by Weldon, Fay
They were to play, according to the menu, during and after the meal:
Haydn’s Quartet in D Major, opus 64, No. 5, The Lark
Three Shanties – Arnold
Quintet in E Minor – Danzi
Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik K525
The diners were on the whole indifferent to music. Observing this, the musicians played only the Haydn and the Mozart, which they could do, as it were, standing on their heads. Musicians of all races and kinds love to play such little tricks on their audience, when they feel that audience to be uncultured and unresponsive.
Now. People can be known by the way they eat: their characters and their histories; whether they are sensuous or austere, angry or charitable. The child with many siblings guards his food; the oldest eats ravenously; the middle child picks – so busy is he looking from side to side; the youngest eats up, the good little darling! And so forth.
Murray was to toy with his food throughout, leaving most of everything on his plate, although he made some inroads into his salmon.
Bella was to eat ravenously, Murray to watch her, in admiration. So was the General, Baf, Panza, Sergei, and Victor. So was Mew, who was not impervious, as we know, to female charm. Bella was to scrape her plate, mop up her gravy with bread – the cranberry jelly was acceptable though the caribou patty rather tough going, and Bella was hungry, always hungry – and gladly accept more, when Horatio, the one-time harbour pilot from Jakarta, soft-footed and gentle-eyed, appeared at her right elbow with more, the silver dish heavy on a convenient forearm, strong from the guiding of large ships through tricky waters. Bella was, however, to decline the Blueberry Délice and the watching men to decide she did not have a sweet tooth.
Joan Lumb was too busy watching how the food was received to pay much attention to what she ate herself. This is the fate of the hostess. She could only have told you what was in front of her by consulting the menu.
Victor ate happily whatever was on his plate. He and Joan, when children, had been obliged to finish one course before being allowed to go on to the next; not only that – one meal had to be picked clean before the next could begin. Victor had sat, the entire day, on his seventh birthday, before a congealed fried breakfast egg, still not properly set about the yolk, although long since cold and otherwise hard. He knew if he ate the egg he would be sick. At tea-time he did eat it, and was indeed promptly sick. He had a memory of then being required to eat up the sick too, but could not quite believe it. One day he would overcome pain and embarrassment and ask his sister to verify, or otherwise, the memory. But all food nowadays tasted good to Victor, being non-compulsory. He often took second helpings, in order to leave them untouched. Shirley would smile, indulgently.
Shirley was just plain happy to eat a meal she had not prepared herself. She could easily enough have employed a cook, Victor’s salary being what it was, but then what sort of wife and mother would she be? How could a family be a family when the food was cooked by an outsider?
Panza ate slowly, chewing every mouthful well, not so much to extract flavour from the food as to do justice by it. He was a short but neatly set man; self-contained: with a straight nose and pretty, almost girlish lips. He was in his late thirties. In his twenties he had been a fencer of Olympic standard: but there the cut and thrust goes to the young and agile: cunning will get you so far, no further. So he had retired from the game, not without bitterness, and lectured instead at the Shrapnel Academy. He understood sport, and endeavour, victory and defeat, as well as the ins and outs of computers. An unusual combination, which made him valuable to the Academy. What is sport, but warfare without blood? What else computers, but thought without guilt?
Sergei ate out of politeness, and the fear of Joan Lumb’s vengeance. It was not sensible to offend Joan if there was any way of avoiding it. Little things might happen. He would find his next term’s timetable to be full of inconveniences, or the lecture hall allocated to him draughty and with bad acoustics: or the water supply to the summer house dry up, because of the allegedly essential re-laying of water mains in the grounds. These things might only be coincidence: certainly Joan Lumb, if challenged – but who would challenge her? – would deny prejudice let alone malice. Nevertheless Sergei ate and pretended enthusiasm. He would have preferred a quail’s egg or two, followed by a strip of veal in Madeira and a green salad, rather than this early Canadian extravaganza of indigestibility. Sergei was a man of taste, discrimination, and judgement. But a patch of alcoholism followed by a bad back and a diet of painkillers led to a brief incarceration in a psychiatric hospital, and after that university and TV work had fallen away; and all there was left was lecturing at Shrapnel and burnt pumpkin soup and Joan Lumb, and whether or not she persecuted him or he merely believed she did, how could he say.
Muffin ate like a well-behaved child.
Mew ate like a bad child: she was sulking: she hated being at the bottom of the table. Conversation was always better at the top.
Baf ate as a young man with a clear conscience eats, ravenously and cheerfully.
The General played with his food. He lifted his soup as if to assist a landing craft, partitioned his patties, piled his potatoes to make an enemy redoubt, sliced slivers off his délice, and ate hardly a thing. His digestion, like Murray’s, was not what it had been. Age and anxiety have, in the end, much the same effect as a dose or so of acid.
Sergei smacked his lips over the pumpkin soup.
‘Delicious,’ said Sergei. ‘The real authentic flavour of the redwood bonfire!’ He thought he saw Joan Lumb’s eyes gleam as if the devil had suddenly peered out from between thunder clouds. Bella lifted her heavy lids and stared at him. He thought her skull was too obvious beneath her skin: the pale eyes looked out from bony sockets. If Joan Lumb was the devil, Bella Morthampton bore a strong resemblance to Death. Sergei looked around the table for some balancing energy, some saving grace, some representation of the Divine, and saw none. The Universe looked black indeed: a kind of Stygian wrinkled cloth, the sort draped over coffins, the weft the grey ordinariness of everyday, the woof malevolence, and not a shiny white thread anywhere, nor any kind of help galloping to the rescue over the celestial horizon to snatch the cloth away. Fortunately the vision faded before he was half-way through his soup. and he felt better. He was on a course of antidepressants. and such nightmares were, the doctor told him, not uncommon. though not of an enduring nature. A mere side-effect, in a list which included, in order of frequency reported, nausea, restlessness, lassitude, death.
Throughout the dinner, alliances were formed and enmities established. But today’s ally is tomorrow’s enemy and vice versa. And the greater enemy, that is to say Downstairs, and the territorial imperative created by the green baize door, had not yet declared itself.
I should perhaps just record here a snatch of conversation between Shirley, Panza and Baf which took place during the soup. Panza wore spectacles with old-fashioned thick glass, and the candlelight kept catching them, so Shirley could hardly see what manner of man he was. His hair was close-cropped. ‘I’ve never seen a man who looked more like a Scorpio!’ said Shirley brightly, feeling he needed drawing into the general conversation. ‘Do tell me, is your birthday in November?’
‘I prefer to keep the date of my birthday to myself,’ he said, ‘and I am not gullible enough to believe that the stars dictate either my appearance or my nature.’
‘Spoken like a Scorpion,’ she said. ‘I knew it! They’ll sting themselves to death rather than admit dependency! You teach computers, I believe? How clever you must be. But then Scorpions are always clever.’
‘I do teach the computer sciences,’ he said, ‘amongst other things.’
‘Officers seem to have to know so much,’ she said. ‘Almost as much as doctors.’
‘The professions are not unalike,’ he said. ‘Both try to prevent death, and both merely hasten it.’ Panza’s mother had died on the operating table, during an appendectomy. Panza had been five.
‘But there’s not going to be another war, is there?’ she tried again. ‘I mean, there can’t be. Mutual deterrence and all that. Isn’t that the point?’
‘Madam,’ he said, ‘wars are fought by men, and man does not change. Has there been any discernible difference in the fundamental nature of man over the past five thousand years? No.’
‘But surely—’ said Shirley.
‘That is the one lesson we learn from history,’ he said. He did not like questions or interruptions. She was glad not to be one of his students. He turned back to his soup, without enthusiasm.
Shirley turned to Baf. She hoped Piers would grow up to look like this agreeable, cheerful young man. She felt motherly towards him, or thought she did.
‘Bet you’re a Gemini,’ she said. ‘May, June?’
‘Too right,’ he said. ‘June 5th. Bang in the middle.’
Baf was in fact born on Christmas Day but knew the value of cheerful lies over the dinner table. Shirley blossomed and preened and he was pleased to see it.
‘Now I couldn’t possibly have known that, could I?’ she said, ‘especially as one doesn’t usually find Geminis in the army. It’s just not an army sign.’
‘Actually I’m not in the army,’ he said, ‘I’m in armaments.’
‘Really?’ Now she was disconcerted. Nobody liked arms dealers. To make a profit out of death seemed wrong. But here he was at the dinner table just like anyone else. Perhaps she was wrong: perhaps arms dealing was okay?
‘Another thing,’ said Panza, leaning suddenly towards Shirley, his thin lips ringed with yellow soup. ‘Because the nature of man has not changed, neither have his basic objectives when he turns to war: the employment of lethal instruments to force his will upon other men with opposing points of view. War is inevitable.’
He subsided as quickly as he had erupted, and did not speak again for the rest of the meal.
‘Wow,’ said Baf. ‘Quite a speech!’ And he smiled at Shirley and Shirley thought, no, I don’t feel like his mother, not at all. Why am I dressed like this? In a flowered curtain tied in the middle with a piece of string? Why can’t I look like the General’s whatever-she-is; why can’t I wear a black dress that’s so understated it’s all statement? She put her spoon down and ate no more soup. Perhaps if she lost weight she would be a different person.
Joan Lumb asked Murray if he was enjoying the music but Murray said he was tone-deaf and lapsed into silence. Baf remarked that being tone-deaf might come in handy in Murray’s line of work. There was an interesting new torture being developed in Belfast which involved total sensory deprivation except for three unresolved chords played over and over again.
Joan, who was seldom content with her own seating arrangements, wished she’d seated Baf somewhere altogether further away. He was a pleasant enough young man; but like all the young of today, had no sense of what was in bad taste and what was not. But Murray seemed not to have heard what Baf said, or at any rate did not reply, and fortunately the General seemed interested, if sceptical, rather than offended. He and Baf liked one another.
‘But does it work?’ asked the General, ‘or is it like so many of these new ideas? Fine in theory but hopeless in the field?’ And he told the story of the USS Princeton, the first screw-propelled warship in the world. A certain Robert F. Stockton, a US navy captain, devised a new 12-inch gun for the Princeton, named it ‘The Peacemaker’; fitted it, and steamed down the Potomac to try it out. The gun looked just fine on paper. But when it was fired it blew up, killing the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Navy, and several Congressmen besides, all of whom had turned out to see the fun. Oh, the fun of it, ’til it stopped. What a bang! Whose bits went into which coffin was anyone’s guess.
‘Fine in theory but not in practice,’ concluded the General. Baf said the Belfast trials hadn’t been concluded yet: time would tell. Shirley asked if it wasn’t odd to call a gun ‘Peacemaker’, but Joan Lumb said briskly that it was not odd at all: war existed to preserve peace. She signalled to Acorn, who gestured to his staff, who removed the empty soup plates. That is to say, some were empty, some merely finished with. Pumpkin soup can be a little sickly sweet for some tastes, and it had, in the making, gone through some vicissitude.
My own opinion where pumpkins are concerned is that the only way to eat the stuff is very fresh, cut up small, and served as a vegetable. Forget pumpkin pie, forget pumpkin soup. Toss pieces of pumpkin in melted butter in a hot pan, salt, cover with boiling water, simmer briefly, drain well, and serve with more butter and ground pepper. Then it’s just fine – a cross between old courgette and new potato. Leave out the butter if you worry about the cholesterol, the salt if your blood pressure’s high, the pepper if you worry about carcinogens. (It’s not, these days, so much that we fiddle while Rome burns, as we chatter away, exchanging recipes and tips on healthy living.)
After the soup, two whole poached salmons were presented to the guests, each on its own silver plate, one at each end of the table. They were noble fish, albeit dead. Acorn presented one at Joan Lumb’s end of the table: Raindrop the other, at Mew and Muffin’s end. This latter fish, Sergei observed, was on the whole inferior in colour and texture, being the product of a fish farm and not of a Canadian mountain stream. The fish were then whisked away to be not so much carved as partitioned – for who can carve a really fresh salmon? The flesh is too tender; it disintegrates beneath the knife. A delicate cucumber salad was served with the fish. This had been properly made: the cucumber peeled and salted, blanched with boiling water, crisped immediately with iced water, well drained, and the now limp yet lively slices tossed in a delicate vinaigrette. The bread rolls that went with the fish and salad were home-made, soft, puffy and warm.
Joan Lumb was pleased to see, after the all-but failure of the soup, that the fish was well received. She blamed Mrs Simcoe in her heart, not only for putting up with such a terrible soup, but actually recording the recipe. Mrs Simcoe, of course, had had trouble with the servants: Upper Canada was one of the worst places for servants in the world, she wrote home at the time. ‘We cannot get a woman who can cook a Joint of Meat unless I am at her heels... I have a Scotch girl from the Highlands, Nasty, Ill-tempered Creature.’ Joan Lumb felt sorry for Mrs Simcoe, as must any woman for another who has servant trouble, however far in the past that trouble might be, but by now mistrusted her judgement, and fear as to how the caribou patties would turn out quite spoiled her pleasure in the success of the fish.
It was over the fish that Mew engaged Victor in a discussion about abortion, and incurred his dislike.
‘What do you think of the new abortion law?’ Mew asked him. There are always new abortion laws, as societies struggle over the meaning of life and death.
‘I don’t think,’ said Victor, ‘it’s a subject I want to talk about over dinner.’
Mew looked puzzled.
‘Then when would you want to talk about it?’
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘not at all. Any more than I want to talk about murder.’
‘I suppose you think murder and abortion are the same thing!’ said Mew.
‘My dear young lady,’ said Victor. ‘I have no doubt that you are all for abortion and the strangling of defective babies at birth and so on and so forth, but please, not over the fish!’
‘Over the caribou patty, then,’ said Mew. ‘And anyway I’m not sure about strangling; I imagined smothering is preferable. Less violent.’
At this point Victor turned away rather pointedly to talk to Sergei, on his right. What could possibly have induced his sister to ask this disagreeable young woman to dinner?
‘Don’t you think it odd,’ said Mew to Muffin, loudly, ‘that people who view the destruction of fully grown millions with equanimity should get so concerned about the fate of a wretched foetus or so?’
But Muffin, wisely, refused to be drawn into the conversation; she smiled and nodded agreeably and Mew sighed and went back to her fish, and planned questions in
her mind for her interview with the General. She was surprised that he seemed so personable and equable: she had expected a twitchier and more wizened person by far. It occurred to her that the fork in her hand was both pleasant to the touch and nicely balanced and she concluded that it was made of pure silver.
‘Where does the Shrapnel Academy get its funding?’ she asked Muffin.
‘What do you mean?’
‘How do you pay everyone’s wages?’
‘Out of the bank, of course,’ said Muffin.
‘How does it get into the bank?’ asked Mew.
‘You’d have to ask Joan Lumb that,’ said Muffin, primly.
‘I will,’ said Mew. Muffin was sorry she had lent Mew her clothes and decided she did not like her one bit.
Victor asked Sergei, courteously, what his function at the Academy was. Sergei replied that he taught Liberal Studies to the cadets. The army liked its officers to have a broad cultural base. The Ancient World could teach the modern a great deal about the government of the apparently ungovernable, the handling of subject tribes, the suppression of subversion, and so forth. The modern soldier must be able to do more than merely defend his shores.
‘After all,’ said Sergei, ‘in any future conflict it’s likely that the central civilian power will collapse almost at once. Its representatives are elected, not promoted, and for all the wrong reasons. It would be left to the army to take over the chain of command: soldiers must know how to govern.’
Victor said that surely business executives would have the requisite training to take over a panicked and indecisive government in time of nuclear crisis, and there was more than enough of them about to do so.
‘Business executives are trained to compete,’ said Sergei, flatly, ‘not to co-operate. They would not be suitable.’
