No Laughing Matter

by Angus Wilson

  ‘And, of course, Krupskaya was with him all the time, cooking upon that stove you see there, acting as his correspondent, his secretary.’

  Sleeping with him in that narrow bed? He wanted to ask, but, as they moved on out of the room, they were pressed almost to stifling point. Since he could not ask his question, he moved close to Madame Paulhard, letting his hands accidentally press for a moment against her thighs. To his surprise the soft smoothness that he touched rubbed against his fingers. True, the press of the crowd was considerable, but … his fingers itched for a moment to give her buttocks a sharp tweak, yet why spoil the chance of a beautiful friendship? Instead he let his hands travel deliriously down her thighs. The pleasant pressure continued until they had left the holy fastness, but when she turned, her little delicate face bore its usual angry scowl, like a schoolboy afraid of appearing soft. Now he found himself next to old Kursky’s wife, an imperious handsome elderly creature who always reduced him to the sort of social banality he reserved for old ladies.

  ‘So they had the telephone even then?’

  She was quick to register his fatuousness but not in the words he expected.

  ‘1917? Well, of course. My parents had the telephone in 1900.’

  You old snob, he thought. Then he remembered her pre-revolutionary bourgeois social origins; that was why she had that vague aura of bourgeois chic that irritated him so, made him address her as if she were an old fool.

  ‘Where was your parents’ mansion, Sofya Petrovna?’ he asked, delighted to remember her patronymic.

  She looked down her roman nose at him. He realized suddenly that, since those he trusted were not here, he had come quite illogically to see all who were there as enemies. Yet his intuition, perhaps because it was usually so strictly bridled, had its head in full canter today.

  He heard himself say, ‘I am most disappointed not to see Mrs Rakitin. Her name was on the list of speakers. She gave such an interesting paper three years ago. Do you know why she’s not here?’

  Mrs Kursky paused a moment.

  ‘Mrs Rakitin? I don’t think I know her. What does she do?’

  He knew at once that this must be a lie, but he registered no surprise.

  ‘She’s a child magistrate.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Well, my husband isn’t a lawyer. And we have no small children. But I’ll ask Sukhanova for you.’

  He should have stopped her, but he didn’t.

  ‘Sukhanova,’ she called. My word! he only now saw how grand her manner was. ‘Mr Matthews wants to know why a friend of his, a child magistrate, why a Mrs Rakitin is not here.’

  This time Sukhanova turned in real anger.

  ‘Mr Matthews, I have told you twenty times. Mrs Rakitin is not here because she is busy. The courts have to continue, you know. The Russian people don’t stop living because all the clever social scientists from abroad are discussing the best ways to live.’

  In her annoyance her voice sounded sarcastic enough to startle a number of the delegates – even Miss Amy Taylor pursed her lips. Mr Kursky, large, portentous, yet more managerial, less patrician than his grand wife, said something to rebuke Sukhanova which Quentin could not hear, but she seemed unwilling to listen.

  ‘Come along now, everyone,’ she cried brightly, ‘If we don’t get into our coaches soon we shall miss the treasures of the Winter Palace. Or our lunch. You don’t want to miss your lunch, do you?’ She said this quite sharply to Miss Taylor who had, as Quentin remembered, a rather small vegetarian appetite. He got into the charabanc feeling relaxed. He had achieved his purpose, both Kelvin Douglas and Mary Parr had, he saw, registered at last his insistence upon the absent delegates – and these were the two English visitors who held any really big guns.

  So much had Kelvin Douglas observed that he came to sit next to Quentin, his vast bulk flowing flabbily all over his neighbour. With his huge head, hair en brosse, conventionally, almost Victorianly clad huge body and his plummy pompous voice, he was hardly distinguishable from Kursky or many other Soviet delegates. Only the burr of his Rs gave to his academic solidity a peculiarly smug homely aroma of high teas and a distant free kirk childhood.

  It was no surprise when he said, ‘I think, perhaps, Matthews, we ought to drop this question of some of the Russian delegates not being here, eh? Quite frankly I have the impression that there may be some little domestic quarrel that’s divided our friends and some have preferred not to attend. It’s very understandable. I often feel, when we disagree at home as we so often do, that it would be much better for the minority to stop away from meetings. Controversy and disagreement do impede any sort of decision. And decision must be ultimately what we’re after.’

  ‘With the first of your suggestions I agree, though I doubt if any of the absent delegates I know have chosen to stay away. With the second I entirely disagree. This is not a revolutionary situation, nor are the decisions we are reaching binding upon anyone, nor are they indeed in any but the most academic sense, political. As I understand it we are an international meeting of more or less professional people connected with various branches of social organization and the theory of social organization, all socialists, designedly chosen on a very broad definition of that term to include as many of us as possible who are committed to the furtherance of a socialist society. Our purpose is to exchange ideas and experience in our various spheres in order to facilitate social planning in socialist communities of every size from the Soviet Union down to the mayoralty of Marseilles, or the Borough Council of Clydeside. Am I right?’

  ‘Oh, perfectly, perfectly.’ Kelvin Douglas paused, and taking a very small lozenge from a small tin, placed it very slowly into his vast mouth and began even more slowly to suck it. His voice sounded Like that of an eminent hippopotamus under water. ‘Oil of clove. Very soothing wherever there’s any little roughness of the throat. You don’t however mention two things which, though not part of our agenda, are, as is so often the case, almost more important than any published aim. I’m thinking, of course, of the very valuable work we’ve already done in demonstrating against the Fascist claim to any serious social planning. Understand me, I see our meeting as only in part an exchange of ideas. At the present crisis all meetings of socialists, whatever their concern, must serve primarily as demonstrations of our determination to resist by all means in our power the naked aggression of Fascism. And to deter whatever right wing reformist elements in our own countries….’ He glanced at Quentin, and appeared to decide on a new sentence to express his views. ‘Whether we necessarily accept our Russian friends’ definition of Social fascists for some of the more backward of the Social democrats is perhaps a matter of literary taste.’ He smiled in naughty complicity at Quentin, who managed not to respond. ‘But the language apart, and it has a certain shorthand value on these occasions, we are united in sentiment. Which puts upon those of us who have differences of view from our Russian hosts a peculiar duty of preserving our disagreement for the most private occasions since the aim of the reactionary forces everywhere today is to drive a wedge between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies. This really mustn’t happen, or, to be very English, appear to have happened.’

  ‘There could be no possible reason why it should appear to have happened if the Conference were to stick to its educative purpose and not to attempt to turn itself into an international demonstration.’

  Kelvin Douglas shifted his weight from one buttock to the other, pinning Quentin against the side of the coach in the process.

  ‘I must say that these concepts of professionalism and academic discussion seem to me the sheerest petty bourgeois illusion.’ He added, ‘Sukhanova does a very hard job extremely well. I think we ought to buy her some little gift before we leave – the English delegation I mean.’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘And meanwhile perhaps we can all make her job a little easier by not pressing her with questions which, as those of us who are old hands know, she is not in the position to answer.’

>   He had made his own position quite clear, yet Quentin felt that if he could force the man more into the open they might at least argue out their duty.

  ‘If you mean that such questions make her job more dangerous, I …’

  He was indeed open to argument on this ground. But Kelvin Douglas was not. He receded.

  ‘Dangerous?’ He laughed. ‘Well, no, even at their worst, most trying moments I doubt if any of the Anglo-Saxon delegates are literally homicidal.’ He left his seat and joined a Ukrainian authority on social hygiene. ‘I’ve just been telling my colleague Matthews that I’m extraordinarily impressed by the reports you gave us of the rapid and efficient isolation system in the event of epidemic’

  Sukhanova had to translate, but the Ukrainian answered emphatically and immediately.

  ‘Yes, we act very quickly.’

  Later that evening, following an afternoon of speeches on crêche organization and child care, Quentin tried to relax in the sitting-room of his hotel suite. The grand piano with its flowered shawl, the high Japanese pot, the ebony table with mother-of-pearl inlay, all reminded him of No. 52. And so, of course, every decorative object in the city – that was not a treasured antique – should, for all bourgeois decoration had been put to sleep in the city like the princess’ castle at that bourgeois moment when the Countess was braving the Zeppelins. And these art nouveau, early ballet russe objects, would remain in that sleep, no doubt, for a hundred years, until they crumbled. But what then would they use to embellish the rooms of bourgeois sympathizers from abroad, for they had evolved no decorative style of their own? No need, he would have said a few years back, for long before then there would be no more bourgeois sympathizers, world revolution would be complete. But now he only hoped that for this reason alone he would not be cut off from the USSR, for if anything warmed his heart, it was this lack of triviality, of luxury, of effort and skill wasted in designing fashions and modes to keep running a world of high profits and pitiful doles. Grand pianos and pots and portraits and all the rest of it, if they must be, let them be as shabby as possible; and, for the rest, the plain, the simple and the dowdy.

  All these girls with their cheap printed frocks in the streets, even though they did look tired, tore the balls out of him. That was why he was always so randy here – none of that awful cash display which made bourgeois women into profit charts, none of that superfluous display which choked the life out of sexual desire, making women whores without the harlot’s honesty. Now here…. He went to his private bathroom. He turned the worn-washered brass tap of the old wooden cased bath, tepid water groaned and gurgled and gushed in spasms as fierce as if it had been at boiling point. This was the only luxury he ever craved for here, as a well known friend of the Soviet Union he could indulge it. He lowered himself into the lukewarm water so delicious on this sticky evening. But not for long, mopping his dripping body, in his old Jaeger buff dressing gown, he answered the knocking at the door.

  ‘It’s me. Mary Parr.’

  As he looked at her standing there with her heavy amber earrings and amber necklace, her dyed black hair done in earphones so dead and scurfy that one felt that, if they were lifted, moths would fly out of them, her dreadful arch smile as she took in his deshabille, he almost shut the door in despair. But then for all the absurd artiness and girlishness of her manner which made listening to her interventions at the congress more embarrassing than watching the positively last appearance of some grisly old worn out opera singer, she had yet produced since 1898 (yes 1898, God, she must be quite sixty) a series of books of somewhat excess enthusiasm but remarkably good sense on that stamping ground of bores and cranks – woman’s role in society. Now she sat herself firmly in his solitary chair so that, standing, he felt more the silliness as well as the discomfort of being wet and naked beneath his old gown.

  She fussed as usual with an absurd cigarette holder and lady spy black cigarettes so that he began to shiver as much with impatience as wetness. But then she surprised him.

  ‘I’m their special star, you know,’ she said. ‘Not really political. Just what they call a modern thinker. My name adds a whole colour band to the anti-fascist spectrum. And I’m glad to do it. We intellectuals can’t stand aside any longer. But I don’t want to add a band to the wrong rainbow. That’s why I want to know why you’re surprised at these absences. I don’t know the place like you do, but I came prepared for some, what shall we say, disappearances. And these aren’t even that. Just non-appearances. Or am I being naïve? What do you know? Why are you fussing?’

  He looked around the room. He must have seemed more worried than he realized, for she said: ‘What’s that about? I’ve got you out of your bath, haven’t I? Is that face cos you’re wet or because there’s some sound equipment in the room? Well, if there is I’m glad they should know what I have to say. And if there isn’t …’

  ‘I’ve not felt happy in Leningrad this time, Miss Parr, though it’s my favourite Russian city. I’ve missed many friends at the conference and many more whom I’ve wanted to see in their private homes. Of course, as they say, it’s August. It’s pleasing to see how the success of the second five year plan is making possible the summer holiday habit. It wasn’t so when I was here two years ago. On the other hand the telephone system is not so good. I’ve been cut off many times and so many numbers appear to be unobtainable.’

  ‘I see. More non-appearances than is reasonable even in revolutionary circumstances. Well, I envy you having so many unavailable friends. However I must judge as I find. I don’t think I’ve ever been so charmingly entertained. As Kelvin Douglas said to me, “What other nation in the midst of one of the world’s greatest economic experiments would have time to think of baskets of fruit in their gues’ bedrooms?”’ She winked at him. As she talked she was writing. ‘And this is the nation itself that’s had this charming little thought. There is, you know, a little ticket on my basket of fruit “in admiration from the Russian people”. So that proves it, doesn’t it?’ Her voice sounded more than ever like a little girl trying to sound sophisticated.

  She passed to him what she had written.

  ‘That’s my London address, by the way, for that article you promised to send me.’

  She had written her address and some lines lower had added: ‘I want to know for myself if possible.’

  ‘And,’ he said, tearing off this sheet from her pad, and writing on the next sheet, ‘this is the name of that book of Maurice Dobb’s we were speaking of, in case I forget to give it to you.’ He wrote the title indeed, but beneath, ‘No one will speak, they’re all too frightened.’

  To his amusement, she tore off this piece of his message and swallowed the tiny piece of paper.

  ‘I’m a great reader of light fiction,’ she said, laughing. ‘Insomnia, you know, but who can sleep well with Hitler on the doorstep?’

  She got up from the chair, ‘Well, you’ve not really convinced me. And I suppose we’ll all be signing a joint statement tonight.’

  ‘I will,’ he said, and added immediately, ‘I won’t.’

  She seemed to understand, for she stopped at the door, her many bangles jangling. ‘I expect you to squire me to this delicious banquet tonight.’

  Before he got back into his bath he took her address from his dressing gown pocket and tore off the message. He was about to flush it down the lavatory, when he divided the small strip into two and swallowed both pieces. He laughed and said under his breath, ‘Infectious paranoia’. But he thought with disgust as he splashed in the cool water that they were mockingly parodying the same scene that people were enacting in mortal terror from Tokyo through Moscow to Munich.

  The long eighteenth-century gallery with its baroque carving, its mirrors and chandeliers, was like the scene of some Victorian academic banquet. So, with similar pomposity, jocosity, verbosity, and hideosity must Carlyle and Tennyson, Herschel and Huxley, George Eliot, Miss Nightingale, Baroness Coutts, Mrs Lynn Linton, Sir Theodore Martin, Matthew Arnold, and
Ebenezer Prout, or any Victorian mixed bag of worthies, have degraded often and often with their tedious hypocrisy, solemnity and greed many and many a beautiful English eighteenth-century drawing-room. The men, in particular, in their drab dress and huge bulk, were a Lytton Strachey sketch for a circle of Inferno; and the tables groaning with caviar and sturgeon and blinis and whipped cream and crayfish and fruit from the Crimea and ice puddings and pies of pigeon, pies of duck, pies, for all one knew, of Russian bears, all waiting to be washed down with Georgian wine. The whole banquet united Queen Victoria with her Tudor ancestors. That indeed was what it was; for despite the short hair and dresses of the women, the talk of hydroelectric dams, and the great scientific and industrial projects of the twentieth century, the conformities and the hypocrisies of these social gatherings were mid-Victorian, while the appetites, the terrors, and the vast, empty laughter that hid the terrors, belonged to the court of bluff King Joe.

  Mary Parr, who appeared to have met the banquet’s sartorial demands by exchanging amber for jade, twisted and swayed her skinny old hips for all the world like a Mata Hari playing out her last brave act. She came in on Quentin’s arm, the great spy coolly flirting with her handsome firing squad. As he listened to her he despaired. Even her supposedly sophisticated remarks were imitations of what had been said a hundred times at the functions during the week. ‘Caviar again,’ she drawled, ‘Isn’t it naughty of me, but do you know I get a tiny bit tired of caviar.’ And, ‘Oooh! Do have some of this sturgeon. It’s so deliriously tender. I think it must be virgin sturgeoa.’ And so on.