No Laughing Matter

by Angus Wilson

  On the day of the trial when Margaret and Douglas went to fetch the Countess and Billy Pop they had changed their minds. The Countess in a lemon nightdress and a lilac dressing gown explained to Margaret: ‘The whole thing’s aged me so terribly, Margaret. I’ve grown overnight into a little, bent, shrunken old woman. I suddenly saw myself, dear, pushing your father into that court room in his wheelchair – a pathetic old couple. For that’s what we are now. A sight like that couldn’t help anyone, least of all Gladys.’ When they had accepted this she became more agile, more sporty with Douglas. ‘Now, Douglas, as soon as they’ve come to their senses and released that poor girl, we must all have a celebration. Something quiet, of course; Billy and I are no longer youngsters. But I rely on you to book a table somewhere nice, somewhere amusing that’ll take the poor girl’s mind off all these horrors. You know the West End of London today. Billy and I are so out of it.’

  Margaret said: ‘Mother, you’d better realize that Gladys may very well be convicted and sent to prison.’

  The Countess began to cry into a little lace-edged handkerchief.

  ‘You’ve always been so hard, Margaret. You and Marcus. I don’t think you can be children of mine. Oh, yes, she has, Douglas, I know her better than you. All those horrid books! Oh, you’ve made my head ache. I’m not at all well these days, you know.’

  She went back to bed. Billy Pop called to them from his study: ‘You’ve heard what your Mother thinks. I daren’t tell her how poor the chances are. The vile injustice of this world, eh, Mag? Gladeyes, the best of the lot of you.’

  ‘Yes, Father, she is.’

  He tapped his dictionary impatiently. ‘Well, the best I can do and it’s a poor best is to get on with my work. You hear Mrs Hannapin won’t come in and cook today? Though she knows your Mother’s not up to it. A sister over from Canada or something. La Rochefoucauld was unpleasantly right – “The troubles of other people sit lightly upon our shoulders”.’

  The trial lasted nearly the whole day, despite Gladys’s refusal to offer a serious defence. Margaret, sitting between Douglas and Rupert, heard every word that was spoken and could remember none a minute later. She went over and over that evening when Douglas had not told her of Gladys’s visit, so much so that when he took her hand she pulled it away. And it did not help that the idea that she had got that evening at the theatre – she couldn’t quite remember now what it was – had done the trick. It only remained to kill Aunt Alice in loneliness and fear. Nevertheless she let her hand remain in Rupert’s, for this belonged to their childhood, this was part of the nightmare of 52.

  At the magistrates ‘court and in the weeks between she had felt, every time that Gladys had made some stupid facetious joke or fooled about when she was in such danger, that they were all on trial for accepting their sister’s clowning, her fat jollity as a substitute for the pains of real intimacy. She sat tense while Gladys stone-walled in the witness box and made no compunctious noises but only once or twice bad, childish jokes until the Judge rebuked her sharply – no welcoming family laughter here for the nursery Bessie Bunter. When at last the jury brought in the expected verdict Margaret was nearly sick and she could feel Rupert’s hand clench in hers.’ Your defending counsel has laid great emphasis upon your realizing your assets in order to recompense Mr Ahrendt. It is his job to do so. But I confess that I can see here little more than a last minute panic, an effort to buy off the man you had so grievously wronged. Grievously, and from your conduct in court today, I fear, heartlessly, with a shameful levity. The public must be protected against this kind of fraud….’ My God! in her fright, in the loneliness we’ve all condemned her to, she’ll surely seek to buy him off with a somersault or a false nose. But the woman who received the sentence – ‘You will go to prison for four years penal servitude, the maximum sentence for your offence, which I have no hesitation in pronouncing’ – was suddenly a very quiet, portly, dignified woman, who, standing quite alone, an object in an active world, said in a voice so low that Margaret could hardly hear it, ‘Thank you, my Lord’ and disappeared below. So, perhaps, Margaret noted, not, as the nieces expected, in vulgar ranting, would the old raddled woman go out in her lonely bedroom.

  Outside in the cold air they could none of them, Margaret saw, bear the prolongation of any family play.

  Rupert said defensively, ‘Debbie didn’t feel she should come,’ and looked at Douglas as an intruder.

  Marcus immediately said, ‘Thank you for coming, Douglas,’ so that Margaret felt she must come to Rupert’s defence.

  ‘Oh, Douglas! He’ll do anything helpful a bit late. I’ll telephone them at 52 and for the rest, we’re all quite useless.’

  So they all felt, and went their own ways.

  Quentin, recovering in hospital from broken wrist, fractured ribs, concussion and shock, read the news in the evening paper. He could only remember that in his comminatory catalogue of his brothers and sisters on the fatal night he had completely forgotten Gladys’ existence. He would write to her. Get on to Pritt about the case – they hadn’t quarrelled that much and he was a fine lawyer. Poor Gladys – lonely, neglected, fat old dear, completely forgotten. As he was. Not a single soul had been to see him in hospital. It was the price you pay for telling the truth; not a soul, not even Lena, ‘the good hearted trollop’. He was still very weak and he began to cry.

  ‘Good gracious me! Whatever is wrong?’ asked brisk Nurse Evans in her sing song.

  ‘I’m so alone, nurse, so absolutely bloody alone.’

  ‘And so you will be if you go on like that. Nobody wants to visit a grown man crying like that.’

  But he did receive visitors at five o’clock – Dodo Towneley, two other chaps from the paper and Muriel Lane, their famous roving correspondent, a good looking, bubsy, snooty bitch. He couldn’t keep his eyes off her cleavage. They said, of course, that they’d meant long before now to comfort their hero beaten up by Blackshirt bullies, but they hoped to make up for it with fruit and books and calf’s foot jelly. The really important thing, however, was this absolutely terrific article of his. Dodo showed it to him. ‘What makes the Red Cross’ it was called, and subheaded, ‘The Dane who didn’t like atrocities’. It was first rate, a sash hit with everyone, all Fleet Street was laughing.

  ‘I laughed like a drain,’ Muriel Lane said.

  ‘Look,’ Dodo said, ‘This is your line – exposing all these hells with good intentions. I tell you what, you’ll be out of here in a fortnight, your doctor says. We’re going to send you to convalesce in Africa. There’s a body of cranks – schoolteachers, nuteaters, pacifist poets and American missionaries marching next month to the Abyssinian border to protest against Italian exploitation. Of course Musso won’t let them in. But you must cover it. It’ll be the funniest thing we’ve had for years.’

  ‘But what harm are they doing?’

  ‘What harm? Good Lord! Well, even as to harm, they’re deflecting attention from the important things that are being done – yes, that’s the line.’

  ‘You’ll be coming with me,’ Muriel said, ‘I’m covering the news angle.’

  Nigel phoned to Debbie the next week. ‘Debbie, darling, I’m calling a couple of rehearsals on Wednesday and Thursday. As always the performances have gone ragged. But Rupert! Deary me! It’s all broken in pieces. The line’s quite gone. One minute he’s a sort of sergeant major and the next he’s a lost soul in agony. I thought as you’d done so much before …’

  ‘Oh dear, Nigel. I’m afraid it’s all this business of his sister. He really never saw the poor creature, but you’ve no idea what a “family” family the Matthews are in their unconventional way. But I’ll work on him. Don’t worry.’

  *

  Munich came to most of the Matthews brothers and sisters as a horrible, long-awaited, too predictable curtain to an exhausting play. They greeted it – most of them abroad – with the sad recognition that the nagging pain in their vitals would not now be brought to an end by any of the advertised
panaceas, of which Mr Chamberlain’s ‘peace in our time’ scrap of paper was so obvious a parody. Quentin in Somaliland doubled his evening whisky intake; Rupert, now in the Broadway transfer of Twelfth Night, remembered that the show must go on; Margaret at Aswan went out in a boat all day by herself and at evening had a headache from the sun; Marcus, viewing an ornate Saint Sebastian in a church at Sao Paulo, schemed to keep Jack from returning to Europe. Gladys, who might have been a more shocked recipient of the news, was numbed by prison.

  But the effect on Billy Pop and the Countess was dramatic. The Countess was sure that it was a terrible comedown for England, but Billy Pop had met old so-and-so again, the chap who was high up in the Ministry who said that, not at all, it was the genuine last concession to Hitler, and old so-and-so in the War Office who said Hitler had bitten off more than he could chew, and, in any case, if it came to a scrap, most of the German forces were only on paper, whereas ours…. But the Countess didn’t feel convinced. Billy Pop had reassured her so often in life and did old so-and-so really know? Your Father’s a brilliant man but he’s let himself drop out of the world that counts for so long; and, again had he really met old so-and-so? It wouldn’t be the first time or the last that he’d lied to her. As for the children, away from England, it just showed how little sense they had of what was happening in the world; clever enough, but with their heads in the air, ostriches with their heads in the sand. Now Billy, whatever his faults, was always alive to things, and, as for herself, she’d never been a dreamer, thank God. She wrote to Sukey since the others were unavailable. ‘We must pray and hope. But your Father and I and a lot of informed people do feel that this is the red light. It isn’t just Czechoslovakia and all that. We simply cannot give way anymore.’ Sukey was so cut off, living in the provinces.

  Sukey wrote in answer:

  ‘Hugh had a good idea of what was going to happen over a year ago. Friends in high places are often useful. That’s why we moved the school. If it’s to come (and I’m pretty sure it must) the sooner the better, I say, and get it over. Senior and Middleman (who’s recovered from his pacifist measles) are all ready for it and I don’t intend to make things harder for them by holding on to them. Even P. S. makes soldierly noises, silly boy. But of course it’ll all be over before he’s reached Fifth Form. Anyway, if you’re worried about yourselves, you’d better let me find you a hotel down here to live in. The authorities in London will have quite enough on their hands without the elderly. Everyone says it will be comparatively bomb free down here. There’s a hotel on the other side of Exeter that might suit you well; you wouldn’t want to be mixed up with a lot of grubby little boys, I know.

  We’re still in a terrible pickle after the move here, and now that Hugh’s sole headmaster I have to give all my time to the school. They say I’m not half bad at it, but I’m determined not to become the complete headmaster’s wife. Luckily – Father will laugh – but a chap in Western Regional whose boy we’ve got for next term happened to see a piece I’d written about our days on the houseboat on the Nile. He liked it enormously-just the sort of thing when the news is so awful and everyone wants to think of the good old days. I’m going to do him a weekly series. They say my voice comes over with real authority. Who knows? I may outdo Margaret, especially as her sort of morbid sarky stuff is not the thing for this moment. Of course, I’m only joking. I enclose a typed copy of’So many tombs but only one mummy’, the piece about us on the Nile I broadcast last week. I’ve written another script about the car we had in 1928 that got stuck on Exmoor; you remember Winnie the Wolseley. I’ve got a few more in mind – all family adventures – I wonder if you can guess what they’re about from the titles:

  Two hundred mums and one pot of shrimp paste

  How to climb Snowdon without a tin opener

  When Santa left too many cricket bats

  Why can’t we take the Rhino home?

  Oh, by the way, P.S. is looking forward terrifically to his Easter London visit, but do remember not to mention the wretched Gladys business. I don’t want him to know. I’ve told him she’s gone to Australia (well, it’s almost true, isn’t it?).’

  Billy Pop once again remarked on the truth of La Rochefoucauld’s cynicism, but the Countess was more concerned with Sukey’s interpretation of her war warning.

  ‘As if I’d written because we were afraid! The idea!’ she told Mrs Hannapin. ‘Why, if war comes, Mr Matthews will be wanted at once for propaganda. He’ll be over military age this time, you know.’

  And Billy Pop too was angry enough to write to Sukey, ‘I’m afraid I shall be too busy doing my bit to get down to West Country hotels. And your Mother won’t leave London if there’s a war, that’s certain. She’ll have the time of her life.’

  As to Sukey’s broadcast they could neither of them read much of the script she’d sent, but then she lived such a provincial, shut-off life.

  ‘We were in fact very much a Swiss Family Robinson; and I, in particular, felt completely “my good wife”, when Senior (then at the Awful Age) fell into the Nile and instead of coming up a Gruesome Green was fished up a Beastly Brown by our faithful Ali, for I was able by the aid of my “magic box” (I really believe Ali thought there was magic in it) to find a soap powder (quite a new discovery in those days) that took the stains out of his little white shirt and grey flannel knickers.’

  Billy Pop said, almost in surprised tones: ‘This is muck.’ But the Countess insisted on reading a little further.

  ‘I suppose it was P. S. (then as we used to call them a Toddler) who made the biggest hit with the servants until the awful day when he learned to imitate our Beloved Goose that swam round the boat and took scraps (mostly large quantities of rice that the Lord and Master refused to eat and I had to smuggle out in envelopes or even handkerchiefs, for dear Ali and Mohamed were very touchy about their culinary arts, which indeed, except to Lord and Master’s taste, would have bid fair to outdo Escoffier). I noticed that P. S. was getting a number of what we had decided to call Egyptian Evil Eyes when I suddenly realized that his goose grunts which so amused us were giving offence below stairs, or perhaps I should say in the galley. Of course I knew that the Romans had sacred geese, but I had no idea …’

  The Countess put the typescript down. ‘I think, living down there, she doesn’t really know what interests people.’

  *

  When the war came, indeed up to the invasion of France, the Countess was most active, going around with a map of London that showed where the Zeppelin bombs fell – ‘We really went through it then.’ And Billy Pop, through Margaret, sold an article to a new highbrow magazine that was about to appear. The article was called ‘A Day’s Cricket with Enoch Soames’ and contained his recollections of the poet, Stephen Philips. But in August 1940 they moved from 52 to the country hotel suggested by Sukey. As the Countess said, ‘London has enough mouths to feed.’

  POSTSCRIPT TO BOOK THREE

  French Windows – An interrupted play

  [Scene the drawing room of Exe Grange, a residential country hotel in Devonshire. Time: late April 1942. Armchairs and sofas in flowered cretonne loose covers. Curtains of the same material. A few occasional tables on which are bowls of daffodils and early species tulips. A small wood fire is burning, but through the French windows the last rays of a warm spring sun are shining. In one armchair, COLONEL CHUDLEIGH, an old retired officer of the courteous kind, is reading Blackwood’s Magazine at one of the tables, MRS LOMAX, a fussy but sharp-eyed old lady is settled in a high chair playing patience. From outside the French windows voices (a man’s and a woman’s) can be heard.]

  MRS LOMAX: Oh, dear, another session of ‘our brilliant children’! The Earl and Countess back from their evening airing.

  COLONEL CHUDLEIGH: And what he did in the Great War, Daddy. It is a bit steep.

  [The French windows open and MRS RICKARD-MATTHEWS, well preserved, well made-up, well but hardly suitably dressed, comes in. Nothing about her would betray her sixty-five
years. She lifts her husband’s wheelchair down the one step into the room. MR RICKARD-MATTHEWS is frail and shrunken, except for his face which is still ruddy, and the more cherubic for his smooth bald head fringed with a halo of soft grey curls.]

  MRS LOMAX: How was the sunset?

  MRS RICKARD-MATTHEWS: Oh, all right for Devonshire.

  MRS LOMAX: Don’t forget Colonel Chudleigh’s is one of the oldest families in Devonshire.

  MRS RICKARD-MATTHEWS: Oh, but you’ve travelled, haven’t you, Colonel? You’re not a country stick-in-the-mud. My aunt – the children’s great aunt – was quite a famous traveller. She was the discoverer of one of the original tulips. All these we have now are garden what its names, you know. She used to say the loveliest sunsets of all were in Arabia. Do you remember that, Billy? How Mouse always praised the Arabian sunsets? Of course, she travelled in the days when …

  MR RICKARD-MATTHEWS: Speaking of Arabia as Clara has made us do it amuses me, Colonel, to hear all the fuss made about T. E. Lawrence these days. I met him a number of times in the middle ’twenties. In fact I often think that if I’d had time to cultivate him he might never have made an ass of himself enlisting in the Flying Corps. But I also knew F. L. Garthwaite, who was one of Allenby’s right hand men. After talking to him the Lawrence legend can only be an embarrassment. I was arguing about it with my son-in-law, Douglas Rootham just before he and my daughter left England …

  MRS RICKARD-MATTHEWS: Douglas is on the general staff in Cairo. He’s a brilliant archaeologist, you know, and …