Free No Laughing Matter by Angus Wilson

looked at him. ‘I don’t believe I’ve hurt you at all. What a ghastly little piece of nothing you’ve turned into.’
    He picked up the brogues and moved back to the door. She clenched the sheet tightly in both her hands. He thought she was going to scream. He said, ‘My dear girl, that won’t do any good.’
    ‘He’s going back,’ she shouted at him, ‘he’s going back. Next week. I hate every bone in his body.’
    He looked at her primly. ‘I suppose so. But you’ll get over it.’ He became aware suddenly both that he was smiling broadly and that his sudden, involuntary sincerity had goaded her into fury. He added, ‘The children will miss him.’ He sought for other benevolent phrases to restore their usual relationship. ‘We shall all miss his wonderful Yankee directness.’
    She seized the ivory box of cigarettes from the night table and flung it at his head. He ducked and it crashed against the wall, showering the floor with black, gold tipped Turks.
    ‘Oh Lord!’ He mocked her antics, but all the same he turned tail and fled. Her screams followed him. ‘Take your filthy smirk out of here. You gutless swine!’
    A crash below her bed woke Margaret suddenly. And then came the Countess’s screams to make her at once, as always, tense with renewed childhood terror. Slowly, practisedly she relaxed by means of the familiar stringing together of words. ‘If a certain cacophonous crying is the hallmark of Greek tragedy, Sophie Carmichael qualified for Clytemnestra herself, a role which she would dearly have loved to play if only in order to shock the bridge club gossips. Her adulteries, though suburban, could perhaps have passed for something more regal if only her husband, James, had been more worthy of Agamemnon’s role. As it was, thought their daughter Elizabeth, rudely awakened by parental quarrelling, their noise might as well be mice as Mycenae.’ Margaret relaxed but she was hardly content with the words. The long analogy was altogether too cumbrous, and the pretension of someone of her half-education scribbling about Agamemnon and Clytemnestra made her blush. Then through the words came a sudden intense vision of her mother’s bare shoulder, and with it the sensation of rubbing her cheek against it, of being squeezed in her mother’s arms, stroked by her mother’s cool, long-fingered hands. It was when she had fallen down on the rocks at Cromer and cut her forehead (the scar was still there, but hidden under her fringe). Her mother had responded at once, had whispered and kissed away her fright. Pity, if not love, nagged her. But she would never be able to reach them, never. At least she could bring them to life again in words that were more complete, more understanding, more just to her own comprehension of them than the flat self-protective ironies of her Carmichael writing. But first she must get away, far enough off to be fair and just and creative. In a room perhaps in the Adelphi (a real writers’ world from what she could tell) she would sit at her desk and words, exact and living, would flow from her pen like the river flowing past her window. Exactly, definitely, she relaxed her long, immature body enough to fall into a light sleep, not so fully that she would fail to awake in time for her early morning duties.
    At the sound of Regan’s retching in the basement, Billy Pop almost cut off Teddy’s long tail. Instead he so jolted the scissors that the blade pricked his left thumb. He searched for a wad of cotton wool that he had put away in one of the drawers of his desk. He could ill afford such a loss of precious time. Gingerly dabbing the tiny drops of blood, he reflected on how often work, certainly over the years, his work had been interrupted by trivia. Regan’s regular drunken Saturday nightvisits to her family in South London, for instance. He’d written something about it during the War, ‘Our Cockney Cook goes over the Water’, but for some reason or other he’d