Now, gentle reader, shall we return to the Blades, whom we last saw sailing in their Volvo past the unfortunate Mew from the Woman’s Times.
Gentle reader! What have I said! You are no more gentle than I am. I apologise for insulting you. You are as ferocious as anyone else. The notion that the reader is gentle is very bad for both readers and writers – and the latter do tend to encourage the former in this belief. We all believe ourselves to be, more or less, well intentioned, nice – goodies in fact, whether we’re the greengrocer or the Shah of Shahs. But we can’t possibly be, or how would the world have got into the state it’s in? Who else but ourselves are doing this to ourselves? We simply don’t know our own natures.
Consider Shirley. Driving along with Victor sleeping beside her, and Serena, Piers and Nell all agreeably crumpled up in the back seat, and Harry trembling and travelling behind the mesh. Shirley seems gentle and ordinary and perfectly pleasant – of all the people in this book so far by far the nicest. She certainly believes herself to be amiable enough. But she wouldn’t stop to give Mew a lift, would she? No! Don’t you think a perfect person would have, a truly good, unselfish woman? The kind we all appreciate, ought to want to be? Shirley knew Mew was in danger from the weather, and from possible rape at the hands of the likes of Baf, and still she left her standing there at the side of the road. What sort of sisterhood is that? Baf was about to come along. Had Baf been less civilised, less chivalrous, he might well have cried outrage at Mew’s refusal to be helped, and used his hurt feelings as an excuse for sexual aggression; and do not forget, Baf was armed, wonderfully armed, albeit in miniature, with his hand-weapons (none bigger than a lady’s cigarette-lighter) with their bullets like those silver balls you put on birthday cakes, which enlarge and engorge and explode so violently when meeting human flesh. And how could Mew have resisted had he chosen to threaten her with this power? Baf did not choose, he would not so choose, but how exciting that power is. He could have chosen. Sex, death, megadeath: if one, why not a million, or a million million? Shrapnel to the power of five hundred thousand in a knife box at the back of a car! Oh, Henry Shrapnel, if you knew what you were doing, or what path you were on, when you invented the exploding cannonball, would you have hesitated? I think not. Who can be responsible, here and now, for what the future does? Are we?
Plaintive civilian whines! How Joan Lumb sneers at them!
Joan Lumb had not been unprepared for her small visitors. They trailed sleepily into the Shrapnel Academy after their parents, a doll in Serena’s hand, a woolly lamb in Nell’s, and a teddy in Piers’. Shirley thought they looked perfectly sweet. ‘I knew you’d bring the children,’ said Joan Lumb, looking at them with distaste. She had already asked Hilda to prepare the nursery, Genghis Khan on the first floor, albeit at the back of the house.
‘Say hello to your Auntie,’ said Victor to Serena, Piers and Nell, and thank God they did, rubbing sleepy eyes, awed by the expanse of polished parquet, dark brown panelling, lofty ceiling, portraits of generals and occasionally their wives, who gazed down upon them, stern but kind. Shirley would never have suggested they so greet their aunt, knowing that refusal could only offend. But it was, after all, in Victor’s nature to take risks, and succeed. That was why, she assumed, he had risen so far at Gloabal.
‘Hello, Auntie,’ said Serena.
‘Hello, Auntie,’ said Piers.
‘Allo Wanty,’ said Nell.
‘She doesn’t speak very well,’ said Joan Lumb. ‘Is she all right?’
‘That’s how three-year-olds speak,’ said Shirley, firmly.
Joan Lumb raised her eyebrows.
‘We didn’t mean to bring them,’ said Shirley, ‘but we had to because the girl gave notice.’
‘It’s always hopeless employing Europeans,’ said Joan Lumb. ‘They imagine they’re as good as you are, and are hopelessly overpaid, which unsettles them. But you would have found some other reason for bringing them, Shirley. I know you would.’
‘They’re only little for such a short time,’ said Shirley, helplessly. She was right. The world whirls on, season gives way to season, and before you know it, the child is the grown man, the grown woman.
‘For quite long enough,’ said Joan Lumb. She had never wanted children. Procreation, it seemed to her, was altogether too chancy a business. There was no controlling a child’s genes, and there were, in her experience, a number of traits which no amount of early training seemed able to eradicate. She had herself been fortunate enough to escape weak-mindedness. Victor, on the other hand, had inherited a sentimental streak, which had made it impossible for him to join the army. He could wield the power of life and death but only from a distance, by means of shuffling pieces of paper about. He did not have the guts, as Joan had once remarked to the Colonel, to deal with the Ace of Spades.
Joan Lumb clapped her hands. Hilda appeared, her curved and sensuous mouth gently smiling.
‘Hilda,’ said Joan Lumb, ‘take the children to Genghis Khan. Bath them, feed them, put them to bed.’
‘Yes, madam,’ lisped Hilda, and the children followed where she led, up the stairs and down corridors, such was the authority in Joan Lumb’s voice, the enticement in Hilda’s walk, without so much as looking back. Or perhaps it was that the portraits frightened them? You know what portraits are – how the eyes seem to follow the guilty. And who guiltier than small children, who know well enough the trouble and torment to which they put the adult world? No wonder they’re frightened of the dark. No wonder they have nightmares. It is their own selves terrify them.
Serena went first, mousey and round-faced and prim; then Piers, sombre and brooding; then Nell, blonde, wide-eyed and giggly. Charming! And Hilda glided in front of them, demure, her look liquid, her limbs graceful: these being the rewards of gratified desire, and Acorn much given and very able so to gratify her. Hilda had made one of the broom cupboards beneath the servants’ stairs into a place where he and she could love in privacy and grace: she had hung it with rich fabrics from the linen cupboard, and floored and lined it with feather quilts and cushions and hung amulets here and there: such a place, such a shrine to sensual needs, was invaluable to both of them, since below stairs the male and female staff slept in segregated dormitories. Acorn had recently commandeered an entire dormitory to himself, the better to hold staff meetings. Those thus displaced in the community interest doubled up elsewhere and did well enough, or simply slept on the floor, if that was what they were accustomed to. But Acorn preferred to meet Hilda under the stairs, in the broom cupboard, and no doubt had his reasons. And it was, as we have seen, Hilda’s part to accept, not question. The broom cupboard, incidentally, was adjacent to the Alexander Room, and it was the unexplained noises which so often arose from the cupboard which had given rise to the rumour that the room was haunted.
Shirley’s eyes followed the children, as they went with Hilda. She was anxious. They were going with a stranger, and so quietly! But how could she demur? Joan’s manner denied it. So, when it came to it, did her husband’s. Victor believed in mother-love, of course; and, as do all civilised people, that the child is happiest in the mother’s company – though the mother not always in the child’s. But at the moment Victor believed in delegation even more than mother-love. Self-interest defeated paternal concern. The children would be safe enough: he wanted peace, and relaxation, and his wife’s company while he changed for dinner. And she wanted, for herself, the same thing of him. Of course. These are the rewards of married life, and why should we not have them?
Honestly, friends, we have to take shifts at virtue. We can’t keep it up all the time, relentlessly, not even mother-love, least of all sexual loyalty. Look how a decade’s fidelity can flash within the drunken, silvery hour into infidelity – does that devalue all that went before?
Yes, is the answer. Yes, yes, yes. Where shall we find the saint amongst us?
Oddly, Joan Lumb thinks she has found the saint, the Hero, in Henry Shrapnel. In her mind he is second only to Murray. She would have him sanctified if she could. She plans to make a speech about Henry Shrapnel and his contribution to military history – which is all history in her view – when she replies to the toast ‘The Shrapnel Academy’ at the Eve-of-Waterloo dinner.
Be all that as it may, off went the children to Genghis Khan. The suite had a rather unfortunate view over the waste-disposal area. Not, of course, that this mattered for the moment, since it was dark, and beginning to snow quite hard besides, and the snow would soon obliterate ugliness and make everything, even dustbins, pure and beautiful. The room was kept especially for children: it contained four small beds, two cots, an adjacent cubicle for a resident babysitter, and a small kitchenette where food could be prepared, and children, presumably, kept self-contained.
Genghis Khan, the Whirlwind from Mongolia, working and striving around and about the year 1200, was another who did a wonderful job, unifying his people and turning them into an all but invincible military organisation. Genghis Khan’s horse troops swarmed all over Asia, plundering, killing, devastating, learning as they went new tricks of defence and attack; and the arts of siegecraft – how to use siege engines, mangonels, giant catapults: how to dig tunnels under the fortifications of besieged cities, and enter by stealth – how best to shower flames upon those within, and enter under cover of smokescreen, how to herd captives before them so defenders were forced to kill their own kind. Genghis Khan went south, north and east, slaughtering, laying waste, burning, wonderfully successful – and why? Because he had one of the best-organised and most thoroughly disciplined armies ever created. It was quality, not quantity, that counted: those Mongol hordes were scarcely hordes; rather they were crack teams. All were on horseback. Forty per cent were heavy cavalry, for shock action: each man completely armoured and carrying a lance, with a scimitar in his belt. And behind would come the 60 per cent of light cavalry, without armour, but with bows and scimitars, whose function was reconnaissance, screening, the provision of firepower support to the 40 per cent and general mopping-up operations. Each man wore a vest of raw, tightly woven silk so that if he got hit by an enemy arrow surgeons could extract the arrowhead by pulling out the silk. And the horses! They were wonderful. They could live off the land, go for days without food, and in general sustain themselves. And because they were mostly mares, the men could live off their milk, and did, and occasionally carve a slice of meat off a living rump. Brilliant! Genghis Khan’s intelligence network was superb – it spread throughout Europe and Asia, spies travelling in the disguise of merchants or traders. The Mongols used every trick and ruse they could: they had no notion of chivalry: of armies waiting for a signal to advance. All they wanted was to kill and not be killed: they were not interested in honour or renown; they were in love with their own cunning. They would move fastest in the hard winter when the marshes were frozen and rivers ice and everyone else stayed home. (They would find out just how safe the ice was by driving local populations out upon it. Whoops! Sorry! Oh, the joke of it!) They loved to burn crops and prairies and towns simply to hide their movements. They loved to declare peace and then slaughter the vanquished when they least expected it. It was fun, fun, fun! And then the Mongols turned west and Europe shivered but somehow they had outgrown their strength. They slipped off away home, for no reason anyone can quite grasp. That’s the way things go. Empires rise and fall. Perhaps death’s appetite is cyclical. Perhaps she gets indigestion. Perhaps even her gorge rises with so much blood.