No Laughing Matter (24 page)

Hearing Jane’s choking sob – Oh dear! all the times that she had heard it in protest against falsity and cruelty – she slipped in without knocking. ‘Jane, darling Jane, don’t,’ she cried. And was greeted by Derek’s rabbit nose almost, as it seemed, sniffing at her. ‘I think,’ he began. But her sisterly sympathy swept right over him. ‘Jane darling, don’t, don’t,’ she cried. ‘It’s not as if you were going a thousand miles away from us. Besides you’re going to be so incredibly happy.’ She lied firmly, for she realized that darling Jane in her heart found the whole rabbit wedding as absurd as she did. But over Derek’s shoulder Jane’s blue eyes blazed at her. ‘Oh, go away, Liz, go away! Haven’t you all made me unhappy enough?’ And Derek, suddenly, yes, she could see it now, not a rabbit at all, but a noble though gentle hare, said, ‘I think, Elisabeth, that it would be better. You mustn’t care about it, Jane darling. But you have all been a bit unkind, Elisabeth. We
are
the family Jane’s marrying into. And we are human. But it doesn’t matter,’ he added.

She rushed from the room. Oh, it was too. terrible. She felt so ashamed. Stoats and weasels indeed! Vulgar, self centred,
attitudinizing
brutes! As she came back into the Fragonard Room Sophie was giving orders to the photographers. ‘Ah, there you are, Lizzie. We’re just going to have a Carmichael photograph.’ And her elbow firmly brushed Mrs Culmer out of the way to make her point. ‘Where’s Jane, Lizzie?’ ‘With Derek, of course.’ And James, in a special warm bumbling voice, ‘Well, let our Jane put off her cooing if not her
billing
to join her family for a last photograph.’ Elisabeth stamped her foot. ‘Oh how can you be so blind and selfish?’ And when Aunt Mildred took her arm, saying, ‘Stand by me, Lizzie, the two giantesses together,’ she wrenched herself away. ‘I wouldn’t think of being in the damned photo.’ She stared at her family drawn up in close phalanx for the photograph; as James so often said, they were nothing if not striking looking. In the older generation, indeed, the cult of
personality might well be said to have strayed into eccentricity, or what her mother called ‘looking interesting’. For such seasoned
campaigners
Jane’s distress, even if she told them of it, could only, like her marriage to the ridiculous Derek, be a weakness, a fit of the vapours. But Louie and the brothers, were they also determined to prove themselves the surviving fittest? Alas, she felt, they were. Ronnie, for instance, how in his pretty butterfly flight could he be expected to take account of a dowdy sister’s mothlike marriage? Elisabeth saw this elegant, gaudy young brother of hers, so mysteriously lost for hours of the night among London’s bright lights, as flitting from flower to flower, gathering little honey perhaps, but oh so enjoying his winged arabesques and pas de chats, what should such as he do risking his beautiful wings in the dim candle-light of marriage? No, poor Jane Cuhner, you are no longer, perhaps you never were, a Carmichael, she thought.

‘Well,’ said Sophie, ‘it’s been a good wedding.’

‘She’s made a good marriage, our little Jane,’ said James.

But Sophie burned him with a look. ‘Don’t be sentimental and false.
We’ve
made the best of it. That’s all. As we all well know.’ And she looked around at her family.

Elisabeth alone of them refused her mother’s smile of complicity. ‘Jane has the best of it, I think,’ she said.

And as she said it, much of the day’s guilt fell away from her. For, however late, she at least had felt and seen reality. Oh, she felt a wild elation! She could have cried Yoicks or Tally Ho! as she hunted her heartless family on behalf of the ordinary, the decent, the simple.

*

In the little stuffy parlour a bee, trapped between the pots of Busy Lizzie and the never opened windows, buzzed a continuo to
Quentin’s
impassioned explanation. Every now and again he would glance across at it angrily but he was too eager and too voluble to spare time to put an end to its interruption. The noise of the others, consuming the ample spread the pub offered, also made him stop his discourse two or three times with an impatient look that settled now upon Vernon Seymour stirring sugar into his tea, now upon the chap from Balliol cracking his eggs unnecessarily loudly, now upon John Ballard chewing crisp lettuce, at last upon Marian Powell who for some annoying woman’s reason had started to stack the disused plates. While he was still out of breath from their long tramp over hilly
country, he had eaten voraciously and in record time more than his own share of boiled eggs and of the slices of bread and butter and jam, and of the rock cakes that the landlady had set before them. That his heart beat so fast and so irregularly had only made him more
impatient
with the idea of slow eating or of any relaxation; it was always so when he was forced to remember his wound. Now as he talked he covered a series of rending belches with the sucking in and blowing out of clouds of pipe smoke.

‘I only tell you, of course,’ he ended his recital, ‘because it means that the discussion groups will need a new convener. I suggest Marian.’

‘Oh, no,’ the young woman was quite determined. ‘I’m glad to come along, of course, but as you all know, nothing I say in this field has authority. I’m a historian who’s strayed into contemporary issues, not a trained political scientist. In fact, I’m really only here as a chaperone for Valerie.’

He turned away at the laugh with which she accompanied this last remark, and knocked out his pipe on the mantelpiece edge. The
tobacco
ash fell and scattered on the clean tiled hearth.

‘Oh, the poor landlady,’ Marian said.

‘Yes, really, Quentin …’ Valerie began.

‘I thought we chose this place because it was homely.’

‘Of course, and it is,’ Valerie pulled off her red tamoshanter and shook out her dark bob to confirm the words. ‘But whatever sort of home can you have had? You’d get what for all right in ours.’

He imagined with distaste her own home’s neat front parlour; the thought helped him to take his eyes from the shining flesh colour of her crossed knees where they protruded below her tight check skirt.

‘My family are lumpen middle class, to risk a Marxist heresy.’ Dismissing applause easily as he always did when it came, he pointed at them with the stem of his pipe – ‘If you should want to become official at some time, statutes require, you know, that your chairman should be a senior member of the University. You’re the only one who qualifies, Marian.’

‘I do not. And you as an exploiting male should remember it. We don’t exist. We’re just a place in the Woodstock Road that boards and teaches young women like Valerie. But Ballard could.’

‘No, no. Ruskin’s in the same position. Working men like women, don’t exist. We don’t even board in a posh, respectable street like you do.’

‘We could invite Wicksteed as honorary chairman or Cole or one of them.’

Valerie leaned forward on her little hardwood chair, showing the outline of her small firm breasts as they pressed against her green woollen jumper.

‘Oh, not Wicksteed after the way he’s let Quentin down.’

‘He hasn’t let me down at all. He warned me that they might not renew if I went down to Wales. Don’t get it wrong. I went down to encourage men in a strike that should – would in any logical
continental
country – have been the spark to set off Revolution. St Ebbes don’t want Revolution – most of them want port and medlars after dinner and the undoing of the Revolution of’88 and the abolition of votes for women. I was the odd man out, not them, as Wicksteed said.’

‘Yes,’ said Seymour, ‘urging you, I suppose, to toe the line. He’s no guts, you know. I don’t know why you stand up for him.’

‘You might have the charity to remember he was in Maidstone jail for two years as an objector. The swine deliberately ruined his health.’

‘Well,’ said Valerie, ‘and you were wounded.’

He glared back at her admiring look and noticed with satisfaction that she blushed and looked down. He did not, as he knew they expected, fill the silence. The black marble clock on the sideboard ticked loudly. Staring at the wall opposite he suddenly took note of the dismal oleograph behind a flyblown glass. A ghastly mid-
Victorian
sentimental picture of a young man bending over a young woman with a baby in her arms in some rosy arbour. Across her shoulders, around the baby’s neck and on to the young man’s wrist, hung some flowery creeper. The lovers, if such they were, were dressed, God knew why, in Regency clothes or something of the kind – cravats, breeches, hoop petticoats and wigs, what Granny M. had always called ‘costumes of the olden days’, in fact the stuff they used to have in the nursery dressing up box. The title he could just read through the stains and the dirty glass: ‘The Daisy Chain that Binds them’. He shivered and withdrew his gaze. Valerie was smiling at him. He frowned. Picking up his cap, his ashplant, and his mackintosh from the wooden bench by the window, ‘I’ll pay,’ he said. ‘We’d better push off while it’s only drizzling.’

As they came out the sun shone suddenly for a moment over distant Oxford. Only Marian remarked on it.

‘So you’re never going to be a scholar again, only a gipsy,’ she said and smiled amusedly as she saw the others look down on the ground or away from her. Quentin realized how ill-suited she would be to lead them in his absence. Valerie pulled off her tamoshanter, rolled it up and put it in her mackintosh pocket, then taking off the mackintosh she folded it neatly over her arm.

‘I dare say you don’t want testimonials from your students, but you can’t surely give up
all
teaching with your talent for making people think for themselves.’

This time he returned her smile. ‘Not the talent most commended at the Universities.’

‘Not here, perhaps,’ she cried, ‘But join Ballard at Ruskin. Or in London. Good heavens, to work under Harold Laski! Just think! Or at Manchester.’

‘No. I don’t want any of it.’

The man from Balliol said, ‘Of course, freelance journalism will leave you time for WEA work.’

‘No! No!’ cried Quentin, ‘that’s extensionism. For God’s sake let us confine the plague while we can.’

The blurred wave of his hand seemed to suggest that the centre of infection lay somewhere around Tom Tower, now hidden in thick grey rain clouds.

‘I shall give courses at the Labour Colleges if they want me. There one can teach as one likes.’

‘As they like,’ said Marian quietly.

‘University teaching within the present class framework of
education
must end in perversion or sterility.’

‘But –
laying
the seeds for socialist infiltration in the higher levels of the bureaucracy?’ Seymour asked.

‘That’s an evolutionary illusion. In any case, whatever you stuff into their heads here, the machine will corrupt them three years after they’ve gone down. Besides I want to test all this theory against the facts of industrial life.’

‘Empiricism,’ said Marian, ‘a grave if not infantile disorder.’

He noticed with gratitude that Valerie didn’t laugh with the others. Even so, despite the fact that they were rapidly being swallowed up by the growing domestication of large houses with drives and gardens and shrubberies that sucked them back gradually into urban life, he felt isolated on an empty bare hillside. A sudden cold breeze blowing
his mackintosh tightly round his thighs made him conscious of his legs, his body; he knew himself naked, scrawny and damaged before the world at large, before the great city stretched out there,
sophisticated
, sure of itself and unfriendly.

Hitting with his stick at the well-trimmed hedges of the large gardens they passed he sought to draw all his companions in with a net of words, that, rescuing them from their withdrawal, he might gather them around him again, a warm screen to keep off the blasts.

‘It takes a tough bourgeois background to resist this soft, insidious, misty charm, to see through the bonhomous invitation to join the club, and the cold heart, the indifference to a rotten world’s pains that lie behind courteous passing of the port.
You’ve
all had warm family backgrounds. Oh I know that the genteel poverty of mine is a feeble joke beside the poverty you’ve known as the norm of daily life. But your homes were warm with necessary generosity, the
neighbourliness
that’s born of no hope. I was farmed out, you know, pretty early to an indulgent grandmother. But the family existed all right with the unusual pretences of bourgeois family morality spread so thin that the cold heart and the ruthless claw showed through all the time.’

A few large drops of rain were falling but he could feel that he was holding them, for no one hurried or protested about the coming storm.

‘That’s why it’s so much easier for me to renounce Oxford and all her false works.’

Ballard said, ‘Ruskin’s hardly part of the club. However, maybe you’re right. I like to believe that what I enjoy here is not part of …’

Marian interrupted, ‘You mean, Quentin, that we’re snobs.’ And she added, ‘Not that my family ever
was
poor.’

The rain coming faster now seemed to find some gap through which to strike him, cold and sharp.

‘Oh, God,’ he said, ‘it’s me, Marian, who’s the snob. Always seeking some argument or other to advance my rotten gentility, to make me out superior. No, Ballard, you’re right.
You
can make Oxford accept you on your own terms. But I can’t. I must get away or be damned.’

He could not quite tell what effect his words had upon them, and a moment later the rain pelted down so hard that they must run for such shelter as they could get beneath some overgrown ornamental hollies at the entrance to a rich man’s drive. As they stood there silent, Quentin felt a hand on his forearm. Looking up, he saw her fresh
face, her cheeks red from the wind, her dark eyes glittering like the rain drops that ran down in streams from her sopping black fringe.

‘You’ve done the right thing,’ Valerie whispered.

*

‘Oh, you’ve done the right thing all right!’ Doreen cried. With tears and rain at once pouring down her face, with her scraped-back lively yellow hair now dark and dead with water, she seemed to look more than ever for the pity due to someone saved from drowning. ‘Oh, yes, you’ve done the right thing. But how can I bear it if I can’t be sure that you’ve done it because you love me?’