No Laughing Matter Read online

  Marcus looked very grave. ‘Thank you. Shall we go in a hansom cab?’

  ‘In a chariot, if you wish.’

  ‘I wash my hands entirely. You see what happens, Granny. My slightest attempt at discipline is undermined.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know, I’m sure. If Quintus will just find the North Gate for me.’

  ‘Quentin will go home with you, of course. I’ve never heard such nonsense. Unless he’s to sleep on the nursery floor.’

  ‘It might be, you know, that the man’s point of view should be heard as well as the clatter of women’s tongues. You and Mother seem to think you own the boy. It may not have occurred to you that he’s reached the age to appreciate a father’s companionship. Well, Quintus, how would you like to live with your Dad again?’

  Quentin stared at each of them in turn. There were tears of distress in old Mrs Matthews ‘eyes. He took her arm.’ I think I should go with Granny, sir.’ But it was still difficult to hear him. Young Mrs Matthews rippled laughter.

  ‘Oh, Billy, someone hasn’t chosen you. You’re losing your charms, my dear.’

  Old Mrs Matthews said, ‘I’m sure the boy doesn’t mean …’ But her son turned his back on her.

  ‘It’s just as well,’ he said, in the direction of his wife, ‘so long as we depend on damned driblets and drablets of charity someone in the family should keep on the right side of the old lady.’

  When his mother and Quentin had left, he took his Hunter watch out of his ticket pocket. ‘Well, I’ve got an appointment with a man about a dog. I shall dine at the club.’

  Laughing, his wife said, ‘I hope the devilled bones choke you, Billy.’

  And laughing, he replied, ‘I’m sure you do, my dear. But they won’t. After Stoker, Mr Paul is the best chef in London.’

  She turned her attention to Rupert. ‘I wonder if my handsome boy will grow up careless of himself and everybody else, too lazy even to eat his breakfast egg without spilling it down his waistcoat.’

  But Mr Matthews did not glance down. Mrs Matthews put her arm round Rupert’s waist. ‘Of course he won’t. He’ll be famous, won’t he? Entertaining his poor old Mother on his flagship.’

  Mr Matthews let his hand rest for a moment on Gladys ‘shoulder. ‘So she’s going to marry a cowboy and leave her father behind.’ He smiled at her. ‘Good old Podge.’

  As he moved off, Stoker called, ‘But Master Marcus, sir …’

  Gladys spoke out, ‘What about Marcus, Father? You promised to take him to dinner.’

  ‘And so I will. But some other day, old chap. When we’re all more in the mood. And I’ll take you Podge, too.’ He pulled his daughter’s pigtail, ‘When you lose a little of that weight. A pretty girl is the crown of a good meal.’ He took a half-sovereign from his pocket, then, after reflection he replaced it with a five shilling piece. This he gave to Stoker. ‘Give them all a treat, Stoker, before you leave the exhibition, and see that the littlest fellow has what he wants.’

  The Countess said, ‘There, Marcus. Perhaps you’ll know in future that all isn’t gold that glitters. Now, I’m tired. Rupert, you shall see me home. It’s time you learned to be an escort, darling boy. Stoker will take the rest of you on the District Line. You’ll like that. And in any case you ought to know that your father isn’t made of money whatever he wants you to think.’

  Just before South Kensington station Marcus asked Stoker, ‘Why did they both laugh when Mother said she hoped the bone would choke him?’

  ‘Ah, there’s questions.’

  ‘Mother laughs to make herself more frightening – like the ogress,’ Gladys told them.

  ‘She succeeds,’ Margaret said. ‘And he laughs to make her more angry.’

  ‘He succeeds too.’

  ‘Were your parents awful, Stoker?’ Marcus asked.

  ‘You mustn’t talk about them like that to Stoker,’ Sukey explained. ‘Must he, Stoker?’ But she added, ‘Most ordinary people don’t make people stare at them in tea rooms and all those awful things, do they?’

  ‘What were your parents like, Stoker? Gladys asked politely, for the train had stopped at Sloane Square and they could be heard by other passengers.

  ‘I never knew er. And we never seed much of im. Not when we was little. E was at sea. E paid this woman sometimes. And when e dident, we knew it all right. Then years later when Em was married and I was working along with that Monser Jules at Queen Anne’s Mansions – that’s the one that learned me my fancy dishes – e comes back from sea. “I’m finished with it,” e says, “I can’t keep me victuals down.” And e couldn’t neither. Well e goes to live with Em. Barnum and Bailey’s it was. E ad a bloomin parrot and a concertina and there was this little Chinee that come regular to play with im, a sort of chequers they played. I ad me own room in those days. Dident live in. Tothill Street it was. You could spit on the Abbey. One afternoon I come back tired out after cooking lunches and there e was. “I’ve come to you, girl,” e says. “Em won’t let me ave me squeeze box.” Well I gets im a room, but I told him the bird ad got to go, and the concertina, which e called is squeeze box. Well there was a fuss about that all right. “I’d as well be at Em’s,” e said. “I think you would,” I told im. And off e goes. But then one day ees back again. “She’s sold Polly,” e tells me. Well, I let im stay a week or two. Paid is rent, but I don’t know what it was. Em and I was talking about it only last time I see er. “Things get remembered,” she told me, “it’s only natural.” Anyway, after a bit, I told im I can’t ave that Lee Fu coming ere – it gives me a bad name. Well, there it was,’ she ended for they had arrived at Victoria.

  Walking from the station to the house, Gladys asked what had happened to old Mr Stoker.

  ‘Seamen’s rest,’ was the answer.

  ‘It wasn’t very kind,’ Gladys said.

  ‘Didn’t people blame you?’ Sukey asked.

  ‘Kind! Blame! We was too poor for notions!’

  They were all silent, then Marcus said, ‘I expect that’s why they’re so awful. Being so poor.’

  His sisters in chorus said, ‘Ssh!’

  And Stoker said, ‘Poor! You’re the gentry.’

  ‘She looks like a gipsy,’ he announced in contradiction.

  But when they went to say good night to her in the drawing-room, she didn’t look at all like a gipsy. She lay on the sofa in her feather-trimmed mousseline de soie dressing-gown with eau-de-Cologne pads on her temples. Only one small rose-shaded brass lamp was alight in the dim room.

  ‘No good nights, I’m completely shattered. Remember their prayers, Gladys. I’ll have a tray in my dressing-room, Stoker dear, after you’ve got them to bed. And you can brush my hair. Something light – an egg or two beaten in milk and sherry. And bring two sherry glasses. You can make me laugh and then perhaps by some miracle, I’ll sleep.’

  When Stoker had given them their bread and milk in the nursery, they told Rupert about her treatment of her father. ‘She’s Regan. That’s what she is.’

  But they didn’t understand, so he had to recount to them the story of King Lear. Then they all took it up. ‘Regan,’ they cried, ‘Regan,’ except Marcus who cried, ‘Dear Regan.’

  Stoker put her head round the door, ‘Now then, off to bed – Or you’ll ave your Ma up ere. And you won’t like that.’

  Later Rupert woke to hear Stoker singing one of her cockney songs and his mother laughing. Later still he woke again to see his Mother bending over Marcus’ bunk.

  ‘You dirty little beast.’ She pulled him out of the bed and took off his pyjama trousers.

  Rupert could feel how dazed his brother must be. She had bent him over the side of his bunk and was smacking his bottom with a hair brush.

  ‘Little wetabed,’ she whispered, ‘dirty little wetabed.’ And then, ‘Gipsy, is it? Very well, beware the gipsy.’ She pushed him back into the bunk. ‘It’ll do you good to sleep in it. Teach you a lesson.’ Rupert pretended to be asleep when she came over and kissed him on the forehea
d.

  Later still they all heard their father returning. Marcus was still sobbing, so Rupert tried to soothe him.

  ‘“He’ll have to sleep in the dressing-room.” She told me, coming home in the taxi. “Cool off, Countess! We’ll see who’s to cool off I shall make him sleep in the dressing-room,” she said. It’s for always.’ Then finding suddenly the softest, richest tones of his Father, ‘I don’t ask very much of life, children. A book, my pipe, my desk, a comfortable bed, and – is it too much to ask? – a little quiet from my loving family.’ Delighted with his surprising power of imitation, he started to repeat the phrase, when from the corner of the room came his Mother’s voice, sharp and petulant, and raised to a high peak like the voice of a love-bird. ‘I hope you’ll never know, Marcus,’ she said, ‘what it’s like to be in love with life and to be cheated of it.’

  ‘That’s what she says,’ Marcus explained, ‘What does she mean?’

  ‘Oh, some rot or other. You do it jolly like.’

  ‘So do you.’

  ‘Let’s try again.’

  They repeated the same phrases, then they tried out some others. At last they sounded so like that it was creepy and, to break the eerie atmosphere, they burst into giggles. Down below a full row was in progress so that they had no need to hush their delight at their new found game. Giggling and imitating, it was some time before they fell asleep.

  Book Two

  1919

  ‘So,’ said Quentin, ‘we’re all agreed.’ Expecting the response that should surely have come in rapid fire, he covered the silence for himself, as he had always done when waiting for volunteers, by prolonged play with pipe and pouch and matches.

  Sukey looked in turn at the others mute in their private concerns – Gladys re-threading her ambers, Margaret soaking her feet luxuriously in the hip bath, Rupert lolling on cushions, long legs loosely dangling, hand aimlessly waving the limp Pierrot doll beside him. She put down the monthly tradesmen’s books, her toil for the family, very deliberately.

  ‘Yes, thank you, Quentin,’ she said, ‘we’re all very grateful to you. Without you things would have dragged on interminably. Coming from outside you’ve seen the whole thing so clearly.’

  Marcus’ small puckered white face, his huge dark lemur’s eyes, appeared above the sofa.

  ‘I’ve seen it clearly for at least two years, ever since my voice began to break.’

  ‘It hasn’t,’ said Gladys.

  ‘It hasn’t finished,’ said Margaret, ‘We should be exact even about small boys.’

  ‘You ought to be especially grateful to Quentin, Marcus,’ Sukey told him.

  ‘He ought to be in bed,’ Rupert with his plectrum plucked three notes on the Hawaiian guitar on his lap.

  ‘I left my love in Avalon,’ Gladys sang.

  ‘That was not remotely the tune I sounded.’

  ‘I think if it hasn’t broken,’ Marcus said, ‘it’s because Gladys did more than her family share of voice breaking.’

  ‘Praise heaven for it,’ Rupert cried. ‘Do Dame Clara Butt singing “Land of Hope and Glory” before we all go to bed, Gladys.’

  ‘Oh, yes, Gladys, do!’ said Margaret. ‘It’ll send us away with high hopes.’

  ‘Dame Clara Butt’s real name is Mrs Kennerley Rumford. There’s glory for you,’ Marcus said.

  ‘Kids of that age,’ Rupert remarked, ‘think everything funny.’

  ‘He’s encouraged at school as a wit and aesthete,’ Margaret explained.

  ‘And shall be for three more years if all your plans for me work out. Remember that. If I am to stay at school, and, of course, Quentin’s right – I ought to want to – then you’ll all have to put up with my being precocious.’

  ‘Precocious to the grown ups,’ said Rupert, ‘a wit in the playground. But to us a pimply little squirt.’

  Since the others paid no heed to Quentin’s busy pipe sucking, Sukey said, ‘Please don’t think we’re really against Marcus, Quentin. It’s just that he mustn’t be encouraged.’

  Quentin stopped sucking. ‘The sharpness seems general.’

  ‘Oh dear, does it? I suppose it does. It’s just a rather silly way we’ve got into. Under it all there’s a lot of loyalty. We’ve had to stand together so often, you see, in the last years when you’ve been away.’

  Marcus hid behind the sofa. Rupert strummed. But Margaret took her feet from the mustard bath’s luxury and spoke out.

  ‘If you had been more of a little mother to us, Gladys, we shouldn’t have to put up with Sukey talking like that in public. It’s your fault. You’re the eldest. You should be our substitute for the Countess’ failure.’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ Marcus spoke from behind the sofa’s safety, ‘Sukey was right. We’ve kept up a front and we really are united. If anything’s wrong this evening it’s because we’re shy of you, Quentin. You’ve been away so long.’

  ‘Keeping up another, more important front,’ Rupert murmured.

  ‘Talk about schoolkids ‘bad taste!’ Gladys said.

  Sukey broke in. ‘The only thing I’m worried about is this relying on the old women. They just aren’t to be trusted.’

  ‘We’re not going to rely on them. We’re simply going to see that they know what’s what.’

  ‘Quentin means we’re going to use them,’ Margaret explained. ‘Actually we had all understood that except Sukey. You mustn’t expect her to understand things quickly, Quentin.’

  ‘It has been a help, Quentin,’ Gladys said, ‘knowing that we don’t seem to you to judge them too harshly.’

  ‘Oh, no. The war is on.’

  ‘Against the white slug,’ said Rupert.

  ‘And the black bitch,’ whispered Marcus.

  ‘Names don’t help, do they, Quentin?’ Sukey asked. And she repeated her question, for as they all often found so disconcerting he seemed to have fallen away from them into a black chasm of his own thoughts. But now he answered, in the brighter tone he used when he returned to their world suddenly.

  ‘Battle cries are a bit out of date in modern trench warfare conditions, but we might allow them as a special ration for young hotheads.’

  Margaret said, ‘As a returned soldier on demob leave, bitterly pledged to end all wars, Quentin, you offer us a straight diet of jolly military metaphors.’

  ‘I’m disgusting.’

  ‘Oh, no, no. I didn’t mean quite that.’

  ‘Your tongue, Meg,’ Sukey said reproachfully.

  ‘I was only thinking of Rupert.’

  ‘Thank you, Maggie.’ Rupert put his hand on his sister’s bare leg where, shapely, it protruded below her kimono. ‘As a matter of fact, I do rather resent being put in with the schoolboys, Quentin. After all I have been dingily winning bread for the house in my awful clerk’s job. Though I’m grateful to you for releasing me under The Plan.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Quentin said, ‘I salute you as an independent artist of future fame.’

  ‘Salute!’ Marcus said, ‘Margaret’s caution has not been very effective.’

  Gladys picked up an empty rubber hot-water bottle and threw it at Marcus’ head.

  ‘I think,’ Marcus said, ‘that by extending our sharpness to Quentin we show him that we’re more at ease with him.’

  ‘Oh the ghastly child! But we are, old boy, we really are,’ Sukey put her hand on her eldest brother’s stooped shoulders.

  Margaret looked at Rupert and he unfolded himself from the cushions to tower above them in his six feet one. Elocutionwise he cupped his ear, elocutionwise he put his finger to his lips.

  ‘Hist! I hear creaks.’ Tis now the very witching hour of night.’

  ‘And witches may well be abroad at any moment,’ Margaret used her cracked cockney pantomime dame’s voice.

  Marcus peered round the sofa, ‘Children! Children! Dismal faces! I don’t want dismal faces. I’ve been dancing all the evening and I want to go on and on.’

  ‘Bandmaster, give the lady a tune,’ cried Rupe
rt.

  Marcus rose and continued, ‘I’m in love with life, children. And so must you be. Come on now. Stop looking sleepy, damn you! Let’s raid Regan’s larder.’

  ‘Cups of coffee and La Bohème and talk, talk, talk,’ Margaret said drily.

  ‘Till any old hour,’ ended Gladys in her gruff voice.

  ‘I thought we weren’t to play The Game tonight,’ Sukey said. ‘Quentin said …’

  But Rupert was beaming at them now. He had made himself small and cosy looking. His voice was infinitely mellow. ‘Pardon an old white slug for creeping out from under his stone. Back from his club. An old white slug but with a young slug’s heart. But midnight, you know, midnight.’

  And maunderingly, mumblingly, they repeated the words, first Margaret, then Marcus, then Gladys – ‘Midnight, Midnight, Midnight.’ As the solemn, empty voices rolled around the room, they all began to laugh, even Sukey, who, at last, in a thick suety voice that she knew would reduce them to final delirious giggles, said, ‘Midnight.’ Then she glanced nervously at Quentin, but he too was laughing helplessly.

  Gladys was the first to pull herself together. ‘I thought it was to be plans, not games.’

  ‘Come,’ Rupert cried, ‘be bloody, bold and resolute. And let me tell you all that nothing may quicker break our resolution and our unity than a sudden little young-hearted, brave-hearted paternal pathos at this time of night.’

  ‘Unless,’ said Margaret, ‘it be a young-hearted mother’s sudden brave gaiety. Scolding …’

  ‘Flirting,’ said Rupert.

  ‘Confiding,’ said Gladys.

  ‘Cajoling,’ said Susan. ‘Is that a word, Mag?’

  But to their surprise Quentin ended it for them in imitation of Gladys ‘deep voice,’ ‘Till any old hour,’ and then in his own voice, ‘No, we can’t run that risk. Off to bed, everyone.’

  Marcus stood up in his striped pyjamas and old plaid dressing-gown. ‘Neither of them would have the slightest effect on my resolution.’