I'm Dying Laughing

by Christina Stead

  It was one small room painted ochre, with ten small tables arranged for the most part in pairs. The tables were dressed with new cloths of rough linen striped red and blue and yellow and had slender vases of flowers. On the walls were exhilarating posters advertising Spain, Algiers, Italy, Marseilles. There was a small counter, a switchboard with red and blue lights and a door leading to the workers’ hotel upstairs. There was no one there. They were early. An Algerian worker came in soon after they were seated, saluted the middle-aged, short, dark-haired woman at the counter, drank a very small glass of muddy wine and went upstairs.

  ‘It is a workers’ restaurant,’ said Evelyn cheerfully.

  Perhaps because of the feeble light the Howards felt miserable. Dan cheered up however and said he would take a small aperitif. They had come early, he explained to the woman at the counter:

  ‘Let us have a porto before your nice dinner.’

  The woman gave him a pleasant smile, almost of recognition. Women gave this smile to Dan, though Emily considered him very unattractive, being nursed and henpecked by Evelyn and because he had attacked them as runaways and renegades—that was what they had heard. She frowned and thought of herself, ‘Why are we eating with this dirty backbiter? If he thinks that of us, why does he eat with us?’ She had to take a porto, there being no whisky there.

  Presently from the kitchen came a youngish, middle-aged man in sweater and worn grey trousers who took their order for the first course: for the Howards, the truffled pate for Dan and Evelyn parmentier soup, the soup of that evening, for the Oateses various hors-d’oeuvres.

  Stephen said pleasantly, ‘I’ve capitulated to the local habit of eating soup every evening, but I can’t eat leek and potato soup in the evening. It insults my wife. I stay up half the night worrying about my stomach.’

  This embarrassed Evelyn.

  Next, Emily ordered one dozen Burgundy snails with the special sauce, Stephen waited and the others shared a dozen between them. This took some time and with the snails they consumed each a glass of poor white wine. Emily declared, eating the snails with gusto, ‘Well, it’s grand anyway. It’s a workers’ dump but you tell an American truck-driver that in a French workers’ restaurant you get truffled cream of paté de foie gras, burgundy snails and parmentier soup and roast chicken and pheasant, I see they have—and scalloped veal and mushroom sauce and so on, why the guy would think you were a traitor to the USA, a wiseguy, a spy, a greenhorn, a phony and all ready for the guillotine.’

  ‘They don’t have guillotines in the USA, fortunately,’ said Stephen.

  ‘I’d like to write an article, saying, listen friends, they don’t eat wayside weeds boiled in water eked out with a few cans of hamburgers and pineapple juice sent over from the USA, they eat paté de foie gras. And if I wrote down what I understood just now from this character who cooks, that these snails were fed on these herbs for three weeks beforehand, and white wine with the poor wretches—eh? They wouldn’t buy it. Or else they’d say, “See what they’re reduced to living on? Snails! I guess it came about that way to begin with, they were poor,”’ and she looked thoughtfully at the snails.

  ‘Very funny,’ said Stephen sourly. He was depressed by the quiet and modest men coming in to sit at the nine other tables, and another worker with lime on his sabots, who had just gone upstairs, perhaps without supper; by the poor light, by the smell of the garlic sauce on the snails, by the doubts about his quondam friend Dan, who seemed a little upstage with him, by the pain in his entrails and by a twinge of his rheumatism, too. The foie gras had been ordinary, not exceptional, the wine acid. He had ordered a beefsteak; he wondered if it would be cow or horse in this place. He wished he had ordered veal, along with Emily. Dan had ordered cod in black butter (‘What a horror!’ Emily had signalled to Stephen) and Evelyn boiled mackerel with caper sauce (Terrible! What did you expect?’ Stephen signalled to Emily). The Oateses had jugged hare and boiled potatoes; though Ruth seemed discontented.

  The Howards ate their dinners painfully. The Oateses seemed very cheerful. The Howards decided not to go to a cafe with their friends. Stephen was suffering from the acid white wine. ‘We’ll go home and you’ll come to us next week.’ They took a taxi home and in the taxi they both groaned. Unlucky evening.

  Emily said, ‘Oh, I wish we had gone to the movies. It’s so dull in Paris, Stephen. Everything is so dull and accepted and bourgeois; and here bourgeois I found out from Suzanne means family-style. Home-style—pot luck. We know them. They can’t like it. It’s fun for them like going to the fair; hamburgers and ice-cream. But when I go out to eat in Paris I want good food. Oh heck. We’ve moved miles away from anyone we used to know and like. Our standards were wrong! Juvenile. Like, if you’re hep, you go and eat in a Jo’s Diner, terrible food, hamburgers like chopped soles off the shoes of dead bums and drown it in sauce and coffee, like water the bum was found in, shoes and all. Oh, my! Stephen. They live here, they know Europe and they keep up these childhood games. The love-the-workers stance.’

  ‘I only want to be home and sit down and begin to relax. I can’t wait to get home. It pours all over me like a salve. I don’t love the workers, or the friends of the workers, I just want to survive. I feel lousy.’

  Upstairs was a letter from Anna saying that her visit was put off” to just before Christmas and she would bring Fairfield then. The letter had been left with the porter by mistake. The courts, said the letter, after further applications, had decided that Olivia might be taken care of by her grandmother, since the Howards were living abroad. However, Grandma would leave Olivia where she was till she came over with Fairfield.

  ‘Oh, zut, zut and double-zut! We’re always on trial, always being put on our best behaviour. There’s no peace in our life!’ said Emily. ‘Oh, how detestable the rich are, knowing their power and getting the bowstring ready and holding it over your head like a bowstring of Damocles.’

  They had only been home a few minutes and were dolefully traducing their hosts and friends, when Emily had, noted down by Olivia, a telephone message from Violet Trefougar. She felt obliged to come and see the Howards that same evening. She knew they did not go to bed early and she needed them badly. Stephen said that he had had enough guilt for one evening, just looking across the table at Dan, and that Violet always made him feel guilty. Emily telephoned the Trefougars.

  The maid said, ‘I am afraid Madame is not very well,’ but Violet sprang to the phone and cried, ‘Oh, I am not well but I must come to see you.’

  They heard her in fluent though foreign French speaking insolently to the maid; and then again to Emily: ‘Oh, darling, if I don’t come to see you this evening, I’m afraid I shall go out of my mind. I have to take a taxi because Johnny has gone off again—on one of those things, you know!—and taken the car.’

  ‘You must stay with us tonight, Violet.’

  ‘No, I can’t because of the child.’

  The Trefougars had just adopted a little boy of six, well-grown and beautiful, tall, straight, proud and amiable. Violet hoped that with him her life would change, her despair would cease.

  ‘If I have any sanity left, Emily, it is because of this child; this little man has saved my life.’

  Emily put down the phone and burst into tears. ‘And we have just heard that we are losing Olivia: and we have lost Christy.’

  ‘I told that little hound to wait here to look after you. But he turned his back on you like the others. He is very good at turning his back on people and always with a righteous reason, the dog. I hate hypocrites.’

  ‘Oh, Stephen, we didn’t like those people tonight, did we? What is happening to us? We are alone.’

  Stephen’s eyes were wet, too.

  They waited impatiently for Violet. She came, beautifully dressed in a Worth dress, blue, simple. She was excited and nervous beyond anything they had yet seen in her.

  ‘Oh, my dears, I’m so frightened, troubled, I live in fear! How good to have you to run to!’

 
; They felt guilty, more touched than before, because since the Belgian trip they had been condemning her for her hysteria. During the past weeks, unknown to Stephen, Emily had become not only friendly but something of a crony. She understood Violet better and feared her.

  Suzanne had said, ‘She’s just a selfish beast,’ and Stephen, ‘She’s intolerable, I’m sorry for Johnny, I’d smack her.’

  And during the past six weeks, Stephen had come to know Trefougar better and to fear him. They both now wondered, each privately, whether Violet’s upset, her vice, had arisen from the welter of threatened violence, suicide, murder, other crimes, dirty companions and perverted sex and whether she had not for years shown, as Emily claimed, ‘Dignity, astonishing perfection of manner, decency and remarkable self-control.’ The story of the adopted child had altered their feelings towards her.

  Violet was saying she thought of them so much. She secretly agreed with them in many things. It was Johnny who was a brutal fascist. She was for making compromises, even making amends to the East.

  ‘We’ve treated them too long as if they were brutes, pigs, farm animals, without understanding, and frightful monsters. When the real brutes were the Germans, whom we admired so long for their culture.’

  She brought all this in before she began on her own troubles, which were of the same sort as before. Johnny had no sooner returned than he had gone off. He had come home, quarrelled with her, given her no money, gone off. The little boy had been there, seen all, listened to everything innocently, and tried to console her when Johnny, now called his father, had gone.

  ‘The child seemed to understand everything, though of course, that’s impossible. Without him I should have killed myself yesterday.’

  She had sacrificed her personal life and dignity for long years, she said, for Johnny’s sake and now she had decided to do so again for the charming boy; but it was hard. She had no one to call upon.

  ‘Either they believe Johnny’s lies, or they’re in with him, in whatever traffic he carries on, or they just can’t be bothered taking my side; easier not to. Besides, it’s a male society. Women are just part of the luggage. When I weather this, I’ll be all right. Only now I need intelligent sympathy.’

  She asked their bedtime, would only stay till then, went through the house with them, went to the kitchen where she was always happy she said, drank coffee, went with Emily to Christy’s rooms, where some of his things still were, waiting for removals. Emily wept and clung to her.

  ‘I feel for you so deeply about this little boy of yours.’

  Giles hearing all the movement, got up and came down to see them in his bunnyhug pyjamas.

  Violet was still talking of the mistakes Johnny had made in his diplomatic career; in a way, he was right; but she did not believe in him or in the general British policy. If they never met and were never friendly with the communists, how would they ever know their plans, come at them?

  ‘Johnny says we know enough about them. Our job is to be lined up against them. My feelings are that they’re right on some points. I’m a bit of a communist.’

  Giles, who was drinking warm milk, declared suddenly, ‘I’m not. Communists are Jews and I don’t like Jews either. No one in our school likes Jews.’

  Giles was now a brown-faced, chubby and amiable boy of seven, alert, witty.

  Violet hugged him, ‘Little precious infant!’

  He let her hug him, ate and watched them wisely, smiling a little.

  His father asked, ‘What’s this? You’re an American. America is a democracy. We don’t believe in fascism. We don’t hate Jews or Negroes or Mexicans or even little boys who are too big for their pants.’

  Giles grinned, ‘Yes, but Daddy, the boys at school aren’t Americans, they’re French, one’s Greek, one’s Swiss, one’s Italian, one’s English and they all come from democracies, except the British and they don’t like communists. Communists aren’t democratic. Louis’s father said so.’

  ‘Who’s that, Louis’s father?’

  ‘Louis is a Greek. His father’s a Greek. The communists want to take away his house and his business. That’s robbery. And Louis says I’m an American, an American believes in democracy; and Louis says the Americans are helping his father. So they can’t be communists.’

  Emily laughed and opened her mouth. Stephen said, hesitating, ‘Yes, no doubt the Americans are helping his father because his father is rich.’

  Giles said seriously, helping himself to a slice of apple pie, ‘And because his father has a factory and we have a factory, I told him. I told him you are a communist, but he doesn’t believe me. He says, no Americans are communists.’

  ‘Well, you know Axel and Ruth and Bundy and Mike and a lot more of our friends are communists, and they’re Americans.’

  Giles said, ‘Oh, they’re poor. I mean rich Americans like us, who have factories and houses and automobiles.’

  Stephen said testily, ‘We don’t have a factory, we don’t have a house and at the moment we haven’t even an automobile. And in America every hillbilly has an automobile and every communist, too.’

  ‘But we have a factory. I told him we had a lot of them.’

  ‘Well, you will have to tell him differently. Because we don’t have one, not one,’ said Emily energetically.

  Giles stopped chewing and looked at her severely, ‘Not one?’

  ‘Have you ever seen a factory we owned?’

  ‘No, but I know—Grandma and Grandpa and Grandma Wilkes—a lot of people and Uncle Cha in England and Aunt Dunbar Melton in England—they all have; and I know in Alexandria we have. I told Akim, we have factories in Alexandria.’

  Emily said, ‘Well, we don’t. Other people do but we don’t. And that’s why we’re the other side of the fence. We’re communists.’

  ‘But why? Akim and Louis and Gilbert and Giorgi, the Bulgarian boy and the others, they are all against communists, everyone in the school and they say I must be too because we have factories. They said so.’

  ‘I can see their point of view all right, very rational,’ said Stephen smiling.

  ‘And they say I have to be on their side because if the Americans don’t stand with them, there’s going to be hell to pay.’

  ‘Eh? What’s that?’ said Stephen.

  ‘The whole world would go to the devil. Ilsont raison, they’re right. Because they say if I were a communist I’d try to rob their factories and I said I wouldn’t, so they said I couldn’t be a communist. I said I’d fight them if they said my father would try to rob their factories.’

  Stephen sighed, ‘Oh, I wish I could. Never mind, their point of view is crystal clear. You boys have interesting talks for toddlers.’

  ‘Pedro says he isn’t worried because his father’s factories are all in South America and at present South America is lined up with the United States; but there are communists everywhere trying to take their factories; and you never can tell, we all have to stand together.’

  Stephen said, ‘Well, that’s a solidarity that’s quite touching; and I only wish we were as solid ourselves. That’s pretty good. Only Giles, we have to be solid on the other side, because we’re the have-nots, have-not factories, have-not rich villas, have-not yachts, et cetera. We’re on the outs and so we have to side with the workers.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we are workers.’

  Giles studied them, baffled and anxious: ‘But we aren’t workers! We don’t work!’

  ‘That’s cool from my own son. Come, when you grow up, Giles, you’re going to work, aren’t you?’

  ‘No. I’m going to have a factory and two automobiles like Eduardo and Louis, and race-horses. We are all going to whip the workers, just like they used to do in the olden days. It is the only way to make them work.’

  Stephen sprang up, ‘Well, for Christ’s sake. What sort of a den of thieves have we led him into? He’s coming away tomorrow morning. I’m not going to support at this rate a seven-year-old fascist and peon-whipper. I�
�ll go and see the headmaster in the morning.’

  Violet asked, ‘What do you expect him to think? He’s only a baby. I think it’s interesting to hear what they say. I think we don’t pay enough attention to the other side.’

  Emily murmured, ‘You’re right. But just the same, Vee, we pay good money for the boy to be taught, not distorted. Bad joke.’

  Stephen said to Giles, ‘When you grow up, my pretty child, you’ll have to work; just like Giorgi and Louis, Pedro, Eduardo and whoever they are. They have a big surprise coming to them.’

  ‘Eduardo says he will never work; he will kill every worker with his own hand first; and Gilbert is going into the Foreign Office and Louis says he is going to play along with the Americans and we all should.’

  ‘They certainly teach a lot and fast at that school,’ said Stephen.

  Emily and Stephen, especially Emily, spent the next twenty minutes telling the boy what he should think and say, and explaining work and the worker to him. Giles replied, ‘But it wouldn’t be fair taking away Alessandro’s race-horses, and automobiles and everything.’

  ‘A new personage, who is Alessandro?’ said Emily.

  ‘A Greek boy. It’s wrong. It makes him mad. It makes me mad too. Besides, I already told them about Grandma and Fairfield and everything.’

  Violet said, ‘Poor child. Oh, it is confusing. I shouldn’t know what on earth to answer a child. Parenthood is fascinating, dangerous of course, but it makes you think. I’m glad I have a child now.’

  Stephen yawned and stretched, ‘Well, do what you like. I leave it to you, my boy. I don’t go with those boys and I never did mix with such high-feathered birds. I don’t want to preach communism in a place where they couldn’t understand it. I don’t want you to get into a mess for nothing. Just remember which side you’re on. The side of the workers and the Soviet Union.’

  ‘But Dr Thibault said and the teachers all say that Russia is making war against the whole world and is stirring up France and making France poor.’

  ‘Some school. You know that’s a lie, Giles,’ said his mother.