No Laughing Matter (11 page)

‘The cock bird’s the igh one,’ she said, ‘That’ll do for your Granny Matthews. She’s one of the old school. She likes er birds gamey. Miss Rickard’s got a weaker stomach for all er travelling. She’ll take the breast of one of the ens. Or as much as
eel
leave for er.’ She chuckled.

‘Oh, Regan, the things you remember about us.’

‘That’s part of bein in service, Miss Sukey.’

‘You’ve spoilt us, you know.’

In
the
great
roomy
farmhouse
kitchen
from
whose
speckless
tiled
floors
one
could
eat
one’s
breakfast
any
day,
Ada
laughed.
‘
Oh,
I
gave
him
a
piece
of
my
mind,
Madam;
“The
garden
isn’t
yours,
”
I
told
him,
“asparagus
like
great
pillars.
The
idea
of
it!
Just
for
your
old
village
show!
When
you
know
that
the
mistress
likes
the
early
spikes
as
thin
as
her
little
finger.
”
It
won’t
happen
again,
you
can
assure
the
master
of
that.’
Sukey
said
to
this
tall
country
woman,
so
neatly
dressed
in
her
uniform,
almost
handsome
with
her
direct
self-respecting
gaze,
‘Oh,
you’ve
bullied
him,
Ada.
The
poor
man!
And
you
know
he’s
in
love
with
you.’
‘Oh,
he’s
all
right,
Anderson
is,
Madam.
But
every
man
needs
to
be
put
in
his
place
now
and
again.
It
doesn’t
do
to
spoil
them.
You
know
that.’
‘Indeed,
I
do,
Ada.’
Then laughing – two women together – she looked up and saw Regan’s greasy old apron, a hairpin hanging over her ear.

‘And
we’ve
spoilt
you
,
Regan,’ she added softly. And then not to upset the old creature, no, rather, surely to be fair, ‘
They
have. This house. It spoils everything.’ She looked ahead trying to catch sight of Ada, even of the kitchen garden, but there was only the grocer’s gift calendar still announcing June and marked with a bloody thumb-print.

‘Too stiff for your wrists?’ Regan came towards the bowl of batter. ‘Ere, let me.’

‘No, no, it’s quite all right. Oh, you are a darling, Regan, putting up with us all.’

‘Now what’s this you want? All over me, aren’t you?’

The woman was in a rare friendly mood. Sukey, drawing back from a blast of cooking brandy fumes mixed with onion,
determinedly
separated real warmth from maudlin alcohol. Determinedly also she replied to Regan’s warm self.

‘Dear Regan, you always see through us. I do want something. Yes.’ She made her request.

‘Kittens messing all over my kitchen floor. No thank you. Never eard of such a thing. Insanity that’s what it is. Insanity.’

‘But think of the mice we’ll get if we don’t have a cat to take Leonora’s place.’

‘Leonora! That taxi was a Dispensation, if you ask me. Besides you won’t get no mice in my kitchen. The idea! And if there was, mice droppins is better than cats’ mess. Why, there was an old geezer once sent down to the kitchen to thank me for the sponge cake with chocolate flutings. I said to Monser Jooles, “Chocolate flutings! She’s barmy!” It was only after, I thought of the mice. Mice
drop-pins
, why when I was working for Mrs Pitditch-Perkins …’

‘Oh, Regan, darling! What an absolutely glorious story!’ Sukey turned and there was the Countess ‘framed’, as she no doubt thought of herself, in the kitchen doorway. Sukey saw in her mother only a means of stemming Regan’s tide.

‘So you’re going to challenge poor Grannie’s cherished ideas of etiquette.’ She looked at her mother’s small toque of pansies and violets.

‘Well, she shouldn’t cherish them if she’s so vague about what’s the done thing.’

‘All the same, a toque’s rather a timorous challenge. Especially with Grannie’s short sight.’

‘A timorous challenge! That’s quite witty for you, darling. I used to think Margaret would be the wit but she’s getting so sour. Perhaps you will be. I hope one of you will inherit. After all I’m here as a constant example, and better still you’ve got Regan’s
natural
wit. And so you’ve agreed, Regan. I knew as soon as I heard that wonderful mouse story. You’re going to give my kittens a warm home near the boiler. And for party occasions they can come upstairs to the
dining-room
and be looked at by visitors. You mustn’t let them be a nuisance, Regan. Sukey will see to their feeding, won’t you, darling? And one of the others can empty the sandbox. Marcus, I should think. It will be good for him. No schoolboy should have such clean white hands as Marcus has.’

‘I don’t fancy kittens in the kitchen, Madam. It’s insanity.’

‘Insanity!’ The Countess laughed down the scale. ‘You’ve been got at by Miss Sukey and all those awful school of cookery ideas. Sanity, that’s what they teach there, and look at the result. Those terrible potato flour scones! Thank goodness, Sukey, you only cook for the nursery menu. But you, Regan, you made even the Zepp raids an orgy! Do you remember those delicious little woodcock the night the bomb fell in Covent Garden? But you will take my kittens, won’t you, Regan? I need an awful lot of consoling today. My friend Major Ward has gone back to the United States. He sent a special message to you, Regan. Your praliné ices will live with him for ever.’

The Countess was in tears. Sukey turned away. But Regan
responded
.

‘You ad igh old times together, didn’t you? And will again. If not with im. There’s others. You’ve never been content with one.’

‘Oh, Regan, you’re a shockingly bad influence on me. Thank heaven for you! And my kittens?’

Regan clicked her tongue. ‘Oh, all right. You can ave your muck box. But don’t blame me if you all get the bellyache. And now off you go if Miss Rickard’s to ave er creme brule.’

‘Dear Regan,’ the Countess said. She went over to Sukey. ‘There you are, darling. The kittens are provided for. And I want
you
to look after them for me. And Sukey,’ she whispered, ‘do see she doesn’t take another nip. She’s had just enough to produce a superb luncheon, but we don’t want her paralytic. The kittens are
called
mine, darling, but, of course, you’re the one to care for them. The idea of your sharing with the others was absurd. Do remember, darling heart, that Billy and I have special reasons for wanting to please the old girls today.’

‘Yes, Countess, I understand.’ Sukey felt quite conspiratorial in the irony of her answer, like Mazarin or someone in one of Billy Pop’s historical stories.

She poured the batter mixture into the greased baking tin. The mixture, cascading smoothly white from the smooth white bowl, seemed to carry her along with it without thought or care. Regan, too, was whistling gaily, not in her usual sad, off-key drone.

‘Why are we so happy when she gets her own way, Regan?’

Regan, busy clarifying the sugar, said nothing.

‘I suppose it’s a relief to have her in a happy mood.’

‘Oh, drat you, Miss Sukey! Don’t keep on talking. Your Ma’s
avin a bad time. Let’s leave it at that. Anyway she don’t know what a real bit of fun means. You none of you do. The gentry or those that goes by the name. She ought to come over to my sister Em’s place of a Saturday night. I couldn’t let
them
know what I’ve come down to. ‘She poured herself out a glass of cooking brandy.’ But there, you’ve got to kick the bucket somewhere. And one filthy ole’s as good as another.’

Sukey concentratedly spread margarine thinly on the bread scraps for the pudding she was preparing. So concentratedly that she found to her annoyance that she had prepared more bread scraps than the baking dish would hold even if she left out the always optional fistful of currants. She turned round with released fury when she heard Billy Pop’s voice.

‘Well, Regan, well?’ he was asking.

‘It isn’t well at all, Father. It’s very bad. She’s just called the house a filthy hole.’

‘Oh, dear.’ he began to lick the cream from the blades of the whipper that Regan had used, ‘Oh, dear! Well, there it is. If you know a better ‘ole, Regan, go to it, as Old Bill said.’

‘It isn’t only Regan who wants to go. Don’t make any mistake about that. We all of us hate it here. Not just the dirt but the way you’ve let everything slide. Look at you dropping cream on your waistcoat now.’

Regan dipped a dishcloth in boiling water and rubbed Billy Pop’s waistcoat vigorously. ‘There!’

Billy Pop poured himself out a half glass of the cooking brandy. He took a mouthful and made a face. ‘Not a good brandy.’ He hastily swallowed the rest. Sukey’s full bottom lip was trembling, she brushed tears from her eyelashes with the back of her hand.

‘“April, April, laugh thy girlish laughter, and the moment after, Weep thy girlish tears, April.” Nothing seems so terrible again as it does when one’s young, eh, Regan?’

Regan did not answer him, and, as Sukey started to cry he went over to her. ‘If you’re trying to compete with your mother’s mercurial moods, my dear, don’t. Remember she’s a Mrs Siddons, a Bernhardt. You’re not. Or probably not. You’re peaches and cream.’ He pinched her cheek, but this did not stop her sobbing. ‘Well, you’ve brought all this on, Regan. You’ll have to deal with it,’ he told her. She was balancing the roasting dish against her knee as she basted the ducks. He went over and broke off a piece of well toffeed skin.

Sukey shouted at him. ‘Oh, yes, anybody but yourself. And what have you brought
her
to? Faithful old Regan.’

‘You’re saying hurtful things, Sukey.’

With this rebuke he faded out of the kitchen like the steam from the brussels sprouts boiling on the range. But something moist remained with them – for Regan a kiss in the cellar before the All Clear, for Sukey the watering eyes the day his last manuscript came back ‘no sale’ from his agents. They also conjure up who only fade away.

*

James Carmichael lightly touched his gay blue and white spotted foulard bow tie. He was out of his seat in a second to greet her. ‘My dear,’ he asked, ‘how do you contrive to look so lovely? Like
champagne
to the thirsty traveller.’ But her black eyes were contemptuous. ‘James, if you’re going to make speeches, think first. Champagne doesn’t quench thirst.’ His body became bowed, his knees sagged, he resumed his seat before she sat down. Ash fell from his cigarette upon his waistcoat. ‘I don’t seem to sleep. This shortness of breath. But still, who cares?’ he mumbled.

Margaret put down her pen, satisfied that Billy Pop had been nailed on paper. The speech was less rotund, perhaps, less pompous, but then James Carmichael was an idle stockbroker, not a failed writer. His speech
would
be more truncated, less flowery. But the Countess wasn’t there at all. She was neither herself nor Sophie
Carmichael
. True, Sophie was intended to be less ‘bohemian’, but this dialogue was that of a dowager – ‘think first’, it was an old woman snapping. Without the Countess’s laughter and mockery, the words were dead. Complexity was gone and complexity was the heart of the life she sought to convey. How to put it on paper? Her fingers itched to tear up all she had written, to find the one magic word that would say everything. If she could convey the surrounding
atmosphere
of No. 52 perhaps – ‘From below stairs rose the familiar, humiliating smell of cabbage a-boiling and with it Charles’ tremulous tenor singing some ridiculous, sugary tune from Chu Chin Chow.’ ‘A-boiling’ was too affected and ‘cabbage’ too obvious. Why not use the immediate, the familiar and real ‘brussels sprouts coming to the boil’? But where to put the sentence? ‘Like champagne to the thirsty traveller? From below stairs rose the familiar, humiliating smell of brussels sprouts coming to the boil, etc’ Margaret sat back with a smile. It was pleasing, placing irony. And yet, and yet, by
ironically placing so carefully it somehow failed to capture the contradictory whole. She flattened the nib of her pen against the blotter until it broke. Now at least she had the respite given her by the task of replacing it.

*

‘Youth is the time for loving, so poets always say. ‘Maybe they did, but Billy Pop felt a resistance to the couplet when offered to him by the flirtatious mingling of Rupert’s tenor and the Countess’s contralto floating out from the drawing-room. He felt isolated by it and decided to seek feminine assuagement from his daughters on the top floor. Meanwhile as he climbed the stairs he covered the unwanted duet with his own bawled solo –’ I cobble all night and I cobble all day. Turn tiddy turn, turn tiddy turn. I am Chu Chin Chow from China, from Shanghai China.’ The ‘Shanghai’ was a mistake, inartistic. Particularity spoils art. Some important chap had said it. Probably at the Thursday Bookmen Luncheon. Gosse or Q. But the great features did not emerge at all. Probably not great at all, probably Smith, Brown or Jones. For after all, exactitude, the mot juste and the cherished fact, artistically cherished of course, were the keys to art. For example, ‘I cobble all night and I cobble all day!’ Everything exact. The last, the stretch, the awl. The cobbler gives his awl. No, excess of wit destroys simplicity. Just ‘The Cobbler’, that crystallized gem the short story – surely crystal gem, most unfortunate to crack one’s teeth on a sugared ruby. Every word as hard as a diamond. The last, the stretch, the awl. All but not perhaps enough. Well, any trade would do when starting from scratch. A printer maybe. A more familiar world. César Birotteau. But then Balzac really knew. No, damn this splitting head, stick to your last. Ars longa and needs endurance. Arnold Bennett, generous old vulgarian, ‘to those of us who still care for the precise image your little masterpiece of the cockney cobbler’s day out at Margate….’ Cockney? Ah, perhaps Regan’s brother-in-law was a cobbler. Exactitude, that was what one needed. A writer’s note book. And then selection. Life can’t be put on paper in all its complexity. ‘True art, as you show, lies so much in the selecting gift of eye and ear.’ Arnold Bennett, generous old vulgarian. ‘The generosity of your encouragement needless to say is a more satisfactory stimulation to fresh work than any perfunctory praise from run-of-the-mill critics. If my little story has passed your exacting….’ Composing his generous but quite unvulgar reply to
Arnold Bennett and humming the Cobbler’s Song, Billy Pop paused in contented dreaming mood for a moment on the top landing.