9

Servants

I like to have my morning newspaper ironed before I read it. I like to have my shoes boned before they are polished. I like to sit in the back of the car and be driven. I like beds to be made, dishes to be washed, grass to be cut, drinks to be served, telephones to be answered and common tasks to be dealt with invisibly and efficiently so that I can devote my time to major decisions like the choice of wines for dinner and who to vote for in the next election for the mayor of my village.

That is life as it should be lived, and all it takes is money and servants.

The instant and superficial attractions of having a personal staff are such that many a young man has rushed off in search of butlers and maids without pausing first to think the whole thing through. Believe it or not, there are disadvantages that are not immediately apparent. We shall come to those later. But first, the good news.

The most obvious benefit of having servants is that they allow you to avoid disagreeable, uncomfortable or dangerous jobs. They will see to the small but important details of your daily life, from garbage disposal to laying out your clothes every morning and keeping the bar stocked. They can be sent out to do your Christmas shopping, to stand in line outside the movie theatre until you have finished dinner, to open up your house in the country or to lie prone in the street so you always have a parking space available. If you should stray into an unsavoury neighbourhood, you will have nothing to fear as long as you take a large servant with you. Let him reason with the muggers while you look for a cab.

Aside from practical matters, servants are social assets. They confer status on their master, particularly if they are slightly exotic and don’t speak English. My personal preference would be exiled members of the Polish aristocracy. Or you can choose your staff on the basis of their national skills: a French cook (marvellous soufflés), an English valet (wonderful with clothes) and a German chauffeur (mechanically very sound). It all depends on the languages you speak and the size of your establishment.

Here, unfortunately, we begin to come up against the problems of maintaining staff on the premises. Even the smallest servants take up a lot of house room. They must have separate quarters, or you will be forever tripping over the chambermaid in the bedroom or arguing with the butler about which TV programme to watch. In the good old days, servants could be tucked away in the attic, where they polished the silver by the light of a guttering candle, but now the minimum space requirement is a suite of bedroom, bathroom and living room. Obviously, the standard of comfort and decoration will not be anything like your own opulent surroundings. But even so, with rents the way they are, you’re looking at an additional overhead of a few thousand dollars a month.

That may not be a problem. Indeed, you may take a benign pleasure in accommodating your servants so well that you hope they will really feel at home. They will. And since no good deed goes unpunished, your generosity will encourage them to behave just like junior members of the family. This inevitably leads to what the English upper classes describe as ‘forgetting their place,’ in other words, a lack of deference that shows itself in many irritating ways: backchat while serving dinner, unflattering remarks about your choice of ties and scotch, over-familiarity with your guests, demands for longer vacations, and all the rest of it.

If you’re tolerant enough to put up with this for the sake of a quiet and idle life, worse is to come. Your servants will eventually grow old and develop into eccentrics, like the butler in an Irish country house whose habit it was to serve coffee after dinner stark naked and reeking of Old Bushmills. He was never fired, partly for sentimental reasons and partly because of his close links with the horseracing fraternity in Dublin, but that’s another story.

One final snag: a houseful of servants will lead to an almost total loss of personal privacy. Let us imagine you have had a brutal day at the office. You return home wanting nothing more than a hot tub, a cold bottle of champagne, and an hour or so of peaceful reflection while you knit yourself together. Not a chance. As you undress, your valet will be catching your clothes before they hit the floor. You escape to what you hope will be the steamy solitude of the bathroom, only to find one of the maids in there testing the temperature of the water with her elbow and asking if you want your back scrubbed. The butler arrives with the champagne. The valet pops his head through the door to consult you about your plans for the evening so that he can prepare an appropriate outfit, and the chauffeur calls on the bathroom phone to ask when you want the car. The whole damned world is hovering around you, full of concern and good intentions, and it’s a nightmare.

With servants, you are never truly on your own, and for some reason they always find something that needs to be done in the room you have chosen for a few moments of quiet rumination. Perhaps it’s evidence of effort—an instinctive desire to be seen working—but if you happen to be in the library, it won’t be long before someone tiptoes in to dust the bindings. You retire to your study, and they will follow you to change the paper clips. After a while, you will begin to agree with the Spanish proverb that describes servants as ‘unavoidable enemies.’

You can, of course, tell them to go away and leave you alone. If you’re the sort of man who can kick a cocker spaniel in the teeth without a qualm, you won’t be affected by the hurt and reproachful look they give you as they cower out of the room. Otherwise, you will feel guilty and spend the rest of the day being excessively pleasant to them as penance for your harsh behaviour. One way or another, unless you are very careful, the servants you live with will influence your routine and your disposition to such an extent that your life will seem to revolve around them rather than the other way around.

But what are the alternatives? To shine your own shoes, make your own bed, drive your own car, and devote your leisure time to drudgery? To be pointed out in the office as the only executive with dishpan hands? To be seen in the supermarket with an armful of toilet paper rolls? Living with servants might be exasperating, but living without them would be intolerable to a man of your position and refinement.

Do not despair. I have spent many hours thinking about the servant dilemma, and I believe that I have found the solution—an arrangement that gives you privacy when you want it and round-the-clock service when you need it. And, apart from the occasional tip, it won’t cost you a cent.

It is a bold and imaginative extension of the corporate lackey system that already exists in every office, the servant hierarchy that starts with cleaners and women who sterilise the phones, progresses through messengers, drivers, maintenance men and secretaries and finally reaches the dizzy level of executive personal assistant. The structure is in place. With some minor adjustments and additions, it can be made to conform precisely to your requirements.

There are only two inflexible rules. The first is that everyone you hire is put on the company payroll. The second is that none of them lives in.

You will need two chauffeurs—one for yourself and one to ferry staff in and out. You will need a cleaner. You will need a housekeeper to supervise general domestic maintenance and a gentleman’s gentleman to take care of your wardrobe. Then there is the cook and possibly someone to look after the houseplants and see to it that the flowers are changed every day.

Seven people. What is that to a company? Nothing. When you consider that it is not uncommon for a chairman to have three secretaries, a chauffeur, a pilot for the Lear jet, a speechwriter and at least one all-purpose minion just to service him during office hours, your retinue looks almost skeletal in comparison. Maybe you should employ a sommelier as well to keep your wine cellar up to scratch.

There will be murmurings of dissent, probably from the company treasurer or some busybody in personnel, but their concern will be more with terminology than with principle. “You can’t put a valet on the payroll,” they will say, with the relish of the professional wet blanket. Fair enough. Call him something else—corporate identity adviser, sartorial consultant. As long as it sounds official and businesslike, you will probably get away with it. So the cook will become a home economist, and everyone else can be hidden beneath the impenetrable camouflage of public relations.

And there you have it. Servants when you want them, a home you can call your own, minimal overheads—now that I think of it, this arrangement is one of the very few inducements that might make me consider a return to the office and honest work.