No Laughing Matter (31 page)

She looked at her watch. Heavens, that dentist was keeping him a long time, but, of course, anticipation was one of the best parts of their times together. Deliberately relaxing her legs by burying her feet in the sand she took up her pen again.

‘At four and twenty, Clifford Arbuckle felt that the world lay at his feet. Time and the temporary convenience of others were obstacles that he did not allow seriously to incommode him. He had felt so at ten years of age and the everts of the intervening years had not given him to revise his estimate. Nurtured in a humble home, early imbued with strict denominational principles that forbade all frivolities
ineluding 
dancing and Sunday travel, he had yet been indulged from his first years by his mother, a system to which his affectionate sister soon learned to subscribe. Absolute male authority was the principle of the Arbuckle household, subordination of all female claims to
consideration
its inevitable result. The manners of Mr Arbuckle and his son Clifford were simple, almost rude, their diet was frugal, but in all else their whims and caprices were as much indulged as those of the most effete and luxurious caliphs or sultans. Endowed by nature with a clever disposition and an agreeable person the young Clifford soon learned to explain the system of his upbringing as the reasonable
expectation
of his exceptional talents and graces. A system of state scholarships continued the indulgence which the fond mother had begun. Born in the ruder north, he feared the established society of London and the surrounding counties lest a more polished code of manners would accept less easily his primitive claim to male
superiority
. His admiration, his attentions, his studious enquiry, all were given to our enemy across the narrow seas. To be received by the French was a delight, to be thought French was bliss. To this end he smoked a pipe, so, by a complicated whim imitating those anglophile young Frenchmen who supposed themselves to appear English by filling the drawing-room with clouds of coarse smoke. To labour to study the French system, the French manner, the French history, became all his pains; yet the endurance of more childish pains – a sick headache, a toothache, a disordered digestion – he found impossible, fretting about them with a petulance that might rather have been expected from a small child. To such a state had constant and excessive maternal indulgence reduced this young man of parts so that if he had not possessed …’

But Clifford’s saving graces remained forever unrecorded, for Margaret’s attention was distracted by a young girl’s cries. Looking up, she saw on the farther side of their path a girl of twelve or so – one of the goat-seeking children whom they had encountered previously. It was impossible to tell from her nasal accent and patois speech what was wrong, but she clearly required help. The day seemed fated to be one of interruptions and tediums, so Margaret, climbing over the rocks and through the undergrowth with some difficulty, followed the girl’s lead, sometimes helped by her hand. At last they came in the growing heat to a widely spreading old fig tree. Here stood a small boy of nine or so, whom Margaret remembered to have seen with the girl before. At once both children pointed to the ground and there to her
horror Margaret saw a brood of young snakes lying basking on the dead leaves and leaf mould. At first she wondered if some child had been bitten and tried to recall stories of Mouse about first aid for snake bite, but at last she understood that the children were offering to sell her the snakes. To her frightened disgust, when she had made her refusal perfectly clear the young boy began to beat the small delicately marked coils with his goatherd’s stick, and, within seconds both children were dancing barefooted like African savages, reducing the dying snakes to a squalid pulp. Margaret turned and fled. Hysteria overtook her, she was tripped by the undergrowth once or twice, cut her hand and bruised her knee before she returned tearful to the sandy hollow. Her book lay open as she had left it. Fear that Clifford’s
toothache
had been a more serious symptom than they had thought,
conscientious
anxiety that she had mocked him, both determined her to return to the town. I shall meet him on the way, she thought, and all will be all right again. She picked up her book. Beneath her own writing, she read in his, ‘The tooth extraction was bloody. The man is a maniac. How pleased you will be. Seriously I don’t see how we can maintain a real relationship if I (and other human beings) are. so totally unreal to you that you can love them when they’re with you and write this sort of thing when they’re away an hour from you. I apologize for thinking that your upbringing had any advantages, it has clearly left you without the confidence to make any deep and sustained relationship in life. You have not commented on the
selfishness
of my ambition, but one of the side effects of the male dominance that you so dislike and which I know to be natural is that I do not intend to be saddled with a neurotic wife. Best of luck with your stories for which you have got very great talent. I’m going back to Aix. Thank you for everything.’

Her first anger was for his total lack of humour, her second for her own selfish frivolity. For two days she stayed on at the hotel divided between these furies; then she telephoned to him. At last he agreed to pass a night with her at an hotel in Marseilles. Perhaps it was an insufficient remedy for a deep malady but they parted next day, agreeing to be good friends.

The only permanent legacy he left to her was that she always remembered that Corneille was a Norman ‘qui patoisait’, whatever that implied socially in seventeenth-century France.

*

Letting the curls of his wig fall around his shoulders, Marcus unpeeled one layer of disguise, changing from Lady Caroline Lamb’s vengeful page to the lady herself. He had taken off the page’s neckcloth and embroidered livery coat, and lay on the big bed, naked to the navel below which an orange sash was wound. This, with his baggy pink Turkish trousers, were presumed to be Lady Caroline’s somewhat extravagant idea of a page’s uniform.

‘
I
don’t think Mary Clough either attractive or intelligent,’ he said, and, shaking his Turkish slippers from his feet on to the floor, he curled his legs up on to the bed.

‘No. But then you’re not qualified by nature to judge either the attractions of women, or intelligence.’ Jack took off his full-bottomed wig to rid the reproof of the triviality of travesty. Yet in
eighteenth-century
undress and in his controlled anger he seemed much more like the vitriolic Mr Pope than he had when rather clumsily fox trotting at the ball.

‘And you, of course, are a connoisseur of cunt.’

‘No. I simply don’t find it necessary to sum up the qualities of my friends. That someone is a friend naturally means that he or she is attractive, intelligent and so on.’

‘Don’t sum up! You’re the biggest set of gossip mongers I’ve ever met.’

‘I should hope so. We’re not politicians or public servants trained to avoid reality. My friends are people. Their concerns are humane.’

‘Pulling to pieces Lady Westerton.’

‘Lavinia Westerton is only doubtfully human. Anyway, only people who have no capacity for friendship talk vaguely about
speaking
ill of no one.’

‘Well, it wasn’t very humane of Monty Golding to make fun of me because I mixed up Masoch or whatever he’s called with the Italian painter.’

‘First of all you’re using the word humane in a loose colloquial sense that is hardly helpful.’ Jack tightened his thin lips. His delicate, bony Jewish face, his wide nostrilled nose, suited the
eighteenth-century
undress if not exactly the role of Pope. Marcus knew that this precision, this pedantry were meant to try him; he only hoped that Jack didn’t know how nearly they exasperated him. ‘Secondly your confusion of Sacher Masoch with Massaccio led to some ludicrous misapprehensions which it would have been affected not to pursue.
Instead of primping and pouting you might have assisted in furthering the joke as you very well could have done if you’d tried.’

‘And what about Mary’s pouting? I suppose that was aesthetic disgust.’

Jack was clearly set upon aggravation, for he did not immediately answer the question. He stared instead at the Bakst drawings he had given Marcus on his birthday.

‘I can’t remember why you wanted these.’

‘Because they’re the prettiest pictures I can think of. And the most decorative. Also for good or ill I first saw you magnificent in your box from my gallery seat at
Sleeping
Beauty.
Years before you picked me up at the Coliseum.’

‘You said,’ Jack left it, ‘but sentiment apart you should have a good painting in here. After all, it was you who chose the Delaunay and the Gris still life. In six months you’ve improved the collection enormously.’

‘Thank you. But I don’t want the good pictures in here. I just want fun things like the Bakst. Gorgeous. To go with my wonderful, vulgar, ornate bed. Oh, how I wallow in it after years of 52.’

‘I’m not sure that it’s quite decent for you to wallow in my parents’ bed. And they not so long cold. To return. If Monty wasn’t disgusted with you, I was. Vulgar malice and spite! You sounded just like your awful mother. And to Mary who’s always been so civil to you.’

‘Civil! It’s impossible to tell with your friends whether they like one or hate one.’

‘Being my friends they’re naturally disposed to like you, as you should them. Anyway all this hangover of lack of self-confidence. It isn’t much of a compliment to our six months together.’

‘If only Monty hadn’t got on to that bloody story of Margaret’s.’

‘Your sister’s stories are limited but they have real merit. They appealed to Monty. He praised them. Surely it’s as simple as that.’

‘It isn’t simple at all. I’ve suffered from that awful wedding story of Margaret’s before now. It always upsets me when people talk about it.’

‘Oh, don’t be so tiresome, Mark. A work of art is a work of art. That’s what Monty was talking about. Nobody knew it was by a sister of yours. Or would have cared if they had. Now that is gossip. Anyway it was only because you’d been sitting there ever since the dancing finished, looking like a very pretty constipated chinchilla that
Mary out of misplaced kindness asked what you thought about it. You’re very decorative my dear, but … And why couldn’t you have just said it was written by your sister and that you thought it false and left it at that, if you wanted to? “I don’t think you and I are ever likely to know much about weddings, Miss Clough.’”

Jack’s imitation, Marcus knew, caught exactly his own prissy, high pitched petulance.

‘Poor Mary! You knew bloody well that Oliver had just walked out on her after all these years. And to marry some flapper. It was foul of you, Mark, and cheap. And it hurt her.’

‘There wouldn’t have been much point in saying it if it hadn’t. Anyway, shall I tell you why I didn’t rush to claim Margaret for my sister? Perhaps it’ll make you and your friends a little less quick to sum human beings up in phrases.” So mysteriously lost for hours of the night among London’s bright lights…. Oh, so enjoying his winged arabesques and pas de chat.” You see, I know the passage off by heart. It was easy enough for Margaret and all the rest of them to fancy me as “flitting from flower to flower”. They’d left home. Do you want to know what I was doing lost among London’s bright lights? I was flitting from one sordid old man to another trying to sell my bum. How disgusting! Not yet seventeen! Well, I couldn’t always get extra work at the film studios, that’s why. And when I couldn’t and Regan was drunk or the Countess was in a rage, I didn’t get enough to eat.’

Marcus was crying now; not with the old hysterical screaming of his boyhood. Tears ran slowly down his face, but his hands were shaking. His anger was as great as Jack’s had been. Jack went over and tried to put a hand on his shoulder, but Marcus pushed him away.

‘All right,’ Jack said, rather wearily, ‘Tell.’

He sat back in a little tub chair, one leg thrown over the other, finger tips of one hand pressed against those of the other.

‘You bloody judge,’ Marcus said, but nevertheless he began to talk.

‘I don’t think you can imagine what 52 was like after I left school. At first there were my fashion drawings. But then as every paper from
Vogue
down sent them back I gradually knew that all that was a sort of dream. One woman was nice enough to write and what she said seemed to sum it all up, “Your designs show a nice sense of fantasy, but you appear to be living in a vacuum.” I was. I just used to sit and think about sex all day. Not that I don’t think about it most of the time now. It was the only thing to do. 52 really had become an awful
house. The Countess had no one else to pick on but me and then she’d got the change coming on, so she was at her bloodiest anyway. That probably made me put on what she called effeminate airs just to spite her. I was supposed to have an allowance until a job came along. Billy Pop did give me ten bob once. In return I was to help with the
housekeeping
. I must say there wasn’t much to do. Arrange some daffodils for the Countess and then I used to do the shopping, when there was any money to shop with or we’d got credit again at the Army and Navy Stores. What I must have looked like among all those colonel’s wives and admirals’ widows at the grocery counter! A boy of sixteen. I put red on my cheeks and my lips from my paintbox, and sometimes blue on my eyelids. And then I had a sort of grey sombrero that I’d bought second hand in Soho, and I used to stop all the time in front of shop windows and tuck my gorgeous black curls in on the other side. And my walk! I took so many little delicate steps that the muscles of my thighs used to get cramp. Of course all the men who sold flowers or newspapers down at Victoria used to call out after me, “Look at Angela,” “Puss, Puss, puss.” Terrific dishes some of them were! Anyway the more they called the more I did the nance. I was terrified of them, of course. Partly because I was hoping they would pick me up and partly because I honestly thought they might knock me down. Once when I’d pinned a small bunch of violets on to my overcoat a man came up and said, “Bloody little pouff? They ought to poleaxe the lot of you.” I was so scared I peed myself, but I only put on a more queeny act. I held the collar of my overcoat together as though it was the sables the Grandduchess had smuggled out of Vladivostok. I just longed to be noticed. It didn’t matter how.