by Weldon, Fay
And so, in tune with their prosperity, and their virtue, made only a little late by the problems that accompany success and power, Shirley, Victor, and the little Blades approached the Shrapnel Academy: Shirley driving, the children sleeping, Victor dozing, and Harry the dog, the sleek black Doberman, quivering in surprise as snow swirled out of the darkness to hit the heated rear window, where it melted and disappeared. There one minute, gone the next! Harry was less than a year old and had never seen snow before. He did not like surprises.
4
Baf drove a dark green sportscar: it scuttled between the high hedges as if it were a beetle running for cover. Baf had owned the car for a week. It was thirty years old, two years older than blond Baf himself. There was a map-light attachment on the dashboard and a compass stuck by suction to the windscreen. Baf drove with the roof open, regardless of the cold. He wore a leather flying jacket with a fur collar, turned up high beneath his square and handsome jaw. He was in a hurry to see Muffin, who worked at the Shrapnel Academy. Muffin was Joan Lumb’s secretary. Baf had visited the Academy, in secret, many times. He would telephone ahead, so Muffin would be watching the drive when he arrived. She would open one of the side doors for her lover. They would hurry up the back-stairs to her small bedroom on the third floor where he would throw himself upon her, leaving her scarcely any time at all to remove her garments. The red horse-heads upon her royal blue headscarf and his fur collar were etched into the other’s erotic consciousness.
Reader, what is etched in yours? What collar-bone, what little patch of textured skin, what dangling pendant? Think! Remember! Keep back the glacier of age by the sheer warmth, the sheer force of sexual recollections, wild imaginings! It can be done: it is worth the doing.
Today Baf would go to the front door, openly. He too had been invited by Joan Lumb to come to dinner and meet the General. The dinner would no doubt be boring, but Baf would at least stay overnight, officially. Muffin would have the sense to put him in a room easily accessible to hers. And Baf would take the opportunity, during the Saturday morning, of cornering the General and demonstrating the miniaturised weaponry he carried in a velvet-lined Victorian knife box in the boot of the car. Once such fire power would have needed a half-mile wagon train to carry it. Now, a knife box! Oh, nifty! Oh, progress! Stunning! Oh, the cleverness of men! Bump, goes the knife box the other side of a hump-backed bridge. Up, down, bump, and bump again.
Baf did not think he would marry Muffin. Someone better would probably come along: Kashoggi’s daughter, Arafat’s niece. And Muffin, to be fair, felt that marriage to Baf was likewise unsuitable. One married, she supposed, for a quiet life. Sooner or later, Muffin expected to be the wife of one of the young officers who came to the Shrapnel Academy for courses in Weapons Through the Ages, The Rule of Law, The Concept of the Just War, and so forth. She also sometimes thought, regretfully, that it probably wouldn’t make much difference which one it was. They all seemed much the same: that is to say, shy and sweet, rather like Muffin herself. If she smiled at them, they would smile shyly and sweetly back, but she had to smile first. Muffin was spectacularly long-legged and shaggy-headed: she had large blue eyes with droopy lids. She seemed to inspire romantic rather than erotic love in the hearts of young men other than Baf. If she dropped a drawing-pin, when pinning lists and rotas on the noticeboards, there would be a dive to the rescue, and a trembling of hands if hers touched theirs. Well, that was right. Husbands should respect wives. And Baf didn’t respect Muffin; she could tell by the things he did in bed. Muffin thought she would just put off marriage as long as she possibly could. But how the gentle, soulful young cadets were ever to become men of war, she could not imagine: storm towns and drop bombs and so on!
Baf realised that the bump and lurch after the hump-backed bridge, which he had rather enjoyed, was unfamiliar. He had taken a wrong turning, an easy enough thing to do in such a spiderweb of lanes: the light snow which was now falling blanked out detail and made one crossroads much like another. He stopped at the next signposted turning, took out the map and switched on the map-light, pleased to have found an opportunity for making use of it. The compass, alas, had fallen off the windscreen. Baf located it on the floor, re-licked its suckers, and pressed it on again. It stayed. A right turn and then another should, he imagined, after proper consultation of map and compass, bring him back to familiar territory. So he had planned his route in the past, in the uncharted wastes of the Sahara, and in jungle tracks in Bolivia and over the South African veldt. A compass had never fallen off before. He imagined it was the cold and damp which did it.
After the first right turn his headlights picked out a motorbike lying by the side of the hedged road. He slowed, thinking perhaps there had been an accident. He saw no signs of a body, but after the next turn came upon a young woman, walking away from him in the centre of the narrow road. She carried a rucksack in one hand, and a bike helmet in the other. When she heard the car, she pressed herself against the hedge to let it pass. Baf slowed, stopped, lowered the window. There was not much of her to be seen, inasmuch as a donkey jacket concealed her figure, and her head was wrapped in a long woolly scarf, of the kind he had so often seen on Jumble Sale stalls in his youth, when his mother had been active raising funds for the Little Sisters of Mercy Overseas. But she was young, female, in trouble and he wished to help.
‘Can I give you a lift?’
‘No, you cannot.’
The reply was curt: the tone of voice almost offensive. Baf was hurt. He noticed, so bright was the map-light which he now switched on, that she was wearing heavy boots and that their laces were double-knotted. He had the feeling that if he pressed the matter she might well produce a knife and use it. She was the kind of young woman who carried cartons of pepper to throw in men’s eyes, and handy pocket tear-gas sprays to blind them. Then when the man was helpless, weeping and coughing, and no doubt deafened by an alarm siren as well, she would get him with the boots. Girls like that were everywhere, these days. Baf wound up the window, and carried on. Let her walk. Muffin, in similar circumstances, would have accepted a lift. Those who looked for evil found none, and Baf had certainly meant none. He was glad to notice it was snowing harder, as he turned into the grounds of the Shrapnel Academy.
5
Murray Fairchild, discovering there was no bus service, was obliged to take a taxi to the Academy from the station at Stupehampton; a distance of fourteen miles. He thought Joan Lumb should have warned him of the expense.
‘The Shrapnel Academy? They say they make nerve gas in there,’ said the driver, settling in for a chat. Murray wanted only silence. The driver was a middle-aged woman. She chain-smoked. She had a bad head cold.
‘Of course that’s only silly rumour, but what does go on there? Or is it secret?’
‘It isn’t secret,’ said Murray. He spoke courteously, in spite of his irritation. He who had deflected bullets in Vietnam, withstood torture in Argentina, and narrowly escaped defenestration in Pakistan, found difficulty in being impolite to women. ‘The Shrapnel Academy is similar to an Arts Centre, but military in its nature.’
‘Oh, I see,’ she said. He doubted that she did.
He stretched his right leg. It ached, and it itched. There was, he knew, a tracery of engorged veins between ankle and knee. The whole leg, were he to look, would have a curiously mottled red and mauve appearance. Yet his left leg remained smooth, lean and bronze. He was sixty. Various physical changes were to be expected with the years, but why should the passage of time affect the right leg, and not the left?
‘Something the matter with your leg?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘Bet there is. You men are all the same. Take it to the doctor before it’s too late.’
‘Thank you for your advice,’ he said. But he did not mean to take it. No hypochondriac he, to go running to doctors. A sprinkling of antibiotic powder on a jungle sore, some quinine for malaria, a plank for a slipped disc – Murray did his own doctoring. The l
eg would respond to healthy living, positive thinking, in its own good time.
‘So, what’s your business at the Shrapnel Academy?’
‘I’m a guest there,’ he said, shortly. He was to be the lion at Joan Lumb’s dinner party. People would know who he was, and have the politeness not to talk about it. He wished that life could be lived without words, or at worst captions. Wham! Whee! Take that, and that! Ouch! Ugh! And the final dying Cr-cr-croak!
He wished he had chosen any other taxi than this.
‘You look like James Bond, only twenty years on,’ she observed. ‘Is that your line of business?’ She coughed and spluttered. He would need to take Vitamin C tablets as soon as possible.
‘Don’t usually find a man like you taking a taxi,’ she said, when her nasal passages were more composed. ‘What happened? Lose your licence? Driving under the influence?’
It was true that Murray had been disqualified from driving, on the grounds of drunkenness, many times, in many courts and in many lands. But if he wanted to drive, he drove, licensed or not. It was the ache in his right leg which now disqualified him as a driver, more effectively than any police force had ever managed, and obliged him to take taxis and put up with the inquisitions of strangers. He would as soon, he thought, step into a Khmer Rouge camp by night as into a taxi with a sneezing woman driver.
‘Hit the nail on the head, then!’ she remarked, when he did not reply. They were within a mile or so of the Shrapnel Academy when they approached a hitchhiker.
‘Don’t pull up,’ he said, sharply.
Once, years ago, he had stopped for a young woman, apparently involved in an accident on a Route Nationale. Out of the damaged car had stepped two armed men. Murray had been taken hostage, held for ransom, confined in a small space and it was four months before he was able to escape. Now he came to think of it, it was probably that particular confinement, that lack of exercise, which had started the trouble with his leg. He seemed to remember a sharp blow on the right knee-cap. With the remembrance came a twinge. ‘Don’t stop,’ he repeated, but the woman simply ignored him and pulled up alongside the hitchhiker. And there were bars in Agadir where men melted away at Murray’s approach!
‘Where do you want to go?’ the woman driver asked.
‘The Shrapnel Academy.’ It was a girl. Her face was muffled against the cold, but he thought the eyes had the steady, careful, haunted look of the female terrorist.
‘Drive on!’ he said, and the pain in his knee stabbed sharply.
‘I’ll just drop this fare off,’ said the driver to the girl, ‘since he’s so nervous. Then I’ll come back and give you a lift.’
‘I’d be grateful,’ said the girl, and they left her standing on the side of the road and she became part of the darkness of the past.
‘Naughty, naughty, paranoia!’ said the taxi driver to Murray.
Democracy, thought Murray, was scarcely worth preserving, or the personal freedoms which went with it, since it was preserved for the likes of the woman taxi driver, who could only abuse all possible freedoms.
‘Penny for your thoughts!’
He ignored her.
‘My, you are a deep one. I bet they do make poison gas up there.’
‘There it is ahead!’ she said, as the gates of the Shrapnel Academy appeared. ‘Bhopal, we call it, down on the rank. We got there just before the weather. They really get snowed in up here! You’ll be lucky to get out before March. Or have you brought your skis?’
‘You can see I have no skis,’ he said. She was a very stupid woman.
‘You might have the new lightweight collapsible ones tucked away in your pocket, for all I know.’
Murray did not think any such new style of skis existed. He would have heard. He’d skied across the Spanish border into France during the war, a dozen times or so. The skis themselves were always the main problem. How to dispose of them? Now if he could have put them in his pocket – but then where would have been the peril, where the point?
‘Only joking,’ she said. She charged him half what he had anticipated. He had the same sudden feeling of elation as once, when he was twelve, his mother had given him twice his normal weekly pocket money, by mistake. He went almost jauntily up the steps, and almost without limping, a thick-set, grizzled man with a wide brow, slightly brain-damaged by various blows to his head over a long period, deep eyes and a kindly manner, and hands adept at taking life, but only, ever, for the sake of principle, never inclination.
6
Edna the taxi driver returned to pick up the hitchhiker. She did so out of simple kindness, and in no expectation of reward. The night was dark, the girl was young.
‘Silly old fart,’ she said of her last customer.
The girl unwound her yellow and brown knitted scarf in the warmth of the car. She had a lean, young face, stern rather than pretty, quick blue eyes and frizzed out hair of no particular colour. She said her name was Medusa, but people called her Mew.
‘That’s a funny name,’ said Edna.
The girl explained that her mother had been a Greek scholar who took the view that Medusa was Jason’s victim, and that serving him his own children in a pie was no less than he deserved. The mother had called her daughter after her favourite person.
‘I see,’ said Edna. But Mew thought she probably didn’t. Mew’s mother was a feminist. That too runs in the blood, not the brain.
‘My poor mother,’ said Mew. ‘They put her in a nut house, in the end. And it wasn’t even as if she got Medusa right. Jason’s girlfriend was Medea. Is it far to the Academy? I ran out of petrol.’
‘A couple of miles,’ said Edna. ‘But I’ll take you for free. No skin off my nose. What’s your business at Shrapnel?’ It was a puzzle. The girl was white, and so was hardly likely to be on the domestic staff of the Shrapnel Academy. And not having the gloss that money and power gives, she could hardly be a guest: nor could she be one of the students, for they were always male: nor one of the teaching staff, for they spoke with the soft authority of the privileged classes. This girl’s voice had a workaday, anxious twang.
‘I’m a journalist,’ said the girl. ‘Someone’s making a speech there tomorrow. Some general.’
Edna did not believe her. This was not, in her experience, how journalists looked and behaved. They did not wind themselves in woolly scarves, ride motorbikes and run out of petrol.
‘You don’t believe me,’ said the girl, ‘but it’s true. I’m on the staff of the Woman’s Times. It’s a new daily newspaper. Feminist. Have you heard of it?’
Edna hadn’t. How fast the world changed. One moment women stayed at home and baked steak and kidney pie; the next they drove taxis, published newspapers, and beef was bad for you and pastry worse.
‘If you give me your address,’ said Mew, ‘I’ll send you a copy of the Times. You really ought to read it. Every woman should. It will explain so much to you!’
Edna said she knew more than enough already. She sneezed and eased out a damp tissue from beneath the cuff of her sleeve and dabbed at her nose, which was bright pink and painful around the nostrils. She changed her mind and tucked back the tissue and sniffed up instead; it hurt less and was more efficacious, if noisier, and the girl was getting a free ride.
‘Is that it?’ asked the girl in alarm, when she saw the spotlit splendour of the Academy, and its flag flying proudly through the blizzard. She had assumed, on accepting the assignment, that she would be visiting some local College of Further Education, tucked somewhere at the back of a High Street in a country town. Mew had not envisaged anything so grand, nor anywhere so remote as this. She knew nothing about the army. How could she? Why should she?
‘That’s it,’ said Edna. ‘That’s the Shrapnel Academy, and thank God for it. It keeps the taxi-rank in business. We’d all be bankrupt otherwise.’
The taxi’s wheels stuck and spun in soft snow as Edna reversed and set off home. The sky was clearing; she could even see a star sparkling above the trees. If t
he snow stopped falling and then froze on the ground, and then started again, as the weather forecast suggested, there would be a hard weekend ahead on the roads.
7
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’.
