No Laughing Matter (73 page)

He didn’t stay for Q. J. Matthews’ lengthy statement that the concern of his programme was to avoid exactly these things, but darted out of the room to return with more bowls of pistachio nuts and sun flower seeds with which he plied them like an old maid feeding her canaries. Then, indeed, he turned on his brother.

‘Have you any idea of what the poverty is like here, Quentin? Go down and look at it. I can send you to misery that’ll shock your remaining hairs off. Warmth and colour indeed! What
do
you think I started my scent factory for if there hadn’t been need to relieve poverty?’

‘My dear Marcus, your Robert Owen enterprise is one of the most attractive old-fashioned paradoxes of this …’

But Marcus cried, ‘Robert Owen, who’s that? Never heard of him. But you’re all so clever. Are you
all
at the University? New University! Whatever’s that? Surely they have enough of them
already
with their old Oxford and Cambridge – terrible old things bathing naked. I’d give them all a good day’s work – cleaning the streets. What do
you
study?’ He turned to Humpy, ‘
You
,
Mr I couldn’t catch your name. Do take those great glasses off. You’ve got very nice eyes if you’d only show them. Literature! Whatever for? Either you write naturally like my sister here or you don’t. If you don’t, it’s a waste of time. We had enough of that with our Father, didn’t we Margaret?’

‘There was a wonderful lack of reality about Billy Pop’s writing that has great charm in these days of kitchen sink,’ Q. J. began. But Marcus merely said, ‘Kitchen sink? Oh, do you still have those? I thought it was all labour saving now.’ And he was gone to return with great rolls of brightly coloured silks. These he presented to Lucilla.

‘I expect you’ll want to go into the Souk. You can’t possibly go in those jeans things. I dare say she
did
in Marrakesh, Adam. It’s full of terrible tourists. I go to my house there for March and April because the wind’s so awful here, but I never go out. Anyhow I’m not having anyone connected with me upsetting Leila and Nihal and Mrs Bekkai and the other decent women who live in this town.’

Adam protested again, ‘She’s got an absolutely super skirt she could wear.’

But Lucilla, who clearly enjoyed Marcus ‘draping the materials round her, said,’ I don’t think it would satisfy, Adam. It hardly covers my thighs.’

‘It certainly wouldn’t,’ Marcus said. ‘What do you want to dress like Clara Bow the It girl for? It was vulgar enough forty years ago. You’ve got nice legs. Why not let him do some imagining instead of dressing himself up in those violet musical comedy trousers? I shouldn’t think Clarkson’s would take them back in the condition you’ve got them into, Adam. Oh, aren’t they hired? You mean you
own
all this dressing-up stuff? Well!’

Margaret said, ‘Really, Marcus, your fancy dress parties were the rage of London for ten years or more! He adored dressing up and gave the most wonderful parties – with themes, and acres of lights and décor overlooking London.’ Seeing their incomprehension she gave up trying to explain. ‘They were all in green,’ she added lamely.:

Marcus laughed. ‘My dear, we had two little numbers here recently. I don’t know
what
they were – chorus boys they’d have been in my day. Travelling with a rich Australian. Anyway the little blond one nudged the other and asked in a screaming voice who I was. “Oh, my dear! Don’t you know? She was famous for her green balls.” “I’m not a bit surprised,” the blond said. Which though rude was rather one up to him.’ To Humpy’s astonishment Lucilla and Adam were in fits of giggles, in which Marcus joined them. Q. J. smiled and moved on to the essential fidelity of young people’s relationships today.

‘I wish I could think that this embellishment of the male sex, repulsive though it is to my notions of manliness, spelt a return to a more gracious reverence for physical love …’

Marcus who was kneeling on the ground with pins in his mouth, fixing Lucilla’s skirt, got up and spat out the pins.

‘Oh Lor! I’ll run this up on my machine,’ he told Lucilla, and was gone.

Margaret said, ‘I think this is appalling, Quentin, to preach away against sex just because it’s given you up. He used to be the most terrific womanizer,’ she told them.

‘We’ve made it the dirtiest three letter word in the language,
Margaret.’ Brother and sister both looked so annoyed that Humpy thought he should tactfully deflect the fire to himself.

‘We don’t agree with you about the pill, Mr Matthews.’

‘Oh, of course, it was
you
,’
Lucilla cried, ‘Oh, that was awful!’

‘Yes,’ Adam accused, ‘You spoke against the pill.’

They all looked so solemn that Quentin burst out laughing.

‘Blasphemy against the sacred pill.’

Even Margaret had to laugh at their expressions.

‘I don’t think there’s any way of being funny about the pill that isn’t vulgar.’ Lucilla told them.

Margaret suddenly felt sympathy with her brother Quentin.

‘I’m all for a bit of vulgarity now and again,’ she said.

Hassan coming in at that moment, she presented him to them all. With perfect formality he asked them about their journey, their present comfort, their destination.

‘You are welcome,’ he said. It was a phrase he had learned from Americans but, as Margaret could see, they took it for an old Arabic greeting. ‘As Monsieur Marcus’s family you are particularly welcome.’ Then he whispered with Margaret and was gone.

‘Isn’t he super,’ Adam cried. ‘Who is he?’

‘My brother Marcus’s rather super friend, I imagine. Isn’t he, Margaret?’

‘My dear Quentin, you really shouldn’t be allowed to go on talking on television about Islam if you say things like that. Hassan’s
twenty-six
. Naturally he’s married and building up a fine family. What he may have been as a pretty boy of sixteen is long forgotten. And in any case you are not the only Matthews to leave sex behind you, although Marcus and I haven’t made an ethic out of necessity.’

Humpy looked to see if the other two were as embarrassed as he felt. They were. But Q. J. was on to the beauty of the calm of old age, when Polly came rushing into the room.

‘Oh, Oh, isn’t it marvellous? There’s a man called Omar in there and I asked him about the Andulasian songs that survive here. And it seems they do. Of course he didn’t know they were fifteenth century. And apparently it’s the Jews in a place called the Mellah, but there still are some. So we must persuade him to take us. For some reason he doesn’t seem very keen. And we have to do it now because apparently, to everyone’s inconvenience, dinner’s got to be early for some reason and he won’t be here afterwards.’
‘I’m afraid,’ said Quentin, ‘the early dinner is because I have to leave straightway for Casablanca. I’m flying to Cairo tonight on my way to Singapore where emergence, alas, is a good deal more noisome than here.’

Polly was scarlet with embarrassment.

‘I’m terribly sorry. Anyway it doesn’t matter. They can all come and talk to him now. You must be sick of entertaining them after the talking you have to do on the tele. And I know what Humpy is, he just sits. And the others aren’t much better. You and Miss Matthews must have had to do all the talking.’

‘I don’t know if it’s wise to fuss Omar about the Jewish quarter,’ Margaret said. But the others had all risen. ‘I think we’d better see what Polly’s been up to,’ Adam told her.

‘All right, but before you rush away, Hassan wants to know about rooms. Would you like four? Or will some of you want to sleep together? We
have
double beds,’ she spoke as casually as she felt intimacy and politeness together demanded. But absurdly they appeared fussed.

‘Well, couldn’t we sort of sort it out ourselves …’

But Lucilla broke in, ‘No, that’s not polite, Adam. You can’t snub people in that way. We know you won’t upset Mummy and his grandmother and everybody by telling, so yes, Adam and I will sleep together.’

Margaret essayed gravity in her acknowledgment.

‘And the other two?’

But at this they all burst into giggles.

‘Well, really, I can’t be expected to know your esoteric jokes. I quite agree with Marcus. So long as the young will go around dressed like space-travelling hermaphrodites who’s to know who sleeps with who?’

But the young had gone. A few minutes later, however, Polly came back.

‘I’m afraid that seemed rather rude. Only you see Humpy snores so much that after two nights in tents I’ve been saying that the one thing I longed for was not to hear him. That’s why we were all laughing.’

Later again Quentin was giving Margaret more details of his Emergent series when Adam, too, returned for a moment.

‘I’m sorry. All that singing makes an awful row. And don’t think you have to be involved. Actually we’re all sick of folk songs, but it’s the one thing with Polly, and she had a sort of breakdown last
term, and so it seems important to let her find herself on this trip.

‘Margaret said,’ ‘Of course.’ And when Adam had gone, ‘At least they
do
have breakdowns.’

‘Yes. Out of that something better may build up.’

Margaret felt ashamed that she’d meant something so much less disinterested.

*

When the stewardess took away the breakfast tray, he took out his notes for Singapore and turned his shoulder away from the
cameraman
, Bill Archer, to show that he wanted no conversation. How many sacred cows here to puncture in the udder that this filthy world might one day be washed clean with milk? The old Raj. The sinking of the Hood. The Burma Road legend, perhaps; that could bring a shoal of protest letters. But all that was past stuff to stir suburban or middle class dovecotes. Mr Lee’s special brand of socialism,
inappositeness
and futility of. A few back bench Labour M.P.s might squeal. Urbanism generally – the American way of life, all that stuff. It all seemed a bit stale. Then he saw the word ‘Chinese’. What about that – efficiency, hard work, ambition, etc., etc. The Jews of the East. All right, why should people pretend to like the Jews if they didn’t want to, or efficiency or hard work or ambition? That was one to try out on Bill, cynical-sentimental, Americanized journalist
Englishman
.

‘We’ll have to touch on this Chinese problem, Bill. It could blow up in Singapore as it has done in Indonesia. The ordinary Malay resents the clever urban Chinese …’

‘Yes,’ Bill commented, ‘we ought to hit that racial stuff hard in the first round, catch it before it can get up again. Without the Chinese the Malays couldn’t survive into the next century.’

‘Yes,’ Q. J. said.

He set out in his mind to tease Bill’s conventional prejudices. ‘Perhaps,’ he said over to himself, ‘the most central feature of this overgrown, over populated city today is the resentment, probably even the hatred, of the ordinary Malays for their Chinese neighbours. The Chinese, of course, are hardworking, efficient, ambitious. As an Englishman said to me, without the Chinese the Malays couldn’t survive into the next century.’ Then in his mind he practised various pauses and various ironies of voice to mark the change. ‘If the next century is going to be modelled on the collective fantasies of Wall
Street, our friends in the Kremlin and Comrade Mao I can only say that I heartily sympathize with the Malayans. ‘Or,’ But why should the Malayans wish to survive into a century of compulsory
purposeless
visits to the deserts of the Moon, sterile obligatory promiscuity, a world where Old Mother Goose Progress has laid her golden egg and it has turned out to be that strange idol so similar to the black stones and marble slabs of ancient paganism – the pill?’

But now they were to land at Karachi Airport, where the
loathsomely
neutralized female voice informed them that local time would be 6.36 a.m. and the temperature twenty-two degrees centigrade, the weather windy. He fastened his seat belt, then underlined ‘Chinese’ three times in his notes. Looking out he could see the dismal
excrescence
of the Raj sprawling among scrubby bush with endless surround of rocky desert. And there was the airport waiting room, no doubt, where in the thick heat with pasteboard numbers they would, in transit, await with orange juice the flight’s resumption. But now suddenly the plane began to ascend again and round and round they circled, bumping furiously. There was no cause for alarm, only some delay in landing due to cross winds; they must keep their seat belts fastened. But now the lights went out, and absurdly the canned music came on – Dance Little Lady. For a moment the Countess’s dark eyes filled the plane for him. Next to him Bill Archer was mumbling, ‘Christ, Christ, Christ.’ Quentin’s legs shook involuntarily, and he felt a mild not unpleasant pressure on his balls, but he had felt this so often in the war that he was proud to know that he wasn’t physically afraid. Good God, he’d been too near to death in the trenches…. As to leaving all this triviality and vulgarity for the darkness, the warm darkness, if he could take the whole human race with him into it so much the better. But he wished he had been able to love; in the darkness, warm, free from the deadening prickles of sterile reason, perhaps he would.

*

When they left the next morning laden like pack mules, they asked if they could stay with Marcus on the way back, and appeared really to mean it. Margaret had to say that she would not be there.

‘This is alright for Marcus, but I like real Arab country. Morocco’s Berber land, really. In a few days I shall be off to Saudi Arabia.’

Lucdlla then said, ‘I liked
Divide
and
Rule
enormously. Of course, I’ve never known any schizophrenics but I was terribly impressed.’

‘It made a fascinating technical problem,’ Margaret explained.

‘Oh, I see. Well, I
couldn
’
t
put it down.’

‘Really, Lucilla, your language!’ Adam said. ‘Some of your early Carmichael stories are in the Inter Wars period English Special, Aunt Margaret.’

But Margaret thanked Lucilla. ‘I’m awfully pleased you were held by it. That’s what matters. The technique’s my own affair.’