Making the Cat Laugh (21 page)

To celebrate the 3,000th
Listener
crossword, I thought I might share a little secret with you. Shout it aloud in Gath and Hebron: nobody on the
Listener
staff has the first idea of how to do the
Listener
crossword. For years, we have been convinced that the clues are actually coded messages from MI5.

Speaking personally, it’s not only crosswords that I can’t do.
All sorts of brain teasers leave my brain completely unexcited. The ones I particularly dislike are those that are designed to develop your verbal reasoning skills, where you are supposed to infer a whole system of relationships from a few key bits of information. For example: a) ‘Julie has a dog but it does
not
have blue eyes’; b) ‘John knows all the words to
Melancholy Baby
but can’t quite get the tune’; c) ‘Sylvester only recognizes words with fewer than
four letters’;
d) ‘The dog
will
sing, but only for Maltesers’.

Perhaps my dislike for these exercises explains why I found it so hard to get started on Iris Murdoch’s novel,
The Book and the Brotherhood
. She launches straight into this kind of information about a vast number of characters (Conrad is taller than Gulliver, though Gulliver is considered tall; Gerard is Tamar’s uncle but Violet’s cousin; Gerard, Jenkin and Duncan all wear dinner-jackets), with nary a thought for those of us hastily sketching diagrams on the fly-leaf.

So which puzzles
can
I do? Well, I will confess that I have a certain aptitude – given the right airport-lounge – for the ones that present you with a block of letters, and ask you to find the hidden words.

Now, to the untrained eye, this looks like a mere mess of jumbled letters. But I think I can demonstrate something pretty startling.

Since the book is now out, it is too late to ask Susan Hill to be gentle with me. As from yesterday, a surging modern sequel to Daphne du Maurier’s
Rebecca
has crashed and boiled by moonlight into the bookshops, and my name – Mrs de Winter – is once again in common parlance, along with Rebecca and Mrs Danvers, and Mad Ben the beachcomber. (‘No shell here,’ nods gap-toothed Ben mysteriously in my dreams at night. ‘Been diggin’ since forenoon. No shell here.’)

Ho hum. Crash. Boil. That’s the trouble with being shy and mousy. When you are the sort of nervous person who pushes the shards of a broken ornament to the back of a drawer so that the servants don’t find out (‘Oh lord, that’s one of our treasures, isn’t it?’ quips your husband, helpfully), it is natural that people should go right ahead and publish sequels about you, without bothering to ask you first. In my worst moments I think Mrs Danvers was right, I should have chucked myself out of an upstairs window and done everyone a favour. But the trouble with being Rebecca’s nameless heroine is this: supposing Susan Hill
had
taken me out for a coastal drive and then explained, ‘I’m asking you to be in my new novel, you little fool!’ – well, I would have had no option but to swoon my acceptance, wouldn’t I?

But I have changed a lot since
Rebecca,
since those ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea. And I just hope Susan Hill is aware of it. The fact is, I experienced a quite surprising character change just at the point when Daphne du Maurier’s narrative left us – Maxim and me – on that mad, desperate nocturnal drive westwards towards the blazing Manderley. You may remember the scene. I spotted the giveaway glow on the horizon, and suggested, feebly, that it was the northern lights. ‘That’s not the northern lights,’ said hubby, all grim and lantern-jawed (as usual). ‘That’s Manderley.’ And he put his foot down. ‘Maxim,’ I whined. ‘Maxim, what is it?’ But he didn’t answer, just drove faster, much faster. I felt cold, very cold. It was dark, horribly dark. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. ‘It’s the bloody house!’ I yelled, suddenly. ‘That snotty cow in the black frock has set fire to the bloody house!’

Well, you can imagine the consternation. We came off the road. The car juddered to a halt. There was a hiss of steam. The ash still blew towards us with the salt winds of the sea, but I beat it off my jacket saying, ‘Ugh! Ash! Yucky! Look!’ Maxim could not believe his ears. ‘Stop it, you idiot!’ he said, but it was the wrong thing to say. ‘And you can stop calling me an idiot as well!’ I said, and socked him on the jaw. It was terribly peculiar; not like me at all. The author watched in stunned amazement, and then asked very quietly whether she could have a word.

The whole point of
Rebecca,
she explained patiently, was that I – as the modest, hapless, mooncalf heroine – should serve as a role-model for readers yet unborn, as the acceptable face of womanhood. Surely I could see that? ‘First we have Rebecca,’ she said; ‘she’s sexy and manipulative and selfish. You see? Then we’ve got Mrs Danvers, who is dark and jealous and self-sacrificing and is obviously everybody’s mother because she
knows their faults and judges by impossible standards and rests her chin on their shoulder. And then there’s you, the victim. And you haven’t got a clue, basically. But because you are well intentioned, not very bright, motivated by gratitude and love, and terrorized by a fear of failure, you’re the heroine. Everyone loves you! Trust me! You are a great modern archetype! One day your followers will include the Princess of Wales!’

But I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Where’s the fun in that?’ So I divorced Maxim, took half the insurance money on Manderley, learnt to sail, wrote a book on sexual politics, broke a lot of ornaments and felt much better. That’s all there is, I think. Except that I decided to call myself Jackie. It comes as a surprise to some people, but as I always say, it’s a great deal better than nothing.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I wake up in my little flat, turn on the light, and burst into tears with relief. ‘Oh kitties,’ I gasp. ‘What a terrible dream! I dreamed I was in the Algarve on holiday on my own again!’ The awoken cats (God bless them) at first assume an air of polite concern. But at the word ‘Algarve’, they exchange weary glances (the feline equivalent of ‘Tsk’) and settle their heads back down on their paws. My buried-alive-in-Portugal saga seems to have lost its news value.

Meanwhile, I witter on. ‘I am in this café, you see, and I am reading the phrase-book. And all I can say in Portuguese is that I want two coffees, and four teas with milk, and lots of cakes! But I don’t really want all these drinks because I’m on my own! And they keep bringing cakes and teas and coffees, and I don’t know how to say Stop! and the teas keep coming and it’s like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice and …’ I look around and see that nobody is listening.

The good thing about this Algarve nightmare is that at least it covers everything you might want to have a nightmare about – from waking up in a box, to doing Finals in Sanskrit, to being drowned in a flash flood of Twinings. It’s all there. A friend of mine, who frequently suffers from the Finals dream, says he sometimes manages to double the anxiety by imagining that if he doesn’t pass this impossible exam, he won’t be allowed to reach the age of thirty-five; he will be obliged to go back to eleven and start again. Yike. In a similar exercise, I sometimes ring the changes on my Algarve nightmare by imagining that while I order the usual never-ending buckets of tea and coffee, I am unaware the laws of the country have been changed, so I am slung into jail for some sort of beverage transgression.

Why am I going on about it? Because I have been studying a little phrase-book I picked up in Italy on my last holiday, and have been rather alarmed by it.
L’Inglese come si parla
has worried me, I admit, ever since I first discovered I had goofed in the shop and bought the wrong sort of phrase-book – intended for Italian visitors to England, rather than the other way around. ‘What would you charge to drive me to Richmond?’ was the first phrase I saw in it, helpfully spelled out in pretend-phonetics:
Huot uud iu ciaadg tu draiv mi tu Ritc’mond?
And I thought, hang on, this can’t be right. Richmond is miles away.

But what I didn’t fully appreciate at the time was what a nightmare experience the Italian visitor would have if he allowed this little phrase-book to govern his expectations of England. Because close attention reveals this newly printed publication to have been written either: a) by someone trying to push back the boundaries of existential terror; b) by someone who got all his information from watching Ealing comedies; or c) in 1948.

It’s the telltale references to trams that first set you thinking. Then you notice that the pubs close at 10 o’clock, the planes stop at Renfrew, and there are jam omelettes on the bill of fare.
The world is suddenly all Sidney Tafler and black and white. In a tobacconist’s shop, the choice of cigarettes is Gold Flake, Players and Capstan; and the lonely Italian visitor in search of a girlfriend proceeds at once to a dance hall. ‘
Dhis tiun is veri na(i)s, isn’t it?
’ he says to his partner, peering over her shoulder at the phrase-book, and speaking like a computer. He riffles a few pages. ‘
Iu aa(r) e wanderful daanser! Mei ai sii iu ho(u)um? Huot is iu(r) adres?
’ Encouraged to dabble in less formal English, he tells his new lady-friend she is ‘
(e) nai(i)s litl bit ov guuz
’ (a nice little bit of goods). Something about all this makes me intensely worried on his behalf.

I mean, what would happen if he arrived at Victoria Station, and shouted (as he is advised here), ‘
Poorter! Te(i)k dhis laghidg tu dhe Braiten trein!
’ (‘Porter! Take this luggage to the Brighton train’). There would be some sort of riot. Alas, the British public would never guess he was living in some parallel phrase-book universe, would they? They would just assume he was asking for a punch in the eye. ‘Wash the car, and give it a good greasing,’ he commands at a petrol station. But what’s this? Biff! Boff! Ooof! Crawling back to the car, clutching his abdomen in one hand and his phrase-book in the other, he mutters, ‘
Dhets dhe ghidi limit!
’ (That’s the giddy limit).

I do wonder whether the book was published in a spirit of mischief by someone obsessed with Ealing films, because actually the story that emerges from its pages is rather like an Ealing plot. Poor guileless foreigner (played by Alec Guinness, perhaps) works hard to overcome loneliness by using authentic popular slang such as ‘nose-rag’, ‘old horse’ and ‘cheese it!’ and nobody knows what the hell he is talking about. ‘
Dhets ool mai ai end Beti Maarten!
’ he exclaims jocularly (‘That’s all my eye and Betty Martin’), amid general shrugs.