No Laughing Matter (40 page)

‘Did you say, Miss Canova, that this was only part of a larger building?’

‘I am Sukhanova,’ their Russian friend with a sweet smile, told her wearily. ‘Yes, this building is an addition to the earlier building, the former Smolny Monastery, built in the baroque style.’

‘By the great architect of Petersburg, Rastrelli,’ Quentin added.

He felt at once ashamed of himself. What importance had baroque architecture beside. Lenin’s achievements, what the hell did he care anyway for baroque architects? And Miss Amy Taylor, as could be seen from her blank, rather pretty freckled face, cared less. To descend to needling with points of minor aesthetic interest was to have sunk pretty low. Then ahead among the crowd he saw the short white hairs and wrinkled flesh of the nape of Zemskova’s neck. She was walking on her own but as some delegate pressed forward upon her heels, she turned. He smiled and gave a little wave of his hand. Her old grey eyes went completely blank, although her nicotine stained mouth twitched slightly. She had aged enormously, as he had seen in their one conversation, but he had noticed then no signs of senile twitches. He felt a new resolve not to give in.

It was difficult, however, in the stuffiness of the corridors, with tired feet and bored mind, with the close pressing of stout over-dressed
men and thickly clad women, all too human in the great summer heat, not to relax into vacuity if one was to avoid claustrophobia. He
concentrated
on placing and naming the delegates, but now as they queued up to go through to that little fateful room he realized again that of the Russian delegates he knew only a handful. In his own field of housing old Kursky was there with his wife, and there was an unpronounceable penologist, and Melgunov, the transport man, and a few others, mostly subordinate people. Of the Leningrad
University
people only Professor Polovtzev and Doctor Breit were there. The numbers who were not…. Now, suddenly the little room itself, the desk, the chairs, the stove, the small, Spartan bed – he
remembered
how when he had seen them before, despite his dislike of political emotionalism, he had been forced to swallow again and again to prevent tears coming into his eyes. At the sight of such dedication, such clarity of purpose, such inflexible will, all the
ruthlessness
, the undoubted chaotic absurdities of some of the early Revolutionary decisions, the megalomaniac traits were so swallowed up as to become as nothing. He had felt an overpowering admiration for the man who could force millions of human lives and wills and all the chance events of this so vast a country into one dogmatic bottle as small as the room he organized the bottling from. But now as Sukhanova’s cooing tones took up the tale he revolted from the whole thing, as though he had been told of a very neat but brutal rape.

‘On the morning of 7 November 1917, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, deciding that the moment had come for action, left the villa where he had been staying since his arrival from Finland …’

‘The villa that used to belong to the Tsar’s mistress, the ballerina, wasn’t it?’

Sukhanova paused for a moment. ‘Yes. But please do not interrupt, Mr Matthews. Now I shall lose the guide’s words.’

She appealed with a look to the audience, many of whom frowned at him. A picture came into his mind of beautiful young girls in tutus, dancing towards him on their points, arms waving. Catherine’s young noblewomen. Hardly in
Swan
Lake.
He shook his head to keep awake in the stuffy atmosphere. After all, those girls, beautiful young creatures in hoop petticoats and powder (did young girls wear powder?) with their ripening breasts, were also leaders in a revolution. Boarding school! Experiment of the Enlightenment. A
long step to woman’s emancipation, to the bob of Miss Amy Taylor, or the boyish crop of that attractive bitch, Andrée Paulhard – she would have suited Lenin’s ruthlessness.

‘And, of course, Krupskaya was with him all the time, cooking upon that stove you see there, acting as his correspondent, his
secretary
.’

Sleeping with him in that narrow bed? He wanted to ask, but, as they moved on out of the room, they were pressed almost to stifling point. Since he could not ask his question, he moved close to Madame Paulhard, letting his hands accidentally press for a moment against her thighs. To his surprise the soft smoothness that he touched rubbed against his fingers. True, the press of the crowd was considerable, but … his fingers itched for a moment to give her buttocks a sharp tweak, yet why spoil the chance of a beautiful friendship? Instead he let his hands travel deliriously down her thighs. The pleasant pressure continued until they had left the holy fastness, but when she turned, her little delicate face bore its usual angry scowl, like a schoolboy afraid of appearing soft. Now he found himself next to old Kursky’s wife, an imperious handsome elderly creature who always reduced him to the sort of social banality he reserved for old ladies.

‘So they had the telephone even then?’

She was quick to register his fatuousness but not in the words he expected.

‘1917? Well, of course. My parents had the telephone in 1900.’

You old snob, he thought. Then he remembered her pre-
revolutionary
bourgeois social origins; that was why she had that vague aura of bourgeois chic that irritated him so, made him address her as if she were an old fool.

‘Where was your parents’ mansion, Sofya Petrovna?’ he asked, delighted to remember her patronymic.

She looked down her roman nose at him. He realized suddenly that, since those he trusted were not here, he had come quite
illogically
to see all who were there as enemies. Yet his intuition, perhaps because it was usually so strictly bridled, had its head in full canter today.

He heard himself say, ‘I am most disappointed not to see Mrs Rakitin. Her name was on the list of speakers. She gave such an interesting paper three years ago. Do you know why she’s not here?’

Mrs Kursky paused a moment.

‘Mrs Rakitin? I don’t think I know her. What does she do?’

He knew at once that this must be a lie, but he registered no
surprise
.

‘She’s a child magistrate.’

‘Oh, I see. Well, my husband isn’t a lawyer. And we have no small children. But I’ll ask Sukhanova for you.’

He should have stopped her, but he didn’t.

‘Sukhanova,’ she called. My word! he only now saw how grand her manner was. ‘Mr Matthews wants to know why a friend of his, a child magistrate, why a Mrs Rakitin is not here.’

This time Sukhanova turned in real anger.

‘Mr Matthews, I have told you twenty times. Mrs Rakitin is not here because she is busy. The courts have to continue, you know. The Russian people don’t stop living because all the clever social scientists from abroad are discussing the best ways to live.’

In her annoyance her voice sounded sarcastic enough to startle a number of the delegates – even Miss Amy Taylor pursed her lips. Mr Kursky, large, portentous, yet more managerial, less patrician than his grand wife, said something to rebuke Sukhanova which Quentin could not hear, but she seemed unwilling to listen.

‘Come along now, everyone,’ she cried brightly, ‘If we don’t get into our coaches soon we shall miss the treasures of the Winter Palace. Or our lunch. You don’t want to miss your lunch, do you?’ She said this quite sharply to Miss Taylor who had, as Quentin remembered, a rather small vegetarian appetite. He got into the charabanc feeling relaxed. He had achieved his purpose, both Kelvin Douglas and Mary Parr had, he saw, registered at last his insistence upon the absent delegates – and these were the two English visitors who held any really big guns.

So much had Kelvin Douglas observed that he came to sit next to Quentin, his vast bulk flowing flabbily all over his neighbour. With his huge head, hair en brosse, conventionally, almost Victorianly clad huge body and his plummy pompous voice, he was hardly
distinguishable
from Kursky or many other Soviet delegates. Only the burr of his Rs gave to his academic solidity a peculiarly smug homely aroma of high teas and a distant free kirk childhood.

It was no surprise when he said, ‘I think, perhaps, Matthews, we ought to drop this question of some of the Russian delegates not being here, eh? Quite frankly I have the impression that there may
be some little domestic quarrel that’s divided our friends and some have preferred not to attend. It’s very understandable. I often feel, when we disagree at home as we so often do, that it would be much better for the minority to stop away from meetings. Controversy and disagreement do impede any sort of decision. And decision must be ultimately what we’re after.’

‘With the first of your suggestions I agree, though I doubt if any of the absent delegates I know have chosen to stay away. With the second I entirely disagree. This is not a revolutionary situation, nor are the decisions we are reaching binding upon anyone, nor are they indeed in any but the most academic sense, political. As I understand it we are an international meeting of more or less
professional
people connected with various branches of social
organization
and the theory of social organization, all socialists, designedly chosen on a very broad definition of that term to include as many of us as possible who are committed to the furtherance of a socialist society. Our purpose is to exchange ideas and experience in our various spheres in order to facilitate social planning in socialist communities of every size from the Soviet Union down to the mayoralty of Marseilles, or the Borough Council of Clydeside. Am I right?’

‘Oh, perfectly, perfectly.’ Kelvin Douglas paused, and taking a very small lozenge from a small tin, placed it very slowly into his vast mouth and began even more slowly to suck it. His voice sounded Like that of an eminent hippopotamus under water. ‘Oil of clove. Very soothing wherever there’s any little roughness of the throat. You don’t however mention two things which, though not part of our agenda, are, as is so often the case, almost more important than any published aim. I’m thinking, of course, of the very valuable work we’ve already done in demonstrating against the Fascist claim to any serious social planning. Understand me, I see our meeting as only in part an exchange of ideas. At the present crisis all meetings of socialists, whatever their concern, must serve primarily as
demonstrations
of our determination to resist by all means in our power the naked aggression of Fascism. And to deter whatever right wing reformist elements in our own countries….’ He glanced at Quentin, and appeared to decide on a new sentence to express his views. ‘Whether we necessarily accept our Russian friends’ definition of Social fascists for some of the more backward of the Social democrats is perhaps a matter of literary taste.’ He smiled in naughty complicity
at Quentin, who managed not to respond. ‘But the language apart, and it has a certain shorthand value on these occasions, we are united in sentiment. Which puts upon those of us who have differences of view from our Russian hosts a peculiar duty of preserving our
disagreement
for the most private occasions since the aim of the
reactionary
forces everywhere today is to drive a wedge between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies. This really mustn’t happen, or, to be very English, appear to have happened.’

‘There could be no possible reason why it should appear to have happened if the Conference were to stick to its educative purpose and not to attempt to turn itself into an international demonstration.’

Kelvin Douglas shifted his weight from one buttock to the other, pinning Quentin against the side of the coach in the process.

‘I must say that these concepts of professionalism and academic discussion seem to me the sheerest petty bourgeois illusion.’ He added, ‘Sukhanova does a very hard job extremely well. I think we ought to buy her some little gift before we leave – the English delegation I mean.’

‘Certainly.’

‘And meanwhile perhaps we can all make her job a little easier by not pressing her with questions which, as those of us who are old hands know, she is not in the position to answer.’

He had made his own position quite clear, yet Quentin felt that if he could force the man more into the open they might at least argue out their duty.

‘If you mean that such questions make her job more dangerous, I …’

He was indeed open to argument on this ground. But Kelvin Douglas was not. He receded.

‘Dangerous?’ He laughed. ‘Well, no, even at their worst, most trying moments I doubt if any of the Anglo-Saxon delegates are literally homicidal.’ He left his seat and joined a Ukrainian authority on social hygiene. ‘I’ve just been telling my colleague Matthews that I’m extraordinarily impressed by the reports you gave us of the rapid and efficient isolation system in the event of epidemic’

Sukhanova had to translate, but the Ukrainian answered
emphatically
and immediately.

‘Yes, we act very quickly.’

Later that evening, following an afternoon of speeches on crêche
organization and child care, Quentin tried to relax in the sitting-room of his hotel suite. The grand piano with its flowered shawl, the high Japanese pot, the ebony table with mother-of-pearl inlay, all
reminded
him of No. 52. And so, of course, every decorative object in the city – that was not a treasured antique – should, for all
bourgeois
decoration had been put to sleep in the city like the princess’ castle at that bourgeois moment when the Countess was braving the Zeppelins. And these art nouveau, early ballet russe objects, would remain in that sleep, no doubt, for a hundred years, until they crumbled. But what then would they use to embellish the rooms of bourgeois sympathizers from abroad, for they had evolved no
decorative
style of their own? No need, he would have said a few years back, for long before then there would be no more bourgeois
sympathizers
, world revolution would be complete. But now he only hoped that for this reason alone he would not be cut off from the USSR, for if anything warmed his heart, it was this lack of triviality, of luxury, of effort and skill wasted in designing fashions and modes to keep running a world of high profits and pitiful doles. Grand pianos and pots and portraits and all the rest of it, if they must be, let them be as shabby as possible; and, for the rest, the plain, the simple and the dowdy.