No Laughing Matter (53 page)

Here at his changing point, Euston, there were rifts and eddies in the crowd, but the patterns no longer fascinated him, had suddenly become nauseating. The press, the noise, the human smell were more powerful than his vision. Satisfying abstractions were now replaced by a vile expressionist nightmare army; a threatening insensate world turned vengeful was led all the way to the Borough by two jellied breasts, two ripe bursting fruits that with another lurch of the train might at any moment cram their mellowness into his mouth and stifle him with soft, scented female flesh.

He came out with the crowd (who could they all be? And why was London Bridge Station closed?) on to the narrow platform, shot up, wedged in the lift, and emerged into Long Lane, half fearing to find the road as jammed as the carriage had been. But even a large crowd is soon swallowed up and lost when unconfined, so in the street he found, not it was true the usual Sunday empty grey-brown
desolation
of poverty, litter and decay, but a curious bustling
Brueghel-like
scene in which little brightly coloured knots of people gathered here and there for a moment and then broke only to re-form in some different pattern upon the other side of the road. Policemen,
paper-sellers
, now as he looked closer badges and lapel buttons, here and
there a small group busily unfurling a banner. He must have arrived for some minor political demonstration, some dreary slogan-shouting do. Fortunately in his many visits to Devon Mansions he had come to know every side lane that led into Tooley Street so that he could easily avoid whatever tiresome nonsense might be going on. He refused
Soviet
Weekly
,
the next day’s
Daily
Worker
and some
disconsolately
offered peace leaflets, also
Freedom
,
and set off down the broad, sad road of endless, decaying, artisan rectangles whose decently regular shape, thank God, disguised their monstrous misery. (Or was it? – Madge said, roaring her jolliest cockney fortissimo, ‘That that lot were all right; the more the bugs the warmer in bed.’ And Ted said, ‘What you want to come by them back streets for? I don’t like it. They’ll get you one time in Long Lane or Abbey Street. One of the mobs.’ He came that way of course because Madge also said, ‘Look, honest, we can’t av that shover sitting out there for all the neighbours to see, can we?’ and Ted also asked, ‘What you want to keep a taxi checkin up outside like that, Markie? It don’t look right.’)

Not because of anger, righteous anger – God blast the rich – but because of what will the neighbours think? That was why he now travelled over the water (or under it) to Ted by the tedious, smelly tube train; why he walked through the dead streets past houses that he wanted to level like nursery bricks with one angry blow of the hand, yes and all the poor who lived in them, the helpless poor who gave you only disgusting alternatives – to freeze your heart
Countess-like
into a useless icicle or to weep cheap, Billy Pop tears. Now he found himself swallowed up by a small group of men, capped and blue suited, with a banner (talk about Longfellow’s strange device!) which they carried so uneasily that he could only guess at some noble Puvis de Chavannes figures beneath an ornate scroll, Battersea was it? No, Bermondsey, of course, Trades Council. Another home-made banner of white canvas said in red letters, ‘No, pasaran’, and another, Yiddisher boys know what to do’. Some young men were singing, ‘Bye, Bye, Black Shirt’. But only one or two of them looked Jewish. At any rate they were on the right side and he found himself humming the tune of Bye, Bye, Blackbird, and even joining in the words,’ as we come the blackshirts go’. Embarrassed when he heard his own voice, he rapidly crossed the road, only to realize that he was leading this small procession. The crowd on this far side of the road had swelled to such numbers that he slowed almost to a crawl. Impatiently
he turned off down a side lane but here the throng of people was thicker still. Although its movement was rapid, its progress
apparently
purposeful, he felt suddenly that he was being held back, sucked into a pace and will that he refused. He had to dodge and skip among the crowd to make his own pace. Cutting through a gap between two groups he bumped against a stout woman and she cried: ‘There’s no need to push, mate. We’re all together.’

A young man in a sports coat, his neck enveloped in swirls of green and magenta college scarf cried: ‘Plenty of time before they get near here. They’ve been turned back at Southwark Bridge.’

The emergence of these two identities, though irritating to Marcus, released him from his increasingly anxious isolation.

‘It’s provocation, that’s all it is,’ a young woman said, ‘and the police are with them.’

‘Ah! The fuckin police!’

‘The Stepney boys stopped them last year.’

‘And we’ll do it again, don’t you worry.’

‘The speakers were indeterminate to Marcus; he could hardly ‘place’ anyone; male and female voices, voices old and young, bodies thin and fat, nothing to notice if it were not more bare heads than he was used to seeing out of doors.

‘Coming down and upsetting other people’s business.’

‘Oh! There’ll be plenty to do that for you in the next year or two.’

This voice was sardonic, schoolmasterly.

‘Ignore them! What’s that for advice?’ someone asked scornfully.

‘Herbert Morrison! I’d have that lot out straightaway.’

But the fat woman took this up: ‘I don’t know. We’ve always been Labour. My old man wouldn’t have nothin to do with it. If the party tells us to stop away, then stop away, e said. But I told im that’s all right for you, but what if
we
was Jewish?’

‘That’s right. Free speech, but no filth. Coming down here with their filthy propaganda. Incitement to disorder, that’s what it is, eh?’

Marcus heard himself say, ‘Oh, God! They’ll bring order all right, if we let them. The order of death. That’s why we’ve got to stop them.’

He hardly had time to feel their responsive glow when a sudden shift of the thickening crowd pulled him away from his new found friends. He was urged forward ten feet of more up the little street.
But now he found himself so firmly wedged that he could hardly respond to the crowd’s pressure as it swayed to and fro with a rhythm that had nothing to do with purpose. Like the straphangers in the tube train, but without their sudden lurchings and violent sprawls, this great world of people of which he was only some tiny lump, some senseless unsmooth surface, kept up its determined,
incomprehensible
, regular motion – back, as the pressure of the heavy man in front rolled down upon him, on to the hard corners of the hand bag held by the woman behind him, then forward again by the pressure of her breasts on to the wadding of the heavy man’s firm bum. All the cries and the talk, the snatches of singing, came like the creakings of this huge world as it swayed to and fro. He peered desperately towards the cracks of cloudy sky, the odd glimpse of a soot-thick chimney that seemed to offer the safety of dead matter in this senseless mass of life. Intent upon these patterns of sky and sooty brick that alone kept him safe from his mounting panic, his growing fear of being cut off from Marcus Matthews – ageing but still
beautiful
young man, friend of the Sitwells and Cocteau, part owner of Kandinskys and Braques, sole owner of Marie Laurencins and
Magnasco’s
Cardinals in a Crypt, lover of Jack and Ted, occasional sufferer from haemorrhoids, giver of green balls – he stretched on to his toes to complete the triangle of grey that he had carved from the visible sky and came near to losing his balance, to being sucked underfoot. By happy chance his panic reaction was cut off by a sudden distant singing out of his childhood – Tipperary! It must be a delusion – such as the Scots girl, what was her name, Jessie’s at Lucknow – he saw the school history illustration before him – ‘Dinna ye hear them, the pipes of the Campbells?’ He said it aloud and giggled for the absurdity of his new role. A woman shouted:

‘Stop the bastards.’

And a man:

‘To Tooley Street, comrades.’

As if, thought Marcus, they were not going there as fast as they could. But he was wrong, for whatever barrier had blocked the crowd’s way was suddenly removed and with a rush they now swept forward, first a directionless world in flux, and then at last small groups, scattered individuals, himself, all making for the sound of Tipperary. He had time to think that Jessie’s was no illusion –
Lucknow
had
been relieved – when he realized with fury that this
boisterous
farewell to Leicester Square came from the approaching Fascists, not from the relieving Campbells but from the enemy. Well, he had always detested all that khaki sentiment, Quentin’s wounded heroism, old Bill, his mother giving herself to the boys on leave, all groups, and nations, and waving of flags and unsought tears of emotion. From the crowd around him came an answering song, slow, solemn, creaking, yet charged with suffering and pathos: ‘Though tyrants frown and cowards sneer, we’ll keep the Red Flag flying here.’ They could keep it as far as he was concerned. But then again, most insistently pathetic, it came to him: ‘Our cause, I fear, is dying.’ He looked around him for some neutral force to save him from engulfment, to restore him to his own Sunday individual purpose – over the water to Ted. Never mind. Here, before the junction with Tooley Street, the police cordon had broken and the crowd were busy piling chairs, tables, street barrows, anything to hand to form a great barrier against invasion – of what?, a lot of paranoid, half-educated weasel-faced vets and dentists and suburban housewives – into their warm, bug-ridden slum burrows. Well, good luck to them. He summoned all his snobberies, inherited and acquired, to save him. He went up to a nearby policeman.

‘I’m awfully sorry to trouble you, Constable, but is there any possibility of getting through to Devon Mansions in Tooley Street? I’ve come here to visit friends. I had no idea I’d run into all this.’

The handsome face showed a complete blank at his question, but to face him with improbable reality in the shape of a posh,
tony-voiced
cissy in a grey sombrero on the battlefield of Tooley Street, was perhaps to try slow wits hard.

‘I mean can you at all suggest what I had better do?’

For a moment he feared that the law would offer him all the indignity that the mob had spared him, for the policeman raised his hand. Marcus could see already the two upward pointing fingers, or would have done if he had not wildly feared worse in the shape of a smack on the face. But instead the officer took his arm, kindly, paternally:

‘If you were to go down that little street there, Sir, you’d come round to Devon Mansions the other way. And then…. But look, I’ll …’

As he was about to conduct Marcus to this possible short cut, this potential safety exit, a shout from an inspector recalled him to duty.
The marchers he was there to protect were upon them – no longer Tipperary, but that awful Mussolini tune that Marcus remembered dogging him and Jack from every band, every hurdygurdy, two years ago in search of South Italian Baroque. The young policeman left him as abruptly as he had offered help and guidance.

Marcus was once more alone. All around him the crowd had started singing another tune. From the deep chested contralto of a woman near him he thought he heard: ‘Too long we’ve been the vulture’s prey.’ Phantasmagoria in Munch or Ernst at a pinch, though not for his taste; lunacy here on a Simple Sunday Outing was too much. He was about to turn down the lane the policeman had
indicated
, no matter what cries of ‘stop the bastards’, ‘stop the Fascist rats’, or a sudden improbable clear ladylike call of ‘Don’t let them get through, comrades’, when suddenly it was the cornet and the fife, it was everyone rushing at high speed towards Tooley Street.

Angry, cruel and arrogant, beyond even Marcus’s wet dreams, the mounted policemen appeared as seen from below. They did not break the childish thrill that Marcus had felt as he rushed towards the martial music, though they laced it with exciting physical fear. But then the first Fascists, with no help of uniform, filled him at once with loathing – they were so pathetic with their dreary, self conscious heads held high, their occasional nervous smirks, their awful gym instructors ‘p.t. postures, their feigned arrogance so ridiculous beside the arrogance of their mounted protectors. The defiant faces were chalk white, why couldn’t they have the decency at least to show the natural fear they felt as they marched through this crowd of men, women and children all screaming their hatred? Marcus wanted to kick them, to smack their faces in order to drive away that silly pretence of disdain and officers’ courage, he wanted to shout at them to go, that they had no bloody right down here where their suburban fears and graces had no place in a warm packed instinctual world.

‘We’ve got to get rid of the rats,’ he shouted with those around him, ‘We’ve got to get rid of the rats.’

And he cheered as a group of young men successfully made a fresh barrier of chairs and barrows farther down the street and nimbly escaped the policemen who ran to arrest them. From nowhere an old woman, some mad moll survival from the London of Dickens or even Hogarth, got through the police cordon to shake her fist in the
faces of the Fascist marchers, to shout heaven knew what oaths or threats or obscenities at them. Marcus with the whole vast crowd cheered this old woman in her straw boater and shawl who could have been the spirit of the cockney past come back to avenge this hateful, impudent invasion. And now the horses began rearing and foam spewed over their bits as crackers exploded and fizzed beneath their hoofs. As soon as a policeman broke from the cordon to pursue a cracker thrower the crowd would rush through the gap to chuck oranges, rotten apples, whatever was to hand at the faces now at last showing fear and hate. Marcus led the jeers as Fascist boys nervously slipped off the false Jewish noses which they had thought, as they set off from reassuring solid Westminster, were such a good joke with which to taunt the East End scum. And now the Fascist women, burly or petite, always ladylike and neat, marching grande dame to the guillotine. And here, with this monstrous regiment, the march halted as inspectors of police and mounted men and ‘leaders’ consulted together, surrounded on all sides by heaving seas of raging men and women, now straining forward, now receding, but only held back by a tight-packed, hard-pressed cordon of police. Marcus’s intense excitement, his furious sense of love for the crowd around him, his sudden loathing identification of the bestial army that in its squalid adoration of brute health threatened everything he cared for, began to ebb. What was he doing here shouting? What warmth tied him to the stinking armpits of the brawny young man under which he squinted to view the scene? What love did he really feel for the old bobbed grey head that in her excitement or at the crowd’s pressure rubbed his face with greasy, scurfy hairs? The rearing horses, the crowd’s shouting, the fireworks, the rival singing, youths seized and led off jeering by the police, all this now repetitive film news was freezing into a ‘still’ and, as it froze, so emotional tension began to relax. Had Ted been silly enough to involve himself in this mêlée? Or even generous-hearted Madge? Was this what Picasso’s
wonderful
Guernica stood for, this Roman holiday? No form, no rich colour, no pale elegance. Nothing. Nothing to satisfy in this shapeless human muddle.