No Laughing Matter (54 page)

Then suddenly – something that made his hands tremble with rage. There, surely, in black sweater and pleated grey flannel skirt, Dulcie, tittering and whispering with a companion marcher as the march was halted, with a weather-beaten old battle axe with faded blonde hair
come up from the country no doubt to show the shirking dockers true discipline and pluck. Something Dulcie said set the other cow off laughing and then, at a word from a grey haired dragon woman they both set their silly faces again in a noble-martyred, how we girls faced the lions, look. The silly cunts and their fucking pluck! All the bloody, middle class, oh how common don’t touch pitch, you never know what council school boys may have in their hair, teaching of his childhood blew over him in a foul wind of touch me not, smelly ladylikeness that made him want to vomit. Dulcie’s distant white blob of a face seemed the very source of all his isolation from life’s warmth.

‘Get out, you Fascist cunt,’ he shouted.

A grey-haired, young-faced man with a large Adam’s apple above a butcher-blue shirt and a red tie turned and said:

‘Now, look here. That language isn’t going to help things, you know.’

But a group of delighted youths had taken it up.

Fascist cunts! Fascist cunts!’

A Trades Council man with a United Front badge and a Party girl started up The Internationale again and the obscenity was soon drowned. And solemnly, oh so decently, Dulcie and her friends tried to purify Tooley Street from this alien noise with memories of the Old Contemptibles – ‘It’s a long, long way …’ their nice voices told the East End air. This time Marcus answered by laughter. ‘Oh, God,’ he cried, ‘Silly bitches.’ This time he was truly the leader, for the laughter spread through the crowd and grew and swelled and lapped the more against the isolated women trying so ridiculously to sing on. At a shouted word of command, the Fascist marchers with their mounted escort turned off from Tooley Street, from the improvised barricades that had stopped their way, and, to the crowd’s cheers of derision, set off down a side street opposite to a new secret meeting place. Silly sods, they’ll never get to Jamaica Road! At last even the swagger and harshness of the mounted police looked as silly as their charges. They were strutting to Colonel Bogey, and the young kids that ran at their side parodied the blaring sounds. Laughter drove them out of Tooley Street. A right lot of charlies. And Marcus felt some freedom, some ease that he had always missed, as he let off a raspberry himself at Dulcie’s retreating bum.

He found himself talking spiritedly, happily to a small, artily
dressed young woman with her black hair wrenched back into a bun.

‘Oh, the heaven of victory!’ he said.

‘Marvellous,’ she answered, ‘they can’t say it was just the Jews like they did about Stepney. It’s the South Londoners this time, who’ve shown what they feel.’

Thinking of Ted and of Jack, he said, rather crossly:

‘What’s the difference?’

‘Good Lord! The propaganda effect’s completely different. Where on earth do you come from?’

‘Hampstead. And so do you.’

Something about his remark drove political contempt from her face. She laughed and said:

‘Does it show so much?’

‘Yes, but never mind.’

As he said it he thought, My God! What on earth am I doing talking to a nut-eating, jet-earringed woman like this, she’ll offer to show me her hand loom in a minute. They edged each other a little warily, but there was no time for their friendliness to be blown away, for the crowd was suddenly turning, running, shouting. Marcus tried to stand his ground but he was swept back down the lane, fighting all the time to keep his balance.

‘It’s the Facist bastards let it loose,’ an old man shouted.

But an old woman said, ‘They oughtn’t to have done it. Not even if it was our own boys. A lorry! Why, they might av killed the kids.’

But all causes, enemy or erring friend, gave way before the sound of hoofs bearing down upon them. Two heavy young men running drove so violent a passage between Marcus and the grumbling woman that he sensed himself flying through the air past the crowd to the side of them, although he could feel his feet still making contact with the road; indeed he caught his ankle sharply against the edge of the pavement, sprawled in front of the running feet and then dragged himself to safety in the narrow step of a doorway. Feeling, rather than seeing, the crowd hurrying past, he had a terrible fear, as in nightmares, that he would be lost if he were left behind. Yet he was too shaken and bruised to move from his half crouching posture; he had time to think ‘lost’? but to whom or to what pursuer? The thumping of running feet grew less and with it his panic; at last he knew silence enough and security to examine the pain in his knee
where the torn trouser cloth flapped bloodily. He staunched the wound with a handkerchief, got up, felt dizzy, imagined Madge’s big-sized brown pot of tea, longed for it and, turning, saw his
Hampstead
young woman held kicking and screaming in the air by two grim faced young policemen. Whether it was the pathetic way that her tight black bun, symbol of her austere superiority, had fallen in a shapeless mass on her shoulders, or the one shoeless foot waving so helplessly, or the invasion of her privacy where her skirt had ridden up to show a white thigh, he was overcome by rage on behalf of women, the poor bitch sex that had been forever pushed around by brute force, the duped victims of men’s spunky idiocy. The
embarrassed
, self-consciously passionless faces of the two policemen were to him at that moment a mask for vicious lust. They were wrenching the poor woman’s arms cruelly. Staggering into the road, he came up to them as they lifted her past him to a waiting van.

‘You don’t have to wrench her like that, you know. I shall report that.’

He meant to sound like a commanding, substantial colonel, but, of course, it came out in high pansy dudgeon. The younger policeman said to his mate:

‘You take her, Fred. I’ll just deal with Mabel here.
What
did you say?’ pushing his face very close to Marcus’s, showing all the fury he had concealed when handling the woman. Marcus felt from his balls a sexual battle.

‘I said I should report you.’

Immediately, his arm was roughly and painfully seized.

‘You bastard,’ he cried, trying to free his arm.

‘That’s quite enough of that. I’m booking you for abusive language and obstructing a constable in the execution of his duty.’

*

That evening Marcus joined the one hundred and eleven people arrested in Bermondsey. When he had been charged at the Borough Police Station and released on his own surety to appear at Tower Bridge Magistrates’ Court on the Monday, he somehow no longer thought with pleasure of Madge’s hot tea. He went back to
Hampstead
, where, after a long hot bath, he spent a delicious hour in showing a rich and knowledgeable Chilean their collection. And an even more delicious quarter of an hour followed when the
wraith-like
, mink clad wife, who had looked lemon disdain at the abstracts,
went into a narcissistic transport at his pet Marie Laurencin. Certainly, take one startled hare’s eye, lose one swan’s neck, it might have been her portrait. Jack, following the husband’s lead, essayed an
embarrassed
gallantry. But Marcus said, ‘Oh the bliss of someone who can like beautiful nonsense as well!’ He insisted on showing her his Magnasco cardinals.

As Jack said afterwards, ‘You allow no human form to resist your obsessive patterns. You should have been a Moslem.’

*

Christmas (eighty days to go from Marcus’s fine of
£
10 – ‘You had no business to be in Bermondsey. Your behaviour was totally
irresponsible
’) loomed distantly ahead that year in a flurry of questions rather than of snow, in an atmosphere of increasing fears that gnawed the guts when goodwill should have been warming the cockles. Of course a year ago there had been questions too. At 52 the Countess had demanded of the dying Regan, ‘Who on earth is she?’ and it seemed too absurd, some American woman, when only yesterday she had dreamed again and again of dancing with him herself – at Ciro’s. But Billy Pop had been so reassuring: ‘They can’t afford to let him go,’ he’d said, ‘he’s our chief national asset.’ But they had, and now he was over the water with the woman he loved. It was all too rotten. The Countess and the waitress who always served her at Fuller’s tea-room had cried about it together. It was dramatic, and the Countess found herself often looking at the piano as though there ought to be some special music to go with the whole story.

But as this renewal of the Bethlehem theogony approached, the questions in the newspapers were all to do with unpleasant quarrels in far away countries, all, except Austria (those enchanting waltzes), unknown to the Countess. In any case Billy Pop reassured her again and again, he had met So and So, who was the real man at Something or other, and again old So and So, who was the fellow behind
something
else. And although all this was confidential, it did seem that there were answers. In the end the Countess decided to meet the question by refusing to read the newspapers; in any case, she was always too busy to give them more than a glance.

Gladys, too, saw a time when she wouldn’t be able to open the newspapers. Unless, that was, she could answer, no, more than that, satisfy Alf’s demands – was she calling him a liar then? Was this what they’d meant to each other all these years? Ringmer Development
was flourishing, considering the uncertain property market and all this international tension; and Asbestos Products was expanding, no less. And now his baby, the one really sure thing he’d got on to in his life, his Cinema Hire Limited, was in danger. Good God! He’d got the securities, and more than half were paid for. She’d seen young Fison’s letter; as soon as the old boy had had his op the rest of the money would be in the post. Three weeks at the most. Christ! She didn’t want him to chivvy a sick man, did she? Well, if she did, no thank you, just because the bloody auditors were chivvying
him.
My God, if he’d had ten thousand pounds by him and she’d been in a jam…. But then she obviously didn’t trust him; all right, call him a bloody liar. For three weeks, three lousy weeks, that was all he was asking her, to borrow money from an old chap who didn’t even know he’d got it. He wasn’t asking her to sell to Christie’s or any of the posh places. No, he’d heard of a chap she could go to. A Jew as a matter of fact. Oh, for God’s sake, girlie, you don’t seem to have understood me much after all these years. The best Jews are the salt of the earth and absolutely brilliant. Hadn’t he always said so? All right then. Give him credit where credit was due. And as for this old boy Einstein or Twostein or Halfamostein, in three weeks she could plonk him down his ten thousand quid, they could even afford to forget the commission and she’d have saved him all the fuss of should he take the price or shouldn’t he? A decision that would probably kill him at that age with a bloody stroke. All right then, go to hell, if she preferred her ruddy principles to him.

Hoarse on the telephone hour after hour, and in American bars, his hand shaking, breathing whisky at her, so red in the face now, mopping the sweat from his brow. And at her flat once, calling her for the first time ever a straight-laced bitch, a bloody Pharisee,
twisting
her plump arm so that she had to bring out the ivory slave bangle she hadn’t worn for years to hide the bruises. And, afterwards two dozen yellow roses by special messenger. But principles were
principles
, though his eyes looked frightened, flickered uncertainly above his tired, baggy cheeks. But principles were principles, though his lower lip now seemed to have a freakish life of its own. Only, at last – they’d gone to Brighton on the new fast train from Victoria – he’d exasperated her and also won her heart by telling her of this
greyhound
he’d bought and how he called it Glad Eyes. Oh, Alf, at this moment! But she’ll win at White City, he said, and again at
Harringay
!
She’ll be the turning point in my ruddy luck, he said. And at kindly Doctor Brighton’s clinic no business talk that day, he said, it wasn’t fair to her, just a hen lobster lunch and a blow of fresh air along the front. And he’d tried so hard to keep to it – admiring a pretty girl to tease her, pointing out sporting and theatrical
celebrities
, explaining how we’d beaten the U boats, sketching the history of the Saint Leger, describing how Lloyds worked, predicting the weather in the channel and diagnosing where Bottomley had made his mistake. And quite suddenly sitting in the shelter, down near the Black Rock, looking out to sea, he had burst into tears. It was Doris, he said; if he were to be prosecuted, it would kill her. But it wasn’t for Doris that Gladys agreed; it was because of an awful vision she had of his body, the hairy chest and legs she knew so well, the strong thighs that had so often gripped her, covered by a ridiculously baggy, too large coarse canvas suit patterned with broad arrows, like
something
in
Punch.
She didn’t know whether they dressed convicts up like that, probably not, but the vivid picture was enough to make her say yes. Can’t help loving that man of mine.

*

Questions breed questions. Stretching her thin, veined, old powdered arm out of her blue wool bedjacket Mrs Ahrendt took the cup of hot milk her husband brought her. Her voice was wheezy, for the flatlet was draughty.

‘But why don’t you ask her for an answer? You are too trusting, Hermann. Surely we have at least learned that no one is to be trusted.’

Her eyelids blinked at him, the curve of her sunken mouth was querulous, Mr Ahrendt, shuffling in his bedroom slippers, went into the sitting-room through the great wide opening where the sliding doors had once been – the landlady said how big this made the room, their old bodies told them how cold. He carefully wound up the ornate green marble Biedermeier Clock before he spoke – they had clung to it sentimentally, since Miss Matthews had told him they would get so little for it. Then he said: