by Weldon, Fay
‘How foolish those people are,’ thought Baf, ‘who believe that money is man’s prime motivation!’ Baf got 12 per cent of every weapon sold, and was a millionaire many times over – though it would have been most imprudent of him to live according to his means – but this, of course, was not why he promoted and sold the weapons. Man is not so base as you might think. Baf was proud of his products, and of the ingenuity and skill which had gone into their devising, and of the beauty of the objects themselves, and he wanted them to be used because he wanted them proved; and whole armies to be proud of them, and rely on them, just as Baf himself did. The money was a symbol of all these things: a testimonial to his professionalism, not an end in itself. (Mind you, it is easy enough for a millionaire to take this rather high view of money.)
So Baf took the knife box out not so much because he wanted to persuade the General to persuade his Ministry to purchase the weapons, as because he was proud of them, and wanted to show them to the General, and for the General to say, ‘Hey, that’s great!’ Just as staff generals want to show the President the missiles rising like silver wands from their silos, and hear him say ‘Fellers, that’s great! Most impressive!’ We all want our father’s admiration and, if we don’t get it, spend our lives looking for it. What’s the betting Baf’s father was a hard guy to please? I’m telling you, very hard. That’s why his wife, Baf’s mother, took to drink and religious mania. But that’s another story. Baf went back downstairs, took the General to a far corner of the room and opened the knife box. Joan Lumb fortunately did not notice, or no doubt would have cried ‘Security’ and demanded that he close it at once.
The General admired in particular the cylinder, rather like a latticed cigarette-lighter, whose tiny facets caught the whole light range of colour, so it seemed to live inside its own rainbow. This cylinder contained, under enormous pressure, enough new improved CS gas to subdue the entire audience at the Rose Bowl, and leave not a single child nor babe in arms not coughing, spluttering, gasping and weeping. It could of course be simply converted to the containment of more lethal nerve gases, but Baf found himself neurotic about these, and given a choice – which he was, his employers being civilised and kindly people – had gone for the least effective of all the martial gases. He apologised to the General for what might be seen as a lack of conviction on his part.
‘That’s okay by me,’ said the General, who was eyeing Mew in preparation for his midnight interview with her in the library, and was rather pleased to see that she had unshaven legs. He suspected that denoted passion, that she would not be finickity. He could not abide reluctant women, who had to be stroked, and prodded, and persuaded. Life was too short.
‘I can see you wouldn’t want to carry the really nasty stuff about. Not in a box like that. Where’s the shielding? Where’s the protection?’
Baf was able to explain to the General that the great advantage of miniaturised weapons was the comparative ease and safety of their deployment. The velvet-lined knife box was to the Minitox Range as a lead-lined concrete bunker to any conventional cylinder of toxic gas. The knife box, moreover, was not quite so simple as it seemed. Beneath the vellum surface was a vacuum layer, maintained by a minute vacuum pump, battery-powered, which kept the contents still: bounce it about as Baf might – ‘don’t,’ said the General – the weapons stayed quiet in their alcoves. Baf drew the General’s attention to one of his favourites: the pencil napalm-thrower, which could incinerate a whole platoon from a hundred yards and they would never know what happened to them. Another advantage of the miniaturised range was that men were spared the anticipation of death. This could only be good for their morale. ‘Um,’ said the General. But he admired the object. Being made up of globes within globes, from crystals grown bio-chemically, it radiated a steady white aura.
‘Isn’t that radioactive?’ he asked, and then apologised. ‘I’m not as young as I was. I’m used to thinking things that glow are either radioactive or magic.’ He went on to explain to Baf that while miniaturised cannons and guns, both for shot and gas, missiles and flame throwers, would indeed change the face of conventional warfare, the point was, could anyone these days afford the change! Difficult for a modern state to behave like the Assyrians and live off booty: the money had to come from somewhere!
Baf said he’d been trying the home market first, naturally, but would presently have to sell abroad. The investment in research and development had been enormous. The General said that was Baf’s problem, not his. He, the General, was most interested in the weapons and had much enjoyed seeing them but he had given Baf names at the Ministry and what more could he do? The General was beginning to sound cross. The General smiled at Mew, who smiled back and wondered what it was that Baf was showing the General.
Click, click, went Mew’s camera, produced from up her sleeve, in the general direction of Baf’s open knife box. She’d finished the film. The faintest click told her so.
‘What does Baf do?’ asked Mew of Muffin. Stuck away as she had been at the end of the dinner table, she had had no opportunity to discover where, as it were, he was at. But she suspected him of something underhand. His smile was too bright, his face too boyish, as he turned it trustingly towards the General.
‘He’s some kind of international salesman,’ said Muffin, vaguely.
‘Don’t you know? Aren’t you his girlfriend?’
‘I was,’ said Muffin, sadly, and wondered whether it was really worth her time chatting up Sergei, who had dug his chin so firmly into her shoulder as they stood together looking out into the snow, and so make Baf jealous. But perhaps Baf wouldn’t even notice, and it never did to make complications at work. Even as she decided that she and Sergei would be the exception to this latter rule, Baf deserted the arm of Bella’s chair.
‘What’s the matter, glumface?’ he hissed into Muffin’s ear, and she felt better at once. All the odd pains, in her heart, in her throat, in her mouth, quite disappeared.
‘Bella the Bitch is so Boring you wouldn’t Believe it,’ said Baf, who seemed to feel the need to make amends. ‘What a lot of B’s! Do you think if we went upstairs anyone would notice?’ Muffin said probably, not that she cared. Baf said neither did he care, except about her, Muffin, and they began to make their way towards the door. Baf carried the knife box with him, taking rather especial care of it, as Mew observed. What, she wondered, was in it? What interested the General so? Would it be worth seducing Baf, over the weekend, the better to steal it? There would be a scoop for the Woman’s Times. Her job would be secure: she might even manage private psychiatric treatment for her mother. Beyond and above that, of course, was her public duty. Things went on in the male world of the Shrapnel Academy women ought to know about. If she stole the box, of course, she would have to leave the motorbike in order to make a quick get away. She saw that snow might really get to be a nuisance: great lumps of white stuff standing between you and your ambition. And where was she? Miles from anywhere, cut off from civilisation, with a group of mad people who believed they were sane – pretty much as her mother had done. Mew’s mother, tangled in her mind, had one day poured boiling water from the kettle over her daughter’s body as she slept. Her father’s name was Jason. Mew’s mother felt obliged to boil her children, serve them in a stew, as Medea had done. Yet her mother loved her. Mew had not taken offence: it was others who had carted her mother off. But Mew knew disasters happened, when people who believed they were sane, were not, and tangled in their minds.
She thought she should be on the safe side, and sat down on a sofa by which, on a highly polished table, stood a large pot containing an aspidistra plant. The plant was flourishing – the soil, as it should be when growing aspidistras, was all but dry. (The knack of growing good aspidistras is to drench them thoroughly but only occasionally, and always to keep the leaves well dusted. They like to be pot-bound. Don’t even dream of re-potting!) It was an easy enough matter to make a little hole in the earth with a casual forefinger, then slip the camer
a from her sleeve into the hole, and cover it again. Then she rose and stood and stared casually at the painting above the marble fireplace, and tried to feel safe, and failed.
Reader, one would be hard put to it to say whether or not there is such a thing as telepathy. I can report my own experience, and convincingly, but what good to you is my sample of one? I am certainly as ready to believe in the paranormal as I am to believe we all live and die on a lump of rock, a mere 7,926 miles in diameter, whirling and thrumming through infinite space. That notion seems to me the real bummer. Well, there’s my own position declared. Yours must be your own. But if Mew felt nervous she was right to be. After all, downstairs serving dishes floated in the air (or were believed to) and the matter of cooking and eating her was under quite serious discussion. The portrait above the mantelpiece did nothing to reassure Mew as to the sanity of man. It was of President Roosevelt, Supremo Stalin and Prime Minister Churchill signing the Yalta Treaty in 1945. Now the Yalta Treaty was the one in which the two great powers – with the third power to make it seem less like a carve-up – did just that: carved up. They divided the world into spheres of influence, without any reference whatsoever to its inhabitants. You take Bulgaria, I’ll have Chile. What about Afghanistan? Oh, um, well we’ll have that and you take Finland. We absolutely have to have Australia but you can have Korea! And so on. It was at this painting that Mew happened to be staring, having just buried her camera beside the aspidistra, when Acorn and Inverness brought up the good-night cocoa and sandwiches.
Firelight made Mr Gromyko’s face – he stood at Stalin’s right hand, an agreeable, shrewd young man – dance and smile. He knew what he knew – and still does – that nothing the human mind can conceive won’t in time be done. The Family of Now will be with us any minute, killing, looting, raping, holding hostage, disturbing our Sunday lunch. Click! Click! ‘Holocaust on Honduras Airfield’, ‘Model raped in laser space drama’, ‘Powers split the world in two’. You invent it, they’ll do it.
Cocoa was served to the guests. It was poured by Acorn, very civilly, from a silver jug into those rather awkward but ubiquitous thick French cups with angled sides. They were deep green, gold-rimmed. The guests did their best to be at ease with them, but when Acorn handed round a silver tray on which were placed, on beds of lettuce (Israeli), and cress (South African), little soft white sandwiches, filled with a thick and delicious, though slightly strandy, meat pâté, they were pleased to set down their cups and accept the food. All ate with relish.
Murmurs of appreciation were heard all round.
‘Delicious!’
‘Wicked!’
‘How tasty!’
‘But what is it?’
Joan Lumb assumed the sandwiches were filled with the remains of the caribou patties, mashed and moulded, and was glad. She hated to see waste. In the morning she would congratulate Acorn. Where was Acorn? She rang for him. Why had he disappeared? The silver tray, with nearly all of the sandwiches gone, and with Sergei now finishing up the lettuce and cress, lay abandoned on the Georgian sidetable. She looked around the room. There were no servants at all in sight, only plenty of large cups of half-finished cocoa, grim and dark-grained around their golden rims. Annoyed, she rang for Acorn again. Nothing happened.
‘Murray,’ she said, ‘I’m getting no reply from the servants’ hall. Why do you think that is?’
‘You’d better ask your communications expert,’ said Murray. ‘I’m more of a field-man myself. What’s in the sandwiches? Reminds me of something. Can’t think what.’
And he ruminated, trying to dislodge strands of meat from between his cracked, yellow, tough teeth.
‘Well,’ he said gloomily, ‘if it is dog I’ll know soon enough.’
‘Don’t be such an old Eeyore, Murray,’ chided Joan Lumb. Elsie Blade, her and Victor’s mother, had read and re-read The House at Pooh Corner to her children. Joan Lumb thought of her mother with sudden and unusual gratitude and smiled at her brother. He smiled back and crossed over to her. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘I can’t quite remember. Did mother really once make me re-eat a fried egg I had vomited up?’
‘Of course,’ said Joan Lumb, and lied for her brother’s sake, and indeed for her mother’s too. They had been strictly brought up, in their own interests, but not, she felt, strictly enough. She herself had finished up everything, always, dutifully, the slimiest of porridge, the sourest of fish. Victor had got away with murder, in Joan Lumb’s eyes. Nursery food had to be finished, come what may. It was training for life. She would be as strict, she knew, with her own children. By disliking them, by refusing to conceive them, she did them a favour. Joan Lumb is not all bad. No one is.
Joan Lumb crossed to the window and looked out. Virgin snow lay smooth and heavy across the landscape. It was impossible to see where the drive stopped and the lawns began. The grizzled god Mars, who, in the act of piercing a beardless youth with a heavy sword, formed the centre-piece of the ornamental fountain, had lost stomach, thighs, legs, feet; only the muscle of his fine torso, his powerful arms, gleamed distantly in the light which Joan Lumb released from the parted curtains. The snow had stopped again, and the wind had dropped. Joan Lumb did not like what she saw, not at all.
‘It’s too bad,’ she said to Murray. ‘What are the servants playing at? They’ve made no attempt to clear the snow. Tomorrow’s guests will have trouble parking! Not that they’ll let a little weather deter them! But are the servants deaf and blind? I’ve rung and rung and nothing happens.’
But Murray took no notice. He was paying attention to Bella. She was explaining that she ate all the meat she could. She suffered badly from anaemia. The doctor had said the best thing for her was raw ox-blood, but she could not face it. And Murray was telling Bella how once, lost in Venezuela, he had kept alive by slicing steaks off living cows. They were getting on like a house on fire. Joan Lumb’s voice faded away. She was unhappy, and not in the habit of being so. She was quite accustomed to feeling angry, or irritated, or bored, or resentful, or self-righteous, but not simply unhappy. Colonel Lumb had never made her unhappy. Her mother, on the other hand, had. ‘It’s love,’ she thought, ‘love makes you unhappy,’ and there and then set her heart against Murray. Some women, poor things, have this capacity: to stop loving when it hurts.
Victor finished his first sandwich and Shirley her second and Victor said, ‘You’ll get fat,’ but he might have said ‘fatter’ and Shirley was grateful for small mercies. Her husband was back at her side, and she felt calm, and relieved, and a little too bright, like a sunny dawn after a stormy night. And Victor was indeed still lingering in that state of marital disaffection which the presence of a deathly glamorous woman can produce in the mildest and most devoted of married men. (Married women do not seem to be quite so disturbed by the presence of beautiful, available and desirable men, but this may be merely custom and convention, and no doubt in the perfect world we all work towards, when unfair gender distinctions have faded away, men and women will be equal in this too.)
Do you want to know, as Shirley longs to, what Victor had said to Bella, as she sat, or rather lounged, stretched, with her long body pressed somehow hard and heavy into the dark red velvet, as if a man’s body was already upon her, and the only doubt which one of the men in the room it could possibly be? Victor had said:
‘Bella, from what you say, your work at the Ministry of Defence hardly gives you the opportunities and rewards a young woman of your intelligence and competence should have. Had you ever thought of working in the private sector? In Industry?’
‘Can’t say I had,’ said Bella.
‘I think you should seriously consider it,’ Victor said. ‘Here, let me give you my card. I want you to ring me at this number – see, here’s my extension—’ and he took her long pale forefinger, with the rather square and flattened nails, and it was cool and smooth to the touch, and he was conscious of the reddened, tough, male hairiness of his hand, so that both fingers, his and hers, pointed to the numb
er – ‘and we’ll make an appointment, and you will come to visit me at my office and we’ll discuss it.’
But Bella took her hand away from Victor’s.
‘I’m doing okay where I am,’ she said, and looked at him and smirked, as if saying ‘men! all the same!’ and the dream blinked into a nightmare. Her voice had seemed suddenly hard and guttural and quite frightened him. She was a ravenous woman: she would swallow him up, engulf him as she had engulfed her food at dinner. The smirk was possibly because, invisible at her elbow, flapping unseen wings, was a host of sinewy vampires with heavy claws and bloody beaks, which were about to tear him to shreds. That was when he rose and returned to Shirley, his wife. And Shirley had said:
‘Do have a sandwich, Victor. Keep me company!’
So he did. But still he looked over towards Bella, chatting to Murray. Perhaps the vampires could be outfaced, or even ruled: perhaps to be King of the Vampires was a loftier aim than to be Prince at Gloabal? It was obviously late: he was not thinking sensibly. He said to Shirley:
‘Shall we turn in soon?’ and she said yes, and smiled at him with simple and endearing wifeliness. Shirley was happy. They would make love: they always did when they were away: a different bed, a different ceiling, the distance of the children, those reminders of ordinariness, permanence, refreshed the pleasure. He would try not to think of Bella; it was a discourtesy to Shirley.
‘Okay?’ he asked again, and again she said yes, and he rubbed her warm cheek with the same hand that had lately touched Bella. He supposed Bella would presently rejoin the General, but the General was rather surprisingly deep in conversation with the young woman journalist with the dirty face. ‘I can’t think why Joan asked her,’ he complained to Shirley. ‘She’s obviously the kind to make trouble.’
