No Laughing Matter

by Angus Wilson

  Standing up, she asked irritably, ‘Who is it?’

  He laughed, ‘I’m sorry, darling, but you will involve yourself. The Chairman of the Victims of Fascism Appeal! A meeting at Kings way Hall.’

  Touched by his ironic inverted commas, she kissed him.

  ‘Damn and blast,’ she said.

  On the telephone the man was very evasive.

  ‘It’s your brother. It seems difficult for him to appear.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. He’s to be in this new Twelfth Night in the West End. An actor’s life, you know. Anyway the occasion’s a serious demonstration against the German treatment of the Jews, not a family trapeze act.’

  ‘It’s not Mr Rupert Matthews. It’s Q. J. Matthews.’

  ‘Oh, well. Quentin’s horribly overworked too. But I’ll try to persuade him if you like.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ the man sounded aghast, ‘no, that’s not it at all, Miss Matthews. It’s that two of our speakers – I’d rather not give names – are not happy about appearing on the same platform with Q. J. Matthews.’

  ‘Good Heavens! I never heard such ridiculous rubbish. Why ever not?’

  ‘Well, you know, he’s put out rather cranky notions about Spain lately and then he’s been such a violent critic of the Soviet Union.’

  ‘Whatever my brother Quentin has written, he’s had a good deal of reason, I am sure. From start to finish Quentin’s been concerned with getting at the truth ever since he was a boy. I can tell you this, Mr Smalley, if your objectors won’t appear with Quentin, they don’t appear with me. Or with my brother Rupert. And don’t quote my words back at me because the case is changed now.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to. As a matter of fact I think the appeal of three related celebrities who’ve never appeared together before on an anti-Nazi platform is a most important draw. That – and we’ve got Matthias Birnbaum. I’ll just have to go back to the others and see what I can do.’

  ‘I am afraid you will. My brother Quentin’s been a hero to us since we were tiny children.’

  When she put down the receiver Douglas was looking at her with one eyebrow raised.

  ‘Strong words.’

  ‘Well, and rightly so, Douglas. Why, Quentin and I come from the same womb.’

  He burst out laughing. ‘Wombs and purple cloaks. It’s all beyond me.’

  ‘No, I won’t have wombs dismissed with a little irony. Let’s get lunch over. I must get back to work.’

  *

  ‘Oh! No! This is it. This is the really big performance we all knew he had in him!’

  ‘It was so moving, Debbie, that I felt quite ashamed when the everyday things like intervals happened.’

  ‘To be perfectly honest, at first I thought: No, I am not going to like this, he’s playing it in too low a key. But then, of course, when the dark cellar scene came I knew why he’d done it like that. I nearly stood up and shouted for the old boy there and then.’

  ‘Of course, he won’t care what a spotty schoolboy thinks, but I thought I must tell you that the first time Malvolio went from the stage Jonathan whispered to me, “Gosh! Mummy, I didn’t know Shakespeare could be fun!”’

  The telephone had rung at the Bloomsbury flat all Thursday morning; and at last, when Rupert had gone off to the Garrick for luncheon, it was Nigel saying:

  ‘Is he gone, Debbie darling? Good, because I don’t believe that producers should ever encourage too much and anyway the newspapers have done it all. But it was very, very good. And specially for you, I wanted to say how did you do it? Because quite honestly, my dear, it was after you’d given him a talking to or something, yes, just about a week ago, that he stopped fudging around and made the line of his performance. Did you, darling? Well, there you are, you see, you asked the right questions. And, of course, that gave him the right line which in turn gave him confidence. I’m so awfully pleased for you too, Debbie, because to be perfectly frank I had with my monster, unerring eye, unerringly wrong as it’s proved, thank God, detected a tiny rift. But it’s obvious that the Dunmow Flitch is yours for the eating. Bless you, for helping, darling.’

  Which bitchery, Debbie thought, showed that the little beast was furious but also admiring. It had been a wonderful morning because although she’d been practically certain as she watched his performance, you can’t ever be quite certain and he’d been so discouraging himself.

  And now to crown all, Sunday and Jimmy Agate to lie in bed with down at Sunningdale, the November sun reflecting off the snow-covered garden through the huge new picture window, and Oxford marmalade and crisp bacon and skating to look forward to with the children on the pond. She stroked Rupert’s cheek with the back of her little finger in nervous delight as she read the wonderful notice, now sticky with marmalade, for a second time. But before she had finished, Rupert’s right hand was between her thighs and his left was taking the Sunday Times away from her. He nuzzled his face into her cheek and whispered:

  ‘Put it away, darling. We’ve had enough of it.’

  And though she had intended to rise early in order to skate with the children there was something sweet in giving herself to her clever, lauded boy. And, afterwards, she thought as she sought his mouth, they would skate with the children on the pond with bright scarves and sweaters against the snow covered evergreens. She saw the scene as brilliant, vital and gaily familial like something out of War and Peace.

  *

  ‘You know, she is rather old, my wife, Mrs Heathway,’ Herr Ahrendt said. ‘And she has been worrying, fretting. She has not been well. Otherwise I should not worry you.’

  But he did worry her, Sylvia wanted to say; he worried her very much, for she could get no sense out of Gladys about the wretched business.

  ‘But surely Christie’s word was good enough,’ she said, ‘and if they were willing to pay …’

  Yet gruffer with every questioning – and there had to be questioning because Herr Ahrendt rang every three days now and once came to the shop, looking sideways at her – Gladys repeated: ‘I’ve taken it to this chap. I wanted a second opinion.’

  Until at last Sylvia had said: ‘Really, anyone would think some doctor had diagnosed cancer instead of Christie’s recognizing an old master.’ Gladys seemed about to cry, but she went instead into their little lavatory at the back of the shop and came out again, smelling of lavender water and with her face freshly powdered.

  ‘I’m sorry, Gladys, I certainly don’t want to worry you.’

  But she did worry Gladys who was already almost dead from anxiety and distress. Over four weeks had gone by now and in these last days she couldn’t even get hold of Alf. The first week after she’d produced the money for him had been like a second honeymoon (if, that is, they’d ever had a first). His Home Cinemas was going ahead, old Fison was recovering and, if he didn’t, young Fison was rearing to get in on the thing. She was a good girl and still the best looking woman with the finest figure when they supped after a show at Rules, and nothing was too good for her as he’d have shown her before if he hadn’t been worried to death. In the second week, he’d given her a cheque for a thousand pounds just to show that everything was O.K., to use a Yankeeism. And this before she had even mentioned the repayment of the money, for their bargain had been for three weeks. In the third week when she expected (well, you would call it half expected) not the repayment in full – knowing Alf there was bound to be a hitch – but at least enough that with her own small capital she could at once repay, she received instead a letter from young Mr Fison saying that Alf had asked him, he understood that it would be of service, since it appeared that she was an interested party, he merely wished to state his genuine and considerable interest, etc, etc. There seemed no doubt that the delay and the contingency were as Alfred had said – ‘the impossibility of discussing the negotiation with my father in his present grave state of health.’ ‘Now,’ said Alfred, ‘you know that it’s only a question of time, a short few days, girlie.’ Yes, now she knew. So, having given Alfred a s
plendid meal at the flat and settled him with a coffee and Courvoisier, she said:

  ‘Alf, are you going to stand me up over this business? Because, if you do, my dear, I shall go to prison, for I haven’t got the money myself or not nearly enough. Not to mention that we shall have treated two old people in a way that’s vile. You are not as big a skunk as that, are you?’

  She thought, if he storms and raves, I shall know he intends to let me down.

  ‘Look,’ he said very quietly, and his flushed face seemed flabby as ever but paler like the loose folds of colour-washed paper, ‘there is a slight hitch. But I give you my word of honour that you shall have the money in a week. In any case, I shall be the one to go to prison if anything goes wrong. I’m to blame. No English judge or jury would let a woman take the rap for a man. But there isn’t any question of it. I tell you what, give the old boy a couple of thousand and tell him the auction regulations hold up the rest. He won’t know.’

  But she wasn’t really listening. He got up and took her by the elbows. Shaking her arms to the rhythm of his words, ‘You’ll have the money in full within fourteen days at the outside.’

  She said, ‘Thank you, Alf,’ and turned the conversation to the antique trade at Christmas.

  From now half her energies had to be given to seeing that if the worst happened he should not be involved, for if he were, then the whole of this shameful business and misery she had suffered would be meaningless.

  The next afternoon she received a telegram at the shop. ‘Down with ’flu, probably due this putrid weather. Don’t ring. Doris jumpy. Keep your pecker up. Ten days at the outside and we’ll be over the top.’

  Recovered from ‘flu (or still with it perhaps, for the weather continued to be inclement), his next card came from Manchester where he ’was on to a good thing’. She found it much easier to dismiss her fears as unworthy when he was not in London. And even easier because at this very time, Herr Ahrendt telephoned to say, too, that he had some sort of influenza.

  ‘Please, Miss Matthews,’ he said, ‘try to hurry up these connoisseurs. I know that the picture is probably nothing. Jesus Christ in the garden. There are thousands such old pictures. But Mrs Ahrendt is not at all well. She gets fancies. If you can find us some news before Christmas, please.’

  Well, so that was all right. Alf would have arranged things long before then. To think of someone in his absence as a monster seemed too shameful. And if luck was against him, for poor old Alf was hardly God, then the business stock would realize perhaps £3000 and £1000 Alf had sent and £1000 she could lay hands on – if only the shop were not rented, if only the flat …

  Sylvia asked: ‘You know, Gladys, I haven’t much savings, but if a thousand pounds would help, you would ask me, wouldn’t you?’

  The relief was enormous, to be able to talk about it, though she would have to play down Alf’s part; but she’d worked out that alibi already.

  ‘The thing is, Sylvia,’ she said, ‘I’ve got myself into the most appalling mess racing. Oh, I know that doesn’t excuse …’

  But she was not to know relief, for Sylvia said:

  ‘No, Gladys. I don’t want to know anything about it.’ She took Gladys’ hand. ‘Well, honestly, dear. Think. Is it fair on me to tell me a lot of things I shouldn’t know?’ And when Gladys, ashamed that she was in danger of crying, nodded her head because she couldn’t speak, Sylvia added, ‘But if a thousand would help, for God’s sake tell me.’

  It did help over the weekend. And in addition when she was sealing up the letter containing her monthly contribution to the family cheque for Billy Pop and the Countess, heartened perhaps by Sylvia’s generosity that widened the world to include more than herself and Alf, she thought I can always ask Margaret, or Marcus – although it had slightly shocked her recently to realize what he was – or even Rupert who must be doing very well, if, as he would not of course, Alf should be forced to let her down. When she came to the shop on Monday there was a note from Sylvia to say that she was not well; and on the Wednesday came a letter from the Capetown Castle in Southampton docks. ‘Please forgive me. But although I’ve never said it I’ve got more and more scared about this war business. It seems too silly to stay in London and be blown to pieces when my sister Gwen has been urging me for so long to go in with her at the boarding house in Bulawayo. You’ll think me mad offering to lend money just when I’m going to need it elsewhere. Or perhaps you’ll understand. The very best of luck. Don’t let him sacrifice you. He’s hopeless, I’m sure. And God bless the shop, it saved my sanity.’ It had not been fair, Gladys saw, to ask Sylvia to know anything.

  *

  Quentin woke to the banging of Mrs Ryan’s dustpan and brush on the landing outside and the slow tuneless dirge with which she provided a continuo to her loud periodic thumps. Seeing no letters by the crack under the door, he realized that it must be Sunday and latish, for she never did the stairs until she was back from Mass. She’d given her mite, no doubt, for the Christian General. As he thought of her, grubby, lumpy and sodden like the clouts and mops that she spawned wherever she swam – on the stairs, the landings, in the close-smelling lav and in her high-smelling basement – and of her spawned workless grandson Terence, and the bog world they’d escaped from, which no doubt made this King’s Cross slum one of the ‘bits of heaven’ they forever droned about in their songs of Killarney and Tralee, he was overcome with one of his rages – fits that came more easily since he’d been back from Spain – so that tension brought on cramp in the muscles of his calves and he writhed on the narrow lumpy mattress, grimacing and groaning. With every spasm that shot through his legs he smashed in the face of some sneering tweedy landlord, some fat Spanish bishop, some smarmy Member for Eastbourne or Bournemouth, some smirking ‘left’ intellectual, some hypocritical bloodyhanded commissar. Grinders of faces one and all, he ground his heels into their porky, acorn-fed chines. And then the bells of St Pancras Parish Church told him just how late he’d woken, with a thick mouth and aching eyeballs. Not old Mother Ryan’s tinselly, poor-defrauding Mother of God, but the orderly call to morning service of the bloody British bourgeoisie, God rot them! He could see that great square pile of Classical decency swallowing up their silly, floral Sunday bonnets, their sleek bowlers, their stiff upper lips, their overfed bellies and their moneygrubbing, tight-arsed buttocks. The caryatids, so decently clothed, that held up that huge barracks of an Erechtheum became row upon row of gracious English matrons holding up the whole weight of this vast sham structure – Old Queen Mary breasting the waves, Lady Londonderry, Lady Astor, Lady Westerton, Lady Houston (poor old crank, he almost loved her), Lady Atholl (red duchesses! – makes you laugh, mate!) yes and old Beatrice Webb (made Stalin laugh, mate) yes, and La Passionaria, too, just to get them all together, with his own dear Mum and old Granny Matthews (God rest her soul all the same). Well let them hold it up if they can, the cows – round and round he’d keep them going, like the treadmill, while poor old Mother Ryan and Regan and all the old girls down at the Antelope danced knees up Mother Brown or the Carmagnole to see the fun.

  There certainly wasn’t much fun here, in this room, as he tried unavailingly to turn on the gas fire and light it without getting out of bed. On the cheap, rickety chest of drawers were piled his small change, two soiled handkerchiefs and a jumble of rejected articles with the editors ‘letters, bloody, insolent, or smarmy lies:’ inopportune moment’, ‘frankly seems a stab in the back’, ‘in view of Attlee’s visit to Madrid’, ‘without a very much more thorough documentation of what is after all hearsay, rumour, suspicion, or at least generalization from personal experience’. ‘May I say, by the way, that the passages from your Barcelona diary of April have lost nothing of the old Matthews magic’ (that from the unctuous Dodo Towneley). ‘Look, Q. J., I can’t touch this, it’s too hot. But you’re a housing man. Go up to Jarrow and give it to this bloody government where it hurts, we’ll print it.’ ‘About some of your allegations I can only say have you tried the D
aily Mail, or better still Lady Houston’s rag?’

  All right, you buggers, but I’ll fight you. But looking round the room, the stained marble top of the wash stand and its cracked blue-flowered jug, the brutally scarlet oleographed Sacred Heart with its flyblown glass, even the acorn of the green canvas blind, cracked so that it nipped his finger when he pulled it, he wondered with what he would fight. Christ, it was cold! But he cheered himself, thinking of the awful, prosperous, late Sunday morning outer suburb bedroom warmth that all that bloody arse-licking crowd of editors would be lying in now, covered by vulgar, pink wadded eiderdowns or shot silk bed spreads, with skinny sour-faced wives saying, ‘not just now, darling’, or fat horrors with feather negligées tickling them up the nostrils saying,’ give it to me quick.’ ‘Good fucking, boys,’ he said aloud, ‘I’ve got my Lena and she’s got her art.’

  The thought of Lena levered him out of his bed, gave him the energy to dress and to make himself a cup of tea on the gas ring. As he gulped it down he made a note to repeat all that he was determined to write for Towneley, but to disguise it all in the form of his own Spanish journal. He was determined to make the man sorry that he ever composed that little softening up, sob stuff addendum to his rejection – ‘the old Matthews magic’ – the bastard made you retch. Well, he’d force them to publish the truth if it took a year. A year! He began to pull his week’s dirty linen out of the dressing table’s ill-fitting bottom drawer and to tie it up in a pair of soiled pyjama trousers. Lena would wash a shirt for him, with which he could shame the bastards in their offices. He believed in fighting but first in softening up.

  A whisky and a sandwich at The Antelope, then. And after a nice bit of fucky-fuck with Lena in her studio, then let her talk about her ‘art’ while she dressed, then a drink and a meal at the French Pub, and back to the studio for another slice of the cake. The prospect quickened his powers of thought and he sat down to type the notes he had made, when there floated towards him, cloud borne like the oleographed Sacred Heart, three double whiskies, a double portion of pâté, two rolls, the wing and breast of a chicken dressed with roast potatoes and cauliflower, a hunk of bread, butter and a piece of Camembert cheese. Lena would consume the lot that evening at the French pub – if he was lucky that is and she didn’t ask for more. If he was going to poke up, she said, then she had to stoke up. But he just couldn’t provide, he knew it quite suddenly. He could fight this battle and win if he were only one – he was used to living rough, to scrounging a bit here, borrowing a bit there, hocking anything marketable except his typewriter. Yes, with one only to keep, he could get through. But two, no. For all he saved on Lena was his laundry – she’d do that, for some esoteric aesthetic reason, but cooking was an interference in the anarchic life necessary for her art. For her good humour, her absolute readiness in bed, her wonderful figure, her miraculous powers of availability, there was, therefore, to pay, not only the price of her zany drivel about art (that, somehow made her seem more ready, more available to him, or at any rate, took away from any guilt) but also this sheer need to consume. Facing the future quite squarely, he eliminated her. He had to. He couldn’t afford her. He’d never from the first moment allowed sex to get in the way of what had to be done, and he wouldn’t now. He’d have to cut out the Fitzroy and her other usual stamping grounds for a bit. It was a deprivation, almost a sadness; but when he’d beaten the bastards, forced them to print the truth, he could pick up again with her or with another. He’d had long periods of one night stands before, even of chastity, though it drove him up the wall. All the same, when he stuffed his laundry back into the drawer, his elation had gone. The room was intolerable. He took himself off to a pub in Gray’s Inn Road.