No Laughing Matter

by Angus Wilson

  ‘Oh, no, we have them. But I can walk easily in these.’

  ‘No, No, you mustn’t! Middleman, where are your manners? Darling, really! Hold back the brambles for Frau Liebermann and then she can walk on the path.’

  Sukey would have liked to have protested at the woman’s total lack of any sense of economy. Ruining good shoes in her position. Coming on a picnic in that good, real wool three piece and with high heels. But tact was the only thing that mattered for these next three weeks.

  When they reached the grass clearing Senior set down his picnic basket, looked at his watch and said: ‘I say, it’s pretty late, Mum. I should think we’d better do our blackberrying stint before we have tea. Give everybody a basket, P. S.’

  Sukey made faces at him to be more tactful, then said: ‘I’m not going to apologize, Frau Liebermann, for treating you like one of the family. We’ll leave you here with the picnic things while we go off blackberrying. Rugs for Frau Liebermann, Middleman.’

  Behind her in a scarcely audible whisper, Senior said: ‘Frau L’s not Granny to be left with the basket.’

  ‘No,’ whispered Middleman, ‘nor a maid.’

  ‘I thought at one time,’ Sukey said, ‘that my offspring looked like avoiding the tiresome stage of growing up. Now I see that was a fond mother’s delusion.’ She laughed in order to give the rebuke a flavour of teasing. But if Frau Liebermann tactfully did not hear the boys’ words, she responded to their sentiments: ‘Oh, no, I shall be glad to pick fruit.’

  ‘We don’t usually say “pick fruit” for blackberries and things that grow wild,’ Sukey told her.

  ‘But we could,’ Middleman said. ‘It would sound rather nice. I vote we do.’

  ‘I’m trying,’ Sukey explained, ‘to help Frau Liebermann to speak English correctly.’

  ‘Thank you so much. You are very kind.’

  ‘You speak jolly good English already,’ Middleman told her.

  ‘Jolly good, Jolly good,’ Sukey laughed. ‘Well, you’ll be equipped with schoolboy lingo anyway, Frau Liebermann.’ But she put her arm round Middleman’s shoulders, ‘And I wouldn’t have it otherwise, darling.’

  ‘Do you have blackberries in the Harz, Frau Liebermann?’ Senior asked. ‘These ones here?’

  ‘Oh, yes. We call them Brombeeren. But more usually on the ground. Heidelbeeren. How are those called in English, Arnold?’

  The little boy’s swarthy features flushed with red as usual when his beloved mother questioned him, and as usual he answered in a mumble ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Could it be heathberries?’ P. S. asked, ‘Heide is heath, isn’t it?’

  ‘Jolly good,’ said Middleman, ‘except that there aren’t such things as heathberries.’

  Sukey frowned at him.

  ‘There could be,’ Senior said, ‘I should think they’d be what we call bilberries or whortleberries. We don’t get them round here.

  Suddenly Arnold had flung himself down on the ground, crawling on his stomach, as so often quite unrestrained in his imitations. Sukey looked towards P. S. and gave him a comforting smile, for she knew how much this feeble fooling by another boy of his own age embarrassed him. At the same time, remembering Frau Liebermann’s position, her evident devotion for her hideous little son, she cried:

  ‘Oh, that’s just right, Arnold. What a nuisance they are to pick, aren’t they? And what a strain on the tummy muscles! But they’re delicious with cream. And they remind us of our darling Quantocks, don’t they, boys? The West of England is so beautiful, Frau Liebermann. You and Arnold must …’

  But as strands of hennaed hair blew across the thick orange make-up with which Frau Liebermann apparently loved to cake her face, Sukey broke off. The clash of the two reds, and then again the dark oiliness of Arnold’s skin, the precocious black hairy growth on his upper lip simply did not fuse with the brown combes and the purple heather of the Quantocks.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘each to his own direction. And back here, in what? Half an hour? But do remember your lovely stockings, Frau Liebermann. The thorns are terrible.’

  Arnold pulled at his mother’s sleeve. ‘Look, Mummy, that way are the best. Shall we go there?’

  ‘“Mummy”, auch sprachst du?’ She ran her hand through his thick, straight, lifeless black hair. Then she gave him a little push. ‘You go there, Arnold. I shall go another way. So we shall be getting more fruit for Mrs Pascoe than if we go together.’

  Sukey smiled, but she felt herself now forced to take the opposite direction from that P. S. proposed.

  Blackberrying was something that she truly enjoyed. To find a bush covered with shiny, fat ripe berries, patiently and systematically to pick every one, never by any chance allowing an immature, still partly red fruit to fall unnoticed into the basket, to hook down with the crook of her stick clusters swaying high up in the air, to bend low for single mammoth berries growing almost over the hollows of rabbit warrens, above all, sighting a fruitful bush deep within the thicket, to fight her way through and emerge a little scratched and dishevelled, to repeat the despoiling of another hoard, all this called for sufficient physical endurance and agility, enough demands on her constant awareness, to excuse the indulgence of half an hour’s day dreaming. Better still, it was usually an occasion for the peculiar pleasure of sharing day dreams with P. S. – spoken or unspoken, for their bond was too close to need words. But today this tiresome woman had deprived her of P. S., worse still had intruded herself into her reverie. Today she picked and picked and scrambled through briars and knelt on rotting leaves and sticks until a cruel cramp seized the muscles of her calves, not in order to excuse her roving thoughts but by concentrated action to keep Frau Liebermann out of them.

  Of course one felt desperately sorry for her – a bit absurd with her hennaed hair, but that was continental, or even more likely Jewish, indeed it only made her stories of neighbours ‘slights that had turned overnight into bullying, the desperate fears for her absent husband and her grown son, more horrible, more pitiable because so unheroic. A human being after all that one could not but want to help; yet not someone to include in the family circle, no, not at all, for she neither fitted in nor stimulated by her challenge. She was just there, living in her own feelings, with her thoughts somewhere quite else. And naturally so, she would have been the same herself in some foreign land without the family, without the boys, without P. S., but then Frau Liebermann had her Arnold with her. Somehow the woman made them all feel as though the happy life they had built up was quite … Sukey heard the word ’nice’ echoing inner thoughts, but it was hardly meaningful, no, as though their life, the world they had made, did not matter. She refused the idea at once; she had never accepted the view that merely because people were unhappy or poor or ill they should be considered before others. Hugh at times spoke in that way about some wretched small boy who couldn’t fit into the school, but then that was his job. For the rest, health and happiness every time – without them all was muddle and dirt.

  People like Quentin – clever if cranky – disapproved strongly of individual charities, said they only scratched the surface of the world’s troubles. Certainly this woman coming to them did not seem to have put off this foul war scare one atom. God had not answered…. With her stick to the ground she levered one long spiny branch packed with luscious berries, then held it in place with her foot and picked, telling herself not to be a complete, dotty fool. She must read the papers more often – she had never had time for such things in her busy life – but that article of Garvin’s last Sunday had been most reassuring and he knew.

  No! She suddenly accused herself, for she saw the real truth – she was jealous, of all absurd things, jealous, that was it. Despite her streaky hennaed hair, her orange make-up, her dullness, her abstraction, Frau Liebermann was one of those bores who yet had charm; an unconscious, odd, uncaring sort of charm, but it had conquered Senior and Middleman, there was no doubt of that. And she, their own mother, was becoming jealous! Stirring t
he blackberries around in the basket with the palm of her hand, making patterns, picking out here a green, there a red interloper, she gave herself very bad marks indeed. It was well known that boys of seventeen or eighteen fall in love with older women, women old enough to be their mothers. It was only a question of understanding, perhaps of a bit of teasing. She felt the hot, late September sun waking her after the disappointing, cold, wet summer. She looked with pleasure at her full basket. That she had beaten down so many brutal thickets, smashed so many thorny, lacerating branches, braved her hands, and come through victorious, made her body, now that she could relax, seem to her young again, younger than her thirty-five years, certainly young enough to laugh a bit at all her own solemn mother-of-a-family-bowed-down-with-care stuff. Returning, she slipped easily through a gap in the bushes here, noticed a trodden branch there, noticed indeed more than her own former pathway – a new place for picking primroses next spring, and surely, yes, it was, a weasel’s skull to tell P. S. of – lively, observing, with a swinging walk, with a sure sense of direction she returned to the family, and, catching her foot in a bramble sucker, fell. Most, though not all of the blackberries were scattered, yet she could only think – ‘pride comes before a fall’. And, for some reason, the old maxim made her giggle helplessly. If only P. S. were there to share the fun. She picked up the scattered fruit one by one. But, as for those berries that had rolled into the dense, thorny scrub, damn them, they can stay there; what do I care if they have escaped me?

  On the stretch of open downland the others had already started their tea, or rather they took her appearance as a signal to begin. Only P. S. waited for her to give the usual word. Yet she felt no desire at all to rebuke them. Sitting down on the same rug as Frau Liebermann she asked: ‘Do you have sausage rolls in Germany? Oh, they’re delicious, you must try them. Look, have half this one with me to see if you like them. And for goodness sake, help yourself. I shall. We can’t afford to be ladies with these great louts about.’ And stuffing her mouth with food she imitated Senior at his greediest until they were all laughing.

  ‘Well you drop crumbs everywhere and get butter on your chin when there’s buttered toast,’ he told her. It was his old retort.

  ‘All perfect ladies do eat messily, don’t they, Frau Liebermann?’ Sukey asked. And they had to laugh because Frau Liebermann really had made a terrible mess with her sausage roll.

  ‘Anyhow she’s collected a perfectly wizard basket of blackberries, Mummy,’ Middleman said.

  But P. S. wasn’t having that. ‘Mummys’ll be the biggest, I bet. It always is.’

  The two baskets put side by side showed Frau Liebermann was an easy winner.

  ‘But mine fell over,’ Sukey said protesting. ‘It did, really it did.’ She began to giggle helplessly again. ‘You don’t believe me, do you? You think I’m just saying that to save my wounded pride. Oh, dear, how funny!’ She could hardly get the words out. Then she saw Frau Liebermann’s glance of surprised curiosity. ‘Congratulations, Frau Liebermann. We ought to shake hands.’

  But she could not stop laughing. ‘You know what,’ she said, ‘I’m going to seize this rare sunshine to have a delicious snooze.’

  She lay back with her head on an ancient molehill and soon fell asleep in the warm breeze.

  When she woke, the sun was still shining, but it might as well have been smothered in cloud, for she felt cold and cheerless; and she must have eaten the sausage rolls too quickly for they lay on her chest like sharp edged stones. Her cheeks burned, sour bile filled her mouth, she felt too tired to move. Their talk went through her like the movements of some animal, of a dog or a cat licking one’s face when one wished to sleep. All she could do was to let it lap over her.

  ‘But you see we did not notice at first. The people who turned their heads from us, we had never liked. So naturally we were not so sad. If you do not like some people, if they are pigs, you are glad when they do not speak to you. But then Arnold was sent back from the school and he was crying and his eye was cut, I did not know what to do. I was so angry and frightened. But after again it was better. We heard from the Friends and he came here to Mrs Carver and your father. And Sigmund was still away in Italy, so for some months it was only I and my dear Herbert who must face these things. And with Herbert it is always so easy to laugh. He is so brave. But now I shall tell you something to shock you. There was in our – what do you say – house of apartments a girl, quite young, seventeen, eighteen, I don’t know, something of your age, who for many years cannot walk. She has been quite ill with poliomyelitis and must be in a chair. So, I have never liked to be with ill people, or what do you say, cripples? Yes, that’s it, thank you. But each morning she is there at her window and so I found the habit – can you say ‘found the habit’? – to say to her, good morning, and sometimes, because her mother is old, to make some shopping for her. One day when I ask, “What do you want me to buy today, Fraulein Kissinger?” she turned her head away and would not speak. At first I was finding tears in my eyes – how shall I bear it if the poor cripple girl will not speak to me? And then I think I am very happy – I don’t like cripples, I don’t want to speak to them, I don’t wish to make their shopping. I am free from all that. So, you know, staying here now with you in this beautiful country I sometimes think in such a way, what do I care about Germany, I am free, but then …’

  There should be no but then to it. Sukey had up to now let the words flow over her, but the monotonous, level voice depressed her spirits, flattened the world for her. The boys said nothing. With her eyes closed she could not tell their reactions, but she guessed – knew – hoped them to be bored; what sort of stuff to serve up to boys of that age! and she could not have this woman boring them all, boring and depressing herself with, these tales, she must assert their strong happiness, the happiness of nearly twenty years to banish these treacherous, pervasive mists of sadness. Sitting up suddenly, she said: ‘Do you know, that’s exactly what I used to feel on the houseboat? You didn’t know we’d been exiles too, Frau Liebermann. But we were in Cairo, on the Nile. Hugh had pneumonia some years ago and one of our parents was a rich Egyptian currant merchant and he lent us this boat for Hugh to convalesce. I know exactly how you must feel. The strangeness of making orders for lunch that first day, because of course P. S. was too much a baby to eat rice. And just being on the great river with the strange little fishing boats that might have come out of the beginning of time. Do you remember Ali, our little cook, Senior? “Yes, I tank you.” And the geese that swam round the boat as we breakfasted. I thought I shouldn’t be able to bear it all at first, but then Hugh had an absolutely beastly headmaster, a proper Hitler. I’d had terrible rows with him. And suddenly I remember thinking just like you, that I was glad to be away from it all. Senior was only five then but he made a little garden on the bank of the river with just a packet of seeds and, of course, with the sun and the fertile soil we had flowers in a few weeks. I think I was as surprised as he was. Do you remember, Senior?’

  Senior gave a slight smile of recall.

  ‘But you don’t, Middleman, you were too small. You might just remember the great captain of the boat, such a huge man in his turban and blue coat, quite dark, a Sudanese. Do you?’

  ‘Perhaps I do, Mother, I’m not sure.’

  ‘Well, I am sure if he’s alive he remembers you. He was forever saving you from drowning. I shall always be grateful to him. Like a very lovable gorilla. And then the old carriages, the Victorias, with their drivers calling to us whenever we came on deck. The noise, the bustle, the sheer life of the Nile. Oh, I shall never forget …’

  ‘Mummy! Mummy!’ P. S. shouted, ‘Do shut up! Who wants to recall that old stuff now?’

  *

  As a rule he just sat and let the hideous, whimsical advertisements break up in the rattle and speed of the journey into a pleasant, trivial, Dufy-decorative mass of points of colour and light. Appropriately reminded by the many toothpaste names that shot at him from every side h
e would feel himself encased in a grey steel tube rushing through time – to what? To Sunday afternoon family fug, the smell of the baby’s nappies, of washing up and of Madge’s old Dad’s incontinence – but why? why? easiest for the moment just to say, over the water to Ted.

  But this Sunday afternoon bodies pressed upon him, threatening to crush him against the glass partition – more and more of them at every station, blotting out the specks of colour, obliterating even the swinging bells made by the hanging straps. At first he distracted himself with Jean’s letter. Then came a sharp pain, as with the swaying of the train a high heel dug deep into his foot and made him drop the letter and then scrabble for it among the pillared maze of legs. Jean’s spidery elegance was defiled by the criss cross imprint of a rubber heel by the time he retrieved it; but like all his possessions it was in any case due for a crumpled existence wedged amid combs and pocket books and other old letters in his inside breast pocket. He amused himself until Camden Town with Jean’s accompanying sketches of les boxeurs et les boxophiles, but always the feeble lines – here of a young man’s tapering hips, there of the crooked mouth of a drooling old satyr – annoyed him by their total failure to measure up to Jean’s power of words, his wit, his charm, his wonderful physical presence. Stuffing the drawings away with the letter, he looked up to see an enormous black, cloth-clad bottom sharing his line of vision with thinner, meagre buttocks, their outline lost in shapeless, almost threadbare, grey flannel. As he let his eyes rove these nearby spheres and hemispheres seemed to stretch out into an infinite series of circles, semi-circles, ovals, as white faces gleamed against heavy breasts bursting out of their dresses, and vast bottoms gave place to tree trunk thighs and bottle calves. With the swaying of the train the shapes changed their patterns until suddenly with a violent lurch the huge black bottom fell upon his face, threatening to cushion him into extinction.