by Weldon, Fay
Baf looked at Bella with interest, as Bella went ahead down the stairs. She wore thin spiky heels and had to go carefully. Muffin, noticing, was upset and puzzled. How could Baf be interested in a woman who looked thin, spiteful and bad tempered? Didn’t men like nice, warm, rounded, friendly women, who were careful with and responsive to their feelings? Her mother had told her they did. Muffin, unlike Bella, believed her mother must surely know best: or at any rate had, until this very moment. It occurred to Muffin now, as she came down the stairs, that just as the palate has an appetite for sour as well as sweet, so does the male fancy. Perhaps she should practise being just plain horrid, and see what happened.
17
Now where, you may ask, is Mew? You may even be beginning to feel hungry, as dinner is further and further delayed. Certainly the guests are. What had held Mew up between the bottom of the steps where Edna the taxi driver left her all those pages ago, and the front door? Not the snow: Mew wore stout flat boots with the laces double-knotted and could cope with the white stuff easily enough. But visibility being bad, and her acquaintance with the houses of the great small, Mew went looking round the back of the house for what seemed more like a door than the great impassive oak slab which faced her at the top of the steps. She thought the slab must serve some decorative rather than functional purpose and, as the snow on her eyelids obscured her vision and made the light from the massed carriage lamps flicker and change, she quite missed the discreet gold bell inset in the marble columns which flanked the door.
No money had been spared on the Shrapnel Academy over the years. The army lives well, and knows how to spend, and likes its buildings at home to be substantial: the better, no doubt, to withstand the minor blows and explosions of civil insurrection. When on the move, of course, it is adept at laying down its giant futon at night and rolling it up in the morning and moving on, leaving crushed meadow flowers behind. But look, what’s a flower? What’s a whole host of flowers? What are these little passing things, compared to Glory, Victory. Conquest, Triumph, Freedom and so forth? Flowers, like people, spring up, open wide, drink in the sun and rain, fling around a seed or so, fade and die. The living thing is nothing, the concept all. Why else, but knowing this, century after century, do generals so cunningly command and soldiers so gladly die? Why else are the giant cannons of contemporary Europe stocked with neutron bombs which kill life, but leave the structure of civilisation intact? The people will not survive, but the concepts will. This is not madness, as some think, this is sanity indeed. Ask Joan Lumb.
Back to Mew and her stumbling journey round the Shrapnel Academy, searching for entry! Mew’s eyes were all but blinded by flying snow, her nose was pink and numb, her cheeks painful in the wind. Her body was warm enough – she wore a Marks & Spencer thermal vest beneath her navy sweater: it was warm, bright red, and prettily lacy. Though Mew affected a tough woman’s-wear exterior – it does not do to be too frivolously fancy if you want to keep a job on the Woman’s Times – she liked to be Hollywood-like next to her skin. That is to say, on the whole silky and sensuous, and if thermal, why then lacy. She even wore oyster satin knickers beneath her jeans. She hoped, as she stumbled, that the Wellington Lecture would be worth her pains, and her expected story on the mad male military ethos up to scratch. She had been surprised at how quickly her request to attend the General’s lecture had been granted: more surprised still when the invitation to dinner came. Perhaps the Shrapnel Academy had nothing to hide? She did not want to think so: the general feeling on the Woman’s Times was that in order to be spectacularly in the right, other people had to be spectacularly in the wrong. If they changed their ground, it undermined their position. Mew would be gratified by evidence of military depravity, disappointed by any sign of reform.
Mew came upon a small flight of broken stone steps leading down to a door of all too human size. A balustrade had, so far, protected the entrance from the worst of the flying snow: even so, a thin coating of white over moss made the steps treacherous. Mew slipped, and fell against the door, which obligingly burst its lock and opened wide. Mew tumbled, as Alice down her well, into a dimly lit corridor. She picked herself up and looked round. She was in a store-place for broken chairs, three-legged tables, torn curtains, unstuffed sofas, butter-spattered tapestries and so forth. Military cadets are famous for their high spirits and jinks, and feel duty bound to live up to their reputation. Things get broken. Joan Lumb would ask the young men, in her introductory lecture to whatever course it was they attended, to do what they could to preserve the dignity and grace of the interior fitments (sic) of the Shrapnel Academy and they would nod and click politely – nothing so polite as a well-educated young gentleman; butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth – it was just that when dinner-time came, excitement would surge, drink would be drunk, as often as not from the wrong side of the glass, women being absent private parts would be exposed, and in the general de-bagging, why then butter and potatoes and treacle pudding would fly about the room with the memorial crystal glasses; the tables would be swept clear the better for dancing upon; the sabres on the walls be used for bayoneting sofas – well, in spite, or perhaps because of, everyone’s best intentions – the corridor got crowded. And the modern craftsman not being what he was (as the servants were not) and more interested in money than in the exercise of his repairing skills, the corridor seldom got cleared. There was, for the witnessing, a backlog of destruction. Acorn’s habit of commandeering household funds for SWORD delayed matters still further. Craftsmen who do not get paid, do not return.
Mew, entering this raggedy, derelict, dimly lit place, was first simply glad to be out of the cold, and then, looking around, aware that this was not the proper entrance for guests. She carried in her pocket, as part of her journalist’s equipment, a very small but fool-proof camera, in which she used that kind of film which can pick up images in the almost dark. This she used. Click, click, click again! The camera was no bigger than a key-ring tab.
How Joan Lumb’s eyebrows would have raised, had she but known what was happening. What a discourtesy! Photographs ought never to be taken without permission, especially by the press. But Mew already saw the caption. ‘Order on top, chaos below’ or some such, and had no qualms.
Mew opened the door at the end of the corridor, and was at once in warmth, light and noise. A host of startled eyes turned towards her. Mew was in the staff dining-room: a place normally sticky with cooking smells and sweat, noisy with conversation and the shrieks of playing children. Now it grew suddenly cold and silent, and the eyes that watched her were wary. Children scuttled under tables and curled up and pretended not to exist, as beetles will: old women melted into the background, as they are so good at doing. But these ones did it on purpose, and not because they couldn’t help it.
Click, click! It was Mew’s instant reaction to untoward circumstances. Film first, think later.
Neither Acorn nor Inverness were present. Acorn was attending to Murray’s glass of tap water and Inverness was attending to the laying-out of Miriam and her placing in cold store. When the snow had thawed she would be buried, with due ceremony, in the staff cemetery at the rear of the Shrapnel Academy. Others of the senior – that is to say the English-speaking staff – were for the most part in the kitchens, busy with the Eve-of-Wellington dinner, and a selected few upstairs, giving an extra polish to a glass here, straightening a fork there. Those on the meal shift which Mew now interrupted were floor scrubbers, groundsmen, porters, sweepers, those with not sufficient wit to operate domestic machinery – or assumed not to have it. There was, as always, soup for dinner: scraps from upstairs bubbled all day long in ancient stock. The pot never ran dry. The staff talked, laughed, had good times as well as bad. Everyone does. Under Acorn’s tutelage they were increasingly able to ignore the religious and dietary differences which so far had kept them divided. This one Muslim, that one Hindu, that one Christian, what did it matter? asked Acorn, stirring the pot of their divine discontent to stop it bubbling
over when it shouldn’t. We have one enemy, only one! Upstairs! No wonder they fell silent, as they now did, at the sight of Mew.
It was left to Raindrop, the houseman, to step forward. He was a small, lean Tamil from Sri Lanka who, alone of his ten-strong family, had escaped death by burning. He had been named Raindrop on a day when Joan Lumb had been feeling on the whole uncreative, but was staring at the rain through an autumnal and melancholy window-pane. He spoke thinly through sensuous lips. He had studied the guest list. This could only be Mew Whittaker.
‘Miss Whittaker,’ he said, ‘I will take you upstairs. They are waiting for you.’
Mew wanted to say, ‘But I belong with you. I belong to the poor and oppressed: understand me: let me stay. I am one of the world’s victims. I am a woman in a man’s world—’ but she stayed silent. The stares were too cold, the hostility too evident. She was altogether too white, too well-fed, to make any just claim upon these people. She had the burden of her Imperial past to bear: to be female was not to escape it. She belonged to the world of the mistress, not the maid. She must accept the communal guilt of the lucky. She acquiesced, and followed Raindrop upstairs, not without relief, longing quite badly to be once again where she understood the prevailing rules.
At the top of the stairs, at the green baize door, Raindrop stopped, and passed her over into the care of the waiting Acorn. The gracious rooms, the long corridors, the wide stairways and easy windows of Upstairs were separated from the warren of small rooms and pantries and barred windows of Downstairs by a solid, straight flight of stairs, fourteen treads and fifteen rises high, and a single thick oak door, lined with soft green baize. It could be bolted from either side.
Joan Lumb came forward to greet Mew, strong hand outstretched. On her forefinger she wore the Shrapnel ring, a fine ruby in a gold setting, which Henry Shrapnel himself had once worn, gift of his monarch, in gratitude for his help in the defence of Gibraltar. Shrapnel’s invention, the exploding cannonball, not only put fear into a nation unreasonably claiming the Rock as its own, but was clearly invaluable when a large area had to come under fire from a small. Henry Shrapnel had bequeathed the ring to his grand-daughter; she who had founded the Academy in 1840, to the honour and glory of her grandfather, and the sustenance of the military ethos. Joan Lumb was the tenth Administrator. This was to be the sixtieth Wellington Lecture.
‘So you were delayed by the storm, Miss Whittaker?’ said Joan Lumb now to Mew. ‘Never mind. Just in time! Of course we would have waited dinner! How could we start without The Times! You’ll want to change. Acorn, take Miss Whittaker to her room on the second floor. Take your time, Miss Whittaker, but not too much. Take your Time! Ha-ha.’
‘It’s not The Times I represent,’ said Mew, ‘but the Woman’s Times. It’s a new paper, but very good. Feminist, of course.’
‘Acorn,’ corrected Joan Lumb, ‘I meant on the third floor. The Trident Room on the third floor.’ She was too well bred to let the expression on her face change. She knew that Acorn would understand. ‘Perhaps as you’re tired,’ she suggested, ‘you might prefer to eat in your room tonight?’
‘I’m not tired in the least,’ said Mew. ‘I’ll eat with the others.’ What could Joan Lumb do?
Mew followed Acorn upstairs and along long corridors. Marble statues of battling giants, and great vases of dried flowers stood on the first and second landings: even on the third stood naked alabaster ladies, holding lamps. Acorn went ahead.
Acorn wore a black frilled shirt and silk breeches. Over the Wellington Weekend the upstairs staff wore, at Joan Lumb’s request, dress which she felt appropriate to the honouring of Henry Shrapnel’s life and times.
Acorn, for his part, liked the look of Miss Whittaker. She had, he thought, a good face, albeit white. Mew lived by principle, or tried to, and the very effort carved planes upon her face, as if the granite disc of absolute morality whirred too close for comfort, and shaped her nose straight and firm and her chin strong. She would never be pretty, but she would always be handsome.
‘What does she mean “change”?’ asked Mew of Acorn when he had opened the door of the small square room which was to be hers, with its single framed photograph of Trident rising from the waves upon the wall, its narrow bed, its white washbasin, table and chair.
‘Change for dinner,’ explained Acorn, in the gentle, patient tone with which he explained taps, indoor sanitation, knives, forks and shoe laces to those members of the staff who encountered them for the first time. Acorn’s capacity for gentleness all but compensated, in the eyes of the staff, for the fits of rage, the all but frothing at the mouth, of which he was also increasingly capable. Joan Lumb, of course, saw only that side of Acorn which he chose to present. ‘That means you wash and change and put on fresh clothes before you sit down at the table.’
Mew hopefully searched her rucksack with cracked and grimy hands – she had tried to coax the motorbike into life by fiddling with this and that before realising that its trouble was lack of petrol: and oil, and cold, and the cigarette ash which powdered Edna’s car, and dust from the corridor, and the hot greasy atmosphere of the staff kitchen had all left their marks upon her hands and face. She pulled out a crumpled white shirt and said:
‘I did bring this. But I’m not one for fancy clothes. I suppose I could iron it. Is there time?’
Acorn said he thought not, and quickly summoned Muffin, who took one look at Mew and all but ran to her own room, El Alamein, and returned with a pink silk blouse, a full red satin skirt, patterned tights and a pair of orange shoes with high heels, and checked that there was soap in Mew’s basin.
‘I don’t mind the skirt,’ said Mew. ‘Our feeling on the Woman’s Times is that rather than women aping men and wearing trousers, men should be encouraged to wear skirts. Why should we always give in, and them never? I just love the blouse, so what the hell. But the shoes! To render oneself helpless – madness! Whoever knows what’s going to happen next?’
‘There isn’t time to worry too much,’ said Muffin, politely. She felt wonderfully warm and enchantingly sore between her legs: she and Baf’s lovemaking had made up for in energy and passion what it lacked in time. ‘And look, you have a smear of oil on the side of your face. Don’t miss it: I always miss just there by the ear. And do hurry!’
Muffin left. Acorn lingered.
‘I won’t wear the shoes,’ said Mew, stubbornly. ‘I’d rather go bare-footed.’
Acorn smiled his slow charming smile and his even white teeth gleamed. Mew could not help but look at his competent hands and imagine them over and in her body, feel his body heavy upon hers – oh, stop it!
‘Miss Whittaker,’ said Acorn. He took her hand in his and she did nothing to prevent it. She, so easily suspicious of the likes of Baf, was now acquiescent. Perhaps she felt that Acorn, being black, was automatically counted in the number of the oppressed, the good, and so could not be an enemy? Perhaps she had a scale of sexual response, the result of inclination and ideology mixed? It would go like this:
White women
Black men
Black women
White men
Your author, gentle reader, is not saying good or bad. Your author is just remarking.
‘Miss Whittaker,’ said Acorn. ‘Put on the shoes! Staff come to me in all manner of states. Some will starve rather than eat pork, some will kill rather than not face East at a certain time, some will go mad if they cannot wear a turban, some curl up and die if made to wash in still water. On these trivia, they believe their dignity, their sense of self, their link to past and future depend. They are wrong. Put on the shoes. Join the Family of Nowhere. Bow your head now, the higher to lift it later. Then how great will be your revenge!’
‘Tell me more,’ said Mew. His hand now held her wrist: he stood close to her: her head came to his chest. The flounces of his black shirt were about her ears.
‘Later,’ he said, putting her from him as if she were a chocolate and he on a diet. ‘Now you must
wash and change and put on the shoes, and go down to dinner at once.’
She did so, wondering what he meant by ‘later’. She would leave her door unlocked that night; and then observed that anyway there was no lock on the door. In the shadow of the silver Sea-Trident leaping from the water into the cool, clean air, she washed and changed, and within minutes looked truly lovely, being full of vague sexual expectation.
Baf, of course, did not recognise Mew, in her high heels and pink silk, as the girl in the Oxfam scarf by the side of the road, to whom he had so rashly offered a lift. Who could?
18
This was the seating plan for the Eve-of-Waterloo Dinner.
The menu was in honour of Henry Shrapnel, and was based on a dinner served by Mrs Simcoe, wife of the Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, in January 1794. (Henry Shrapnel was stationed for a time in Canada.)
Pumpkin Soup
*****
Poached Salmon
*****
Caribou Patties & Cranberry Jelly
*****
Turkey Pie
Sweet Potatoes & Peas
*****
Blueberry Délice
*****
Stilton
The white wine was to be Pouilly Fumé, 1983, and the red a good solid 1976 Margaux. There was to be a ten-year-old Porto Calem with the Stilton. So much one could read on the menu, prettily printed in blue and silver upon white, decorated with a scarlet and gold bow.
The toasts were to be to the Monarch (given by Joan Lumb, responded to by Victor), the Army (given by Murray, responded to by the General), the Shrapnel Academy (given by Victor, responded to by Joan Lumb).
The table staff consisted of Acorn, Rainbow, Yagalone, Horatio, Wendy and Belinda.
There was to be a short programme of music provided by members of the staff, some of whom had come on musical scholarships to this the host country and had then failed to find employment appropriate to their talents; others of whom had enjoyed satisfactory, indeed even splendid musical careers in their native land, but had been obliged to leave for one political or military reason or another.
