Gay Times

There they sat, wreathed in cigar smoke, candle-lit, an unreal group. He saw them as three dissonant fig­ures at the centre of an intolerable design. "Bellairs," he told himself, "is a gaiety merchant. Gaiety!" How fashionable, he reflected, the word had been before the war. Let's be gay, they had all said, and glumly em­bracing each other had tramped and shuffled, while men like Breezy Bellairs made their noise and did their smiling for them. They christened their children "Gay," they used the word in their drawing-room comedies and in their dismal, dismal songs. "Gaiety!" muttered the disgruntled and angry Edward. "A lovely word, but the thing itself, when enjoyed, is unnamed. There's Cousin George, who is undoubtedly a little mad, sitting, like a mouth-piece for his kind. between a jive merchant and a cad. And here's Fée anticking inside the unholy circle, while Cousin Cécile solemnly gyrates against the beat. In an outer ring. I hope unwillingly, is Lisle, and here I sit, as sore as hell, on the perimeter." He glanced up and found that Rivera was looking at him, not directly but out of the corners of his eyes. "Sneering," thought Edward, "like an infernal caricature of himself."

"Buck up, Ned," Lord Pastern said, grinning at him. "We haven't had a word from you. You want takin' out of yourself. Bit of gaiety, what?"

Ngaio Marsh, A Wreath for Rivera
© 1949

Please note that this is not the Daily Mail complaining that "gay" is no longer available to describe innocent enjoyment. On the contrary: Marsh, or rather Edward (who is in a particularly bad mood) does not want to use the word, feels that once the thing has been named it is denatured, and indeed associates gaiety with frantic and manufactured pleasures which are not really pleasures at all. All this gaiety is just a setting for murder.

toujours gai toujours gai...
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