No Laughing Matter

by Angus Wilson

  The elegant, thin-faced, tall woman (London store buyer of Paris models? champion bridge player? new style headmistress?) in the next room heard him go and checked herself from calling to him. He must never know that she had heard. She picked up the seal muff that she had found among Her things and rubbed its sleekness against her cheek. Such quaint femininities were never seen now, and, trailing a stifling camphor – it must be noticed, but she did not care – anything that would soothe and soften her against the hideous cold of this her native land, of this her home, of this her cruelly cramped room. Already she felt frozen, aware of her thinness, aware of her bones, drawn in, every muscle tensed, shrinking from the chest of drawers, shrinking from her brass-headed bed, shrinking most of all from the other, the iron bedstead (so she had been the more richly treated! Like Jane she had played Cassandra, while to the real Cassandra the second best bed).

  Yet surely some honour, some piety was due to the log cabin where it had all begun and to the long-legged tomboy (though she had hardly with her dancing class and her coral necklace been the lass of the limberlost imitating the whip-poor-will’s call under the old hickory tree) the plain Jane who had started it all. From log cabin to P.E.N. Club. Of course it was all there in the early Carmichaels, this tension, this smallness, this snake coiled in upon itself ready to hiss – and it was just that hissing in those early stories that, for all the critics ‘praises, she couldn’t bear. But all the same, as a saga composed to cock a snook at His thick, soupy self-content and Her endless acid-throwing, self-assertion, it had been highly creditable for a gawky girl in her ‘teens. She tried to compose it again in the old manner – surely in this room she could recapture that voice, the earliest Austen parodies of her early ’teens – ‘Elizabeth Carmichael had little reason to congratulate herself upon her fortune which was small, her face which was long, or her figure which was meagre, but she had some compensation in her tongue which was ready and her ear which was sharp….’ But had she? For she had spent more than a quarter of a century since then trying to adapt the tongue to poetry, to attune the ear to deeper music than mere mimicry. The failure in human sympathy! – To have grown up in that room, not noticing that hers was the brass. She had blotted out the iron bedstead and all that went with it; had remembered only sisterly confidences and giggles, had forgotten, but now they crowded in on her, the other images – long white legs a little blue with the early morning cold fighting their way into scruffy, crumpled woollen stockings, the first shaping of Sukey’s breasts, her desperate neatness from the start with her rags, ‘which of you girls has got hares in her drawers?’ (that elaborate, silly sniggery school joke that had only been said to her Sukey). In all those years only glimpses of her sister as a living body – for she had managed by every elaboration of movement to avoid seeing this horrible intrusion of privacy, this beastly twin flesh that kept time with her times, that disgusted her with her own.

  Here had begun the Mouselike tightness, acidity, protective cattiness, sharpened claws and all the rest of it that had led to the P.E.N. White House. If instead she’d gone out, Martha-like as Sukey did, and got on with the job, perhaps her talent would not have been so thin, so acid, so poisoned at the source. But then she remembered and began laughing until she had to sit down on her bed and wipe her eyes. No, no, never Sukey, stupid, limited Sukey the butt! The Countess came up the stairs bearing the little sauce boat in her hand: ‘What is this revolting, pasty mess?’ waving it in front of Sukey’s rounded blue eyes, fortissimo dramatic. ‘It looks like your Father’s white soggy soul.’ ‘It’s bread sauce, Mother.’ ‘Bread sauce! Ill-bred like all you Matthews children. Poisoned at the source!’ The Countess herself had hardly been able to finish her tirade for laughing. At least that was how the libretto ran when she and Rupert and Marcus had played it over a few times. Later when she’d Carmichaeled it, she toned it back to what was probably the original. Laughing still, she rose from the bed. ‘No,’ she said aloud, ‘it was a life of desolation and I was priggish and prudish, but that was the start. Only the start, of course. But, oh, we did laugh!’ She joined her brother in the dining-room.

  ‘An adjutant!’ she cried, ‘I couldn’t believe it when Douglas told me. You remember when you missed me in Cairo. An adjutant!’

  ‘Well, the Colonel was rather a silly one. And then he liked his officers to have a lot of money and lose to him at bridge. And I have kept a large house and a demanding man comfortable and well fed for many years so the mess was child’s play. Also I was rather good at camouflage work. We can’t all have brains, some of us must be good with our hands.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure you were most competent but I’d always thought you’d either go to prison as an objector or march into battle leading the attack with plumes in your helmet.’

  ‘How novelists do love to romanticize pansies…. I can’t think why you want to be so nice about us. It’s a very good thing, duckie, that these clichés don’t get into your books. Or do they? I haven’t read a book for years. They were one of the things the Colonel didn’t like.’

  She shrugged in apology: ‘Well, what next?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Except that I can’t bear all the dowdiness and austerity of London. It’s all like this house – dust and pinched memories. Anyway Jack couldn’t possibly eat this food after what rationing’s done to his proud stomach. He firewatched, poor thing. A truly awful war. And then ate at Claridge’s or the Berkeley as though rations were better there. The silly ideas of the rich! Still as I tell him it’s better than the gas chamber. Luckily we’ve got the pictures in New York as an excuse even though the monstrous government won’t give us any of Jack’s money there. And they dared to send poor Gladys to jail! Who knows, when we see the Kandinskys and the Miros, perhaps some of the splendour’ll come back? Anyway I don’t want “people”. You can imagine after all that good talk in the mess – “I don’t know whether you’re religious, Matthews, I’m not, but an odd thing happened to me….” Oh, the odd things that happened to that Colonel. All to do with time. He was shot forwards and backwards through history like a billiard ball. No, I don’t want people. Certainly not that kind. I don’t really know what I want. Lucky you with your writing.’

  ‘Oh, yes, scribble, scribble, Mr Gibbon. I shall battle on. But not in this climate, thank God. The old blue, chilblained fingers of Mrs Gaskell or George Eliot are not for me. Douglas has been put in charge of the new dig at Saqqara.’ She smiled across at Marcus as sounds came from the kitchen. ‘Sukey’s put the kettle on, we’ve all come through.’

  Taking the clean napkin off the top of the straw shopping basket the brisk neatly dressed woman in the tweed suit, the little broken veins of whose cheeks showed through caked face powder (was she social worker, racehorse owner or advocate of birth control?) unpacked two thermos flasks, a bottle of milk and a packet of Marie biscuits. It was lucky that she had remembered that the gas would be cut off. For the others no doubt would have been happy to pop out for snacks at all hours, but if they were ever to get through sorting out this mass of stuff they must get down to the job. Some of the furniture was all she wanted, for schools can always use furniture. As for the rest anyone would be glad of clothing in these rationing days and papers should always be burnt – but no doubt they would maunder, or even less appropriately giggle, over every object that came up. They had no families of their own, of course. Or apparently, Rupert did. But theatrical families, what could they be like? Of course 52 had never meant anything to her. She’d been determined to get away and she had. Here in this kitchen she’d fought smells, and dirt and grease, and won. True, her dreams had been absurd – servants and manor houses! Her mouth puckered over her dentures in a dry little smile – she must remember them for her weekly broadcast when, if ever, her adventures with the boys dried up. ‘Did you know that I once had a butler, two footmen, two gardeners, a chauffeur, a lady’s maid, a cook and heaven knows how many house parlour maids? Well, I did. In my school girl dreams. Wouldn’t it be appallin
g if our childish dreams suddenly came true? How could an independent modern housewife bear such tyranny? How did our grandmothers survive it?’ How could she have had anything but novelettish dreams with an oddity like the Countess for a mother? She hadn’t known then, of course, that it didn’t matter how you married, it was the children that mattered and they could as well be of a poor man as of the lord of the manor; they were your own. Of course she had known; that was why there’d been all that slop about animals – crying over drowned kittens! Every woman should have children to love. That poor, dirty, old Regan, always trying to tell one’s fortune – dark men over the water, Prince Charmings and all that rubbish that the lower classes soaked up in those days; though the Countess was hardly better, romantic as a shop girl when she wasn’t behaving like one of those. They should have been married to unromantic, steady old Hugh!

  Suddenly tears began to pour down her cheeks. She held her breath, she wondered if she would burst with the effort, but she couldn’t stop. She had been so frightened all that time – frightened of Regan’s strange hints, frightened of Aunt Mouse’s tongue, always on the edge of tears. If she could have found that upright corn-haired girl going about her tasks so tensely but so determinedly in that vast ogreish kitchen, she would have taken her in her arms! But the girl would have been too proud, wouldn’t have wanted it. The tears ceased now and, taking her powder puff from her handbag, she liberally covered her reddened eyelids. What a squalid lot of memories! But it couldn’t all have been like that, the heredity of the boys and P. S.! Carrying the tray upstairs, she remembered Granny M. and felt a stab of conscience. There had been a breath of decent orderly sanity, an old chatterbox, but steady!

  ‘No,’ she said, pouring out tea for them, ‘there was nothing to do, really. It was a direct hit. Nothing left.’

  ‘Poor Countess!’ Marcus said, ‘A Baedeker raid! And I’m sure she never went into the Cathedral. She hated what she called old musty things.’

  ‘A Mrs Lomax wheeled Father round one day. He gushed about it to me a bit. I can’t remember what he said. Poetic experience or something. They rather lorded it over the other old dears in the hotel, you know. I think they enjoyed their last days.’

  ‘The throne room here had gone a little stale certainly. A change of royal residence was overdue,’ Margaret said.

  ‘My dear, yes! The Countess wrote to me. She used to look at the sunsets and pick daffodils. The last and pastoral phase.’

  ‘And then P. S. went over to see them at least once a fortnight.’

  The finality of Sukey’s statement left Margaret and Marcus bewildered.

  Margaret said, ‘Delicious tea! I’d no idea prep school boys were the pampered ones in England. You must be terribly relieved, Sukey, that all yours came through unscratched.’

  Sukey laughed. ‘I simply put them into God’s hands before Munich when one knew war couldn’t be avoided. And He’s rewarded me. Of course, I knew P. S. would never be involved. There was an absurd moment when Hugh said they’d call him up despite his history schol. But John’s were very good, they got deferment. Now, of course, he’ll have to do this National Service. The other two tease him about playing soldiers. Poor P. S.! He isn’t a bit pleased. He’s got girl trouble. Some girl at Newnham. So it won’t do him any harm to occupy the awful Germans for a bit.’

  To prevent herself laughing, Margaret tried to exchange a glance with Marcus, but to her surprise he was staring intently at Sukey.

  ‘Gracious, Sukey, you are lucky. Having a family to make do and mend for. I do hope you’ve spoilt them and given them every luxury and comfort. It’s especially important for boys.’

  ‘What an idea! I’ve given them love and security, that’s what all children need.’

  ‘Well, yes, of course. But I do think a bit of luxury, too, and especially to see beautiful things and to travel. I suppose, really, that’s an uncle’s job. Oh, I do feel ashamed. When can I meet them and take them out and spoil them?’

  ‘My dear Marcus! You’re very kind but I don’t think they’d interest you very much. They’re not youths any longer, you know. They’re great hulking men.’

  Margaret smiled at Sukey’s limited conventional notions. She was going to exchange a smile with Marcus, for he’d never been reticent about his tastes to her, but he had gone red in the face.

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t like them to hulk over me. Anyway they won’t have an opportunity. I shan’t be in this bloody country, thank God.’

  Really, Margaret thought, to take Sukey so seriously.

  ‘And you’re going to settle in Egypt, Mag, I hear. We were there in ’29 you know. A parent lent us a houseboat. I’ve written one or two pieces about it. Of course, you don’t know that I write now. I hardly dare tell you. For broadcasting, from the local station, you know. Just ordinary family stuff, of course. But I think I’ve caught the West Country taste. That Nile trip has been most fruitful. Are there still those hawks, Mag, that mew like kittens? I’ve done a piece about a special one that became quite tame and used to take food from P. S. ‘s hand when he was a baby – Mu Mu, he called it – and then one day I came out on deck and found it had dropped a dead rat on to his pram. I’ve called it “Mu Mu’s Tribute”.’

  After a short silence, Marcus said, ‘I can’t wait to stay en famille in Torquay, can you?’

  ‘And you, Mag, how was your war?’

  But Margaret suddenly felt impatient. ‘It’s no good Sukey, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’ve never missed the patter of tiny feet. I can’t bear the little brats.’

  The twins glared at one another across the table. Marcus was overcome with nausea from the gross smell of women. Let’s put them through their hoops, he thought. Let’s make the bitches purr.

  ‘It’s easy for you two to wrangle. You’ve always had the chance of fulfilment.’

  Sukey blushed but her tense face softened contentedly; and even Margaret’s thin lips parted in pleased relaxation. They both looked at him with complacent compassion.

  ‘Oh, I know,’ he cried, ‘if the Countess had let me grow away from her or whatever it’s called. But then I shouldn’t have been so stinking rich. I must say I shouldn’t like not having money.’

  The heavily built, tall man with flushed, jowled, handsome face and with blond hair greying at the temples (Banker? Wing Co. or even A.V.M.? or perhaps a confidence trickster pretending to Air Force rank?) was thinking of money, too, as he played somewhat stumblingly The Cobbler’s Song on the out of tune grand piano in the room above. He wasn’t quite sure why money pervaded his thoughts, for, of course, he was in fact reflecting on women and their importance. He owed everything to them. My God, he’d only to be in this room with this absurd moth-eaten Spanish shawl, even something of Her scent still coming from it, to remember that. If it hadn’t been for that love – hate battle with Her, he might have remained a good looking flirty clerk, a sales manager Lothario to this day. But She had played with him so terribly, made him so restless, so keyed up to meet the demands of any scene, that his powers had been extended to their very top note. She’d been so completely ruthless, too, in getting rid of his Monas for him. And all for what? It was easy to say that ultimately he owed it all to the Great White Slug for not satisfying her, but that wasn’t fair. He knew too much about it all now to blame the old boy for not being quite up to it. No, she was torn apart inside, ravaged by a need for power. She’d never let go. And if you asked her what she wanted the power for, she wouldn’t have known.

  They none of them did. She’d said she needed life and air (understandable in 52. It ponged a bit today of mice and mould and general decay); Alma said it was in order to be able to give ‘her all’; and Debbie said it was for him and for the children. But if they’d really known what they wanted, then it would have been all up with men, for it was out of this rage, this striving in the bellies of women, that men found their powers, their creative thrust. If a man found a woman who thought she had this urge herself, then he’d best wean h
er from it, as he had weaned Debbie. Yes, he saluted the long, lazy blond cad with his Hawaiian guitar who had sprawled and idled around these rooms in a haze of brilliantine and Turkish tobacco smoke and post cards of Toots and Lorna Pound. He might have been such an unutterably, underbred cad, but as it was …

  ‘Well, actually, no,’ he told them, ‘I’ve played everything from Hamlet – the gravedigger scene of course, the humour still lives, you know, even for hardened old Desert Rats – to Lady Audley’s Secret and in the most God awful, out of the way holes, so I’m off Rep. even at the Old Vic, off theatre altogether at the moment.’

  ‘Oh, Rupert! But your Malvolio was so unforgettable.’

  ‘Thank you, Mag darling. And bless you for that note. It happened when all that G. business came up … I hope you were right. At the moment I don’t feel quite sure of myself. I don’t want to depend on others’ opinions.’

  ‘Oh, no, you must never do that in creative work.’

  ‘I’m glad you feel that too. Anyway, the theatre hasn’t found itself again after all those thunderingly good air raid audiences. No, I want to try films for a bit. Broaden my technique. And Britain’s going to have it all her own way with the cinema industry now we’ve got subsidies. Hollywood’s done for. I shan’t go for good, mind you, The theatre’s my real love. But I’ve got rather a handsome contract with Rank. ‘He smiled a rueful, boyish smile,’ and it won’t be unwelcome. Sandra’s being presented this summer and with Christopher two years off Eton …’ He added quickly, ‘Of course, we’d have sent the boys to you, Sukey, if Debbie hadn’t wanted a school near enough to Sunningdale to drive over for the afternoon.’