by Weldon, Fay
Miriam was warm and cheerful: her eyes were large and liquid and her mouth soft and sweet. She was not so pretty as Hilda, or so intelligent, but she was worthy of Acorn’s attention. The baby which now attempted to batter its way out of her helpless, gentle embrace was his.
‘She will have to go to hospital,’ said Inverness. ‘She has to have a Caesarian.’
‘You must do it yourself,’ said Acorn. There were no proper facilities for surgery in the pantry, although Inverness had once, triumphantly, there performed a successful appendectomy, using a kitchen knife. It was not possible to involve the health authorities, even in emergencies. Names, passports, visas would be required and none were available. Immigration officers would arrive on the doorstep and deportation for all be the almost inevitable conclusion. The young and vigorous would survive well enough, but the old, the weak, the feeble in mind and body, women and children, the homeless and stateless, would have little future outside the shelter of the Shrapnel Academy.
‘There is no way I can do it,’ said Inverness. ‘She will die.’
‘She must take her chances,’ said Acorn. ‘But save the baby, if you can.’ Given a choice between mother and baby, the surgeon must save the baby: this is the tradition of the world, and who is to say it is wrong?
So now Miriam sweated and groaned and the baby butted and fought and found no way out. Miriam bled and the flow would not stop. Matilda the Mexican girl used towel after towel sopping up the blood. Drops fell right through the mattress, through the spaces of the rusty wire bed springs and onto the well-swept, well-scoured floor. The bright bare lightbulb flickered and dimmed, as the wind and snow hit the power lines, but then recovered. Inverness used his kitchen knife, and saved the baby. Otherwise both would have died. Inverness rocked the baby to his slight chest, and wept, and presently went with the child in his arms to the staff dining-room. Acorn sat at the head of the table, devouring a chicken, tearing it to pieces with strong, greasy hands. All around him stood and sat the staff, half-admiring, half-alarmed, more civilised by half than he, but twice as helpless.
‘Acorn,’ said Inverness.
‘Lord Acorn—’ said Acorn.
‘You’re joking,’ said Inverness.
‘I am not,’ said Acorn, and the people around grew still.
‘Lord Acorn,’ said Inverness. ‘here is your baby. Miriam is dead.’ A sigh went up: a sob or so, quickly silenced. ‘Something like this was bound to happen sooner or later. We can’t go on this way.’
Acorn put down his chicken. He looked at his own strong powerful hands. They were good for tearing meat, for strangling. They could also make love wonderfully, for all the good that that had done Miriam. He did not speak at once.
‘Miriam’s blood is not on my hands,’ he said. His voice began to rise. ‘Guilt rests with those upstairs, who have deprived us of our freedom. The scales must be righted. There must be justice! We will have vengeance!’
He shouted the last word, releasing his audience from their burden of quiet: those who spoke English translated the words for the benefit of those who did not: there was an agreeable and exciting buzz of voice and communion.
‘Mad,’ thought Inverness. ‘Finally flipped. What have I done? Triggered a psychotic response? I should have kept my mouth shut.’
‘Vengeance,’ said Inverness to the crowd, ‘is not an appropriate response,’ but he didn’t have the trick of public speaking, and very few took any notice. Why should they? Acorn had charisma: Inverness had not. Acorn said what they wanted to hear: what Inverness said was boring. Inverness handed the baby to Matilda for safekeeping, and prudently left the room, before Acorn’s anger could focus on the bringer of bad news. A few like-minded allies went with him.
That was during the Friday afternoon. By the time the guests arrived, and the gâteau-au-rhum was prepared, the servants’ quarters were throbbing with the pleasure-pain of welling subversive thought, as a boil throbs excitingly, just before it bursts. Acorn came striding down the vaulted corridor to the blue living-room where Joan Lumb spent this precious hour alone with Murray Fairfield. He opened the door without knocking, as he was right to do – a good butler only ever knocks on the doors of bedrooms – and stood framed in the doorway, shiny black, energetic. Murray sat peacefully on one side of the wide fireplace, and the leaping flames sent shadows over his grizzled face. Joan Lumb sat on the other side; she turned her flushed face slowly towards Acorn: she looked almost pretty, almost young, almost soft. So much love does. Murray, of course, thought she looked like this all the time. How could he not?
‘Acorn,’ she said. ‘Did I ring? Yes, I rang. Some Perrier water for Mr Fairfield.’
‘Madam,’ said Acorn, ‘on your instructions we keep no Perrier water in the house.’ And this was true enough. Joan Lumb objected strongly to paying through the nose for water, however charmingly bottled, however lively to the palate, for did not water fall freely from the sky, and run freely through the fields, and flow all but freely from taps? But now Murray asked for Perrier water, and she had none!
‘Well then, Acorn,’ she said. ‘Bring Mr Fairfield some iced water and lemon.’
‘No lemon,’ said Murray. ‘Too acid for my digestion. I’m happiest these days on just plain mealie-bud mash.’ Whatever that might be.
‘Iced water, Acorn,’ said Joan.
‘Hold the ice, Acorn,’ said Murray. ‘Too much of a shock to the system. Room temperature. Tap water will do me fine.’ Acorn bowed politely, and went to do Joan Lumb’s bidding. As for Murray, he concluded that Joan Lumb was a good sort of woman, as white women went, and politeness was due to her as his hostess, but she did fuss, and not as brown women fussed, with soft looks and touches and smiles, but awkwardly, as if a dog, attempting to be a cat, had jumped on a lap. Murray imagined there were little brown women amongst the staff – he had seen the flash of a young dusky shoulder vanishing down a corridor when he arrived, the movement of small buttocks under silk – and hoped Joan Lumb would have the sense to see that one came knocking at his door during the night. But he doubted it. That was the trouble with having women in men’s jobs.
‘Plain water and mealie-buds,’ cried Joan Lumb. ‘A man who risks not just his life but his digestion in the cause of freedom – oh, Murray!’
She laid her hand on his. It seemed to Murray a curious thing, very large and white, and the nails were blood-red. But he did not like to remove it. He even felt some explanation was necessary.
‘I was once made to drink acid in a San Salvadorian jail,’ he said. ‘My insides haven’t been the same since. Fortunately I was able to get to water in time. They were doing the drowning trick. They hold your head under water, let you up, hold you under – well, I just swallowed and neutralised the acid. Torturers are stupid people. It’s the only hope one has.’
‘Oh, Murray!’ The hand tightened. He patted it.
‘Actually I didn’t hold my tongue that time,’ said Murray. ‘I talked. Broke.’
Why was he telling her this? This plain white woman whom nobody loved?
‘But that’s true courage, isn’t it,’ she said, and he was grateful. ‘Not just heroics. To know fear, succumb to it, recover, carry on—’
‘It made no difference, of course. The people I betrayed had already been discovered, wiped out –’
‘Not betrayal, don’t say betrayed—’
‘But it was betrayal,’ he said, sadly. ‘Once I broke, they simply let me go. I guess they were disappointed in me. I’d let everyone down: friends, foes, myself. I can’t tell you what I felt. It was worse than pain.’
He found he was weeping: his hand clenched upon hers: hers responded. In all the rest of my life, she thought, they can’t take this moment away from me. It is happening, it has happened. Murray Fairchild holds Joan Lumb’s hand, trusts her, and weeps.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said presently. ‘I guess it’s just that you remind me of my mother.’
Her heart seemed to falter. It was a shock. It
was not at all what she had hoped to hear. How cruel life is, to women of a certain age, who keep forgetting that that is what they are.
At that moment Acorn returned with a glass of water.
‘Thank you, Acorn,’ she said. And then – ‘Acorn, you touched the rim of the glass with your hand. Go downstairs and fetch another. I know you people have no grasp of hygiene, but couldn’t you at least try to learn?’
Well, she was upset. Acorn didn’t hit her or kill her, he just went to fetch another glass. He was biding his time.
15
‘Shall I just pop in and look at the children?’ asked Shirley of Victor. She had changed into a flowered linen dress. She looked clean and decorous, pretty but not glamorous. She had three children under seven. She had shelved all that other for the time being. One day, one day!
‘You’d only disturb them,’ said Victor.
‘I expect you’re right,’ said Shirley. She wanted a drink; not badly, but enough to be conscious of it. She tried not to drink, and mostly managed not to. She did not want to be like her sister, Valerie. Shirley had opened a closet in Valerie’s house, mistaking it for the bathroom door, and empty gin bottles had tumbled out. Some had broken. It had been embarrassing. Valerie said she was saving them to make indoor tropical gardens to give to people at Christmas, but the explanation was not convincing.
‘Shall we go downstairs?’ she asked Victor. She thought he looked particularly handsome, and said so. He put his arms round her and gave her cheek a little peck.
‘I have a funny feeling,’ said Shirley, ‘that something not very nice is going to happen.’
‘We might be snowed in,’ said Victor, peering out of the tall windows. ‘That might not be very nice.’
‘I bought snow chains,’ said Shirley, virtuously. ‘You know there was a hitchhiker on the road? I nearly stopped.’
‘But you didn’t stop,’ he said.
‘I feel bad about it,’ she said. ‘Perhaps she’d run out of petrol, perhaps she was a genuine case.’
‘Perhaps she was part of an organisation which kidnaps senior executives and holds them to ransom,’ he said. He was part-joking, part not. Such things happened. He had put on a dark grey suit, silky to the feel. His socks were dark red.
‘Hardly after dark on a country road,’ she said.
‘Mostly after dark on a country road,’ he said.
‘Anyway,’ said Shirley, ‘the children were asleep. She’d have woken them up getting in.’
‘Quite so. First, we must look after our own: after that, if there’s a surplus, we can look after other people. Our children must sleep, and she risk rape. That’s the way it goes. Besides, when they’re awake they’re very noisy children. It’s safer for you to drive while they sleep.’
‘I think I should have stopped, all the same,’ said Shirley.
‘It was somehow an unlucky thing of me to have done, not to have stopped.’
‘Not-stopping is not doing something,’ said Victor, ‘it is merely failing to do something.’
‘All the same!’ said Shirley, and shivered.
Victor and Shirley went downstairs to join Joan and Murray, locking the door behind them, though this was not customary in the Shrapnel Academy, where a high standard of honesty normally prevailed. But those who steal are always anxious about being stolen from: and Victor was the thief of other men’s life and labour, as it is almost impossible for men in industry not to be.
Now. Your appetite for facts has perhaps returned? Your documentary indigestion has abated? You are ready for Napoleon, the greatest military genius of all time? (Joan Lumb places Henry Shrapnel above him but that is surely just perversity. Shrapnel was an inventor, a scientist, not a leader of men. Joan Lumb would argue that a leader is nothing without weapons, which is true enough, but what are weapons if there is nobody to organise their deployment?) During the Middle Ages there had been yet another decline in battle management. Charlemagne and Gustavus Adolphus were forgotten. Armies now simply met head on in pitched battles: Agincourt, Cressy, Sedgemoor, and so forth. Opposing forces, some mounted, some on foot, would sway this way and that over a confined patch of ground (armies 100,000 strong would be deployed against one another in areas of only a few square kilometres) slashing and hacking over terrain which became increasingly difficult as the dead and dying piled up underfoot. Death was for the most part by trampling, crushing and asphyxiation. Who actually won was hard to determine. Napoleon found this battle-system barbaric. A great general needs to exercise great skill. He changed the face of warfare once again. He went to battle with flair, style and skill. Casualty rates fell sharply during the Napoleonic wars, as compared to early wars. The average casualty rate in 1600 was 30 per cent for the defeated and 20 per cent for the victors. By 1820 it had fallen to 23 per cent for the defeated and 19 per cent for the victors. (That is if you leave out the French adventure in Russia in 1812, when the death rate was 80 per cent for the defeated and 90 per cent for the victors, but that was an exception, and it is unfair to count that in the statistics – in the same way that it is unhelpful to average out a child’s exam results, when the child gets 90 per cent for English and 10 per cent for Maths. What you do not have here is an average child!) Napoleon did not wish to win at any cost, but to keep that cost down as far as possible and still achieve a victory. Therein, according to Napoleon and his successors, lies the skill, charm and achievement of warfare. The quest is for bigger, better weapons, inflicting maximum casualties on the enemy, but minimum damage to your own troops. (The casualty rate for civilians goes for the most part uncatalogued by army historians. They do not find it interesting.) Even so, at the Battle of Waterloo, in 1815, horses still slipped in the blood and dismounted their riders, so that important messages never got through.
This failure in communications was one of the factors which led to Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, and his successors (generals learn by their defeat) have been perfecting codes and communication devices ever since. The other factor was the sheer weight of man and gun power which opposed him. The relative combat power of the attacker (Wellington and the allies) against the defender (Napoleon) was 1:·79. Heavy odds against Napoleon! On the other hand, French combat effectiveness (that is to say, the efficiency with which Napoleon deployed men and weapons) was far greater than that of the English: to the ratio of 1:·61. The French had superiority in leadership, training, experience and what the military are pleased to call ‘intangible variables’. Nevertheless, they lost the battle; too few men by far faced too many, and communications failed. Generals ever since have done their best when in a conflict situation to avoid these two eventualities. In the First World War, between England and Germany, thousands upon thousands upon thousands upon thousands upon thousands of men were poured in by either side, in the attempt to outnumber the other: and how the Morse coders clicked and semaphores gleamed so there was no danger to the lines of command by messengers slipping in blood and mud. The French, by the way, claim victory at Waterloo. They inflicted more casualties on the allies than the allies did on them. Victory and defeat is a matter of interpretation, and what happens next.
At the Shrapnel Academy there was a whole Napoleon wing, but most of it was closed for redecoration during the Wellington Weekend. Victor and Shirley were in the only part of it which remained open; and there was a strong smell of paint in the rooms, particularly in the bathroom. They were glad to close the door behind them.
16
Meanwhile, in the Gustavus Adolphus Suite, the General rehearsed the next day’s speech with Bella as his audience. The General wore a navy velvet suit which showed off his high complexion and thick white hair to advantage: Bella wore a simple black dress. Both of them admired themselves in mirrors from time to time, when they thought the other wasn’t looking. The General’s wife did not like him wearing velvet: it made her uneasy. Bella’s mother had once urged her never to wear black, saying it did nothing for her complexion. She had worn it a great deal ever sin
ce: it was not complexion so much as je-ne-sais-quoi which attracted men, but how was Bella’s mother to know a thing like that? Bella’s mother was a nun and forty-seven when Bella was born, and so far as Bella’s mother was concerned, she was virgo intacta and a bride of Christ. There was talk of either miracle, or parthenogenesis, that is to say, self-fertilisation. It happens in snails, of course, and in some of the higher mammals too: eggs begin to divide without fertilisation, growth starts: the child’s genes are identical to the mother’s: a girl child is born, twin to the mother but a few decades late. And Bella bore an uncanny resemblance to her mother. The Church decided on parthenogenesis, rather than miracle. Had either woman, the mother or the daughter, been rather more likeable, they might well have opted for the latter. Some key in Bella’s makeup was flipped during her childhood; which had remained untouched, or thrown the other way, in her mother, and Bella dedicated herself to random fornication in the same spirit as her mother had dedicated herself to Christ: in a kind of all-or-nothing way.
‘If you practise too much now,’ said Bella, who longed for a drink, and assumed there’d be one downstairs, ‘you’ll lose the freshness.’
He conceded the point and they went downstairs, meeting Muffin and Baf on the way. Bella was pale and composed, Muffin flushed and fluffy and rumpled, in spite of having brushed out her hair after leaving Baf’s bed. Her fringe badly needed cutting. Every hair on Bella’s head had, as it were, been individually attended to. Her mother had kept her head shaven under its cowl: some things simply could not go on as they had done in the past.
