No Laughing Matter

by Angus Wilson

  As he made for a taxi, he could hear behind him, above the station’s din, how Madge’s anger at this reminder clashed with Ted’s grievance. Margaret had been listening to the young faced woman with blue-rinsed hair seated next to her. One of the last war’s tragic girl widows, she was now one of England’s rare successful women solicitors. Question by question through the grapefruit, the meagre fillets of sole Dieppoise, the cutlets reforme and the mocha bombe, she had built up this life of male and still more of female prejudice overcome, the ‘not the clients I should have chosen’ that gave the start, the family clients wooed and retained, at last the spectacular case won, and then, thought Margaret, no doubt the ‘not the clients I should have chosen’ (poor shady creatures) dropped. Gladys had interrupted once, ‘Watch out, Monica, she’s preserving you in vinegar.’

  But Monica had said, ‘Libel’s my speciality. I’m quite safe,’ and with laughter, Margaret had continued her fascinating jig-saw game. ‘And do you still feel that you must go down to Mrs Seymour-Clinton’s house? Or can you command her presence now at your office?’ For listening is an art and part of it consists in feeding back proper names, dates and other facts to show the speaker that you are inside the story. But now with the coffee and Turkish cigarettes (though most of the halo-hatted ladies with eyes as hard as their diamond clips preferred their own Players or Gold Flake), she began to feel the usual tiny scratchings in the depths of her insides. As they grew she could do no more than smile fixedly at Monica, and finally (for even those very thin bright green peppermint creams could not save her, though she adored them) had to become intent on making pyramids of crumbs around her plate. At last Monica noticed (as they always eventually did) and turned to her other neighbour. Margaret knew just that humpy, glum look that she must be wearing for even Gladys was drawn to say: ‘I say, I’m afraid Monica’s bored you horribly, Margaret. Of course, none of us are intellectuals. But Monica’s rather bright as a rule.’

  ‘No, no, it’s been fascinating. It’s only that I’m going to speak in a few minutes. I always die the little death. Aren’t you worried, Gladys?’

  ‘Me? I’m only going to make an announcement and the rest is you. You don’t realize what a big figure you are. Most of these women will have read a lot of your stuff. You mustn’t judge by a Philistine like me.’

  ‘But don’t you ever feel nervous before speaking?’

  ‘No, I can’t say I do. Ought I to?’

  Out of her deepest beliefs about luck and humility and atonement Margaret wanted to say, yes, yes. But she thought instead – none of this is important, my writing’s all that matters. Suddenly she saw how to develop the story – Alice would try, of course, to play the nieces off against the other. And they maliciously would encourage it, comparing notes. The irony would … but, if she thought of this, she would lose touch. She made herself attend to Gladys.

  She was surprised when her sister, despite the muffling disadvantage of a huge wide brimmed hat, spoke clearly and easily. So surprised that some minutes had passed before she realized how even more unexpected was what Gladys was saying.

  ‘I don’t know how many of you know Cromer, but it’s cliffs and East Winds. At any rate it seemed to be so when we were there as kids. Perhaps that’s why I used to feel particularly out of it all there, Out in the cold, as they say. That and the fact that I felt so useless. At home, as I was saying, things were so hopeless that I could try to be a little mother and flatter myself that I wasn’t cut off from all the rest. But down at my grandmother’s there were competent servants to look after us and regular meals and the old girl herself, though rather a fusspot, was kind to us all. But just because of that I suppose I felt desperately lonely always on those holidays. Of course it was just as bad for the rest, but I had this special difficulty of being the eldest. I think that’s why I used to love Little Women so …’

  Margaret felt a wave of resentment. It had been good of Gladys to let her make this appeal to her business women on behalf of the Basque children, but she had no right to use the occasion to make this tear jerking appeal for herself. ‘Little mother’ indeed – it called up pictures of Little Nell and Little Dorrit and all those awful horrors that made Dickens so impossible to read. She looked around at the hard, well made-up faces looming like so many painted moons from beneath their halo hats and was even more furious to see that their hard-boiled expressions had softened into mawkish blurs. And Gladys seemed determined to press upon this sickly and irrelevant vox humana stop.

  ‘I must have looked a disgusting object, lees too fat in long white cotton stockings, and a sort of straw bonnet that girls had to wear then, just like the bonnets the donkeys wore on the front, and out of it a great fat face like a kid’s drawing of the moon. It wasn’t exactly the face to make friends and influence people, but then as a kid one doesn’t realize that. You can imagine then how bucked I was when this couple by the high-falutin name of Tankerville-Jones took me up. A fat girl of twelve whom nobody much wanted to know. It must have been down on the beach one of the few sunny days we had in frozen Cromer. The Tankerville-Jones had a hut near Granny’s. I am sure if she had seen them, she’d have said they were most unsuitable people, but she never came down to the beach. And as for the parents they didn’t notice anything that we did. Nobody noticed, in fact, that for more than a week I was away from the family most of the day. Mr Tankerville-Jones had hired a pony and cart and took me and her out into the country for farm teas. He used to call her his missus, though I doubt if the poor thing was. And she used to tell my fortune again and again with the cards on a woolly green chenille tablecloth – you know the sort I mean, Margaret, what we used to call caterpillar muck – in the dingy room they’d rented. I loved that, for she was a romantic creature and was always marrying me off to Lewis Waller. And as for Mr T J, he was a perfectly splendid mimic – and I knew about mimics with my brother Rupert at home, a brilliant actor already, even though he was only a small kid. But Mr T J could do Little Tich so that you wouldn’t notice he was six foot and all his height seemed to have gone into his feet. Oh, they were wonderful days!’

  Gladys sighed, and Margaret came to, realizing that she had long forgotten the Soho dining-room, the paper carnations, the hard faced women, the Italian waiters and the litter of coffee cups and petit fours.

  ‘And I knew,’ Gladys said, ‘as sure as eggs were eggs that they were an illusion. I remember thinking one day as I came into that stuffy little parlour and Mr TJ looked bilious and Mrs TJ, for all her rouge and her feather boa and her little laughs, was tearful, that I was in a balloon and soon someone would prick it and it would go bust all round me. Which was something I hated. At Christmas parties I used to stuff my fingers in my ears. I suppose it was just to cheer them up that I told them how Granny would be giving us each a five pound note that week as she always did every summer holidays. I remember now that as I told them about it, I knew that the five pound note would be theirs. I could see all around Mrs TJ’s eye that she’d powdered it thickly to hide where the skin was bruised, and something in his eye frightened me as much as it did her. I think that’s why she cultivated me, looking back, because she was scared and to have anyone around, even a child, was better than being alone with him. I shouldn’t be surprised if he did her in in the end. But I never saw it in the papers if he did. And why he bothered with me, I never like to think. But back I went next day with Granny’s fiver. And of course he borrowed it. And the day after when I went round to the lodgings, my friends had done a moonlight flit. And, honestly that was all I could think about. Not the money, although I had to keep on lying all that summer and went without sweets or anything for months, but all I cared was that I’d lost the only friends I’d ever made. It all came into my mind in the taxi coming here. And here are these Basque kids turned out of their homes. Never mind for what reason. As I told my sister, we’re not political here. But it’s awful for kids to be lonely. It makes them so dependent on any bit of love they can pick up here and there.�
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  Margaret, looking at the women around the table, saw that their hard little smiles, their conscious competence and their conscious chic had melted as completely as the little pools of mocha cream that remained in the ice cream glasses. She felt a wondering admiration for Gladys and with it a faint, grumbling envy. I don’t want to have sentimental, middlebrow storytelling powers like that. But still melted faces meant lots of money for Basque children.

  Although not perhaps for Gladys. Her speech continued: ‘I say, I’ve just realized that I’ve as good as said that we don’t want your money because lonely kids shouldn’t be dependent on strangers. Just the sort of floater I would make, babbling on. But anyhow, there it is and Margaret’s the clever one, she’ll tell us why we’ve got to fork out. The only thing I ought to have said is that plans are going ahead and I hope that when we meet next year we shall do so not as a lot of nameless women but as the Association of Professional and Business Women – what a mouthful! That is if certain objections to our using the title from some ladies in Burlington Arcade and Bond Street can be got round. With which bad joke in poor taste I’ll sit down and let you hear a real speech from your favourite novelist, Margaret Matthews.’

  She sat down with one of her clownish bumps – surely there must be a jam tart stuck to her sitdown upon. Why did she have to clown? Looking at the melted faces Margaret saw that they too had hardened again into their usual lines of boredom, crossness, egotism and fear. Well, she couldn’t revive their fleeting tenderness. They must be content with facts and figures from her. Such she gave them, for, after all, they expected a dry note from so ironic an author.

  In the taxi on the way back for a cup of tea at the shop in George Street Gladys said: ‘Honestly, Margaret, I do apologize for waffling on like that. Thank Gawd you were there to save the day.’

  Margaret was about to snap back, when, turning, she saw that this stout, handsome woman in the smart black suit and the silly hat was genuinely afraid of her reaction.

  ‘It’s awful, Gladys, that we all seemed so close to one another as children and yet we knew nothing really of each other.’

  And despite the oath she had taken on Sukey’s wedding day that after all those years of sharing a bedroom, she would never in her life again touch or let herself be touched by another woman, she put her arms round her sister, and, refusing to allow even the absurdity of the brim of Gladys’ hat pushing her own Astrakhan cap askew to deter her, kissed her full on the lips.

  ‘If you knew, darling, what a heroine you’ve been to us all always.’

  She wanted to say sacred cow, but it would offend; and it was true, whatever else they felt about each other, Gladys’s courage and simplicity and lonely success had stood above all their bitchery or moralizing.

  ‘And as to your hold on all those women,’ she added, ‘Darling! And you talk about loneliness!’

  For it was true, for those few minutes they had obviously adored her.

  ‘Oh well, you must remember a whole lot of them got their first jobs through my agency.’

  Then she stopped the taxi for a few minutes at a fishmonger’s and returned with a huge bag of prawns for their tea.

  That, thought Margaret, is the secret of her charm. Here they sat in the little office at the back of the antique shop, she, Gladys and this rather nice, faded woman called Sylvia, drinking strong Indian tea and peeling prawns as though it were some dormitory feast. Imagine strong Indian tea and prawns at home! She would never allow herself such coarse indulgence, such threats to her digestion, and if, in some moment of madness, she did so, Douglas’s good sense and forethought for her health would banish them at once. Yet here she was trying covertly to take two prawns to every one that Gladys ate, while this most genteel, faded Sylvia was probably getting away with three.

  Of course they started off the occasion to a happy tune, with heartening news that some impoverished old refugee couple possessed a Grünewald without knowing it. Gladys had made the most of that. Then and there they had debated about how and when to break the news; her own opinion had been asked and regarded as though she’d been in on the story from its very beginnings; so much so that it looked in the end as though she were responsible for the final decision – that nothing should be said until the letter from Christie’s confirmed the telephone call to Sylvia, and that then Gladys and Sylvia would go up to St John’s Wood, and Sylvia would say this and Gladys would put that face on, and so and so on until, at the last, the moment would come when the good news could burst forth. And the old gentleman’s thin, bearded face would crease into incredulous smiles of happiness, his nicotine stained fingers would tremble with excitement. And as for Mutti – strange little bent witch-like lady! ‘Oh, what a good thing you were here, Margaret! That’s absolutely the best way to go about it.’ When really, of course, she had played no part in devising such a children’s surprise. It was gross sentimentality. That awful Dickens again. Scrooge and Tiny Tim. But it was entirely acceptable, for unlike Dickens, it obviously came to Gladys naturally; there was no faking, no ‘told to the children’.

  Then, from toasting the old couple in strong tea, they had passed now to prawns and intimacy. Sylvia was telling them of a ridiculous boy with huge ears who had fallen madly in love with her at seventeen – the sequence was a natural one, for the boy’s father was a picture restorer; as Gladys commented, ‘of all things’. Margaret wanted to say ‘Why shouldn’t he be?’ but somehow the atmosphere was unpropitious for such dryness. As Sylvia’s story unfolded she seemed to Margaret’s ear, even for a girl, to have encouraged the wretched boy in a heartless, genteel fashion. But under Gladys’s influence – at least that was what it must be – the story appeared quite different – absurd, droll, a tremendous lark. ‘Oh, those ears!’ Sylvia ended, ‘wouldn’t it have been terrible if I’d married him and produced a whole brood of bats?’

  And it did seem comic, and Margaret found herself laughing with the others, for all the world like three schoolgirls drunk on pop and doughnuts. She had an extraordinary sense of loving women’s company as though it were a happy world of innocence from which the old Adam had been temporarily shut out. Fighting against this irrational view she thought, I know what it is, for all that caddish looking man of hers, Gladys is really Lesbian, that’s why women respond to her. But, looking at her sister, the idea was an absurd sophisticated platitude, plainly inapplicable to this simple, easy woman. She heard herself saying: ‘Believe it or not I should never have had my first affair but for a rat in my bedroom. It was the most absurd thing …’

  But of course she knew it wasn’t absurd at all, that for very good reasons she never let herself think of, the business with Roger …

  ‘I screamed and screamed and this very presentable young man …’

  ‘The age of chivalry was not dead then,’ said Sylvia, but what might have been bitterness sounded like light hearted comment.

  ‘Oh, yes, a very parfit gentle knight. But I’m afraid I was a horribly scared damsel in distress. You see I’d had no experience …’

  Margaret thought, why don’t I talk more with other women in this open way. She was really enjoying her story when the telephone rang.

  ‘Oh, hullo, old dear.’ Gladys said, and, ‘Oh Lord! I thought that was all settled…. Do they, the blighters? … That’s steep, isn’t it? … Oh Lord! So do I…. No, I didn’t mean to. Of course, I see it’s frightfully serious…. I don’t know where we’re going to get that amount from…. No, of course, my dear, No. We’ll just have to try…. No, I’m not, Alf. Honestly, I’m not. I blame myself. I ought to have known.’ At last she said, ‘All right. The Piccadilly. American Bar. I’ll come straight away.’

  Margaret had tried with Sylvia’s help to cover this strained conversation with vague chatter about the shop – did people really pay good money for Victoriana? How many people knew a fake from the real thing? Not to underline their unconcern with Gladys’s private alarms she went straight on with her story.

  ‘He wa
s an awfully nice boy, really. And only a bit less innocent than me.’

  But Gladys said, ‘Sorry, Margaret. Some other time. I must dash. Will you shut up shop, Sylvia? I shan’t be back this evening.’

  And when Margaret, in her annoyance, invaded her sister’s privacy by asking, Whatever are you going to the Piccadilly Hotel for? That was where the Countess used to net trout. You must remember,’ Gladys said impatiently,’ I can’t say I do. This is a damned sight more important than anything Mother ever did.’ And was gone.

  They saw her through the shop window, fat and ridiculous, agitatedly flagging a passing taxi.

  Margaret exclaimed, ‘Well! Is that old flame of hers always so importunate?’

  She regretted the question, for, looking at this thin, anaemic woman she realized that she liked her as little as she knew her. She regretted it more when Sylvia answered: ‘I know nothing about Gladys’s private life. I never think that sort of thing does in business.’

  Margaret rose. ‘I must say antique buying’s as good an excuse as any I’ve heard for an afternoon’s gossip. How much is that?’

  She seized upon the first tolerable object to hand as she walked through the shop – a hollowed Seychelles nut set in an ornate gold salver.

  ‘Twenty pounds. It’s not genuine. It’s a Victorian imitation in gilt of the sort of baroque stuff you see at Waddesdon.’

  ‘It looks pretty. That’s all I mind.’

  As Margaret made out her cheque, Sylvia said: ‘I hope we gave you lots of material with our gossip for one of your wonderful, nasty short stories.’

  *

  Along the last five hundred yards of the bridle path brambles stretched out at every level, to sting the face, to catch the arm, to tear stockings. As Frau Liebermann hesitated Sukey stepped out on to the stubble.

  ‘It’s quite all right,’ she said, ‘the harvest’s in weeks ago. Such as it was this dismal summer.’ Then she cried, ‘Oh of course, your shoes! I should have thought to warn you. Or perhaps you don’t have these stout brogues in Germany. They’re hideous but they’re awfully convenient in the country.’