by Weldon, Fay
‘What do we keep servants for,’ said Joan Lumb, ‘if not to make rooms up. Have it done at once!’
The room Joan Lumb thus decreed for Sergei Wootton was named after Alexander of Macedonia. Macedonia is in today’s Northern Greece and part of the Common Market. Alexander, who lived in the third century BC, was another hereditary ruler, and at an amazingly youthful age conquered all the lands around by devising a way of using human beings themselves as weapons – the thundering, powerful, noisy, relentless, invincible, charging Phalanx. This was a flock of running men, in disciplined, tactical formation, its rows eighteen men or more deep, each man carrying a long pike and a short sword. When that lot started pounding towards you, look out! Goodbye, limbs, stomach, breath, life! The great advantage of the Phalanx, at least for its general, was that around the perimeter could be placed the professional soldiers, the tough, aggressive men who always love a fight, and in the middle could be placed the farmers, the peasants, the family men, the raggle-taggle and downright weaklings and cowards. Deserters have always been a problem for emperors and generals. There are always too many men in an army who want to be fed, not to fight. But Alexander really cracked the problem. Once the Phalanx began its thunderous charge there was no running away for any of its composite members. If a man so much as hesitated he would be trampled to death. Safer by far to go with it than to flee. And this is the principle to which all Alexander’s successors have held – make it kill or be killed, charge or be trampled, slash or be slashed, push the button or be incinerated. Bully for you, Alexander!
There was more to Alexander’s army than just the Phalanx, of course. Generals like to embroider and decorate, as much as anyone: not merely to be on the safe side, but because deployment can then become an art; there is justification for much pacing up and down; all kinds of difficult judgements can be made and important decisions taken. Battles must be fun, or what’s the point of them? Defeats must be dramatic and victories glorious, or all you are left with is the trampled, messy mud-and-blood and smelly severed limbs of the battlefield. So, in front of the Phalanx, before it started its battering run, would go a skirmish line, made up of bad servants, inefficient foragers, criminals and so forth, armed with bows, javelins, darts and slings, who would harry and tease the enemy, and seldom survived, but needed a lot of organisation. And wheeling and dealing around the side of the Phalanx, surrounding and protecting their Emperor, were the young noblemen, Alexander’s elite corps of cavalry, who could be relied upon to grasp, as the peasants so often failed to do, such concepts as Valour, Liberty, Loyalty, Endeavour, and Sacrifice. This particular cavalry corps set a great example for similar young men throughout the Age of Muscle, and well into the Age of Gunpowder. Do you think Alexander’s infantry died cheering him? That we will never know. Those who wrote about battles in the past liked to assume that this was how soldiers behaved. I prefer to believe that they come to their senses as they gasp their last, and the boots of their own side trample them into the mud, and think ‘What am I doing here? How did I allow this to happen? Is fun for the others worth this for me?’ I may be wrong.
Be that as it may. Panza Jordan and Sergei Wootton, during the course of Friday afternoon, were put, respectively, in the rooms where they would be least happy, the former in Tiglath-Pileser III, where the heating was inadequate, and the latter in Alexander, which was reputed to be haunted, for reasons which will later be made clear. They turned up together on the Academy doorstep as snow began to fall, and Muffin let them in. Both men blamed Muffin, not Joan Lumb, for the wretchedness of their rooms, which she had expected. Employees so often carry the can for their employers.
10
Acorn the butler opened the great front door of the Shrapnel Academy in response to General Leo Makeshift’s ring. The General and Bella stepped inside, and a flurry of snow blew in with them. Acorn sent the houseman Raindrop to see to the garaging of the car. Joan Lumb stepped forward to welcome the General and rather half-heartedly greet his young secretary Bella.
Acorn took the opportunity of asking Muffin where exactly the General’s chauffeur and the General’s secretary were to be put, since Joan Lumb had issued no orders, and now Ivor stood at the back of the hall, waiting, embarrassed, and as it were undesignated.
‘She’s a little indecisive today,’ said Muffin, kindly.
‘It’s all the excitement, and of course Murray’s coming.’
Joan Lumb believed her feelings for Murray were well disguised, but of course they were not. Everyone knew but Murray. ‘Besides,’ added Muffin, ‘she does like to see people first. But I’ll ask her for a decision.’
At the Shrapnel Academy the grand ground-floor rooms were used for dining, lecturing and relaxing. On the first floor were the suites where visiting dignitaries and lecturers were accommodated – the Queen’s sister herself had once stayed in the Charlemagne Suite. On the second floor were the smaller but still pleasant student, cadet and Academy staff bedrooms, and on the attic floor were the small dormered rooms where visiting white servants slept. The Shrapnel servants slept in dormitories in the semi-basement and basement which made up the kitchen and service areas of the great house. And if they slept five to a bed, and six under it, Joan Lumb was not to know. Their children were trained not to cough or cry when she was on her monthly round of dormitory inspection. Old ladies stayed their wheezing and old men their coughing, while Joan Lumb strode by. They pressed themselves into the cupboards and alcoves of this dank, subterranean world, and lived to see another day.
In Joan Lumb’s mind the status scale ran thus:
Employers, male, white
Employers, female, white
Servants, male, white
Employees, male, black
Servants, female, white
Employees, female, black
Servants, male, black
Servants, female, black
This seemed to Joan the natural order of things; and exceptions, of course, proved the rule. Both Ivor and Bella, on first sight, presented Joan Lumb with difficulties. It was rare for a servant to be as blond as Ivor the chauffeur. His very blondness seemed to qualify him for more than a servant’s room; on the other hand he was a chauffeur – fairly low down the servant scale. And what about Bella? A secretary? Surely she, by virtue of her pallor and the carved, still quality of her perfect face, all but qualified for a room on the second floor? Moreover, she was coming to dinner. But no, look again. She was no secretary, she was the General’s tart. Her blouse was thin and cheap and she wore a ridiculous gold cross at her neck.
‘The third floor for Miss Morthampton, Acorn,’ said Joan Lumb. ‘And for the chauffeur too, of course.’
All this detail as to where guests are put and why must seem tedious to some, and I hope they will bear with me, but anyone with more than one spare mattress at their disposal will understand the calculations which go on in the hostly mind: will the doubleness of the bed make up for the twanging of its springs? is it the oldest guest or the most entertaining who deserves the quilt which does not lose feathers? who’s to get the spare bed in the child’s room – the heaviest sleeper or the one least likely to take offence? And he or she will sympathise with the likes of Joan Lumb and see themselves in her, in this small manner, or that. We must lose our good opinion of ourselves if the world is to be changed, and see ourselves in those we most dislike.
I must tell you rather more about Acorn the butler; he was the uncrowned king of the downstairs domain. Acorn Jeffreys was young, shiny black, languid of speech, brilliant of smile, quick of thought. Plucked as an adolescent from his native Soweto, he had been shipped North and educated by a white welfare agency far, far beyond his parents’ expectation. Both bad and good fairies danced attendance at Acorn’s birth. The bad doomed him to Soweto and an absentee mother – absent against her will, of course; money has to be earned if children are to be fed, but the child takes little notice of maternal motives and sees only maternal conduct – and the good granted him mag
nificent good looks and a fine intelligence, the wherewithal of his salvation.
Acorn had passed well enough through the white man’s schools and university, but had been sent down from his law college, not for revolutionary activity, but more simply, for non-payment of his fees. Acorn had given the money to SWORD (Student World Organisation for Revolution and Democracy), instead, and argued his right to do so. But educational institutions are much the same the world over. They are, on the whole, kindly, but how can they keep going if students will not pay their fees? They will make do somehow if a pupil who can provide no money provides gratitude and comfortable notions, but if a pupil offers nothing pleasant, why put up with him? Can you blame them for expelling him? Now, partly from choice and partly from necessity – for his government would not allow him home – Acorn worked with the needy and oppressed, in the servant quarters of the Shrapnel Academy. Acorn had to eat, so he had to serve. The white races, in his experience, were too cunning to give, except in their own interests, and too dangerous to rob. So now Acorn worked for them, as did so many of his countrymen, as had his mother before him, placing their food in front of them, wiping up after them. Acorn ate well, mind you, better than his mother ever had. For now he was at the heart of Empire, where the good things are, and the crumbs which fall from the tables of power are fat and large.
In fact Acorn ate not just crumbs but whole chickens, appropriated from the upstairs table, at the rate of eight or ten a week. The cooks provided them; a simple enough matter – the young gentlemen upstairs ate well, and chickens passed through the kitchen by the hundred. The downstairs staff did not grudge Acorn his luxuries, or if they did, did not show it. Acorn’s warm brown eyes could quite quickly turn cold and cruel. The cooks themselves, along with the rest of the staff, these days made do for meat with flakes of chicken flesh left over from the upstairs table. Mixed up with rice, vegetables, lentils and chillis – which will make the poorest dish exciting – it served them well enough. It had to. It was Acorn’s habit to commandeer the money allocated – generously enough – by Joan Lumb for the staff table, and send it off weekly to SWORD. Joan Lumb inspected the kitchens once a week. Acorn saw her round, and Joan Lumb saw nothing wrong, and continued to believe that her staff numbered thirty souls. In fact, several hundreds lived in the warrens below, and the numbers grew all the time: babies were born, spouses shipped in, partners acquired, runaways sheltered, and Joan Lumb knew nothing about it.
It did sometimes occur to Hilda, the lovely, gentle Balinese girl who was Acorn’s bedfellow, she with the degree in English Literature, to wonder how much of Joan Lumb’s Staff Food Allowance was sent to SWORD and how much went into her lover’s pocket, but she said nothing. How could she? Why should she? She was trained to love, admire and appreciate, not to criticise. Acorn had spent a summer training with SWORD in the Lebanon, and knew all too well how to deal with opponents, secretly, quickly and effectively. If you are the lover of a man like that you need to go carefully, tread more softly, not less.
Hilda, of course, had not started life as Hilda, any more than Acorn had started life as Acorn. But Joan Lumb, being a member of the literate races, had no time for names which, however full of phonetic and racial resonance, would give difficulty to typists.
‘Acorn,’ she said, when first he stood before her – he seemed to glisten with pride and strength – ‘We will call you Acorn.’
‘That from which mighty oaks grow,’ he remarked. ‘Very well, Acorn it shall be.’
Joan Lumb, having not required this assent, was a little taken aback to receive it. She hoped the young man would not prove uppity. But his English was excellent, and he was intelligent, and cheerful, and there is nothing worse than being served by people who do not understand a simple order, are debased in their humanity, and unhappy. She wanted, quite actively, to have him on the staff. She employed him in the same spirit as a businessman employs a pretty girl rather than a plain one; and then she made him butler, in that same spirit as the headmaster makes a naughty boy a prefect, hoping it will quieten him down.
11
Joan Lumb, since Acorn was occupied with Bella Morthampton and Ivor, herself showed the General to the Charlemagne Suite. The suite was named after the Emperor-General who did so much, during his reign from AD 771 to 814, to bring grace and style back to warfare after the fall of the Roman Empire. Battles had degenerated alarmingly since the days of Tiglath-Pileser and Alexander and, after them, the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome. Battles were no longer informed by tactics, as they had been in that ancient world. Now there was nothing but a disorderly alignment of opposing warriors, all shoving and pushing, in roughly parallel orders of battle, followed by dull, uninspired butchery (sic. I quote a military historian: it is their habit to make this kind of distinction, between inspired death-dealing and uninspired butchery) until one side or the other fled. There was no leadership; no ingenuity, sophistication or discipline on the battlefield at all. Perfectly dreadful, military historians agree! Then, as if in answer to the challenge of the times, Charlemagne emerged. He it was who brought ritual back into battle, and discipline, oh, such discipline! Charlemagne established ranks amongst his troops and efficient lines of command: he developed the arts of foraging so that his armies could go farther and yet farther afield – now they could venture a thousand miles from home or more. Whole nations might go hungry, there might not be seed for next year’s harvest, but the troops would be fed and the battle be won! And there were always such lots of troops. Charlemagne’s nobles had to provide them, or lose their lands. So the peasantry lost its freedom, the feudalising process was hastened, and a good supply of soldiery insured for centuries to come. Good on you, Charlemagne! Good on you, cobber!
The suite of course was charming, and done in rococo style which enchanted the General. In the bedroom, however, was a large double bed hung with heavy tapestries, which he hoped was dust free. He had suffered from asthma in his youth, and although now free of the disease, had an automatic fear and suspicion of dust. He had a terrible vision of Bella bouncing naked on the bed, and with each bounce a cloud of dust arising, and himself wheezing and huffing. He need not have worried: the bed was well aired and the hangings and blankets properly shaken, but adulterers make over-anxious, guilty lovers, quite ridiculously nervous of possible catastrophe. And although the General was not consciously guilty, knowing quite well that all through history the brave have deserved the fair, and by definition a general is a brave man, he was, all the same, married. ‘I’m sure I’ll be most comfortable here,’ said the General, bravely. ‘A really enchanting room! And what an interesting bed.’
‘A bed with a history,’ said Joan Lumb. ‘It’s called the Charlemagne bed. The Queen’s sister once slept in it.’ These things do not go forgotten.
12
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 ap
preciate, 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.
