No Laughing Matter

by Angus Wilson

  MR RICKARD-MATTHEWS: My dear girl, they wouldn’t make him a lieutenant colonel just because he can dig up fossils. No, he speaks Arabic like a native. My daughter wrote the other day …

  MRS RICKARD-MATTHEWS: Oh, Mrs Lomax, you’ll be excited to hear this. There’s a new Margaret Matthews on the way. Margaret wrote to say she’d just sent off the proofs. Two copies this time by separate post because of the submarines – special arrangements and all that, my son-in-law is in a position and so forth, although she’s famous enough in her own right…. She couldn’t say where she was but the most fascinating thing was that she’d met her brother Rupert for a talk. He’s been on a tour of all the R.A.F. stations in the Middle East. I shouldn’t be surprised if Douglas hasn’t packed her off to Jerusalem, Billy, with things in Egypt as they are. That could be where she met Rupert. I know he expected to go there. Of course in Douglas’s position he can arrange accommodation for her anywhere at a moment’s notice. Yes, it’s probably Jerusalem. She mentioned cypress trees.

  MR RICKARD-MATTHEWS: Oh, the blabbing of women, eh, Colonel? Walls have ears, my dear. I wonder if you agree with me, Colonel, in thinking that air force skills and so on are not quite so specialized as we’ve been led to believe. I’m not speaking of the bravery of these boys, of course, that’s beyond question. But the sheer skill needed. I say this because my boy Rupert who’s been an actor all his life …

  MRS RICKARD-MATTHEWS: My dear Billy, Colonel Chudleigh knows Rupert Matthews. He hasn’t lived quite out of the world. It was all they could do to stop Rupert joining up, Colonel, although he’s not a boy any longer. Everyone told him how much more valuable he would be entertaining the troops. At last they got me to speak to him. I simply said, ‘Rupert, don’t be silly. This war doesn’t have any star parts. It’s team work, my dear.’ Now, of course, he’s done I don’t know how many thousand miles flying, keeping morale up. And of course right up to the firing line. He insists on taking the controls.

  MR RICKARD-MATTHEWS: That’s just what I was about to say, dear. They say he’d have made a first rate pilot if he hadn’t been over age. I don’t think it can be quite such a specialized …

  MRS RICKARD-MATTHEWS: Oh, nonsense, Billy, it’s just that war brings out unexpected things in people. My youngest boy … we really thought …

  MR RICKARD-MATTHEWS: Oh, but Marcus was always artistic, Clara, and that’s what you want in camouflage work. Though I’m surprised he makes a good adjutant.

  MRS LOMAX: And how is your other daughter, Mrs Rickard-Matthews?

  MRS RICKARD-MATTHEWS: Oh, I told her not to think less of herself just because she’s not in the forces. Running a school’s vital war work, don’t you think, Colonel Chudleigh?

  MR RICKARD-MATTHEWS: And a full time job. We’ve expressly forbidden her to waste her time coming over to us. It’s the youngsters that matter, not those who have got into the sere and yellow stage.

  MRS LOMAX: No, I didn’t mean Mrs Pascoe. I always see her at the Violet tearooms when I go into Exeter. She’s a great elevenses devotee. I meant your other daughter who came to you for Christmas after being away so long? Has she found war work yet? I remember there was some difficulty. I do think nothing should prevent …

  MRS RICKARD-MATTHEWS: Oh, that was only a temporary bother. Billy pulled strings, didn’t you, darling?

  MR RICKARD-MATTHEWS: Yes, a very tough but powerful string at the War Office to be exact.

  MRS LOMAX: As long as it’s not the Treasury. We’re finding it difficult enough to pay for this war as it is, eh, Colonel?

  MRS RICKARD-MATTHEWS [losing immediately all her bright manner, fierce and aloof]: Either you’re too stupid to know what you’re saying, Mrs Lomax, or you should be careful not to be slanderous.

  MRS LOMAX: Slanderous! Now, Mrs Rickard-Matthews, what is the point in pretending? I remembered your daughter’s name at once. Didn’t I, Colonel? The whole case. Of course when she was here I was very careful…. She’d paid the price. No one wanted to hound her.

  COLONEL CHUDLEIGH: Now really, I don’t think this is necessary, Mrs Lomax. Mr and Mrs Rickard-Matthews have all our sympathies as we said at the time.

  MRS LOMAX: But that’s exactly it. It’s so much better not to bottle these things up. When I think how I should have felt if my dear Isobel … but then of course her father was as straight as a die in money matters …

  MR RICKARD-MATTHEWS: I don’t know what you’re insinuating, but …

  MRS RICKARD-MATTHEWS [taking his hand]: Oh, Billy, dear, you don’t have to explain yourself to every Tom, Dick and Harry. My dear, you’re an artist, a man of the world, don’t apologize for it.

  MR RICKARD-MATTHEWS: You are right, Clara. As always. [He presses her hand.] Just wheel me along to our room, my dear. We may as well put on our glad rags, even if it is only vegetable pie for dinner. Dressing for dinner is an old established British custom when you’re living among savages. [Smiling boyishly at his joke he is wheeled away by his proud, handsome, straightbacked wife. As they reach the door, she turns, smiling sweetly.]

  MRS RICKARD-MATTHEWS: Colonel Chudleigh, would you please explain the laws of slander to Mrs Lomax? I shall expect an apology, you see, when we’re all dressed and civilized and in our right minds.

  [Curtain. From, the darkness amid the rustle of papers and clanking of tea cups comes a woman’s voice: ‘Oh I think she’s wonderful. That exit! She moves so beautifully. None of the young ones today can do it. And they say she’s almost seventy.’

  As the lights go up in the auditorium another woman’s voice is heard: ‘Her acting always seems a little hard to me. But really he is amazing. That little chuckle and that smile, he hasn’t changed since I was a schoolgirl. And he gives such a polished, quiet performance.’]

  POP AND MOTOR

  A Catastrophe

  [Later that night-scene a big bare bedroom in the same hotel. The lighting is full upon the centre stage where sits POP, swathed like a mummy, in his wheelchair. Around him prowls MOTOR like an old caged, mangy tigress. In the darkness of the corner of the room various articles of furniture make ever new monstrous shapes that never quite acquire definition. A faint, sad, moonlight coming from the window reaches the central pool of light and dies there.]

  POP [reciting with dramatized nostalgia]: They are not long the weeping and the laughter. All is sleeping in the hereafter.

  MOTOR [half adapting her steps to the rhythm of her high, tuneless singing]: Every boy in London Town is phoning.

  POP [taking out a megaphone from the folds of the rug that covers his legs, begins bawling]: I think they have no portion in us after we pass the gate.

  MOTOR [breaking into a slightly rusty quick fox trot, produces a portable radio that accompanies her singing]: Dancing time is any old time for me.

  POP [shouting now as he tries another tack]: And sick of an old passion, yea, I was desolate and bowed my head.

  MOTOR

  [singing in the high little upper class notes of Edwardian musicals]:

  Fates may be crossed, loves may be lost under the deodar.

  [THEY CONTINUE TO RECITE IN COMPETITION FOR SOME MINUTES.]

  POP: This has gone on long enough.

  MOTOR: It had gone on too long the moment it began. But in for a penny in for a pound, I said. Laughing and looking back, my white lace dress fell for a second from my shoulder and the geranium gleamed against it scarlet as blood! Belle dame sans merci, he cried. The scent of geraniums was cloying, but I ran, a young girl, back to my first ball. Je vous félicite, Mademoiselle, de votre parfum, and a hand pressed against my gloved hand in the lift and later at the casino, Je vous félicite, Mademoiselle, de votre tango. I blew smoke rings at him as we sat on the little, too correct, gilt chairs. Rauchentraümer, meine geliebte. And then so much later, coming home in the early hours, my stocking pinned to my drawers …

  POP: Suzette, Ninette, Arlette, Noisette, Poupette, Babette, Nanette, Bravo! la gigolette. But it was Pierette whose troubled eyes haunt me. Sh
e lay on her tousled bed – her ruff, her pompoms, her clown’s cap, a touching wreckage of the evening strewn around her. Her little breasts were firm, but her little body was so thin. She arched her back like an alley cat. So ‘Dawn will see you gorn?’ (reminiscently) or could it be ‘Don will see you gone?’ The little important things like that that we forget. Oh, she would spit, that little one. And then …

  MOTOR: With a safety pin. Oh, it was crazy! But his body looked so firm and white and young as he lay there – only a week later it was to be blown to pieces, to smithereens. Be a sport, give me your garter. An amulet. He didn’t want to die. They none of them did. And so, how could we women be less generous? We came waltzing home in the early hours – I don’t know whether my thoughts were sad or gay, I can’t remember – with our stockings pinned to our drawers with safety pins. And then after it was all over they were so restless, their safety pins had been drawn. They’d seen things they couldn’t talk about. So we laughed at the coffee stalls. What does it matter who one talks to? Tinker, tailor, beggerman, thief. The world’s gone mad.

  POP: She looked up at me. All that you write there, you English faithless one, all that poetry and so, does it tell you why … why all this? The little room was pitiful with its cheap finery, but even so she wanted so much to know why …

  MOTOR: Of course I wasn’t just a Dance Mad Mother. Once when we were at Cromer I was sitting under the cliffs. The children were playing on the beach, laughing, shouting, singing. Suddenly everything was silent, as though I was still a girl and yet a grown woman, as though there was no time, and the whole world, everything beyond it, sky and all were on that beach. I felt as though I knew then why two and two make four, what the shape of it all was, that everything was good as it had been when I was little, as though there might be Somebody, a Friend above the bright blue sky. And then a great wind …

  POP [bobbing up and down in his chair with pleasure]: Wind! Wind! Farting! Belching! That’s all it ever is. Don’t be a mystic, take Phystic – the only real carminative that will confirm your doubts. Two and two don’t make four, it isn’t good, there isn’t any Friend, no pie, and no shape unless we make it ourselves! And when I say we [he raises himself in his chair with disdainful hand extended, looking

  in his pride like Humpty Dumpty] I mean we, oui, oui. Years ago I remember, for it hasn’t all been Babettes, I was poking around my grandmother’s garden, rather at a loose end because there was no cricket – I was an athlete, you know, close to nature, you need that too, cricket if it hadn’t been for water on the knee (rain stopped play, eh?) or tennis if it hadn’t been for tennis elbow – when I kicked over a stone and there was an old wrinkled toad. Probably been there half a century. It frightened me, its squat shape, its age, its power of remaining immobile. Another boy might have squashed it with his foot, but I couldn’t have toed it. Well, that’s life too. But I knew that wouldn’t break its power over me. I needed a spell, an exorcism, for that – a word, not just green or brown or wrinkled or spotted, or even all those words together, but a single word that would describe its toadness. And suddenly the word came to me. The single word laid up for that moment to describe that toad and with him all toadness. The word was …

  MOTOR [stopping in her tracks and shrieking]: Shit! We tried to blame the boys. I told you to beat Marcus for it and you did. But you had beaten him to it! It was you who wrote it on the lavatory wall. Like a pathetic, sneaky, dirty minded schoolboy. And it was always the same with you – making me undress in the bathroom and peeping through the keyhole, Keyhole Pop, The Weasel, saying my bottom’s sore in front of the girls, walking about when Regan first came to us with your hideous, puny little object showing below your vest, a knob not worth carrying. You could never do it without sniggery, snickery …

  POP: And you could never take it without hiding your face. Am I your femme fatale, Billy, you asked, am I, am I? Meanwhile you kept your body taut and your soul empty like some schoolgirl turned tart. That’s why you’re so dried and withered now, all the jam licked off like a mummified girl. But I! Why even my paralysis is the fruit of my lust. My body is alive with it. I pullulate …

  MOTOR: But you won’t for long. Doctor’s diagnosis: Locomotor ataxia. Symptoms: disturbance of the genito-urinary functions, diminution of knee jerks, sluggish condition of the irises, paralysis of the cranial nerves, symptoms of Rombergism; prognosis, poor.

  POP [groaning and shaking his fist]: I hope loco motor attacks yeh. [Pulling himself together.] But I don’t believe it. I’ll go to a naturopath, a homeopath, an osteopath, any old path that winds on. [Singing] The top of the hill hasn’t room for two, be sure the one that gets there is you. [Turns upon Motor.] But for you, putting your hand up to pull down the blind, running from the shop to catch the infrequent bus, taking the too hot bath on the too cold night, bending to take in the scent of carnation [in her voice] ‘Oh, what Heaven,’ a tearing, rending pain in the chest, your legs tremble, your head swirls, all goes red, goes black. Over in a minute that seems a lifetime. But I [propelling his chair round so that it creaks] creaking doors never wear out.

  MOTOR [in a more tender voice]: Never worry, my Popsie. I don’t intend to let you die in or out of doors. Looking after you keeps me alive.

  POP [cheerfully]: Ah! that’s better. We needed a change of tune on the trumpet.

  MOTOR: I thought so. [She puts her hand in his. He lifts her on to his knee.]

  POP: Let’s pretend, my strumpet [he takes her arm and puts it round his neck. He places his hand on her thigh].

  MOTOR [getting up]: No, no that’s repulsive. Words only. [In a shy young girl’s voice.] My dearest, dearest darling, last Tuesday was so, so wonderful.

  POP: Tuesday isn’t a very likely day, my crumpet.

  MOTOR: Wednesday, Thursday then, any day [sound of aeroplanes in the distance].

  POP: In these things verisimilitude has some importance. We’re not improvisatori.

  MOTOR [in her young girl’s voice]: I am only simple. I don’t know the world like you do. But I felt that evening as though we had both learned how to live, really live life as it should be lived. Oh, if only I had words …

  POP: But you said this was to be in words. Oh, I can’t understand it all. I can’t remember and it’s too tiring. How about resting?

  [Suddenly.] Supposing we rested for good. Just two old no trumps. You could go and take me with you to that eternal rest …

  [As they speak the noise of the many aeroplanes grows louder.]

  MOTOR: Oh, how I should love to. But how do I know you would follow me? You’re such a liar. Anyway you ought to go first. You’re the man.

  POP: Oh no, ladies first. [The noise of aeroplanes is very loud.]

  MOTOR: Oh, if only I could be up there with those brave boys of ours. To let the pilot take me and do as he wills … or almost.

  POP: Ah, there they go, my birds, my flying words, the beautiful flying words that I wrote, or rather meant to write.

  [A vast explosion. A single scream. The stage is in complete darkness. Curtain.]

  Book Four

  I. 1946

  Passion seized this slim-figured, balding man, so sombre and black but for his absurd dolly liquid eyes and his démodé ankle bracelet that glinted beneath his silk sock as he moved. He picked up a cheap wooden chair – he was clearly as strong as agile. (Could he be a window dresser? a ladies’ hairdresser? a portrait photographer?) – and smashed again and again at the box-like construction until its boards lay broken beyond repair on the worn linoleum flooring. Dust flew everywhere so that he sneezed. Looking up to the ceiling he could find nothing, no Double Hooded Crow, for where there had been damp there was now a black gaping hole and broken, protruding rafters. On the floor below a pool of plaster lay green-mouldy, like a painter’s reflection of the black gap. He looked at the curtains, but thick dust had smoothed all their secret meanings. But from the broken box-bed soared minarets and domes (Byzantine? Moorish? Baroque?). He checked a sentimental sigh for
the ignorance of the cheap little, trash-fed, snob-educated, prim, mincing, high-voiced schoolboy – Pss, Pss, hello, Nance, got your K.Y.? If innocence was disgusting and now not to be condoned, then surely ignorance must also be flushed away with the rest of the rubbish.

  But still they surged towards him in great waves of colour-wash drawing, colours barbaric and splendid – domes, minarets, towers, campaniles, colonnades, fountains, Scheherazade, great Turkish-trousered sultans, serpentine houri-eyed sultanas, huge bellied eunuchs in Muscovite furs, Negroes vaulting, tumblers, blazing macaws on golden rings, pretty faced marmosets on brocaded shoulders, pretty faced pages, dressed as this, dressed as that, running behind the cypress trees, hiding behind the cinammon tree, the papaya tree, giggling, beckoning, here a smooth small buttock, there another, and there again the laughing saucy saucer eyes and … but that was absurd, he had never known Pirelli until many years later, and for himself, why, he judged a man by the size of his piece, no more, and, make no mistake, no less, that was well known. But somewhere the plump little buttocks persisted, and lemur’s eyes, heaven knew where from, and eyes more recently seen peeping, beckoning, dark Cairene, musk scented Ceylon, isle of spices where lovely boys are vile. If that were he, then, oh indeed, how ignorant he’d been – fed no doubt by Oscar on Dvořák’s scarlet melodies and that absurd, pathetic supping with panthers not, as they said, to have known his arse from his elbow.

  But now, the Bakst drawings imposed themselves on the shadowy sultans, sultanas, eunuchs and pages – the Queen’s Guard, Carabos herself, the Princess, Porphyrophores, and the pageboy of the Fairy Cherry in panniered skirt and cherry tree headdress – the very same he had dreamed, wet dreamed no doubt as well, pressed down, hemmed in by his wooden box. There at least he could find some link with the small enuretic – he would make him a present of the Bakst drawings, indeed, of all his fun paintings – the Laurencins too, and the Magnasco. Poor little creature! Yes, he could allow him at least one sigh in return for his luxurious dreams, a child starved of colour, of softness, of elegance, of superfluity. Time later to tell good from Kitsch, enough that he’d struggled to feed himself on all the scents of Araby. Laughing kindly, he was suddenly again seized with rage – to put him in a box for all the world like a raree show – come and see the little bed-wetter, the little pansy boy. He kicked the broken boards savagely, then turned and went out of the room downstairs to the dining-room.