No Laughing Matter (57 page)

‘But you will, Mrs Pascoe. There will be war or God help you. You must let them go. You have your husband. He needs you. To help him to make up his mind to move the school and then all the work there will be when you move to the West of England.’ Frau Liebermann took off her hat and shook her hair loose; she took off her shoes and stretching her legs, wriggled her toes. ‘Very well, I’ll stay tonight. But tomorrow I’ll go to London. I’ve saved money. I only make trouble with you all here. I’ll take a room. Arnold can join me when the holidays come.’

Sukey got up. ‘Of course you’ll stay tonight and tomorrow. We’ve done badly, but we’ve done our best. I’m not going to let you put us further in the wrong. Oh, this awful world! That two grown women who should be leading their own lives should be thrown into such intimacy.’

She moved to the door: ‘I can’t do much for you, but as you say you’re going – and you’re right, of course –
I
can try to be intimate for once. And though you may not believe it, it really costs me something. Do, for Heaven’s sake, mind your own business even with the Quakers. Probably someone had to say what you said to me. But I shan’t be able to forget it. I don’t think anyone can forgive things like that. We certainly can’t here. We’ve had our own ways too long for that.’

Margaret, reading the weeklies in her mid-morning break from writing, did not know the answers to her brother’s questions. But she thought, why is he always so cocksure? It struck somehow a false note. So Marcus had always thought and he had a wonderful ear for the spurious.

But then she felt ashamed for herself. For really what did she know, or indeed do in these ghastly days except make occasional speeches at progressive rallies? Ill informed nonsense too. She and all other artists
probably ought to stick to their own job and get on with their art in a mad world.

The last paragraph she’d written this morning was good. The flow had come when she had remembered that opera cloak of gold thread and raised purple velvet pansies which the old woman in the royal box had worn when they went en famille to
Chu
Chin
Chow.
Mouse had smiled at its vulgarity, Granny M had thought it shockingly ‘fast’, but the Countess had secretly longed to possess it. It was exactly the thing Aunt Alice would have treasured from her past and the nieces, especially sex-starved, genteel Jessica would have hated. The effect was heightened by appearing in this Jessica-viewed section. She sat down, relaxed, to read what she had written:

‘When she had fixed the bed table over the old woman’s knees and set down the breakfast tray, Jessica waited for the usual recriminations, the usual objections to the little cosies she put on the eggs. But it appeared that her ladyship was in happy mood this morning for, “A real three and a half minute egg” was said with a smile. The unexpected smile irritated Jessica. Going to the huge walnut wardrobe, she opened a door. At once the old woman’s expression changed. “Don’t fuss in there, Jessica. I won’t have it.” “If
you
won’t, auntie, the moths will.” She felt pleased with her condensed sentence. And, as though to approve, a small clothes moth flew out, and then another. “Damn and blast Nancy,” cried the old woman, “I told her to put moth balls …” “Oh, don’t be so selfish, Aunt Alice, my poor sister. She’s rushed off her feet as it is. All this rubbish.” Jessica pulled out at random an old purple and gold object and shook it. An opera cloak with velvet pansies! The vulgarity of it! As she shook it the room was filled with – she could only call it, a rank smell of men. “This old rag must go for a start.” “Old rag! I’ve had very good times in that old rag, my girl,” Alice’s chuckle was obscene. Jessica rolled up the piece of finery into a bundle and carried it from the room.’

Yes, yes, so the niece was genteel and prudish and spiteful, and the old woman had been lusty and opulent. But were liking egg cosies and having failed to attract men to count as villainy, to stand for cruelty? And was having taken so many men into you, and wearing of purple gold cloaks with whatever pleasure, with whatever warmth, whatever extravagant finesse, to be accounted graces? And, if they were, then what was to stand for the old woman’s cruel selfish past? For if she had not been cruel and selfish then this protest against her
crumbled majesty, her senile powerless body was mere protesting on behalf of the angels. It was the protest against powerlessness and old age itself that she sought to make, the protest against anyone, however guilty, however ‘deserving’ of retribution, being acted upon, used, disregarded like the bed she lay in. In which case the splendid vulgar purple raiment with all its overtones of life and lust and saving
absurdity
was simply a sentimental gloss, as false and tearjerking as that awful Lord’s Prayer that trumpeted Jo’s ascent to join the angels. Oh, it was all false, false.

Here she was, left to write in peace, Mrs Armitage told not to come, Douglas banished to the Travellers, until luncheon, and down she could dig in stillness to her very self – and what had she brought to the surface but false sentimentality? She wrote on another sheet of paper, ‘Elizabeth Carmichael flung her arms wide. “Oh, it’s false, it’s false,” she cried, for she too could be poor Lady Isobel or a tragedy queen.’

But the old mockeries did not somehow work. She lit a cigarette and leaning heavily on her desk, stared out to where the bare trees of Holland Park made Chinese shapes against the skyline. Why couldn’t she take on something simple, something whose outline declared itself in advance? The owls had been hooting again last night. A Gothic fable, perhaps, all elegance and self-parody about the great and wicked Lady Holland …

When Douglas came in he must have seen from the dejected slump of her body that she was all but up to her neck in the slough, for he put his arms round her shoulders from behind and stroked her breasts. She could tell, as he soothed her, that he was reading what she had written.

‘Well?’ she asked.

‘All right. Very good. Jessica’s as odious as she ought to be. The garment sounds pretty revolting.’

‘Oh, no!’ she cried, horrified that he should be so obtuse.

‘Purple velvet pansies? Well,
I
don’t know about these women’s things.’

‘I assure you they used to be worn, darling.’

‘Really?’ He didn’t sound interested. ‘And they succeeded? You liked them?’

‘Well, not
liked
!
Of course not. They were preposterous. But …’ She couldn’t find words.

‘I see. I don’t think I really understand. I’ll get you a large whisky.’

As soon as he had gone from the room, she saw it all. The wretched purple cloak
was
all sentimental journalism, pride of memory, pride of eye. Journalism and worked up righteous anger, that’s all she’d written. Egg cosies and cloaks! Taste to do service for morality! And a patronizing acceptance of someone else’s false taste into the bargain! The purple merely cloaked old Alice’s cruelty, her vulgar tyranny. The possession loved could have splendour, but it must also once have had malice. Immediately she saw what it must be. When Douglas returned she was already making her notes so that he put the whisky down on the desk without speaking. She gulped it down eagerly in three goes, as quickly as her fountain pen was covering the paper. ‘Pudding, A’s beloved Persian cat, his smoke blue hair, his
dark
amber eyes.’ She underlined dark, for she could see it all now exactly. ‘An earlier scene in detail where he cruelly plays with a mouse. Old now. Sleeps on her bed. Mud left once. Nancy forbids it on bed. Old A. tottering to lift him on bed, falls.’ As she wrote ‘falls’ she could hear the telephone ringing and Douglas answering it. ‘Jessica joins to ban Pudding on bed. Doctor Malone suborned to agree cat on bed insanitary. For A. loss of cat’s warmth on bed at night is death that much nearer.’

‘Darling, I’m sorry I don’t think I can deal. Whatever I say might be wrong.’

She looked up at him with hatred for his interruption and wrote almost illegibly, ‘next time they’ll refuse to let him into the room and how could she know?’

Standing up, she asked irritably, ‘Who is it?’

He laughed, ‘I’m sorry, darling, but you
will
involve yourself. The Chairman of the Victims of Fascism Appeal! A meeting at Kings way Hall.’

Touched by his ironic inverted commas, she kissed him.

‘Damn and blast,’ she said.

On the telephone the man was very evasive.

‘It’s your brother. It seems difficult for him to appear.’

‘I’m not surprised. He’s to be in this new
Twelfth
Night
in the West End. An actor’s life, you know. Anyway the occasion’s a serious demonstration against the German treatment of the Jews, not a family trapeze act.’

‘It’s not Mr Rupert Matthews. It’s Q. J. Matthews.’

‘Oh, well. Quentin’s horribly overworked too. But I’ll try to persuade him if you like.’

‘Oh, no,’ the man sounded aghast, ‘no, that’s not it at all, Miss Matthews. It’s that two of our speakers – I’d rather not give names – are not happy about appearing on the same platform with Q. J. Matthews.’

‘Good Heavens! I never heard such ridiculous rubbish. Why ever not?’

‘Well, you know, he’s put out rather cranky notions about Spain lately and then he’s been such a violent critic of the Soviet Union.’

‘Whatever my brother Quentin has written, he’s had a good deal of reason, I am sure. From start to finish Quentin’s been concerned with getting at the truth ever since he was a boy. I can tell you this, Mr Smalley, if your objectors won’t appear with Quentin, they don’t appear with me. Or with my brother Rupert. And don’t quote my words back at me because the case is changed now.’

‘I wasn’t going to. As a matter of fact I think the appeal of three related celebrities who’ve never appeared together before on an
anti-Nazi
platform is a most important draw. That – and we’ve got Matthias Birnbaum. I’ll just have to go back to the others and see what I can do.’

‘I am afraid you will. My brother Quentin’s been a hero to us since we were tiny children.’

When she put down the receiver Douglas was looking at her with one eyebrow raised.

‘Strong words.’

‘Well, and rightly so, Douglas. Why, Quentin and I come from the same womb.’

He burst out laughing. ‘Wombs and purple cloaks. It’s all beyond me.’

‘No, I won’t have wombs dismissed with a little irony. Let’s get lunch over. I must get back to work.’

*

‘Oh! No! This is it. This is the really big performance we all knew he had in him!’

‘It was so
moving
,
Debbie, that I felt quite ashamed when the
everyday
things like intervals happened.’

‘To be perfectly honest, at first I thought: No, I am not going to like this, he’s playing it in too low a key. But then, of course, when
the dark cellar scene came I knew why he’d done it like that. I nearly stood up and shouted for the old boy there and then.’

‘Of course, he won’t care what a spotty schoolboy thinks, but I thought I must tell you that the first time Malvolio went from the stage Jonathan whispered to me, “Gosh! Mummy, I didn’t know Shakespeare could be
fun
!”’

The telephone had rung at the Bloomsbury flat all Thursday
morning
; and at last, when Rupert had gone off to the Garrick for luncheon, it was Nigel saying: