No Laughing Matter (55 page)

‘If we have learned that, my dear, then that man really has
destroyed
us. But you’re tired. Drink your milk. Shall I rub your chest with some camphorated oil?

But in the morning when he brought her coffee and a roll she asked immediately again: ‘Will you go to Miss Matthews this
morning
? Just ask her, that’s all, just ask her.’

‘She has told me, Käthe, the experts are looking at it. Anyway what is it? Some copy, my dear. These religious pictures were copied in hundreds.’ The subject, Christ’s agony in the garden, annoyed him; when so much greater agonies were a commonplace today!

Perhaps it was the cold she’d caught, or perhaps it was because, after all, it wasn’t her fault that they were here in this draughty hole – she was a Christian of Christian lineage and the Christian religion familiar to her – for whatever reason she didn’t know, Mrs Ahrendt began to cry. And, since he could do nothing, Mr Ahrendt picked up his black velours hat and his string bag and went out to Swiss Cottage to buy the week’s groceries. The old lady called after him – so many years they had been together, he was her man. But no answer and even in bed it was so cold.

*

Rupert asked: ‘Look, if I cross now, Belch won’t be able to move upstage when he leaves the seesaw without masking the clown. Shouldn’t I cross later on my exit lines?’

And, all right, they tried it. So, moving, he would rebuke Maria; moving he would warn her ‘she shall know of it by this hand’. But his thoughts were how to join this arrogant, self-righteous and, with it all, favour-currying man with the pathos, no, not the pathos,
something
much stronger, the abominable horror of ‘in a dark chamber adjoining’. If he could not do this, all movements were meaningless for he would move no one. The Elizabethan conception of lunatics? – I am not mad, Sir Topas. I say to you, this house is dark. Ha, ha, ha! dark as ignorance, though ignorance were dark as hell. Ha, ha, ha! But I am not mad, Sir Topas – And – if he were, he hath been most notoriously abused. Not perhaps ha, ha, ha! but finally greeted with a gentle smile, my lady’s dismissive little shrug and pitying
after-glance
. Puritanism? Remember the abhorrence in which the puritans were held, but quite suddenly he
couldn’t
‘remember’ something three centuries before he was born. Is’t even so? – old Norman’s voice, thick, but he hadn’t really got there, simply superficially a drunken voice. He
couldn’t
remember the abhorrence in which … Sir Toby, there you lie. Sir Toby, there you lie … Rupert! Rupert! … I’m terribly sorry, I’ve dried. Do you mind then, Nigel asked in a slightly bored, almost angry voice, if we take it all again? Act 2, Scene 3, from your entrance, Rupert – My masters, are you mad? And
were
they? Was that it? To laugh at a man in hell. And again, I’m sorry
I’ve dried. And twice again Nigel, in bored, angry voice asked, Do you mind if we take it all again? At last lie said, All right, let’s break for lunch. Two fifteen sharp.

And to Rupert, after explanation and exhortation and
encouragement
and censure that flew in and out amid the smocked waitresses and wooden soupbowls of the snack bar, ‘Look, love, is it Debbie?’ And it wasn’t, though it was clever of Nigel to have surmised, for really the shadow on the hearth was so faint that, himself, he almost thought it was his fancy. No, it was – ‘How do I join the two
Malvolios
?’ he asked, ‘how can I make them connect?’ And Nigel, who had been into all that – the ‘humour’ of Malvolio, the anachronism of psychological unity in Shakespeare – said, with as much disguise of weariness as he could muster (for it was probably some mental
blockage
and would work itself out in rehearsals) ‘I think you can only do it, Rupert, if you give the character enough love!’ Then, embarrassed by the echo of the words in this coffee-smelling shop of wooden tables, wooden spoons and wooden-faced women, he added, ‘The effect of those yellow stockings alone in
this
production, my dear! For it was to be done, save for Malvolio’s stockings, in black and white. So Rupert tried giving love to the bullying and self-esteem and the pomposity. He loved himself as he averred, ‘Infirmity that decays the wise, doth ever make the better fool’ and as he announced, ‘She added, moreover’ and as he conceded, ‘If you can separate yourself from your misdemeanours.’ And with love, it was true, he stopped ‘drying’ and he fancied that his voice had seldom sounded better; he was, he could not help thinking, giving some real poetry to the part. Once, it seemed to him, hearing his own rich tones, that he had found a certain nobility. Anyhow they would not reach darkness and hell until tomorrow and before that, Debbie would know, Debbie would succour him.

For it had been – and this had seemed its own reward – a red letter day for Debbie when he told her he’d agreed to do Malvolio. She had taken over that evening from May in the kitchen and cooked specially for him as she had not done for ages, rognons Bercy and omelette confiture. She had toasted him, ‘May you be blessed in the Bard’ which was a phrase that the ridiculous old pro whose wife was their landlady in Sheffield had used the week they became engaged. And Tanya and little Christopher had been cleared out of the way early that evening. He had read aloud to her after dinner as she sat
at his feet in front of the great log tire – ‘O sing the Lord a new song; sing unto the Lord all the earth’, and again, ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.’ Not that they were religious – although since Tanya had been old enough Debbie had taken her to Sunday School and sometimes herself went to matins. But Debbie had long thought that the Psalms were the most lovely pure language in our literature; and such a perfect vehicle for Rupert’s voice. And they had drunk between them a whole bottle of her home-made sloe gin. But this evening when he returned, panting for comfort, from rehearsal, not to Sunningdale but to the Bedford Square flat, Debbie was reading aloud to Tanya and
Christopher
a book most suited to
her
voice.

‘“Smooth and hot. Red, rusty spot never here be seen.” Oh!’ she looked up and smiled at her husband. ‘
Mrs
Tiggywinkle
,
darling,’ she said.

‘As if I didn’t know.’

But his smile was effaced for she put her finger to her lips and frowned. To her amusement Tanya and even little Christopher did the same. When Rupert came back from washing she had begun, at Tanya’s importunate request,
Jeremy
Fisher.

‘This is getting tiresome. I think I should like some lunch, said Mr Jeremy Fisher,’ she read. The drollery she gave the word tiresome grated cruelly upon Rupert’s actor’s nerves. Later, however, when the children made a scene over Nanny’s taking them to bed, she was quite firm. ‘No, you’ve had me all the afternoon. Now it’s Daddy’s turn. You don’t want Daddy to be forgotten, do you?’ As soon as the door had closed behind them she came up to Rupert and, holding him by his lapels, stood back and looked at him.

‘Tired?’ she asked and answered herself, ‘Yes. Definitely tired.’ She at once mixed a superb dry martini. At dinner she insisted that he kept most of the mushrooms for himself, though he knew that she loved them.

‘Well?’ she asked, when with the tangerines she could see that he was no longer hungry, ‘Has Nigel been tiresome?’

And he felt soothed by her putting it in this way, but then, as, taking his coffee, he sat down on the sofa a hard, edgy object jabbed him in the small of his back. Rummaging, he took out one of
Christopher’s
bricks, and resented her tactful approach to his mood.

‘No, why should he have been?’

And now, delving deeper, he brought to light a small celluloid swan for floating in baths.

‘This flat is really too small for children.’

‘But you always like to have me in London for the first rehearsals, darling.’

‘I said, the flat’s too small for children.’

‘I’m sorry, but while Christopher has these nightmares I am not going to leave them down at Sunningdale.’

‘What on earth do we pay Nanny for?’

‘What she can do. But she can’t dispel Christopher’s nightmares.’

‘We all had nightmares at 52. I can’t remember the Countess doing a lot of dispelling.’

‘I don’t suppose so, darling. She was probably
in
them all.’

He hated her to talk of the Countess; it made her seem petty. And the Countess’s hand had touched his as he had lunched her at the Ivy last Friday. ‘So, it’s Shakespeare now,’ she had said. ‘And you could have been playing in that very funny
French
Without
Tears which everyone says is going to run for years. Debbie should have been a schoolmistress.’ She had looked extraordinarily elegant and slim; he had really enjoyed her evident delight with the whitebait. He got up and poured himself out a brandy.

‘I’m not going to be able to do it. So you’d better make up your mind to that. Oh, I’ll give a performance, but I just don’t connect. What is the connexion between a pompous ass and a wretch groaning in hell?’

And all her answers were Nigel’s.

‘After all, darling, the Elizabethans weren’t exactly tender about lunatics. They thought them funny. And in a sort of way I suppose they are. Surely, Malvolio’s a kind of “humour”. He’s not meant to be filled out or anything.’ And she went on, ‘Oh, no, darling, I’m sure you can’t apply all that
modern
psychology to Shakespeare. You’re looking for consistency, but he gives us something much more, he gives us poetry.’

‘You mean he couldn’t create character?’

‘Oh, really, darling, I’m not going to …’

So they read the whole play through together. And she took great trouble going over every Malvolio speech with him, trying to show how it all fused on the language level. At last:

‘Well, try giving it love, darling,’ she said.

She was near tears, lie knew, but he refused to relent. He would not now be faced with this problem if it were not for her ambitious approval.

‘I don’t see … and I don’t see,’ he said, ‘That’s all there is to it. How can I give love to such a self-centred, time-serving old bore? I don’t have that much love in me.’

When she got up from her chair the first signs of her slightly swelling belly caught his attention. By the New Year there would be swollen legs again, he thought, and her face would acquire that look of a perpetual cold. Indeed it was so now as she turned at the door. She was crying.

‘Well, why don’t you try self-love?’ she asked, ‘You’ve got enough of that and to spare.’

*

And was Marcus, too, Mary Clough asked, going all political,
becoming
, in fact, a bore? And Rex Clough who’d never liked him
remarked
, it wasn’t exactly the sort of arrest they’d all been expecting for him sooner or later, was it? Andrew Crosby-Grieves, whose Matthew Smith Marcus had refused for the exhibition, asked whether the whole thing, arrest and all, wasn’t just a stunt. I mean surely, he said, weren’t his parents circus performers before Jack picked him up? I mean isn’t he the most terrific exhibitionist? I mean look at those awful baroque objects, nobody who really cared about painting in a serious way would have that Magnasco, would they? And Beatrix and Simon Dickerby, who adored the Marie Laurencin and the Cocteau drawings, asked surely the Picassos and Legers meant that he and Jack must be Communists, or were they wrong? Lady Westerton asked herself, would it be a mistake to go to this year’s green ball? Jews and tapettes and being arrested and so on. She would hardly know how to justify her presence there to Colonel Deniston. Not, of course, that he would know – he never went into society except to address meetings. But the Ribbentrops might hear of it. Damn! Social life was gettin’ less instead of more easy as she herself got older and more tired.

But, perhaps, all their friends would have agreed with the Countess had they known and heard her, though some would have hesitated to use the word. ‘Really, Billy,’ she cried when she read it in
The
Times
under the heading ‘Hooligans in Bermondsey’, ‘I can’t bear it. How could a son of mine be so common?’

This was the feeling of Ted and Madge, for they asked what did he want to get mixed up with that lot for? Black shirts! Madge said, well who cared about them? That was what she wanted to know. Let them march if they were so daft. But blocking up the streets, throwing crackers at poor dumb horses, shouting and screaming so that baby damn near cried herself into a fit, jostling poor old Mrs Barnaby at no. 40 when she was coming back from the Church Hall, what sort of behaviour was that? And Ted said, too, did they think the South of the River boys didn’t know how to take care of themselves? Coming in like that, a lot of foreigners! A bloke he knew had shown him where it said in the
Daily
Mail
–
wait a minute he’d got the cutting – ‘a large number of men of swarthy complexion, some wearing clothes of obviously foreign cut’ – well, all right, who asked them? Yids from Stepney and Whitechapel! As to Black Shirts, ignore the buggers. What did you do mixing up with them excepting putting yourself on a level with their lot? Well, wasn’t it true? They weren’t clever, Madge said, but they knew better than to behave like a lot of kids. Well, hadn’t he? Honestly. Go on, own up. All right, Ted said, so the Blackshirts
did
want to clear the Yids out. Well, that was the Yids’ business, wasn’t it? They’ll help each other right enough. Everybody knew that. Yes, said Madge, and she asked, what have they done for you, Markie, anyway? At that moment Ted gave Marcus a come on, lustful, knowing look that changed almost at once to contemptuous hatred (were they the same look at one and the same time was the question that remained in Marcus’ mind for years to come). Yeah, answer that one. Go on, what have they done for you? He owes every bloody thing to a Jew. He’d have to lick the bloody rabbi’s arse if his jewboy pansy friend told him to. I don’t know, Madge said, refilling the family teapot, that’s between you and him, Ted. I don’t want to hear about it. I’ve always been pleased to see you, Markie, you know that. And like you’ve said it’s a bit of warmth and home for you away from that ladida lot. But what I can’t make out is what you think of us, making us the talk of the Mansions, with Mrs Dyer saying that was your posh friend wasn’t it that used that language? Arthur’s been so good always, but what does he think of us, he said to me, when he eard, mixing us up with that lot?