No Laughing Matter (72 page)

They could all agree on this basic tenet. So that when they were set down by the town gate and could see only the long, cool shaded streets that ran in dark symmetrical lines among the bright blue and white buildings – lines broken only here by a clump of white robed men seated on the ground around a reader, and there by a ginger torn stalking a tortoiseshell queen – the exhaustion and crossness of a too late Marrakesh night, of diesel fumes, of gritty winds blowing up into the lorry and of bruising jolts across the desert road, all went from them in a moment.

‘Isn’t it super?’ Adam asked.

‘It’s marvellous not to have to pretend,’ Lucilla announced.

‘I pretended most at that Gladys’s in Portugal in that foul street of English villas,’ Polly told them.

‘Oh, did you? I pretended most in that awful Tangiers at that friend of your mother’s who talked about that Barbara Hutton all the time,’ Lucilla countered.

‘If either of you call that pretence,’ Humpy said, ‘I hope you’re not going to be frank.’

‘Never mind. This uncle will be super rich. He gave all the Klees and Kandinskys to the Tate. It’ll all be Hammams and sherbet and imported caviar and dancing girls here.’

‘Dancing boys,’ Lucilla corrected.’ Grandmother gave me a lecture about his tastes. She seemed to think because she used to be on the stage that she was the only one who knew of such things. Not that any actors I know are queer. It’s just one of those things people say.’

Humpy, pointing at the girls said, ‘We’d better leave
them
behind, Adam. They can come later when we’ve prepared the way.’

But Polly wouldn’t have it. ‘I shall convert him,’ she said, imitating
the awful, pious Mary Hedges. ‘It’s what God intended me for.’

Following Adam’s directions read out from the plan that Marcus had sent they were all giggling so much as they turned the corner between the high white houses that they tripped over the cables of the television unit van.

In a space where the sun cut the shaded street at a sharp angle a young man in flowered shirt and dark glasses clicked two boards together and announced, ‘Should They Emerge? Morocco. Mogador. Take Four.’ Walking towards the camera, pressed upon from behind by a mass of ragged small children, of adolescents, of cripples, and barking dogs, Q. J. Matthews was talking with every nuance of his now famous voice:

‘… this blue and white paradise built as a free city for infidels and Jews by the tolerant eighteenth-century sultan Mohammed the Seventeenth was designed on the model of Nancy or some other imitation Versailles of the autocratic French grand siècle by an
architect
from Avignon, a Christian prisoner and slave. What was once a small Portuguese fort – we shall see the remains of their fortress in a moment with its Spanish and Portuguese cannons, proud trophies of a time when the Barbary pirates terrorized all Christendom in the service of the Crescent – this small Portuguese fort was transformed into a strange hybrid of the busy, teeming, muddled, intensely live soul of the Moslem world and the cold straight verticals and
horizontals
of Western rationalism, of the so-called Enlightenment. So perhaps the French slave got his revenge on his Moslem master. Yet as a compromise, as a hybrid, it worked very well, resisting even the blazing cross fires of German and British and French Imperialism, of the famous Panther incident at Agadir, even the dreary version of la belle civilization that French colonialism sprinkled over its surface like those sad little villas and churches we saw coming along the plage – equivalents of the Peacehaven and Frinton life the British tried to impose on so much of Africa farther South. But will this beautiful little town, with its individual life, its colour, its illogicality, its poverty relieved by charity, its wealth tempered by almsgiving, survive the pressures of today? Already Mogador, under the decree of that ridiculous and competitive nationalism that now tyrannizes the Arab world, has changed its name to Essaouira – will it as progress descends upon it, emerge as some absurd African outpost of a
misunderstood
application of the totally irrelevant and mistaken
economic 
theories of the sage of Highgate cemetery? Or will it be granted the blessing of an equally irrelevant paradise of Coca Cola, topless dresses and feeble pop music?’

Above the drone of Quentin’s voice, on Marcus’s roof beneath a green umbrella Margaret sat, making notes for a new novel. She had the intention to shape into a short book – it was to be a psychological duet, hardly more than a novella – the strange recrudescences of violent sexual passion that Douglas had shown in the last two months of his life in that furnished flat in Onslow Gardens. ‘To oppose the intense animality of his desires fighting against physical weakness to my own response so intensely motivated by love and affection but supported
physically
only by my own healthy, strong body.’ The pattern of antithesis was there and surely the emotions, the reality she had known then, were all too powerful. Her fear only was of some grand guignol which would be a monstrous blasphemy, or even that she would fall into Gothic ornamentation to supply the place of remembered reality. It could emerge as decadent, too, and with Douglas, of course, it just hadn’t been; there was nothing of Mirbeau’s femme de chambre in what he had determined to have before life was wrenched away from him or in the part she had tried to play. Damn, she thought, these wretched young people and double damn Quentin – all their overtones of life as it was being lived today were distracting incursions into what she needed to soak in if she were to recapture that past time whole and submit it to patterned discipline. Above all, she mustn’t spare
herself
:
she
had
pretended, however worthy the motive. She had done the right thing but it
had
been a blasphemy. And then her making it into a story – what of that? She
must
not spare herself. Why not enclose the whole novella in a self-satire of the woman writer whose only passion had been feigned? No, that was too artificial and not true. She stared away across the plage where the black crow women paced to and fro at the water’s edge, far over to where the ruins of the Vizier’s palace were sinking every day a little farther beneath the sand. So had sunk Douglas’s kind bones and gentle lines – and she alone by absolute concentration of memory, absolute until the head ached, could recall them to life. But her thoughts were distracted by a scaly place on the crook of her arm, her whole skin was scaling these days and, despite the cream Marcus had given her, had dried, over the years, in the heat. Lady into Lizard! – oh, the shame of old
age when the mind could no longer keep straight ahead, no matter what the hurdles.

In the vast house – three spacious houses converted into one – there was carrying and fetching and running to and fro as if some monstrous creatures – vast beetles or cockroaches – had invaded an ants’ nest. Old Abdullah was directing the bedroom preparations, Omar the table laying, Leila, Hassan’s wife, had come in specially from their home in the souk – rare event – to superintend, veiled, shrill and imperious, the rolling of the couscous. Hassan, himself, tall now and, though still slim, broad-shouldered, passed majestically from room to room to see that all had been done correctly. Hangings had been beaten here, tiles washed there, silver ware polished, leather wall hangings sponged and, because Marcus ordained it, all the great cedarwood chests opened to scent the air. Hassan knew that neither Marcus nor Margaret felt as they should about this entertainment of members of their rarely seen family; but Marcus, at least, had enough of the needed sense of decorum to agree that Quentin and these young people should be received with ceremony suitable for
relatives
, however little they might appreciate it.

The thought of this divided, incoherent, unloving family made Hassan doubly content as he went about his superintendence, for here everyone, except for the Berber gardener who watered the roof plants, was a member of his own family; and Leila who, he could hear, was directing his cousins with energy in the cooking of the now perfectly light and separated couscous, was pregnant with his third child. Mr Hamid Bekkai, the factory manager, who had come with some accounts for Marcus to check, darted out of a dark, cool corner, to ask if Monsieur Marcus was not yet ready to see him – he had been waiting for over an hour, the day was declining, one of the new foremen, a man unwisely hired from El Jaddidah, was not to be trusted, perhaps a thief. Hassan gave him another cup of coffee and said that M’sieur Matthews would be with him in five minutes. He did not really think this likely, for he knew the loquacity of his own great uncle M’Barek ben Ibrahim, who had arrived suddenly from the South and was telling Marcus of his experiences in the French Army of the First World War.

Marcus, indeed, was curled up among cushions, attentively inclined towards the old man’s voluble story of his sergeant days, of Cateau Cambrésis and Soissons and German prisoners, of Monsieur Le
Colonel, of a visit to the Eiffel Tower and of the training camp at Melun. He plied him continually with mint tea and from time to time exclaimed loudly in interest, but in his head he was composing a letter to the U.M.T. and another to the Caid on the subject of Moroccan cooperation in his new scheme of hospital benefits for his workers.

‘Since Plantagenet Perfume Limited is in no sense a profit making enterprise …’ even after five years he regularly repeated this phrase for which, with Hassan, he had after months found a flowery Arabic near translation. There was still something so incredible in its actuality to Moroccan ears, whether Trade Union or Government, that the mere repetition softened them up for his requests, suspicious and minatory though they still remained about the whole affair.

But now M’Barek ben Ibrahim had ended his story of the
disobedient
Austrian prisoners, and the proper attention of one hour had been given to this honourable old man who had risen and was bowing his impending departure. Yes, there would be just time to see Mr Bekkai before this tiresome, quite unnecessary family invasion came upon him; there was to be no question of the television people being entertained, he told Hassan. They could go to the hotel or to the café. The occasion was a family one.

Perhaps it was for this reason that Polly and Humpy felt a little out of it. Polly, as usual, just wandered away, so that Humpy was left to observe the strange scene while Q. J. Matthews talked on, the only addition to his television performance being some curious movements of his arms and hands that suggested a Burmese dance. Humpy lay back into a succubus of cushions and wallowed after the hardships of the last two days. Everything was thick and lush and colourful, although there were none of the famous pictures, only some wonderfully living, bright drawings of negro slaves and Turkish sultans. But the dust and the mustiness, the sense that everything – all this velvet and silk and leather and silver – had been mouldering away in a heavily perfumed caravanserai for years and leagues of
camel-journeying
, overcame Humpy with slight nausea. What the others must be feeling he could only guess, for he was supposed to be the untidy, dirty one of the party. And in this heavily scented dust lived or rather temporarily dwelt these three strange saurians. Q. J. Matthews, of course, was the expected iguana or gecko with his crest of hair, his long thin body, his hooded eyes; yet one could tell
he was no true saurian because of his endless talk and choric – yes, that’s what they were, Greek choric – gestures. But the novelist woman Margaret Matthews who sat so absolutely grey and still and elongated, her dried cheek twitching occasionally, her eyelids blinking when, as rarely, she spoke, was the motionless lizard as her other brother, their host, was the active, busy one. In and out of the room he darted, now here, now there, wearing a big fur pelisse and a scarlet cashmere shawl wound round his head, although the
temperature
inside was only cool by comparison with the sun’s baking heat – but he was never warm, he told them. As how should he be,
emaciated
almost to dried skin and bone except for his huge, lively dark eyes looking into every corner at once and his little tongue that constantly leapt out to moisten his lips. For the most part he only seemed anxious to dissociate himself from the modern world with his quick, angry little questions. That, and a kind of mad, turbulent etiquette which Humpy thought must have reigned at the Red Queen’s court or that of Christina of Sweden. In their first moments of arrival he had insisted on exact introductions and had them repeated to the
innumerable
clients, relatives and guests who were clustered about the great room. There he presented a silent very old man lost in the shadows of an alcove with the greatest show of respect, Abdullah ben Seddiq; then he silenced a knot of arguing young men standing in a doorway – ‘Hassan’s cousins – Mohamed, Ahmed, Hamid – the same name only different if you see what I mean – and Ibrahim and Ali.’ On and on it seemed to go, name after name, until at last he lost patience – either with this vast array of tea drinking visitors or with himself. He waved his one hand at two youths and said, ‘And those are Tiddley and Tom Tom, some cousins of Hassan’s mother’s cousins. I can’t remember their names.’ And then waving his other hand he said, ‘And those people I’m not speaking to.’ He said
something
in Arabic to them that sent them rapidly away. ‘I can’t think where Hassan is. He might introduce the ladies of the party to his wife if you ask him nicely,’ he told Lucilla.

To his brother Q. J. Matthews he said: ‘Emergent? What do you mean? It doesn’t sound very nice. Sounds like an enema to me. If you mean the drainage isn’t perfect, you’re quite right. Oh, is that what they
call
us? Well, don’t start pulling us too quickly into your horrid world. Beatles and beatniks! – terrible creatures, they look like lady novelists with their fringes. Sorry Margaret darling, but
you know what I mean, dead ones like Sheila Kaye Smith, Anyway the men here have very short hair
and
shave off the pubic We’ve got enough real beetles and a horrible thing called Pepst-Cola as it is.’