Ivor the blond chauffeur adjusted his driving mirror so that he could no longer see what was happening on the other side of the glass partition. So much any good chauffeur should do. Then he switched off the microphone which enabled sound to travel from the back of the car to the front. This too was no more than his professional duty. He could not see, he could not hear, but still he knew, and was disconcerted.
Once Ivor too had taken his pleasure with Bella. She had worked at the cash-desk of the Ministry of Defence staff canteen. He was eighteen; it was five years ago. At the annual staff party he and Bella had drunk together, danced together and spent the night together, making love together in one of the secret cipher rooms. Or he thought they had. But the very next day she had seemed not to recognise him.
She had sat composed and tidy at the canteen cash-desk, seemingly unmarked by the night’s experience. Her cheek was smooth and her eyes clear.
‘Bella! Bella, it’s me!’ She raised her large grey eyes to his.
‘I’m sorry. Should I know you?’
‘But it’s me!’ he said. He felt like a child knocking at its mother’s door and no one answering.
‘Of course it’s you,’ she said then, brightly and briskly. ‘Everyone is always them. 10p for the coffee and 7p the Chelsea Bun.’ (The canteen was heavily subsidised.)
He had her bite marks on his shoulders. Whenever he turned his head they hurt. He had woken to the pleasure of these wounds of love. She smiled at him now – yes, those were her teeth, pale and strong – and the amiability of her look belied the cruelty of her words, as she denied him.
‘I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else. Perhaps you only dreamed whatever it was you dreamed? Perhaps someone else said they were me? So many things can happen in this life, especially at night!’
Ivor did not go back to the canteen for a long time and when he did a girl called Debbie-Anne sat in Bella’s place. Presently Ivor courted and married Debbie-Anne, and was now father to three children under four, and his wife lay quiet and still beneath him, and let him get on with what he felt he had to do, but did not wrap her legs around his neck as Bella Morthampton had done on the night of the staff party. This is no criticism of Debbie-Anne, reader. It’s just that she needed all her strength for her unborn or suckling children. Three children under four is a lot to cope with! Bella, of course, had no children. She didn’t like them.
Now Bella was in the back of his car with the General, wrapping her legs where she felt inclined. His one-night stand, the General’s mistress! Ivor admired the General while despising Bella, and hoped that when he, Ivor, was seventy, he would still be in such good condition. But of course, it is young men’s blood which keeps generals young and virile, and where was Ivor to get a supply of that? Generals are not just anyone; don’t think they are. The roads they travel are muddy, and the mud is mixed with blood. Jump out of the way as the limousine rolls by!
Ivor switched the microphone back on. Bella still moaned and the General groaned. It was indecent: but of course it was exciting, as the indecent is. Ivor turned the switch off again, out of respect to Debbie-Anne, and did his best to keep his mind on the road.
The black car was no longer sleek, but mud-spattered. The wipers drove sludge into the corners of the windscreen. Ivor was not sorry. He could spend the weekend cleaning and polishing. Boredom is the occupational hazard of the Ministry chauffeur, waiting in this Rolls or that Mercedes, outside barracks or the palace or on the periphery of parade grounds. Chauffeurs wait, the wrong side of lighted windows, and while they wait they brood.
A right, another right, over a hump-backed bridge, a sharp left along a rutted lane – bump, bump; past a hitchhiker – man or woman, hard to tell which, but in any case ignored. The General and Bella disentwined themselves. Ivor switched on the intercom. Now they travelled narrow lanes between high, untrimmed, dripping hedges.
‘Nearly there, sir,’ said Ivor. He had memorised the map. It was his special talent, and his pride so to do. They passed between tall gates, guarded by a gate-house, down a wide, lit drive lined with trees which no doubt in summer were gracious and majestic, but now were merely sodden and untidy, and there spot-lit, as if waiting for a son-et-lumière performance to begin, stood the Shrapnel Academy, as it had stood for a hundred years, looking for all the world like a scaled-down Buckingham Palace: stout, stone-faced and determinedly grand, in spite of having been badly placed, by its architect, where the ground fell. (It is all very well for a cottage to nestle, but a country house can only properly be at home on rising ground.) Eight great windows ranged on either side of a pillar-flanked front door; twelve smaller ones were ranged above, another row likewise, and then twenty-four little dormer windows stared out from beneath the cornice of the roof. The flagpole was the proud focus of a host of spotlights. From it flew the house flag. This was in yellow silk and embroidered in red upon it were the words THE SHRAPNEL ACADEMY. In the top right-hand corner was a strange device, half-way between an orange and a crown, from which burst streams of light.
‘What’s the flag?’ asked Bella.
‘It is the flag of the Shrapnel Academy,’ explained the General. ‘Always good to see it!’
‘What’s that thing like a rising sun? Is it the Japanese flag?’
‘That is not a rising sun,’ he said, a little stiffly. ‘What you see there is an exploding cannonball. Henry Shrapnel was its inventor, back in 1804; the Shrapnel Academy is a teaching institution: over the years it has become a shrine to the ethos of military excellence.’
‘What a nice gesture,’ said Bella. ‘Who pays?’
‘It is kept going,’ said the General, ‘by voluntary subscription.’
A few flakes of snow had begun to fall. The flag stopped waving and hung limply. Ivor held a large black umbrella for his passengers and escorted them to the front door – the small, lively General and the tall, pale, beautiful girl.