No Laughing Matter

by Angus Wilson

  Adam protested again, ‘She’s got an absolutely super skirt she could wear.’

  But Lucilla, who clearly enjoyed Marcus ‘draping the materials round her, said,’ I don’t think it would satisfy, Adam. It hardly covers my thighs.’

  ‘It certainly wouldn’t,’ Marcus said. ‘What do you want to dress like Clara Bow the It girl for? It was vulgar enough forty years ago. You’ve got nice legs. Why not let him do some imagining instead of dressing himself up in those violet musical comedy trousers? I shouldn’t think Clarkson’s would take them back in the condition you’ve got them into, Adam. Oh, aren’t they hired? You mean you own all this dressing-up stuff? Well!’

  Margaret said, ‘Really, Marcus, your fancy dress parties were the rage of London for ten years or more! He adored dressing up and gave the most wonderful parties – with themes, and acres of lights and décor overlooking London.’ Seeing their incomprehension she gave up trying to explain. ‘They were all in green,’ she added lamely.:

  Marcus laughed. ‘My dear, we had two little numbers here recently. I don’t know what they were – chorus boys they’d have been in my day. Travelling with a rich Australian. Anyway the little blond one nudged the other and asked in a screaming voice who I was. “Oh, my dear! Don’t you know? She was famous for her green balls.” “I’m not a bit surprised,” the blond said. Which though rude was rather one up to him.’ To Humpy’s astonishment Lucilla and Adam were in fits of giggles, in which Marcus joined them. Q. J. smiled and moved on to the essential fidelity of young people’s relationships today.

  ‘I wish I could think that this embellishment of the male sex, repulsive though it is to my notions of manliness, spelt a return to a more gracious reverence for physical love …’

  Marcus who was kneeling on the ground with pins in his mouth, fixing Lucilla’s skirt, got up and spat out the pins.

  ‘Oh Lor! I’ll run this up on my machine,’ he told Lucilla, and was gone.

  Margaret said, ‘I think this is appalling, Quentin, to preach away against sex just because it’s given you up. He used to be the most terrific womanizer,’ she told them.

  ‘We’ve made it the dirtiest three letter word in the language, Margaret.’ Brother and sister both looked so annoyed that Humpy thought he should tactfully deflect the fire to himself.

  ‘We don’t agree with you about the pill, Mr Matthews.’

  ‘Oh, of course, it was you,’ Lucilla cried, ‘Oh, that was awful!’

  ‘Yes,’ Adam accused, ‘You spoke against the pill.’

  They all looked so solemn that Quentin burst out laughing.

  ‘Blasphemy against the sacred pill.’

  Even Margaret had to laugh at their expressions.

  ‘I don’t think there’s any way of being funny about the pill that isn’t vulgar.’ Lucilla told them.

  Margaret suddenly felt sympathy with her brother Quentin.

  ‘I’m all for a bit of vulgarity now and again,’ she said.

  Hassan coming in at that moment, she presented him to them all. With perfect formality he asked them about their journey, their present comfort, their destination.

  ‘You are welcome,’ he said. It was a phrase he had learned from Americans but, as Margaret could see, they took it for an old Arabic greeting. ‘As Monsieur Marcus’s family you are particularly welcome.’ Then he whispered with Margaret and was gone.

  ‘Isn’t he super,’ Adam cried. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘My brother Marcus’s rather super friend, I imagine. Isn’t he, Margaret?’

  ‘My dear Quentin, you really shouldn’t be allowed to go on talking on television about Islam if you say things like that. Hassan’s twenty-six. Naturally he’s married and building up a fine family. What he may have been as a pretty boy of sixteen is long forgotten. And in any case you are not the only Matthews to leave sex behind you, although Marcus and I haven’t made an ethic out of necessity.’

  Humpy looked to see if the other two were as embarrassed as he felt. They were. But Q. J. was on to the beauty of the calm of old age, when Polly came rushing into the room.

  ‘Oh, Oh, isn’t it marvellous? There’s a man called Omar in there and I asked him about the Andulasian songs that survive here. And it seems they do. Of course he didn’t know they were fifteenth century. And apparently it’s the Jews in a place called the Mellah, but there still are some. So we must persuade him to take us. For some reason he doesn’t seem very keen. And we have to do it now because apparently, to everyone’s inconvenience, dinner’s got to be early for some reason and he won’t be here afterwards.’ ‘I’m afraid,’ said Quentin, ‘the early dinner is because I have to leave straightway for Casablanca. I’m flying to Cairo tonight on my way to Singapore where emergence, alas, is a good deal more noisome than here.’

  Polly was scarlet with embarrassment.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry. Anyway it doesn’t matter. They can all come and talk to him now. You must be sick of entertaining them after the talking you have to do on the tele. And I know what Humpy is, he just sits. And the others aren’t much better. You and Miss Matthews must have had to do all the talking.’

  ‘I don’t know if it’s wise to fuss Omar about the Jewish quarter,’ Margaret said. But the others had all risen. ‘I think we’d better see what Polly’s been up to,’ Adam told her.

  ‘All right, but before you rush away, Hassan wants to know about rooms. Would you like four? Or will some of you want to sleep together? We have double beds,’ she spoke as casually as she felt intimacy and politeness together demanded. But absurdly they appeared fussed.

  ‘Well, couldn’t we sort of sort it out ourselves …’

  But Lucilla broke in, ‘No, that’s not polite, Adam. You can’t snub people in that way. We know you won’t upset Mummy and his grandmother and everybody by telling, so yes, Adam and I will sleep together.’

  Margaret essayed gravity in her acknowledgment.

  ‘And the other two?’

  But at this they all burst into giggles.

  ‘Well, really, I can’t be expected to know your esoteric jokes. I quite agree with Marcus. So long as the young will go around dressed like space-travelling hermaphrodites who’s to know who sleeps with who?’

  But the young had gone. A few minutes later, however, Polly came back.

  ‘I’m afraid that seemed rather rude. Only you see Humpy snores so much that after two nights in tents I’ve been saying that the one thing I longed for was not to hear him. That’s why we were all laughing.’

  Later again Quentin was giving Margaret more details of his Emergent series when Adam, too, returned for a moment.

  ‘I’m sorry. All that singing makes an awful row. And don’t think you have to be involved. Actually we’re all sick of folk songs, but it’s the one thing with Polly, and she had a sort of breakdown last term, and so it seems important to let her find herself on this trip.

  ‘Margaret said,’ ‘Of course.’ And when Adam had gone, ‘At least they do have breakdowns.’

  ‘Yes. Out of that something better may build up.’

  Margaret felt ashamed that she’d meant something so much less disinterested.

  *

  When the stewardess took away the breakfast tray, he took out his notes for Singapore and turned his shoulder away from the cameraman, Bill Archer, to show that he wanted no conversation. How many sacred cows here to puncture in the udder that this filthy world might one day be washed clean with milk? The old Raj. The sinking of the Hood. The Burma Road legend, perhaps; that could bring a shoal of protest letters. But all that was past stuff to stir suburban or middle class dovecotes. Mr Lee’s special brand of socialism, inappositeness and futility of. A few back bench Labour M.P.s might squeal. Urbanism generally – the American way of life, all that stuff. It all seemed a bit stale. Then he saw the word ‘Chinese’. What about that – efficiency, hard work, ambition, etc., etc. The Jews of the East. All right, why should people pretend to like the Jews if they didn’t want to, or effici
ency or hard work or ambition? That was one to try out on Bill, cynical-sentimental, Americanized journalist Englishman.

  ‘We’ll have to touch on this Chinese problem, Bill. It could blow up in Singapore as it has done in Indonesia. The ordinary Malay resents the clever urban Chinese …’

  ‘Yes,’ Bill commented, ‘we ought to hit that racial stuff hard in the first round, catch it before it can get up again. Without the Chinese the Malays couldn’t survive into the next century.’

  ‘Yes,’ Q. J. said.

  He set out in his mind to tease Bill’s conventional prejudices. ‘Perhaps,’ he said over to himself, ‘the most central feature of this overgrown, over populated city today is the resentment, probably even the hatred, of the ordinary Malays for their Chinese neighbours. The Chinese, of course, are hardworking, efficient, ambitious. As an Englishman said to me, without the Chinese the Malays couldn’t survive into the next century.’ Then in his mind he practised various pauses and various ironies of voice to mark the change. ‘If the next century is going to be modelled on the collective fantasies of Wall Street, our friends in the Kremlin and Comrade Mao I can only say that I heartily sympathize with the Malayans. ‘Or,’ But why should the Malayans wish to survive into a century of compulsory purposeless visits to the deserts of the Moon, sterile obligatory promiscuity, a world where Old Mother Goose Progress has laid her golden egg and it has turned out to be that strange idol so similar to the black stones and marble slabs of ancient paganism – the pill?’

  But now they were to land at Karachi Airport, where the loathsomely neutralized female voice informed them that local time would be 6.36 a.m. and the temperature twenty-two degrees centigrade, the weather windy. He fastened his seat belt, then underlined ‘Chinese’ three times in his notes. Looking out he could see the dismal excrescence of the Raj sprawling among scrubby bush with endless surround of rocky desert. And there was the airport waiting room, no doubt, where in the thick heat with pasteboard numbers they would, in transit, await with orange juice the flight’s resumption. But now suddenly the plane began to ascend again and round and round they circled, bumping furiously. There was no cause for alarm, only some delay in landing due to cross winds; they must keep their seat belts fastened. But now the lights went out, and absurdly the canned music came on – Dance Little Lady. For a moment the Countess’s dark eyes filled the plane for him. Next to him Bill Archer was mumbling, ‘Christ, Christ, Christ.’ Quentin’s legs shook involuntarily, and he felt a mild not unpleasant pressure on his balls, but he had felt this so often in the war that he was proud to know that he wasn’t physically afraid. Good God, he’d been too near to death in the trenches…. As to leaving all this triviality and vulgarity for the darkness, the warm darkness, if he could take the whole human race with him into it so much the better. But he wished he had been able to love; in the darkness, warm, free from the deadening prickles of sterile reason, perhaps he would.

  *

  When they left the next morning laden like pack mules, they asked if they could stay with Marcus on the way back, and appeared really to mean it. Margaret had to say that she would not be there.

  ‘This is alright for Marcus, but I like real Arab country. Morocco’s Berber land, really. In a few days I shall be off to Saudi Arabia.’

  Lucdlla then said, ‘I liked Divide and Rule enormously. Of course, I’ve never known any schizophrenics but I was terribly impressed.’

  ‘It made a fascinating technical problem,’ Margaret explained.

  ‘Oh, I see. Well, I couldn’t put it down.’

  ‘Really, Lucilla, your language!’ Adam said. ‘Some of your early Carmichael stories are in the Inter Wars period English Special, Aunt Margaret.’

  But Margaret thanked Lucilla. ‘I’m awfully pleased you were held by it. That’s what matters. The technique’s my own affair.’

  ‘There you are. I said it was all right. But they said it sounded as though I were calling you a good read.’

  Humpy then got up courage to ask Marcus about the scent factory. He wasn’t interested so much in the cooperative, social angle as the technical process and the original idea.

  ‘There wasn’t much to that. Portuguese broom flourishes all over the dunes. It was just a question of extraction and marketing. Everyone said the English and Americans would want a French name, but I risked Plantagenet and it worked. All those old queens in wimples made such wonderful advertisements. I wanted to put in Edward the Second but business and fun don’t mix. The real work was persuading the Moroccans that I wasn’t going to exploit them. And perhaps that’ll never really be done.’

  He even promised delightedly to show Humpy round the factory on their return. Polly only had an apology to make. ‘It seems I was rude in not staying and listening to Q. J. Matthews, but you see it was so like the tele and part of my breakdown connects with my parents watching tele all the time.’

  ‘Oh, my dear,’ Marcus cried, excusing her, but he turned to Margaret, ‘I really am worried about the poor old thing, Margaret. He’s over seventy, you know. Flying about like a bat to Singapore and God knows where to keep the wolf from the door.’

  Margaret and all the others assured him that Quentin was very well paid in both money and in the adoration of viewers.

  ‘Oh, perhaps! But at that age! Hotels and aeroplanes! I should die. Not that I can do much. We don’t like each other, so I can’t possibly offer money …’

  When the young people had gone, Margaret, although she was really intent on her novel, felt somehow too elated to leave the conversation alone. To her surprise punctual Marcus, too, although due for a morning visit to the factory, sat down and ordered fresh coffee. They agreed about the niceness of the four young people.

  ‘Of course, one likes being liked,’ Margaret said.

  ‘They probably didn’t really like us, my dear. No young generations do like their elders. But they had such good manners.’

  As they drank coffee she meditated, ‘Why are they so much nicer than we were?’

  ‘Are they? The young are always attractive. It’s like drowned people. When you’re first drowned, nothing could look nicer. Think of that Ophelia of Millais. There’s a nice girl for you. Or that woman of Tennyson’s drifting down to Camelot. But we’ve been rolled about, thrown on to beaches, dashed against rocks and all the rest of it. You can’t expect old people to be very nice.’

  ‘I suppose not.’ Margaret’s mind was on her book, but she couldn’t find the energy to move. ‘Oh, dear, what does it all mean, Marcus?’

  The inanity of the question underlined the inertia Marcus wanted to resist.

  ‘Oh! for Christ’s sake! Don’t let your success with youth turn your head! You can’t sit there at sixty-five asking the questions of a moony girl of sixteen.’

  Margaret flared up. ‘Your malice is detestable, Marcus. All through your life it’s been the same. Restless, impetuous, never stopping for thought, destroying wherever you go like a greedy hen.’

  He felt the attack as intolerable and unfair.

  ‘And you just sit on life with your bony bottom until you’ve pulverized it into sand.’

  Margaret took her notebook away from the house, she felt too angry to work there. She walked for a while in the Souk to calm down amid the familiar shouts and chatter, the smell of offal and warm blood and rotting oranges and cedar wood, the pressure of the milling crowd, until at last she had to jump out of the way of a jingling victoria. How can he say it? What nonsense when all this press of people, this living human mass is what I feed upon! Affirmed, she went up on to the fortifications to write. She sat on the white stone battlements among the baroque cannons and stared out across the ocean. A typical Mogador wind had succeeded the intense still heat of the day before. Atlantic waves were thrashing and flaying the huge boulders below. As far as she could view great white horses leapt and were engulfed in the glaciers of green water. This sea with its constant movement and energy was as much part of her as the desert, whatever Marcus
might say. She breathed in the salt wind. If she were to give herself to the ocean she would be rolled on and on until she came to the New World, to Eldorado, to the noble savages, to life renewed.

  Marcus had his say at the factory – a competent, expeditious but that day a rather ‘scratchy’ sort of say. Yet he could not return home. He took his Peugeot out along the absurd little corniche, and by the cracked tarmac side road that led into the dunes. There he lay on his stomach in the hot sand among the broom bushes and pressed himself deeper and deeper into its dryness. After all these years that she should think that his farmyard hen business and good works were without any discipline, and what did they call it – pecking order? Didn’t she understand anything about self-discipline? know anything of how he had let himself be measured and dried by life until he was at peace with the hot sand?

  In the house the voices raised, the quarrel of M’sieu Marcus and his sister, were a source of eager speculation. Omar, who was a slave of desires, thought that they had quarrelled over lust for one of the young people – who could say which? Abdullah thought that Marcus had been disciplining his sister’s unwomanly ways. Old M’Barek ben Ibrahim declared that the sight of the young people had made them both ashamed of their unnatural infertility. Openly Hassan agreed with this seemly solution, but to himself he gave a more modern answer. There was no doubt that the family visit had stirred the conscience of M’sieur Marcus and his sister; but their guilt was not the old Moslem one his great uncle thought. With the advent of M’sieur Q. J. Matthews so famous and rich, old Margaret must have regretted that she had refused to write for Paris-Match, as she had one day to his horror confessed to him. And perhaps Marcus – his good, noble, kind, friend-might now see how absurd were these cooperative ideas at the factory. Perhaps he might even alter the foolish clause in his will by which the factory was to continue on these mad lines. Hassan, of course, could say nothing, for everything was left to him, so he could never speak of it. It was not as if, when he was owner, he would pay low wages or any foolish old-fashioned thing like that, if Marcus feared it; on the contrary Miracle Germany – Stuttgart, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt – all that he admired most in the modern world, even his favourite journal Time Magazine urged high wages, but also seemly ambition, high profits, and determined management.