Love and the Art of War Read online

  Baldwin had said every Chinese stratagem had a defensive option. What was it? Should Jane hold tighter to Sammie, to put Joe under siege?

  Suddenly she felt like looking at those strategies again, but Baldwin’s handout was back home.

  ‘Chris, which branch has the best Asian collection?’

  ‘Londinistan? Sari Shop? Brick Lane? In the Kitchen? Mango Season? Inheritance of Loss?’

  ‘I meant Chinese—’

  ‘Oh, right, right. Stick Out Your Tongue? Colours of the Mountain? Balzac and the Chinese Seamstress? Sky Burial? Red Dust? Bound Feet and Western Dress? Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers—?’

  Jane shook her colleague by the shoulders until the straight sheets of his blond hair flipped out of his eyes. ‘Chris, snap out of it! I was only wondering, if we don’t have The Book of 36 Stratagems, could we get it?’

  Chris narrowed his pale eyes at Jane through the centre-parted droop of a blond Afghan hound. ‘How about a promotion called New Hong Kong Voices? With Jackie Chan posters? You know, like they told us at that librarians’ seminar. Think “branding,” like with breakfast cereals, so the borrowers come back for more.’

  ‘Right.’ Jane threw up her hands, ‘Branding it is. How shall we brand Charles Dickens? I mean, he didn’t win the Man Booker or the Orange or the Whitbread.’

  ‘Best Violence,’ Chris said. ‘Penguin’s Best 100 ranked Tale of Two Cities as Best Violence.’

  ‘Talking about Best Violence, here come the Rhyme-Timers,’ Jane quipped. These rambunctious vandal-borrowers were as well organized as five-year-olds could manage until a shoving match broke out over Agent Z and Penguin from Mars. Jane faced a freckled urchin who thrust up Tales of the White Snake Woman. A sinuous serpent woman dressed in fuchsia silk brandished a curving sword.

  ‘She looks fierce,’ Jane said.

  ‘Because she en’t really a woman. Got a spell on her.’ The urchin’s eyes widened to round grapes.

  ‘You’ve already read it?’

  ‘Course. And when her prince husband finds out she’s a great, fat snake, the stupid git drops dead. She fixed him with her magic potion, see, coz she’s so stupid she loves him.’

  Who was Joe’s serpent woman and how soon could Jane prove to Joe that his mystery seductress was just a great, fat worm?

  Heading home after work, Jane ran through the possible serpents poisoning her Eden with their interest in Joe’s rough-hewn charms. There was a blonde trainee who’d chatted him up for a job at a rather wet barbecue in Islington. Or was it the elementary school teacher Janice, married to an adulterous Money Programme presenter who thought being on telly made his mole-strewn face irresistible off-camera? Irene, yes that was her name. Hadn’t Irene recently consulted Joe over an arugula salad dressed with tears about her chances of wreaking revenge via a job on The Travelling Kitchen? How far had the distressed Irene taken her appeal for Joe’s support?

  And then there was Rachel, Bella’s PA: crisp ginger hair, vintage frocks that had been discarded for good reason, and winter or summer, bare white-asparagus legs. ‘Rachel Murty, not too purty,’ was Joe’s dismissive joke about Rachel. But was he covering up something?

  If it hadn’t been for the sexy little BlackBerry texts, Jane would have said that Joe’s problem wasn’t illicit love. Winning that BAFTA award for his Afghanistan Vet Suicides was the turning point. She should never have allowed a tipsy Joe to cradle the award home, kissing the sightless Greek mask as if it were an infant leaving the maternity ward. Those lifeless malicious lips had passed him the contagion of professional vanity.

  On the surface, Joe was still the same—hardworking, committed, relishing his ‘full British’ of fried tomatoes, floury beans and puffy sausages with his camera crew in the canteen, each morning. But strangely, after the BAFTA glory, nobody’s ideas were quite as good as Joe’s and no reporter quite up to repeating his masterpiece. No editor—Steenbeck virtuoso or digital whiz—was quite sharp enough for Joe Gilchrist. His anxious supervision in the cutting rooms gave those dry-eyed pros a headache. Joe’s innocent star began to sink as low as his responsibilities piled up: Sammie’s crippling school fees, plus a hefty mortgage over two floors of Number 19 picked up by Lorraine who now roosted under their eaves.

  Not quite sure why his high standards put people off, Joe learned to take what he could get. Finally, all he got was an offer from loyal Bella to produce her show.

  Brooding over all this, Jane locked up the library and headed back across the square.

  Lorraine’s separate front door stood ajar. Her mother’s canary-bird hair and red lips popped over the banister. ‘Saw you coming.’ It was more a summons to the attic than an invitation.

  ‘Sammie doing her homework?’

  ‘Grandma’s on the job.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Jane spotted some black-rimmed invitations standing sentinel on Lorraine’s kitchen shelves. ‘Don’t tell me—’

  ‘Yet more final curtain calls. Outliving the rest of the cast can be so lonely. One of them is a memorial for Esther Redfern.’

  ‘Oh, dear Esther.’ Jane fondly remembered Esther cheating at backgammon in a New York dressing room. ‘I’ll send flowers. The 800-Flowers Special?’

  ‘No, the Ophelia number for Esther. The usual card, you know, Rosemary for Remembrance, yadda yadda. Thanks so much, darling.’

  Always devoted to Joe’s career, Lorraine was right now viewing a Travelling Kitchen episode. She’d turned off the sound, leaving a mute Bella dropping something white and creamy on to the end of her pointed tongue. Lorraine wagged a finger at the screen. ‘Tell Bella that finger-licking business is getting tired.’

  Jane watched as Bella batted her eyelashes at a slim black African wearing a majestic toque. The chef threw back his head in a laugh so wide his pink palate caught the glare of the lights hanging overhead, the ‘babies.’ It looked too much like a training film for dentists, the director cut to the jib camera hovering over the worktable—what cooking shows called ‘Doing a beauty.’

  ‘The usual smutty jokes?’

  ‘Very gassy humour today. The Wonderful World of Beans.’ Lorraine hooted, ‘In my day, beans for dinner meant a show was about to fold. This is about as subtle as The Three Stooges. Watch—see that? I’ve counted five close-ups of her lip gloss smacking away and the camera panned right across her cleavage and nearly fell in, twice.’

  Lorraine herself was cooking, cigarette holder in left hand, wooden spoon in right. ‘Grandma’s cooking’ at Number 19 meant: dried onion soup stirred into sour cream for dipping Ritz Crackers, Blender Hollandaise poured on flank steak, a ‘side’ of tomatoes on iceberg and Rocky Road ice cream. Lorraine never apologized for her cuisine—she couldn’t trundle much home in her trolley and anyway, there were too many matinees to catch, too many lunches with old darlings needing ‘fresh air,’ and her nightly DVD.

  Her conversation was as straightforward as her menu. ‘Your mother has got no side to her,’ was Gerd’s generous exit line to Jane as he abandoned them for life with a boy in Vienna. ‘No discretion, no reticence, no taste, no subtlety, but certainly no side.’

  Gerd followed Jane’s father Jack in the romantic line-up, and preceded a road show Falstaff and a few others. Now the curtain had fallen on Lorraine’s frenetic stage, leaving only the critic’s gimlet eye.

  ‘Jane, you know that religious bookstore at the corner? It is very odd.’

  ‘You mean Muslim.’

  ‘No, in addition to that. Odd. The window display gathers dust. Men come and go at all hours, but no one ever buys a book.’

  ‘Perhaps they have to observe special prayer time or something,’ Jane muttered.

  Lorraine peered through the leaves of her avocado plants across the square. ‘They make me nervous.’ Lorraine went back to whirring up guacamole.

  Jane shifted magazines and letters on to the sideboard and opened a bag of corn chips. She laid out her mother’s plastic ‘A Season of Gershwin’ place mats. The Al
Hirschfeld caricatures of Broadway personalities were half-scrubbed off.

  ‘Darling, a serious talk.’ Lorraine stopped.

  Jane cued her, ‘Line?’

  ‘Well. Apparently, Sammie isn’t studying hard enough.’

  ‘Everything’s . . . fine.’

  Lorraine lit a fresh cigarette and snapped her monogrammed lighter shut. Fur boas, evening clutch bags, swizzle sticks, and cigarette lighters—Lorraine had always hogged the glamorous props and the good stage business. Jane worked a paper napkin into pathetic little squares.

  ‘Joe thinks the child needs more reassurance and stability. He hinted something to me about boarding school.’

  ‘Et tu, Brute?’

  ‘He looked in yesterday morning, after you’d gone to work. He wafted school fees suggestively through the air, waiting for a certain Fairy Grandmother to catch on.’

  ‘You’ll hold off on that.’ Jane added, ‘I know you’re always happy to help.’

  ‘Why hold off? If it’s just to get her through these A thingies? You were a mess when you studied for the SAT’s, and for what? Why we didn’t bring you back to boarding school here in England, I don’t know. You never wanted to stay in the States but why wouldn’t you say so flat out? Instead you just killed yourself studying for those damned things. You were all covered in zits and—’

  ‘That was thirty years ago.’

  Lorraine stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Jane, I’ve never dodged reality, especially if I couldn’t put a show over. I’ve weathered the turkeys along with the sell-outs. Now you’re different from your daughter. You prefer your books. I respect that—’

  ‘No, you don’t. “I chose books, you chose looks”,’ Jane paraphrased Roald Dahl with a rueful smile.

  ‘As if I had a choice! While you were reading Theatre Shoes, I was doing three shows a weekend. While you were reading Othello, I felt like strangling Jack’s sitcom bitch. While you ploughed through the Anna Karenina—’

  ‘Emma Bovary—’

  I was steaming up my dressing room with Gerd—’

  ‘And your point is?’

  ‘My point is, however I lived my life, I always picked up the tab. I never hid behind the covers of a book. Or threw myself under a moving train. Or got me to a nunnery. Or was found strangled, for that matter.’

  ‘And you think I—?’

  ‘I never folded my act. I curse the day I bought you that stupid Nancy Drew. Now what’s going on downstairs? You’re hiding away in the library.’ Lorraine reached out and clasped her daughter’s fingers in support.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jane burbled. ‘Something’s wrong with Joe. Not just the job. Sammie saw some sexy message on his mobile. She asked if Joe was having an affair. He threw a wobbly, but he didn’t actually deny it.’

  ‘Big deal.’ Her mother shrugged.

  ‘He’s bought a bunch of new clothes.’

  ‘New clothes?’ Now her mother frowned. A new wardrobe signalled a new show. ‘I thought he was just worried about her grades.’

  ‘Well, aren’t we all? But he sounded strange about Sammie, as if she were in his way.’

  And that wasn’t like Joe, who adored his child-woman. What was that second stratagem she’d been reading this morning? Rescue Zhao by encircling Wei. Sammie was the weak chink in Joe’s armour. If Zhao was her life with Joe, then Wei, the weak city, was Sammie. Jane should play for time and encircle Sammie to pin down Joe.

  Jane ripped the paper napkin into little pieces. ‘Sammie can’t board. As long as she stays here, Joe won’t leave.’

  ‘That bad, huh?’ Lorraine tasted her guacamole and squeezed in more lime juice. Lorraine liked her acids straight. ‘That’s it, then, no boarding school fees.’

  ‘Remind him that her college fees have just trebled, thanks to Lord Browne. If Joe persists, um, you tell him you want to keep a closer eye on her yourself. Maybe we all need to stop treating her like, like—’

  ‘Second Banana. Or in this case, Fourth.’

  ‘Anyway, no boarding, please, Mum.’

  ‘Oh, we’re talking Mum now.’

  ‘Even if Joe offered you an interview with Piers Morgan.’

  ‘I’ll just tell him to have his people call my people,’ Lorraine brushed away Joe’s fantasy bribe. ‘I’m perfectly happy to spend more time with Sammie,’ Lorraine hesitated, her pride only faltering at the frumpy grandma casting, ‘Unless my agent calls, you understand.’ She winked.

  Chapter Three, Jie Dao Sha Ren

  (Kill with a Borrowed Knife)

  Thanks to a bomb scare delaying the Northern Line, Jane was late for Baldwin’s second class by a full twenty minutes. The other five students were listening to him explain Stratagem Three, the “alibi” or “substitute” stratagem.

  ‘Kill with a Borrowed Knife doesn’t mean using real knives—you laugh, Mr Filgrove, but I teach these tactics in a prison where it’s a genuine proviso. The Knife refers to an outside agent to eliminate your opponent, or to win your objective.’

  ‘Like when Zelda got her best friend to bring me to the pub one Friday night. Zelda fancied me, but used her friend to lure me into her clutches,’ Kevin beamed.

  ‘Good, Kevin! You attack borrowing the strength or allure of another, because you lack strength or you want to save your own ammunition for later.’

  The men had left a seat in the middle ready for Jane. The relief on Winston Chu’s face at her arrival was obvious; how could she extricate herself now, thus squeezed between Keith and Kevin on one side and Winston, Dan and Nigel on the other? Not since playing ‘pretend’ princess in Lorraine’s cast-off costumes had she felt so enthroned, no longer a middle-aged mother with temples of grey frizz that Sammie kept insisting she should rinse out. Now she felt like royalty buttressed by aides and bodyguards on both flanks. Fumbling with her notebook, she shrugged off the silly image; it must be those Lang fairy tales she’d re-shelved this afternoon.

  ‘Another example, Mr O’Neill?’

  ‘Sure. Reminds me of something Stalin did to eliminate the Polish underground defending Warsaw. He used the German army as his knife.’

  Young Winston Chu crossed his eyes at Jane, mouthing ‘Stalin?’

  ‘Indeed he did. Please explain to Mr Chu.’

  Dan turned to Winston. ‘In July 1944, Stalin’s first tank unit reached Warsaw. The Polish underground thought okay, great, help’s on the way, now’s the time to kick out the Germans. They rose up, but the Soviets ground to a halt on the city outskirts. That left the Germans free to throw all their fire against the Polish Resistance. Roosevelt and Churchill begged Stalin to save Warsaw, but the Russian forces just sat on their butts. They let the Germans mop up anybody who might give the Allies trouble later on.’

  ‘Are you some kind of historian?’ Winston ventured.

  Nigel Deloitte commented. ‘Hardly a business example.’

  ‘This is a management class, but each of you might have different things to manage. We’ll get to the business models in good time,’ Baldwin said.

  ‘How could Number Three be used in a business context?’ Nigel persisted. His manicured fingers hung poised over a leather notebook embossed with his bank logo.

  ‘Certainly.’ Baldwin leaned against his desk. ‘Once upon a time, there was a company called Coca-Cola . . . ’

  Happily back on track, Nigel, Reinsurance-Keith and Marks-and-Sparks-Kev copied out Baldwin’s account: Coca-Cola broke the Nutra-Sweet aspartame monopoly by building up a rival, the Home Sweetener Company, and threatening to switch their business away from Nutra-Sweet once Monsanto’s patent expired.

  ‘Then before the Home Sweetener chaps could begin selling their aspartame, both Coke and Pepsi leveraged better contracts with Monsanto.’

  ‘What happened to Home Sweetener?’ Keith asked.

  ‘They were just a pawn, you see, a borrowed knife.’

  The others laughed. Jane imagined the poor betrayed Home Sweetener manager fallen on the steppes of Asia. Long spears rose f
rom his fallen corpse, ragged banners with the Monsanto logo snapped in the breeze, and a Mongolian cavalry sang the Coca-Cola theme song. “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony,” over his sightless eyes . . .

  ‘Jane, another example?’

  Jane started, her reverie torn away from the steppes. Who could be her knife against Joe’s unknown girlfriend? How could she use Joe’s infatuation against him or find an agent to ferret out Joe’s secret? Anyway, who else would care? People committed adultery every day.

  Keith made a stab: ‘Lobbying insurance regulators to change government rules to fit your new policies?’

  The corridor bell jangled. Baldwin said with a smile, ‘Now after the break, we’re doing Stratagem Four, Preserve your Strength, and Take Your Ease while Waiting. So go off, now, and take your ease for fifteen minutes.’

  Nigel bustled away to answer calls on his iPhone. Winston loped along with Dan towards the glass-fronted case of cling-wrapped sandwiches and stale pastries.

  What did her rival even look like? Iago was right. Jealousy was the green-eyed monster. It gnawed at Jane, but its feline eyes stayed myopic as long as her rival stayed in shadow. If anything turned in on itself, it was Jealousy, poisoning its victim with self-loathing. She shouldn’t have cut off her long hair. She shouldn’t have gained weight.

  Memories of her looks during her courtship with Joe on a Panorama recce flooded. She’d been slim then, with glossy curls and ethnic jewellery. As his researcher Jane was happy to help lug files and equipment for Joe Gilchrist, so determined to bring in his exposé on arms sales to El Salvador under budget. What glee they had shared at cadging a few reels of spare film off World About Us so Fergus could sneak cutaway shots of liberation nuns on the run! They’d been inseparable, night and day, Joe brushing the stray wisps off Jane’s forehead while Fergus shot stills of her in the last light of day—that moment cameramen tagged the ‘magic hour,’ which took the world from the saffron sun to salmon dusk. It gave a poetic definition to the homeliest profile.