No Laughing Matter

by Angus Wilson

  ‘The odium that undoubtedly attached to a mammon worshipping City of London and a meretricious high society in what Henry James in one of his more unreadable later efflorescences called The Awkward Age (if only the Master’s words had had half the pithy wit of his titles). But with or without its grain of truth to feed it, anti-semitism certainly flourished in some circles of pre-1914 literary London. Foremost among its exponents was T. W. H. Crosland, the now almost forgotten but able and picturesque editor of the Academy. I first met Crosland when he was editor of the short-lived English Review. He struck me at once as a most plausible ruffian, but then the reader who has borne with me so far in my reminiscent peregrinations will have realized by now that I have a very soft spot for ruffians. Crosland was …’

  He was dead, and forgotten, though there was probably a widow about the place somewhere. How She would like it, when someone else in fifty years ‘time (perhaps also in the supporting degradation of crutches) wrote of W. M. Matthews that he was dead and forgotten, though there was probably a widow about the place somewhere? A widow might be about the place, but a wife wasn’t. Well, who could tell if this furnace were to burst….’ Mr W. M. Matthews, the author, was found dead today …’ ‘Crosland was a born journalist but less evidently intended by nature for an editor. I always thought that Crosland and Alfred Douglas were about the most ill-assorted partners since Codlin and Short. Yet both, even Douglas whom I never cared for, had guts, could stand on their own. They had one trait in common – their love of abuse. And it was on the libel suits that resulted from this love that the English Review foundered. Nevertheless their partnership while it lasted …’

  It wasn’t only self-pity that made his imagination fill the empty house with a sudden swish of her skirt as she turned with her usual nimble rapidity, even now at sixty-five, round some corner, entered through the door of some room. He could hear the peculiar silky quality of that swishing sound as he had heard it now for over forty years, like no other woman’s. He could see at intervals the quick flash of her legs never perhaps again so excitingly shapely after short skirts had revealed them to other men’s eyes. He could smell her scent, something French he couldn’t remember its name, that had never changed over the years, although now and again in recent times he had smelt tiredness, age, death in her wake. Or was it his own smell he put on to her?

  Did he seek to take her with him? To break such a partnership after so long would be the cruellest side of it. He didn’t want to go alone into an emptiness – or to be left behind to the mercy of others, not knowing his lore, for a man acquires his lore over the years. He banished the thought by calling her up from every corner, not only the swish of her skirt and her perfume, but the occasional, increasingly frequent click of a joint, the little cough that nowadays accompanied the tick tack of her heels up the stairs, the turning of taps, the flushing of the lavatory cistern, the half-click of doors to be followed by the louder sound of their closing, the arpeggios with which she prefaced her piano playing. Oh, why didn’t she come home?

  ‘Yet their particular partnership while it lasted was fruitful for English letters if not for the writers who contributed to their journal. My own first contribution to the Academy was an article on the Surrey of Meredith’s novels. After long waiting there came a rather grubby reply from Crosland asking me to visit his offices – somewhere in the City, near the then fairly recent Queen Victoria Street, if I am not mistaken. Apart from meeting a few literary cronies every week at the Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street I did not as a rule penetrate London east of Temple Bar, to me the very symbol of the Forsyteism of my childhood – though of course, like most young writers of the time I had been lured to look at Limehouse and at Stepney by Jack London’s Godgiven prose and had peeped at the Jewish East End brought to life by Zangwill’s colourful pen. I therefore climbed the stairs on that particular afternoon with a certain resentment which was not decreased when a stentorian Yorkshire voice from within the office answered my knocking by “Come in, blast you.’”

  And there was her key in the Yale lock, he would have known it from all others – did in the days when the children had their own keys – she seemed to take more time to insert it, to scratch around the lock almost as if she’d had one over the eight. Of course, a woman all over, she wouldn’t confess that she needed glasses. But that she was home, that was the main thing; he was no longer alone. There it was, that rustling, an inexplicable noise that set you speculating and made concentration on the page before you impossible. If he asked her, of course, as he often had, she would reply, ‘What noise? I was just coming in at the front door, that’s all. You speak as though I were the piano remover.’ This when the piano had not been moved since they entered the house a quarter of a century ago, so that she couldn’t know what noises such a man (if there were one) made. This feminine absurdity this inconsequentiality was what made her so special. And now she was home and he wasn’t alone. He pushed aside his manuscript book and was about to call her, when he heard her heels tapping on the floorboards of the landing above. What had she gone upstairs for? Probably to pee, of course. Her bladder wasn’t what it was, though she wouldn’t admit it. She had a tiresome genteel side. But no noise of water flushing came. Perhaps she’d lost badly at cards and was about to seek refuge in playing the piano. He steeled himself for the arpeggios but they did not come. He determined to put her out of his head, to live as though the house were his alone, only so could he write with the flow that memoirs (bear all its sons away) demanded.

  ‘The man that stood before me was not prepossessing. He was tall, well over six feet I should think, with a corporation and the familiar heavy moustache of those days. To crown all he was dressed in what seemed (and probably was) as incongruous a collection of second hand garments as could have been purchased from the street markets of London so much more evident then than today.’

  But now she was tapping her way downstairs. She could hardly have given a more exact aural account of her movements if she had been blind with a white stick. For a moment, with the word ‘blind’, some fears he had not known since childhood came to him. Someone would open the door, but it would not be she, it would be a hideous creature with black glasses and a tapping white stick who lured children. He shook himself. These tedious background noises! No wonder he had written ‘the man that stood before me.’ vulgar journalese, and ‘corporation’, a tired piece of facetious verbiage. With such pervasive noises! And now that cough! Uck uck. Uck uck. If she’d got phlegm on her chest why couldn’t she hawk it up and be done with it? All this gentility. She had reached the kitchen now. He tensed his body to resist the clashing of crockery, the banging of saucepans. To relax his tension he carefully shut up his manuscript book and capped his fountain pen. No noise came. And a moment later she was with him.

  ‘Here’s your hot toddy,’ she said.

  ‘Did you have a good evening?’ he asked and he smiled up at her.

  ‘I won the last two rubbers,’ she said, ‘I cut both times with a Mr Isaacs, a new member. I’m not fond of the chosen race as a whole, but they always play a very good game of bridge.’

  *

  Margaret woke to the sound of an aeroplane overhead.

  Her first thought was that whatever they all said – comforting newspapers, well informed old clubmen, ladies with nephews in the diplomatic service, family solicitors seeing one to the door, poets who respected the Germans as fighting men, above all Douglas acting nanny-comforter to her distressed senses – there would be war. She tried to say without fear, ‘And so there ought to be. Against such evil.’ Then, banishing all unreal seeming certainty of war, the book’s problem came full before her. Its form; but its form was its statement. She had lived too long with Alice Cameron and her attendant nieces, so that now greedy expectancy seemed also justified hope of reward as the pitiable anxious concerns of old age seemed often a hideous selfishness. Self-pity seemed pathos; hardness, noble pride. In the light of old Alice’s sterling bawdry her nieces
were genteel rubbish; in the light of those fading spinsters’ sensitivity old Alice was a vulgar, greedy harpy. Upon who narrated certainly depended everything.

  The figures properly related would give the answer. Yet it was not the easy balance of a bit of A and a bit of B and, if that seemed too simple, the addition of a little C to blur the too hard outlines. All voices meant no voices; an all round view looked out on a blank wall. Supposing Jessica were to narrate, and, yet, through her report of Nancy’s reactions to old Alice, the ironic truth of the old woman’s view should itself emerge – no, that would not do, for then Alice, the bullied old woman, would be the central victim and all her past bullying of the faded genteel nieces would be ignored. If each of Alice’s humiliations were to be balanced by the recall of her past despotic insensitivity, then … but flashbacks were no answer, for past and present must be made one. When the nieces cruelly kept the bedridden witty old sinner from company then they suffered again and at that moment her mockery of their first girlish pangs of love. In time-structure B was A, A was B. But these letters had once been three full human beings whom she had slowly and at such cost brought into existence. Now in this formal search they were being petrified into figures and lettered proportions. She banished A B and C, and set all her thoughts, all her feelings painfully to make the three women joyously live again. Thus: Alice Cameron, now 75, rich, arthritic, property in Birmingham, South African mining shares, Argentine Railways, once the actress mistress of the Duke of M., then of Barney Woolf millionaire…. was only another kind of figures.

  ‘Letting her bedjacket fall from her still well-shaped shoulders as though she were settling into her box at the opera, she picked up the silver backed hand mirror from the side table and found everything surprisingly well. A very small touch of eye shadow – her left pupil had always been a fraction larger than … but now, well for an old woman of seventy-six greeting her solicitor…. But he was more than that – he had been very … not handsome but soigné, amusing and worldly, and he’d been madly in love with her. Oh, that had been clear at that dinner at Romano’s though he’d tried to hide it for fear of being hurt. She would tease him a little now. Her hands trembled at the … But would they never bring him up? She rang and rang furiously. “Where’s Lionel?” “Oh, Auntie, did you want to see him? I’m afraid …”’

  She began once again to feel the anger of the lively old woman who had so much to say – stinging and witty about these soft shoed whispering genteel ghost women – who could hear voices downstairs-‘Who was that?’ ‘Why am I not told?’ ‘Only the postman, Auntie, nothing for you.’ Oh yes, she could feel it all again now. She could put it on paper if wanted, where it would flow – but to where was it flowing? She was back then to form and figures and moral shapes. Old Alice was the victim, but the victim of her own victims – so what could one do but stand outside, and ironic, Godlike judge? Yet to do so seemed to ignore the fact that the old woman suffered – and so did the nieces. A victim was a victim. To be one alone was to uphold one’s right to the inner poetry, yet to be one alone was also to be an insufficient human being. To be two was the start of all human fulfilment; and also of all gangs and conspiracies. Once again she was drifting from old Alice’s powder-thick flesh into abstractions. Books were not written in the insomnia of the small hours, or at any rate, not hers. Deliberately she turned from the novel and thought of the speech she was to make to Gladys’ professional women. Should the appeal be the usual warning of the totalitarian menace? If professional women were like business men, abstract liberty would not be their rallying cry. Perhaps like herself, like Gladys, they would be childless, then she must reach for the same sentiment in them for these refugee children that she knew was in herself.

  If she could let herself go for once, not to be afraid to wallow a Httle, avoid the barbed remark. Surely if ever irony was not called for it was in the cause of these wretched refugee Basque children. Why not? Mockery was the best weapon…. If now she could show old Alice mocking the nieces and yet somehow mock the mocker, for goodness knew perpetual irony had its own absurdity. But how? Oh, she must sleep. Sleep as Douglas’s gentle breathing showed that he slept. Every night in that divan bed not two feet away from her he slept the gentle sleep of a gentle man; and she the victim of his gentleness. How could she bring the conflict, the anger, the cruelty of these trapped women to life while he smoothed out all wrinkles, turned away all wrath, negotiated all tricky corners, smothered her in the softness of his feathered decency, her dear old goose, her murderer? She felt the flush and trembling of anger that came over her nowadays with sudden consciousness that she was the victim of a victim. With Ralph there had been no smothering kindness, but a constant renewal of the body by battle. There was no end to the passion then in her writing. What was she trying to kindle some old woman’s embers for? She should be writing about men, about their bodies, about the way our bodies answered theirs, about the courage and heroism that lay in the line of a man’s shoulders or the curl of his mouth and set the heart beating, the blood rushing to the head – no matter how he treated one. The real values lay not in words and emotions and memories but in the movements and responses of the bodies, of two bodies – a man’s and a woman’s. All the rest was old woman’s talk and old maid’s defences.

  *

  ‘Oh, no doubt, there was a very undesirable element in the early days. Mostly in the S. A. A friend of mine tells me it came as the greatest shock to Herr Hitler himself when he …’

  ‘I’ve no doubt at all of the fairness of the Lebensraum argument. Besides I always look back to the visits of courtesy I used to pay as Commissioner into Togoland before 1914. The whole place was a model of what a colony should be. If one compares the shambles of the Portuguese or the Belgians or even the French …’

  ‘Of course, you have to realize that they’re quite different to the sort of Jews we come across here. In Frankfurt, or in Vienna for that matter, since Versailles, you’ve had to be a Jew to have any hope of …’

  ‘Yes, Tony’s at Westminster with the Ambassador’s son. We met the father at the Latin play. A very distinguished man and a connoisseur of wine. I felt that he was personally so very upset by the tone of some of our newspapers….’

  ‘They’re largely the creation, of course, of men who had no understanding whatsoever of Balkan history.’

  ‘I only wish our young people were anything like the same good ambassadors for us …’

  ‘No, in the original Mein Kampf there’s no mention of any British colonies. The English translations are all very unreliable.’

  ‘Shared their plum pudding and holly across No Man’s Land. Of course that didn’t suit international finance at all well.’

  ‘Had the cheek to ask our Prince of Wales as he was then to sit down to dinner with this Jew who’d robbed the Post Office at Tiflis. We should never have recognized them after’17.’

  ‘I went prepared to scoff but I damn near stayed to pray. The extraordinary piercing blue of the man’s eyes – I happened to look his way as the torchbearer came into the arena …’

  ‘It seems there was a slaughterhouse for cattle near by. That was the simple origin of this righteous Boston schoolmarm’s story. But, of course, torture of the Jews is probably half round the United States by now. There’s nothing the Americans like better than moral indignation.’

  ‘Oh, Professor Crawford’s so interesting on that. Genealogy’s his subject. The Churchill stock is at least a quarter Jewish. Didn’t you know? Oh they don’t all advertise themselves with names like Leopold Amery.’

  As Marcus elbowed his way to where an ancient maid was pouring out drinks these bursts of conversation came to him from every corner of the large, stuffy Edwardian room – from among the pretty-pretty blue of hydrangeas, from behind Japanese screens, from out the faded charm of Hokusai prints, from under innumerable gilded rococo tables. He, so unpolitical, so undereducated, could hardly have understood them, but, aesthete, he found the noises most disagreeab
le. He felt himself among overfed toads and elegant spitting snakes each giving out their own kind of venom. The snakes were tall emaciated women, of the kind called ‘society’, with too much rouge and long earrings, or thin, well groomed greying men of military or diplomatic appearance; the toads were fat, double chinned old women whose heavy makeup ended abruptly in thick yellowish grubby necks, who flashed too much jewellery and dripped too much mascara, or stout, pink-cheeked, white-haired, doctored torn old men who looked like prosperous sidesmen at a fashionable church. Among them went old Lady Westerton herself. Obviously now rather gaga, she groped her way from group to group, presenting a Hollywood English diplomat – a tall thin fortyish man with a small military moustache and a suggestion of corsets about his elegant figure. Whoever this notable snake was, Lady Westerton did not introduce him to Marcus. Indeed when Marcus had arrived at the cocktail party – and if it hadn’t been for poor Ozzie’s pictures he would never have thought twice about the invitation – she had shown in her embarrassment that she had invited him only through senile absentmindedness.

  ‘I’m afraid Jack couldn’t come. He’s on a business trip in New York.’

  He didn’t offer details, because, although he approved of sending the pictures away, he was uneasy about their own suggested emigration. But the old woman had chuckled quite rudely in answer – she’d obviously become a trifle touched in the head since he’d last seen her two or three years before.