No Laughing Matter

by Angus Wilson

  ‘You can’t be such an ass as to think that anybody wants war, can you?’ Senior demanded. ‘We shall do everything we can to avoid it, but if we do have to fight …’

  ‘Oh, by jingo!’ Middleman said, ‘I know. Well this time ships won’t be very important and let’s hope we haven’t got the money. We could be the first civilized country in the world to contribute nonviolence …’

  ‘To contribute to the end of civilization I should have thought.’

  She had to avoid the small spoilt boy’s eye that wished to include her in their nonsense – as a rule at least this youngest one, though Mummy’s darling, was quieter than the others. But now!

  ‘Why! if Hitler isn’t stopped, it could mean a century of darkness for the world.’

  ‘Oh yes …’ Middleman’s voice particularly annoyed her – blah-blah-blah it went, the clever Pascoe son! ‘Very likely a millennium of barbarism. I quite admit it. But mankind would have begun for the first time a new technique of living.’

  The eldest ugly one’s braying laugh ran through her head.

  ‘It would be the millennium if you got Englishmen to accept that nonsense, wouldn’t it, Dad?’

  But before that poor, feeble Mr Pascoe could answer, the little boy had turned directly to her.

  ‘All the decent people in Germany look to England to do the right thing, don’t they, Frau Liebermann?’

  His silly, well meaning, overloved little face seemed to swell red before her until she knew that if this Pascoe balloon were not pricked the whole world would go down in a carnival of vanity and silliness. Holding her cigarette before her she leaned forward as though to burn the excited boy. She said very deliberately and slowly:

  ‘Perhaps you should know, my little boy, that nobody expects anything any more of England. Of course we have known always that the English talk so great about helping the weak ones and do nothing. After all, you are Great Britain. You must have something great, so let it be words. Oh! But this we are used to – the English hypocrisy. Oh, that we don’t mind – all their, what do you call it? Sunday manners!’

  ‘No, I don’t think I’ve ever heard that.’ Sukey’s tone was flat and conversational but it still didn’t stay the throaty flood.

  ‘But we always think – Now she is only talking, but wait until she is in danger herself, then we shall see the famous lion claws.’ Frau Liebermann shouted so loudly that P. S. giggled. ‘Oh, yes, all this is so funny because, of course, now there are no claws, Only naughty little boys who say we must spare a little thinking for those poor damned Jews in Germany. Very naughty boys who talk about war which upsets Mrs Pascoe. Why, think of it, if we fight Hitler Mr Pascoe may have to move his school to somewhere that the nasty German bombs do not come to. And Mrs Pascoe does not at all want to move. So please, Adolf Hitler, don’t make your speeches and shouting, you are upsetting all the English mothers and their children. But I think you do not have to worry. Your newspapers have the picture of the Führer with the little daughters of Herr Goebbels, oh so sweet girls with blonde hair. Oh, no, we are not to worry. Der Führer liebt die Kinder, nicht wahr? Only I think the Pascoe boys are rather big children, so maybe he will send them to the mines or labour camps or maybe he will shoot them. Oh, I know Mr Pascoe you are right to shout at me, these things are not to say, they will worry Mrs Pascoe and she has her Christmas cards to send to Australia.’

  Frau Liebermann was not quite truthful. Hugh’s voice had been raised, but he had not shouted. He never did so. But now, as Sukey had never heard him before, he bawled at Frau Liebermann until the veins stood out under the dark pigment of the flesh of his temples.

  ‘Stop that. If you don’t feel any gratitude, then at least spare us this exhibition …’

  Sukey, surveying them all so grim, hysterical, excited over a tiresome woman’s irrelevant words could not help raising her eyebrows, sighing and shaking her head in comic impatience; she hoped the comedy of it would touch P. S. and bring him back to her, to home, to the fact that half term was too precious for all this. But her cooling comedy was cut into by Frau Liebermann who began to cry hysterically, tears mascaraedly smearing her rouged cheeks.

  ‘Oh, we must feel gratitude. We know that. Gratitude when the little Pascoe always sleeps here at his home but Arnold is to sleep at the school even at half term.’

  ‘Really,’ Hugh said. ‘Now look, Frau Liebermann,’ and taking his tobacco pouch, he began to fill his pipe, speaking slowly and deliberately to such hysterical nonsense, ‘You perfectly well know that you see Arnold every day, and he comes here to Sunday lunch. And then P. S. is a prefect …’

  ‘A prefect! Yes, and everybody knows he should not be. A favourite.’

  ‘That’s enough of that …’

  But Sukey, looking at the dishevelled red hair, the familiar tiresome face all wet and spoilt, suddenly saw not just a failed talisman, but another woman bullied and wretched. She must keep to her bargain with God. It wouldn’t count if she didn’t live up to it, not just to the letter. God knew when He was deceived.

  ‘Oh, shut up, Hugh,’ she said, but softly. Then going over to Frau Liebermann she took both her hands and began to chafe them. ‘No, my dear. Of course Arnold can sleep here for tomorrow night, why not?’

  But Frau Liebermann seemed too hysterical to be touched by kindness. She got up, pushed Sukey aside and, teetering on her high heels, ran from the drawing-room. As she went her squirrel coat brushed a Bohemian porcelain lamb from an occasional table; it fell to the floor and was smashed. Sukey shrugged her shoulders in despair.

  ‘I’ll go to her,’ she said.

  Hugh levelled his pipe stem at her: ‘My dear girl …’

  ‘No, I must.’

  To P. S. his mother looked so brave a figure as, all alone, she set off to comfort her own sex in distress that he got up to follow her.

  ‘Mummy, Mummy.’

  ‘No, P. S., old chap. This is where the menfolk of the world are de trop. We can be most useful in picking up the pieces,’ Hugh said. He sent Middleman for a dustpan and brush.

  Sukey beat upon the locked door of Frau Liebermann’s room to no avail.

  ‘You’d better open to me. I shan’t go away until you do.’

  Yet it was more than quarter of an hour before Frau Liebermann obeyed. She still had on her fur coat, but she was carrying her suitcase and she had put on that absurd thing like a navy blue man’s homburg hat with a diamanté pheasant pinned in it.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Sukey took the suitcase from her, ‘take off your hat and sit down.’

  Frau Liebermann did not take off her hat, but she sank into the small armchair.

  Sukey sat on the bed.

  ‘Now, Frau Liebermann, it’s no good letting yourself get upset. That’s letting that beast win a victory. And it won’t help to get Sigmund here. Or make things easy for poor little Arnold. You shouldn’t have said that about P. S. But you couldn’t know. He’s not a boarder because he’s very highly strung. Arnold will sleep here ir your room for tomorrow. Just you and him. And we won’t have any more tears or saying cruel things, will we? ‘She paused but Frau Liebermann merely stared at her. Pressed by the silence, Sukey added, ‘You came here on false pretences, you know. I had some mad idea, some secret idea that if we asked you here then I’d have paid my price, that there’d be no war. Oh, of course, I didn’t believe it, but it stopped me worrying … about them, that I shouldn’t lose them.’

  ‘But you will, Mrs Pascoe. There will be war or God help you. You must let them go. You have your husband. He needs you. To help him to make up his mind to move the school and then all the work there will be when you move to the West of England.’ Frau Liebermann took off her hat and shook her hair loose; she took off her shoes and stretching her legs, wriggled her toes. ‘Very well, I’ll stay tonight. But tomorrow I’ll go to London. I’ve saved money. I only make trouble with you all here. I’ll take a room. Arnold can join me when the holidays come.’

  Sukey got up.
‘Of course you’ll stay tonight and tomorrow. We’ve done badly, but we’ve done our best. I’m not going to let you put us further in the wrong. Oh, this awful world! That two grown women who should be leading their own lives should be thrown into such intimacy.’

  She moved to the door: ‘I can’t do much for you, but as you say you’re going – and you’re right, of course – I can try to be intimate for once. And though you may not believe it, it really costs me something. Do, for Heaven’s sake, mind your own business even with the Quakers. Probably someone had to say what you said to me. But I shan’t be able to forget it. I don’t think anyone can forgive things like that. We certainly can’t here. We’ve had our own ways too long for that.’

  Sir,

  Your leading article last week parrots all the old cries about the crimes of Messrs Chamberlain and Chautemps, Attlee and Ernest Bevin and his TGWU stalwarts. The drama playing out before our eyes is not so simple as the one in which the inept and absurd Lords Plymouth and Perth are cast as villains. Non-intervention is a red herring peculiarly suited to the undiscerning palate of the English people – particularly to your mixed progressive readers from red duchesses and pink poets to Uncle Tom Cobley and all. To repeat denunciations of the crimes that the Führer and the Duce are committing against the Spanish people under cover of our Prime Minister’s convenient and cowardly umbrella is too easy an indulgence. Fascism, we socialists cannot repeat too often, is merely the undisguised brutality of capitalism in its most desperate phase. But to echo the slogans of your friends in King Street is not the most helpful way to defeat Fascism or to aid the Spanish workers ‘cause. To anyone like myself who has seen the Teruel front at first hand, to identify the cynical power politics of the Soviet Union with that spontaneous and extraordinary revolution of Marxists, anarchists, syndicalists and workers of all kinds which still has some chance of success in Spain is itself a cynical enormity. A little hard thinking is needed. The first thing required is to ask the right questions. What part, for example, did the Russian consul play in the sad events in Barcelona last April? Who inspired the attack on the Telefonica? What was the role of Comrade Gerö, representative of the Comintern, in the Catalonian events? How far is this suppression of all independent socialist opinion in Barcelona and Valencia only another manifestation of the fake ’trials’, arrests and brutalities that have reigned in the Soviet Union over the last two years? These are just a few of the real questions that ‘an independent socialist newspaper’ (I quote your own description of your esteemed journal) should be asking.

  But, of course, after my experience since my return from Spain when even reactionary newspapers like the Daily Telegraph have been more willing to publish the truths I have tried to tell in my articles than the Left wing press so intent on preserving an United Front, I hardly suppose that you will publish this letter, Yours, etc., Q. J. Matthews.

  [Editor’s note: Q. J. Matthews is quite wrong. Our correspondence is an open forum. We do, however, reserve to ourselves the right not to publish articles criticizing the Valencia government when it is fighting for its life, especially when those articles contain the unfounded charges against the Soviet Union which are now so mechanically regular a part of this brilliant journalist’s analysis of events.]

  Margaret, reading the weeklies in her mid-morning break from writing, did not know the answers to her brother’s questions. But she thought, why is he always so cocksure? It struck somehow a false note. So Marcus had always thought and he had a wonderful ear for the spurious.

  But then she felt ashamed for herself. For really what did she know, or indeed do in these ghastly days except make occasional speeches at progressive rallies? Ill informed nonsense too. She and all other artists probably ought to stick to their own job and get on with their art in a mad world.

  The last paragraph she’d written this morning was good. The flow had come when she had remembered that opera cloak of gold thread and raised purple velvet pansies which the old woman in the royal box had worn when they went en famille to Chu Chin Chow. Mouse had smiled at its vulgarity, Granny M had thought it shockingly ‘fast’, but the Countess had secretly longed to possess it. It was exactly the thing Aunt Alice would have treasured from her past and the nieces, especially sex-starved, genteel Jessica would have hated. The effect was heightened by appearing in this Jessica-viewed section. She sat down, relaxed, to read what she had written:

  ‘When she had fixed the bed table over the old woman’s knees and set down the breakfast tray, Jessica waited for the usual recriminations, the usual objections to the little cosies she put on the eggs. But it appeared that her ladyship was in happy mood this morning for, “A real three and a half minute egg” was said with a smile. The unexpected smile irritated Jessica. Going to the huge walnut wardrobe, she opened a door. At once the old woman’s expression changed. “Don’t fuss in there, Jessica. I won’t have it.” “If you won’t, auntie, the moths will.” She felt pleased with her condensed sentence. And, as though to approve, a small clothes moth flew out, and then another. “Damn and blast Nancy,” cried the old woman, “I told her to put moth balls …” “Oh, don’t be so selfish, Aunt Alice, my poor sister. She’s rushed off her feet as it is. All this rubbish.” Jessica pulled out at random an old purple and gold object and shook it. An opera cloak with velvet pansies! The vulgarity of it! As she shook it the room was filled with – she could only call it, a rank smell of men. “This old rag must go for a start.” “Old rag! I’ve had very good times in that old rag, my girl,” Alice’s chuckle was obscene. Jessica rolled up the piece of finery into a bundle and carried it from the room.’

  Yes, yes, so the niece was genteel and prudish and spiteful, and the old woman had been lusty and opulent. But were liking egg cosies and having failed to attract men to count as villainy, to stand for cruelty? And was having taken so many men into you, and wearing of purple gold cloaks with whatever pleasure, with whatever warmth, whatever extravagant finesse, to be accounted graces? And, if they were, then what was to stand for the old woman’s cruel selfish past? For if she had not been cruel and selfish then this protest against her crumbled majesty, her senile powerless body was mere protesting on behalf of the angels. It was the protest against powerlessness and old age itself that she sought to make, the protest against anyone, however guilty, however ‘deserving’ of retribution, being acted upon, used, disregarded like the bed she lay in. In which case the splendid vulgar purple raiment with all its overtones of life and lust and saving absurdity was simply a sentimental gloss, as false and tearjerking as that awful Lord’s Prayer that trumpeted Jo’s ascent to join the angels. Oh, it was all false, false.

  Here she was, left to write in peace, Mrs Armitage told not to come, Douglas banished to the Travellers, until luncheon, and down she could dig in stillness to her very self – and what had she brought to the surface but false sentimentality? She wrote on another sheet of paper, ‘Elizabeth Carmichael flung her arms wide. “Oh, it’s false, it’s false,” she cried, for she too could be poor Lady Isobel or a tragedy queen.’

  But the old mockeries did not somehow work. She lit a cigarette and leaning heavily on her desk, stared out to where the bare trees of Holland Park made Chinese shapes against the skyline. Why couldn’t she take on something simple, something whose outline declared itself in advance? The owls had been hooting again last night. A Gothic fable, perhaps, all elegance and self-parody about the great and wicked Lady Holland …

  When Douglas came in he must have seen from the dejected slump of her body that she was all but up to her neck in the slough, for he put his arms round her shoulders from behind and stroked her breasts. She could tell, as he soothed her, that he was reading what she had written.

  ‘Well?’ she asked.

  ‘All right. Very good. Jessica’s as odious as she ought to be. The garment sounds pretty revolting.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ she cried, horrified that he should be so obtuse.

  ‘Purple velvet pansies? Well, I don’t k
now about these women’s things.’

  ‘I assure you they used to be worn, darling.’

  ‘Really?’ He didn’t sound interested. ‘And they succeeded? You liked them?’

  ‘Well, not liked! Of course not. They were preposterous. But …’ She couldn’t find words.

  ‘I see. I don’t think I really understand. I’ll get you a large whisky.’

  As soon as he had gone from the room, she saw it all. The wretched purple cloak was all sentimental journalism, pride of memory, pride of eye. Journalism and worked up righteous anger, that’s all she’d written. Egg cosies and cloaks! Taste to do service for morality! And a patronizing acceptance of someone else’s false taste into the bargain! The purple merely cloaked old Alice’s cruelty, her vulgar tyranny. The possession loved could have splendour, but it must also once have had malice. Immediately she saw what it must be. When Douglas returned she was already making her notes so that he put the whisky down on the desk without speaking. She gulped it down eagerly in three goes, as quickly as her fountain pen was covering the paper. ‘Pudding, A’s beloved Persian cat, his smoke blue hair, his dark amber eyes.’ She underlined dark, for she could see it all now exactly. ‘An earlier scene in detail where he cruelly plays with a mouse. Old now. Sleeps on her bed. Mud left once. Nancy forbids it on bed. Old A. tottering to lift him on bed, falls.’ As she wrote ‘falls’ she could hear the telephone ringing and Douglas answering it. ‘Jessica joins to ban Pudding on bed. Doctor Malone suborned to agree cat on bed insanitary. For A. loss of cat’s warmth on bed at night is death that much nearer.’

  ‘Darling, I’m sorry I don’t think I can deal. Whatever I say might be wrong.’

  She looked up at him with hatred for his interruption and wrote almost illegibly, ‘next time they’ll refuse to let him into the room and how could she know?’