No Laughing Matter

by Angus Wilson

  MRS MATTHEWS junior: That’s all very well for you, Quentin. Of course we know that you must make your own life. Nothing’s too good for our returned soldiers. But you must have a sense of proportion, my dear. Marcus and the twins are children. They can’t be considered in the same terms.

  SUKEY: But that’s just what Quentin is doing. If you and Father don’t care what happens to the family, Quentin does. He’s going to stand by us until we can all make a start together.

  MRS MATTHEWS junior: Make a start together by keeping Marcus on at a school which he hates and where he learns nothing. You’re making a good start together, aren’t you? No, you’re all just trading on your brother’s generosity, sheltering behind his misplaced kindness. If Quentin had had more to do with children he’d know exactly how selfish they are.

  MARGARET: But Gladys isn’t a child.

  MRS MATTHEWS junior: Girls! As if boys and girls have the same life in front of them. Whatever cranks like your Aunt may say, I’ll tell you girls what growing up should mean for you, what life is for women – marrying, and if they’re wise, marrying well.

  MR MATTHEWS junior: Yes, marry well, my dears, and if you can’t, well, marry. There are lots of different ways of marrying well, not all of them bringing material comforts, but that’s where growing up begins. And not only for girls. After that, life takes its true shape. Companionship, sharing the rough with the smooth … it isn’t just a cliché. Your mother and I have proved it. We know its reality. Comradeship of any sort. But the best, of course, is marriage. How could I have done my work or your mother have given to the world so much of herself unless we’d helped each other out of the cold? [MOUSE snorts.] Well, Mouse, what have you got to offer the children?

  MOUSE: I’m not unaware of what I’ve missed, William, nor of how considerable it is. And I’m not so simple as to think that however shoddy a marriage or any other relationship may be, it can’t be a real relationship. But relationships are as valuable as their results. Clara and William have pandered more every year to each other’s weaknesses. When William calls that companionship, it is right that his family should see it for the cant it is.

  MRS MATTHEWS junior: And what will you offer them, Mouse? A lonely, bitter, sharp-tongued old age?

  MOUSE: I shall tell them that growing up means self-reliance, Clara. A lesson Quentin knows a great deal better than any of us pampered civilians.

  MRS MATTHEWS junior: Self-reliance. As if the Universe was self. Responsibility for others, that’s the only kind of growing up that doesn’t kill the heart.

  MOUSE: And irresponsibility towards others is the kind of childishness that kills others.

  MR MATTHEWS junior: There are more kinds of responsibility than you ever envisage in your narrow, gilt-edged world, Mouse. You’ll grow up, Rupert, when you see that life could have a meaning just in giving your mother some of the things I ought to have given her and haven’t.

  RUPERT: She’s already made that indecent proposal. But then, what of my responsibility to my own wife? Or is it mothers we owe our responsibility to? Has Billy Pop’s failure been to you, Granny, is that it?

  GRANNY MATTHEWS: Oh, my dear. I don’t understand you all. I’m not a clever woman. But perhaps it’s just as well. Life isn’t all cleverness.

  MARGARET: Granny gives us only a negative definition of life. The other definitions have all been positive.

  SUKEY: Yes, Granny, what do you think growing up means?

  GRANNY MATTHEWS: I don’t know, my dear. That’s such a big question. Now if only your grandfather had been here to answer it.

  MR MATTHEWS junior: One comfort at least I can feel is that the Guvnor is not here to offer his penny wise pound foolish version of life to my children.

  SUKEY: Ssh! Father, sssh! What do you think, Granny? After all, you’re the one who really cares about family life?

  GRANNY MATTHEWS [patting SUKEY’s hand]: Thank you, my dear. Sometimes it seems as though I had failed so badly. I suppose, really, growing up is when you can first see that life’s all one thing, that however silly you have been in the past it’s all part of you, you can’t refuse it. There, I can’t express what I mean. But I remember that when I was your age I used to suffer agonies of embarrassment thinking of the silly things I’d said as a child. And then suddenly one day I saw that it was all part of my life, I couldn’t turn my back on any of it. I think that’s when I grew up.

  MR MATTHEWS junior: Having a sense of the past you mean really, Mother.

  GRANNY MATTHEWS: You put it so much better than I can, of course, Will. But laughing too a little, dear. Not too serious. Remembering all the funny things that have happened in the family.

  MARGARET: Like looking through a photograph album.

  MARCUS: Or going through the bits and pieces in the dressing up box.

  GRANNY MATTHEWS: I expect so, dear, yes. But enough of my silly notions. We want to hear from Quintus. What is it you propose, dear? When your mother and father have heard it all clearly and had time to think about it, I’m sure they’ll find some way of arranging things …

  QUENTIN: Well, their way of arranging things is perhaps what we’re trying to avoid, Granny. For example, as an absolute necessity to start off with, the money you and Aunt Mouse have given for the twins must be used for them …

  [The scene slowly darkens as QUENTIN speaks until at last nothing can be seen. His voice fades until no words are clearly audible but its low sound can be heard in the background until Act 3 begins.]

  The ginger kitten rasped the fur of his left thigh again and again with his small pink tongue. He had been carrying out the same washing exercise now at short intervals for over half an hour but still he could not rid himself of the strange disturbing smell from the few drops of sherry that Billy Pop had spilled on his coat. The muscles of his lithe little tongue ached, yet hardly did the kitten decide to rest them when the unfamiliar odour would again draw him back to his cleansing ritual. The black and white kitten had found a new and delicious posture in which to drowse – front paws bent backwards and tucked beneath the chest, tail curled round and under the left flank, head forwards and ears cocked outwards. So it would stay for many minutes at a time, its head now and again nodding gently like some palsied old woman’s. But then, feeling its folded-in paws cramped, under the pressure of its body, it would leave its precociously adult drowsing position, and stretch and roll on its side in a kitten-like sprawl, only a few moments later to feel its way into the sensual delights of grown cats once more. The eyes of the tortoiseshell kitten closed to a slit, then opened and again closed to a slit, then opened wide to the sight of an earwig that had travelled long desert distances across the dining-room floor from the Countess’ bronze chrysanthemums. The kitten sat up and lazily stretched out the claws of his front paws, then, deciding not to bother to strike, lay back in the basket. She closed her eyes again in simulated sleep, but through the slits she was all the while following the earwig’s mountain climbing as it tottered its way across the thick pile of a rug; and so she lay discomforted between sleep and the lure of a moving object. The white kitten’s ears pricked up momentarily as odd squeaks and creaks sounded from the room above where Granny Matthews and Mouse and Billy shifted angrily or distressedly in their chairs. Once the kitten raised its whole head as a sudden high vibration came from below where by chance Regan scraped a knife edge against the side of a saucepan. Even the mother of pearl Japanese screen placed before the near-shut dining-room door and the red cloth-covered, sawdust-filled sausage laid across the window ledge did not shut out periodic freezing draughts that made the kittens wobble on their small legs and shiver and huddle together as one body for warmth. For the rest, even when they crawled and stretched and tottered across one another like a tangle of furry caterpillars, each remained encased in its own dominant sense.

  It was thus natural that the first kitten to detect far-off invasion – sinister, Martian – should be the sharp-eared white. A rapid tick-tacking tapping sounded in the
distance, so fussed and busy, so loudening and abating turn by turn, that the kitten could not tell at first whether something was approaching or going round in circles; but at last the sound came always tack, tack, tapping nearer. Now all the kittens cocked their ears, and soon the ginger’s white streaked fur was near bristling round his chunky neck as an acrid, dangerous smell came to him, half smothered in another pungent scent familiar from human hands that now and again so wildly lifted him in the air, so deliriously caressed him, so brutally dropped him back into the basket. When all the kittens were tautened and bristling and the tack, tacking had changed to a pettish scratching by the door’s open chink, it was the tortoiseshell who glimpsed long, coarse black fur through the gaps in the screen’s hinges that made her arch her orange, black and gold-brown patches in prompt defence. And now Pom inched her sharp nose through the chink and squeezed her little frou-frou, Kiki’s mop of a body into the room. Four kittens stood like trembling croquet hoops in the basket, when Pom, scenting their dangerous acrid smell, began to prance forward and back across the room, yapping with delight as the kittens reacted to her presence in sharp contrast to Mr Poll’s teasing, unperturbed indifference on the upstairs landing. There was soon such a preliminary challenge of hysterical yapping and desperate spitting that Mr Poll’s more sedate tap-tapping entrance went unheeded. Only the ginger paused for a moment even in his alarm to sniff a sweetish cloying scent as exotic as the sudden flash of green that a moment later to the accompaniment of two awful shrieks blew overhead in a daunting wind that for seconds silenced both dog and kittens.

  But Mr Poll, once clear of the feeble battle below, resumed his crab-like tapping of inturned claws across the table and on to the sideboard. Here he paused for a moment, cocked his head and rounded his button eye, stretching the wrinkled parchment of the lids, so that he seemed to listen to some far off faintly disturbing hum rather than to the deafening skirmish below. Even this soon failed to distract him from a few almonds that he found lying amid the decaying dust of their outer skin in a small cut-glass dish. But it’s a long, long while from May to September and even further from September to the previous Christmas; Poll, having taken each almond in turn in his left claw, snapped it in two with his coal black crackers and spitting out its staleness from his purple tongue in a trail of mess upon the genuine Turkey carpet below (ironically a wedding present from the bride’s aunt), began to search for some fresher food. The little yellow-red worm that wriggled and reared on the basket’s edge was both bright and lively. With a crescendo of shrieks Poll fluttered down and caught the morsel neatly in his octopus beak.

  THE FAMILY SUNDAY PLAY

  ACT 3

  [Scene: as in Act 2]

  QUENTIN [raising his voice against the animal noises below]: Very well then. And what do you propose to do with him?

  MR MATTHEWS junior [shouting even a little louder to be heard]: Quentin, you’re made of heroic stuff. And you mix well. Not that the two things always go together. The shyness of heroes is proverbial. But you’re the exception. I was an athlete, yet I hated school. You played games not because you could play, but to conform.

  QUENTIN: I played in the Colts.

  MR MATTHEWS junior: Never mind Colts. That you should be familiar with such terms demonstrates the difference between you and Markie. Markie could never distinguish between colts, lambs, calves or kids as far as the football field is concerned, though he might find words to describe the wonderful movements of those young creatures in the fields of clover or trefoil. He has his own originalities, his own special touch on life. But like me he’s a non-mixer. We belong to the frankly-we-didn’t-like-school brigade.

  GLADYS: As long as Marcus doesn’t join the frankly-I-don’t-like-work brigade.

  MR MATTHEWS junior: A palpable hit, Podge. But all the same he may. And it won’t do any harm if he does. He’s clever and original but not made to be hemmed in.

  QUENTIN: What rot you do talk, Father. If he were to work he could win a schol to the House.

  MR MATTHEWS junior: There again, my dear boy, your aims are so much worthier. But your vision’s narrow. You probably despise my pass degree. But I can safely say that my true education at Oxford came from the books I did not read when I wasn’t working.

  MARGARET [to the audience]: His was the epigrammatic age of youth.

  MRS MATTHWS junior: University! You seem to think we’re made of money. We’re taking Marcus away from school to save our pockets.

  MOUSE: From the look on your face, Clara, anyone would suppose you had said something elegant instead of something cheap and cynical.

  MARCUS: She has said something realistic. I must be grateful for that. I shall call her Motor. It’s the fashionable companion to Pop at school. And she deserves fashion as much as he – more.

  GRANNY MATTHEWS: But what will a little boy like this do at home all day?

  MRS MATTHEWS junior: At home! Good heaven’s, he’s fifteen. Three quarters of the nation are earning their living at that age. He can start at the bottom, can’t he? That’s the way Americans get to the top. And whatever else we may say, they’re real men.

  QUENTIN: You pick on every social evil and treat it as a virtue.

  MRS MATTHEWS junior: I pick on nothing, darling boy, except that your father and I can’t afford to go on paying out and paying out. We shall all be picking oakum if …

  GRANNY MATTHEWS: But such a little boy …

  MRS MATTHEWS junior: Oh good heavens, he doesn’t have to go to work at once. We’re not turning him out of his home into the snow. He can stay at home here and be useful to me while he looks around for something to do. You none of you realize how talented Marcus is. He’s eccentric, of course, but it would be a poor world if we were all the same. He’s got great talents. He arranges flowers beautifully.

  SUKEY: But he’s a boy, mother.

  RUPERT: You’re the absolute limit, Countess darling. You complain that Marcus is effeminate and then you want him to arrange the flowers. What do you want to make of him?

  QUENTIN [to MOUSE and GRANNY MATTHEWS]: Surely you see now how wrong it would be for Marcus to leave school.

  GRANNY MATTHEWS: You know I really do think Quintus is right, Will.

  MOUSE: Of course he is, Mrs Matthews. It’s unheard-of selfishness.

  MRS MATTHEWS junior: Very well. If that’s how you see it. But I should like to know where the money’s coming from.

  GRANNY MATTHEWS: Well, it’s a mercy your grandfather didn’t tie down all the capital. But I suppose I must help out temporarily. If Miss …

  MOUSE: Oh, yes. If it meant selling out capital, mind you. But luckily there’s no need for that. However wrong it may be to encourage this irresponsibility, we can’t let these children suffer. But we must do it on our own terms.

  MRS MATTHEWS junior: Well, it’s nice to hear that there’s so much money to throw around. When I think of how Billy and I have to scrape and save. I ache with money worries. And how he’s expected to write books with such a burden round his neck…. However, we must be sacrificed, even if I haven’t a rag to my name. You’re to stay at school, Marcus, whether you like it or not. On your grandmother’s charity and your great aunt’s bounty. And if the big rough boys frighten you, then little man must run to his granny in the future and not come blubbering all over me. They’ll be paying your future term’s fees.

  MARCUS: They’ll have to pay last term’s and this term’s if I’m to return next week.

  MRS MATTHEWS junior: What do you mean?

  MARCUS: Only that the last letter from the bursar said that I could not continue there if the outstanding bills were not paid.

  MRS MATTHEWS junior: Nonsense. How insolent of them. Anyway, how do you know?

  MARCUS: I shouldn’t have done if I hadn’t found the letter in Billy Pop’s handkerchief drawer.

  MRS MATTHEWS junior: How dare you lookin your father’s drawers?

  QUENTIN: How dare Father risk his being sent back from school next week in such a wa
y?

  GRANNY MATTHEWS: I expect he was looking for a handkerchief.

  MARCUS: Well, actually, I was doing what the Countess calls ‘just going through his things in case’.

  MR MATTHEWS junior: Whatever we’ve done wrong, Clara, we’ve reaped our reward. We’ve taught them to be prigs, to sit in judgment on us.

  MRS MATTHEWS junior: If they can’t face life’s unpleasant truths then …

  [She is interrupted by the eruption of a hot, panting REGAN who bursts in at the door. She is dishevelled and a bit drunk.]

  REGAN: Look, I’ve shouted and I’ve beaten that gong till its own mother woodent know its dial from its bum. Dinner’s ready. And if the duck’s dried up dont blame me nor if the pheasant’s burnt to a cinder. Talk talk talk. That wont fill yer bellies. [To GRANNY MATTHEWS] Ow are you Madam? And you, Miss Rickard?

  MR MATTHEWS junior [with an amused worldly chuckle]: She’s a character, Mother. But a real maître de cuisine. With the artist’s temperament. We owe you an apology, Regan. We’ve probably ruined a poem. You must forgive us, but we’ve been discussing the root of all evil.

  MRS MATTHEWS junior: Now here’s someone who knows what Billy and I have to go through. It’s one financial crisis after another in this house, isn’t it, Regan? Who else but Regan would wait days for overdue wages.

  REGAN: Wages! Bugger wages! What I want to know is oo took the three quid out of my piggy box? Come on now, which one of you was it? Oh, I don’t mean you, Madam, of course. Or you Miss Rickard. For you’re the upper ten too, tho’ one of the cranks.

  MRS MATTHEWS junior: Are you accusing my children of stealing?

  REGAN: Children! Come off it, it’s you or im. Now which one of you was it? I just wanter know.

  MRS MATTHEWS junior: Come, Mouse! Granny! I believe there’s your favourite chestnut stuffing. Billy, take your mother down. Rupert, give Mouse your arm. Sukey, dish up, will you? Quentin, please cope with this drunken creature, darling boy. I’d ask Margaret, but I think the situation calls for a man. Come, children, let’s see what smells so delicious, shall we?