No Laughing Matter (45 page)

‘The Comic Spirit is indeed wonderful and mysterious in her
workings
. To hear something that has been a familiar feature of one’s youth hailed by the younger generation as a startling modern phenomenon is one of those recurring situations that bring a discreet twinkle to the eye or a hastily suppressed twitch to the risible nerves of the lips of most septuagenarians at one time or another. Such is the present …

But supposing the twitches were no longer under one’s control, supposing they came and went not at the mysterious dictation of the Comic Spirit but as the physiologically explicable decline of senescent motor and vascular systems. Then surely one ought not to be alone. Autumn, sad autumn, the autumn of one’s life, season of mellow fruitlessness – and in truth he had seldom been writing more smoothly, more easily; but autumn was only a prelude. At the end she had lain down there in that little room with but one eye still alive in that cheery, cockney little body. Oh!
she
’
d
have battled on even if
they
’
d
thrown in the sponge and let the authorities cart her off to hospital, for she had had the tough self-reliance of the streets.

Such is the present crude wave of anti-semitism in Germany
released
by him who must surely be the world’s most tedious and
offensive
housepainter, Adolf Schickelgruber. To hear the young of today talk, persecution of the Jews would seem to be a peculiar and virulent disease of the nineteen thirties instead of one of the oldest plagues man is heir to. In my own young days, we were not without the croaking warnings of Mr Hilaire Belloc and the more rumbustious doubts of Chesterton. Splendid, gifted writers – masters indeed of the essay form, witty polemicists, acrobats of paradox – yet they had bees in their bonnets, bees, as it seemed, with hooked noses and Ikey Mo gestures. The material wealth of our far flung empire, the
Kimberley
Diamond era, the Mammon of High Finance, even the
vulgarity
that surrounded Edward VII’s court were often unattractive and
with this world the names of Joel and of Cassel were closely associated and have to bear some of the odium …’

Written words echo round an empty house and give off hollow reverberations which make it hard to keep going, hard to forget that you could lie here for days, no, in fairness to Clara and not to let one’s imagination become fevered, not days at all but hours, before she came back from her blessed bridge parties. ‘I shall only be gone for a few hours, Billy. We cut for the last rubber at half past ten.’ But that was all very well; those were the hours that mattered. The room was hot, almost stifling, but August was cold this year like autumn. It must be something else than the room that was oven hot. Who knew when the oven’s heat, flooding through the veins, would send the blood pounding to the head, when the room – his old study desk, the see-
no-evil
monkeys, the
Encyclopedia
Brittanica
and the bound copies of the Savoy and of Wisden – would fly round in the crazy fireworks revolution of a Catherine wheel, to stop at last in black darkness, sudden and complete …

‘The odium that undoubtedly attached to a mammon worshipping City of London and a meretricious high society in what Henry James in one of his more unreadable later efflorescences called The Awkward Age (if only the Master’s words had had half the pithy wit of his titles). But with or without its grain of truth to feed it, anti-semitism certainly flourished in some circles of pre-1914 literary London. Foremost among its exponents was T. W. H. Crosland, the now almost
f
orgotten
but able and picturesque editor of the
Academy
.
I first met
Crosland
when he was editor of the short-lived
English
Review
.
He struck me at once as a most plausible ruffian, but then the reader who has borne with me so far in my reminiscent peregrinations will have realized by now that I have a very soft spot for ruffians. Crosland was …’

He was dead, and forgotten, though there was probably a widow about the place somewhere. How She would like it, when someone else in fifty years ‘time (perhaps also in the supporting degradation of crutches) wrote of W. M. Matthews that he was dead and forgotten, though there was probably a widow about the place somewhere? A widow might be about the place, but a wife wasn’t. Well, who could tell if this furnace were to burst….’ Mr W. M. Matthews, the author, was found dead today …’ ‘Crosland was a born journalist but less evidently intended by nature for an editor. I always thought that
Crosland and Alfred Douglas were about the most ill-assorted partners since Codlin and Short. Yet both, even Douglas whom I never cared for, had guts, could stand on their own. They had one trait in
common
– their love of abuse. And it was on the libel suits that resulted from this love that the
English
Review
foundered. Nevertheless their partnership while it lasted …’

It wasn’t only self-pity that made his imagination fill the empty house with a sudden swish of her skirt as she turned with her usual nimble rapidity, even now at sixty-five, round some corner, entered through the door of some room. He could hear the peculiar silky quality of that swishing sound as he had heard it now for over forty years, like no other woman’s. He could see at intervals the quick flash of her legs never perhaps again so excitingly shapely after short skirts had revealed them to other men’s eyes. He could smell her scent, something French he couldn’t remember its name, that had never changed over the years, although now and again in recent times he had smelt tiredness, age, death in her wake. Or was it his own smell he put on to her?

Did he seek to take her with him? To break such a partnership after so long would be the cruellest side of it. He didn’t want to go alone into an emptiness – or to be left behind to the mercy of others, not knowing his lore, for a man acquires his lore over the years. He banished the thought by calling her up from every corner, not only the swish of her skirt and her perfume, but the occasional, increasingly frequent click of a joint, the little cough that nowadays accompanied the tick tack of her heels up the stairs, the turning of taps, the flushing of the lavatory cistern, the half-click of doors to be followed by the louder sound of their closing, the arpeggios with which she prefaced her piano playing. Oh, why didn’t she come home?

‘Yet their particular partnership while it lasted was fruitful for English letters if not for the writers who contributed to their journal. My own first contribution to the
Academy
was an article on the Surrey of Meredith’s novels. After long waiting there came a rather grubby reply from Crosland asking me to visit his offices – somewhere in the City, near the then fairly recent Queen Victoria Street, if I am not mistaken. Apart from meeting a few literary cronies every week at the Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street I did not as a rule penetrate London east of Temple Bar, to me the very symbol of the Forsyteism of my childhood – though of course, like most young writers of the
time I had been lured to look at Limehouse and at Stepney by Jack London’s Godgiven prose and had peeped at the Jewish East End brought to life by Zangwill’s colourful pen. I therefore climbed the stairs on that particular afternoon with a certain resentment which was not decreased when a stentorian Yorkshire voice from within the office answered my knocking by “Come in, blast you.’”

And there was her key in the Yale lock, he would have known it from all others – did in the days when the children had their own keys – she seemed to take more time to insert it, to scratch around the lock almost as if she’d had one over the eight. Of course, a woman all over, she wouldn’t confess that she needed glasses. But that she was home, that was the main thing; he was no longer alone. There it was, that rustling, an inexplicable noise that set you speculating and made concentration on the page before you impossible. If he asked her, of course, as he often had, she would reply, ‘What noise? I was just
coming
in at the front door, that’s all. You speak as though I were the piano remover.’ This when the piano had not been moved since they entered the house a quarter of a century ago, so that she couldn’t know what noises such a man (if there were one) made. This feminine absurdity this inconsequentiality was what made her so special. And now she was home and he wasn’t alone. He pushed aside his manuscript book and was about to call her, when he heard her heels tapping on the floorboards of the landing above. What had she gone upstairs for? Probably to pee, of course. Her bladder wasn’t what it was, though she wouldn’t admit it. She had a tiresome genteel side. But no noise of water flushing came. Perhaps she’d lost badly at cards and was about to seek refuge in playing the piano. He steeled himself for the arpeggios but they did not come. He determined to put her out of his head, to live as though the house were his alone, only so could he write with the flow that memoirs (bear all its sons away) demanded.

‘The man that stood before me was not prepossessing. He was tall, well over six feet I should think, with a corporation and the familiar heavy moustache of those days. To crown all he was dressed in what seemed (and probably was) as incongruous a collection of second hand garments as could have been purchased from the street markets of London so much more evident then than today.’

But now she was tapping her way downstairs. She could hardly have given a more exact aural account of her movements if she had been blind with a white stick. For a moment, with the word ‘blind’,
some fears he had not known since childhood came to him. Someone would open the door, but it would not be she, it would be a hideous creature with black glasses and a tapping white stick who lured children. He shook himself. These tedious background noises! No wonder he had written ‘the man that stood before me.’ vulgar journalese, and ‘corporation’, a tired piece of facetious verbiage. With such pervasive noises! And now that cough! Uck uck. Uck uck. If she’d got phlegm on her chest why couldn’t she hawk it up and be done with it? All this gentility. She had reached the kitchen now. He tensed his body to resist the clashing of crockery, the banging of saucepans. To relax his tension he carefully shut up his manuscript book and capped his fountain pen. No noise came. And a moment later she was with him.

‘Here’s your hot toddy,’ she said.

‘Did you have a good evening?’ he asked and he smiled up at her.

‘I won the last two rubbers,’ she said, ‘I cut both times with a Mr Isaacs, a new member. I’m not fond of the chosen race as a whole, but they always play a very good game of bridge.’

*

Margaret woke to the sound of an aeroplane overhead.

Her first thought was that whatever they all said – comforting newspapers, well informed old clubmen, ladies with nephews in the diplomatic service, family solicitors seeing one to the door, poets who respected the Germans as fighting men, above all Douglas acting nanny-comforter to her distressed senses – there
would
be war. She tried to say without fear, ‘And so there ought to be. Against such evil.’ Then, banishing all unreal seeming certainty of war, the book’s
problem
came full before her. Its form; but its form was its statement. She had lived too long with Alice Cameron and her attendant nieces, so that now greedy expectancy seemed also justified hope of reward as the pitiable anxious concerns of old age seemed often a hideous selfishness. Self-pity seemed pathos; hardness, noble pride. In the light of old Alice’s sterling bawdry her nieces were genteel rubbish; in the light of those fading spinsters’ sensitivity old Alice was a vulgar, greedy harpy. Upon who narrated certainly depended everything.

The figures properly related would give the answer. Yet it was not the easy balance of a bit of A and a bit of B and, if that seemed too simple, the addition of a little C to blur the too hard outlines. All voices meant no voices; an all round view looked out on a blank wall.
Supposing Jessica were to narrate, and, yet, through her report of Nancy’s reactions to old Alice, the ironic truth of the old woman’s view should itself emerge – no, that would not do, for then Alice, the bullied old woman, would be the central victim and all her past bullying of the faded genteel nieces would be ignored. If each of Alice’s humiliations were to be balanced by the recall of her past despotic insensitivity, then … but flashbacks were no answer, for past and present must be made one. When the nieces cruelly kept the bedridden witty old sinner from company then they suffered again
and
at
that
moment
her mockery of their first girlish pangs of love. In time-structure B
was
A, A
was
B. But these letters had once been three full human beings whom she had slowly and at such cost brought into existence. Now in this formal search they were being petrified into figures and lettered proportions. She banished A B and C, and set all her thoughts, all her feelings painfully to make the three women joyously live again. Thus: Alice Cameron, now 75, rich, arthritic, property in Birmingham, South African mining shares, Argentine Railways, once the actress mistress of the Duke of M., then of Barney Woolf millionaire…. was only another kind of figures.

‘Letting her bedjacket fall from her still well-shaped shoulders as though she were settling into her box at the opera, she picked up the silver backed hand mirror from the side table and found everything surprisingly well. A very small touch of eye shadow – her left pupil had always been a fraction larger than … but now, well for an old woman of seventy-six greeting her solicitor…. But he was more than that – he had been very … not handsome but soigné, amusing and worldly, and he’d been madly in love with her. Oh, that had been clear at that dinner at Romano’s though he’d tried to hide it for fear of being hurt. She would tease him a little now. Her hands trembled at the … But would they never bring him up? She rang and rang furiously. “Where’s Lionel?” “Oh, Auntie, did you want to see him? I’m afraid …”’