No Laughing Matter

by Angus Wilson

  ‘I don’t think much about moments, Marcus, nowadays. I’m so poor, you know, that when Lucy Armstrong asked me to stay abroad, that was quite enough.’

  ‘But you should have come to me. Hassan would have been told to look after you like a Princess. And Hamid is the most superb cook. Lucy Armstrong has a dreadful cook. He serves balls of shit on skewers and calls it Tangerine delight. Oh, why didn’t you come to me? You could have had the room with the Dufys. You always liked them. I only kept the decorative things, you know …’

  ‘My dear, don’t I think of it every time I go to the Tate. I can’t imagine how you could have borne to part.’

  ‘Well, I’ve kept the Magnasco and all the Bakst drawings, and the silly Laurencins. Oh, and I’ve still got that embarrassing Tchelitchev of myself and two rather enchanting bad drawings Jean did of Jack with a Negro sailor at Toulon. But for the rest, when Jack died, I realized it had all been him …’

  ‘But, Marcus, it was you who bought all the really good things and not Jack at all. I remember how I used to quarrel with you because you wouldn’t let him buy all our friends.’

  ‘This is one of the spare bedrooms. Moroccan furnishing dear, that’s all you would have had. It fits so much better to these houses. Yes, I had a good eye and I loved buying, but …. Well, anyway, it wouldn’t have been right to have really good paintings in this damp climate.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be any good to have me, either. I’d decline for good and all from rheumatics.’

  ‘That’s one thing about living with the young one never admits.’

  ‘He is very young, isn’t he?

  ‘Are you disapproving, Mary? I expect old Lucy and her crowd spat venom.’

  ‘As if I should take notice with an old friend like you. No, and of course, he’s an enchantment to look at. I was just puzzled …’

  ‘Oh, you mean the change of taste. My dear, it wasn’t until after the war that I did what I think they call realize myself.’

  ‘Marcus, that isn’t very nice about Jack.’

  ‘Jack was a completely special person to whom I owe everything.’

  ‘He owed a lot to you.’

  ‘I hope so. My dear, you do tear away still at personal relationships, don’t you? If I were in charge of you, I’d give you a rubber bone to worry at. This is Hassan’s room. Very austere, you see. Those horrible scarlet and green candles are our only source of dissension. He comes from the South, you know. He’s very simple. Tangier is the summit of worldliness for him. And now you’ve seen it all.’

  ‘It’s a lovely house, Marcus.’

  ‘Yes. I don’t suppose we’ll go on living in it much longer. Hassan gets homesick. Now we must go back to the guests.’

  In the drawing-room Lucy Armstrong was describing the ceremony.

  ‘My dear,’ she was saying, ‘the Minister of the Interior – yes he was that, Rodney, I asked – one of the little fat dark ones with moustaches, no, not with Senegalese blood, they’re the beautiful dark ones, the other kind – spoke for quite half an hour. Apparently in French. Not that one could hear a single word because of the dear little boy scouts – all great hulking things of sixteen or more in shorts – who were screaming and shouting, and pulling down all the flags except their own beloved starry banner. It was really rather pathetic! I felt quite sorry for some of the poor Tangerines, because they’d looked forward to it all so. Their great Day of Independence! The day they too became Moroccans. Except that they shouldn’t think they’re adults when they’re still small children. Anyway it will give them some idea of the chaos to come.’

  Admiral Tembrick said to Marcus, ‘You were perfectly right to stay away. Those of us who care for them should never see them when they’re trying to organize something. They suddenly go to pot and lose all their poise. As Lucy says, the thing was a shambles.’

  Lucy Armstrong seized on it: ‘Exactly. And these are the people who are going to run their own country. People who’ve no sense of order, honesty or public courage. People who can’t even prevent daylight attacks in the Souk. Of course, the Administration has been to blame. They’ve preferred to play in with …

  ‘Well, you can’t blame them for that.’

  ‘All these years of prosperity and good administration wiped out in a moment, n’est ce pas que c’est désolant, Yvette?

  ‘Oui, Oui, Lucy, je parle à Rodney de ce qui arrive aux grands propriétaires.’

  ‘Oh, my dear, even York Castle’s up for sale. And who’s going to buy it with things as they are?’

  Omar, walking round with a tray of drinks, showed no reaction. Hassan sat silent and smiling, if his legs had been longer he’d have been a twenties Bakst doll. The Moroccan restraint and mannerliness kindled Marcus’ anger.

  ‘Old cow, fucking old cow,’ he muttered.

  Mary, not understanding, but feeling, said, ‘I loved all the horses charging and the guns firing.’

  ‘Oh, the fantasia! If things were only as they should be in the French Zone, we’d go down to Fez and see a fantasia done properly. It was pathetic here, wasn’t it, Admiral? But then you see the poor dear Tangerines are not warriors at all. They like to think of themselves like the Riffi or the Blue Men but …’

  ‘Will there be any chance of seeing the Blue Men?’ Mary asked. Marcus’ tension brought back the past unbearably to her.

  ‘My dear, I’m afraid not. Rodney’s made the journey to the desert hundreds of times. He knows all the gites d’étapes and speaks Berber. Yes, isn’t he clever? He would have taken you, dear, but you wouldn’t want to go now, would you, Rodney? You see they speak about their precious new kingdom, but they’re all a lot of Bedouin bandits still, at sixes and sevens with each other. There’d be civil war at this moment if the Glaoui hadn’t died so suddenly …’

  Marcus had uncoiled his legs and risen. Taking the Martini shaker from Omar’s tray he went over to where Lucy sat. Now he filled her glass to the brim.

  ‘Stop talking nonsense about things you know nothing about, and drink that, Lacy, ‘he said.’ Glaoui indeed! The Mahdi’s more your period.’

  ‘Oh! I suppose you’re going to be a good boy and please the nice new government, Marcus. I know a lot of people are frightened of speaking out now. But I’m not like that. I can’t he down just because someone is waving a big stick.’

  ‘My dear Lucy, if you laid down stark naked for an hour and a half in the middle of the Socco nobody would even so much as raise his stick at you.’

  After a gasping moment, Lucy gallantly led the way in uneasy laughter.

  ‘No, but seriously,’ she said, ‘I do resent it after all we’ve done for them …’

  ‘Lucy! Mary’s tried to be tactful twice and I’ve been abominably rude once. Now, will you stop? Apart from anything else it’s very insulting to Hassan and Omar to talk about their country like this, and I won’t have it.’

  ‘Oh, of course, Hassan knows I don’t mean him. Besides he’s not a Tangerine at all. He’s from dear little Mogador. Oh, if only I could take you there, Mary. You’re looking so well, Hassan. Green suits you. Who is Omar, Marcus?’

  ‘Omar has been serving you with drinks.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Oh, well, anyway, it’s them I’m thinking of. Speeches and fantasies! But how do they think they’re going to pay for all these schools and clinics when the foreigners have been frightened away? And they will frighten people away – Look at it; two villas burgled on the Old Mountain only last week and that wretched American tourist mobbed in the Socco just because he was photographing a mosque. And their police stood by idle. Who’s going to stay when that sort of thing goes on?’

  ‘You for one, Lucy. There may be rich people whose money is needed by the new government. I hope they’ll have the sense to remain here. If they don’t, I shan’t blame the government if it takes their property away from them. But you’re not one of them, dear. You live here like the Duchess of Fartshire on what would hardly keep you in an Earl’s Court bedsitter if you went home
…’

  ‘I say, really, Marcus, this is too left for worlds …’

  ‘Left of his senses, I should say.’

  ‘Just because you’re stinking rich, old man …’

  ‘Oh, Marcus!’ Mary cried, ‘Oh, when we’ve met again. It’s too horrid.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mary dear. You came in on the wrong act. Alright, I am stinking rich but I’m sick of all these ill-mannered remittance people …’

  ‘Oh, don’t bother to answer him,’ Lucy cried, getting up to go, ‘We all know what keeps him here.’

  ‘If you mean that I sleep with Hassan and that you sleep alone, Lucy, that’s no reason why you should come up here and abuse people who’ve given you hospitality and service and some sort of illusion of decency for the last ten years …’

  When it was all over he only could think that he should not see Mary again while she was staying with that old cow – for, of course, Mary’s manners as always were still perfect. But now Hassan’s stepfather’s nephew Mohammed had arrived to tell them about the morning’s celebrations in his atrocious mixture of Spanish, English and Arabic.

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard all about it,’ Marcus said and he went to his room.

  Later Hassan came to him with a tray of coffee. He was scowling like a schoolboy sent off the football field.

  ‘Mohammed went away,’ he said, ‘He saw you did not want him. It was clear that our celebrations have no interest for you.’

  ‘Really, Hassan! After all I said to old Lucy Armstrong just because of you!’

  ‘Mrs Armstrong gives very distinguished parties. Now I shall not be asked …’

  Marcus hit the tray so that it flew through the air. There was no noise and no breakage for the cups fell on to cushions, but the coffee formed little soggy wet heaps of sugary grouts on the divan. He pulled Hassan face downwards on to the cushions beside him. The boy was giggling happily now. ‘Mrs Armstrong is a silly old cow,’ he was saying with delight.

  *

  Margaret determinedly watered the hippeastrum plants on the balcony. Looking down she saw the legless boy on his wheeled board at his usual place by the entrance to the flats – the porter had in despair given up trying to chase him away. At the end of the road the taxis hooted ceaselessly as they careered along the riverside. In the distance she could see the scruffy black serge of her favourite local policeman – many were lounging about for there appeared, despite everything, to be football at the stadium. Mrs Karamazian in the flat below had put out all her mattresses and blankets. A hawk mewed. Huge crows pecked at the horsedung on the sticky tarred asphalt. At Dr Yousouf’s someone was stumbling through The Barcarolle on the pianoforte. She registered everything as exactly as she could, sparing time where there was none to spare, for while these landmarks were there, it was still, it must be surely her Cairo. She never went into the city and only on occasion with Douglas into the Desert, she never saw the Embassy crowd and only at great intervals people from the Institute. Her life was all here in the daily sounds and smells of Zamalek. Mrs Karamazian’s hennaed gossip, a visit over the balcony from Mr Younan’s Persian cats, cutting back the bougainvillea, gossiping when she bought the pimentos, the eggplants and the figs, the smell of sesame in Mrs Shoukri’s perpetual frying, the stories about the houseboat restaurant that was no restaurant, even the look of friendly complicity each day with the beggar boy – for they were both, pariah and artist, outside the law – all these, with the occasional drama – the hawk that swooped down and took the veal, the taxis in collision, the mule that died standing as it hauled the little charcoal cart – this was her Cotswold village or Sussex hamlet, but so much warmer, often deliciously hot so that she could work with relaxed nerves – a Steventon or a Rodmell set in the heart of a noisy exotic city. Well, it had worked: three novels she was not ashamed of in ten years, and this fidget now at the back of her thoughts – a schizophrenic dialogue, the gradual fissure of a coherent mind, each chapter making two out of one, or rather at first three for the original personality would still desperately dominate – but all that must be locked away until this absurdity was over.

  She went into Douglas’s room. He was sleeping now, but his face was drawn and white as his little moustache, and his lips had that ghastly blueish shade like those horrible dyed tulips there used to be at florists; his breathing creaked like some unoiled cradle swinging. Leila was fussing with the hot kettle and Friar’s Balsam – no doctor could make her more than half nurse, half witch. Farouk’s flight, Shepheards burning, all had sounded like summer thunder in her village, Zamalek’s remote, daily pettiness. And now suddenly, with Douglas laid low with the worst of his asthma attacks for years, she was forced to recognize that the thunder was really threatening gunfire. They were to leave in twenty-four hours because some hysterical, anachronistic English minor aristocrat (she knew they were mad at home to bring the Conservatives in again) couldn’t come to terms with the modern world. She and Douglas who loved Egypt, who loved every smell and colour of it, who, above all, loved its ordinary people, especially the Arabs. If this ambitious Colonel was going to give a new and decent life to Ibrahim and Yussef and Ali and Leila and millions like them, then Douglas and she were the sort of people he needed here, people who would back him through thick and thin. She was an artist, a writer, and Douglas was a scholar; they weren’t arrogant service officers or greedy business men. That the Suez Canal should be run by Ibrahim and Youssef and Ali was what she utterly believed in. She hated power and riches, always had; and arrogant colonialism. But in these dreadful times all sense seemed to be lost. Order and reason – even in art where passion was king, they had their exalted places, but in ordinary life they were the essence of decency.

  She had rung or seen everyone: the silly people at the Embassy of course were worse than useless – anyway she couldn’t speak to people who represented that wicked fool, and even the Institute seemed to have panicked. It was her Egyptian friends she had relied on, but to no avail. Mr Wa’bi, so clever, so sympathetic as a rule, was almost cold; Major Barawi had been kind but quite frank; Professor Farid had even gone to some minister but he had urged her when he telephoned again to make her arrangements as quickly as possible. Mrs Hussain at least had agreed to take on Leila and Ibrahim, for Yussef and Ali would have no difficulty in getting another place. Of course, her chief reliance was upon Dr Ramses Rasheid, he surely could get them some stay while Douglas was so ill. But even that dear, funny old fat thing who had saved Douglas’s life in his attack of’ 51 she was sure, seemed quite flabbergasted, flapping his hands, his protruding eyes staring, his mouth open, for all the world like a dying codfish. Professor Farid had suggested that, in view of everything, she was unwise to rely on the assistance of a Coptic doctor, so at his suggestion she had consulted some smart young man from the hospital, Dr Kasim al Aziz. But really this had only worsened things, for poor old Rasheid was offended (the Copts were in a terrible state these days) and in the end the smart young doctor could do nothing. All she could contrive was full ambulance arrangements to the airfield, some English nurse who was leaving to accompany them in the plane, and a room at the London Clinic when they arrived while she found her bearings.

  And now obviously the servants, too, were anxious to see them gone, frightened of remaining in their service, though like all the simple people that she had known throughout her life she had made some sort of rapport with them which even this stress could not break. They were to have all the clothes that they couldn’t take with them, and Ali, who was newly married, was to take his pick of the furniture. At least they would leave having paid their debt to the exploited, incoherent, sometimes violent but always responsive ordinary Egyptian people. She remembered suddenly that by the time the ambulance came her legless boy would have moved his pitch – his hours were like clockwork, like all the hours of her little world that she must leave behind though she had the key to it all. She gathered together more money than was really right, but why not? why shouldn’t one legless boy know
a sudden rain of gold from the disguised caliph’s hand? She knew every scratch on the cheap aluminium door of the lift as it carried her bumpingly down. Outside the heat was intense, the sunlight dazzled her for a moment so that she hardly knew her little intimate scene. Then, cautiously so as not to attract the porter’s attention to him, she sidled round the entrance to where the dirty, snotty little boy sat on his wooden board. She gave him a special version of her daily smile – she knew that she was near to tears, but she held them back, for what had it to do with him?

  ‘Barraka Laofik,’ she said, and she put all the notes and coins into his little upturned monkey paw. He rapidly shovelled it all somewhere into his ragged blouse. She waited for that enchanting smile that always transformed a best forgotten missing link into a Murillo urchin. He spat twice, very deliberately on to her candy pink cotton dress, then propelled himself at breakneck pace away on his wheels.

  Coming into the entrance hall she was greeted by Mrs Karamazian, fat, rouged, hennaed and moustached, in a not, over-clean violet satin dress. Mrs Karamazian was weeping so that her mascara ran into her eyes. She held out the official form.

  ‘We are to go. Next week we Armenians must go. But where shall we go to? After fifty years in Cairo. Where? Tell me that. You, bloody English have done this. Now where are we to go?’

  All Margaret’s feelings suddenly dried up within her at these oily lachrymose outpourings. She tasted powder, dried chaffin her mouth; it was the dust, no doubt. Almost choking, she said, ‘Orders to go? Well, you must be thankful that times have changed. At least there are to be no massacres.’

  *

  ‘And now here to discuss the situation we have Colonel Jonathan Brown from the Conservative Central Office, John Cobmarsh, Q.C, Labour member for East Dartford, and Q. J. Matthews.’