Remember Mew’s motorbike? The one she abandoned so blithely at the side of the road when it ran out of petrol? It was not her bike, in fact, but belonged to a boy named Terry, which was perhaps why she forgot it so easily. It was a Harley-Davidson, a collector’s piece, circa 1952, not that that meant anything much to Mew, who was the kind of person who far prefers the present to the past and was just as happy with a plastic spoon as a silver one. Whatever Mew did with his Harley-Davidson – took it, crashed it, lost it, left it in a country lane in a snowstorm, sold it – was okay by Terry, so hopelessly did he love Mew. She, for her part, despised and neglected Terry, but his unrequited passion did give her a nice kind of confidence. It is always pleasant to have someone around, of either sex, to love you no matter what you do, or with whom. Perhaps it was that Terry was sending thought waves out to Mew, over the aether – as the Edwardians used to call it – at any rate Mew remembered his bike and went over to Muffin, interrupting her conversation with Sergei. That is to say, Sergei was talking and Muffin was doing her best to listen.
‘Of course,’ said Sergei, ‘orthodox historians merely say the library burned, that 400,000 rolls were lost, but there’s no real evidence about where the fire started, or how. There’s a scholarly account of what happened in P. M. Fraser’s Ptolemaic Alexandria but who’s to say he didn’t make the whole thing up? Trust, these days, is such a difficult thing!’ Muffin wasn’t even listening. She kept her eyes on his face and nodded and looked interested, but it did not deceive him. He had had many students like that, over the years, who had acquired the art of paying attention and blanking off. His voice faded away. He was discouraged. Once he had commanded the interest of millions of television viewers: they had stopped him in the street to shake his hand: shop assistants nudged one another when he entered their premises – now no one knew, or cared, or listened. And what did the future hold, except the increasing inattention of listeners, as he grew older, less in command of himself and the world, and so less worth listening to?
Muffin too had a pain in her heart. Bella sat languidly in the dark red velvet armchair, one thin pale arm, palm upward, held across the folds of her black dress, almost as if waiting for an injection, some kind of fix: and on one solid arm of the chair perched Victor, and on the other Baf. Bella, Muffin noticed, hardly ever spoke at all. Men spoke to her. It had taken Muffin some time to realise that the pain in her heart was not indigestion from the caribou patties, but a mixture of jealousy and grief.
‘Muffin,’ said Mew, and both Sergei and Muffin were glad to be diverted from their thoughts, ‘I’ve just remembered something. I dumped my bike by the side of the road. I ought to do something about it. It isn’t even my bike.’
Muffin went to the tall windows and parted the curtains a little and looked outside, over the white landscape. The wind had dropped, and the light from the windows sent its brilliance curiously far out into the night, as if the snow itself was a source of light. The trees were out of proportion: even the very tall ones started out of the ground half-way up their trunks and the short ones seemed to have no trunks at all, merely hydrocephalic heads. Funny, thought Muffin.
‘It really has been snowing!’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose anything can be done tonight. But we’ll send a Land-Rover out to pick it up tomorrow morning. Why didn’t you say something earlier?’
‘Forgot,’ said Mew. And so she had. ‘Well,’ she said now, ‘I don’t suppose it’ll rust or anything,’ and moved away, her duty to Terry done. One must at least show an interest, when faced with the problems of borrowed property. So much her mother had taught her, in her saner moments.
Muffin was accustomed to cities, where snow melts almost as it falls, in the warmth of a million exhalations, a million footfalls. But Sergei knew his Nature better. He looked out over Muffin’s shoulder, and said:
‘There isn’t a hope in hell of getting anything moving out there before a thaw, and that’s not going to be soon. You realise what it means? There’ll be no lecture tomorrow.’
‘You tell Joan,’ said Muffin, pouting. ‘I’m not going to.’
‘You look very pretty when you do that,’ said Sergei. ‘Do it again!’
She did, and felt better. It is, as I say, always nice to be admired. And Sergei was gratified by her response to his flattery, if not to the information he had to offer. How quickly we shift from dull despair to animation, given the right circumstances. Men should always admire women and women men, or seem to. It can do no one any harm and improves the general atmosphere no end.
‘I’m not going to tell Joan,’ said Sergei. ‘Let her find out for herself. It doesn’t do round here to be the bearer of bad news.’
The guests helped themselves to brandy and coffee. The absence of the staff went unobserved. Only Mew noticed and regretted the loss of Acorn, whose buttocks under black silk so entranced her. But perhaps, later that night, he would reappear? He knew, after all, which her room was. Perhaps, under the shadow of Trident rising from the sea, black and white could mix and mingle, and click! click! ‘Black Butler Tells All! Wealth Above, Poverty Below!’ ‘Darling, darling, tell me all, even as you show me how you love me.’ Click! click! ‘Let me remember, when all this is over, the words, and not the occasion. Let me be right. Let me be justified. Let the pursuit of truth be worth the betrayal of love—’
But now the General was crossing to talk to Mew. His face was ravaged with deep lines: she found that not repellent but attractive. His hair, though snowy-white, was thick. A bird in the hand, however scraggy, is worth two in the bush, where sexual matters are concerned. All the same, Mew wondered at the catholic, and indeed the heterosexual nature of her inclinations, which could so happily and swiftly include both the young black man and the old white man as objects of desire. And why was she not moved at all by Muffin, in spite of her long legs and high buttocks? Perhaps it was just the feel of Muffin’s silk skirt around her legs – an unfamiliar sensation; usually there was just the brisk rub of denim – or was it the shoes, now she was accustomed to them, which made her feel oddly and agreeably heterosexual? Or perhaps she’d just had too much to drink: or perhaps it was all the talk of war, and the feeling that you’d better now, or tomorrow you might be dead. The prospect of eternal peace, eternal silence, is a great aphrodisiac.
Tell me, General,’ said Mew briskly, ‘how the lethality indices for weapons correlates with the mortality rates of troops in the field?’
‘As one goes up,’ said the General, ‘the other goes down. That is how, in the army, we reckon progress.’
‘So progress in the military sense,’ observed Mew, ‘means more and more civilians killed.’
‘More and more civilians killed potentially,’ said the General. ‘Of course in wartime soldiers are a great deal more valuable than civilians. But these aren’t matters a pretty girl should worry about; especially not at a party. If you seriously want to interview me, what’s wrong with midnight in the library?’
‘Nothing,’ said Mew, which still left her free for Acorn under Trident later. The library today, Trident tomorrow! ‘Good heavens,’ thought Mew, ‘if this is drunk let me have more of it.’
Baf went upstairs to his room in the new wing. Above the door were the words Mother Teresa. The unusual naming of the room was Joan Lumb’s idea.
‘Are you sure?’ Muffin had asked.
‘Of course I’m sure,’ said Joan Lumb.
‘But the students might find it embarrassing,’ said Muffin. ‘Fancy having to say to someone who’s in Julius Caesar, oh, I’m in Mother Teresa!’
‘It is important for them to learn,’ said Joan Lumb, ‘that the army cares.’
Of course, everyone knows about Mother Teresa. Unsupported by any government agency, and only by private funds, Mother Teresa runs a hospice for the dying poor of Calcutta. She gathers the wretched off the streets so they can die, as they have not lived, in an atmosphere of love. She has room for some 2,000. If, in Bombay, on the other side of that crowded continent, you remark upon the number of dead, dying and starving in the streets, you are, as likely as not, to be told, it’s all right, Mother Teresa looks after them. Mother Teresa is a household name the world over; of course she is, of course you know about her: she is the one who cares so we need not. Joan Lumb admires her very much, and she is admirable. Muffin thought Joan Lumb had put Baf in Mother Teresa to annoy her, and was right. She had. Fortunately Baf didn’t even notice the words above the door.
In the wall above the fireplace of Mother Teresa was a safe. It was hidden behind a rather pleasant Victorian print of Jesus driving the money-lenders from the Temple, especially selected for the room by Joan Lumb. Baf got the key from Muffin before dinner and, before going downstairs, he’d locked his Victorian knife box safely inside. The value of the contents ran into many millions. Sometimes Baf marvelled that he, so young, had so much responsibility upon his shoulders. But this was the age of the young. Baf had failed many examinations at school, but had always charmed both teachers and pupils. Since his school was of the expensive English kind, which has grounds spacious enough to house bodyguards as well as pupils, he made the acquaintance there of the sons of the intolerably rich and intolerably powerful of all nations. He became, over the summer holidays, acquainted with the insides of palaces and embassies everywhere. There was no point in him staying at home. It was his mother’s custom to spend the months between June and October either in a religious retreat or in a nursing home for alcoholics.
Now Baf carefully lifted out the knife box from its home behind the print of Jesus and the money-lenders, laid it on his bedside table, and opened it, as much to admire its contents as to make sure it was as he had left it. How neatly the tiny, steely, intricate objects lay in their soft velvet home. They were beautiful: made in metals that entranced the eye, being so like and yet unlike the familiar substances of everyday life. There was no overt decoration: there was no need: the three-dimensional fractals (pyramids within pyramids, globes within globes) of which these slivers of weapons must of necessity be composed if they were to have the strength required of them, created surfaces which seemed to live, and quiver, and change, although the mind knew well enough that they did not. But the eye is used to what it is used to, and sees what it is in the habit of seeing; and an effort of will must sometimes be made if it is to register fact, not fiction: just as the staff below, even as Baf took out his knife box and opened it on the marvels within, looked en masse at the silver tray above Acorn’s head and thought it floated.
‘How foolish those people are,’ thought Baf, ‘who believe that money is man’s prime motivation!’ Baf got 12 per cent of every weapon sold, and was a millionaire many times over – though it would have been most imprudent of him to live according to his means – but this, of course, was not why he promoted and sold the weapons. Man is not so base as you might think. Baf was proud of his products, and of the ingenuity and skill which had gone into their devising, and of the beauty of the objects themselves, and he wanted them to be used because he wanted them proved; and whole armies to be proud of them, and rely on them, just as Baf himself did. The money was a symbol of all these things: a testimonial to his professionalism, not an end in itself. (Mind you, it is easy enough for a millionaire to take this rather high view of money.)
So Baf took the knife box out not so much because he wanted to persuade the General to persuade his Ministry to purchase the weapons, as because he was proud of them, and wanted to show them to the General, and for the General to say, ‘Hey, that’s great!’ Just as staff generals want to show the President the missiles rising like silver wands from their silos, and hear him say ‘Fellers, that’s great! Most impressive!’ We all want our father’s admiration and, if we don’t get it, spend our lives looking for it. What’s the betting Baf’s father was a hard guy to please? I’m telling you, very hard. That’s why his wife, Baf’s mother, took to drink and religious mania. But that’s another story. Baf went back downstairs, took the General to a far corner of the room and opened the knife box. Joan Lumb fortunately did not notice, or no doubt would have cried ‘Security’ and demanded that he close it at once.
The General admired in particular the cylinder, rather like a latticed cigarette-lighter, whose tiny facets caught the whole light range of colour, so it seemed to live inside its own rainbow. This cylinder contained, under enormous pressure, enough new improved CS gas to subdue the entire audience at the Rose Bowl, and leave not a single child nor babe in arms not coughing, spluttering, gasping and weeping. It could of course be simply converted to the containment of more lethal nerve gases, but Baf found himself neurotic about these, and given a choice – which he was, his employers being civilised and kindly people – had gone for the least effective of all the martial gases. He apologised to the General for what might be seen as a lack of conviction on his part.
‘That’s okay by me,’ said the General, who was eyeing Mew in preparation for his midnight interview with her in the library, and was rather pleased to see that she had unshaven legs. He suspected that denoted passion, that she would not be finickity. He could not abide reluctant women, who had to be stroked, and prodded, and persuaded. Life was too short.
‘I can see you wouldn’t want to carry the really nasty stuff about. Not in a box like that. Where’s the shielding? Where’s the protection?’
Baf was able to explain to the General that the great advantage of miniaturised weapons was the comparative ease and safety of their deployment. The velvet-lined knife box was to the Minitox Range as a lead-lined concrete bunker to any conventional cylinder of toxic gas. The knife box, moreover, was not quite so simple as it seemed. Beneath the vellum surface was a vacuum layer, maintained by a minute vacuum pump, battery-powered, which kept the contents still: bounce it about as Baf might – ‘don’t,’ said the General – the weapons stayed quiet in their alcoves. Baf drew the General’s attention to one of his favourites: the pencil napalm-thrower, which could incinerate a whole platoon from a hundred yards and they would never know what happened to them. Another advantage of the miniaturised range was that men were spared the anticipation of death. This could only be good for their morale. ‘Um,’ said the General. But he admired the object. Being made up of globes within globes, from crystals grown bio-chemically, it radiated a steady white aura.
‘Isn’t that radioactive?’ he asked, and then apologised. ‘I’m not as young as I was. I’m used to thinking things that glow are either radioactive or magic.’ He went on to explain to Baf that while miniaturised cannons and guns, both for shot and gas, missiles and flame throwers, would indeed change the face of conventional warfare, the point was, could anyone these days afford the change! Difficult for a modern state to behave like the Assyrians and live off booty: the money had to come from somewhere!
Baf said he’d been trying the home market first, naturally, but would presently have to sell abroad. The investment in research and development had been enormous. The General said that was Baf’s problem, not his. He, the General, was most interested in the weapons and had much enjoyed seeing them but he had given Baf names at the Ministry and what more could he do? The General was beginning to sound cross. The General smiled at Mew, who smiled back and wondered what it was that Baf was showing the General.
Click, click, went Mew’s camera, produced from up her sleeve, in the general direction of Baf’s open knife box. She’d finished the film. The faintest click told her so.
‘What does Baf do?’ asked Mew of Muffin. Stuck away as she had been at the end of the dinner table, she had had no opportunity to discover where, as it were, he was at. But she suspected him of something underhand. His smile was too bright, his face too boyish, as he turned it trustingly towards the General.
‘He’s some kind of international salesman,’ said Muffin, vaguely.
‘Don’t you know? Aren’t you his girlfriend?’
‘I was,’ said Muffin, sadly, and wondered whether it was really worth her time chatting up Sergei, who had dug his chin so firmly into her shoulder as they stood together looking out into the snow, and so make Baf jealous. But perhaps Baf wouldn’t even notice, and it never did to make complications at work. Even as she decided that she and Sergei would be the exception to this latter rule, Baf deserted the arm of Bella’s chair.
‘What’s the matter, glumface?’ he hissed into Muffin’s ear, and she felt better at once. All the odd pains, in her heart, in her throat, in her mouth, quite disappeared.
‘Bella the Bitch is so Boring you wouldn’t Believe it,’ said Baf, who seemed to feel the need to make amends. ‘What a lot of B’s! Do you think if we went upstairs anyone would notice?’ Muffin said probably, not that she cared. Baf said neither did he care, except about her, Muffin, and they began to make their way towards the door. Baf carried the knife box with him, taking rather especial care of it, as Mew observed. What, she wondered, was in it? What interested the General so? Would it be worth seducing Baf, over the weekend, the better to steal it? There would be a scoop for the Woman’s Times. Her job would be secure: she might even manage private psychiatric treatment for her mother. Beyond and above that, of course, was her public duty. Things went on in the male world of the Shrapnel Academy women ought to know about. If she stole the box, of course, she would have to leave the motorbike in order to make a quick get away. She saw that snow might really get to be a nuisance: great lumps of white stuff standing between you and your ambition. And where was she? Miles from anywhere, cut off from civilisation, with a group of mad people who believed they were sane – pretty much as her mother had done. Mew’s mother, tangled in her mind, had one day poured boiling water from the kettle over her daughter’s body as she slept. Her father’s name was Jason. Mew’s mother felt obliged to boil her children, serve them in a stew, as Medea had done. Yet her mother loved her. Mew had not taken offence: it was others who had carted her mother off. But Mew knew disasters happened, when people who believed they were sane, were not, and tangled in their minds.
She thought she should be on the safe side, and sat down on a sofa by which, on a highly polished table, stood a large pot containing an aspidistra plant. The plant was flourishing – the soil, as it should be when growing aspidistras, was all but dry. (The knack of growing good aspidistras is to drench them thoroughly but only occasionally, and always to keep the leaves well dusted. They like to be pot-bound. Don’t even dream of re-potting!) It was an easy enough matter to make a little hole in the earth with a casual forefinger, then slip the camera from her sleeve into the hole, and cover it again. Then she rose and stood and stared casually at the painting above the marble fireplace, and tried to feel safe, and failed.
Reader, one would be hard put to it to say whether or not there is such a thing as telepathy. I can report my own experience, and convincingly, but what good to you is my sample of one? I am certainly as ready to believe in the paranormal as I am to believe we all live and die on a lump of rock, a mere 7,926 miles in diameter, whirling and thrumming through infinite space. That notion seems to me the real bummer. Well, there’s my own position declared. Yours must be your own. But if Mew felt nervous she was right to be. After all, downstairs serving dishes floated in the air (or were believed to) and the matter of cooking and eating her was under quite serious discussion. The portrait above the mantelpiece did nothing to reassure Mew as to the sanity of man. It was of President Roosevelt, Supremo Stalin and Prime Minister Churchill signing the Yalta Treaty in 1945. Now the Yalta Treaty was the one in which the two great powers – with the third power to make it seem less like a carve-up – did just that: carved up. They divided the world into spheres of influence, without any reference whatsoever to its inhabitants. You take Bulgaria, I’ll have Chile. What about Afghanistan? Oh, um, well we’ll have that and you take Finland. We absolutely have to have Australia but you can have Korea! And so on. It was at this painting that Mew happened to be staring, having just buried her camera beside the aspidistra, when Acorn and Inverness brought up the good-night cocoa and sandwiches.
Firelight made Mr Gromyko’s face – he stood at Stalin’s right hand, an agreeable, shrewd young man – dance and smile. He knew what he knew – and still does – that nothing the human mind can conceive won’t in time be done. The Family of Now will be with us any minute, killing, looting, raping, holding hostage, disturbing our Sunday lunch. Click! Click! ‘Holocaust on Honduras Airfield’, ‘Model raped in laser space drama’, ‘Powers split the world in two’. You invent it, they’ll do it.
Cocoa was served to the guests. It was poured by Acorn, very civilly, from a silver jug into those rather awkward but ubiquitous thick French cups with angled sides. They were deep green, gold-rimmed. The guests did their best to be at ease with them, but when Acorn handed round a silver tray on which were placed, on beds of lettuce (Israeli), and cress (South African), little soft white sandwiches, filled with a thick and delicious, though slightly strandy, meat pâté, they were pleased to set down their cups and accept the food. All ate with relish.
Murmurs of appreciation were heard all round.
‘Delicious!’
‘Wicked!’
‘How tasty!’
‘But what is it?’
Joan Lumb assumed the sandwiches were filled with the remains of the caribou patties, mashed and moulded, and was glad. She hated to see waste. In the morning she would congratulate Acorn. Where was Acorn? She rang for him. Why had he disappeared? The silver tray, with nearly all of the sandwiches gone, and with Sergei now finishing up the lettuce and cress, lay abandoned on the Georgian sidetable. She looked around the room. There were no servants at all in sight, only plenty of large cups of half-finished cocoa, grim and dark-grained around their golden rims. Annoyed, she rang for Acorn again. Nothing happened.
‘Murray,’ she said, ‘I’m getting no reply from the servants’ hall. Why do you think that is?’
‘You’d better ask your communications expert,’ said Murray. ‘I’m more of a field-man myself. What’s in the sandwiches? Reminds me of something. Can’t think what.’
And he ruminated, trying to dislodge strands of meat from between his cracked, yellow, tough teeth.
‘Well,’ he said gloomily, ‘if it is dog I’ll know soon enough.’
‘Don’t be such an old Eeyore, Murray,’ chided Joan Lumb. Elsie Blade, her and Victor’s mother, had read and re-read The House at Pooh Corner to her children. Joan Lumb thought of her mother with sudden and unusual gratitude and smiled at her brother. He smiled back and crossed over to her. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘I can’t quite remember. Did mother really once make me re-eat a fried egg I had vomited up?’
‘Of course,’ said Joan Lumb, and lied for her brother’s sake, and indeed for her mother’s too. They had been strictly brought up, in their own interests, but not, she felt, strictly enough. She herself had finished up everything, always, dutifully, the slimiest of porridge, the sourest of fish. Victor had got away with murder, in Joan Lumb’s eyes. Nursery food had to be finished, come what may. It was training for life. She would be as strict, she knew, with her own children. By disliking them, by refusing to conceive them, she did them a favour. Joan Lumb is not all bad. No one is.
Joan Lumb crossed to the window and looked out. Virgin snow lay smooth and heavy across the landscape. It was impossible to see where the drive stopped and the lawns began. The grizzled god Mars, who, in the act of piercing a beardless youth with a heavy sword, formed the centre-piece of the ornamental fountain, had lost stomach, thighs, legs, feet; only the muscle of his fine torso, his powerful arms, gleamed distantly in the light which Joan Lumb released from the parted curtains. The snow had stopped again, and the wind had dropped. Joan Lumb did not like what she saw, not at all.
‘It’s too bad,’ she said to Murray. ‘What are the servants playing at? They’ve made no attempt to clear the snow. Tomorrow’s guests will have trouble parking! Not that they’ll let a little weather deter them! But are the servants deaf and blind? I’ve rung and rung and nothing happens.’
But Murray took no notice. He was paying attention to Bella. She was explaining that she ate all the meat she could. She suffered badly from anaemia. The doctor had said the best thing for her was raw ox-blood, but she could not face it. And Murray was telling Bella how once, lost in Venezuela, he had kept alive by slicing steaks off living cows. They were getting on like a house on fire. Joan Lumb’s voice faded away. She was unhappy, and not in the habit of being so. She was quite accustomed to feeling angry, or irritated, or bored, or resentful, or self-righteous, but not simply unhappy. Colonel Lumb had never made her unhappy. Her mother, on the other hand, had. ‘It’s love,’ she thought, ‘love makes you unhappy,’ and there and then set her heart against Murray. Some women, poor things, have this capacity: to stop loving when it hurts.
Victor finished his first sandwich and Shirley her second and Victor said, ‘You’ll get fat,’ but he might have said ‘fatter’ and Shirley was grateful for small mercies. Her husband was back at her side, and she felt calm, and relieved, and a little too bright, like a sunny dawn after a stormy night. And Victor was indeed still lingering in that state of marital disaffection which the presence of a deathly glamorous woman can produce in the mildest and most devoted of married men. (Married women do not seem to be quite so disturbed by the presence of beautiful, available and desirable men, but this may be merely custom and convention, and no doubt in the perfect world we all work towards, when unfair gender distinctions have faded away, men and women will be equal in this too.)
Do you want to know, as Shirley longs to, what Victor had said to Bella, as she sat, or rather lounged, stretched, with her long body pressed somehow hard and heavy into the dark red velvet, as if a man’s body was already upon her, and the only doubt which one of the men in the room it could possibly be? Victor had said:
‘Bella, from what you say, your work at the Ministry of Defence hardly gives you the opportunities and rewards a young woman of your intelligence and competence should have. Had you ever thought of working in the private sector? In Industry?’
‘Can’t say I had,’ said Bella.
‘I think you should seriously consider it,’ Victor said. ‘Here, let me give you my card. I want you to ring me at this number – see, here’s my extension—’ and he took her long pale forefinger, with the rather square and flattened nails, and it was cool and smooth to the touch, and he was conscious of the reddened, tough, male hairiness of his hand, so that both fingers, his and hers, pointed to the number – ‘and we’ll make an appointment, and you will come to visit me at my office and we’ll discuss it.’
But Bella took her hand away from Victor’s.
‘I’m doing okay where I am,’ she said, and looked at him and smirked, as if saying ‘men! all the same!’ and the dream blinked into a nightmare. Her voice had seemed suddenly hard and guttural and quite frightened him. She was a ravenous woman: she would swallow him up, engulf him as she had engulfed her food at dinner. The smirk was possibly because, invisible at her elbow, flapping unseen wings, was a host of sinewy vampires with heavy claws and bloody beaks, which were about to tear him to shreds. That was when he rose and returned to Shirley, his wife. And Shirley had said:
‘Do have a sandwich, Victor. Keep me company!’
So he did. But still he looked over towards Bella, chatting to Murray. Perhaps the vampires could be outfaced, or even ruled: perhaps to be King of the Vampires was a loftier aim than to be Prince at Gloabal? It was obviously late: he was not thinking sensibly. He said to Shirley:
‘Shall we turn in soon?’ and she said yes, and smiled at him with simple and endearing wifeliness. Shirley was happy. They would make love: they always did when they were away: a different bed, a different ceiling, the distance of the children, those reminders of ordinariness, permanence, refreshed the pleasure. He would try not to think of Bella; it was a discourtesy to Shirley.
‘Okay?’ he asked again, and again she said yes, and he rubbed her warm cheek with the same hand that had lately touched Bella. He supposed Bella would presently rejoin the General, but the General was rather surprisingly deep in conversation with the young woman journalist with the dirty face. ‘I can’t think why Joan asked her,’ he complained to Shirley. ‘She’s obviously the kind to make trouble.’
‘I wondered myself,’ said Shirley, taking another bite of sandwich. ‘But I think she’s you-know.’ She meant lesbian. Victor was astonished. Was Shirley implying that his sister had homosexual inclinations? He asked as much.
‘But, Victor,’ said Shirley, ‘I always assumed she was.’
It’s amazing how long you can be married to someone, sleep with someone, have breakfast (usually), lunch (occasionally), tea (though rarely) and dinner (often) with someone and that still they should have the capacity to surprise you. This, I suppose, is why we marry other people and don’t make do with ourselves. At any rate Victor was surprised, not so much at his sister’s deviant sexuality – if Shirley was right – but that Shirley should hold a view unknown to him.
‘Good God,’ he said. ‘That makes her a security risk!’ and he could not help laughing as they crossed to say good night to his sister.
‘Victor,’ said Joan Lumb, ‘I don’t know what you’re laughing about. I think there is mutiny downstairs. When I ring the bell, Acorn doesn’t reply, and look, the servants haven’t even begun to clear the snow!’
‘Joan,’ said Victor, ‘surely you didn’t ask them to clear the snow? It is never sensible to give orders if you know they can’t possibly be carried out. Wasn’t that one of Napoleon’s precepts? They’ve all gone to bed.’
‘Victor,’ said his sister, with considerable petulance, ‘you may know how to run a chewing-gum factory but you know nothing about servants. We are not dealing with Europeans, but with Asiatics, Hispanics and God knows what.’
‘Joan,’ said Victor, ‘it is the middle of the night.’
‘I wish I could ask the snow to keep sociable hours,’ said Joan Lumb, ‘but I can’t.’ (Sarcasm again!) ‘I want them out there now!’
‘Joan,’ said Victor, ‘be reasonable.’
Joan Lumb hadn’t changed since she was a child. Once, in a fury because she hadn’t been chosen to play Mary in the Nativity Play, she had topped the heads off every chrysanthemum in the vicar’s garden, and worse, refused to say she was sorry.
‘I am not a fool, Victor,’ she said. ‘Nor am I blind. I know there’s a blizzard. All the more reason to keep the driveway clear. If we give in, the Council will too. If we do the drive, they’ll be shamed into sending the snow-plough for the minor roads.’
‘Joan, it’s midnight,’ murmured Shirley, ‘and we’ve all had quite a bit to drink,’ but no one wanted to hear that kind of thing.
‘As for you, Shirley,’ said her sister-in-law, ‘you have not the slightest idea how to deal with servants. Do be quiet.’
‘They might freeze to death out there,’ said Victor. ‘I hope you realise that.’ He was joking.
‘They can, for all I care,’ said Joan. She wasn’t.
‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’ spoke Murray, from Bella’s chair by the fire, startling everyone, and all Joan Lumb thought was, ‘He is foolish, he is senile, he is a poor old man, he is no use to anyone. Oh that Henry Shrapnel was alive and living at this hour!’ In Joan Lumb’s mind Shrapnel stayed for ever young, and vigorous.
‘Talking about sleeping dogs,’ said Shirley, ‘do you think I should go and see how Harry has settled down?’
‘I think Harry can look after himself, Shirley,’ said Victor, patiently. He had quite recovered his composure. Shirley asked silly questions and he answered them. They had got along fine in this manner for fifteen years. (You may be surprised, inasmuch as Serena, Piers and Nell are so small, to discover that Shirley and Victor have been married for so long. But during the first years of her marriage to Victor, Shirley was having treatment for infertility – a condition now happily righted. I would go into the details of that, but now is neither the time nor the place.)
Victor looked forward to living the rest of his life with Shirley, and if Bella was not prepared to be a divertissement, he would continue happily enough with the ongoing melody.
‘Sergei,’ said Joan Lumb, ‘Panza! I’m getting no reply from the servants’ hall.’
But Sergei and Panza only shrugged. She had half-expected it. They were effete. They lived too much in their heads. Thought weakened their resolve. Where was Muffin? Where was Baf? Not yet returned! That did not bear thinking about, either.
‘General,’ she asked, ‘what is to be done? I ring for the servants and they don’t reply.’
‘We must bow to the inevitable,’ he said. ‘They’ve gone to bed.’
He had had far too much to drink, she realised. So had everyone. It had been deliberately done. The servants had filled glasses far too rapidly.
‘It’s more than that,’ she said. ‘I feel it. Something’s wrong.’ How much had she herself drunk? Gin before dinner, three kinds of wine with it, Cointreau afterwards? The lights flickered and went out. Joan Lumb spoke into the dark.
‘And now the lights have gone out.’
Someone laughed. She thought it was Mew.
‘No need,’ said Mew, ‘to state the obvious.’
Stupid, simpering girl, with her red flounces and dirty face, tottering in heels too high for her. What was she doing here anyway? She was probably in league with the servants.
‘They’ve cut the lines,’ said Joan Lumb.
‘Nonsense,’ said Victor, ‘it’s only the snow.’
‘Victor,’ said Shirley, ‘I’m frightened!’ and suddenly they all were.