No Laughing Matter

by Angus Wilson

  ‘James and I went to Madeira for ours. It was quite divine – the mimosa, the bougainvilia, the little boys diving for pennies. Of course we don’t expect that in these hard postwar days, but I did think you’d be a little more enterprising than the New Forest. Poor Jane, surrounded by honeymooning bank clerks! But how silly I am! She won’t notice the bank clerks while she has you there.’ Her eyes selected for exemplary compassion Derek’s clerical collar below his weak chin as she said it. Elisabeth could hardly keep from giggling, for at that very moment Mrs Culmer said, ‘Jane and Derek make such a splendid pair. It seems the Bishop saw them at the church fête and asked who were the Vikings. It’s their being so fair,’ she explained. Elisabeth could still hear her mother’s voice, ‘But perhaps you’ll become chaplain at Monte. They do have an English chaplain there don’t they? And then I can spend my winters with you and Jane. But shall I tell you something very shocking?’ Derek’s teeth protruded even further now in his alarm. ‘I like vulgar Nice better than Monte, isn’t it awful of me?’ Then she added loudly, ‘I do hope you’re going to be a nice worldly, ambitious clergyman.’ Even Mrs Culmer turned at the sound of her son’s nervous giggling. She stared for a moment at Sophie’s green and black outfit, her emerald green turban, her long tasselled green cigarette holder. ‘Your mother,’ she said, ‘can wear things that other people …’ ‘And does,’ Elisabeth said, ‘Let me assure you, Mrs Culmer, does.’ The wretched woman jerked back her head as though the weasel had at last struck. Weasels and stoats, that’s what we are, Elisabeth thought, with these rabbit Culmers. But there it is, she decided, I’ve tasted blood too.

  She tried to make reparation by urging the woman to take a foie gras sandwich. Claridge’s footmen and the Fragonard room! ‘How shall we ever recoup?’ Sophie had wailed, ‘But Jane will like a Claridge’s reception. And if she doesn’t, I shall.’ Truth to tell there would be no recouping necessary, for Granny Carmichael was footing the bill. And there she stood, now repaid in sycophancy, diminutive, yet Madame Mère by virtue of her sables and her lorgnettes, and still more because of the Sèvres and the large cheque she was known to have given. Such of the Culmer guests as were not overwhelmed by the Carmichael opulence stood in a cowed semi-circle before Sophie’s Aunt Mildred who, severe but smart, gave an account of the noseless boy’s head that had been her gift, noseless antiques being beyond the usual aesthetic range of the Culmers. ‘I picked it up in a lamp shop in Trebizond,’ she said. ‘It was some recompense for a sprained ankle that kept me from seeing the tulipa sprengeri I’d been after.’ Derek’s Aunt Ella, the bank manager’s widow, clicked her tongue as appropriate commiseration, but Aunt Mildred clearly misconstrued the click. ‘Oh, it’s not a masterpiece,’ she said defensively. ‘It’s provincial workmanship, of course. But at least it has the archaic feeling. Nothing of the Parthenon about it, thank heaven. Or are you a Parthenon devotee?’ Poor Aunt Ella, Elisabeth thought, for if she had been devoted to anything it would have been the spirit of the Parthenon flickering still in Alma Tadema or Lord Leighton – in oleograph of course. Oh, it was a rout. The ferrets had properly cleared out the warrens. Elisabeth felt a wild elation. She could have cried Yoicks or Tally Ho!

  Just so long as Jane didn’t sense it. But she wouldn’t, she couldn’t, for extraordinary though it seemed to tell it, Jane, their own Jane, their one conventional pretty duckling (though she could give a devastating comic quack when she chose), Jane, so beautiful there in her veil, her train, her blossom (Oh, how the conventions worked on her side!) carrying roses as pink and gold and soft and utterly, absurdly English as herself, was in love, oh, but head over heels in love with this superior rabbit Derek. So that for her, long quivering ears and pink quivering noses and two teeth just perceptibly ready to nip the lettuce leaf were not only the required human look but the perfection of male beauty. To Jane at this moment of solemn, absurd happiness, Elisabeth knew, Adonis and Don Juan, Hercules and Valentino himself all had long ears and quivering noses and, no doubt at all, white scuts. UnCarmichaellike, Jane today, it could be seen, would see, speak and hear no evil. Suppressing her laughter Elisabeth made excuses to the bird of paradise and, whispering to her tall musician brother Gerald, took him, ostensibly for a piece of cake but really to gaze at the bridegroom’s backview, where, sure enough, some handkerchief or piece of shirt or heaven knew what showed white so that, giggling into their own handkerchiefs, she and Gerald had to take refuge in the pretence of viewing once more the presents. ‘But it doesn’t matter,’ she whispered to him, ‘doesn’t matter a jot, for if all her babies are born leverets, Jane’s much too miraculously happy to mind.’

  And Gerald agreed – so imposing and handsome, now he was a Viking! The Culmers scattered before him like pitiful puny Picts before the glorious Norsemen as he advanced to the piano at his mother’s request and gave them La Cathédrale Engloutie. ‘I say, jolly good fingerwork,’ said Derek’s tennis sister and her own sister’s bridesmaid. Aunt Ella said, ‘Charming. So light. Is it your brother’s composition?’ And down went all the rabbits, drowned with the cathedral. Meanwhile Selwyn, their lean, clever brother Selwyn, was giving Mr Culmer apoplexy by being pro-German. ‘Reparations as Clemenceau and the French conceive them are not only wrong,’ he told the old gentleman, ‘but much worse, they are stupid.’ If only, Elisabeth could see Mr Culmer gobbling to himself, this dreadful young bolshie hadn’t been wounded. As it was the rabbits sustained all the wounds; the Carmichaels just tasted blood. Even dear Louie, so handsome, yet somehow cramped in a picture hat and grey charmeuse frock, had joined the attack. ‘Yes, I’m opening a branch in the spring,’ she told Mrs Culmer gruffly. ‘Putting in a young ex-officer as manager.’ ‘A man’s going to work under you?’ ‘If he doesn’t, he’ll soon get his marching orders.’ But it was Ronnie, looking so absurdly decadent with a vast gardenia in the button hole of his hired wedding clothes, his lips and cheeks, as Elisabeth, if no one else, saw, more carmine than mere nature had fashioned, who put the rabbits to their final rout. ‘Putney?’ he answered Derek’s tennis sister, and the waves of heavy scent that came from him spoke of exotic blooms as much as his shrill voice suggested exotic birds. ‘How amusing! Well, yes, I have. Once a Metropolitan train, you know – not the deep kind where you expect to see miners with lamps, but the other sort that pops up above ground now and again for air – took me by mistake to somewhere called Putney Heath. Well, naturally I adore heaths, with all the gruesome gibbets and handsome highwaymen, so I thought how amusing. But, my dear, it wasn’t amusing at all. The whole place was covered, but covered, with the most sinister tramps in old burberries – I expect they were trench coats really that they’d worn out at the front in both senses – who indulged in the most impudent, not to say improper, mendicancy. Well, I am only a boy so I thought discretion was the better part of valour, to use a tiresome cliché – and fled.’

  Of course it was all wrong at seventeen and living at home with nothing to do, God knew what he would become, but all the same she would back him, for he had – and to a degree – the Carmichael hunting instinct when confronted with silliness and mediocrity.

  Gerald began to play again, this time Falla. But Elisabeth’s attention was distracted from the nights in Spanish gardens, however cool, however fountained, by the bride’s sudden discreet movement towards the door. Elisabeth whispered to Louie, but her elder sister from the corner of her mouth said, ‘Travelling dress. Room hired. Ssh! Mother’s putting on her Chopin frown.’ It was clearly what they all thought, that Jane had gone to put on her travelling dress. But no, no, it wasn’t that, she wanted to cry to them all, can’t you see she’s distressed! Some blundering Culmer has trodden on her toes no doubt, hurt our beautiful, our rare Jane on this of all days. The room grew cold and the footmen shrivelled into mere mummies, the cake crumbled into dust, the bubbles died in the champagne, the paradise feathers drooped, Falla indeed became Chopin, his funeral march. And nobody noticed except herself– and why should they, for none of them
were as close as she to Jane’s sweet candour and simplicity. There in the Abbey Cloisters the tablet read, ‘Jane Lyttelton – dear child,’ and she wanted to call to them all to stop their chatter – murderers, worldly trivial murderers, you’ve sent her to the block, our nine days Queen, dear child. But more to the point was to go after her. Slipping past the footmen she inquired softly for her sister’s tiring room. And there it was at the end of the corridor – the ridiculous room, all Pompadour and Dubarry and powder blue and satin ovals and mirrors no doubt, that would have to serve for their last heart to heart, their final sisterly confab instead of their own attic room at home shared over so many years of secret laughter and secret thrills and secret diaries. A hired room at Claridge’s must stand proxy at the last for the whole of their girlhood.

  Hearing Jane’s choking sob – Oh dear! all the times that she had heard it in protest against falsity and cruelty – she slipped in without knocking. ‘Jane, darling Jane, don’t,’ she cried. And was greeted by Derek’s rabbit nose almost, as it seemed, sniffing at her. ‘I think,’ he began. But her sisterly sympathy swept right over him. ‘Jane darling, don’t, don’t,’ she cried. ‘It’s not as if you were going a thousand miles away from us. Besides you’re going to be so incredibly happy.’ She lied firmly, for she realized that darling Jane in her heart found the whole rabbit wedding as absurd as she did. But over Derek’s shoulder Jane’s blue eyes blazed at her. ‘Oh, go away, Liz, go away! Haven’t you all made me unhappy enough?’ And Derek, suddenly, yes, she could see it now, not a rabbit at all, but a noble though gentle hare, said, ‘I think, Elisabeth, that it would be better. You mustn’t care about it, Jane darling. But you have all been a bit unkind, Elisabeth. We are the family Jane’s marrying into. And we are human. But it doesn’t matter,’ he added.

  She rushed from the room. Oh, it was too. terrible. She felt so ashamed. Stoats and weasels indeed! Vulgar, self centred, attitudinizing brutes! As she came back into the Fragonard Room Sophie was giving orders to the photographers. ‘Ah, there you are, Lizzie. We’re just going to have a Carmichael photograph.’ And her elbow firmly brushed Mrs Culmer out of the way to make her point. ‘Where’s Jane, Lizzie?’ ‘With Derek, of course.’ And James, in a special warm bumbling voice, ‘Well, let our Jane put off her cooing if not her billing to join her family for a last photograph.’ Elisabeth stamped her foot. ‘Oh how can you be so blind and selfish?’ And when Aunt Mildred took her arm, saying, ‘Stand by me, Lizzie, the two giantesses together,’ she wrenched herself away. ‘I wouldn’t think of being in the damned photo.’ She stared at her family drawn up in close phalanx for the photograph; as James so often said, they were nothing if not striking looking. In the older generation, indeed, the cult of personality might well be said to have strayed into eccentricity, or what her mother called ‘looking interesting’. For such seasoned campaigners Jane’s distress, even if she told them of it, could only, like her marriage to the ridiculous Derek, be a weakness, a fit of the vapours. But Louie and the brothers, were they also determined to prove themselves the surviving fittest? Alas, she felt, they were. Ronnie, for instance, how in his pretty butterfly flight could he be expected to take account of a dowdy sister’s mothlike marriage? Elisabeth saw this elegant, gaudy young brother of hers, so mysteriously lost for hours of the night among London’s bright lights, as flitting from flower to flower, gathering little honey perhaps, but oh so enjoying his winged arabesques and pas de chats, what should such as he do risking his beautiful wings in the dim candle-light of marriage? No, poor Jane Cuhner, you are no longer, perhaps you never were, a Carmichael, she thought.

  ‘Well,’ said Sophie, ‘it’s been a good wedding.’

  ‘She’s made a good marriage, our little Jane,’ said James.

  But Sophie burned him with a look. ‘Don’t be sentimental and false. We’ve made the best of it. That’s all. As we all well know.’ And she looked around at her family.

  Elisabeth alone of them refused her mother’s smile of complicity. ‘Jane has the best of it, I think,’ she said.

  And as she said it, much of the day’s guilt fell away from her. For, however late, she at least had felt and seen reality. Oh, she felt a wild elation! She could have cried Yoicks or Tally Ho! as she hunted her heartless family on behalf of the ordinary, the decent, the simple.

  *

  In the little stuffy parlour a bee, trapped between the pots of Busy Lizzie and the never opened windows, buzzed a continuo to Quentin’s impassioned explanation. Every now and again he would glance across at it angrily but he was too eager and too voluble to spare time to put an end to its interruption. The noise of the others, consuming the ample spread the pub offered, also made him stop his discourse two or three times with an impatient look that settled now upon Vernon Seymour stirring sugar into his tea, now upon the chap from Balliol cracking his eggs unnecessarily loudly, now upon John Ballard chewing crisp lettuce, at last upon Marian Powell who for some annoying woman’s reason had started to stack the disused plates. While he was still out of breath from their long tramp over hilly country, he had eaten voraciously and in record time more than his own share of boiled eggs and of the slices of bread and butter and jam, and of the rock cakes that the landlady had set before them. That his heart beat so fast and so irregularly had only made him more impatient with the idea of slow eating or of any relaxation; it was always so when he was forced to remember his wound. Now as he talked he covered a series of rending belches with the sucking in and blowing out of clouds of pipe smoke.

  ‘I only tell you, of course,’ he ended his recital, ‘because it means that the discussion groups will need a new convener. I suggest Marian.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ the young woman was quite determined. ‘I’m glad to come along, of course, but as you all know, nothing I say in this field has authority. I’m a historian who’s strayed into contemporary issues, not a trained political scientist. In fact, I’m really only here as a chaperone for Valerie.’

  He turned away at the laugh with which she accompanied this last remark, and knocked out his pipe on the mantelpiece edge. The tobacco ash fell and scattered on the clean tiled hearth.

  ‘Oh, the poor landlady,’ Marian said.

  ‘Yes, really, Quentin …’ Valerie began.

  ‘I thought we chose this place because it was homely.’

  ‘Of course, and it is,’ Valerie pulled off her red tamoshanter and shook out her dark bob to confirm the words. ‘But whatever sort of home can you have had? You’d get what for all right in ours.’

  He imagined with distaste her own home’s neat front parlour; the thought helped him to take his eyes from the shining flesh colour of her crossed knees where they protruded below her tight check skirt.

  ‘My family are lumpen middle class, to risk a Marxist heresy.’ Dismissing applause easily as he always did when it came, he pointed at them with the stem of his pipe – ‘If you should want to become official at some time, statutes require, you know, that your chairman should be a senior member of the University. You’re the only one who qualifies, Marian.’

  ‘I do not. And you as an exploiting male should remember it. We don’t exist. We’re just a place in the Woodstock Road that boards and teaches young women like Valerie. But Ballard could.’

  ‘No, no. Ruskin’s in the same position. Working men like women, don’t exist. We don’t even board in a posh, respectable street like you do.’

  ‘We could invite Wicksteed as honorary chairman or Cole or one of them.’

  Valerie leaned forward on her little hardwood chair, showing the outline of her small firm breasts as they pressed against her green woollen jumper.

  ‘Oh, not Wicksteed after the way he’s let Quentin down.’

  ‘He hasn’t let me down at all. He warned me that they might not renew if I went down to Wales. Don’t get it wrong. I went down to encourage men in a strike that should – would in any logical continental country – have been the spark to set off Revolution. St Ebbes don’t want Re
volution – most of them want port and medlars after dinner and the undoing of the Revolution of’88 and the abolition of votes for women. I was the odd man out, not them, as Wicksteed said.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Seymour, ‘urging you, I suppose, to toe the line. He’s no guts, you know. I don’t know why you stand up for him.’

  ‘You might have the charity to remember he was in Maidstone jail for two years as an objector. The swine deliberately ruined his health.’

  ‘Well,’ said Valerie, ‘and you were wounded.’

  He glared back at her admiring look and noticed with satisfaction that she blushed and looked down. He did not, as he knew they expected, fill the silence. The black marble clock on the sideboard ticked loudly. Staring at the wall opposite he suddenly took note of the dismal oleograph behind a flyblown glass. A ghastly mid-Victorian sentimental picture of a young man bending over a young woman with a baby in her arms in some rosy arbour. Across her shoulders, around the baby’s neck and on to the young man’s wrist, hung some flowery creeper. The lovers, if such they were, were dressed, God knew why, in Regency clothes or something of the kind – cravats, breeches, hoop petticoats and wigs, what Granny M. had always called ‘costumes of the olden days’, in fact the stuff they used to have in the nursery dressing up box. The title he could just read through the stains and the dirty glass: ‘The Daisy Chain that Binds them’. He shivered and withdrew his gaze. Valerie was smiling at him. He frowned. Picking up his cap, his ashplant, and his mackintosh from the wooden bench by the window, ‘I’ll pay,’ he said. ‘We’d better push off while it’s only drizzling.’