No Laughing Matter (74 page)

‘There you are. I said it was all right. But they said it sounded as though I were calling you a good read.’

Humpy then got up courage to ask Marcus about the scent factory. He wasn’t interested so much in the cooperative, social angle as the technical process and the original idea.

‘There wasn’t much to
that
.
Portuguese broom flourishes all over the dunes. It was just a question of extraction and marketing.
Everyone
said the English and Americans would want a French name, but I risked Plantagenet and it worked. All those old queens in wimples made such wonderful advertisements. I wanted to put in Edward the Second but business and fun don’t mix. The real work was persuading the Moroccans that I wasn’t going to exploit them. And perhaps that’ll never really be done.’

He even promised delightedly to show Humpy round the factory on their return. Polly only had an apology to make. ‘It seems I was rude in not staying and listening to Q. J. Matthews, but you see it was so like the tele and part of my breakdown connects with my parents watching tele all the time.’

‘Oh, my dear,’ Marcus cried, excusing her, but he turned to Margaret, ‘I really
am
worried about the poor old thing, Margaret. He’s over seventy, you know. Flying about like a bat to Singapore and God knows where to keep the wolf from the door.’

Margaret and all the others assured him that Quentin was very well paid in both money and in the adoration of viewers.

‘Oh, perhaps! But at
that
age! Hotels and aeroplanes! I should die. Not that I
can
do much. We don’t like each other, so I can’t possibly offer money …’

When the young people had gone, Margaret, although she was really intent on her novel, felt somehow too elated to leave the
conversation
alone. To her surprise punctual Marcus, too, although due for a morning visit to the factory, sat down and ordered fresh coffee. They agreed about the niceness of the four young people.

‘Of course, one likes being liked,’ Margaret said.

‘They probably didn’t really like us, my dear. No young
generations
do like their elders. But they had such good manners.’

As they drank coffee she meditated, ‘Why are they so much nicer than we were?’

‘Are they? The young are always attractive. It’s like drowned people. When you’re first drowned, nothing could look nicer. Think of that Ophelia of Millais. There’s a
nice
girl for you. Or that woman of Tennyson’s drifting down to Camelot. But we’ve been rolled about, thrown on to beaches, dashed against rocks and all the rest of it. You can’t expect old people to be very
nice
.’

‘I suppose not.’ Margaret’s mind was on her book, but she couldn’t find the energy to move. ‘Oh, dear, what does it all mean, Marcus?’

The inanity of the question underlined the inertia Marcus wanted to resist.

‘Oh! for Christ’s sake! Don’t let your success with youth turn your head! You can’t sit there at sixty-five asking the questions of a moony girl of sixteen.’

Margaret flared up. ‘Your malice is detestable, Marcus. All through your life it’s been the same. Restless, impetuous, never stopping for thought, destroying wherever you go like a greedy hen.’

He felt the attack as intolerable and unfair.

‘And
you
just sit on life with your bony bottom until you’ve
pulverized
it into sand.’

Margaret took her notebook away from the house, she felt too angry to work there. She walked for a while in the Souk to calm down amid the familiar shouts and chatter, the smell of offal and warm blood and rotting oranges and cedar wood, the pressure of the milling crowd, until at last she had to jump out of the way of a jingling victoria. How can he say it? What nonsense when all this press of people, this living human mass is what I feed upon! Affirmed, she went up on to the fortifications to write. She sat on the white stone battlements among the baroque cannons and stared out across the ocean. A typical Mogador wind had succeeded the intense still heat of the day before. Atlantic waves were thrashing and flaying the huge boulders below. As far as she could view great white horses leapt and were engulfed in the glaciers of green water. This sea with its constant movement and energy was as much part of her as the desert, whatever Marcus might say. She breathed in the salt wind. If
she were to give herself to the ocean she would be rolled on and on until she came to the New World, to Eldorado, to the noble savages, to life renewed.

Marcus had his say at the factory – a competent, expeditious but that day a rather ‘scratchy’ sort of say. Yet he could not return home. He took his Peugeot out along the absurd little corniche, and by the cracked tarmac side road that led into the dunes. There he lay on his stomach in the hot sand among the broom bushes and pressed himself deeper and deeper into its dryness. After all these years that she should think that his farmyard hen business and good works were without any discipline, and what did they call it – pecking order? Didn’t she understand anything about self-discipline? know anything of how he had let himself be measured and dried by life until he was at peace with the hot sand?

In the house the voices raised, the quarrel of M’sieu Marcus and his sister, were a source of eager speculation. Omar, who was a slave of desires, thought that they had quarrelled over lust for one of the young people – who could say which? Abdullah thought that Marcus had been disciplining his sister’s unwomanly ways. Old M’Barek ben Ibrahim declared that the sight of the young people had made them both ashamed of their unnatural infertility. Openly Hassan agreed with this seemly solution, but to himself he gave a more modern answer. There was no doubt that the family visit had stirred the conscience of M’sieur Marcus and his sister; but their guilt was not the old Moslem one his great uncle thought. With the advent of M’sieur Q. J. Matthews so famous and rich, old Margaret must have regretted that she had refused to write for
Paris-Match
,
as she had one day to his horror confessed to him. And perhaps Marcus – his good, noble, kind, friend-might now see how absurd were these cooperative ideas at the factory. Perhaps he might even alter the foolish clause in his will by which the factory was to continue on these mad lines. Hassan, of course, could say nothing, for everything was left to him, so he could never speak of it. It was not as if, when he was owner, he would pay low wages or any foolish old-fashioned thing like that, if Marcus feared it; on the contrary Miracle Germany – Stuttgart, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt – all that he admired most in the modern world, even his favourite journal
Time
Magazine urged high wages, but also seemly ambition, high profits, and determined management.

Sir Angus Wilson (1913–91), one of Britain’s most distinguished novelists, was educated at Westminster and Merton College, Oxford. He joined the British Museum as a cataloguer before being called for service in 1941. His literary career began with a collection of short stories published in 1949. These were followed by other short-story collections, novels and plays.

Co-founder with Malcolm Bradbury of the MA programme in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, Wilson was appointed professor in 1967. He was chair of many literary panels, including the Booker Prize, and was a campaigner for homosexual equality. He was knighted in 1980.