by Weldon, Fay
‘I wondered myself,’ said Shirley, taking another bite of sandwich. ‘But I think she’s you-know.’ She meant lesbian. Victor was astonished. Was Shirley implying that his sister had homosexual inclinations? He asked as much.
‘But, Victor,’ said Shirley, ‘I always assumed she was.’
It’s amazing how long you can be married to someone, sleep with someone, have breakfast (usually), lunch (occasionally), tea (though rarely) and dinner (often) with someone and that still they should have the capacity to surprise you. This, I suppose, is why we marry other people and don’t make do with ourselves. At any rate Victor was surprised, not so much at his sister’s deviant sexuality – if Shirley was right – but that Shirley should hold a view unknown to him.
‘Good God,’ he said. ‘That makes her a security risk!’ and he could not help laughing as they crossed to say good night to his sister.
‘Victor,’ said Joan Lumb, ‘I don’t know what you’re laughing about. I think there is mutiny downstairs. When I ring the bell, Acorn doesn’t reply, and look, the servants haven’t even begun to clear the snow!’
‘Joan,’ said Victor, ‘surely you didn’t ask them to clear the snow? It is never sensible to give orders if you know they can’t possibly be carried out. Wasn’t that one of Napoleon’s precepts? They’ve all gone to bed.’
‘Victor,’ said his sister, with considerable petulance, ‘you may know how to run a chewing-gum factory but you know nothing about servants. We are not dealing with Europeans, but with Asiatics, Hispanics and God knows what.’
‘Joan,’ said Victor, ‘it is the middle of the night.’
‘I wish I could ask the snow to keep sociable hours,’ said Joan Lumb, ‘but I can’t.’ (Sarcasm again!) ‘I want them out there now!’
‘Joan,’ said Victor, ‘be reasonable.’
Joan Lumb hadn’t changed since she was a child. Once, in a fury because she hadn’t been chosen to play Mary in the Nativity Play, she had topped the heads off every chrysanthemum in the vicar’s garden, and worse, refused to say she was sorry.
‘I am not a fool, Victor,’ she said. ‘Nor am I blind. I know there’s a blizzard. All the more reason to keep the driveway clear. If we give in, the Council will too. If we do the drive, they’ll be shamed into sending the snow-plough for the minor roads.’
‘Joan, it’s midnight,’ murmured Shirley, ‘and we’ve all had quite a bit to drink,’ but no one wanted to hear that kind of thing.
‘As for you, Shirley,’ said her sister-in-law, ‘you have not the slightest idea how to deal with servants. Do be quiet.’
‘They might freeze to death out there,’ said Victor. ‘I hope you realise that.’ He was joking.
‘They can, for all I care,’ said Joan. She wasn’t.
‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’ spoke Murray, from Bella’s chair by the fire, startling everyone, and all Joan Lumb thought was, ‘He is foolish, he is senile, he is a poor old man, he is no use to anyone. Oh that Henry Shrapnel was alive and living at this hour!’ In Joan Lumb’s mind Shrapnel stayed for ever young, and vigorous.
‘Talking about sleeping dogs,’ said Shirley, ‘do you think I should go and see how Harry has settled down?’
‘I think Harry can look after himself, Shirley,’ said Victor, patiently. He had quite recovered his composure. Shirley asked silly questions and he answered them. They had got along fine in this manner for fifteen years. (You may be surprised, inasmuch as Serena, Piers and Nell are so small, to discover that Shirley and Victor have been married for so long. But during the first years of her marriage to Victor, Shirley was having treatment for infertility – a condition now happily righted. I would go into the details of that, but now is neither the time nor the place.)
Victor looked forward to living the rest of his life with Shirley, and if Bella was not prepared to be a divertissement, he would continue happily enough with the ongoing melody.
‘Sergei,’ said Joan Lumb, ‘Panza! I’m getting no reply from the servants’ hall.’
But Sergei and Panza only shrugged. She had half-expected it. They were effete. They lived too much in their heads. Thought weakened their resolve. Where was Muffin? Where was Baf? Not yet returned! That did not bear thinking about, either.
‘General,’ she asked, ‘what is to be done? I ring for the servants and they don’t reply.’
‘We must bow to the inevitable,’ he said. ‘They’ve gone to bed.’
He had had far too much to drink, she realised. So had everyone. It had been deliberately done. The servants had filled glasses far too rapidly.
‘It’s more than that,’ she said. ‘I feel it. Something’s wrong.’ How much had she herself drunk? Gin before dinner, three kinds of wine with it, Cointreau afterwards? The lights flickered and went out. Joan Lumb spoke into the dark.
‘And now the lights have gone out.’
Someone laughed. She thought it was Mew.
‘No need,’ said Mew, ‘to state the obvious.’
Stupid, simpering girl, with her red flounces and dirty face, tottering in heels too high for her. What was she doing here anyway? She was probably in league with the servants.
‘They’ve cut the lines,’ said Joan Lumb.
‘Nonsense,’ said Victor, ‘it’s only the snow.’
‘Victor,’ said Shirley, ‘I’m frightened!’ and suddenly they all were.
25
Now by this time, as it happened, there was no need whatsoever for Upstairs to fear anything at all, at least from Downstairs. (From one another was, of course, another matter.) Civilisation below stairs had been saved, or at any rate an improved status quo restored. Acorn had been deposed, and the servants slept the deep, quiet sleep of the victim whose integrity cannot be impugned, or whose morality doubted. Not for them the restless nights of the General, disturbed by the ghosts of those who would be living now, were it not that he had killed them. The snow spread its soft quiet blanket all around, and sopped up the noise of the drunken agitations up above; the telephone system between Upstairs and Downstairs was not working. Its wires had become unplugged in the struggle between civilisation and barbarity, and no one had noticed.
Tomorrow, thought the servants, drifting into sleep, packed into beds, and beneath beds, and lying filleted one onto another on the palleted floor, children entwined with children, adults lovingly with each other, tomorrow the food will be better; tomorrow perhaps justice can be won and vengeance gained: just let it not be today. All we want to do is live out our lives in peace. Miriam lies dead in the cold room, wrapped in silver foil, but she is only a woman, and all people die, and the baby is safe. Acorn lies strait-jacketed and calmed by major tranquillisers on the kitchen table, where Harry’s body lately lay. He is lucky to be alive. Inverness used up all his supply of clorazepate and thioridazine before he would be quiet. He is, poor man, in an advanced state of clinical paranoia. Inverness means to inform Joan Lumb in the morning: she will want to inspect for herself his rigid body, his staring eye, the convulsive movements of his hands. If he is not ranting sufficiently, Inverness will inject him with some adrenaline. He will be carted away quickly to some secure mental hospital, where he can do no more harm. If questions are asked about his legal status, Joan Lumb will have to do the answering. Poor Acorn. Do you feel sorry for him? I do. But the penalty of believing in him, following him, is death, and not just your own, but the children’s. Inverness is right: boring but right. We deal in this world not in blacks and whites; blending sometimes into denim blue, just occasionally threaded through with brilliant silk. Inverness does what has to be done: he sacrifices the one for the many, and he of all the servants does not sleep well that night, but tosses and turns. Acorn’s just out for the count, of course.
This is what happened.
Acorn, instead of delegating the handing round of Harry sandwiches, as he would have been wise to do, could not resist taking them up, himself, and watching the hazy, drunken crew devour them. Inverness took advantage of Acorn’
s absence, and addressed the servants himself.
‘Friends,’ he said, ‘and I will not call you brothers and sisters, because we are not family. We are people of many different religions, and many different races, brought together here not by the will of Allah but by hard circumstance: trapped not by common cause but by the frailty of man and the blindness of bureaucracy. Acorn is no one’s friend but his own. Lord Acorn, he wishes to be called! By what right? By the right only of his lust for power. Lord Acorn thinks he is Napoleon. Lord Acorn is insane! Agnes, are you there?’
Agnes was pushed forward by the crowd; she stood dull-eyed and slack-mouthed and wretched, quite the wrong end of the scale from the young women who fly you on Singapore Airlines.
‘Acorn is mad as Agnes is mad, but in a worse way,’ said Inverness. ‘That is to say, from time to time both need to be shut up. He beckons you to follow him, in the same way that Agnes beckons. If you go with Agnes you catch a disease. Go with Acorn and you catch insanity itself. The madness of hate and fear is catching.’
His audience shivered. They believed him. They had felt the touch of madness.
‘Acorn will lead you, in his madness, to death, pain, imprisonment, exile, and the only satisfaction you will have is the sight of blood. Acorn will have the principles, you will pay for them. Be sure Acorn won’t die. No, he will take the breath out of your children’s mouths, in the same way as he takes their food, and live off that.’
There was a breath of assent. Inverness was winning. But there was not much time. Soon Acorn would be back.
‘Acorn speaks with a double tongue,’ said Inverness. ‘He talks of purity but is himself corrupt. The woman who is no woman’ (he meant Mew, poor Mew: that is what happens when you wear a donkey jacket and heavy boots, the laces double-knotted, the better to ride a motorbike) ‘waits for him in her bed tonight. Hilda!’
The crowd pushed Hilda forward. Matilda had gone upstairs to collect her when the trouble started. Acorn had either not bothered or forgotten all about her. She could accept her concubine status; could even cradle Miriam’s baby in her arms, but she resented being forgotten. Who wouldn’t?
‘Hilda, isn’t that so?’
But Hilda said nothing. She was afraid. Well, she was very small. Small women often live in physical fear of the men they’re with: they take especial care to charm and entertain, as kittens do. That way they don’t get trodden on.
‘She’s afraid,’ said Inverness. ‘It isn’t love which keeps her silent, or loyalty. It’s fear.’
Still Hilda kept her eyes downcast, and said nothing. Inverness decided not to continue down this particular avenue.
‘Look up, Hilda,’ said Inverness. ‘Tell me how Miriam came to have her baby. Was that love, or fear?’
‘Fear,’ said Hilda, looking up. Sometimes one woman can do for another what she can’t do for herself. ‘It was rape.’
‘Those that hath eyes to see let them see,’ said Inverness, satisfied.
The crowd saw: it shuffled. Inverness promised them more meat in the pot, better heating, better lighting, a little-by-little approach to authority, proper moderate leadership – the crowd began to disperse. They understood such things would and should be accomplished on their behalf, but were bored by the detail. They were tired. It was late.
When Acorn left the drawing-room, too elated by the success of his plan to be properly careful, and pushed open the green baize door, Hastings, Raindrop and Inverness were waiting for him. A man is usually betrayed by those closest to him. Inverness tripped him, Raindrop pinioned him, Hastings bound him. In the struggle up and down the stairs, the telephone wire, which ran along the side of the skirting, became unplugged from its socket, and the old-fashioned bell-wire, rusted almost through over many decades, finally disintegrated. Inverness jabbed Acorn again and again with assorted neuroleptic drugs until he finally lost consciousness. He was strait-jacketed and stretched out on the kitchen table. Inverness dabbed some of the scum, skimmed from the surface of the still simmering pot where Harry had boiled, around Acorn’s mouth, so that no one who saw him could doubt the fact that he had been foaming at the mouth.
Then they went to bed. Securing civilisation is a tiring business. They forgot to remove the pot from the flame. In Acorn’s absence there was no one to keep an eye on such details. And Joan Lumb rang and rang and no one answered.
26
Remember Ivor, the chauffeur whose task it was to drive General Leo Makeshift and Bella Morthampton down to the Shrapnel Academy? On his arrival Ivor was escorted at once to a room on the third floor. It was pleasant, large, well-appointed, but lonely. He listened to the radio, but either the instrument was faulty or reception in the area was bad; he switched it off and watched television instead. A substantial supper was presently brought to him on a tray, by a pretty, dusky girl – Arab, he thought – who spoke no English but had smiled and lingered as if she were offering more than food and drink. Ivor would have none of it. He opened the door for her to leave, courteously and resolutely, and closed it after her with no less determination.
He drank his pea soup, ate his gammon and chips, and some of his apple pie, and waited. Sooner or later something would happen. There was a snap, crackle and pop in the air. He could feel it. He lay on the bed to watch television, and did not take his shoes off. Debbie-Anne would never have allowed it.
When Ivor was with Debbie-Anne and the children, he wanted to be off and away. When he was off and away he wanted only to be with them. He left his room in search of a telephone; if he called his wife he might feel more settled in his mind. He wandered along deserted corridors but found no telephone. He tried doors: most were locked; or if opened, showed only interiors as bleak and functional as hotel rooms. He went downstairs, where the rooms were more luxurious, and searched there. The Shrapnel Academy, Ivor concluded, did not encourage contact with the outside world. He did not venture as far as the ground floor, where the sound of talk and laughter ebbed and flowed from behind closed doors. Someone somewhere had left a window open, or else no amount of double glazing could quite keep the wind out; scurries of cold air wafted down the corridors, carrying with them a slight celebratory smell of wine and cigarettes, and another odour besides – not so pleasant – was it meat scraps boiling or pig swill stewing? The weather outside was worsening. Perhaps he would have to dig the Rolls out of the garage in the morning? Ivor had little experience of snow. He worked mostly in the city.
Ivor went back to his room, and turned the volume of the television up to drown memories of Bella Morthampton – or were they dreams, fantasies? How was he to tell? – and at that moment the screen blanked and the lights went out.
Ivor’s duty was now to be with the General. Not for nothing had he done three months’ in-service training as a bodyguard. A power cut can provide cover for a terrorist attack. He left his room, feeling his way along the corridor walls, coming to the open space of the stairwell, keeping to the wall, down and round, until he reached the great front hall. The door to the drawing-room was open: someone was fetching candles from the candelabras in the dining-room and Joan Lumb’s voice had risen a pitch or so in its agitation.
‘They have cut the lines! We are under attack! Muffin, try the telephones. Muffin, where are you?’
Ivor moved forward to be by the General’s side. Joan Lumb saw him in the half dark and was alarmed.
‘A stranger! Who is it?’
‘Only the chauffeur,’ said Bella Morthampton.
Bella Morthampton, Ivor observed, was smiling. Her teeth glinted in the light of the candle held for her convenience by Victor. Those are the teeth, Ivor thought, those are the teeth that dug into my shoulder as she clung to me and cried out. I know they are. Why did she deny me? Three times she denied me. And now I am married to Debbie-Anne, whom I love and don’t love; and whose fault is that? Why, Bella Morthampton’s. The unhappy must have someone to blame.
The General moved to stand beside the great front door: Ivor moved to stand d
iscreetly and silently at his side.
‘Oh, the children, Victor!’ he heard Shirley Blade say. ‘Suppose they wake and are frightened!’
Muffin and Baf made their way back downstairs in the dark, so happy with each other they could not believe in bad news.
‘What’s happening?’ Muffin asked Sergei.
‘We’re all drunk,’ said Sergei, ‘the power lines are down and Lady Lumb has finally blown her top.’
Joan Lumb, in Muffin’s absence, had been to try the telephones herself, stumbling in the dark between office chairs and tables, barking her shin on the metal edge of the bottom drawer of one of the filing cabinets, left open by Muffin. I should have fired her years ago, thought Joan Lumb, as she lifted the receiver. She was glad to hear the blank, somehow layered, silence of the non-connected phone: she was right. The others laughed at her, dismissed her as hysterical – now they would have to change their tune.
‘We haven’t much time!’ she cried, returning to the drawing-room, swaying from the pain in her shin. ‘They’re going to attack any minute. They’ve cut the telephone wires.’
‘Joan,’ said Victor, and his voice was slurred. ‘Sister Joan, calm down. If the snow’s brought down the power lines, why shouldn’t it bring down the telephone wires too?’
‘Joan feels guilty,’ said Shirley, primly and aside to Victor, ‘that’s all it is. She overworks and underpays her servants, so she lives in the expectation of their anger. It’s a form of projection. We did it as part of our “Getting to Know Yourself” course. And I didn’t have to leave the children until after they were asleep, and on Monday evenings you’re hardly ever there anyway, so I didn’t think I was being selfish in attending the course. Victor, can we go to bed now?’
