No Laughing Matter

by Angus Wilson

  If he had been French, or indeed any foreigner, she would have been scared, although she had come prepared with the excuse that on her first visit abroad alone she had no intention of doing anything as commonplace as being seduced by a Frenchman. If he had been English of any class or area that she knew well she would have shied away with alarm, saying really she hadn’t come all the way to the Mediterranean for that. If he had been a business man or a tea planter on his way back East or any other ‘lowbrow’, as the Americans said, she would have avoided him for ‘one can’t make love like some lady explorer adventuring into unknown lands.’ On the other hand if he had been literary in any sense that she understood, that is had known at once who she was, she would have run fast from his embraces – ‘the London literary world is both small and cruel-tongued.’ All this she knew in advance, for she had sketched out a short ironic story about exactly such a timorous virgin as herself who would make just these excuses, though for disguise she intended to set the scene in Italy and to make the girl a young abstract painter. She had even chosen the title, Nothing to Write Home About.

  But Clifford Arbuckle defied all these prohibitions. He came from Consett, Durham (his was not even the northern accent of ‘pleasing broad A’s’ that she knew), his father was an ironmonger, he had come straight from the University of Durham to the University of Aix en Provence, he intended to give his life to the study and teaching of literature, his particular knowledge was of the changing reputation of Corneille through the centuries, of modern English literature he knew almost nothing although he professed to know her name very well. It was almost a perfect fit. And then he was so improbably romantic looking, the young Byron. But this, too, had its counterpart apparently, for he said before luncheon ended, ‘I suppose I ought to have known you were in the Bohemian set. You look too much of a gipsy, too romantic for what I’ve seen of the posh London crowd you talk like.’ He was perhaps a trifle too emphatic in his assertion of provincialism, of Northernness, as he was in his adoration of all things French. Even as she grew more talkative, let herself go, allowed his attraction to work on her during the meal, she made out of habit a little caricature in her mind of his excessive traits, Francophily the story might be called, or more vulgarly Our Fred’s Gone Froggy. Trying to feel blind that afternoon out on the jetty, she banished successfully the black and white wheeling gulls, turning them to monstrous, strident cats mewing, and as to the green blue sea with its puffy waves nothing was left of it but a smell of brine and ship oil and salt-caked rope, but one visual image persisted, blotting out all traces of the blind girl, so that even though she invented and said a number of times the phrase ‘a board school Byron’, she was forced in the end to close her writing book in despair.

  She woke quite suddenly. It must have been early in the morning, half past four perhaps, certainly not yet five, for there was hardly any light, yet the early fishermen were clattering their carts across the cobbles. Gingerly she felt for the little swivel switch by her bed, for it had come loose from the wall and she was always afraid of receiving a shock. She turned on the light and then, opposite, high up near the ceiling, where a pipe crossed the wall in the lofty room, this huge thing suddenly ran, this horrible thing with a tail, this great rat. Her heart beat as though to burst through her ribs but otherwise she could not, dare not move, even to turn her eyes away. Finding no opening under the ceiling the creature – she could see now that it was old and foul, grey muzzled and with two protruding teeth – turned at right angles in its tracks and began to scuttle down another pipe towards the floor. Margaret put the bedclothes over her head but still her screams came very loud. Some moved in response in a room along the passage; she thought she heard Madame’s voice for a moment. The nauseous rat – frightened no doubt people would say – disappeared below the floorboard. She almost knew that the tap on the door was his. He was dressed in a sort of schoolboys’ piped grey dressing gown and, beneath it, pink and white striped flannel pyjamas. He left the door open, even in her terror she registered this.

  ‘What’s up?’

  She wanted to dismiss it all as the noisy awakening from a nightmare, but she was too frightened, that, once in the darkness again, the rat might return.

  ‘It was a horrible great rat.’ She began to cry.

  ‘Good heavens, they’re more scared of you …’ he was laughing; but then his tone changed. ‘What did you come to a dump like this for? I suppose you thought you’d get local colour or whatever it’s called. You ought to be at Nice, or at least Bandol or Cassis – those are the new smart places for your set, didn’t you know?’

  His sudden anger touched her loneliness. She sobbed uncontrollably. Clifford, she could sense, was alarmed. He went to the door, she supposed to abandon her, but really to shut it. Then sitting upon her bed he took her into his arms, stroked her hair, kissed away the tears that were running down her cheeks. At last when she had come to the hiccoughing end of her hysteria, he said, ‘I’ll go and dress. Put on some warm clothes. You can’t lie here anticipating rats. We’ll walk over to the Bec d’Aigle.’

  In the early morning light and mist they had passed the fat-faced whiskery old women who, in grey printed dresses and black straw hats sat like ancient torn cats, except where here and there a lower eyelid had fallen to reveal red necked eyeballs like those of a bloodhound, guarding their rougets and sea spiders, their langoustes and that squizzling, wriggling indeterminate grey mass which would appear on the hotel menu as poissons du golfe from the slinking, darting voracious half-starved cats which could be seen like jackals’ lean shadows here and there by the harbour’s edge. On the deck of a tramp steamer stood a young negro in drill trousers and a sparkling white vest, cleaning his teeth with a piece of sugar cane. From the tenement buildings on the hill leading away from the harbour Armenian dock workers were crossing the cobbled street so slippery with trodden-in debris from the vegetable carts, to wait at the broad wire gates of the naval dockyard for the siren to sound its summons to work.

  Looking back, Margaret remembered all these scenes as quite separate from one another, from herself. Their only unity lay in Clifford, his talk, his presence, his movements, the swing of his body, the turn of his head, the inverted triangle that his dark hair formed on the nape of his neck. Perhaps happiness, she thought, is entirely disjunctive, love so powerful an emotion that the scrabbling of human reason busily making patterns and corrections is momentarily stilled. Indeed when a month later the memory of this happiness became too painful she set out consciously to piece together, to unify all these sharp edged pictures with a thread of irony. The mists and the early morning light, where had she got them but straight from a score of impressionist paintings? The fisherwomen were surely not real to her but little Boudin figures imported into the Midi from Normandy? As to the cats, she had reason to know that the fish-sellers of La Ciotat were lavish in their disposal of fishwaste to these animals, the implied battle was the conventional nightmare of some English spinster in Rome? The negro, too – Conradian figure – sprang all too easily to life, for what sugar cane would have kept its savour from, at the nearest, India or the Sudan? As to the Armenians – creatures of a chance word of Madame that ‘il y a beaucoup d’Arméniens dans le quartier ouvrier’ – how clever to recognize such ethnic distinctions in that Boudinesque light! But all this tissue of mockery came later as she very well knew. At the time and for all those four weeks (a lie, it was only three) she had never seen the world around so clearly as when it needed no explanation since Clifford was the meaning of it all.

  Weeks later she could have stood examination on every step of that walk – on the frog-like shape left by the peeling stucco of a white outhouse in the first farm they came to, the green lights in the farmyard cock’s feathered neck as it stretched to crow, a row of maize that marked the change from tomato plants to egg plants, the first myrtles of the maquis, the first brooms, which step in the steep descent to the calanque had kept its wooden support, which had lost it and was c
rumbling. Yet every object they came to was only a setting for Clifford’s talk and Clifford’s presence. Then they reached the last step and looked down from jagged rocks into the deep clear blue water flecked with floating weeds and sticks and a sudden glinting shoal of sardines caught in the sunlight.

  ‘And now I suppose we salute the deep waters with our bodies’ splendid nakedness,’ she said.

  But he had not seemed even to hear her, let alone to find cause to laugh or smile. And this was exactly what they had done, diving from the rocks into the deep clear water, unbearably cold, instantly livening. It should have been absurd but it wasn’t, for his body, at any rate, was splendid as he plunged and surfaced and swam around her, and she felt herself a necessary part of his pattern.

  When they lay together in a warm sandy hollow among the aromatic undergrowth and he put his stiff, veined rod into her hand to guide between her opened thighs, it should have brought easing, mocking words into her head, but they weren’t needed. When at last she lay back, the pain only a remote memory amid a delicious muzzy languor, his tongue licked the sweat from her thighs and her belly with a wonderfully agreeable faint rasping and all the store of irony she had saved over the years against this moment too absurd to remember. It was he who commented as they were coming back into the town: ‘Well, at least your readers can only call you Miss Matthews by courtesy now. Unlike that awful old maid you call Miss Austen.’

  But they bubbled with jokes and giggled like ridiculous children as they hungrily devoured the noix de veau and carrots at lunch. Clifford ordered two plates of pintade rôti as well, en supplément. They ate all the white grapes and all the figs and more of the brie than was really their pension due. And this delight in herself, in him, in everything, continued for the whole four, or rather three, weeks that they were together. All the bogies were banished. M. Roger caught the rat in a huge, old fashioned cage trap (or so Clifford told her, for thank goodness she never saw such horror caged); and if there were others, she did not see them, for she slept ten or twelve hours solid after the strenuous days.

  Only a hole in Clifford’s left pre-molar came as the smallest intimation of mortality. He must go to M. Pertius, the dentist, who lived in a verandah-ed villa behind a large acacia. She would buy the two almond paste boats that they ate each morning after bathing in the calanque, and await him in their sandy hollow under the tamarisks, where merely by sitting up straight she could see little green lizards motionless in the sun on the outcrops of rock fifty yards away.

  She blew up the air cushion, arranged it among the shrubby undergrowth, inhaled the scent of the rosemary that she had crushed, settled herself and pulled her kneelength lime linen skirt well up her thighs to get the sun’s full warmth. She was aware only that he would be with her in less than half an hour. She needed no more than this assurance to make the waiting into bliss. Meanwhile she took out her notebook and fountain pen. She felt no present inclination for the new volume of stories. Editors, publishers, agents all could wait. There was enough money, just, especially now when he had given her the knowledge that the moment was absolute. She had begun something fuller, something that, instead of putting a sharp line under life’s episodes, would capture the fusion of all the moments, happy, unhappy. A Carmichael novel in which the surface absurdities and conflicts and bitterness were only one theme in a much larger symphony, where the faithfulness, the enduring affection of the seemingly comic and vulgar Sophie and George were the real still centre of all the little storms. ‘The Countess and B.P.,’ she wrote, ‘seeing each other still as they did thirty years ago on their Madeira honeymoon. They pretend to see each other in more hateful or ridiculous images for public consumption, so that they shall not seem to have failed to notice the stress and storm of the years. But this is only the surface, the public picture they offer to us, their children … your Mother’s aged pathetically, your Father’s lost all sense of pride … but behind that, when they’re alone, or even in company, the old wedding photo remains as fresh as ever, ready to pop up at the most unexpected moments. Not realizing this basic continuity, we are dissatisfied with the disjunctive joys and sorrows, and seek to impose other patterns – the C. resents B.P. ‘s failure, we say, or B.P. cannot forgive the C. for seeking warmth with other men – but these imposed patterns falsify, blotting out both the lifelong vision and the immediate joy. Are these in fact the same? Is eternity experienced in the split second? If B.P. and the C. had this great possibility I now have of standing still in the silence and receiving, wouldn’t …’

  Suddenly, like the clamours of the knights breaking in on Beckett’s sanctuary, voices sounded, carried to her on the light wind. People were coming down their steps. Not the little children who sometimes lost their way there, looking for errant goats, but intruders. Men’s voices and women’s – c’est tout ce qu’il y a de … c’est là la petite plage où Jean-Louis a cherché a trouver…. Determined never to know more of these monstrous Saracens, intent no doubt on sacrilege and plunder, she buried her head deep among the myrtle and sought escape in the shrubby scents and the shrill monotony of a cicada settled somewhere on the bark of a nearby pine tree. But a strange animal sense made her feel the invaders ‘presence although she could no longer hear their voices; equally she suddenly knew that the danger was ending. Allowing herself to surface for a moment she could hear the voices disappearing up the steps, no longer after this desecration ‘their’ steps. ‘Oh, je dirai à Jean Louis … dangereux et un peu puant aussi … Non, après tout, c’est evidemment un petit coin pas du tout agréable.’

  Taking up her notebook she turned some pages and wrote, ‘I think he would not have minded that intrusion as I did. First, of course, because it was French and for him everything French has a special claim for consideration. Which seems to me nonsense and sentimental nonsense at that. Anyhow his picture of French life is a confused and contradictory one, although he doesn’t seem to know it. First there’s all this clarté and civilization and the idea of France as the only classical country of restraint and of honour. (Oh, dear, the tedium of that awful Cid.) And then there’s a much more conventional sort of thing for an Englishman – the only country of sexual maturity. When I point at the black widows, he says: Ah, the provinces! I think he sees Paris as a world of lovemaking and good talk and wine drinking…. And so it may be for all I know. I know nothing about it. And, of course, he would forgive the intruders for intruding in French because he really knows French and is interested in its idioms and forms. And anyway none of this matters in the slightest, or in any way makes him less than the most enchanting person I shall ever know.’ She read through what she had written and wrote above it, ‘Some differences between us.’

  Then she started to write a few lines farther down the page – ‘At three and twenty, with experience behind her of quarrelling parents and a disordered household, Margaret Matthews had nothing further to learn either of the world or of its ways. What she could not attribute to selfishness she put down to stupidity, and where neither of these conveniently pervasive qualities of mankind seemed to apply she frequently discerned motives of greed or lust. It was not surprising, therefore, that Margaret was considered universally as a most alarming quiz, and that the young gentlemen at the Assembly Rooms absented themselves….’ But then she wrote, ‘All the same it is a deficiency that he could read P and P and see only snobbery and concern with money. A narrow world – as if all life were consumption and moorlands.’ The awful tiling was when he said, ‘I should have thought your family life would have been a nice change from the deathly upper middle class respectability of the South of England. After all, you’re a bit of a Tessa Sanger.’ Tessa Sanger! That dreadful sentimental book. The woman can have known nothing of so called ‘bohemian life’ if she could portray it like that, all sugary and sweet. The Sangers could only have been allowable if treated with due irony – and much irony was due to them. Irony was not, as he said, swank. It was discipline for oneself and others. Discipline that wouldn’t all
ow one to have had The Constant Nymph as one’s only modern reading in the last two years! ‘You catch them without their bathing trunks, don’t you? I’ve never read a writer who can do it like you. But I suppose you’ll be working towards a sustained novel now.’ When he said such things, and puffed his pipe and looked like a little boy pretending to be his own father, she could not tell whether she wanted most to hug and kiss him, or to smack his hand.

  She looked at her watch. Heavens, that dentist was keeping him a long time, but, of course, anticipation was one of the best parts of their times together. Deliberately relaxing her legs by burying her feet in the sand she took up her pen again.

  ‘At four and twenty, Clifford Arbuckle felt that the world lay at his feet. Time and the temporary convenience of others were obstacles that he did not allow seriously to incommode him. He had felt so at ten years of age and the everts of the intervening years had not given him to revise his estimate. Nurtured in a humble home, early imbued with strict denominational principles that forbade all frivolities ineluding dancing and Sunday travel, he had yet been indulged from his first years by his mother, a system to which his affectionate sister soon learned to subscribe. Absolute male authority was the principle of the Arbuckle household, subordination of all female claims to consideration its inevitable result. The manners of Mr Arbuckle and his son Clifford were simple, almost rude, their diet was frugal, but in all else their whims and caprices were as much indulged as those of the most effete and luxurious caliphs or sultans. Endowed by nature with a clever disposition and an agreeable person the young Clifford soon learned to explain the system of his upbringing as the reasonable expectation of his exceptional talents and graces. A system of state scholarships continued the indulgence which the fond mother had begun. Born in the ruder north, he feared the established society of London and the surrounding counties lest a more polished code of manners would accept less easily his primitive claim to male superiority. His admiration, his attentions, his studious enquiry, all were given to our enemy across the narrow seas. To be received by the French was a delight, to be thought French was bliss. To this end he smoked a pipe, so, by a complicated whim imitating those anglophile young Frenchmen who supposed themselves to appear English by filling the drawing-room with clouds of coarse smoke. To labour to study the French system, the French manner, the French history, became all his pains; yet the endurance of more childish pains – a sick headache, a toothache, a disordered digestion – he found impossible, fretting about them with a petulance that might rather have been expected from a small child. To such a state had constant and excessive maternal indulgence reduced this young man of parts so that if he had not possessed …’