No Laughing Matter (6 page)

*

Half past one, tense, bitter, yet weeping, she had refused his escort, and now unaccustomedly but quite firmly she opened for herself the door of a taxi with her long, elegant white gloved hand. The breeze caught her gold embroidered black evening cape for a moment. It billowed outwards and she shivered. Rapidly she paid the fare, and refusing a demand for more, cut short the unequal wrangle by taking
out of her silver gilt evening bag her silver police whistle. She had hardly put it to her lips before the taxi had gone. Even so small a triumph made her for a moment forget her terrible mixed grief and rage. She walked up the front steps quite gaily. Only the usual
temptation
to slam the front door made her remember how angry, how desperate she was. Yet to enjoy a banged door brought an intolerable risk of facing in her terrible mood anyone, anyone at all who might wake, but worst of possibilities – Billy, woken from sleep in the bed in his dressing-room. She took off her silver dancing shoes and carried them in one hand as she mounted the stairs.

But however gently you come, my darling, however softly you tread, my love, I shall hear your bitch’s steps. Rupert counted them as she climbed the two flights to her bedroom, heard the door click to and bitter-sweet smiled to think how, undressing, she would caress her own body where her lover’s hands had stroked. Good luck to her, since the white slug had never given her what she needed. And damn her too for cheapening the name of mother. Sensing the shape of his own limbs in the bed – hard calves and thighs, long legs, small hips, hard flat belly and wide shoulders, and now a proud erection – he thought how at last he was grown her equal in beauty, and soon (for the last shall be first) would outstrip her, aged, haggard and dried. Meanwhile they were almost a perfect match. ‘Lord, Sir, to think my great lubberly son should grow into such a one as you, as pleasing and wanton a young fellow as a gentlewoman (somewhat past the spring time) could wish to keep her out of the draughts on a cold December night…. But the triumph of the evening was Mr Rupert Matthews’s playing of the young bully lover; it was a rare theatrical experience to watch the man grow from the boy as the evening progressed, even his frame seemed to fill out, and his step to announce an ever firmer resolution. Miss Madge Titheradge brought her usual experienced playing to the part of the older desperate mistress, but it was Mr Matthews’s evening. There was an autumn pathos in Miss Doris Keane’s ageing actress, warming herself sensually in the last rays of love’s sunshine, but Mr Matthews as the young musician, anxious to free himself from a hopeless passion, determined not to act caddishly towards the woman whose infatuation is
strangling
him, gave us the more terrible pathos of spring in his portrayal of youth’s first realization that life will not always allow us to be noble.’

‘And we in the theatre that night will always remember Mr Rupert Matthews’ … Mr Rupert Matthews … Mr Rupert Matthews, a handsome, passionate Romeo stepped on to the stage and on to a banana skin and fell on his arse, the silly sod! Pleased by his own sudden self-mockery, Rupert fell into a sweet sleep, cocooned in his blankets on the nursery floor.

*

Half past two. And down the road she comes. With a too ral, too ral, aye, does your Ma know you’re out? Swing, swing, how the bleeding pavements swing. Steady, me little cock sparrer. Hold on to the railing. Whoops she goes! All to feed the fishes. Christ, what’s that? There he comes, my own little Bobby, swinging his truncheon, helmet and all. Smash his helmet over his bloody nose, crying, ‘Wotcher, cock?’ Only she didn’t; holding herself very refined and speaking all la di da, ‘Goodnaite, constable,’ she said. And all the answer clatter, clank echoing down the empty street. Blasted swine couldn’t have the manners to reply, eh? Oh absolutelah, don’t cher know? Archibald? Certainly not. With his hand in his pocket too on duty. Ma, look at Charlie, whoops, ees at it again. Not that she’d say no, herself. What about it, cock, lend us the end of your finger? But they wouldn’t lend you a sausage, not one of them, the bleeders. Not if your name
was
Henrietta Stoker, mother unknown, probably titled, six years with the Honourable Mrs Pitditch-Perkins, French cooking trained with Monsieur Jooles what had been at the Savoy. Oh, Lord, up she comes! Oh Jesus help me, Jesus help me, Let me
to thy bosom fly, While the gathering waters roll … yes, and five years going to the Stockwell High Road Sunday School. Treated like dirt by the lot of them. Regan do this, Regan do that. Lend us a quid, Regan. Regan, darling, have you got a pound handy? My name’s Henrietta, I’ll thank you. Forty-six. Forty-eight. Tradesmen owed everywhere, the guvnor boozed everynight, and she can’t keep her legs shut. Oh, the yanks are coming, the yanks are coming. Well, they came every night up
that
street. Fifty-two. Home in port. Who says there’s not a God to answer prayers? Oh, who done that? One of them filthy tarts most like. On the steps of our home too. Filthy trollopy lot. If that constable done his job instead of…. Oh, if Madam were to see. This is the home of Mr and Mrs William Matthews. And the young ladies. Their eldest a Major and wounded but not decorated. And Master Rupert, handsome as Lewis Waller, handsomer. And Master Marcus that goes to Westminster School regular or nearly. And they call me their old Regan, bless their hearts. A regular old cockney I am and one of the family. Make them laugh a caution sometimes. Oh Ria she’s a toff, darn’t she look immensikoff, and they all shouted, waatch Ria!

The singing disgusted Sukey before she was fully awake enough to distinguish what it was. Well, living in this sordid little street they had no need to worry about neighbours. It was to be hoped that all the family would be wakened by it, by their beloved cockney
character
, whose filthy hands and drunken breath they appreciated so much all over their food. At least from what she learned at the cookery school, although with fees unpaid she was little more than a scullion to Miss Lampson, she could occasionally prepare a clean, healthy meal at home when that drunken old creature had taken herself off for the evening. French cooking! Horrible, rich, greasy stuff, and unpatriotic too with butter from heaven knew where and hoarded sugar. Really sometimes she’d thought of telling the police about the dirty old creature, if it hadn’t been that the family would be involved. But, of course, the family wouldn’t be involved – not
them
,
at any rate. They’d he black that they knew nothing of it and let the dirty old wretch go to prison for them, for their greed. And suddenly she found herself sobbing uncontrollably. She buried her face in the pillow so as not to wake Margaret. Margaret who understood people and would put Regan into a book as a comic cockney charwoman, but who did not wake up when the poor, dreadful old thing came lost
and stumbling down the area steps, singing some ghastly tune once recognizable no doubt when a girl, all ostrich feathers and boa, she’d sung it up in the gallery, but now the tuneless dirge of a drunken old crone. Sukey’s limbs began to tremble and totter as she felt Regan’s must do, lost and stumbling, on the scrapheap. The physical sense of being Regan disgusted her. It was this that she couldn’t stand any longer in this sordid home, this terrible pity to no purpose, pity for people who were on the scrapheap, in the dustbins, the drunken, dirty old Regan, and him rambling and maudlin in the evenings to forget failure, and her in her rage for the loss of her body’s youth. She wanted to give love and pity where it could be used, where it could make things grow. To a real family where you never felt alone. To a husband with his life before him, to children asking to be shaped, to plants, to animals, small animals. She thought of the kittens that she had watched sleeping under the stairs before she came to bed, her kittens, the kittens she had rescued, and from the memory of their curled-up innocence she found herself stepping out through the french windows and across the lawn, followed by small things of all kinds and down into the kitchen garden to cut the lettuces for tea, and then, putting on gumboots and jackets and scarves in the lobby, to set off in the frosty moonlight to aid the cowman at calving time. Reverently competent with the newborn calves, practical with the sensible cowman, she turned to receive the faithful parlourmaid’s message— ‘The master says, Madam, will you be long?’ Oh, he who can’t be left alone! Turning, she went back in smiling woman’s
conspiracy
with Ada (yes that would be her name) to the house. Smiling, she snuggled over on to her side and slept, the little ones of all kinds following.

*

Four o’clock, the Aussie at No. 51 woke from a drunken sleep to find French Fifi going through his pockets. Leaning across the bed he hit her once very hard with the flat of his hand across her face. Her scream rang out across the street.

Marcus woke suddenly, soldered tight with terror, powerless to move or utter. Yet surely it was his own scream that had woken him. For some seconds the gipsy’s dark, bony laughter still menaced him, and around her the soft grey mist sweetly offered him escape to treacherous safety. Then the threat of her raised arm faded before he could tell what horrid club she held above him. But the fading
nightmare 
did not at once release him; he could not so soon turn his head to assure himself of his bunk’s familiar safety. At last the wheezy breathing of his stranger brother lying across the room in Rupert’s bed relaxed his muscles. He followed the beams of moonlight to where they bathed Granny M.’s old screen of varnished scrap work in a shiny pool. In the sudden light he could distinguish nothing, but knew the two splashes of red for the robin in the top left-hand corner and the bunch of cherries in the bottom right. How the robin had changed for him over the years. At first just a robin who visited a wren. Then in turn, a robber robin (straight from Grimm), a robin rag and bone boy (slum chum he sometimes dreamed of), a Regency roué robin (straight from the Scarlet Pimpernel) and now again – parody of a Victorian screen Robin – the robin who visited crippled little Jenny Wren who would never grow quite strong enough to quit the nest. From these scraps of colour in the colour scraps he followed the cold light back again to the window, where, reflected on the ceiling, it revealed, in all their now fading outlines, the Double Hooded Crow and the Woman with the Club Foot – visitors that had appeared when the cistern above had burst a week before his sixth birthday. The chain of stories these two shapes unfolded was longer and far more intricate than the sagas of the screen, for here he commanded all, source and ballad too, so that the Crow in certain lights could become the Bearded Emperor and the Woman’s Club Foot turn into a Mermaid’s Tail. But as so often, now he put childish tales aside and dwelt only upon the forms themselves, making wilder and wilder arabesques, ever more involuted spirals, draping the room in sables and furs and crimson velvets, adorning it with domes and minarets, until at last it was Scheherazade’s room and not his own at all, except that there in the centre of the gorgeous East he sat,
cross-legged
, round eyed (a page, a mommet, Scheherazade herself,
slave-master
-mistress) crowned absurdly, fantastically, wonderfully with a vast jewelled tiara almost his own height again; and there, like Venice, he held all this splendour, this gaiety, this nonsense in fee. Until he could build his own world, the familiar ugliness of 52 must be his plasticine. Stretching his small thin legs and arms, feeling his own wiriness against the hard wire mattress of the small bunk bed, he turned on his side to meet whatever the nightmare world had ready for him.

Six o’clock. Billy Pop tried every position of cosy warmth he knew to counteract the increasing pressure of his overfull bladder, but at last he was forced to get up and make use of the chamber pot. He did so, as always, kneeling beside his bed; this and saying the Lord’s Prayer at night in the same kneeling position were rituals he had maintained from his childhood. He had first been made conscious of their absurdity by the Countess ‘mockery in their early married days when they still shared the double room. On this coldish morning in the solitude of the little dressing-room where he now slept, he thought of it again, because in returning from the club last night he had managed to bruise his left knee. It would have been more comfortable to pec standing up, but he somehow felt unable to do so, for he connected the kneeling position in his mind, as he did the Lord’s Prayer and bowing whenever you saw a piebald horse, with good luck. And God knew he was a man who could ill afford to dispense with any luck that might be going. Not that but good luck might well be running his way again, for last night at the club Murphy of Locke, Harrap had spoken to him for the first time since that unpleasant business in the war over the contract –’ When are you giving the world another, Matthews?’ he had asked. Non-committal of course; these people were fundamentally business men. Murphy had added that historical romances were two a penny these days, but good historical novels were as precious as rubies. He had said, of course, that he was busy with his memoirs. But the conversation was pleasant to dwell on – After all, we can all do with a fillip now and again; the confirmation of talent, the belief that we have the goods to deliver. We bring nothing into the world, and it is certain that we can carry nothing out. May be. But in between, man, being the sort of animal he is, does need a little coddling now and again.