No Laughing Matter (68 page)

But it was all right, for Murkins reminded Marcus of the
Honourable
Mrs Pitditch-Perkins. Looking down at his feet, he waved a vaguely senile hand. ‘Shoo, shoo,’ he cried. Margaret got it in one, ‘The Honourable Mrs P.P.! Oh, how the Countess adored that
story! Oh, Glad, do!’ But Regan the Podge had already begun:

But Marcus protested, ‘No, Margaret, you’ve made it up. Who are the Altai, anyway? I don’t believe they exist.’

‘They do.’

‘Oh, fibs, Mag,’ Sukey cried.

‘If Mags says they do, they do,’ Rupert announced.

But Gladys said, ‘Let’s take her shoes off and tickle her feet. If she yells, she’s lying. If she doesn’t …’

‘No, no!’ Margaret was convulsed with laughter which set all the others off.

The man with the thin, high cheekboned, supercilious face had quite a paunch which made him look in all like a clown stuffed with a bolster. (Had he come for the rent? in plain clothes to question them? Or was he the Unknown Warrior?) He paid off his taxi irritably, walked up the front steps uncertainly, but when he heard the mixed excited voices and uncontrolled laughter from the front room he almost turned and walked away. If there was any group from which he felt quite estranged – and, in fact, he felt so about almost all groups – it was the strident baying of an upper-middle-class cocktail party which could make the London streets more savagely lonely to the outsider than any other sound. He pushed the half open front door fiercely and clattered into the hall. This house, its laughters and tears, had never had anything to do with him.

They had quietened into suppressed giggles by the time he came into the room.

Sukey said, ‘We couldn’t write to you, old man. We had no address. That’s why we did it through Dumfrey and Corstall.’

Gladys said, ‘You’ve grown a pot, Quentin.’

‘I heard your wonderful Coventry broadcast. I was in a sergeants’ mess in Delhi. They all sat quite silent. Everybody up to then had been playing for easy tears over it, you know. But you, dear boy …
Well, it made putting over scenes from Henry Five that evening up hill work, I can tell you. Did you always have that voice register?’

‘Your Dunkirk description,’ said Margaret, ‘was the only thing we heard in Egypt that made it alive without patronizing. And your interviews with all those people!’

‘Yes, Hugh thought of substituting the Q. J. Matthews broadcasts for the Sabatini he was reading to the boys, but then you stopped …’

‘You didn’t hear me on the Hamburg and Dresden raids, did you? And the Hiroshima tape got unaccountably burned. Those would have cheered the national morale.’

Marcus, who had been squatting by the bookcase, sorting through old volumes, stood up and half turned towards his brother.

‘You’re among those against war?’ he asked.

‘War? Why the hell? A good time is had by all. We produce wars to all tastes, you know. Even the intellectuals, this time. With cultured Mr Roosevelt and the Hutchinson Soviet novelists. Are you going to any cultured Congresses in Eastern Europe, Margaret? I should move fast. The wonderful spirit’s wearing a little thin. Of course, Hiroshima was a bit hard to swallow, but then Mr Truman’s a bit of a rough diamond, isn’t he?’

Sukey mouthed ‘Drunk’ to Gladys. ‘Well, you’ve got your
government
now, old man, at any rate,’ she said aloud.

‘My? Oh, you mean the Woolton pie’s turned pink. But a man can’t live by pie alone, Sukey. Didn’t you know that? Though I daresay at Pascoe’s Dotheboys Hall …’

‘Oh, stop it, Quentin,’ Margaret cried, ‘Of course it’s all a mess, but think of all the reconstruction there is to be done. Good heavens, with your knowledge of housing, you could do more for this country than …’

‘Oh, by all means give them all two-bedroomed bungalows and an Austin Ten and, if our dear allies are very kind with Lease Lend, who knows perhaps to every man a refrigerator. But don’t ask me to take part in the big swindle, Margaret. I’ve been four years in secret political warwork, I’m not going to spend another four in open political peace-work. Absolute power, my dear …’

‘Oh, politicians, of course. But us, the ordinary people surely we have a …’

‘You the ordinary people! But I find it hard to remember that the intellectuals think of Attlee’s and Ernie Bevin’s as their government.
Anyhow you must lengthen your sights – we live in stirring times, my dear. I’m going to see Justice in person. I’m off to Nuremberg to watch the world dispose of its guilt by hanging a lot of motheaten crooks and psychopaths. There’s nothing I like more than the
spectacle
of Justice. His majesty’s judges and the rule of law – it’s the one thing England can still hope to export in a cold world of shrinking markets. And after that there should be unlimited fun seeing the starry-eyed fit old Uncle Joe into a new brotherhood of nations. That’s going to be really good. So let’s get this house sold and realize a bit of cash as soon as possible. Oh, but I forgot, ‘he cried,’ Please excuse me. You were all down Memory Lane, no doubt, judging by the laughter as I came in.’

‘We were playing The Game,’ Margaret said, ‘that’s all.’

‘Some absurd old stories came back to us,’ Rupert explained.

‘You remember the laughs we used to have,’ Gladys told him.

‘I remember,’ Sukey said, ‘Granny M. saying that growing up meant looking back at oneself with a bit of kindly laughter. I must say I remember
her
very kindly.’

‘Oh, my dear, yes, that terrible day of the kittens. And Mother said that growing up meant marriage,’ Margaret recalled. ‘I
remember
the occasion so well. Heaven knows, strange union though it was, she kept
her
marriage going to the bitter end. So there must have been …’

‘The old boy knocked the nail on the head there,’ Rupert said, ‘Do you remember he said growing up meant companionship? I can’t imagine anyone but the Countess choosing such a companion, but then as one gets older one accepts other people’s choices …’

‘I think all that’s a bit soft,’ Gladys said, ‘I was terrified of her, of course, but it was Aunt Mouse’s advice that stuck in my mind – self reliance!’

Marcus was sitting on the floor, his legs curled behind him, his face buried in a book. He looked up for a second.

‘Regan had a piece of advice specially for me all on my own. She told me not to mix with muck. If only she’d defined what muck was. It’s taken me years to learn. But she was perfectly right.’

‘So,’ Quentin said, rummaging in the sideboard cupboard, ‘I thought so. What a quick getaway our parents made.’ He brought out a decanter and poured himself a large neat whisky. ‘So,’ Well then, wherever they may be now, the clever, ill-treated, misunderstood
sensitive young Matthews have forgiven them. That’s nice. Let me be the one to convey your verdicts, your merciful verdicts to – well, let’s not paint things in unpleasant colours, let’s not particularize geographically, be invidious about exact destinations – let’s say to the Judgement Seat. In fact let me sit on the Judgement Seat. Imagine me wearing the wig of one of His Majesty’s Judges, the Lord Chief Justice himself, why not?, and supplied with a copy of
Das
Kapital
on which witnesses may be sworn and, of course – We, the People of the United States – the Court is impartial. Thus equipped, let me take the place of Jehovah himself, the Ancient of Days, with a long white beard down to my navel. William Ackerley Matthews, your sins are forgiven you. Clara Madeline Matthews, your sins are
forgiven
you. Maud Iseult Matthews, your sins are forgiven you. Florence Stanley Rickard, your sins are forgiven you. Henrietta Peebles Stoker, your sins are forgiven you. Give them all harps and haloes.’

Sukey clicked in disapproval. Marcus quickly snatched up Sukey’s fox stole that lay across the sofa back and cast it stylishly round his shoulders.

‘Billy,’ he called, ‘Billy, is that God prosing away there,
impertinently
forgiving us all? Turn Him out of the house at once. Just because He’s always been out of all the fun and games is no reason why he should bring his great self-pitying clay feet in here, ruining my carpet …’

Quentin stood over his young brother with his fist raised as though to smash him in the face, then he lowered it and went back to his seat. Marcus fussed with the fur about his neck, but he said no more.

The silence was broken by Sukey the practical.

‘Well, the sooner we get everything sorted out the better.
Supposing
I do the nursery. Will you do the upstairs bedrooms, Gladys?’

Gladys, the practised upon, rose with a smiling nod.

‘And Mag, will you go through Her things? You know about clothes. Quentin, will you pick out any books that are too good to go in job lots? And, Rupert, will you go through His things, please? And Marcus, you must know about wine by now, will you see if there’s anything special in the cellar?’

But even she did not find the courage to ask for her fox fur stole to be restored to her. It was better, she thought, just to get on with things.

‘It’s all dirty pink oleanders at the moment and the dusty remains of purple bougainvilleas. Though I
do
have a rather beautiful rare white one. You can’t think how one longs for anything white here in summer. But the Spring garden’s enchanting, because it’s all
frightfully
damp. Well, we can’t stay outside in this heat but I thought you’d like to see the Ocean. It is a heavenly view, isn’t it? But, Mary, why have you come here in July? It’s a mad moment.’

‘I don’t think much about moments, Marcus, nowadays. I’m so poor, you know, that when Lucy Armstrong asked me to stay
abroad,
that was quite enough.’

‘But you should have come to me. Hassan would have been told to look after you like a Princess. And Hamid is the most superb cook. Lucy Armstrong has a dreadful cook. He serves balls of shit on skewers and calls it Tangerine delight. Oh, why
didn’t
you come to me? You could have had the room with the Dufys. You always liked them. I only kept the decorative things, you know …’

‘My dear, don’t I think of it every time I go to the Tate. I can’t imagine how you could have borne to part.’

‘Well, I’ve kept the Magnasco and all the Bakst drawings, and the silly Laurencins. Oh, and I’ve still got that embarrassing Tchelitchev of myself and two rather enchanting bad drawings Jean did of Jack with a Negro sailor at Toulon. But for the rest, when Jack died, I realized it had all been him …’

‘But, Marcus, it was
you
who bought all the really good things and not Jack at all. I remember how I used to quarrel with you because you wouldn’t let him buy all our friends.’

‘This is one of the spare bedrooms. Moroccan furnishing dear, that’s all you would have had. It fits so much better to these houses. Yes, I had a good eye and I loved buying, but …. Well, anyway, it wouldn’t have been right to have really good paintings in this damp climate.’

‘It wouldn’t be any good to have me, either. I’d decline for good and all from rheumatics.’

‘That’s one thing about living with the young one never admits.’

‘He
is
very young, isn’t he?

‘Are you disapproving, Mary? I expect old Lucy and her crowd spat venom.’

‘As if I should take notice with an old friend like you. No, and of course, he’s an enchantment to look at. I was just puzzled …’

‘Oh, you mean the change of taste. My dear, it wasn’t until after the war that I did what I think they call realize myself.’

‘Marcus, that isn’t very nice about Jack.’

‘Jack was a completely special person to whom I owe everything.’

‘He owed a lot to you.’

‘I hope so. My dear, you do tear away still at personal relationships, don’t you? If I were in charge of you, I’d give you a rubber bone to worry at. This is Hassan’s room. Very austere, you see. Those horrible scarlet and green candles are our only source of dissension. He comes from the South, you know. He’s very simple. Tangier is the summit of worldliness for him. And now you’ve seen it all.’

‘It’s a lovely house, Marcus.’

‘Yes. I don’t suppose we’ll go on living in it much longer. Hassan gets homesick. Now we must go back to the guests.’

In the drawing-room Lucy Armstrong was describing the
ceremony
.

‘My dear,’ she was saying, ‘the Minister of the Interior – yes he was that, Rodney, I asked – one of the little fat dark ones with moustaches, no, not with Senegalese blood, they’re the beautiful dark ones, the other kind – spoke for
quite
half an hour. Apparently in French. Not that one could hear a single word because of the dear little boy scouts – all great hulking things of sixteen or more in shorts – who were screaming and shouting, and pulling down all the flags except their own beloved starry banner. It was really rather pathetic! I felt quite sorry for some of the poor Tangerines, because they’d looked forward to it all so. Their great Day of Independence! The day they too became Moroccans. Except that they shouldn’t think they’re adults when they’re still small children. Anyway it will give them some idea of the chaos to come.’

Admiral Tembrick said to Marcus, ‘You were perfectly right to stay away. Those of us who care for them should never see them
when they’re trying to organize something. They suddenly go to pot and lose all their poise. As Lucy says, the thing was a shambles.’

Lucy Armstrong seized on it: ‘Exactly. And these are the people who are going to run their own country. People who’ve no sense of order, honesty or public courage. People who can’t even prevent daylight attacks in the Souk. Of course, the Administration has been to blame. They’ve preferred to play in with …

‘Well, you can’t blame them for that.’

‘All these years of prosperity and good administration wiped out in a moment, n’est ce pas que c’est désolant, Yvette?

‘Oui, Oui, Lucy, je parle à Rodney de ce qui arrive aux grands propriétaires.’

‘Oh, my dear, even York Castle’s up for sale. And who’s going to buy it with things as they are?’

Omar, walking round with a tray of drinks, showed no reaction. Hassan sat silent and smiling, if his legs had been longer he’d have been a twenties Bakst doll. The Moroccan restraint and mannerliness kindled Marcus’ anger.

‘Old cow, fucking old cow,’ he muttered.

Mary, not understanding, but feeling, said, ‘I loved all the horses charging and the guns firing.’

‘Oh, the fantasia! If things were only as they should be in the French Zone, we’d go down to Fez and see a fantasia done properly. It was pathetic here, wasn’t it, Admiral? But then you see the poor dear Tangerines are not warriors at all. They like to think of
themselves
like the Riffi or the Blue Men but …’

‘Will there be any chance of seeing the Blue Men?’ Mary asked. Marcus’ tension brought back the past unbearably to her.

‘My dear, I’m afraid not. Rodney’s made the journey to the desert hundreds of times. He knows all the gites d’étapes
and
speaks Berber. Yes, isn’t he clever? He would have taken you, dear, but you wouldn’t want to go now, would you, Rodney? You see they speak about their precious new kingdom, but they’re all a lot of Bedouin bandits still, at sixes and sevens with each other. There’d be civil war at this moment if the Glaoui hadn’t died so suddenly …’

Marcus had uncoiled his legs and risen. Taking the Martini shaker from Omar’s tray he went over to where Lucy sat. Now he filled her glass to the brim.

‘Stop talking nonsense about things you know nothing about, and
drink that, Lacy, ‘he said.’ Glaoui indeed! The Mahdi’s more your period.’

‘Oh! I suppose
you’re
going to be a good boy and please the nice new government, Marcus. I know a lot of people are frightened of speaking out now. But I’m not like that. I can’t he down just because someone is waving a big stick.’

‘My dear Lucy, if you laid down stark naked for an hour and a half in the middle of the Socco nobody would even so much as
raise
his stick at you.’

After a gasping moment, Lucy gallantly led the way in uneasy laughter.

‘No, but seriously,’ she said, ‘I do resent it after all we’ve done for them …’

‘Lucy! Mary’s tried to be tactful twice and I’ve been abominably rude once. Now,
will
you stop? Apart from anything else it’s very insulting to Hassan and Omar to talk about their country like this, and I won’t have it.’

‘Oh, of course, Hassan knows I don’t mean him. Besides he’s not a Tangerine at all. He’s from dear little Mogador. Oh, if only I could take you
there,
Mary. You’re looking so well, Hassan. Green suits you. Who is Omar, Marcus?’

‘Omar has been serving you with drinks.’

‘Oh, I see. Oh, well, anyway, it’s
them
I’m thinking of. Speeches and fantasies! But how do they think they’re going to pay for all these schools and clinics when the foreigners have been frightened away? And they will frighten people away – Look at it; two villas burgled on the Old Mountain only last week and that wretched American tourist mobbed in the Socco just because he was
photographing
a mosque. And their police stood by idle. Who’s going to stay when that sort of thing goes on?’

‘You for one, Lucy. There may be rich people whose money is needed by the new government. I hope they’ll have the sense to remain here. If they don’t, I shan’t blame the government if it takes their property away from them. But you’re not one of them, dear. You live here like the Duchess of Fartshire on what would hardly keep you in an Earl’s Court bedsitter if you went home …’

‘I say, really, Marcus, this is too left for worlds …’

‘Left of his senses, I should say.’

‘Just because you’re stinking rich, old man …’

‘Oh, Marcus!’ Mary cried, ‘Oh, when we’ve met again. It’s too horrid.’

‘I’m sorry, Mary dear. You came in on the wrong act. Alright, I am stinking rich but I’m sick of all these ill-mannered remittance people …’

‘Oh, don’t bother to answer him,’ Lucy cried, getting up to go, ‘We all know what keeps
him
here.’

‘If you mean that I sleep with Hassan and that you sleep alone, Lucy, that’s no reason why you should come up here and abuse people who’ve given you hospitality and service and some sort of illusion of decency for the last ten years …’

When it was all over he only could think that he should not see Mary again while she was staying with that old cow – for, of course, Mary’s manners as always were still perfect. But now Hassan’s
stepfather’s
nephew Mohammed had arrived to tell them about the morning’s celebrations in his atrocious mixture of Spanish, English and Arabic.

‘Yes, I’ve heard all about it,’ Marcus said and he went to his room.

Later Hassan came to him with a tray of coffee. He was scowling like a schoolboy sent off the football field.

‘Mohammed went away,’ he said, ‘He saw you did not want him. It was clear that our celebrations have no interest for you.’

‘Really, Hassan! After all I said to old Lucy Armstrong just because of you!’

‘Mrs Armstrong gives very distinguished parties. Now I shall not be asked …’

Marcus hit the tray so that it flew through the air. There was no noise and no breakage for the cups fell on to cushions, but the coffee formed little soggy wet heaps of sugary grouts on the divan. He pulled Hassan face downwards on to the cushions beside him. The boy was giggling happily now. ‘Mrs Armstrong is a silly old cow,’ he was saying with delight.

*

Margaret determinedly watered the hippeastrum plants on the balcony. Looking down she saw the legless boy on his wheeled board at his usual place by the entrance to the flats – the porter had in despair given up trying to chase him away. At the end of the road the taxis hooted ceaselessly as they careered along the riverside. In the distance she could see the scruffy black serge of her favourite local policeman –
many were lounging about for there appeared, despite everything, to be football at the stadium. Mrs Karamazian in the flat below had put out all her mattresses and blankets. A hawk mewed. Huge crows pecked at the horsedung on the sticky tarred asphalt. At Dr Yousouf’s someone was stumbling through The Barcarolle on the pianoforte. She registered everything as exactly as she could, sparing time where there was none to spare, for while these landmarks were there, it was still, it must be surely
her
Cairo. She never went into the city and only on occasion with Douglas into the Desert, she never saw the Embassy crowd and only at great intervals people from the Institute. Her life was all here in the daily sounds and smells of Zamalek. Mrs Karamazian’s hennaed gossip, a visit over the balcony from Mr Younan’s Persian cats, cutting back the bougainvillea, gossiping when she bought the pimentos, the eggplants and the figs, the smell of sesame in Mrs Shoukri’s perpetual frying, the stories about the houseboat restaurant that was no restaurant, even the look of friendly complicity each day with the beggar boy – for they were both, pariah and artist, outside the law – all these, with the occasional drama – the hawk that swooped down and took the veal, the taxis in collision, the mule that died standing as it hauled the little charcoal cart – this was her Cotswold village or Sussex hamlet, but so much warmer, often deliciously hot so that she could work with relaxed nerves – a Steventon or a Rodmell set in the heart of a noisy exotic city. Well, it had worked: three novels she was not ashamed of in ten years, and this fidget now at the back of her thoughts – a
schizophrenic
dialogue, the gradual fissure of a coherent mind, each chapter making two out of one, or rather at first three for the original
personality
would still desperately dominate – but all that must be locked away until this absurdity was over.

She went into Douglas’s room. He was sleeping now, but his face was drawn and white as his little moustache, and his lips had that ghastly blueish shade like those horrible dyed tulips there used to be at florists; his breathing creaked like some unoiled cradle swinging. Leila was fussing with the hot kettle and Friar’s Balsam – no doctor could make her more than half nurse, half witch. Farouk’s flight, Shepheards burning, all had sounded like summer thunder in her village, Zamalek’s remote, daily pettiness. And now suddenly, with Douglas laid low with the worst of his asthma attacks for years, she was forced to recognize that the thunder was really threatening
gunfire. They were to leave in twenty-four hours because some hysterical, anachronistic English minor aristocrat (she knew they were mad at home to bring the Conservatives in again) couldn’t come to terms with the modern world. She and Douglas who loved Egypt, who loved every smell and colour of it, who, above all, loved its ordinary people, especially the Arabs. If this ambitious Colonel was going to give a new and decent life to Ibrahim and Yussef and Ali and Leila and millions like them, then Douglas and she were the sort of people he needed here, people who would back him through thick and thin. She was an artist, a writer, and Douglas was a scholar; they weren’t arrogant service officers or greedy business men. That the Suez Canal should be run by Ibrahim and Youssef and Ali was what she utterly believed in. She hated power and riches, always had; and arrogant colonialism. But in these dreadful times all sense seemed to be lost. Order and reason – even in art where passion was king, they had their exalted places, but in ordinary life they were the essence of decency.