by Weldon, Fay
Mew smiled and nodded. She thought Joan Lumb was mad, but seemed the only one around the table who did.
She asked Panza what a lethality index was. He explained that it was the number of deaths any one weapon could expect to bring about in its lifetime, if properly and effectively used. The index of an Assyrian spear was 23, a crossbow 33, a musket 19, a sixteenth-century cannon 43, a great step forward with the eighteenth-century Gaundeval cannon to 940, a howitzer 657,215—
That’s enough,’ said Mew. ‘I understand.’
He seemed sorry not to go on.
22
After dinner the guests moved to the big drawing-room, where more coffee and brandy was served. The guests stood and talked, or sat and talked, or moped (Murray) as their natures and circumstances suggested. Have I properly described this room to you? I doubt it: it is so uninteresting. You know what these large reception rooms in country houses are like! They are designed to suit everyone and offend no one, and end up having no identity at all, like a woman with too placatory a nature. The occasional tables are highly polished and upon them stand tall blue and white ceramic vases, vaguely oriental, on which the eye prefers not to linger – though they can sometimes fetch amazing prices at the auction room. The sofas and chairs, grouped uneasily about the room, are slip-covered with chintz (Bella chose to sit in the one exotic armchair the Shrapnel Academy boasted – and that was wonderfully deep and redly velvet), and the rugs on the parquet floors are undistinguished, although there will sometimes be some really pleasant watercolours on the walls. The only remarkable things about the drawing-room of the Shrapnel Academy were the large and striking portrait of the three world leaders at Yalta above the fireplace and, during the course of the evening, the size of the fire in the grate as Joan Lumb tried, and failed, to drive back and out unusual and rather unpleasant cooking smells which kept back-blowing down the chimney.
Joan Lumb pressed the General to give a brief résumé of his forthcoming lecture, and he obliged. His thesis was that World War II, contrary to common belief, had not been a mishmash of events, but had progressed to its ending through a series of decisive battles. He cited in particular the USA field artillery shoot against Kwajalein Island in the Pacific: a relatively small target, 4,500,000 square yards; 65,000 105mm and 155mm shells were laid upon it – that is to say one shell burst for every sixty-nine square yards. Yet 20 per cent of its population survived, only a little hurt or shocked – being in trenches, dugouts or concrete emplacements.
Mew interrupted to ask if this massacre counted as a battle, and the General said in his view yes. The population referred to was for the most part soldiery, and attempting to fight back: that made it definitely a battle. A decisive battle was one in which much was sacrificed, but something of supreme importance saved – whether it was Greek Wisdom, Roman Virtue, Saxon Bravery, French Democracy – or, as at Kwajalein, American World Dominance. If Mew would remain quiet he would deal with these matters in due course. Click! Click! went Mew, when Muffin wasn’t looking. ‘“America seeks world domination,” says Nato General.’ Click! Click!
The General went on to cite what even he called the Massacre of Dieppe, rather than the Battle of Dieppe. (Sometimes slaughter awes even those who organise it.) But even that had brought about a long-term blessing. The sacrifice had not been in vain. In August 1942 two Canadian brigades attempted an invasion of German-occupied France, at Dieppe. It was, said the General, frankly, a face-saving exercise, a PR junket, to offset the loss of Tobruk. The 2nd Canadian division was simply to sally forth in high summer and disembark on the Dieppe esplanade. Everyone knew the Canadians were legendary fighting men: they’d go in with tanks to muzzle any machine-guns, commandos to disable the flanking batteries. They’d catch the enemy by surprise. But it didn’t work. Of 4,963 Canadians who set sail, only 2,110 returned. ‘How can you possibly see that as glorious?’ asked Mew. Joan Lumb resolved never again to ask anyone to dinner she had not personally met and approved.
Joan Lumb, in her heart, had declared Mew an enemy. Joan Lumb, in fact, lived in much the same frame of mind as Harry the dog, when it came to enemies and non-enemies. Not that Harry was in any particular frame of mind at the time, and never would be, unless theories of reincarnation were true, in which case he was at that very moment being reborn as a lion, if it’s valour that counts, or a rather nasty earwig, if friendliness is required for progress on the Great Wheel of Life. He had been taken from the stew-pot, drained, and boned, and was now being pounded into a mixture of oil, egg and spices. If only we knew what it was like to be dead, how much better would we not all run our lives! We would know whose life to spare and whose to take: whether kidney dialysis for the elderly was worth a nation’s resources; whether abortion was okay or not; whether euthanasia ought to be condoned by the Church: we would know whether it was better to die young of cold and hunger in Napoleon’s Grand Retreat, or to live to fifty and die of TB, looking eighty; we would know whether battles were worth the excitement and amputations worth the pain: we would know whether to give child murderers longer or shorter sentences than bank robbers: we would know whether to be sorry for Harry that he is being pounded up into pâté, or glad for him that he has been spared the murderous passions of his life. But we don’t: our after-life does not inform our living. We have to put up with any number of uncertainties. There is no one to tell us: there can be no proof, only this conviction or that, and so, not knowing death, we can never give proper weight to life. We have to muddle along.
The General, unlike Joan Lumb, quite liked the look of Mew, this young woman with her reds and pinks, her strong face, and the smudge of oil beneath her ear. And Bella would keep. She always had in the past. He had forgotten Shirley. With every year that passed he forgot more and more. But then, he had more and more to forget.
‘My dear,’ he said, ‘these are complex matters. A 47 per cent casualty rate? It’s high, but who is to say what is too high? It’s an arbitrary figure. Is a hundred deaths a hundred times worse than one death? I think not. Come and see me afterwards. We’ll talk about it. Many of those killed were French Canadians. Les Fusiliers de Mont-Royal, in particular, during their ten-minute run-in to the French beaches, were drenched with fire as they touched ground. Over a hundred men were killed on the spot. Still they came on! This courage was not wasted. It put the French Canadians back on the world’s map. If Quebec speaks French today, it is because of the sacrifice – conscious or unknowing – of those brave men, those gallant commandos.’
Shirley yawned. She thought the commandos sounded pretty foolish, but knew better than to say so. What would they have done if they had captured Dieppe, all alone in 1942? She bet no one had worked that out. PR was PR: the deed in itself enough. She was glad Victor had left the army, and gone into business instead. She wondered whether she ought not to go up again and see how the children were – and then thought perhaps not. Supposing Hilda were still there? She would have to face her dark reproachful eyes, and be made to feel like a neglectful mother. She felt she had been sitting idly for long enough. She wondered if perhaps she should go and check up on Harry’s welfare – her sister-in-law had been almost as brisk and brutal in disposing of the dog as she had been in the disposing of the children. But then she would have to venture downstairs through the green baize door, and who knew what she might meet? She had trouble enough encountering a single au-pair girl in her own kitchen, or a cleaning lady in her own bathroom; she had the feeling there were hundreds, hundreds down below. And Harry could surely look after himself. And she was not, she admitted, all that fond of Harry, Peacebarker. A beautiful animal, but sinister; storing up emotions which it had no means of voicing. Rather, in fact, like Bella Morthampton, whom Victor now held in rather intimate conversation. That is to say, Victor talked and Bella watched the movements his mouth made, as if it was his mouth rather than his words which interested her.
Shirley resolutely turned her attention from Victor and Bella, and back to the General. He w
anted sympathy; particularly, it seemed to Shirley, from Mew. He had had to take sleeping pills, he was saying, ever since D-Day plus five, when he’d been obliged to give orders to have a small French hill-top town destroyed, in order to save his advancing troops. What a predicament! The French were allies, there were non-combatants in the town, but there was German artillery as well. Twenty-five thousand of his own men were advancing. A terrible choice! He blew up the town: old men and women, children, allies, and saved his men. The greater, long-term priority was the success of the thrust into Germany.
These are the dreadful dilemmas a man in my position has to face,’ mourned the General. ‘I have not had a proper night’s sleep for forty years.’
‘Bad luck,’ said Mew.
And well, yes, of course, so it was. Bad luck for little baby Leo, Colonel and Mrs Makeshift’s only son, that he grew up to have this kind of decision forced upon him. That he happened to be where he was, when he was, with just those number of flashes upon his uniform; in such a time and place that all around turned to him and said, ‘What shall we do?’ and he the one elected to give the answer. How can a man just do nothing in such circumstances? He can’t. Perhaps you think young Leo should have refused promotion and stayed a captain? But even captains sometimes have to decide, in time of war, whether this trooper will die or that, though on the whole the fate of whole towns is left to generals (and that of nations mostly to Supreme Commanders; in consultation with the civilian powers, of course – if there’s time). And there are only so many hours in one night, and so much sleep a man can lose, so one might as well, in terms of consequence, be hanged for a sheep as well as a lamb, lose a town’s population as a single man: have a general’s pay and not a captain’s. And only the brave deserve the fair, and the fair go to those of highest rank – and when the bells ring out to warn us, or promise us, that peace is over, that war’s begun, there’s joy among the ranks. Promotion’s on the way! Better food, better wine, and a batman to clean your boots! What price insomnia now? Of course the General did not, could not, refuse promotion. Nor would you, had you been him.
What we have to decide, of course, once we’ve settled the vexing matter of what happens to us after death, is whether it is a hundred times worse to kill a hundred men than it is to kill one man. Do numbers really make much difference? Everyone dies in the end. Killing is merely the cutting short of lives. Is it worse to kill a child than an adult, and if so, why? Is it worse to kill an ally than an enemy, and if so, for whom? If there had been 250 troops approaching, not 25,000, ought the General to have blown up the town? And what if the town had contained a school for crippled children? Would that have made a difference? If one of the children were the infant Jesus? By what criteria did General Leo Makeshift proceed? Did he use reason, or sentiment, or what?
But that was in a war long gone, and a war comparatively merciful, at least for those engaged in it. The engagement casualties per day (for the USA) ran at 0.9 per division. In World War I the figure was 20 per cent, and back a little further in the American Civil War, it was as high (at least for the Confederate troops) as 28.9 per cent. The fact is that the army (this side or that) is getting much better at looking after its own. In the Lethality Indices a one-megaton nuclear air burst is reckoned at 695,385,000, and you needn’t lose a single one of your own men. Sorry! I did say I wouldn’t lapse into these plaintive civilian whines. Let’s get on with the story.
‘Bad luck,’ said Mew. So it was. Downstairs, though the mass of Harry himself had been removed from the pot, the stock continued to simmer – cumin and ginger and dog-ear and dog-brain – and to send its aromas through the Shrapnel Academy.
Shirley wondered whether to go over and join Victor and Bella, but pride forbade it. Victor, she told herself, was being just ordinarily charming, as all top executives learn to be. Smooth, smooth! Stroke, stroke! Interested in everyone, everything, fair, reasonable, even with a joke or two, though these do have to be rather carefully learned by heart. But a sense of humour oils the sometimes choppy waters of industry; so all executives have one. Shirley stood alone and a little forlornly in her flowered dress and wondered if she should try and talk to Murray, who sat, apparently in isolation equal to her own, puffing his pipe, tapping his heavy-booted foot, staring into the fire, as if he were not in a civilised drawing-room at all, but in some jungle clearing surrounded by mosquitoes. He said something, to no one in particular.
‘What did you say?’ asked Shirley.
‘Funny smell,’ he repeated. ‘Smelt something like it once before – can’t quite put my finger on it.’
Shirley looked at the forefinger he held up. Instead of finishing with a nail, it was tipped with a long corrugated scar. She shuddered.
Outside, snow continued to fall.
23
Bad deeds escalate: even little ones. They get tossed like a magic ball between one human being and another, back and forth, getting bigger every time: you did this so I’ll do that, until the hands cannot hold it, the burden is too great: and the ball falls, and bursts, and turns out to be full of some kind of murderous corrosive acid which, once it begins to flow, cannot be stopped; a whole river of malice, burning, maiming, killing as it goes, and widows, and widowers too these days, and orphans weep every time a wrong is righted, and people hop around the street blinded or one-legged, and then the flow of malice slows to a trickle, and stops and dries up, like the chain reaction from the first atomic bombs over New Mexico. It’s finished. The ball’s empty. But terrible until it is. So never say a harsh word if you can say a kind one: it may be you who starts the war.
‘Dirty Catholic!’ you say, or ‘stupid Irish’ or ‘I hate all Americans’ or ‘pinko Commies’. Don’t! Don’t! Or, ‘She shrunk my sweatshirt so I’ll stay out all night’ or ‘He crashed my car so I’ll phone his wife’. Don’t! Stop it! Click, click! ‘Car Bomb Massacre – 40 dead’, ‘Broken-home child in suicide bid!’, ‘Wife and lover in Deep Freeze Horror!’ ‘Terrorist dies in police station leap.’
If Muffin had not told Joan Lumb about Mew’s photographs, everything might have been different.
If Murray had been more responsive to Joan Lumb, who loved and admired him above all men, excepting only Henry Shrapnel, and he was dead, everything would have been different. (Joan Lumb avoided Murray after dinner. She was hurt because her company did not seem to make him happy, as his did her.)
If Shirley had not been such an easy prey to the prejudices and illusions of her time, and vain about her hands, and upset by the close attention Victor was paying to Bella—
If Victor had been more courteous: if Bella had recognised the existence of other women—
But Muffin, Murray, Joan Lumb, Victor, Shirley, Bella were the product of their times, as their parents had been before them, and the times move inexorably on from one recorded event to another, from Tiglath-Pileser to the man on the moon, and the times are too strong for them. How can anyone, Joan Lumb, Baf, the General, Hilda, Edna (remember her, the taxi driver?) stop scrambling up the slopes and turn and outface this frightful tidal wave of destiny? But it has to be done. It is all we can do. We are better, braver swimmers than we think.
Now.
Throughout the evening the staff had been gathering in the kitchens to celebrate and/or lament the passing and pulverising of Harry. Brown eyes clustered and gleamed in the dim light. (Joan Lumb insisted on low-wattage bulbs in the staff quarters. It was one of the economies of which she was most proud.) More and more came until finally there seemed to be a shifting yet solid wall ringing the cooking pot and chopping board, mostly coloured Muslim black and grey, patched by the blue of the worshippers of Mao and lightened by the occasional glimmer of Hindu silk. As the jigsaw surface changed and moved, gaps in the wall would appear, through which the occasional child would thrust a bare arm or leg, having successfully burrowed to the front, the better to be near the pot and the block, to catch the smell of the fall of the great, the humiliation of the oppressor. A susurratio
n drifted up, along with the rank odour of Harry and the sweet lingering smell that badly boiled pumpkin and overcooked fish leave behind; it was composed of the murmurs and prayers of the old, and the low chattering of the young, and the sharp intakes of breath of the frightened and the soft ululations of the distressed, quickly hushed. This, all understood, was a moment of destiny. Nothing could be the same again.
Acorn stood upon a table to address the crowd. Silence fell; only Miriam’s baby, held in Matilda’s arms, lamented at the back of the room and wouldn’t be hushed. (Matilda had to go out with it.) Acorn spoke in English: his voice had gained that arrogant edge of the leader into violence: it is the voice of those who give permission to hate: who enlist God on the devil’s side. It is jagged-edged: into it fit, with the greatest ease, the matching jagged edges of anger, misery, spite, paranoia, self-pity, fear and loathing of every kind: it is Henry Shrapnel’s exploding cannonball put together again: and put together it appears as a nice round ball of self-righteousness.
‘We are the Family of the Unknown,’ cries Acorn to the crowd. ‘We are the People of Now. We are everywhere, yet we are nowhere. We are the brown, the black, the helpless hands which serve and are not seen.’
Reader, it is true. The hands that serve you, in any corner of the world, are mostly female, and usually brown, and for the most part go unnoticed; or stay anonymous. Who cleans your offices? Do you know? No. You’d rather not. Who stands in the steam to press your shirt: who cut the upper of your fashion boot? The Family of the Unknown, that’s who. The Myriad People of Now: the scuttling, scurrying, frightened, passive people of the earth, the dusters of cannon, the polishers of buttons. No wonder the staff listened now to Acorn.
