No Laughing Matter

by Angus Wilson

  Something about his remark drove political contempt from her face. She laughed and said:

  ‘Does it show so much?’

  ‘Yes, but never mind.’

  As he said it he thought, My God! What on earth am I doing talking to a nut-eating, jet-earringed woman like this, she’ll offer to show me her hand loom in a minute. They edged each other a little warily, but there was no time for their friendliness to be blown away, for the crowd was suddenly turning, running, shouting. Marcus tried to stand his ground but he was swept back down the lane, fighting all the time to keep his balance.

  ‘It’s the Facist bastards let it loose,’ an old man shouted.

  But an old woman said, ‘They oughtn’t to have done it. Not even if it was our own boys. A lorry! Why, they might av killed the kids.’

  But all causes, enemy or erring friend, gave way before the sound of hoofs bearing down upon them. Two heavy young men running drove so violent a passage between Marcus and the grumbling woman that he sensed himself flying through the air past the crowd to the side of them, although he could feel his feet still making contact with the road; indeed he caught his ankle sharply against the edge of the pavement, sprawled in front of the running feet and then dragged himself to safety in the narrow step of a doorway. Feeling, rather than seeing, the crowd hurrying past, he had a terrible fear, as in nightmares, that he would be lost if he were left behind. Yet he was too shaken and bruised to move from his half crouching posture; he had time to think ‘lost’? but to whom or to what pursuer? The thumping of running feet grew less and with it his panic; at last he knew silence enough and security to examine the pain in his knee where the torn trouser cloth flapped bloodily. He staunched the wound with a handkerchief, got up, felt dizzy, imagined Madge’s big-sized brown pot of tea, longed for it and, turning, saw his Hampstead young woman held kicking and screaming in the air by two grim faced young policemen. Whether it was the pathetic way that her tight black bun, symbol of her austere superiority, had fallen in a shapeless mass on her shoulders, or the one shoeless foot waving so helplessly, or the invasion of her privacy where her skirt had ridden up to show a white thigh, he was overcome by rage on behalf of women, the poor bitch sex that had been forever pushed around by brute force, the duped victims of men’s spunky idiocy. The embarrassed, self-consciously passionless faces of the two policemen were to him at that moment a mask for vicious lust. They were wrenching the poor woman’s arms cruelly. Staggering into the road, he came up to them as they lifted her past him to a waiting van.

  ‘You don’t have to wrench her like that, you know. I shall report that.’

  He meant to sound like a commanding, substantial colonel, but, of course, it came out in high pansy dudgeon. The younger policeman said to his mate:

  ‘You take her, Fred. I’ll just deal with Mabel here. What did you say?’ pushing his face very close to Marcus’s, showing all the fury he had concealed when handling the woman. Marcus felt from his balls a sexual battle.

  ‘I said I should report you.’

  Immediately, his arm was roughly and painfully seized.

  ‘You bastard,’ he cried, trying to free his arm.

  ‘That’s quite enough of that. I’m booking you for abusive language and obstructing a constable in the execution of his duty.’

  *

  That evening Marcus joined the one hundred and eleven people arrested in Bermondsey. When he had been charged at the Borough Police Station and released on his own surety to appear at Tower Bridge Magistrates’ Court on the Monday, he somehow no longer thought with pleasure of Madge’s hot tea. He went back to Hampstead, where, after a long hot bath, he spent a delicious hour in showing a rich and knowledgeable Chilean their collection. And an even more delicious quarter of an hour followed when the wraith-like, mink clad wife, who had looked lemon disdain at the abstracts, went into a narcissistic transport at his pet Marie Laurencin. Certainly, take one startled hare’s eye, lose one swan’s neck, it might have been her portrait. Jack, following the husband’s lead, essayed an embarrassed gallantry. But Marcus said, ‘Oh the bliss of someone who can like beautiful nonsense as well!’ He insisted on showing her his Magnasco cardinals.

  As Jack said afterwards, ‘You allow no human form to resist your obsessive patterns. You should have been a Moslem.’

  *

  Christmas (eighty days to go from Marcus’s fine of £10 – ‘You had no business to be in Bermondsey. Your behaviour was totally irresponsible’) loomed distantly ahead that year in a flurry of questions rather than of snow, in an atmosphere of increasing fears that gnawed the guts when goodwill should have been warming the cockles. Of course a year ago there had been questions too. At 52 the Countess had demanded of the dying Regan, ‘Who on earth is she?’ and it seemed too absurd, some American woman, when only yesterday she had dreamed again and again of dancing with him herself – at Ciro’s. But Billy Pop had been so reassuring: ‘They can’t afford to let him go,’ he’d said, ‘he’s our chief national asset.’ But they had, and now he was over the water with the woman he loved. It was all too rotten. The Countess and the waitress who always served her at Fuller’s tea-room had cried about it together. It was dramatic, and the Countess found herself often looking at the piano as though there ought to be some special music to go with the whole story.

  But as this renewal of the Bethlehem theogony approached, the questions in the newspapers were all to do with unpleasant quarrels in far away countries, all, except Austria (those enchanting waltzes), unknown to the Countess. In any case Billy Pop reassured her again and again, he had met So and So, who was the real man at Something or other, and again old So and So, who was the fellow behind something else. And although all this was confidential, it did seem that there were answers. In the end the Countess decided to meet the question by refusing to read the newspapers; in any case, she was always too busy to give them more than a glance.

  Gladys, too, saw a time when she wouldn’t be able to open the newspapers. Unless, that was, she could answer, no, more than that, satisfy Alf’s demands – was she calling him a liar then? Was this what they’d meant to each other all these years? Ringmer Development was flourishing, considering the uncertain property market and all this international tension; and Asbestos Products was expanding, no less. And now his baby, the one really sure thing he’d got on to in his life, his Cinema Hire Limited, was in danger. Good God! He’d got the securities, and more than half were paid for. She’d seen young Fison’s letter; as soon as the old boy had had his op the rest of the money would be in the post. Three weeks at the most. Christ! She didn’t want him to chivvy a sick man, did she? Well, if she did, no thank you, just because the bloody auditors were chivvying him. My God, if he’d had ten thousand pounds by him and she’d been in a jam…. But then she obviously didn’t trust him; all right, call him a bloody liar. For three weeks, three lousy weeks, that was all he was asking her, to borrow money from an old chap who didn’t even know he’d got it. He wasn’t asking her to sell to Christie’s or any of the posh places. No, he’d heard of a chap she could go to. A Jew as a matter of fact. Oh, for God’s sake, girlie, you don’t seem to have understood me much after all these years. The best Jews are the salt of the earth and absolutely brilliant. Hadn’t he always said so? All right then. Give him credit where credit was due. And as for this old boy Einstein or Twostein or Halfamostein, in three weeks she could plonk him down his ten thousand quid, they could even afford to forget the commission and she’d have saved him all the fuss of should he take the price or shouldn’t he? A decision that would probably kill him at that age with a bloody stroke. All right then, go to hell, if she preferred her ruddy principles to him.

  Hoarse on the telephone hour after hour, and in American bars, his hand shaking, breathing whisky at her, so red in the face now, mopping the sweat from his brow. And at her flat once, calling her for the first time ever a straight-laced bitch, a bloody Pharisee, twisting her plump arm so that she had to bring out the ivory sl
ave bangle she hadn’t worn for years to hide the bruises. And, afterwards two dozen yellow roses by special messenger. But principles were principles, though his eyes looked frightened, flickered uncertainly above his tired, baggy cheeks. But principles were principles, though his lower lip now seemed to have a freakish life of its own. Only, at last – they’d gone to Brighton on the new fast train from Victoria – he’d exasperated her and also won her heart by telling her of this greyhound he’d bought and how he called it Glad Eyes. Oh, Alf, at this moment! But she’ll win at White City, he said, and again at Harringay! She’ll be the turning point in my ruddy luck, he said. And at kindly Doctor Brighton’s clinic no business talk that day, he said, it wasn’t fair to her, just a hen lobster lunch and a blow of fresh air along the front. And he’d tried so hard to keep to it – admiring a pretty girl to tease her, pointing out sporting and theatrical celebrities, explaining how we’d beaten the U boats, sketching the history of the Saint Leger, describing how Lloyds worked, predicting the weather in the channel and diagnosing where Bottomley had made his mistake. And quite suddenly sitting in the shelter, down near the Black Rock, looking out to sea, he had burst into tears. It was Doris, he said; if he were to be prosecuted, it would kill her. But it wasn’t for Doris that Gladys agreed; it was because of an awful vision she had of his body, the hairy chest and legs she knew so well, the strong thighs that had so often gripped her, covered by a ridiculously baggy, too large coarse canvas suit patterned with broad arrows, like something in Punch. She didn’t know whether they dressed convicts up like that, probably not, but the vivid picture was enough to make her say yes. Can’t help loving that man of mine.

  *

  Questions breed questions. Stretching her thin, veined, old powdered arm out of her blue wool bedjacket Mrs Ahrendt took the cup of hot milk her husband brought her. Her voice was wheezy, for the flatlet was draughty.

  ‘But why don’t you ask her for an answer? You are too trusting, Hermann. Surely we have at least learned that no one is to be trusted.’

  Her eyelids blinked at him, the curve of her sunken mouth was querulous, Mr Ahrendt, shuffling in his bedroom slippers, went into the sitting-room through the great wide opening where the sliding doors had once been – the landlady said how big this made the room, their old bodies told them how cold. He carefully wound up the ornate green marble Biedermeier Clock before he spoke – they had clung to it sentimentally, since Miss Matthews had told him they would get so little for it. Then he said:

  ‘If we have learned that, my dear, then that man really has destroyed us. But you’re tired. Drink your milk. Shall I rub your chest with some camphorated oil?

  But in the morning when he brought her coffee and a roll she asked immediately again: ‘Will you go to Miss Matthews this morning? Just ask her, that’s all, just ask her.’

  ‘She has told me, Käthe, the experts are looking at it. Anyway what is it? Some copy, my dear. These religious pictures were copied in hundreds.’ The subject, Christ’s agony in the garden, annoyed him; when so much greater agonies were a commonplace today!

  Perhaps it was the cold she’d caught, or perhaps it was because, after all, it wasn’t her fault that they were here in this draughty hole – she was a Christian of Christian lineage and the Christian religion familiar to her – for whatever reason she didn’t know, Mrs Ahrendt began to cry. And, since he could do nothing, Mr Ahrendt picked up his black velours hat and his string bag and went out to Swiss Cottage to buy the week’s groceries. The old lady called after him – so many years they had been together, he was her man. But no answer and even in bed it was so cold.

  *

  Rupert asked: ‘Look, if I cross now, Belch won’t be able to move upstage when he leaves the seesaw without masking the clown. Shouldn’t I cross later on my exit lines?’

  And, all right, they tried it. So, moving, he would rebuke Maria; moving he would warn her ‘she shall know of it by this hand’. But his thoughts were how to join this arrogant, self-righteous and, with it all, favour-currying man with the pathos, no, not the pathos, something much stronger, the abominable horror of ‘in a dark chamber adjoining’. If he could not do this, all movements were meaningless for he would move no one. The Elizabethan conception of lunatics? – I am not mad, Sir Topas. I say to you, this house is dark. Ha, ha, ha! dark as ignorance, though ignorance were dark as hell. Ha, ha, ha! But I am not mad, Sir Topas – And – if he were, he hath been most notoriously abused. Not perhaps ha, ha, ha! but finally greeted with a gentle smile, my lady’s dismissive little shrug and pitying after-glance. Puritanism? Remember the abhorrence in which the puritans were held, but quite suddenly he couldn’t ‘remember’ something three centuries before he was born. Is’t even so? – old Norman’s voice, thick, but he hadn’t really got there, simply superficially a drunken voice. He couldn’t remember the abhorrence in which … Sir Toby, there you lie. Sir Toby, there you lie … Rupert! Rupert! … I’m terribly sorry, I’ve dried. Do you mind then, Nigel asked in a slightly bored, almost angry voice, if we take it all again? Act 2, Scene 3, from your entrance, Rupert – My masters, are you mad? And were they? Was that it? To laugh at a man in hell. And again, I’m sorry I’ve dried. And twice again Nigel, in bored, angry voice asked, Do you mind if we take it all again? At last lie said, All right, let’s break for lunch. Two fifteen sharp.

  And to Rupert, after explanation and exhortation and encouragement and censure that flew in and out amid the smocked waitresses and wooden soupbowls of the snack bar, ‘Look, love, is it Debbie?’ And it wasn’t, though it was clever of Nigel to have surmised, for really the shadow on the hearth was so faint that, himself, he almost thought it was his fancy. No, it was – ‘How do I join the two Malvolios?’ he asked, ‘how can I make them connect?’ And Nigel, who had been into all that – the ‘humour’ of Malvolio, the anachronism of psychological unity in Shakespeare – said, with as much disguise of weariness as he could muster (for it was probably some mental blockage and would work itself out in rehearsals) ‘I think you can only do it, Rupert, if you give the character enough love!’ Then, embarrassed by the echo of the words in this coffee-smelling shop of wooden tables, wooden spoons and wooden-faced women, he added, ‘The effect of those yellow stockings alone in this production, my dear! For it was to be done, save for Malvolio’s stockings, in black and white. So Rupert tried giving love to the bullying and self-esteem and the pomposity. He loved himself as he averred, ‘Infirmity that decays the wise, doth ever make the better fool’ and as he announced, ‘She added, moreover’ and as he conceded, ‘If you can separate yourself from your misdemeanours.’ And with love, it was true, he stopped ‘drying’ and he fancied that his voice had seldom sounded better; he was, he could not help thinking, giving some real poetry to the part. Once, it seemed to him, hearing his own rich tones, that he had found a certain nobility. Anyhow they would not reach darkness and hell until tomorrow and before that, Debbie would know, Debbie would succour him.

  For it had been – and this had seemed its own reward – a red letter day for Debbie when he told her he’d agreed to do Malvolio. She had taken over that evening from May in the kitchen and cooked specially for him as she had not done for ages, rognons Bercy and omelette confiture. She had toasted him, ‘May you be blessed in the Bard’ which was a phrase that the ridiculous old pro whose wife was their landlady in Sheffield had used the week they became engaged. And Tanya and little Christopher had been cleared out of the way early that evening. He had read aloud to her after dinner as she sat at his feet in front of the great log tire – ‘O sing the Lord a new song; sing unto the Lord all the earth’, and again, ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.’ Not that they were religious – although since Tanya had been old enough Debbie had taken her to Sunday School and sometimes herself went to matins. But Debbie had long thought that the Psalms were the most lovely pure language in our literature; and such a perfect vehicle for Rupert’s voice. And they had drunk between them a whol
e bottle of her home-made sloe gin. But this evening when he returned, panting for comfort, from rehearsal, not to Sunningdale but to the Bedford Square flat, Debbie was reading aloud to Tanya and Christopher a book most suited to her voice.

  ‘“Smooth and hot. Red, rusty spot never here be seen.” Oh!’ she looked up and smiled at her husband. ‘Mrs Tiggywinkle, darling,’ she said.

  ‘As if I didn’t know.’

  But his smile was effaced for she put her finger to her lips and frowned. To her amusement Tanya and even little Christopher did the same. When Rupert came back from washing she had begun, at Tanya’s importunate request, Jeremy Fisher.

  ‘This is getting tiresome. I think I should like some lunch, said Mr Jeremy Fisher,’ she read. The drollery she gave the word tiresome grated cruelly upon Rupert’s actor’s nerves. Later, however, when the children made a scene over Nanny’s taking them to bed, she was quite firm. ‘No, you’ve had me all the afternoon. Now it’s Daddy’s turn. You don’t want Daddy to be forgotten, do you?’ As soon as the door had closed behind them she came up to Rupert and, holding him by his lapels, stood back and looked at him.

  ‘Tired?’ she asked and answered herself, ‘Yes. Definitely tired.’ She at once mixed a superb dry martini. At dinner she insisted that he kept most of the mushrooms for himself, though he knew that she loved them.

  ‘Well?’ she asked, when with the tangerines she could see that he was no longer hungry, ‘Has Nigel been tiresome?’

  And he felt soothed by her putting it in this way, but then, as, taking his coffee, he sat down on the sofa a hard, edgy object jabbed him in the small of his back. Rummaging, he took out one of Christopher’s bricks, and resented her tactful approach to his mood.

  ‘No, why should he have been?’

  And now, delving deeper, he brought to light a small celluloid swan for floating in baths.

  ‘This flat is really too small for children.’