Remember Ivor, the chauffeur whose task it was to drive General Leo Makeshift and Bella Morthampton down to the Shrapnel Academy? On his arrival Ivor was escorted at once to a room on the third floor. It was pleasant, large, well-appointed, but lonely. He listened to the radio, but either the instrument was faulty or reception in the area was bad; he switched it off and watched television instead. A substantial supper was presently brought to him on a tray, by a pretty, dusky girl – Arab, he thought – who spoke no English but had smiled and lingered as if she were offering more than food and drink. Ivor would have none of it. He opened the door for her to leave, courteously and resolutely, and closed it after her with no less determination.
He drank his pea soup, ate his gammon and chips, and some of his apple pie, and waited. Sooner or later something would happen. There was a snap, crackle and pop in the air. He could feel it. He lay on the bed to watch television, and did not take his shoes off. Debbie-Anne would never have allowed it.
When Ivor was with Debbie-Anne and the children, he wanted to be off and away. When he was off and away he wanted only to be with them. He left his room in search of a telephone; if he called his wife he might feel more settled in his mind. He wandered along deserted corridors but found no telephone. He tried doors: most were locked; or if opened, showed only interiors as bleak and functional as hotel rooms. He went downstairs, where the rooms were more luxurious, and searched there. The Shrapnel Academy, Ivor concluded, did not encourage contact with the outside world. He did not venture as far as the ground floor, where the sound of talk and laughter ebbed and flowed from behind closed doors. Someone somewhere had left a window open, or else no amount of double glazing could quite keep the wind out; scurries of cold air wafted down the corridors, carrying with them a slight celebratory smell of wine and cigarettes, and another odour besides – not so pleasant – was it meat scraps boiling or pig swill stewing? The weather outside was worsening. Perhaps he would have to dig the Rolls out of the garage in the morning? Ivor had little experience of snow. He worked mostly in the city.
Ivor went back to his room, and turned the volume of the television up to drown memories of Bella Morthampton – or were they dreams, fantasies? How was he to tell? – and at that moment the screen blanked and the lights went out.
Ivor’s duty was now to be with the General. Not for nothing had he done three months’ in-service training as a bodyguard. A power cut can provide cover for a terrorist attack. He left his room, feeling his way along the corridor walls, coming to the open space of the stairwell, keeping to the wall, down and round, until he reached the great front hall. The door to the drawing-room was open: someone was fetching candles from the candelabras in the dining-room and Joan Lumb’s voice had risen a pitch or so in its agitation.
‘They have cut the lines! We are under attack! Muffin, try the telephones. Muffin, where are you?’
Ivor moved forward to be by the General’s side. Joan Lumb saw him in the half dark and was alarmed.
‘A stranger! Who is it?’
‘Only the chauffeur,’ said Bella Morthampton.
Bella Morthampton, Ivor observed, was smiling. Her teeth glinted in the light of the candle held for her convenience by Victor. Those are the teeth, Ivor thought, those are the teeth that dug into my shoulder as she clung to me and cried out. I know they are. Why did she deny me? Three times she denied me. And now I am married to Debbie-Anne, whom I love and don’t love; and whose fault is that? Why, Bella Morthampton’s. The unhappy must have someone to blame.
The General moved to stand beside the great front door: Ivor moved to stand discreetly and silently at his side.
‘Oh, the children, Victor!’ he heard Shirley Blade say. ‘Suppose they wake and are frightened!’
Muffin and Baf made their way back downstairs in the dark, so happy with each other they could not believe in bad news.
‘What’s happening?’ Muffin asked Sergei.
‘We’re all drunk,’ said Sergei, ‘the power lines are down and Lady Lumb has finally blown her top.’
Joan Lumb, in Muffin’s absence, had been to try the telephones herself, stumbling in the dark between office chairs and tables, barking her shin on the metal edge of the bottom drawer of one of the filing cabinets, left open by Muffin. I should have fired her years ago, thought Joan Lumb, as she lifted the receiver. She was glad to hear the blank, somehow layered, silence of the non-connected phone: she was right. The others laughed at her, dismissed her as hysterical – now they would have to change their tune.
‘We haven’t much time!’ she cried, returning to the drawing-room, swaying from the pain in her shin. ‘They’re going to attack any minute. They’ve cut the telephone wires.’
‘Joan,’ said Victor, and his voice was slurred. ‘Sister Joan, calm down. If the snow’s brought down the power lines, why shouldn’t it bring down the telephone wires too?’
‘Joan feels guilty,’ said Shirley, primly and aside to Victor, ‘that’s all it is. She overworks and underpays her servants, so she lives in the expectation of their anger. It’s a form of projection. We did it as part of our “Getting to Know Yourself” course. And I didn’t have to leave the children until after they were asleep, and on Monday evenings you’re hardly ever there anyway, so I didn’t think I was being selfish in attending the course. Victor, can we go to bed now?’
She must have spoken louder than she intended, for she received a sudden sharp blow across the face from Joan Lumb’s hand.
‘Unbelievable!’ cried Joan Lumb. ‘This is unbelievable!’ taking much the same attitude as Clausewitz, that great military tactician, when he observed the impossible actually happening; that is to say, Napoleon’s Great Army in mid-flight from Moscow in 1812 – an army which went proudly out to invade Russia, 600,000 strong, returning home with 100,000 stunned, diseased and wretched men. And that, they said, was due to the snow, the weather, the unreasonable cold, that same cold which froze solid the switch of the Shrapnel Academy’s emergency power supply, which should have cut in automatically when the mains supply failed. It was not, of course, the snow that killed so many. It was war. Had everyone stayed safely home in their beds the snow wouldn’t have mattered in the least.
But there you are; the war was inevitable, the next step in the long march forward, initiated so long ago by Tiglath-Pileser III. Whoops, and off we go! If the right foot goes forward, so must the left. Russia had taken that step, France had to take this, to keep the balance. War kills, not weather: it kills by disease, hunger, cold, trampling, suffocation, blowing to bits, or bits off, mistaken identity, and the blunders of generals. Many, all the same, as we have already observed, prefer war to peace. Martial music, a delightful sense of togetherness, and the pride and the glory, and the achievement, and the wonder of victory and the drama of defeat, to some seems well worth the risk of death and dismemberment. Nevertheless, a good general should not spoil the fun, prick the bubble by losing 450,000 men in a forced retreat from a pointless war, as Napoleon did in 1812. But it happened, and Napoleon ceased to be the bogey man who frightened little children, and quite lost his street credibility. Unbelievable!
‘Unbelievable!’ said Joan Lumb, said Clausewitz. That such things can happen in a civilised world! No food, no blankets, no shoes for the troops, limbs lying everywhere, no telephone for Joan Lumb and the Wellington Lecture in danger. Clausewitz went home and wrote On War – the bible of generations of military men throughout the world. Shirley turned to Victor, weeping and saying, ‘Your sister hit me. Why did she do that, Victor?’ and Joan Lumb demanded that a party be sent down to investigate the servants’ intransigence. The General agreed that this should be done, as much to allay Joan Lumb’s fears as anything; the males of the party formed themselves into a double file, three deep – Ivor with Baf went first, as the youngest and strongest, then the General and Victor, then Sergei and Panza, who were thinkers rather than doers. Intellectuals, that is to say. Murray was nowhere to be found, and no one cared. Least of all Bella.
Ivor put his shoulders to the green baize door, and pushed. It did not budge. Baf tried, and then the others, and then all together. It was stuck firm, and the more they pushed, the harder it seemed to stick, which was not surprising, since the door opened inwards. But you know how it is – once you have decided something is lost – like the bottle opener – there’s no finding it, although it is under your nose. Once you have decided something won’t work – like the steam iron – there is no extracting steam from it. The brain, expecting disaster, fails to find the obvious solution. No one thought to pull the door: all pushed.
Joan Lumb did not seem so foolish now. The men looked at each other.
‘Hmm,’ said the General. ‘Locked out! Snowed in! In the dark! With no communications. It doesn’t look too good, does it, Baf?’
‘Perhaps I should bring the knife box down,’ said Baf, ‘just to be on the safe side.’
‘Don’t even think of it, boy,’ said the General.
The eyes of both men sparkled in the candlelight. The General looked younger and Baf older, which was what each wanted. Some people thrive on emergencies. The men still clustered around the green baize door: the women edged nearer.
‘Knife box, what knife box?’ demanded Joan Lumb.
‘The knife box,’ said Mew. ‘The secret weapon?’ It was half a joke, but she shouldn’t have made it. Joan Lumb heard.
Victor said, ‘We’re taking this too seriously. The door may simply be jammed,’ but his voice lacked conviction, and he convinced no one. He would have fired himself, had he so spoken at the Board Room table. But it was late, he was tired, he had been more upset by Bella than he knew, and the temperature was dropping every minute. The boiler ran on oil but was sparked by electricity. Shirley ran upstairs with a candle to be with the children.
At that moment Murray came back from the Gentlemen’s Rest Room, where he had been retching up the sandwiches.
‘Dog,’ he said. ‘What I ate was dog. There was dog meat in the sandwiches. Only dog meat does this to me. There’s no mistaking it.’
And that was the end of the peace; the beginning of the war.