No Laughing Matter

by Angus Wilson

  CLARA MATTHEWS: I thought you were meant to be tidying yourself, Susan, not spying in my kitchen.

  MARGARET MATTHEWS: Now, Countess, you know very well Sukey’s never been called Susan.

  CLARA MATTHEWS: Don’t interfere, Wendy. Your Father and I were the ones who christened her Sukey. Now I’m calling her by another name. Responsibility! It’s you girls who’ve forgotten all you owe to that woman. To dump her down in a back street in Clapham. After all the years of fun she’s had with us here. And the ugliness of that dreadful little slum house. It almost makes one understand why Quentin went bolshie. Why here she’s got the garden. All this beauty. Do you see that your snow vine’s flowering, Margaret?

  SUKEY PASCOE: Mother! Don’t be absurd. What is going to become of this house with old creatures like that looking after it?

  MARGARET MATTHEWS: Yes, Mother, really, you know, you cannot run a house this size on a half paralysed cook and a slummocky charwoman.

  GLADYS MATTHEWS: And we’d all arranged to pay Miss Agnew. She’d have taken the whole thing off your shoulders.

  CLARA MATTHEWS [a little daunted by this triple attack]: There’s an excellent woman, Mrs Sankey, who’s to come in and get Regan’s supper. We’re not expecting Regan to cook more than once a day. And if your Father and I don’t feel like going out, we can always have a lobster mayonnaise or some oysters sent over from Overtoils.

  SUKEY PASCOE: The place will get like a pigsty.

  GLADYS MATTHEWS: Miss Agnew said Regan herself really needed a nurse.

  MARGARET MATTHEWS: You’d much better let us sell up and get you a good suite in a hotel.

  WILLIAM MATTHEWS [singing]: And the Russians shall not take Constantinople! We don’t want to fight, my dears, but by jingo if we do [kissing his wife]. You’ve fought the bare behind, my dear, haven’t you? No, my dears, we’re not going to be tidied up. We love our old 52. ‘I love it, I love it and who shall dare to keep me from my old armchair?’ Your Mother used to recite that when I first knew her. In drawing-rooms. Brought tears to my eyes.

  CLARA MATTHEWS [giggling despite herself]: I never did Billy! You dreadful liar. Anyone would think I was born before the Flood.

  SUKEY PASCOE [bursting into their flirting]: Well, I’ve never known anything so irresponsible. And cruel. Poor old Regan! I’ll tell you this, both of you, even if you get into such a state here that you have the Council condemning the house I’m not going to involve myself. The trouble I took. Coming up to town, then all the way down to Clapham when P. S. has been frightfully seedy.

  CLARA MATTHEWS: I see no reason why you interfered, Susan. You don’t help your Father and me like the others. No, Margaret, I must speak out. We know your husband only earns a pittance at that school and then you’ve the boys, but the fact is you contribute nothing, so you’ve no call to interfere.

  GLADYS MATTHEWS: Oh, Mother, really. We all do what we can.

  CLARA MATTHEWS: It’s hardly your Father’s fault or mine if the government has reduced our income to nothing [she is almost tearful].

  WILLIAM MATTHEWS: Now, now, my dear. They all mean well but they’ve none of them the feeling for life that we have. We knew the world as it was before the crash. Feelings have coarsened since then.

  SUKEY PASCOE [explaining on the side to MARGARET]: I’m glad to say the time hasn’t been entirely wasted, Mag. Hugh’s buying a partnership. I’ve at last got him to see that it’s impossible to go on with the awful Great Man. I didn’t mind for Senior and Middleman. But P. S. is very highly strung and I couldn’t have anyone telling me how we should educate our children. But with our own school P. S. won’t live with the other boarders. He’ll be like a day-boy. I’ve been to Gabbitas, the agents. And there’s a school in Kent. It just suits because the present head’s wife doesn’t want me to be involved with the school at all. So there’s no question of my having to fuss with other people’s children. On the other hand, Mr Carver, that’s the head, quite understood that I should want P. S. living at home. Hugh may fuss, but Senior and Middleman are both away at public school now which is quite enough. Don’t ever marry a schoolmaster, Mag. One has to spend so much time keeping them in their place. Not that Hugh isn’t an old dear. But he’s such a stick-in-the-mud. Just because he’s been at St Aidan’s so long. Men are such sentimentalists!

  CLARA MATTHEWS: You’ve the money to buy schools then. Have the Pascoes suddenly become so rich?

  SUKEY PASCOE: If you want to know the truth, Mother, hard though you may find it to believe, I’ve saved the money out of what you call Hugh’s pittance. That’s one thing 52 did for me. It taught me how to save. Hugh’s quite happy with pocket money for his old tobacco. And then there was the little that Granny left me.

  CLARA MATTHEWS: Which should have gone to your Father. Well, it should, Billy. I never was so upset as when I heard about your Mother’s will.

  WILLIAM MATTHEWS: Never mind that. My old mother left me something almost as precious as money. All the family albums. They’ve proved an invaluable mnemonic for my memoirs. You girls haven’t seen them yet. A world without eternal talk of doles and dictators. [Exit.]

  CLARA MATTHEWS: And your Father was so upset at the time. But troubles to him are like water off a duck’s back [looking round the weeds and rubbish]. When I think of what a happy free home this was for you all. London children brought up in all this peace and quiet. We must have been a family in a thousand! All this talk about self-expression nowadays. Your Father and I had discovered that for you children years and years ago. And now … I can’t think how things can have gone with you as they have.

  SUKEY PASCOE: Oh, don’t talk such nonsense, Mother. I know I’ve only brought up a family, though that’s something too. But all the others have done very well. Maggie and Rupert are quite famous. Hugh’s friend Trevor Plowright has a sister who reads all your works, Maggie. And anyone who’s employed matrons knows of Gladys’ agency.

  GLADYS MATTHEWS: It won’t be mine much longer.

  CLARA MATTHEWS: It hasn’t been for some time, has it, dear? I mean not your own.

  GLADYS MATTHEWS: Well, no. But in any case, I’m leaving. I’m starting up my own business with antiques.

  MARGARET MATTHEWS: Antiques! Gladys! How fascinating!

  GLADYS MATTHEWS: Well, I’m getting to be a bit of an antique myself.

  CLARA MATTHEWS: Chop and change, chop and change. And Margaret’s divorce!

  MARGARET MATTHEWS: There’s no question of divorce, Mother, only … Oh, you mean my divorce from Ralph. Darling! That’s ancient history.

  CLARA MATTHEWS: It doesn’t make it any less sad, Margaret, And then Rupert. What does he want to appear in this miserable Russian play for? Anne Faulkner White went to a matinée and she said with the best will in the world she could hardly sit through it. And the theatre was half empty. A few terrible cranks in beards and beads. When I think how fine he looked in those amusing plays with Alma Grayson. Things one could really recommend to one’s friends. That first night of The Other Menage! I shall never forget it! Lady Diana Cooper and Lady Louis Mountbatten! I really felt one of you had arrived. Of course, Marcus is apparently in the so called smart set now. It amuses me to see his name in William Hickey’s column. Your Father and I went through all that when you were children. And our dear old plane tree would soon be cut down if Quentin’s bolshie friends had their way. To make way for some wretched crêche or other. No, I don’t think Billy and I could possibly have seen how far away you all would drift from the simple, happy way of living we’ve tried to give you. [Although the three sisters have once or twice caught each others’ eyes during their mother’s speech and even had to suppress a giggle, as the yellowing leaves flutter down over them and the smoke from a nearby bonfire drifts across the garden a mood of sadness settles upon them. MARGARET sighs, GLADYS shifts uneasily in her rickety chair, even SUKEY shuts her eyes in an unwonted moment of tiredness.]

  CLARA MATTHEWS [observing them, with satisfaction]: Oh, I didn’t mean to depress you
girls. You’ve had your own lives and you’ve chosen to live them the way you have. You mustn’t be affected by my feelings for a quieter, more spacious way of living. It’s only an old woman’s mood.

  SUKEY PASCOE [pulling herself together]: And a very stupid one! Ugh! sitting in this falling to pieces old yard! [She shivers.]

  [WILLIAM MATTHEWS has come down the steps again. And now he puts in front of his three daughters a large photo album open at a particular page.]

  WILLIAM MATTHEWS: Do you remember this? ‘I shouldn’t have paid a guinea for this fowl. It’s jolly tough.’ And you were quite right, Podge. A guinea fowl’s a beastly table bird.

  GLADYS MATTHEWS: Was I really as fat as that?

  CLARA MATTHEWS: You were a Glaxo baby.

  SUKEY PASCOE: You always looked so neat though, Gladys. Do you remember, Mag, how we used to call her the sleek rook? And we were the scarecrows.

  MARGARET MATTHEWS: It was because you had that black coat, Gladys. Terribly sophisticated for a girl of ten!

  CLARA MATTHEWS: Not at all. Black coats were in for little girls. Besides it had a white fur collar. I should never have let a child of mine be dressed in too grown-up a fashion.

  GLADYS MATTHEWS: Look! Marcus after that party when he was sick at Cromer!

  WILLIAM MATTHEWS: My dear old Mother’s idea of food for children was not exactly …

  [The scene fades as the falling leaves and bonfire smoke turn to a delicate rose pink. We hear the voices, excited, nostalgic, reminiscent through the haze. Then gradually the sound of a barrel organ playing the dear old tunes grows louder and with it the mists clear to reveal the group still bent over the album.]

  MARGARET MATTHEWS: Mouse was tremendously elegant, you know. It was part of an immense sureness about our culture and our right to take it to any desert or jungle we chose.

  SUKEY PASCOE: Dear Granny! No old ladies would wear those black velvet ribbons round their necks now. Everyone’s too frightened of belonging to the past. But Granny M. never cared. She was much too sure of everything she believed in.

  GLADYS MATTHEWS: Look! a photo of poor old Regan in her Sunday best. She was really jolly good looking, you know, when she was young. And the cheeky look in her eye. They may have known their place in those days, but Lord! what fun they had with the antics of their lords and masters!

  WILLIAM MATTHEWS: And here. Look at that! In this very garden. A family photo. Don’t we look ‘a rare old ricketty racketty crew.’ I’ve got an amusing story about Phil May in my memoirs, by the way. But this must have been pre-war. In the old Earl’s Court Exhibition days. We still had a rockery then.

  CLARA MATTHEWS: Yes, and the laburnum was still living that we’d put in when we were first married. Oh, Billy!

  WILLIAM MATTHEWS: This calls for a celebration. I’ll open a bottle of Bristol Cream. [Exit.]

  [The barrel organ grows almost deafeningly loud.]

  CLARA MATTHEWS: There they go. They’re Welsh miners. I always give to them. Soon there won’t be any unemployed. And we shan’t have our gay little tunes in the morning. I hope Quentin and his friends will be satisfied. Oh, I must take them some coppers before they get too far down the street. [Exit.]

  SUKEY PASCOE [turning over a page]: What a revolting little creature with that common smile! It’s that awful little American of hers. What was his name? You know, the one that Marcus spat at.

  MARGARET MATTHEWS: Sue, did you know he made a pass at me? It was her fault. She would make me teach him the slow fox. And then she saw and she was in one of her rages with me for days.

  GLADYS MATTHEWS: Look, there’s Marcus with that poor cat that was run over.

  SUKEY PASCOE: Leonora! Oh, I don’t think I’ve ever been so unhappy as I was over those kittens.

  MARGARET MATTHEWS: He really does look disreputable, doesn’t he? He’s put on what we used to call the ‘patting’ smile! The one he used when he patted our friends from school.

  SUKEY PASCOE: Did I ever tell you that he patted Mary Crowe’s bottom and she slapped him. She did! Thank goodness being his daughters kept him away from us.

  GLADYS MATTHEWS: It didn’t save me.

  SUKEY MATTHEWS: Gladys! He never!

  MARGARET MATTHEWS: Really? Oh, Gladys, darling, how absolutely hateful. And how typical of his slyness and your courage that we never knew …

  GLADYS MATTHEWS: Wet Sunday afternoons I used to feel as though I were in prison.

  SUKEY MATTHEWS: The dirt had worked into the grease in corners of the kitchen in a way I shall never forget …

  MARGARET MATTHEWS: Trying so desperately always to make some sense of those rare moments of beauty when one came up for air …

  [The smoke seems to close in again and through it we hear the three sisters’ voices as when they were girls.]

  THE THREE SISTERS IN CHORUS: Now we shall never get away from 52.

  GLADYS: Alfred in apologetic secrecy will make up for a spinsterhood of cutting up food cards.

  SUKEY: I shall stand in the squalid kitchen clearing my little space for fresh vegetables and greaseless meat and I shall dream of manor houses and ordered voices and little creatures properly cared for.

  MARGARET: They will tread on my toes, my feet will ache, my back will burn, but my fancy will be mocking their clumsiness, their platitudes, their vulgar genteelism.

  [From the house behind them, we hear the voices of their parents.]

  BILLY POP: Humour’s the great leaven in life’s heavy dough.

  THE COUNTESS: And wit gives sparkle to the flattest wine.

  [Encouraged, the three sisters respond and through the mist we hear them speak in their voices of The Game.]

  OLD GRANNY SUKEY: There’s such a lot to smile at as one looks back and even tears have their own salty tang.

  MISS MARGARET MOUSE: Elizabeth Carmichael liked at times to think of her father and mother as an inexhaustible treasure house, but artistic honesty forced her to admit that even their store of vulgar pretension, unbridled selfishness and capricious affection was ultimately limited.

  REGAN THE PODGE: What price Gladys Matthews Limited as a name? Limited? I don’t fink. Twice round er once round the Albert all.

  [She ends with a pantomime dame’s exit laugh. Then all three at once sigh again. But now the smoke and fuzz gradually clear. The sisters shake themselves, open their eyes, and rub them.]

  SUKEY PASCOE [getting up briskly]: I ought to be at Harrods. Senior’s decided he must have a lounge suit and if I’m not there Heaven knows what terrible garment he’ll choose.

  MARGARET MATTHEWS: But, darling, John’s nearly sixteen, isn’t he? Surely …

  SUKEY PASCOE: My dear Maggie, he’s not French, thank Heaven. English boys are never grown up until they’ve left school.

  MARGARET MATTHEWS: I wonder if they ever do. Well, I’ve got an agent’s lunch.

  Gladys Matthews: And, believe it or not, I have to go to a museum to learn the difference between Chelsea and Bow.

  [Exeunt.]

  [A moment later BILLY POP returns bearing a tray with sherry and glasses, followed by the COUNTESS. They look at the empty chairs in surprise.]

  THE COUNTESS: Well! It couldn’t be, Billy, surely, that they’ve actually decided to run their own lives instead of ours.

  BILLY POP: I think, my dear, that for once we pipers went on strike. And we’re calling our own tune. That surely demands a celebration.

  III. 1937

  ‘The Comic Spirit is indeed wonderful and mysterious in her workings. To hear something that has been a familiar feature of one’s youth hailed by the younger generation as a startling modern phenomenon is one of those recurring situations that bring a discreet twinkle to the eye or a hastily suppressed twitch to the risible nerves of the lips of most septuagenarians at one time or another. Such is the present …

  But supposing the twitches were no longer under one’s control, supposing they came and went not at the mysterious dictation of the Comic Spirit but as the physiologically explicab
le decline of senescent motor and vascular systems. Then surely one ought not to be alone. Autumn, sad autumn, the autumn of one’s life, season of mellow fruitlessness – and in truth he had seldom been writing more smoothly, more easily; but autumn was only a prelude. At the end she had lain down there in that little room with but one eye still alive in that cheery, cockney little body. Oh! she’d have battled on even if they’d thrown in the sponge and let the authorities cart her off to hospital, for she had had the tough self-reliance of the streets.

  Such is the present crude wave of anti-semitism in Germany released by him who must surely be the world’s most tedious and offensive housepainter, Adolf Schickelgruber. To hear the young of today talk, persecution of the Jews would seem to be a peculiar and virulent disease of the nineteen thirties instead of one of the oldest plagues man is heir to. In my own young days, we were not without the croaking warnings of Mr Hilaire Belloc and the more rumbustious doubts of Chesterton. Splendid, gifted writers – masters indeed of the essay form, witty polemicists, acrobats of paradox – yet they had bees in their bonnets, bees, as it seemed, with hooked noses and Ikey Mo gestures. The material wealth of our far flung empire, the Kimberley Diamond era, the Mammon of High Finance, even the vulgarity that surrounded Edward VII’s court were often unattractive and with this world the names of Joel and of Cassel were closely associated and have to bear some of the odium …’

  Written words echo round an empty house and give off hollow reverberations which make it hard to keep going, hard to forget that you could lie here for days, no, in fairness to Clara and not to let one’s imagination become fevered, not days at all but hours, before she came back from her blessed bridge parties. ‘I shall only be gone for a few hours, Billy. We cut for the last rubber at half past ten.’ But that was all very well; those were the hours that mattered. The room was hot, almost stifling, but August was cold this year like autumn. It must be something else than the room that was oven hot. Who knew when the oven’s heat, flooding through the veins, would send the blood pounding to the head, when the room – his old study desk, the see-no-evil monkeys, the Encyclopedia Brittanica and the bound copies of the Savoy and of Wisden – would fly round in the crazy fireworks revolution of a Catherine wheel, to stop at last in black darkness, sudden and complete …