No Laughing Matter

by Angus Wilson

  [She gets up and puts one arm round QUENTIN and another round RUPERT, kissing them in turn. Then bending down, she kisses MARCUS on the forehead. BILLY Pop puts an arm round MARGARET and another round GLADYS. He tickles their waists. Releasing them, he goes and holds SUKEY to him for a moment and kisses her. The COUNTESS cuts up some duck on a plate and puts it down for the kittens.]

  MRS MATTHEWS junior: There, they shall have the lion’s share. Now that the roarers have left us. They won’t learn any lesson from it all, of course, poor old things [she giggles]. But that odious Mr Polly and the horrible Pom are balder than when they came here. [She sits and begins to carve.] Oh, we’re all together again. Billy, this calls for a celebration. [But BILLY POP has already brought out a bottle of champagne from the sideboard cupboard. He opens it and when the cork pops everyone cries ‘Oh!’. As he pours out the champagne, they hear the sound of the door bell and of GRANNY MATTHEWS’ departure in the car. REGAN appears at the door.]

  MRS MATTHEWS junior: I know, Regan, Madam’s gone. Have a glass of bubbly, Regan darling. You couldn’t be more squiffy. [Seeing one of Mr Polly’s green tail feathers on the carpet, she picks it up and puts it in her hair.] Oh, you darlings, all of you, you’ve made me feel so much better. I feel quite ready for any battle. With my war paint and my tomahawk. I know, Marcus, I know … [imitating him] whatever a tomahawk may be. [All the family watch to see how this teasing overture from the Countess to her most ancient enemy among the children will be taken. The boy smiles and speaks.]

  MARCUS: It means the sharpest of axes, Motor. But, as befits you, the most gaily coloured of axes too.

  [All the family feel free to laugh and the curtain comes down on their happy laughter.]

  End of Act 3 of the Family Sunday Play.

  Quentin said: ‘Of course this means going about things the hard and slow way. I hope everybody realizes that. We’re not to suppose that the parents have changed their spots overnight. We’ll have to put up a fight for what we believe in. But I admit that I feel happier this way. It isn’t as if we don’t all know what’s wrong with the ethos of number 52; we’ve all suffered from it. But Billy Pop had a point when he spoke of their revolt. His, at any rate, I can imagine. I lived at Ladbroke Grove and I know. You’ve none of you felt its full force. Dividends, roast beef and the Great British Empire used to stifle me. It was Grandad’s legacy. Of course Granny’s all right. She’s a fine old stick. But it was part of his system that she should be a reflection. And from what Aunt Mouse said this afternoon, she appears no better. Their failure this afternoon was the failure of a class. But that’s another matter. We couldn’t have acted in any other way. We’d taken on the kittens and we were committed. Luckily commitment to action is a wonderful tonic. One found that again and again after a long spell of trench stalemate. It happened just in time. If we’d gone ahead with our plan we’d have given hostages to the barbarians. As it is whatever we achieve will be without strings.’

  He talked on like this for some time. At first with the unfamiliar champagne inside them, the others listened with a sense of inspired certainty, of high will that knows no obstacles; and at last, with the unfamiliar champagne still inside them and the familiar cosy nursery warmth around them and the familiar fairy tale Gothic storm outside, they fell into various fitful sleeps. And Quentin, too, eventually droned his way into slumber.

  At about that time his mother awoke from her after lunch nap. Awoke with the clearest impression of her father’s hand laid upon her shoulder. Father, those strange dark flecks on the flesh of his cheeks, which was alternately wrinkled and stretched like the skin of a tortoise’s neck in his last years, but never pale except in the final unfamiliar death (how angry Mouse had been that the nurse had taken her, a five year old, into the bedroom); always sunburnt from his years abroad, and with his dark restless eyes always bright (though that must be sentimental distortion, for no eyes could have remained bright with all that pain and wasting). Father, who smelt so nice of lavender water and heather and cigar smoke and leather. She sensed that she had netted some true beauty from the depths of her childhood when she realized that the words had come to her in rhyme. And now this frowsty bed, and the crêpe de chine nightdress she had put over her petticoat smelt of stale sweat and, God knew why, faintly of onions. But surroundings are nothing; memories, feelings, these are one’s true self, despite all life’s mischances. Knowing this, she returned resolutely to the past.

  If Father had lived, she would have gone with him to his foreign stations, for he refused all the old Indian conventions and Mouse was like butter in his fingers; indeed he had promised her that there should be ‘no boarding school for his motherless girl’. She would have sat on the verandah with him, he reading aloud, while she sewed, for even the nuns had to grant her the sewing (especially fine stitching), and the Indian servant coming out with delicious drinks at sundown, and a letter from Mouse from Turkey or Nepal or somewhere mountainous telling them of a new tulip species discovered or a row with some Orthodox monks over photography, at which together they would have looked solemn and then burst into laughter at the same moment, but kind laughter, for who would have minded Mouse’s madness while he lived? But he hadn’t lived, damn him, and so she hadn’t married one of his subalterns, a regiment at her feet, but Billy Pop and a smelly house and a sour bed. What right had the old beast to come back and haunt her in her dreams, making her remember the crocuses at the foot of the elm where he sat in his wheel chair that sunfilled March and the tadpole he showed to her in the pool by the cowhouses, in the last weeks that he was wheeled out in that chair it must have been, for it was hot late May or June weather – she could smell roses – and by August he was dead. And a good thing too, probably an old bore like most army men. Yet his hand, rough-skinned and bony so that the flesh slid upon the veins and sinews as one touched, had been so gentle as it held hers and guided her fingers over the inside of his crocodile skin cigar case, to help her not to mind putting on gloves, for the uncured side of the leather set her teeth on edge. ‘A pair of gloves are the making of a beautiful woman’s hands, Clarrie. And hands and feet …’ he had said. She had drawn a picture of him shooting the crocodile in green and red chalks, in the Sudan it had been, near Wadi Haifa or some such place.

  And now Marcus drew and she must sacrifice good gloves to help him do so. Or so the world would say. Milton had loved her hands. Now stroking the back of her hand against the pillow she seemed to be once again caressing his cheek where the pillow threads had been unpicked and it was rough to the touch, as occasionally his chin. She buried her face in the grubby linen and – memory stronger than fact – his smell came back, something very expensive he rubbed in after shaving, from New York, and masculine sweat. She stretched and moulded until Milton held her when suddenly her father was with her again, but now with no hand on her shoulder, but in his wheel chair staring at her gravely until she was frightened and forced her eyes to open to escape him. It was all very well for him, the dead don’t feel, so what the hell right have they got to reproach with their eyes, cutting off sleep – sleep which was the only remaining escape? And come to that, he was probably as lecherous as the rest of them, only that she’d been too small to recognize it. Disgusting they were in his day, groping their way through all those layers of undies and whalebone. That girl in grey who came to see him, fifteen years younger at least, and Mother only dead a year. Miss Karton, or Keaton. Filthy old beast.

  But at the thought of Keaton she had slid off the bed, put her kimono on, and a few minutes later had tiptoed down to shake the sleeping Billy Pop in his study swivel chair. Though he stared at her in bleary dismay, yet he seemed at once to know what she intended, as though they had been two illicit lovers of long standing and secret night couplings. She said, whispering, ‘I’ll go to Mouse’s club and see her tomorrow.’ And she smiled, but not, as he might have thought, in anticipation of money received, rather because she had decided to wear her grey coat frock with the lemon feather tr
imming.

  ‘You go to your Mother’s at tea time. Don’t take flowers. I’ve got some of that honey which Edith believes cures her cough. Your mother always likes you to think of the servants.’

  ‘But you’ll come …’

  ‘No, Billy. She sees you alone so little.’

  She almost laughed as she said it, because he reacted at once with a little sentimental, vain movement of his head which she had anticipated. But now, having spat out the phlegm which seemed to trouble his afternoon awakenings, he buttoned up his cardigan and was ready to act. They tiptoed upstairs without a word said of their immediate intent. She motioned him to lift the basket and herself placed a cushion on top of the sleeping trio, but the white kitten moved and she hadn’t the nerve, as she’d meant, to press the cushion down. Perhaps he had expected her to do so, for when she relaxed her weight and, taking up the cushion, put it under her arm, he stumbled and almost upset his burden.

  ‘Oh, don’t be clumsy, Bill. It’s hopeless to ask you to do anything. Give me the basket,’ and she snatched it from him.

  He now carried the cushion and downstairs they crept. For a moment coming from the dark staircase into the light of the hall, she Stood blinking.

  ‘What’s wrong? Seen a ghost?’ Then peering at her, ‘You look ghastly. Are you all right?’

  ‘Dreams,’ she said, ‘I dreamt of my father or someone very like him. It upset me. I don’t know why.’

  ‘Duck and stuffing,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the filthiest taste in my mouth. But I thought your father was a hero. Now if it had been my guvnor popping back from the dead …’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Billy! You talk too much.’

  As they crept down the stone stairs to the basement, she said angrily, ‘He was a soldier. At least he wasn’t scared.’

  ‘Anybody could massacre Afghans or Zulus. I don’t suppose his duties often called on him to drown kittens. Who knows what gurgling and struggling there’ll be?’

  ‘Oh, Billy, don’t be so horrid. Keep your writer’s imagination until it’s over. When it’s done you’ll have seen it and have something real to write about for once.’

  ‘And what if I muck it all up?’

  ‘Well, then, you’ll muck it all up. But of course, you won’t.’

  Between the two versions of what was to be she couldn’t decide. But of one thing she was sure: standing with her back to the kitchen door, barring his entrance, she said, ‘And muck it all up! You used to speak such wonderful English, it was pleasant to listen to. But now it’s like all the rest, you’ve let everything slide.’ And when he smiled, she added, ‘No, I mean it, very seriously. If you don’t pull up, you’re done for, my boy.’

  As he seemed about to defend himself she pushed the door open and impatiently urged him on. Taking the bucket from the pantry cupboard, she knocked over a broom, but the noise seemed of little concern, drowned as it was by Regan’s loud snores from her bedroom. Nevertheless the tortoiseshell kitten mewed and the Countess started, almost dropping the bucket.

  ‘That damned dream,’ she said, ‘if it hadn’t upset my nerves I’d have done all this myself. I know what you are Billy, all talk and no do.’

  ‘Well, this time, the quicker it’s done the better.’

  She noted with satisfaction that what she said seriously still influenced him even under stress, for he added, ‘I readily grant that this is no occasion for protracted parleying.’

  She filled the bucket. He took the black and white kitten by the scruff of its neck and plunged it into the water, holding it down with his hand. But a few seconds later he fished it out again, a squealing struggling object, monstrously embryonic, its head more than ever abnormally large above its thin fur-flattened, dripping little body.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Oh, give it to me.’ But at the touch of its soggy fur she was revolted. ‘Get Regan,’ she said, ‘servants always understand how to do these things.’

  Regan, indeed, took longer to wake from her heavy sleep than, once woken, grumblingly to drown the kittens.

  The Countess remarked, ‘Well, that’s soon over.’

  But Billy Pop must have found the time had passed more slowly, for he said, ‘Who would have thought such little blighters would have such a kick in them?’

  ‘Well,’ Regan demanded, ‘what’s to be done with this lot?’ And she thrust the bulging, dripping sack beneath the noses of her employers. (She had seen at once the need for a sack. Had she a peasant granddam somewhere back in history, this apparently wholly Rowlandson-Hogarth woman, or did the basic folklores still bind country and town at that level in those days?)

  ‘What’s been done with the other?’ asked her mistress.

  ‘Miss Sukey’s wrapped it in a andkerchief and put it by the back door. They’re burying it under the tree in the back yard.’

  ‘Burying it! I’ve never heard such nonsense. What’s wrong with the ovens?’ The Countess spoke prophetically, then changed her mind. ‘No, put them in the dustbin. Good heavens, when I think of the huge Christmas box we give each year to those men.’

  And the bell rang.

  ‘Oh, my God, who can that be on a Sunday afternoon? Your Mother perhaps, or Mouse, come back to apologize?’

  The Countess went to the kitchen window to peer up the area steps, but with the kittens’ death the wind had died also and fog was thickening outside in the growing dusk, murky, smoke thick, dun coloured, so that viewed through the grubby, flyblown glass the world outside was crepuscular, passers-by mere shadowy moths.

  ‘I’m out, Regan. No, see who it is. And tidy yourself up, Billy, while I dress. Be sure you wash all that muck off.’

  Who could say what muck?

  Not Regan who, left alone, set out to finish the job started, bell or no bell – and the effing thing rang and rang. Shovelling muck into a dustbin doesn’t take all day, not that is if your head doesn’t ache to beat the band. And then again if you’ve had a couple at midday, especially watery, vinegary stuff like champagne, number one comes first. So, like Marie Lloyd, she walks among the cabbages and pees. Oh, ring, ring, ring your bloody head off. What silly sod will call in a pea-souper. More like night! And sure enough it was a foreigner. One of her yanks, tho not the usual. ‘Mrs Matthews?’ And, ‘Gome on in,’ she told him. In the hall, in the light he seemed a nice boy. Young, younger than the other. Does your Mother know you’re out, Sonny Jim? But you couldn’t help fancying him. Probably the champagne, there’s other things it brings on besides peeing. ‘I’ve been ringing that bell a pretty good while. I reckoned the Matthews family was away from home. Were you hitting the high spots last night or what?’ ‘We were sleeping.’ ‘Sleeping? Come to look at you, you seem as though you had a pretty thick night.’ But she wasn’t having familiarity. ‘What name, Sir, shall I say?’ A randy laugh he’d got, but she smiled to show there was no offence. It sounded like Lootnant Iced Pratts. Well, he’d certainly come to the right shop for them. If that was the way he wanted it…. So she shouted the name loud and clear up the stairs. And there was milady, quick as your finger, standing at the top of the stairs, ‘Oh, Lestah, how lovelah to see yah.’ Have a banana! And, ‘You wicked boy, you’ve brought mer flahs. My favourite chrysan the old enough to be your mums.’ And, ‘I thought maybe that now Major Ward has gone, you wouldn’t object to a plain lootnant!’ Object! You’d better move quick, Lestah, or Her Highness will have come in her drawers. And,’ Oh, no, I can’t let you spend your pay on little me, but Billah, Billah, come and meet Mr Iced Pratts while I slip into something a bit more suitable.’ What about your birthday suit, madam? See if you can touch this poor mug for a couple of quid? And where shall it be? ‘Oh, ai know, the Piccahdillah. Did you know you can net your own trout thah?’ Yes, and he’s netted an old trout here while he’s about it. ‘Let me mix your high balls before I go up to change.’ Oh, milady, how can you talk so dirty? And now we come tripping down in our black jet bodice, apache skirt, velvet tam, cigarette
and all. ‘How do I look, Regan, darling?’ Like a young girl going to her first ball, I don’t think. But, Oh Gawd, a short life and a quiet one, not in this house. Here they come and up will go the bloomin balloon. Who’s going to answer this one? Not yours truly. Not on your nelly. I’m off to finish my kip.

  But Sukey was the one, despite all her convention and love of respectability, to make a public scene.

  ‘Where are they? Where are the kittens?’ she asked going straight into the drawing-room from her vain visit below.

  ‘Sukey, dear. Lieutenant Eispratz. One of the twins, Lester.’

  ‘How do you do? Where are the kittens, Mother?’

  ‘I don’t really know, dear. She’s the animal lover of this family. Have you seen the kittens, Billy?’

  ‘Lost their mittens again?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly, Father.’

  ‘Oh, dear, the lack of respect of the younger generations for the paternal parent. Of course it’s all the fault of you Americans. Ever since Milton christened poor Billy ’Pop’. Perhaps they’ve gone for a walk, Sukey. They’re getting to be rather big kittens.’

  ‘They would hardly walk out of the dining-room when the door’s shut.’

  ‘Well, ask Regan, dear. She’s probably done something with them.’

  When Sukey called over the bannisters to Regan, ‘Are the kittens in the kitchen, Regan?’ the old girl just bawled out, ‘I ave a little cat, and I’m very fond of that, but I’d rather ave a bow, wow, wow, wow,’ so that, comical kid, even the most po-faced would have had to smile.

  Sukey gone, the Countess was quick to urge her swain abroad.