Through that afternoon the Shrapnel Academy prepared itself for the Wellington Weekend. The Eve-of-Waterloo dinner was the least of its problems. That was to be an intime affair, with merely twelve around the table, to be served in the panelled dining-room, not the gold-encrusted banqueting hall. But two hundred were expected for the Wellington Lecture on the Saturday afternoon, and to celebrate the event later at the traditional Tea. In the kitchen teams of servants had been preparing smoked salmon (Canadian), mushroom vol-au-vents (using canned Cuban mushrooms), cucumber and tomato sandwiches (these from Israel), strawberries (fresh from Australia) and cream (local), and tropical fruit salad from the equatorial regions. A splendid chocolate-and-rum gateau was yet to be prepared, from a copy of Recipes for New Zealand Teas given to Joan Lumb on her twenty-first birthday by an antipodean aunt. What a wonderful place the world is today: no one need fear winter, when summer is only flight-hours away! There would not be muffins for tea: Joan Lumb, the Administrator, did not think at all highly of Rupert Brooke’s poetry. She had not read it, but knew from hearsay she would not like it, and in this her judgement was quite right. She had embarrassed Victor greatly by claiming on his wedding day that ‘If’ was her favourite poem, and after ‘If’ – ‘Trees’.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
‘Pity he didn’t try a bit harder with the elm,’ said Victor, ‘and make it impervious to Dutch Elm Disease.’ Really, the two of them did not get on. It was a source of sorrow to them both. They were orphaned brother and sister, and should have gone hand in hand, in a perfect world.
Joan Lumb summonsed Muffin from the administration offices, where she was trying to make the word processor allocate rooms on a non-random basis to the seventy-five guests who planned to stay on after the Waterloo Ball on the Saturday night. She needed help, Joan Lumb said, in setting the eleven name places for the Dinner Intime in the dining-room.
‘So important,’ said Joan Lumb, ‘to get the seating arrangements right. A dinner party’s like a cocktail – no matter how good the ingredients, if you don’t stir properly, everything’s wasted.’
She and Muffin stood in the dining-room, while the grandfather clock ticked by the minutes until the guests arrived. Muffin fidgeted, while Joan Lumb put a card here, then changed it for one there, and then stood back to admire the effect, as a stage designer might, the better to admire the efficacy of a set. So much to be done, so little time to do it! But employers are like that: they can seldom, in the employee’s eyes, distinguish the unimportant from the important.
The dining-room was long and low, the walls panelled in Victorian oak. The room should have been handsome, but was not. The sideboards were good pieces, the chairs valuable, but were out of sorts with each other. A central crystal chandelier which would have done well enough in a higher, squarer room, in this one cast uneasy shadows. Faded tapestries lined the walls: they had little merit except age. The archers of Agin-court, the hosts of Thermopylae, the vengeance of Marathon, the fury of Saratoga, all fading gently into the past, stitched long ago by docile female hands, the widows and orphans of the warrior race. Who else but the unlucky sew for a living? And how else but by glorifying the abysmal, can we make the abysmal glorious? The sewers stitched, no doubt, with loving hands, and worshipped their oppressors.
Joan Lumb wore a brown tweed skirt (size 18), and a cream woollen blouse (size 12), brown stockings and rather surprising bright yellow shoes (size 8) with white bows. Her hair, which was brown to grey and usually plainly and sensibly washed and dried, had today been put in curlers, and was now arranged in elegant sweeps and curls about her beak-nosed face. She would, of course, change before dinner, before Murray came.
The sight, indeed even the thought, of Murray made Joan Lumb’s heart beat faster, made her swallow, made her moisten her lips, made her voice rise to a higher pitch. These are the physical effects of love. Where else but in such a man could Joan Lumb find her match? Brave Murray, lonely Murray, steadfast Murray, bearing alone the intolerable burden of secrecy, slipping by stealth out of this country, into that, facing torture, imprisonment, ignominy, death; organising, resisting, linking this cell, that cell, joining together men and women of goodwill, in the secret fight against barbarism, godlessness. Murray was employed sometimes by the CIA, sometimes by MI5, sometimes by more enigmatic folk; but all of whom loved freedom, hated oppression. Others talked, Murray did. Joan Lumb looked into the hearts of other men and saw there poverty, vacillation and shoddiness – a sorry incapacity for fine deeds and a frightening lack of noble aspiration. What was happening to mankind? The past was littered with glorious empires; strewn with great men, heroic deeds – now there was nothing but self-doubt, cowardly words, pacifism, lack of resolve. Only in Murray the man did Joan Lumb catch a glimpse of the greatness which had so illuminated the past. She would die for him, she thought, just as he would die for a cause he believed in. Well, that was woman’s part. They were the hero’s recreation and his inspiration. She wished she had been born a man. Her brother Victor should have been the girl, she the boy.
‘I was afraid there was going to be a real male-female imbalance,’ Joan Lumb said brightly to Muffin. ‘That’s the only trouble with the army: so many more men than women when it comes to dinner parties!’
(You have your troubles, Joan Lumb, I have mine!)
Muffin wore jeans and sneakers and a fluffy green sweater, which made her blue eyes bluer and her fair hair fairer; her bra did not properly contain her bust. Joan Lumb wished Muffin would hurry up and get married, so she could employ someone smaller and neater. She had taken on Muffin for Muffin’s father’s sake, when he was handling the estate of her late husband, Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Aubrey Lumb. Muffin’s father had proved drunk and incompetent; the estate yielded a quarter of the amount it should; she had taken her business elsewhere and still she was landed with Muffin, who ate more food than was reasonable, and kept her electric blanket on all night, and treated the Academy word-processor as if it could think for itself, which only a fool would do.
‘I wish you wouldn’t wear jeans,’ said Joan Lumb. ‘If a woman isn’t a proper woman, how can a man be a proper man? Surely this is the root of many of today’s troubles!’
‘My jersey’s fluffy,’ said Muffin. ‘Won’t that make up for it?’
‘Good heavens,’ said Joan, ‘by a proper woman I don’t mean someone fluffy. I mean someone with dignity and proper standards.’
‘Well, anyway,’ said Muffin, ‘I’m changing for dinner. Nobody can see.’
‘God can see,’ said Joan Lumb, ‘and I can see you. And the servants, most certainly, can see.’
Oh, they saw, they saw! The Shrapnel Academy employed a host of servants of every race except Caucasian. They came as supplicants from India, Pakistan, Mexico, Indonesia, Puerto Rico, Sri Lanka, Cuba, Nicaragua, seeking shelter, food, employment. Few had visas which would stand careful inspection. Behind them they left parents, spouses, children, friends: each life a reproach to a wicked God, the God that Joan Lumb loved. They saw, they watched, they waited! Dark eyes glowed, bright or sombre, sulky or docile, watching and observing, but what sense did they make of what they saw? Did they so much as include Muffin in the human-race? This untidily bodied white woman who left her dirty knickers on the floor and her soiled Tampax in the bin. (She couldn’t use the WC. Notices saying ‘Disposable does not mean flushable’ could not forever be ignored.) This young woman who fornicated freely with her secret lover, at all times of day or night, without ritual, without shame, like an animal? It could hardly matter how she clothed her legs, she was so far beyond disgrace. Yet they admired her, how could they not; the unbearably privileged are much admired: admiration is a healing emotion. Why else do the elderly die of hypothermia blessing the Queen? the soldier expire from his wounds whilst praising his general? Admiration of the lucky! Luck, luck: luck is the God of the luckless. Muffin was lucky. The servants were not. How could they not admire her, even while they despised her?
What are we to do? What, as Lenin asked, is to be Done? Why, get on with the story.
‘I should never have asked the girl from The Times,’ said Joan Lumb. ‘I did it on impulse. But that’s me all over – impulsive!’ She misjudged herself, but who doesn’t?
‘Her voice on the telephone,’ Joan Lumb complained, ‘was not at all promising. No girl of good family talks like that.’
On hearing from Muffin that the Features Editor of The Times was on the phone, Joan Lumb had grabbed the instrument in her eagerness to talk.
‘It’s quite trendy,’ said Muffin, ‘not to talk posh even if you are.’
‘Not with that particular nasal twang,’ said Joan Lumb. ‘No, she comes from the Inner City. She simply won’t fit in. She will be ever so intellectual and ever so plain. I should never have asked her. Who will I sit her next to? What a puzzle!’
‘So long as she doesn’t knock the General in the interview,’ said Muffin, ‘I don’t suppose it matters.’
‘My dear Muffin,’ said Joan Lumb, ‘I hardly imagine The Times has been infiltrated by beatniks, peaceniks and subversives. You do have a brain, I suppose. Please use it!’
Muffin sulked. Joan Lumb didn’t notice.
‘I have to get back to Room Allocation,’ said Muffin. The sooner she finished the more time she would have with Baf. She licked her full lips with her pink tongue.
‘Don’t do that,’ said Joan Lumb. ‘You’ll chap your lips. Now who is this Bella whatsit the General’s bringing? Perhaps she could sit next to the girl from The Times? Heaven knows what she’s like either, or why I should be expected to have her at my dinner table! What’s the matter with his wife?’
Let us answer the question for her, since Muffin won’t. The very same things that were the matter with Lord Nelson’s wife; age and respectability. Emma Hamilton, Nelson’s mistress – for there is only very little fairness in this world – got asked almost everywhere. She was always fun, and dressed up, or rather down, after dinner, and did Greek poses on marble tables, prettily and scantily draped. Lady Nelson would never have done a thing like that.
‘She’s only his secretary,’ said Muffin, relenting. ‘The General must be over seventy. I’ve arranged for the chauffeur to have a meal in his room. He might feel awkward in the Servants’ Hall.’ She meant that he was white and the servants were not. ‘If you like, I could arrange for Bella Morthampton to do likewise.’
‘I wouldn’t want to offend the General in any way,’ said Joan. ‘This country owes so much to him I’m sure we can overlook a peccadillo or so. He did particularly ask for Bella to sit next to him.’
‘Perhaps he needs her to cut up his meat.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Joan. ‘Of course he can’t dictate to his hostess and expect to get away with it altogether!’
Muffin perceived that it was unlikely that Bella Morthampton would be sat next to the General. And she knew better than to suggest that she should sit next to Baf, or that would never happen either.
Muffin peered out from between the damask curtains. The fabric was a rather dismal faded maroon, braid trimmed. And not gracefully faded, at that, but more as if a host of insect pests had first nibbled and gnawed at the surface and then bleached out the colour by sucking it up as mosquitoes suck blood.
‘Supposing we’re snowed in. What fun!’
‘We can’t be,’ said Joan Lumb, flatly. ‘God wouldn’t allow it.’ Muffin went back to her office and the word processor.