No Laughing Matter (69 page)

She had rung or seen everyone: the silly people at the Embassy of course were worse than useless – anyway she couldn’t speak to people who represented that wicked fool, and even the Institute seemed to have panicked. It was her Egyptian friends she had relied on, but to no avail. Mr Wa’bi, so clever, so sympathetic as a rule, was almost cold; Major Barawi had been kind but quite frank; Professor Farid had even gone to some minister but he had urged her when he telephoned again to make her arrangements as quickly as possible. Mrs Hussain at least had agreed to take on Leila and Ibrahim, for Yussef and Ali would have no difficulty in getting another place. Of course, her chief reliance was upon Dr Ramses Rasheid, he surely could get them some stay while Douglas was so ill. But even that dear, funny old fat thing who had saved Douglas’s life in his attack of’ 51 she was sure, seemed quite flabbergasted, flapping his hands, his protruding eyes staring, his mouth open, for all the world like a dying codfish. Professor Farid had suggested that, in view of everything, she was unwise to rely on the assistance of a Coptic doctor, so at his suggestion she had consulted some smart young man from the hospital, Dr Kasim al Aziz. But really this had only worsened things, for poor old Rasheid was offended (the Copts were in a terrible state these days) and in the end the smart young doctor could do nothing. All she could contrive was full ambulance arrangements to the airfield, some English nurse
who was leaving to accompany them in the plane, and a room at the London Clinic when they arrived while she found her bearings.

And now obviously the servants, too, were anxious to see them gone, frightened of remaining in their service, though like all the simple people that she had known throughout her life she had made some sort of rapport with them which even this stress could not break. They were to have all the clothes that they couldn’t take with them, and Ali, who was newly married, was to take his pick of the furniture. At least they would leave having paid their debt to the exploited, incoherent, sometimes violent but always responsive ordinary Egyptian people. She remembered suddenly that by the time the ambulance came her legless boy would have moved his pitch – his hours were like clockwork, like all the hours of her little world that she must leave behind though she had the key to it all. She gathered together more money than was really right, but why not? why shouldn’t one legless boy know a sudden rain of gold from the
disguised
caliph’s hand? She knew every scratch on the cheap aluminium door of the lift as it carried her bumpingly down. Outside the heat was intense, the sunlight dazzled her for a moment so that she hardly knew her little intimate scene. Then, cautiously so as not to attract the porter’s attention to him, she sidled round the entrance to where the dirty, snotty little boy sat on his wooden board. She gave him a special version of her daily smile – she knew that she was near to tears, but she held them back, for what had it to do with him?

‘Barraka Laofik,’ she said, and she put all the notes and coins into his little upturned monkey paw. He rapidly shovelled it all
somewhere
into his ragged blouse. She waited for that enchanting smile that always transformed a best forgotten missing link into a Murillo urchin. He spat twice, very deliberately on to her candy pink cotton dress, then propelled himself at breakneck pace away on his wheels.

Coming into the entrance hall she was greeted by Mrs Karamazian, fat, rouged, hennaed and moustached, in a not, over-clean violet satin dress. Mrs Karamazian was weeping so that her mascara ran into her eyes. She held out the official form.

‘We are to go. Next week we Armenians must go. But where shall we go to? After fifty years in Cairo. Where? Tell me that. You, bloody English have done this. Now where are we to go?’

All Margaret’s feelings suddenly dried up within her at these oily lachrymose outpourings. She tasted powder, dried chaffin her mouth;
it was the dust, no doubt. Almost choking, she said, ‘Orders to go? Well, you must be thankful that times have changed. At least there are to be no massacres.’

*

‘And now here to discuss the situation we have Colonel Jonathan Brown from the Conservative Central Office, John Cobmarsh,
Q.C,
Labour member for East Dartford, and Q. J. Matthews.’

Many thousands of viewers who might have turned off in face of another documentary, another dose of politics at this all too political time, took heart at the sight of that long face, those disdainful lips, those amused eyes. There was sure to be fun with the outrageous Q. J. Matthews – a brilliant bloke, even when you couldn’t
understand
, you could sit back and watch. Many other tens of thousands who felt shame of one sort or another over Suez or shame of a more definite kind over Hungary, or, rather helplessly, all sorts of shame at the same time were compelled to meet Q. J. Matthews’s lazy gaze, to hear what sort of nonsense the fellow would talk, to know how far the renegade would mountebank this time. They were not
disappointed
. The producer angled the camera as much as possible on to him while the others were talking. As the Colonel’s solemn soldier tones boomed forth like an honest cannon in these days of warfare by slide rule and ‘stinks’ (he was, they said, a peculiarly wily and ambitious politician), Q. J. stared in amused yet not unloving
fascination
at this mammoth brought back from extinction especially for the delectation of himself and – for he always shared his fun – the millions of viewers who, no doubt, were watching tonight the Q. J. Matthews show. As Mr Cobmarsh talked, quick, eager,
passionate
, voluble (an up and coming back bencher, they said, if there weren’t too many lawyers already in his party) one could see a more sickened recognition on Q. J.’s face, his eyes became veiled with ennui, he shuddered a little at the thought of the possible harm that might come to all those million, faithful viewers from all this stale; cleverness and too often shown enthusiasm. At last when the visitors had had their full time and more – as viewers felt and the interviewer, rather implied – the question was put to Q. J. Matthews:

‘Does it matter all that amount?’ he asked, ‘Oh, granted that, as my idealistic old friend John Cobmarsh has suggested with so much emotion, had it not been for our Government’s palaeolithic
expedition
in defence of the all red route and the dreams of Cecil Rhodes,
we might now be able to offer rather more aid than President
Eisenhower’s
Episcopalian pieties to the insurgent government in
Budapest
…. ‘Camera to John Cobmarsh protesting with many gestures. ‘Q. J. Matthews knows perfectly well that it’s not just a question of rather more aid, it’s a question of that extra help….’ Camera to Q. J. Matthews.

‘Very well….’ Q. J. Matthews smiling at the clever child who points out the utterly irrelevant minor mistake in addition in the Chancellor’s annual budget, ‘Very well, we could have given enough to alarm our ebullient but ultimately exceedingly cautious friend from the Ukraine, Nikita Sergeyevich, and have given the worthy Dr Nagy a year, two years more of precarious Revisionist Socialist – let us not forget the magic language – rule.’ Camera to Cobmarsh.

‘More, much more.’ Camera to Q. J. Matthews, waving his long tapering hands in liberal allowance.

‘Very well. More. But our little systems, you know…. And they are such
very
little systems! To replace the ruthless, satellite
government
of Mr Rakosi who
pretends
to govern by every word that came out of the mouth of a bearded, worthy, but misguided bourgeois gentleman of the Victorian era now lying in Highgate cemetery, by the more insecure, somewhat less dependent government of Dr Nagy, who really
does
believe that the words of the late and wholly irrelevant Karl Marx are gospel truth, is that such a very valuable change? Is it something for which we should risk the annihilation by radiation of man such as he is and his achievements such as they are?’ Camera to Colonel Brown.

‘Hear! Hear! – Hear! Hear!’ Camera to Q. J. Matthews smiling with a kindly acidity all his own.

‘Oh, don’t mistake me, Colonel, no doubt if our left hand had not trembled so agitatedly,’ camera to John Cobmarsh shaking with fury, ‘our right hand could have smitten the Egyptian hip and thigh with the same agility that we showed in those days when Lord Cramer and Lord Kitchener walked before the Lord. But what would that have done, Colonel? Really, what
would
that have done?
Prolonged
the British Empire a few more years before it inevitably goes the way of Nineveh and Tyre; and put some extra dividends into the hands of some already overweight, thrombotic shareholders and directors in the City of London. And you both ask me to take all this seriously.’

On the whole it was first-class Q. J. Matthews stuff. Yet only once did he rear his head and spit fiercely as viewers above all liked. It was when John Cobmarsh pressed him about his personal friendship with Dr Nagy, his long conversations with Professor Lukač.

‘This is really abominable, Matthews. You’ve known both Nagy and Lukač personally. You know what sincere and courageous men they are. You also know that your voice on the television tonight like all influential voices from the West may make the whole
difference
to the Russians’ attitude towards these men who are in mortal danger.’

‘Oh, you flatter me, my dear fellow. Quite honestly, I doubt if anything we can say here will influence Comrade Nikita and his thugs. In any case I have the greatest personal liking both for Nagy who’s a good chap and Professor Lukač who’s a clever one. I hope they come well out of these bad times. But if you’re suggesting that I have any concern for their cause, I must remind you that to me the Marxist nonsense they believe in is no more respectable than the crudest sort of Flat Earthism. And, do remember – they chose politics and politics like all games of power carries its own risks.’ Camera to John
Cobmarsh
, gesticulating wildly.

‘This is too disgraceful. Well, even if you won’t consider the fate of your personal friends …’

‘Oh, but I do, my personal friends are many, are …’

‘… perhaps you’ll have some concern for the Hungarian common man.’

‘I have no concern for the common man except that he should not be so common.’ The contempt with which Q. J. Matthews looked into the camera as he spoke was the masochistic moment for which his million common viewers waited every week.

‘All right, quibble if you will! Let us say the thousands of ordinary people – young men and women, many of them just beginning their lives – who are now streaming over the borders into Austria, into a Western world, sick with disappointment, sick with despair.’

‘Oh, my dear fellow, I have. Unlike many of my friends of the humanitarian and liberal section of our country, I am not busy telling these wretched young people to expect a paradise here. I have too much concern for man’s spirit, man’s real self, to suggest to them that by leaving the drab earnestness of the Marxist Utopia for the glittering triviality of tie affluent lollygarchy they have gained
anything
whatsoever but a hire-purchased Hoover and a sleeping pill salvation.’

Putting down their whiskies and sodas, their cocoas and their cokes, a million viewers felt comfortably rebuked.

*

‘No, we shall be living quite close. Hugh will do some of the Latin Common Entrance so long as Mr Birkenshaw wants him.’ Sukey shot the young man in question a glance that forbade him to deny his need of Hugh. Then:

‘Me? Oh, I’ve got so much to do, you know. Five grandchildren. Then I shall go on with my weekly talks for the Western Region. I’ve only missed six weeks in twenty years. And I’m on the bench now and the R.D.C. So what with that and Cathedral business
I
shan’t be at a loose end. Although, of course, I shall
miss
the school. You can’t shake off old habits, can you?’

‘And the school will miss you,’ one woman said, and then another. And soon it was spreading amongst the whole group of these mothers arrived to take their boys out for half-term weekend.

‘I shall try out the Birkenshaws, of course. But it won’t be the same without Mrs P.’

‘Mr Pascoe was a first rate teacher, but it was she who kept the school together.’

‘I remember three years ago when Jerry first came here, I was terrified of her. But she’s been like a second mother to him.’

‘What age would she be? She looks indeterminate.’

‘She’s looked exactly the same to ray knowledge since my eldest boy came here which must be five or six years ago. But of course she’s got such energy.’

Poor little Mrs Birkenshaw listening thought, oh, how will it work out? however will we undo the Pascoe legend? Oh, thank heavens, they’re retiring at last. And now boys were appearing in the drawing-room to be taken off by indulgent, impatient parents. Among the fathers even this customary half term parental impatience to be gone was drowned by the National Debate. Mr Oldbourne, the bank manager from Taunton had started up an argument with Wing Commander Jackley who was stationed near Beer. It was not that either of them had any doubt about the rightness of our cause, the shame of our withdrawal, it was only that the Wing Commander was unhappy lest we might perhaps alienate the right kind of Arabs,
the splendid chaps, and unhappy that we should find ourselves mixed up with Jewish politics; while Mr Oldbourne thought all this was sentimental nonsense, the Arab world was three hundred years out of date, medieval, while Israel was a going concern. But they both rounded on Mr Latimer, who produced children’s programmes for West Region, when he said that it was we, with our gunboats and our ultimata, who were living in the past. In a few moments the political debate had engrossed all the fathers and spread to the mothers, even some of the boys in their best Sunday long trousered suits had begun to punch and pummel one another over the rights and wrongs of the affair. Hugh and the Birkenshaws tactfully withdrew from the discussion, tactfully finding errands – boys to call, marks to show, the new Rugger XV photos to pass round. Sukey appeared to show her tact in a different way by reminiscing right through the torrent that raged around her, now indeed most fiercely, for Mrs Latimer had quoted the
Observer
and Mrs Oldbourne had been shocked that anyone should still read that rag – ‘the traitor’s paper we call it.’