by Weldon, Fay
Run the cannonball down a snowy slope; see it collecting snow, collecting support, getting bigger and bigger as it runs: the shrapnel of rage and right encased deep but certain below: oh, they were all ears! Who wouldn’t be, and the scent of Harry inflamed their senses with the notion that action is possible, revolutions happen, things change: and how handsome Acorn was: personable, powerful, frightening, but unfrightened. Pin your colours to that mast: oh yes, it is the only mast you have, and anyway, if you don’t it’ll only fall on you and crush you.
‘Brothers, sisters,’ said Acorn, and who could not want to be included in this family? ‘We will live no longer under the yoke of oppression; we will strike back: we will wipe out the transgressors against God. We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’
A few faces looked puzzled. It seemed to them that there was a great deal to fear: homelessness, hunger, cold, prison, death. ‘Miriam is dead,’ said Acorn, in his new gritty, shrapnelly voice. ‘Murdered! A life for a life; a dozen of theirs must equal one of ours. Say to yourself, brothers, sisters, who harms my brother, my sister, in the Family of the Unknown, harms me. And vengeance must be ours!’
And if there were those who thought, well: it could be said equally that Acorn’s baby murdered its mother; or that Acorn’s refusal to let the medical services in hadn’t helped: or that Acorn’s sequestration of the meat money hadn’t helped Miriam’s health, no one said so. That Joan Lumb’s action in overlooking the formalities of visas and so forth might be construed as kindness (albeit mixed with self-interest) rather than simple exploitation went unremarked upon.
‘Brothers, sisters,’ said Acorn from his soap-box table, and his eyes rolled and his clenched fist struck into the heavy air, ‘death is nothing. Better we are all dead than live with shame another day!’
There came a slight harrumphing from the front. Inverness disengaged himself from the human jigsaw of the wall and sat upon the edge of the table, legs swinging, spectacles glinting. He seemed a very modest, small, elderly man, sitting thus at Acorn’s feet. Acorn’s legs were vast and tall above, like shiny pillars. Inverness smiled, in a situation and position where smiling seemed unthinkable. And, even as he smiled, he undermined Acorn’s case. Many trembled for Inverness’s sake. He would follow Harry into the pot if he wasn’t careful – or bits of him, which he’d then be obliged to eat, and probably not in sandwich form.
‘But what is our objective?’ asked Inverness, innocently, his head turned up towards Acorn. ‘What can be gained by violence? I have seen too much of it. So have most of us who make our refuge here. I quite agree: there must be change. But let us be reasonable, let us negotiate. Let us present our complaints in the proper way.’
‘You are a fool,’ said Acorn, but it was a mistake on his part to so much as acknowledge Inverness’s presence. Eyes turned to the older man’s face, and the slight, sad smile. Inverness had patched cuts, and delivered babies, and cured pain, and counselled patience and acceptance. And his courage was immense: he was a fish nibbling where the shark thought he oughtn’t.
‘I may be a fool,’ said Inverness, ‘but better a live fool than a dead hero.’
‘There are the words of a coward,’ said Acorn, ‘and a traitor to the Family of the Unknown, the People of Now.’
‘We are warm, we are fed, we are safe,’ said Inverness, leaving his perch upon the table rather suddenly, and returning to stand in front of the people’s wall, as if making himself their spokesman. ‘What more do we want?’
‘Dignity,’ said Acorn. ‘Justice. Vengeance. Blood.’
‘I would rather have a hot dinner any day,’ said Inverness, and around him people laughed.
‘This is no man! This is a woman who speaks,’ sneered Acorn, and the laughing quickly stopped. He pressed home his advantage. ‘This is a man who killed our sister by his neglect,’ said Acorn. ‘He is in the pay of our oppressors: he is a spy: he speaks for them, and not for you. He drips his words like poison. Shut your ears to them, my brothers and sisters, before they deafen you to the truth. Lo, the fruit of our hatred—’
And he held above his head the silver tray where the spirit of Harry rested, trapped between two slivers of bread, and a breath of wonder welled up like a current of air hot enough and strong enough to take the weight of the tray, so that it seemed to support itself, and not need Acorn’s hands at all, but just to float there. A miracle! Or was it a trick of the light?
‘The dog is dead!’ cried Acorn, ‘and yet it lives! Today they killed one of us and didn’t know it. Today they shall eat the dog and not know that.’
‘And what then?’ asked Inverness; though now elbows and shoulders obstructed him, tried to ease him away from the front of the crowd. ‘Detail, please. Detail!’
‘Then we will kill them,’ shrieked Acorn. ‘We will boil them alive.’
‘And what happens to us then?’ persisted Inverness, now from the depths of the crowd. ‘When the snow melts and the authorities arrive? When our crime is disclosed? What do we say? Perhaps that the entire dinner party was spirited away by flying saucers?’
‘Still piping away, woman?’ asked Acorn, dancing up and down with rage. ‘Careful, or I’ll tear your voice out of your woman’s throat! See these hands? They will crush the breath from the enemies of the People of Now. They will tear the flesh off the bones of our enemies. There will be a risotto: the most wonderful risotto the world has ever known. For once there will be no shortage of meat. We will eat the dinner party!’
Reader, you may think all this too crude, too simple, but have you listened to the Watergate Tapes? It is hard to imagine how barbarous the language of our leaders is, in private, how simple and emotive their judgements, how their love of money and power and vengeance rises to the surface like the white crust on boiling strawberry jam. They know no better than you or me; they behave a good deal worse. And how gullible we are, so long as it suits us! Oh, Nixon, you say! Nixon was an exception. Really? What about Gadddafi: how many children have been blown to bits since he made his first ‘sweep them into the sea’ speech twenty years ago? Since he first gave permission to hate? How many have died so the Basques can be free? Free from what? The Common Market? Oh, terror! Discover outrage, and a few good phrases, promise pain now and justice later, vengeance for past affronts and any Leader of Man’s away. If you belonged to the Family of the Unknown, the People of Now, what would you do? Fight back? Eat the dinner party? You bet! So would I. Can you imagine anything more tedious than Inverness’s proposed proper presentation of complaints? Acorn’s right. We don’t want him in the Family.
To get back to the matter of the possible eating of the dinner party, I find the very idea disconcerting, the more I consider it, and the idea is mine, so it may disconcert you, reader, even more. But in the scale of human depravity, is such a deed particularly bad? Victor, that very day, that equable family man, and though indirectly, had been the cause of several deaths by malnutrition in southern India. That is to say, they would not have died had Chewinox not pulled out of the area. The handsome and virile General, as we know, had many thousands of deaths to his credit and could happily contemplate more. Lovely Baf was a dealer in death and pain. Panza and Sergei sent weariness and depression abroad; fed it into the hearts of the young. Murray killed with his bare hands. If death deserves death, then surely they deserved to die? And all, what is more, killed those who had never offended them. Now Acorn was personally upset, affronted and damaged by the behaviour of Upstairs, and yet his reaction, to kill, cook and eat, and thus incorporate and control the evil, seems to us on the instant far more reprehensible than anything perpetrated by his putative victims. At any rate it does to me.
24
Remember Mew’s motorbike? The one she abandoned so blithely at the side of the road when it ran out of petrol? It was not her bike, in fact, but belonged to a boy named Terry, which was perhaps why she forgot it so easily. It was a Harley-Davidson, a collector’s piece, circa 1952, not that that meant anything much
to Mew, who was the kind of person who far prefers the present to the past and was just as happy with a plastic spoon as a silver one. Whatever Mew did with his Harley-Davidson – took it, crashed it, lost it, left it in a country lane in a snowstorm, sold it – was okay by Terry, so hopelessly did he love Mew. She, for her part, despised and neglected Terry, but his unrequited passion did give her a nice kind of confidence. It is always pleasant to have someone around, of either sex, to love you no matter what you do, or with whom. Perhaps it was that Terry was sending thought waves out to Mew, over the aether – as the Edwardians used to call it – at any rate Mew remembered his bike and went over to Muffin, interrupting her conversation with Sergei. That is to say, Sergei was talking and Muffin was doing her best to listen.
‘Of course,’ said Sergei, ‘orthodox historians merely say the library burned, that 400,000 rolls were lost, but there’s no real evidence about where the fire started, or how. There’s a scholarly account of what happened in P. M. Fraser’s Ptolemaic Alexandria but who’s to say he didn’t make the whole thing up? Trust, these days, is such a difficult thing!’ Muffin wasn’t even listening. She kept her eyes on his face and nodded and looked interested, but it did not deceive him. He had had many students like that, over the years, who had acquired the art of paying attention and blanking off. His voice faded away. He was discouraged. Once he had commanded the interest of millions of television viewers: they had stopped him in the street to shake his hand: shop assistants nudged one another when he entered their premises – now no one knew, or cared, or listened. And what did the future hold, except the increasing inattention of listeners, as he grew older, less in command of himself and the world, and so less worth listening to?
Muffin too had a pain in her heart. Bella sat languidly in the dark red velvet armchair, one thin pale arm, palm upward, held across the folds of her black dress, almost as if waiting for an injection, some kind of fix: and on one solid arm of the chair perched Victor, and on the other Baf. Bella, Muffin noticed, hardly ever spoke at all. Men spoke to her. It had taken Muffin some time to realise that the pain in her heart was not indigestion from the caribou patties, but a mixture of jealousy and grief.
‘Muffin,’ said Mew, and both Sergei and Muffin were glad to be diverted from their thoughts, ‘I’ve just remembered something. I dumped my bike by the side of the road. I ought to do something about it. It isn’t even my bike.’
Muffin went to the tall windows and parted the curtains a little and looked outside, over the white landscape. The wind had dropped, and the light from the windows sent its brilliance curiously far out into the night, as if the snow itself was a source of light. The trees were out of proportion: even the very tall ones started out of the ground half-way up their trunks and the short ones seemed to have no trunks at all, merely hydrocephalic heads. Funny, thought Muffin.
‘It really has been snowing!’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose anything can be done tonight. But we’ll send a Land-Rover out to pick it up tomorrow morning. Why didn’t you say something earlier?’
‘Forgot,’ said Mew. And so she had. ‘Well,’ she said now, ‘I don’t suppose it’ll rust or anything,’ and moved away, her duty to Terry done. One must at least show an interest, when faced with the problems of borrowed property. So much her mother had taught her, in her saner moments.
Muffin was accustomed to cities, where snow melts almost as it falls, in the warmth of a million exhalations, a million footfalls. But Sergei knew his Nature better. He looked out over Muffin’s shoulder, and said:
‘There isn’t a hope in hell of getting anything moving out there before a thaw, and that’s not going to be soon. You realise what it means? There’ll be no lecture tomorrow.’
‘You tell Joan,’ said Muffin, pouting. ‘I’m not going to.’
‘You look very pretty when you do that,’ said Sergei. ‘Do it again!’
She did, and felt better. It is, as I say, always nice to be admired. And Sergei was gratified by her response to his flattery, if not to the information he had to offer. How quickly we shift from dull despair to animation, given the right circumstances. Men should always admire women and women men, or seem to. It can do no one any harm and improves the general atmosphere no end.
‘I’m not going to tell Joan,’ said Sergei. ‘Let her find out for herself. It doesn’t do round here to be the bearer of bad news.’
The guests helped themselves to brandy and coffee. The absence of the staff went unobserved. Only Mew noticed and regretted the loss of Acorn, whose buttocks under black silk so entranced her. But perhaps, later that night, he would reappear? He knew, after all, which her room was. Perhaps, under the shadow of Trident rising from the sea, black and white could mix and mingle, and click! click! ‘Black Butler Tells All! Wealth Above, Poverty Below!’ ‘Darling, darling, tell me all, even as you show me how you love me.’ Click! click! ‘Let me remember, when all this is over, the words, and not the occasion. Let me be right. Let me be justified. Let the pursuit of truth be worth the betrayal of love—’
But now the General was crossing to talk to Mew. His face was ravaged with deep lines: she found that not repellent but attractive. His hair, though snowy-white, was thick. A bird in the hand, however scraggy, is worth two in the bush, where sexual matters are concerned. All the same, Mew wondered at the catholic, and indeed the heterosexual nature of her inclinations, which could so happily and swiftly include both the young black man and the old white man as objects of desire. And why was she not moved at all by Muffin, in spite of her long legs and high buttocks? Perhaps it was just the feel of Muffin’s silk skirt around her legs – an unfamiliar sensation; usually there was just the brisk rub of denim – or was it the shoes, now she was accustomed to them, which made her feel oddly and agreeably heterosexual? Or perhaps she’d just had too much to drink: or perhaps it was all the talk of war, and the feeling that you’d better now, or tomorrow you might be dead. The prospect of eternal peace, eternal silence, is a great aphrodisiac.
Tell me, General,’ said Mew briskly, ‘how the lethality indices for weapons correlates with the mortality rates of troops in the field?’
‘As one goes up,’ said the General, ‘the other goes down. That is how, in the army, we reckon progress.’
‘So progress in the military sense,’ observed Mew, ‘means more and more civilians killed.’
‘More and more civilians killed potentially,’ said the General. ‘Of course in wartime soldiers are a great deal more valuable than civilians. But these aren’t matters a pretty girl should worry about; especially not at a party. If you seriously want to interview me, what’s wrong with midnight in the library?’
‘Nothing,’ said Mew, which still left her free for Acorn under Trident later. The library today, Trident tomorrow! ‘Good heavens,’ thought Mew, ‘if this is drunk let me have more of it.’
Baf went upstairs to his room in the new wing. Above the door were the words Mother Teresa. The unusual naming of the room was Joan Lumb’s idea.
‘Are you sure?’ Muffin had asked.
‘Of course I’m sure,’ said Joan Lumb.
‘But the students might find it embarrassing,’ said Muffin. ‘Fancy having to say to someone who’s in Julius Caesar, oh, I’m in Mother Teresa!’
‘It is important for them to learn,’ said Joan Lumb, ‘that the army cares.’
Of course, everyone knows about Mother Teresa. Unsupported by any government agency, and only by private funds, Mother Teresa runs a hospice for the dying poor of Calcutta. She gathers the wretched off the streets so they can die, as they have not lived, in an atmosphere of love. She has room for some 2,000. If, in Bombay, on the other side of that crowded continent, you remark upon the number of dead, dying and starving in the streets, you are, as likely as not, to be told, it’s all right, Mother Teresa looks after them. Mother Teresa is a household name the world over; of course she is, of course you know about her: she is the one who cares so we need not. Joan Lumb admires her very muc
h, and she is admirable. Muffin thought Joan Lumb had put Baf in Mother Teresa to annoy her, and was right. She had. Fortunately Baf didn’t even notice the words above the door.
In the wall above the fireplace of Mother Teresa was a safe. It was hidden behind a rather pleasant Victorian print of Jesus driving the money-lenders from the Temple, especially selected for the room by Joan Lumb. Baf got the key from Muffin before dinner and, before going downstairs, he’d locked his Victorian knife box safely inside. The value of the contents ran into many millions. Sometimes Baf marvelled that he, so young, had so much responsibility upon his shoulders. But this was the age of the young. Baf had failed many examinations at school, but had always charmed both teachers and pupils. Since his school was of the expensive English kind, which has grounds spacious enough to house bodyguards as well as pupils, he made the acquaintance there of the sons of the intolerably rich and intolerably powerful of all nations. He became, over the summer holidays, acquainted with the insides of palaces and embassies everywhere. There was no point in him staying at home. It was his mother’s custom to spend the months between June and October either in a religious retreat or in a nursing home for alcoholics.
Now Baf carefully lifted out the knife box from its home behind the print of Jesus and the money-lenders, laid it on his bedside table, and opened it, as much to admire its contents as to make sure it was as he had left it. How neatly the tiny, steely, intricate objects lay in their soft velvet home. They were beautiful: made in metals that entranced the eye, being so like and yet unlike the familiar substances of everyday life. There was no overt decoration: there was no need: the three-dimensional fractals (pyramids within pyramids, globes within globes) of which these slivers of weapons must of necessity be composed if they were to have the strength required of them, created surfaces which seemed to live, and quiver, and change, although the mind knew well enough that they did not. But the eye is used to what it is used to, and sees what it is in the habit of seeing; and an effort of will must sometimes be made if it is to register fact, not fiction: just as the staff below, even as Baf took out his knife box and opened it on the marvels within, looked en masse at the silver tray above Acorn’s head and thought it floated.
