her rooms.
"Can I ring you?" Harold asked.
"Why not? But better ring me at The Defender" (the left-wing paper where Frances worked as a journalist). And she lowered her voice, because of her sons. "I'll be there tomorrow afternoon."
"Right," he said, and off he went. This had been so casual that she was only just taking it in that he was interested in her as a woman, for she had got out of the habit of expecting it. And now Colin came to ask, "Who's that man?"
"An old friend of Johnny's - from the old days."
"What is he telephoning you about?"
"I don't know. Perhaps we'll go and have a cup of coffee, for old times' sake," she said, lying casually, for already that aspect of her self was re-emerging.
"I'll get back to school," said Colin, abrupt, suspicious, and he did not say goodbye as he went off to catch his train.
As for Andrew, he said, "I'll go and help Julia with our guest, poor man," and left her with a smile that was both complicit and a warning, though it was doubtful he was aware of this.
A woman who has shut a door on her amorous self as thoroughly as Frances had, has to be surprised when suddenly it opens. She liked Harold, that was obvious, from the way she was coming to life, pulses stirring, animation seizing hold of her.
And yet why? Why him? He had got under her guard, all right. How very extraordinary. The occasion had been extraordinary, who could believe such a thing, if they hadn't seen it? She wouldn't be at all surprised if this Harold was the only person there who had allowed himself to take in what Reuben Sachs had said. A good phrase, take in. You can sit for an hour and a half listening to information that should shoot your precious citadel of faith to fragments, or that doesn't match easily with what is already in your brain, but you don't take it in. You can take a horse to water . . .
Frances did not sleep well that night, and it was because she was allowing herself to dream like a girl in love.
He telephoned next afternoon, and asked her to go with him for a weekend to a certain little town in Warwickshire, and she said she would, as easily as if she did this often. And she had to wonder again what it was about this man who could turn a key so easily in a door that she had kept shut. He was a solid, smiling, fairish man, whose characteristic look was of cool, humorous assessment. He was, or had been, an official in some educational organisation. A trade union official?
She supposed the usual assortment of the kids would arrive for the weekend, and went up to Julia to say that she would like to take the weekend off. Using those words.
Julia seemed to smile a little. Was that a smile? Not an unkind one . . . "Poor Frances," she said, surprising her daughter-in-law. "You live a dull sort of life."
"Do I?"
"I think you do. And the young ones can look after themselves for once."
And, as Frances went out she heard the low, "Come back to us, Frances," and this surprised her so much she turned, but found that Julia had already picked up her book.
Come back to us . . . oh, that was perceptive of her, uncomfortably so. For she had been seized with a rebellion against her life, the relentless slog of it, and had wandered into a landscape of feverish dreams, where she would lose herself - and never return to Julia's house.
And there were her sons, and that was no joke. Told that their mother would be away that weekend, both reacted as if she had said she was off for a six-month jaunt.
Colin, from school, said on the telephone, "Where are you going? Who are you going with?"
"A friend," said Frances, and there was a suspicious silence.
And Andrew gave her the bleakest smile, which was full of fear, but he certainly did not know that.
She was the stable thing in their lives, always had been, and it was no use saying both were old enough to allow her some freedom. But at what age do such insecurely based children no longer need a parent to be there, always? This was their mother, taking off for the weekend with a man, and they knew it. If she had ever done anything like it before . . . but how obedient she had always been to their situation, their needs, as if she was making up for Johnny's lacks. "As if"? - she had tried to make up for Johnny.
On the Saturday Frances crept out of the house knowing that Andrew would be on the look-out, for he was a restless sleeper, and Colin might have decided to wake earlier than his usual mid-morning. She glanced up at the front of the house, dreading to see Andrew's face, Colin's - but there were no faces at the windows. It was seven in the morning of a wonderful summer's day, and her spirits, in spite of her guilt, were threatening to shoot her up into an empyrean of irresponsibility, and here he was, her beau, her date, smiling, obviously enjoying what he saw, this blonde woman (she had had her hair done) in her green linen dress, settling herself beside him, and turning to him to share a laugh at this adventure.
They drove comfortably through the suburbs of London, and were in the country, and she was enjoying his enjoyment of her, and her pleasure in him, this handsome sandy man, and meanwhile she combated thoughts of the helpless unhappy faces of her sons.
Dear Aunt Vera, I am divorced and I bring up two boys. I am tempted to have an affair but I am afraid of upsetting my sons. They watch me like hawks. What shall I do? I'd like to have some fun. Don't I have any rights?
Well, if she, Frances, was in line for some fun, then do it: and she shut her sons firmly out of her thoughts. Either that, or say to this man, Turn around and go back, I have made a mistake.
They stopped by the river near Maidenhead and had breakfast, rested later in a town whose public gardens looked inviting, drove on, were invited by an attractive pub, and had lunch in another garden while sparrows hopped about them in the dust.
He said once, "Are you having difficulty suspending disbelief?"
"Yes," and stopped herself saying, It's the boys, you see.
"I thought so. As for me, I am having no difficulty at all." And his laughter had enough triumph in it to make her examine him for the reason. There was something in all this she was not understanding - but never mind. She was quite recklessly happy. What a dull life she did lead: Julia was right. They drove up side roads to avoid the motorways, got themselves lost, and all the time their looks and smiles promised, Tonight we are going to lie in each other's arms. The day continued warm, with a silky golden haze, and in the late afternoon they sat in another garden, by a river, observed by blackbirds, a thrush, and a large, friendly dog who sat by them, until it gained its bit of cake from both of them, and wandered off, its tail slowly swinging.
"A fat dog," said Harold Holman, "and that's what I shall be, after this weekend." Replete, yes, he looked that, but as well there was this other ingredient, a pleasure in her, in the situation, which made her say, without planning to, "Just what are you so pleased with yourself about?" He at once understood, so that the aggressiveness of it, which she regretted, for it contradicted the radiant content she felt, was annulled as he said, "Ah, yes, you are right, you are right," and gave her a laughing look, and she thought that he looked like a lazy lion, his paws crossed in front of him, lifting a commanding head in a slow lazy yawn. "I'll tell you, I'll tell you everything. But first, I want to get somewhere when the light is like this." And off they drove again, into Warwickshire, and he parked outside their hotel, and came to open the door for her. "Come and look at this." Across the street were trees, gravestones, shrubs, an old yew. "I was looking forward to showing you this - no, you're wrong, I've not brought a woman here before, but I had to stop in this town, months ago, and I thought, it's magic, this place. But I was alone."
They crossed the street hand in hand and stood in the old graveyard where the yew seemed almost as tall as the little church. It was an early summer dusk, and a moon was emerging bright into a darkening sky. The pale gravestones leaned about and seemed to want to speak to them. Breaths of warm summer air, wisps of cool mist, brushed their faces, and they stood in each other's arms, and kissed and then were close for a long time, listening to the messages from each other's bodies.
"I've been in love with you for years," he said (after they had booked in to their room at the hotel), "years. Ever since I saw you first with those little boys of yours. Johnny's wife. You don't know how often I fantasised about ringing you up and asking you to sneak around the corner for a drink. But you were Johnny's wife, and I was so in awe of him."
Frances's spirits were taking a fall, and she wished that he would not go on: but he would have to, that was obvious, for here was the sad face of the truth. "That must have been in that dreadful flat in Notting Hill."
"Was it dreadful? But we didn't go in for gracious living in those days." And he laughed loudly, from an excess of everything, and said, "Oh, Frances, if you've ever had a dream you thought would never come true, then tonight is that, for me."
She was thinking of herself then, overweight and worried, with the small children always at her or on her, clutching her, climbing up her, competing for her lap. "Just what did you see in me then, I'd like to know?"
He was silent for a while. "It was everything. Johnny - he was such a hero to me then. And you were Johnny's wife. You were such a couple, I envied you both and I envied Johnny. And the little boys - I hadn't had children then. I wanted to be like you."
"Like Johnny."
"I can't explain. You were such - a holy family," he laughed and flung his limbs about, and then sat on the edge of the bed, stretching up his arms into the moony light of the room and said, "You were wonderful. Calm . . . serene . . . nothing phased you. And I did realise that Johnny wasn't necessarily the easiest . . . I'm not criticising him."
"Why not? I do." Was she really going to demolish this dream - she couldn't. Oh, yes, she could. "Did you have any idea how much I hated Johnny then?"
"Well, of course we hate our dear loved ones sometimes. Jane - she was a pain."
"Johnny was consistently a pain."
" But what a hero! I admired that man more than anyone in my life. For me he was a sort of god. Comrade Johnny. He was much older than I was . . ." He lifted his head to look at her.
"That means I am much older than you are."
"Not tonight you aren't. I was in a bit of a mess when I first met Johnny - at a meeting, it was. I was a green boy. I had failed my exams. My parents said, 'If you are a communist don't darken our doors.' And Johnny was kind to me. A father figure. I decided to be worthy of him."
Here she controlled the muscles of her diaphragm, but whether to forestall laughter or tears, it was hard to say.
"I found a room in a comrade's house. I took my exams again. I was a teacher for a bit, I was in the Union then . . . but the point is, I owe it all to Johnny."
"Well, what can I say? Good for him. But surely, good for you?"
"If I had believed then that I could be with you tonight, hold you in my arms, I think I'd have gone mad with joy. Johnny's wife, in my arms."
They made love again. Yes, it was love, a friendly, even amorous love, while laughter bubbled in the cauldron, well out of his hearing but not out of hers.
They slept. They woke. And then it seemed he had bad dreams, for he started awake and lay on his back, holding her, but in a way that said Wait. At last he said unhappily, "That was a bad blow, you know, what that man Sachs said."
She decided to let it go.
"You can't say it wasn't a shock."
She decided she would speak. "Newspapers," she spelled it out. "Newspaper reports for years. Television. Radio. The Purges, the camps. The Laagers, the murders. For years."
A long silence. "Yes," he said at last, "but I didn't believe it. Well, some of it of course . . . but nothing like - what he told us."
"How could you not have believed it?"
"I didn't want to, I suppose."
"Exactly." And then she heard herself say, "And I bet we haven't heard the half of it yet."
"Why do you say that? It sounds as if you are quite pleased with yourself."
"I suppose I am. It is something to have been proved right, after years of having been put down and - trampled on. Of being put down now," she said.
And now he was dismayed. But she went on, "I didn't agree with Johnny. Not after the very first days . . ." She suppressed, When he came back from the Spanish Civil War. Since after all, he hadn't. She suppressed, When I saw what a dishonest hypocrite he was. Because after all, how could he be called dishonest? He believed every word of it.
"I fell for all that glamour," she said. "I was nineteen. But it didn't last."
He didn't like that, no, he didn't like it all, and she lay there silent by him, enough at one with him to be hurt because he was.
There was a long drowsing silence: outside it was already a full hot day, and the traffic had begun.
"It seems it was all for nothing," he said at last. "It was all . . . lies and nonsense." She could hear the tears in his voice. "What a waste. All that effort . . . people killed for nothing. Good people. No one is going to tell me they weren't." A silence. "I don't want to make a thing of it, but I did make such sacrifices for the Party. And it was all for nothing."
"Except that Comrade Johnny inspired you to great things."
"Don't mock."
"I'm not. I'm going to allot Johnny one good mark. At least he was good to you."
"I haven't taken it in yet. I haven't begun to take it all in."
And so they lay side by side, and if he was letting go dreams, such dreams, such sweet sweet dreams, she was thinking, Obviously I'm a very selfish person, just as Johnny always said. Harold is thinking about the golden future of the human race, postponed indefinitely, but I am thinking what I have shut out of my life. She could hardly bear the pain of it. The sweet warm weight of a man sleeping in her arms, his mouth on her cheek, the tender heaviness of a man's balls in her hand, the delicious slipperiness of . . .
"Let's go down to breakfast," he said. "I think I'm going to cry otherwise."
They breakfasted soberly, in a decorous little room, and left the hotel, noting that this morning the graveyard seemed neglected and shabby, and the magic of last night was going to seem like bathos if they did not remove themselves. Which they did, and went off to a place where lying on a grassy hill he told her that here, where they were, landscapes rolling away in all directions, that this was the very heart of England. And then, and she understood it absolutely, he wept, this big man, face on his arm, on the grass, he wept for his lost dream, and she thought, We suit each other so well, but we won't be together again. It was the ending of something. For him. And for her too: what am I doing prancing around the heart of England with a man heartbroken because of - well, not because of me.
(c) Doris Lessing