No Laughing Matter (36 page)

Do your characters sometimes come to life, Miss Matthews? Yes, but not real life. You know I’m not a dissociated schizoid. Oh to be just that, to melt this lean flesh and take on cliffs or wrecked boulders, a dwarf nightmarish incorruption. Mind what Desmond MacCarthy wrote! She wondered at how little Douglas guessed what was tearing at her vitals. And yet at a moment’s notice, if she switched on to him – lay in his arms, went over his exquisite photographs of Luxor with him, read aloud with him turn by turn the poems and sermons of Donne, saw peristyles and Gothic voussoirs and baroque cupolas in his company, under his enlightening teasably pedantic guidance; or simply sat with him at café tables or on public benches staring at Spanish nuns, at Arab watersellers, or at Serbo Croat gentlemen
reading
newspapers on bamboo frames – in a second the despairs and their fuzz of surrounding depression would disappear, become one with outer darkness, where they would wait to spring at her in the night or as she came downstairs at Holland Park to receive friends for dinner or as she waited for a bus, or in the hotel lobby buying
postcards
, at any time when her guard was down. This very Douglas, her refuge, her hand that stroked the forehead, her voice that banished the lingering shreds of nightmare, her water wings, and her ‘Excellent, you only want confidence in order to achieve the highest …’ Douglas, who was all these, a very present help in time of trouble, thought that she had been upset by Desmond MacCarthy’s warm, burring,
avuncular
reproof, by Uncle Desmond regretfully chiding her attempts to spread her wings and asking her to repeat again the little pieces she used to say so well, the little pieces that had allowed him and her other literary aunts and uncles to see what a clever little girl she was. ‘I cannot help wishing that Miss Matthews had never heard of God and Tolstoy. She was surely so much nearer to saving us and the world, if that must be her generous concern, when she remained content to feed us periodically with those cool, astringent doses of life as lived by the fascinatingly disagreeable Carmichael family. After all, Jane Austen did not feel it necessary to show Wickham regenerated by death upon the field of Waterloo, nor Mr D’Arcy’s spiritual enlargement
by contemplation of the Derbyshire peaks. And we are grateful to her that she did not.’ How to mind such a kind, irrelevant reproof?

How could Douglas fail to see the brutal thrust with which the
Literary
Supplement’s
flatteringly long review had pierced her. ‘We do not believe as so many of Miss Matthews’ admirers would seem to hold, that she has extended her range too far, nor, in aiming too broadly, missed her mark …’ And on and on through hundreds of flattering words of clever, considered criticism to end – ‘The simple think that Miss Matthews “hates people”. The more sophisticated believe that she loves them, and quarrel only whether she has been wise to attempt to express that love positively. The truth is that she neither hates nor loves human beings; she is indifferent to them. And considerable fiction, even perhaps considerable art of any kind cannot be born of human indifference.’

And it was with this judgement, these words ringing in her ears that she must now sit down and compose stirring words to rouse a
congress
to defend the liberty of the artist, and, in so doing, affirm the vital importance, the final significance of each and every human being, and of man in general as the centrepiece.

If it hadn’t been for the limestone cliffs she would simply have given this anonymous creature (a well known face, no doubt, red and blustering or white and smirking, seen very often all smiles behind a cocktail glass) the direct lie. From girlhood she had been the amused and loving observer of human quirks and oddities. Every face in the street as she shopped or travelled to work by bus posed problems for her, haunted her, pursued her. Each boy, each girl in dancing class had demanded her attention as a potential sketch or story of adult tragedy or farce. Catching the exact word, pinning down the phrase, these had been as much her constant pursuit as imitating the exact nuance of voice had been Rupert’s. For year after year, for twenty years now, yes, since she was fourteen or less, she had been straining herself, tearing herself to pieces to put together human mosaics, to give movement and purpose and relationship to the creatures of her imagination, to set them working backwards and forwards in time, round and about in space; and now this anaemic, constipated,
bad-breathed
, underpaid failure lurking behind anonymity told her that all she had been doing was to play a glorified game of chess.

If it had not been for the limestone cliffs, and last year the vast rolling empty plains of La Mancha, or again and again over the years
mountains, deserts, marshes seen in flashes from trains, seen and longed for, she would have dismissed the little flutter of fear that responded to the Grub Street jackal’s whine as a seemly but over sensitive humility. She who enjoyed life so much – travelling, talking, walking, eating, dancing, sleeping, making love, reading, writing and painting in oils, too, if that meant doing nothing in glorious contentment. But why then did she long to become that little Pearl White figure, Andromeda chained forever alone on that rock, Crusoe before he was troubled by Friday’s faithful service? Of course, she had known despair: before the divorce she had looked at the white tablets by her bed hopefully and then, picturing herself with vomit pouring from her mouth and nostrils, turned away; she had smelt eagerly the gas fumes in that room in Onslow Square but, seeing herself a mindless empty patient year after year in a hospital ward, had turned off the tap and had gone out to the cinema. Certainly in those months in Cassis after that boy from Durham, when she had first found the easy trick of bed without love, she had been very near once or twice to ‘contemplating suicide’, but that did not mean that she had not always been tempted back to life by hot fresh rolls and French butter, by the way the sea lapped around a rock, by a new evening dress, by the muscle of a man’s arm stretched on the sand, above all by fusing on paper Adela Takeley (that dreadful artists’ model) and Geneviève Rocquetin (that caricature of a jeune fille bien élevée). There had always been more than enough in life to spare.

And yet how the limestone, the marsh mud and the desert sand drew her to them! For every human assertion there are hundreds of inanimate negations. It was those, their stillness, their quiet, their
non-existence
which she so desperately needed. They were the other side of life, the nothing side, denying which everything was an empty boast, a silly whistling in the dark. She was not in love with easeful death, not at all, if that meant surrendering to the grave’s embrace, but she did need the refreshment of negation, the refreshment of bare dead rock if she were to have the strength, the endurance to receive human noises. The great tenor arias that she would hear in humanity’s defence in Paris, how to bear their inevitable vulgarities? The small, private noises, sharp and astringent that she perhaps or Mr E. M. Forster might contribute, how to bear their occasional cosiness? How to endure the millions that exulted in the boastful, empty lies that came from Nuremburg and Bayreuth and Rome?
Or the little dirty cheapening talk of everybody everyday? For these she must keep her imagination frighteningly yet deadly clean with the non-human – with the snow blowing through centuries in the icy blizzards of Antarctica, with the sand collecting endlessly in the Gobi desert. But Mouse who had died amid such refreshment would have urged her to snap back at the world. This she would not do, comfortable, easy though it would be, delighted though the world was to be snapped at. Relying upon that other side, that clean,
inanimate
world to be there when she needed it, she would return as warmly as she could to men and their doings, and offer them if not certain love, at least the devotion of all her will. She would start to build once more upon these new foundations. The name of Geneviève Rocquetin had brought memories that pressed.

She got up from the deck chair and returned to her cabin.
Undressing
, she put on her pyjamas, took a fresh exercise book, got into bed, unscrewed her fountain pen and wrote: ‘Andrée (Geneviève’s sister Adèle, Sukey as she used to be at Cromer before she knew her vocation was marriage) living near Aigues Mortes (that Château of the Rocquetins) has a life divided since girlhood between the marshes (those hours of my riding in the Camargue, the egrets white against the black cypresses, suddenly coming on the flamingoes, the popping sound of crabs bubbling below the mud surface) and the frigid Protestant haute bourgeoisie of Nîmes and round about (Madame Pipard, “Ours is the clean France, Mademoiselle Matthews. In more than three centuries – Monarchy, Empire, Republic, what does it matter? The others have got their hands dirty”). Reacting against this glacial social world of her parents, she becomes friendly with …’

When Douglas returned she was busily writing. Seeing that he was ready for her attention, she made some rough note – ‘a continual dialogue between Andrée alone on the marshes and Andrée, the dutiful daughter, the secret mistress of Patrick, the secret diary writer, is the only solvent of the
absurd
beauty of
life
(satirical scenes) and the
futile
need for
death
(the solitary scenes). Being alive means a responsibility to solve this.’ Then she added quickly, ‘Much of the solitary Camargue nature side to be treated with irony too, a young girl’s first reactions to Nature, to God, etc. Almost a compendium of the absurdities of nineteenth-century romanticism. On the other hand the full felt tragedy of this ridiculous, dead, ingrown, provincial Protestantism. Balance on both sides so that life isn’t mocked.’

‘We leave for Rijeka in five minutes. I wish you’d seen the Cathedral. It was benediction. The singing was surprisingly good.’

‘I’ve started a scheme for a new novel.’

‘I know. I saw. You were bound to. It was the only thing. But don’t suppose I don’t realize the courage it’s taken. I could smash that MacCarthy’s jaw.’

Naked he lay beside her, taking from her her book and her pen. He held her and kissed her. She couldn’t respond immediately. With Ralph she’d always been able to; he could touch her physically as though she were controlled by an electric button, but then with Ralph daily married life had been an unloving blank. Douglas was so good to her, made her days so happy that at these times she owed him sincerity.

‘All this is only a substitute, you know.’

‘Good Lord, yes,’ he took it for teasing, ‘I’m well aware. Close your eyes and think of Robert Taylor.’

She couldn’t carry sincerity on into cruelty, so she made no further remark, but with pleasure, almost with excitement, she responded.

At midnight she woke to the wind outside the porthole and to Douglas’ light breathing. But these Protestants from Nîmes would speak in French. All her main gift for dialogue would be valueless. The whole novel, she saw, was an absurdity.

*

Rupert came in from the stable yard invigorated, warm, pleased with everything, although a little breathless. He took off his top boots and left them in the passage, but his trousers still shed a few flakes of mud, some sawdust on to the parquet floor when he came into the living room. He carried a heavy basket of logs and, bending down, set it beside the already blazing open fire. When he stood up his shoulders in their peat smelling tweed still seemed a little bowed.

Deborah’s aunt remarked on it: ‘You’re not holding yourself so straight as a year ago.’

‘I’m not as young as I was a year ago, Aunt Annabel.’ And then before she could reply, ‘I am very old. Oi be one undred and foive come Martinmas, In the archives of Vladivostok is certificate. Born seventeen hundred eighty-five. How much is? One hundred fifty. Then I’m one hundred fifty. But nothing appen to me. Not even Emperor Napoleon. I sit in my chair. When is Emperor coming? I ask. Emperor is not coming. Emperor doesn’t come. In Vladivostok nothing ever appen.’

He sat back dejected, on the pouf. Aunt Annabel laughed a little nervously, but at that moment Debbie, holding little Tanya by the hand, came in through the French window.

‘Have
you
done all that sawing? Bless you, darling. The moorhens are on the pond again.’

Tanya said, ‘Boorpen.’

Rupert snatched her up in his arms.

‘Oh, by garnd be ko to Bosgow? By garnd be, Darnyer?

‘He’s been like this all the morning, Debbie. Sausages for breakfast, that’s what it is, I can see. You should never feed men meat before luncheon, my dear.’

Rupert gave a lion’s roar. Deborah, seeing Tanya’s lip tremble, took her from her father’s arms and set her on the floor.

‘Daddy’s happy,’ but as the lip still trembled she quickly took the Teddy Bear from the piano top where someone had left it and gave it to the child. Then she knelt on the rug, throwing logs on to the fire.

Tanya cooed over the woollen animal.

‘
He’s
the
real
Rupert, isn’t he? Now if you appeared in the
Daily
Express
everyday, darling, like Rupert the Bear, you might receive some respect from your daughter.’

Rupert lifted his wife from her kneeling position. She put her arms round him and he kissed her, working his lips against hers until she broke away, patting her hair, pulling down her tweed skirt.

‘Oh, the Sundays are wonderful!’ she cried. ‘Dear, loveable Jimmy Agate. I could kneel down and kiss his shoes.’

‘My dear, the peculiar things you say.’

‘Well, if what our Doris says and she’s not one to tell a lie, the
pee
culiar things dear Mr Agate does.’

‘Apart from the delicate presence of your Aunt Annabel, I will not have the greatest dramatic critic of our time besmirched. That’s rather a good word, Aunt Annabel, isn’t it? Besmirched. Besmirched or be-any thing else in this house. The man who can write “Never has the meaning of Chekhov’s play come over so completely to me as in Rupert Matthews’ performance of the brother Andrey. Watch him in the last act as he comes up for the third time clutching that
depressing
pram and goes down for ever to the insensitive scolding of his vixenish wife. For this is what
The
Three
Sisters
is about – drowning. And seldom have I see an actor drown so piteously and yet so comically as Mr Matthews – an Andrey that combines the
pathos of Dan Leno with the loveable absurdity of Mr Pooter.”’