No Laughing Matter (22 page)

It was notable that in
T
HE
J
UDGE’S
short absence a marked
bifurcation
of personalities occurred.
M
ARCUS
T
HE
C
OUNTESS
said, ‘Give me a gasper, Billy.’ But when
R
UPERT
T
HE
B
ILLY
P
OP
presented
his silver cigarette case, Gladys intervened, ‘He’s not to,
Rupert
.’ Meanwhile Margaret, asserting her Mousehood, got away with smoking, though only by forcing an unwilling Sukey into the act, who with natural giggles and little puffs miraculously produced a perfect Granny Sukey coy exhalation. ‘Oh I don’t know if I ought, but after all one’s only on trial once in one’s life’ – ‘How lucky you are, Mrs Matthews, most of us have been on trial all our lives,’ said
M
ISS
M
ARGARET
MOUSE
, as, old campaigner and rough sleeper out, she smoked a Wild Woodbine from a battered old square tin just like the Tommies in the trenches.

‘Oh God!’ said
M
ARCUS
T
HE
C
OUNTESS
, ‘I wish there was some fun, some gaietah, some beutah in meh life.’ Then Marcus, putting aside his pencil cigarette-holder, helped himself to three toffees from the Mackintosh tin. Cheeks bulged, words swallowed, he said, ‘I must say, Quentin makes the game pretty grim. He’s so solemn.’ Gladys looked shocked.
R
EGAN
T
HE
P
ODGE
, said, ‘I’ll catch you one over the lug ole if you’re narky about the Judge, me lad.’ Gladys added, ‘Surely you’re not too young to realize how much Quentin is doing for us all these days.’ ‘Yes,’ said Rupert, ‘Put a sock in it, bedwetter. And put your shirt on properly. Actually,’ he added, ‘I should think it’s jolly bad for you pretending to be a woman.’

M
ARCUS
T
HE
C
OUNTESS
said, ‘You cad, you’re twistin mah wrist,’ whereat
R
UPERT
T
HE
B
ILLY
P
OP
, twirling imaginary
moustaches
and grinding his teeth cried, ‘Ho, ho, my pretty maiden, I have you in my power.’

‘Have you ever heard the Billy Pop trying to imitate?’ Rupert asked, ‘It’s absolutely putrid.’

The flushing of the water next door caused Margaret to remark, ‘I can’t think what happens to prisoners when they’re taken short, can you?’

But
G
RANNY
S
UKEY
beaming, said, ‘The dear boy. He’s always so regular. That’s Ladbroke Grove training.’

So that when Quentin opened the door they were all in fits of giggles. ‘I shall now pronounce sentence,’ he said as he sat down. The five
accused trembled and shook until their teeth chattered.
M
ARCUS
T
HE
C
OUNTESS
, lovely white arms outstretched, went down on her knees and cried, ‘Remember you once loved me, D’Artagnan.’

But all was to no avail. ‘I thought,’ said
T
HE
JUDGE
, and it could be seen from his manner that he did not intend to forgo any part of his role, ‘I thought ‘I when I retired that I should have to condemn you as a generation, or rather as two generations, indeed as all the older generations, perhaps as the embodiment of accumulated history. You are, after all, all we know of the past. It’s you who’ve put us in the soup and don’t seem prepared to help us out of it for fear of scalding your fingers. Not to put any pretence upon it, you are a guilty lot. But as in my moments of retirement I reflected, I soon saw that this business of generations just would not do. Here we have a system and a class in decay. Granny, you with your large annuity, your servants, your house property …’

Sukey said to Margaret, ‘Miss Lampson wanted me to wait on customers on Thursday. I may be an apprentice teacher, but I drew the line there.’

‘… And Aunt Mouse,’
T
HE
JUDGE
was saying, ‘is just as much part of the system. She may go to Kamchatka or Tierra del Fuego but she only does so on what she inherited…. And with her non-violent tactics, what will she do with her vote? Why, vote for her gilt-edged, of course, or the occasional safe gamble like …’

Margaret said, ‘Penelope Skinner gets relief by bathing them in boiling water and washing soda when she gets home, but it’s so hard
to tell whether they were always rough looking or whether it’s the soda that’s doing it …’

‘… As to Regan, she’s a pitiful victim of the system, but now so pitiful that it’s hard to imagine the system without her. She flatters our…’

Gladys frowned hard in order to appear to give adequate weight to her brother’s words. She thought, if I took six guineas out it wouldn’t be a lot and I could buy that black taffeta evening dress for when we go to the dinner dance at Maidenhead, but then probably Alf would say I was dressing old just to fit in with him. But the white does make me look a size!

‘… As to our dear parents, they have been entirely destroyed by the economic system in which they have been brought up. They have learned to expect its benefits automatically. Some greater
emancipation
of women might have allowed Mother …’

Rupert thought of the months ahead of him. He would start in a Christmas season at Liverpool and then on to Edinburgh with a repertory of
As
You
Like
It,
The
Merchant,
The
Dream,
Monsieur
Beaucaire,
Ghosts
and
The
Rivals.
Perhaps he would have two lines in The Merchant, and two in Monsieur Beaucaire at the most, but he would double perhaps in
As
You
Like
It.
Even though Stratford had finished, Lady Benson had said, they would carry on, though poetry and religion were like dead in this futuristic world. And then there was always Spanish flu – the boon of understudies. Resolutely he decided to give notice at the office in the morning. They would be glad to see the last of him. Moving his lips and his eyebrows in suitable notice-giving manner, he suddenly said aloud, ‘I shall not easily forget the months that I have spent here.’

Surprised,
T
HE
JUDGE
brushed aside such unsolicited gratitude. Then as Quentin he leaned forward with his elbows on the table and compelled their attention by his suddenly menacing gaze – hawk’s, eagle’s, stout Cortes’s, Father Bernard Vaughan’s, Elmer Gantry’s. ‘All this sounds very nice, very comfortable, very warming to our little vanities. Everyone else is to blame. Only, unfortunately for us, it isn’t so. The most rotten part of this rotten set-up is us. Yes, you all and me. Especially me.’

Margaret thought: as Robin Carmichael grew older he fell into the habit of making the most disagreeable sound. He called it “
thundering
”. With shame she stored the passage away for future use. Sukey
blushed because the pitch of Quentin’s voice suggested that they had all failed him, and Gladys shifted in her seat because she understood that she could not have been pulling her weight. ‘I’m a lazy great porpoise,’ she announced. Rupert reddened with prepared anger, for his brother might be about to demand sacrifices. Marcus was just embarrassed.

‘We’ve all enjoyed ourselves very much being funny or witty or whatever we like to call our performance at their expense. But we’ve never considered for a moment that we have only ourselves to blame. We’ve taken it for granted that the system which has produced them will work for us, only decently of course, because we’re such decent people. Well, it won’t. Or at any rate not for much longer. Crumbs from rich men’s tables, or rich widows’ or rich spinsters’ for that matter, just won’t be falling our way or anybody’s soon. And so the quicker we make up our minds to depend on ourselves the better.’

‘Self reliance,’ said
M
ISS
M
ARGARET
M
OUSE
. ‘Can I hear aright?’

‘You can call it what you choose. But it’s not the old cut-throat selfishness. Cooperation.’

‘Each for all and all for each,’ said Marcus.

‘Not a bad idea,’ his eldest brother told him, ‘Though hardly for the same aims as the Three Musketeers.’

‘They couldn’t be really,’ said Marcus, ‘because we don’t know any cardinals to frustrate.’

Quentin frowned, and the others straightened themselves, Rupert withdrawing his chair a little from where Marcus sat.

‘If our despised parents in their decadence can take action, then surely …’

‘Do you mean,’ asked Sukey, ‘that we should make our peace with Granny and Aunt Mouse? For
they
will tomorrow, I’m sure.’

‘Yes,’ said Margaret, ‘Mother in a new hat to Mouse’s club, and father on his own to Ladbroke Grove to make it just the two of them together, like it used to be before he married.’

‘Well after all,’ said Rupert, ‘now the kittens have gone …’

Quentin put his face into his hands and gave a groan. ‘We cannot compromise,’ he said, ‘That’s their rotten system, parasites on
parasites
. For God’s sake don’t let us add to it. Let’s get on with the delousing. I’m the most to blame, for I have had a chance to stop still in the last months and to read and to consider. And then before that I …’

They sat listening now as he spoke of the trenches and the War. Everyone knew that it was his or her duty to do so.

‘… but ghastly although the whole thing was – something I can’t and never shall be able to speak about – it didn’t happen out of
nowhere
.’ Sukey tried to stretch her legs without interrupting. ‘It came from, the diplomacy of secret treaties by frightened men who didn’t understand the world around them. It came from the natural result of years of Grandfather Matthews’ …’ Margaret quickly wrote something in her pocket diary, then, tucking the little book under her knee, she looked absorbed. ‘… who now saw that it was the time if his income was to increase to send Grandfather Rickard to fight a heroic battle. And, of course, – ’Gladys stared ahead, but her lips were counting (hours before she saw Alfred? pounds necessary to start out on her own?) ‘… if he were wounded there was always great grandfather Rickard, the surgeon, to cut him up and patch him up if he could. Oh, for heaven’s sake, I’m not thinking of myself and my famous hero’s wound. Eight millions were killed, let alone the
wounded
.’ Only just audible at moments was the hum of Rupert’s ‘Any time’s Kissing Time.’ ‘And of course I don’t just mean Grandfather Matthews but Grandpère Mathieu and Grossvater Matthäus and all the rest of them. The thing was the logical outcome….’ Marcus twisted the duster aigret into a feather boa. Quentin laid his arms upon the table, the palms of his hands flat on the wooden surface,
UP-Jenkins
, smashems, nothing hidden. He seemed to relax, then speaking suddenly in a whisper, he said, ‘And I, God help me! (but he won’t) dictated to you who had asked me for help. No, that’s not true. I came in as Mr Panacea, a President Woodrow Wilson whom nobody had invited. And my fourteen points were not like his something to offer us a ray of hope, but an encouragement to you all to fight the same old wars, the tedious pointless battles that have shaken this family to its decaying old roots ever since I can remember. I, who should above all have known better than to have suggested that the old world of alliances, and counter alliances, secret treaties and open pacts, in short of balance of power, could lead to a positive result, could lead to anything but war and wicked waste.’

They were still now, as his voice grew louder, staring at him fixedly, Sukey’s neck even suffused with red. Only Marcus moved once or twice, knocking his knees together rapidly, whatever emotion had roused in him having made its greatest impression upon his bladder.
Quentin sat back and smoked his pipe. As he did so, he looked for a moment frightened as though, losing their attention, he might be left all alone. Then, wreathed in infernal smoke, his thin face creased to reveal Mr Punch, the Imp of Lincoln. ‘Good God! as if it mattered. As if any of you mattered, or less a still broken down skeleton like myself, fit only to hang in the wind and let the bones rattle to scare the birds away.’

The sudden change in his features, the fierceness with which he spat out his words, above all the cackling contemptuous laughter with which he accompanied them now at last compelled attention. ‘I’ve seen enough rotting, green corpses and young flesh that had barely time to live to suppose that it matters what happens to the clever young Matthews kids who’ve had a hard deal, especially to the soap box orator, know-nothing, returned hero, Quentin Matthews.’

Margaret tried to look away but her brother’s tufted eyebrow, as he looked sardonically through the curls and loops of his satanic smoke rings, held her. Sukey tried to think of something else – the family, her own future children, England, the Quantock Hills, the North Sea waves breaking against the cliffs at Cromer – anything by which she could be justified, but as they all failed she waited with fear for his next words. Gladys saw only Quentin’s eyes where points of light danced and glittered in mockery of all her hopes – Alfred was an old lecher, their love a hole-in-the-corner squalor, herself a fat bladder of lard for a clown to burst as a joke on an ass’s head. Rupert wanted to give forth in rivalry, to howl, ‘Blow winds and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!’ or to volley forth, ‘You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate,’ but he knew as his brother’s voice lashed him that however he swelled his chest there would come forth no tenor Caruso, he would drown no stage with tears, for his croaking would show him to be not Rupert of Hentzau but the bullfrog Prince. Marcus’ dark eyes stared, yet not as usual ikon-like from a varnished yellow skin, but more ghostly, like holes in a white sheet on All Hallows’ Eve.