by Weldon, Fay
‘Clive Cunningham took my other hand as we swept along the corridor of the dying and I saw a smile pass between him and Aldred in the glow of events that joined us all, in which there was no pain, only connection. I say smile, I say saw, because these are the only words I have to describe what is beyond words – such feeble, incomplete instruments they are! Let me go, whoever you are! Why do you make me speak, use words where no words belong, only connection? Truly I was mistaken: I have no rules to give you: there is such a tangle in the sewing box! Where does one thread begin, another end? How can I know? Please let me rest in peace!’
My poor Gabriella’s voice faded out. She seemed to suffer. I wanted not to hear, but how could I refuse experience? I turned switches and dials full on, almost to overload. I would not let her go.
‘Here, see, a strand,’ she went on, after a while, as if fingers and mind had been busy un-plaiting. ‘A strong one, a central one, around which the tangle forms. Yes – see! – that must be Timothy Tovey. It is plaited and woven and multicoloured; it is shot through with silver and gold. How wonderful it is! But look! Someone has washed him badly, made the water too hot. The colours have run. It need never have happened. Any person can be washed, if proper care and attention is paid, even those which say “Dry Clean Only” – which is mostly only a manufacturer’s convenience – oh, my poor head! What is a word, and what is a label, and what is a principle, and who can we trust?…’
Here, for all my efforts, the tape ends, abruptly; and, fortunately, with it the sensuous spell cast over me by that elderly woman, Gabriella Sumpter, dead these three months. Lucky for Honor: how can a woman deal with a husband in love with a re-wind? When he moons and sulks, and picks at his food, and longs for death, the sooner to join his beloved, to be part of the joyous throng in the Great Script Conference – for that, I have no doubt, is where Gabriella Sumpter found herself.
Honor was doing her best to keep me in this world, tempting me with the food she thought I liked, and certainly needed. Honor, of course, has never washed a garment by hand, let alone ironed one. She does not even possess an iron: she pushes a week’s multicoloured laundry into the washing machine and switches it to ‘whites, heavy’ and gets on with her life. That is why my underclothing is always harsh and pinkish-purplish. But neither would Honor have deceived me with the likes of Clive Cunningham.
12
I counted my blessings, shook the spell of Gabriella Sumpter from me, and prepared a solid and constructive report on the Sumpter Tapes for the coming GNFR Synod. I argued that they contained no evidence that the GSWITS was attempting to contact his humble creation; or giving us the reassurance we need that we have indeed, through our contacts with the re-winds, put our fingers on the meaning of the universe. The rules of laundry are not the rules of life! I included some fairly strong criticism of the current clique of pinner priests. The report may well be something of a sensation. But I was not finished with Gabriella Sumpter. That night she came to me in a dream: a high-bosomed sixteen-year-old girl in a white dress, singed around the hem, her hair dishevelled, her lovely eyes wild. She begged me to take a message to Janice Tovey, to say there was nothing to grieve about, since everything was part of everything else. How familiar, how sweet her voice was. But I decided I would do nothing; Janice Tovey would hardly welcome such a message. Re-winds are everywhere these days, and the messages they send are not necessarily more sensible in death than in life.
On the following night Gabriella came again, and this time Honor saw her too: the presence in our bedroom was so bright it was as if someone had switched on the light. Honor, usually such a sound sleeper, woke with a start and, seeing a stranger in the room, groped for the teeth she kept in a glass beside the bed. I have no doubt she wanted to look her best, for Gabriella, at some thirty years, was the most ravishing creature I have ever seen, dressed in the cream-coloured muslin nightdress she had spoken of, gathered under perfect breasts with a lilac ribbon, dark hair flowing round the sweetest face.
‘Tell Timothy Tovey to hurry,’ she said. ‘Tell him he is the thread that binds us together.’ At that she faded out – but not, I thought, without a slight frown at the grey pinky-purple state of our bed-linen; though that last may be my imagination.
‘That was Gabriella?’ Poor Honor was terrified. I explained a little of the story, and she suggested, wisely, that perhaps I should do what I had been asked and get in touch with the Toveys, in case Gabriella next chose to appear in her winding sheet – no matter how beautifully made by Miss Martock – fresh from her grave and deliquesced about the eyes. A horrible thought!
So that is what I did. The Toveys lived in a magnificent house on Hyde Park. It is one of the sadder features of the GNFR that it tends to maintain, indeed even increase, such inequities as already exist between the haves and the have-nots. Although dramatic individual stories of rags to riches, riches to rags, are a common enough feature in Western societies nurtured under the GNFR, on the whole there is little social mobility. The poor just gently get poorer; the rich, not so gently, get richer: our religion seems to breed social passivity. To consent is not to strive. The idea is so important in the formation of civilisations, is it not? Notions of socialism and a fair society faded along with Christianity: the eighties finally saw them off. The GSWITS, I fear, is a great admirer of Dickens.
Be that as it may, it was obvious to me that money was the least of the Toveys’ worries. Depression, however, may well have been. I saw a Rolls Royce parked in the drive, and a Bentley in the garage, but both in a dull old-fashioned black, not the brilliant spots and swirls so popular these days. The interior of the Toveys’ house, though flawlessly decorated, was bleak and reproachful in its grandeur: the very flowers in the vases seemed to sigh and wilt in the unkind light of central chandeliers which sent unflattering shadows through the too-high rooms. The many leather couches were so plumply upholstered as to make it more likely that they would throw one off than welcome one in. It was a household run by a woman on a perpetual diet of the senses. It would be uncharitable of me to suggest a likeness between Honor and Janice Tovey – suffice it to say that I understood at once why Timothy Tovey should have sought solace in Gabriella’s arms.
Mrs Tovey being out at a fund-raising, I could not pass on Gabriella’s message to her in person – somewhat, I must say, to my relief. I was shown instead into the library, where I found Timothy Tovey, a courteous white-haired man who still had about him the remnants of the vigorous good looks of his youth. I had, I think, expected to see him bowed down by grief at the loss of Gabriella, but he seemed cheerful enough, even lively. He was obviously a man with a great appetite for life. He talked to me freely; he was a member of the GNFR and although I am not of the high priesthood I am sufficiently advanced in the lay hierarchy to hear confession, or, as we like to call it, life-story.
‘What, my Gabriella!’ he exclaimed. ‘Taped by the priests! Come back as a re-wind! Well, it doesn’t surprise me. That woman’s egocentricity would survive a hundred deaths. Waiting for me in the hereafter? Janice isn’t going to like that! Waiting for Janice, too, you say? Oh, my Lord!’ And he laughed, heartily.
I was, I must say, a little taken aback. He apologised. ‘I loved Gabriella,’ he said, ‘very much indeed at one time of my life. But is there to be no end to love? I held her hand when she died simply because she had sent for me, quite out of the blue. I had not seen her or spoken to her for twenty years: though GSWITS knows she had cost me enough in that time. And, seeing her as she was, old and ill, on her deathbed, it was hard to remember just why she had inspired such passion in me. She could be a very trying woman, you know. She once refused to see me for two years, on the grounds that she had discovered I slept with my own wife in a double bed!’
‘Three,’ I said. I tried not to sound too reproachful. Timothy Tovey had his part to play. As do we all.
‘As long as that? I can hardly remember. But I do recall she wanted to run off with some Greek waiter: she spent two
years trying to persuade him to marry her, but she failed and came back to me. That was what all that was about. Did she tell you the truth? I doubt it. I first encountered her via her dental X-rays. We shared the same dentist, way back, when I was young. The poor man was obviously hopelessly in love with her – quite deranged. “See,” I remember him saying, as I reclined helpless in his chair, waving the X-ray plates of a total stranger in front of me, “A perfect arch! A crime if anything happens to those teeth.” I could not help but notice the name. Gabriella Sumpter! It entranced me, together with the concept of a perfect arch. And I suppose it is in a man’s nature to love and want what another man loves and wants, albeit a dentist. So I sought out the young woman, and found the most beautiful creature imaginable, living with, though not married to, a prosperous, fashionable and very boring young doctor. I resolved at once to make her my mistress.’
And so the sorry story continued. Timothy Tovey had no intention of damaging his prospects in the diplomatic service by marrying Gabriella, though he confessed to promising her he would, the more easily to seduce the poor woman. They succeeded in keeping their relationship hidden from the doctor for some years, until Miss Martock, then resident as housekeeper in Orme Square, eventually became party to it – and she it was who, under a terrible burden of guilt, informed Aldred Ray about what was going on under the pear tree at home, and in a little service flat in Mayfair away from home. Gabriella forgave Miss Martock for her indiscretion – she relied heavily by then upon her housekeeper’s dressmaking skills. But Aldred could not forgive Gabriella; alas, he hanged himself in the bathroom, there where little pink-lacquered birds flew across gilded tiles. After which scandal, of course, it was all the more difficult for Timothy Tovey to regularise his relationship with Gabriella, although he did admit that at this stage he very much wanted to. He introduced Gabriella to his mother, and to his surprise Lady Julia quite liked the girl, in spite of her past, and would almost, he thought, have consented to the match, and encouraged him to face and overcome any consequent difficulties in his career, had it not been for Gabriella’s extraordinary behaviour, one morning, over the spoiling in the wash of a cheap muslin nightgown. She had fussed and carried on as if it had been some expensive silk extravaganza, quite spoiling Lady Julia’s breakfast. It was apparent that the girl had no idea at all how to manage the servants. She had been badly brought up. A diplomat’s wife has to know how to deal with staff. It is the key to her husband’s success.
And so thoughts of marriage were abandoned and Gabriella was set up by Lady Julia in the little house in St. John’s Wood, where it seemed she could do no harm. Here, Timothy Tovey explained, he was a frequent visitor, until shortage of money obliged him to marry Janice – a less distant relative of royalty – who was able both to feather his pocket and further his career.
‘I loved Janice’, Timothy Tovey said to me, ‘as a man loves a wife, and I appreciated Gabriella as a man appreciates a mistress. The wife stokes the fire; the mistress warms her hands at the blaze.’ The passion between himself and Gabriella had gradually faded. Some ten years into the marriage, when Janice had put him on a diet, came a time when the flame rekindled, and Timothy Tovey visited Gabriella more frequently than the once-a-fortnight which had been his custom. But that too soon passed. ‘The bedclothes,’ he complained, ‘were always uncomfortably scratchy.’ Finally the visits stopped altogether.
Children? They had never discussed the matter. It would have been totally inappropriate for Gabriella to have had his, Timothy Tovey’s, offspring. He could not have acknowledged them. Nor, he thought, would he have continued to support Gabriella had she had children by another man. As it was, he believed he had dealt very fairly with her. But still sometimes, just sometimes, he would wake up in the night, and reach out for Gabriella, and find instead the staunch body of Janice.
‘And you feel like weeping,’ I finished his sentence for him, since he could not, ‘but quite what for you can’t make out.’
We were interrupted by the arrival of Janice Tovey, and I was not sorry. He seemed to be telling me a tale of waste and sorrow: of lives and happiness thrown away. But Janice, although I must say plain of feature, was a determined and positive woman, who seemed to have lived a good enough life, and when warned by her husband that Gabriella was roaming the city as a re-wind merely laughed and said: ‘She never bothered me when she was alive. Why should she now she’s a ghost?’ Poor Gabriella, I thought. The only one in the world to take herself seriously – but that, no doubt, is the fate of women who do not marry, and who do not have children, for whatever reason.
‘Love’, I said reflectively to Honor, when I got home, ‘is a woman’s whole existence. To men, it is a thing apart.’ Honor just laughed, and put a plate of high-fibre beans on unbuttered wholemeal toast in front of me, and said I had changed, probably for the better, but I must now stop thinking about love and get on with the reform of the GNFR. Honor is, of course, quite right. Strange days, indeed. Oh, strange days.
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First published in 1987 by Hutchinson, an imprint of Century Hutchinson Ltd
This eBook first published in the UK in 2014 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Fay Weldon, 1987
Cover image © Sniegirova Mariia
The moral right of Fay Weldon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (E) 9781781858059
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Contents
Cover
Welcome Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Copyright
On the anniversary of the Eve of the Battle of Waterloo, an assortment of unusual dinner guests gather at a remote country house to pay homage to Henry Shrapnel, inventor of the exploding cannonball. But all is not peaceful at the Shrapnel Academy: The downstairs servants, a group of third-world refugees led by a South African butler, are plotting to overthrow their upstairs oppressors. When a blizzard hits the countryside and traps everyone indoors, the rebellion erupts into bloody warfare throughout the Academy...
Table of Contents
Henry Shrapnel, or Shrapnell, that great military genius, thought up his idea for a spherical case shot in approximately 1793. It was approved for use by the Board of Ordnance in 1803, and first used in Surinam (Dutch Guiana) in 1804. The common bursting shell had, of course, been in use since the middle of the seventeenth century; but in the same fictional spirit as we say Columbus ‘discovered’ America in 1492, we can say that Henry Shrapnel ‘invented’ the exploding cannonball in 1804.
1
The Shrapnel Academy is an institution dedicated to the memory of that great military genius, Henry Shrapnel – he
who in 1804 invented the exploding cannonball. Bella Morthampton spent a weekend at this interesting and curious place last January. She went in the company of her lover, General Leo Makeshift, who was to give the annual Wellington Lecture; his subject was to be ‘Decisive Battles of World War II’. Bella and he travelled down to the Academy on the Friday evening. Their car was a chauffeur-driven black Rolls-Royce, so plumply upholstered within it might have been a padded cell. For much of the journey the General’s hand was upon Bella’s knee. The interior fitments of the limousine were embossed wherever possible with the emblems of the Ministry of Defence; its windows were darkened and bullet-proof. It was surprisingly quiet inside, as is a church in a noisy city centre. Those outside, of course, could not see those inside at all; who it was who travelled in so grand and mysterious a way, though who could doubt that whoever it was had the future nicely at their fingertips. And as for the view from within, well, that was distorted by the thickness of the toughened glass panes, so that the world passed by, as intended, as if it had almost nothing at all to do with Bella or the General; neither the noble broadwalks of the central city, not the humbler, messy suburbs, nor the stark and unleaved country lanes the limousine presently manoeuvred – the Shrapnel Academy was situated in the rural heart of the country – but of course it had: it had very much to do with them, and they with it.
