Page 122 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

the making. They compiled a list of Cambridge’s homeliest wenches, a list which later fell into the
hands of one of the women who had been invited to the Bettencourt’s annual dinner. This lady
stole the list and sought out other women who’d accepted invitations to this dinner. Having
gathered a number of them together she showed the list of homely wenches around and asked:
“Is this kind of list all right with us?”
“No it jolly well isn’t,” the others replied. “This is Cambridge, for goodness sake—if a person
can’t come here to think without these kinds of annoyances then where in this world can a person
go???” 3
They hesitated to involve the women whose names they’d seen on the list. Some of the
Bettencourt dinner invitees were friends with the homely wenches, and didn’t want to cause any
upset. Who wants to see their name on such a list? But in the end they decided it was the only
way to gather forces that would hold. Honoring delicacy over full disclosure only comes back to
haunt you in the end. Moira Johnstone, the first of the homely wenches to be informed of her
place on the list, had to suspend a project she’d been working on in her spare time—the building
of a bomb. She’d been looking for an answer to a question she had regarding the effects of a
particular type of explosion, but the temptation to test her model on a bunch of fatheads was too
strong. The others had similar responses, but soon settled on a simple but emphatic riposte. As
they worked through this riposte, the Bettencourt dinner invitees and the homeliest wenches
discovered that, by and large, they liked each other and were interested in each other’s work; they
thereby declared themselves a society and gained the support of new members who hadn’t been
featured on either list. Nonetheless the members of this new society dubbed themselves Homely
Wenches one and all.
The 1949 Bettencourt Society Dinner began pleasantly; lots of champagne and gallantry,
flirtation and the fluent discussion of ideas. They were served at table by waiters hired for the
evening, and whenever a Bettencourter disagreed with one of the guests he made sure he
mitigated his disagreement with a compliment on his opponent’s dress, thereby reminding her
what the true spirit of the evening was. Fun! At least it was for the boys, until a great crashing
sound came from the next room as the waiters were preparing to bring in the first course.
Rutherford called out to the head waiter for the evening; the head waiter replied that “something a
bit odd” had happened, but that service would be up and running again within a matter of
moments. Waiting five minutes for a course was no great hardship—more compliments, more
champagne—but when the head waiter was asked to explain the delay he asked jocularly: “Do
you believe in ghosts?”
The lights in the kitchen had been switched off and then switched on again as the food was
being plated, and then the waiters had heard footsteps in the next room, and then the portrait of
Sir Hugh Bettencourt in that very same room had fallen off the wall. The Bettencourt boys laughed
at this, but their guests turned pale and went off their food a bit. Who could say what might have
happened to it when the lights had gone out? The Bettencourt boys laughed even more. Even the
cleverest woman can be silly. When the same sequence of events occurred between the first and
second courses—footsteps and falling objects, this time all along the floor above the dining room
—the Bettencourters stopped laughing and looked for weapons that would assist them in
apprehending intruders, spectral or otherwise. Their guests were one step ahead of them and
already had a firm hold on every object that could conceivably be used to stab or whack
someone, including cutlery. “Do you want us to go and have a look?” asked Lizzie Holmes, first-
ever Secretary of the Homely Wench Society.
“No no, you stay there, we’ll take care of this,” Bettencourt President Rutherford said, adding a
meaningful “Won’t we?” to his patently reluctant brethren.
“Yes, yes of course . . .” The Bettencourters had to go forth unarmed, since the frightened
women refused to release even one set of ice tongs. Up the stairs they trooped, with no light to