Arms and the Women

by Reginald Hill

  Mungo Macallum, the armaments king.

  There are some who say that you were the model for Undershaft in Major Barbara, Mungo. Great wealth from a morally dubious source, yet not without your own moral concerns. Poverty you saw as a cause of evil, not an effect. You paid, by the standards of the time, fair wages, and you underwrote the establishment of a savings bank to encourage providence among your workers, and a building society to give those who desired it the chance of buying their own homes.

  And you led by example, showing the world how money wisely invested was the basis of prosperity.

  In 1914 you were already rich. By 1918 you had wealth beyond computation.

  In Flanders fields the poppies blow

  Between the crosses, row on row,

  While westward eighty miles or so,

  In England’s fields the profits grow.

  And in a Yorkshire field, in that remote and peaceful wedge of coastal land called Axness, you found Granary House, a bat-infested, rat-infested ruin of a mansion looking out across the sea, far far away from the glow of the furnaces and the dust of the spoilheaps. Not that you were ever ashamed of the source of your wealth. And when you heard as you rebuilt and refurbished Granary House that your mocking friends were referring to it as Gunnery House, that’s what you officially renamed it.

  Here at Gunnery you hoped to found a dynasty in a world which your own weaponry had made safe for your descendants. Lord Macallum of Axness. Oh, your title was all chosen, your coat of arms prepared. Cleverly you forbore to stoop for the windfalls the dying storm of war shook from the many branches of the new and Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. The golden fruit you wanted was not to be scabbed with war-profiteering sneers. Through the twenties you paved the way with charitable deeds. But you could not forbear to make assurance doubly sure by crossing the palms of those who claimed to be able to tell your noble future with gold and silver, and all your hopes died in the Honours for Sale scandal of 1933.

  One plan had failed. Another looked like to fail. Three wives (by death, not divorce) had left you with a single child. But not the son you needed to lead off your dynasty.

  Yet a man may do something, may do much, with a biddable daughter.

  Alas, poor Mungo, what you had was not a biddable daughter.

  What you had was Serafina, born as one war ended to come of age as another began.

  Serafina, the passionate one.

  And, for a while, Serafina, one of us.

  For they were all ours for a while, those brave boys and girls who played their merry games in the enemy’s own yard. So many going, so few returning. But for that few, such a bright future, such a world of profit and delight lay ahead in those years after the shooting stopped and the real war, our kind of war, began.

  But by that time you, Serafina, had been too long away, had caught a foreign infection, had gone native.

  What you saw was not a world in the glorious turmoil of necessary recreation, with populations shifting, new battle lines being drawn up, new alliances formed, a glorious opportunity to play a part in the last and greatest crusade. No, what you saw was individuals suffering pain and deprivation and loss and injustice. Instead of population patterns, you saw refugees. Instead of demographic trends, you saw orphaned children. Instead of the forest, you saw the trees.

  Oh, here it all is, Serafina, in your little casket. The charities, the agencies, the foundations, the movements, the causes, and hardly a one of them, to start with, whose strings were not being pulled by us. Or someone somewhere very like us.

  look at her spending…

  And Mungo, as he saw his hopes in you fade, began to nurse new hopes of ennoblement after the Restoration of ’51, till your cries of outrage over our failure to intervene in Hungary and our ill-fated intervention in Suez set heads a-shaking. How could our dear Queen be asked to ennoble a man who could not control the behaviour of his own child? Furious, he gave you the ultimatum. Hold your tongue or lose your inheritance to charity. Furious, you told him by all means to leave his tainted wealth to the poor and the needy, which is what you intended doing with it anyway. His charitable donations, his paternalistic care for his workers through savings schemes and building society loans, meant nothing to you. These were the indulgence fees that sinners in peril of their immortal souls paid to pardoners, and worth just as much.

  Who Mungo would have left his wealth to, we shall never know. His lawyer’s car was pulling up at the front door when he suffered the stroke which was to kill him. Several efforts he made in the next few days to speak, but nothing came out that even the most partial of auditors could interpret as an instruction. An approach was made via us to the lawyer with a view to drafting a will along the lines he would most probably have chosen, with a signature to be provided by our finest calligrapher, but the lawyer proved too conventional to corrupt, too rich to bribe, and too upright to blackmail. And when you finally arrived, dear Serafina, from some distant part of the globe, Mungo took one look at you and died.

  So let’s see how the money has gone.

  It’s amazing how hard it is to dissipate the fortune of a clever man who has invested cunningly, setting his wealth to beget more wealth, which in its turn will beget still more until the fourth and the fifth generation thereof.

  But you have tried, Serafina. For more than forty years you have tried.

  pouring her pelf into bottomless pits of despair…

  why does she care?

  Till at last you saw the beginnings of the end, not of your compulsion but of your cash, and so, though Mungo missed out on ennoblement, you at least came to that last infirmity of a noble bankrupt and started selling your land and property.

  Mungo’s country estate which he had established out at Axness as authentication of his wished-for title and which you had tried to turn into a kind of communistic Arcadia, all those farms and fields and copses and cottages where horny-handed peasants cut corn with a sickle, all have gone under the hammer. But not Gunnery House, not that refuge for the fast-talking fugitive, not that sump for all the dross and dregs of modern life – though most of them have fled now, most of them have voted with their fear – this you left too long, this you cannot sell or lease or mortgage, for it is held in fee by a force more greedy, grasping, and unrelenting than even a high street bank. The sea.

  So this is how it ends, Serafina. Without your wealth, what will you become? A figure of fun, an object of ridicule, yesterday’s activist, listened to kindly by those in the aid game who remember your glorious past, listened to gloatingly by those whom you elbowed aside in your certainty of rectitude, but paid heed to by no one except those few belonging to the Liberata Trust, who can hardly ignore you, its sole founder and financer.

  Oh, Serafina, with my strange magic, I resurrect you as you were when you were still one of us. So young, so fresh, so full of joy and sparkle. I could fall in love with you just looking at my screen.

  What a loss we suffered when we lost you, Serafina. All that energy, all that passion. How much you might have achieved with us, how far you might have gone.

  Then I touch the keys again and see you as you are now.

  Oh, the sad change.

  And yet… and yet…

  With us, you must have long since been retired, laden with gifts and reputation perhaps; perhaps even with some version of that honour poor Mungo so coveted; but definitely and irrevocably retired.

  By yourself, with your bicycle and your bags, so far gone down that wrong road you can probably not recall the moment you took the wrong turning, you may be ridiculous, yet for a while, for a final innings, you are still a player, else Gaw would not have instructed me to fold you up in Sibyl’s Leaves.

  Why they want you, what they have in store for you, is, of course, not for me to know. I am merely the instrument of the gods.

  But you cannot give a child toys, Uncle Gaw, and not expect her to play. And I am beginning to put things together, to see something… a speck, a mist,
a shape, I wist! Oh yes, Gaw, you will know me again as a player before these leaves of mine all fall!

  Now once again I look at you as you were, poor sad, mad Feenie Macallum, and I wish you well.

  All these looney people, where do they all come from?

  All these looney people, where do they all belong?

  xi

  a game of hearts

  In the house, Pascoe found Rosie in the lounge watching television.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ he said, picking her up and giving her a hug and a kiss. She responded briefly then struggled free and refocused her eyes on the screen.

  ‘All by yourself, dear?’ he said.

  ‘The house is full of people,’ she said in her long-suffering voice, which made people sound like termites. ‘Mum said we’d have a game of Black Bitch after tea, then all these people came.’

  For some reason, as she recovered from her illness, Rosie had turned her back on the make-believe world which had been her favourite recreational territory hitherto. Storybooks, dolls, even computer games, had all been put aside in favour of playing cards. Ellie theorized that she wanted to give her imagination a rest as there were things there which were a trouble to her. Whatever, she devoured every new card game greedily, and was not deterred by limitation of numbers. Black Bitch or Hearts, her current favourite, was not really a two-handed game, but Rosie got round this by dealing three hands and playing two of them herself. She would even, at a pinch, play it solo.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Pascoe. ‘I’ll just get myself a bite to eat, then I’ll have a game with you before you go to bed.’

  ‘You’re not as good as Mum,’ she said, meaning she saw through Pascoe’s amateurish attempts to let her win, whereas Ellie, who understood her daughter’s needs better, kept up a front of solid competitiveness. ‘Anyway, the holidays have started.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So you always say I’ve got to go to bed because I’ve got to get up for school in the morning. Well, now I don’t.’

  Pascoe tickled her stomach and said in his Jimmy Cagney voice, ‘Nobody loves a smartass, kid,’ a combination which rendered her a giggling wreck.

  ‘Well, I’m glad someone’s having fun,’ said Ellie from the doorway.

  Pascoe kissed her and said hopefully, ‘Prayer meeting over?’

  ‘What?’

  He explained Novello’s error. In anyone else she might have found it amusing. Or, the way she was feeling, perhaps not.

  ‘The only prayer being said in there is me praying for Feenie to get a move on,’ she said. ‘I’m on my way to make coffee. Sorry about this, but I’d forgotten all about them what with everything else. I’d made us a salad to go with that salmon pâté, it’s in the fridge, so you just go ahead.’

  ‘You mean you haven’t had anything?’

  ‘I was waiting for you, wasn’t I? And I could hardly sit down and have my supper while the meeting was going on, especially as we’re talking about people being starved in jail.’

  ‘Well, I’ll wait for you,’ said Pascoe firmly. ‘If you like I’ll make a lot of noise and rattle dishes at the door. Or Rosie could go in and faint.’

  Rosie looked up hopefully at the prospect.

  ‘Rosie can start thinking about going to bed,’ said Ellie. ‘Yes, I know it’s not time yet, but if you start thinking about it now, perhaps it won’t be the usual devastating shock when it is time. Shall I make you a coffee?’

  ‘Please.’

  He followed her into the kitchen and said, ‘You OK?’

  ‘Fine. Just I could have done with a quiet night. Funny. I only suggested they came round here to show myself we were back to normal after, you know, Rosie. Maybe if you marry a cop, this is normal, people trying to kidnap you and beating up your friends.’

  ‘Happens all the time. Can I have one of those biscuits, or are you sending them all to Somalia?’

  ‘This is Liberata, not Oxfam.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ said Pascoe, helping himself to a biscuit.

  Ellie busied herself making coffee. Instant, he noticed, not cafetiere, always a sign that she would be glad to see the back of her guests.

  ‘So, are the mighty brains of Mid-Yorkshire’s Finest any closer to an arrest?’

  ‘Oh yes. By definition, every hour that passes takes us an hour closer to what is yet to pass.’

  ‘Seriously.’

  ‘We have a fingerprint. We have a make and colour of car with perhaps two numbers and possibly one letter. We have a description. All this to add to what you were able to give us yesterday. So I’d say we were making progress.’

  ‘Well now, that’s a comfort. Peter, over the years I’ve got used to you bringing the job home with you. But now it seems the job’s coming home without you, and I’m not sure I want to get used to that. Could you get the door for me?’

  He held open the kitchen door to let her pass with her trayful of coffee mugs, then overtook her to open the dining room door.

  ‘You’ll take care of Rosie?’ she said as she passed through.

  ‘Of both of you,’ he said to the closing door.

  In the dining room, Serafina Macallum was giving a precis of a documentary on Nicaragua some of the others had managed to miss. She was one of the most single-minded women Ellie had ever met, mind-blastingly so in Pascoe’s eyes, but Ellie felt that a bit of tedium was a small price to pay for the assurance that any cause Feenie got her teeth into would be fought over to the death. It did occur to her now that with almost any other group of women she worked with, a coffee break would have been the signal to relax into an exchange of gossip and personal news, might even have given her the opportunity to share some of the traumas of the past two days. But she wasn’t on that kind of footing with these people, or rather the group didn’t offer that kind of closeness. This too was down to Feenie who’d insisted from its foundation that the only way Liberata could perform its function of helping endangered women all over the world was if its members left their own concerns and problems, large and small, at home.

  So with these women with whom she shared a common cause, Ellie had very little social relationship. Whereas Daphne, who regarded most foreign aid work as unwarranted intrusion into the private affairs of other countries (‘just like those Euro-nerds trying to tell us Brits what to do!’), had somehow wriggled into her heart.

  Tonight, she thought, as Feenie guided them briskly through the rest of the agenda, even the glue of common interest was pretty weak.

  ‘Right,’ said Feenie. ‘Correspondence.’

  Like a kid who hasn’t done her homework, Ellie tried to avoid catching the woman’s eye.

  One of the others began to talk. The usual thing, she’d written, no one had replied. It was like sending radio messages into space, Ellie thought dispiritedly. Feenie gave the usual pep talk, insisting that it was worthwhile reminding the authorities that this particular prisoner wasn’t forgotten. No one likes being watched, tyrants and torturers least of all, she said.

  And if feeling there might be someone out there watching them troubles the oppressors half as much as it terrifies me, she’s dead right, thought Ellie.

  Was terrifies too strong a word? She consulted her feelings. Yesterday after the adrenalin rush of her assault on the invaders and their undignified retreat, she had settled into a sense of threatening unease, balanced by her recollection of utter triumph. But now, after the incident with Daphne…

  No, it wasn’t too strong. Not with Rosie in the house…

  ‘Ellie?’

  Feenie was studying her through the magnifying glass she used instead of reading glasses, a preference she explained by saying, ‘Spectacles mark a weakness, but a magnifying glass is a weapon.’

  ‘What? Sorry. Oh yes… I mean, no…’

  She’d drifted away, missed what the others had to say, and now it was her turn. Feenie said with impatient emphasis, ‘Have you heard from any of your girls?’

  Girls might have been a point
of issue with anyone else, but not with Feenie.

  ‘No, nothing.’

  ‘Not even Bruna?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry, nothing, not since before…’

  Before Rosie had been taken ill. Time now tended to be divided as before or after Rosie’s illness. She must stop doing that.

  ‘… since I last saw you.’

  She thought that was true. During the critical time of the illness she had had no energy to spare for anything else. She still occasionally came across references to events which meant nothing to her, and knew they must have occurred during those crisis days. Could be that somewhere in the house there was a card from Bruna that had got set aside for future reference then slipped out of sight. Only the other day she’d had a letter threatening to turn off the gas supply as she’d seen fit to ignore their last Final Notice. She’d sent them a cheque, and a letter pointing out that as they’d now sent her another Final Notice, their previous Final Notice was not in fact their last Final Notice but their penultimate Final Notice, or perhaps simply their Penultimate Notice, as finality, like uniqueness, was not a quality readily susceptible to qualification. So far she had had no reply.

  Feenie said, ‘I had thought…’ then changed her mind about what she’d thought and continued briskly, ‘So, no reply to your last. When was that?’

  She was talking about Bruna, of course, not the gas company.

  ‘Well, I’m writing to her just now actually,’ she said evasively.

  Feenie was giving her that cold, turn-you-transparent stare which came as a shock to those who didn’t know her, like a shaft of laser light out of a damped-down fire.

  Ellie found herself wondering, does she know about Rosie’s illness? Surely someone must have told her. But would it have registered?

  She certainly wasn’t going to say anything now, she thought resentfully, meeting Feenie’s gaze head-on.

  It was the older woman who broke off.