No Laughing Matter (66 page)

[
Later
that
night-scene
a
big
bare
bedroom
in
the
same
hotel.
The
lighting
is
full
upon
the
centre
stage
where
sits
POP
,
swathed
like
a
mummy,
in
his
wheelchair.
Around
him
prowls
MOTOR
like
an
old
caged,
mangy
tigress.
In
the
darkness
of
the
corner
of
th
e r
oom various
articles
of furniture make
ever
new
monstrous
shapes
that
never
quite
acquire
definition.
A
faint,
sad,
moonlight
coming
from
the
window
reaches
the
central
pool
of
light
and
dies
there.
]

Passion seized this slim-figured, balding man, so sombre and black but for his absurd dolly liquid eyes and his démodé ankle bracelet that glinted beneath his silk sock as he moved. He picked up a cheap wooden chair – he was clearly as strong as agile. (Could he be a window dresser? a ladies’ hairdresser? a portrait photographer?) – and smashed again and again at the box-like construction until its boards lay broken beyond repair on the worn linoleum flooring. Dust flew everywhere so that he sneezed. Looking up to the ceiling he could find nothing, no Double Hooded Crow, for where there had been damp there was now a black gaping hole and broken,
protruding
rafters. On the floor below a pool of plaster lay
green-mouldy
, like a painter’s reflection of the black gap. He looked at the curtains, but thick dust had smoothed all their secret meanings. But from the broken box-bed soared minarets and domes (Byzantine? Moorish? Baroque?). He checked a sentimental sigh for the ignorance of the cheap little, trash-fed, snob-educated, prim, mincing,
high-voiced
schoolboy – Pss, Pss, hello, Nance, got your K.Y.? If
innocence
was disgusting and now not to be condoned, then surely ignorance must also be flushed away with the rest of the rubbish.

But still they surged towards him in great waves of colour-wash drawing, colours barbaric and splendid – domes, minarets, towers, campaniles, colonnades, fountains, Scheherazade, great
Turkish-trousered
sultans, serpentine houri-eyed sultanas, huge bellied eunuchs in Muscovite furs, Negroes vaulting, tumblers, blazing macaws on golden rings, pretty faced marmosets on brocaded shoulders, pretty faced pages, dressed as this, dressed as that, running behind the cypress trees, hiding behind the cinammon tree, the papaya tree, giggling, beckoning, here a smooth small buttock, there another, and there again the laughing saucy saucer eyes and … but that was absurd, he had never known Pirelli until many years later, and for himself, why, he judged a man by the size of his piece, no more, and, make no
mistake, no less, that was well known. But somewhere the plump little buttocks persisted, and lemur’s eyes, heaven knew where from, and eyes more recently seen peeping, beckoning, dark Cairene, musk scented Ceylon, isle of spices where lovely boys are vile. If that were he, then, oh indeed, how ignorant he’d been – fed no doubt by Oscar on Dvořák’s scarlet melodies and that absurd, pathetic supping with panthers not, as they said, to have known his arse from his elbow.

But now, the Bakst drawings imposed themselves on the shadowy sultans, sultanas, eunuchs and pages – the Queen’s Guard, Carabos herself, the Princess, Porphyrophores, and the pageboy of the Fairy Cherry in panniered skirt and cherry tree headdress – the very same he had dreamed, wet dreamed no doubt as well, pressed down, hemmed in by his wooden box. There at least he could find some link with the small enuretic – he would make him a present of the Bakst drawings, indeed, of all his fun paintings – the Laurencins too, and the Magnasco. Poor little creature! Yes, he could allow him at least one sigh in return for his luxurious dreams, a child starved of colour, of softness, of elegance, of superfluity. Time later to tell good from Kitsch, enough that he’d struggled to feed himself on all the scents of Araby. Laughing kindly, he was suddenly again seized with rage – to put him in a box for all the world like a raree show – come and see the little bed-wetter, the little pansy boy. He kicked the broken boards savagely, then turned and went out of the room downstairs to the dining-room.

The elegant, thin-faced, tall woman (London store buyer of Paris models? champion bridge player? new style headmistress?) in the next room heard him go and checked herself from calling to him. He must never know that she had heard. She picked up the seal muff that she had found among Her things and rubbed its sleekness against her cheek. Such quaint femininities were never seen now, and, trailing a stifling camphor – it must be noticed, but she did not care –
anything
that would soothe and soften her against the hideous cold of this her native land, of this her home, of this her cruelly cramped room. Already she felt frozen, aware of her thinness, aware of her bones, drawn in, every muscle tensed, shrinking from the chest of drawers, shrinking from her brass-headed bed, shrinking most of all from the other, the iron bedstead (so
she
had been the more richly treated! Like Jane she had played Cassandra, while to the real
Cassandra
the second best bed).

Yet surely some honour, some piety was due to the log cabin where it had all begun and to the long-legged tomboy (though she had hardly with her dancing class and her coral necklace been the lass of the limberlost imitating the whip-poor-will’s call under the old hickory tree) the plain Jane who had started it all. From log cabin to P.E.N. Club. Of course it was all there in the early Carmichaels, this tension, this smallness, this snake coiled in upon itself ready to hiss – and it was just that hissing in those early stories that, for all the critics ‘praises, she couldn’t bear. But all the same, as a saga composed to cock a snook at His thick, soupy self-content and Her endless acid-throwing, self-assertion, it had been highly creditable for a gawky girl in her ‘teens. She tried to compose it again in the old manner – surely in this room she could recapture that voice, the earliest Austen parodies of her early ’teens – ‘Elizabeth Carmichael had little reason to
congratulate
herself upon her fortune which was small, her face which was long, or her figure which was meagre, but she had some
compensation
in her tongue which was ready and her ear which was sharp….’ But had she? For she had spent more than a quarter of a century since then trying to adapt the tongue to poetry, to attune the ear to deeper music than mere mimicry. The failure in human sympathy! – To have grown up in that room, not noticing that hers was the brass. She had blotted out the iron bedstead and all that went with it; had remembered only sisterly confidences and giggles, had forgotten, but now they crowded in on her, the other images – long white legs a little blue with the early morning cold fighting their way into scruffy, crumpled woollen stockings, the first shaping of Sukey’s breasts, her desperate neatness from the start with her rags, ‘which of you girls has got hares in her drawers?’ (that elaborate, silly sniggery school joke that had only been said to her Sukey). In all those years only glimpses of her sister as a living body – for she had managed by every elaboration of movement to avoid seeing this horrible intrusion of privacy, this beastly twin flesh that kept time with her times, that disgusted her with her own.

Here had begun the Mouselike tightness, acidity, protective
cattiness
, sharpened claws and all the rest of it that had led to the P.E.N. White House. If instead she’d gone out, Martha-like as Sukey did, and got on with the job, perhaps her talent would not have been so thin, so acid, so poisoned at the source. But then she remembered and began laughing until she had to sit down on her bed and wipe her
eyes. No, no, never Sukey, stupid, limited Sukey the butt! The Countess came up the stairs bearing the little sauce boat in her hand: ‘What is this revolting, pasty mess?’ waving it in front of Sukey’s rounded blue eyes, fortissimo dramatic. ‘It looks like your Father’s white soggy soul.’ ‘It’s bread sauce, Mother.’ ‘Bread sauce! Ill-bred like all you Matthews children. Poisoned at the source!’ The Countess herself had hardly been able to finish her tirade for laughing. At least that was how the libretto ran when she and Rupert and Marcus had played it over a few times. Later when she’d Carmichaeled it, she toned it back to what was probably the original. Laughing still, she rose from the bed. ‘No,’ she said aloud, ‘it was a life of desolation and I was priggish and prudish, but that was the start. Only the start, of course. But, oh, we did laugh!’ She joined her brother in the dining-room.

‘An adjutant!’ she cried, ‘I couldn’t believe it when Douglas told me. You remember when you missed me in Cairo. An adjutant!’

‘Well, the Colonel was rather a silly one. And then he liked his officers to have a lot of money and lose to him at bridge. And I
have
kept a large house and a demanding man comfortable and well fed for many years so the mess was child’s play. Also I was rather good at camouflage work. We can’t all have brains, some of us must be good with our hands.’

‘Oh, I’m sure you were most competent but I’d always thought you’d either go to prison as an objector or march into battle leading the attack with plumes in your helmet.’

‘How novelists do love to romanticize pansies…. I can’t think why you want to be so nice about us. It’s a very good thing, duckie, that these clichés don’t get into your books. Or do they? I haven’t read a book for years. They were one of the things the Colonel didn’t like.’

She shrugged in apology: ‘Well, what next?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Except that I can’t bear all the dowdiness and austerity of London. It’s all like this house – dust and pinched
memories
. Anyway Jack couldn’t possibly eat this food after what
rationing’s
done to his proud stomach. He firewatched, poor thing. A truly awful war. And then ate at Claridge’s or the Berkeley as though rations were better there. The silly ideas of the rich! Still as I tell him it’s better than the gas chamber. Luckily we’ve got the pictures in New York as an excuse even though the monstrous government
won’t give us any of Jack’s money there. And they dared to send poor Gladys to jail! Who knows, when we see the Kandinskys and the Miros, perhaps some of the splendour’ll come back? Anyway I don’t want “people”. You can imagine after all that good talk in the mess – “I don’t know whether you’re religious, Matthews, I’m not, but an odd thing happened to me….” Oh, the odd things that happened to that Colonel. All to do with time. He was shot forwards and backwards through history like a billiard ball. No, I don’t want people. Certainly not that kind. I don’t really know what I want. Lucky you with your writing.’

‘Oh, yes, scribble, scribble, Mr Gibbon. I shall battle on. But not in this climate, thank God. The old blue, chilblained fingers of Mrs Gaskell or George Eliot are not for me. Douglas has been put in charge of the new dig at Saqqara.’ She smiled across at Marcus as sounds came from the kitchen. ‘Sukey’s put the kettle on, we’ve all come through.’

Taking the clean napkin off the top of the straw shopping basket the brisk neatly dressed woman in the tweed suit, the little broken veins of whose cheeks showed through caked face powder (was she social worker, racehorse owner or advocate of birth control?)
unpacked
two thermos flasks, a bottle of milk and a packet of Marie biscuits. It was lucky that she had remembered that the gas would be cut off. For the others no doubt would have been happy to pop out for snacks at all hours, but if they were ever to get through sorting out this mass of stuff they must get down to the job. Some of the furniture was all she wanted, for schools can always use furniture. As for the rest anyone would be glad of clothing in these rationing days and papers should always be burnt – but no doubt they would maunder, or even less appropriately giggle, over every object that came up. They had no families of their own, of course. Or apparently, Rupert did. But theatrical families, what could they be like? Of course 52 had never meant anything to her. She’d been determined to get away and she had. Here in this kitchen she’d fought smells, and dirt and grease, and won. True, her dreams had been absurd – servants and manor houses! Her mouth puckered over her dentures in a dry little smile – she must remember them for her weekly broadcast when, if ever, her adventures with the boys dried up. ‘Did you know that I once had a butler, two footmen, two gardeners, a chauffeur, a lady’s maid, a cook and heaven knows how many house parlour
maids? Well, I did. In my school girl dreams. Wouldn’t it be appalling if our childish dreams suddenly came true? How could an
independent
modern housewife bear such tyranny? How did our
grandmothers
survive it?’ How could she have had anything but novelettish dreams with an oddity like the Countess for a mother? She hadn’t known then, of course, that it didn’t matter how you married, it was the children that mattered and they could as well be of a poor man as of the lord of the manor; they were your own. Of course she
had
known; that was why there’d been all that slop about animals – crying over drowned kittens! Every woman should have children to love. That poor, dirty, old Regan, always trying to tell one’s fortune – dark men over the water, Prince Charmings and all that rubbish that the lower classes soaked up in those days; though the Countess was hardly better, romantic as a shop girl when she wasn’t behaving like one of those. They should have been married to
unromantic
, steady old Hugh!

Suddenly tears began to pour down her cheeks. She held her breath, she wondered if she would burst with the effort, but she couldn’t stop. She had been so frightened all that time – frightened of Regan’s strange hints, frightened of Aunt Mouse’s tongue, always on the edge of tears. If she could have found that upright corn-haired girl going about her tasks so tensely but so determinedly in that vast ogreish kitchen, she would have taken her in her arms! But the girl would have been too proud, wouldn’t have wanted it. The tears ceased now and, taking her powder puff from her handbag, she
liberally
covered her reddened eyelids. What a squalid lot of memories! But it couldn’t all have been like that, the heredity of the boys and P. S.! Carrying the tray upstairs, she remembered Granny M. and felt a stab of conscience.
There
had been a breath of decent orderly sanity, an old chatterbox, but steady!

‘No,’ she said, pouring out tea for them, ‘there was nothing to do, really. It was a direct hit. Nothing left.’

‘Poor Countess!’ Marcus said, ‘A Baedeker raid! And I’m sure she never went into the Cathedral. She hated what she called old musty things.’