Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals

by Jesse Armstrong

  We turned and Penny gave the man a kiss on the cheek. It was Ronald. He didn’t look dirty at all. He looked patrician and, more than anything else, clean. The flesh of his neck, though loose, was pulled taut by the cuff of a clean white shirt collar, buttoned tight with a nice lilac tie set off by a light grey suit. His long face managed to look at once noble, stoic and preposterous, like he was a bloodhound dancing on its hind legs at a circus.

  ‘Yes, they can’t admit it,’ he went on, taking a look around, ‘but there’s probably only one or two pieces in this whole place that are competently restored and genuine. The best pieces are all the looted ones.’

  ‘Really?’ Penny asked as I looked at Ronnie and he nodded swiftly at me.

  ‘He turned up – this “Ante Topic Mimara” – in Munich, end of the war, at the Allied Art Collection point, papers in hand, saying he was the head of the Yugoslav Restitution Commission. He didn’t manage to claim much at first. But he found an accomplice, a young German art historian, and she gave him enough information on what was unassigned to manufacture Yugoslav claims. One hundred and sixty-six masterpieces of European art were loaded onto trucks and simply driven to Belgrade.’

  He stooped in at the painting. I looked at Penny. She raised her eyebrows to say, ‘He talks too much,’ and I smiled to say, ‘I like it!’ because I could tell she did too.

  ‘Later, he and that young art historian married and she now lives in a castle in Salzburg that he bought with the proceeds of selling the Bury St Edmunds cross to the New York Met. Have you seen it?’ he asked me out of nowhere, like a teacher checking to see if everyone is paying attention. ‘It’s incredibly beautiful and rather anti-Semitic,’ he said.

  ‘Like your mother,’ I said and looked at Penny, hoping this might be a zinger, but suddenly unsure as to whether Penny might, in fact, be Jewish. She smiled and Ronnie decided to take me for Dorothy Parker in a crumpled Next shirt rather than something more unpleasant.

  ‘No one knows where he got the cross. Indeed, no one knows who he was, really. He may have been the young man who stole the ivory from Zagreb Cathedral in the twenties and sold it to Cleveland, Ohio.’

  I guess what was dirty about Ron was that, like a bad friend, he didn’t take care of us. After that first exchange he mingled, brutally. Leaving me and Penny conferring. Maybe this was all we were going to get of him? What if he slipped away with the King of Romania and a janissary and a flamenco dancer and we never got to make our request for help? Eventually Penny chased after him and asked how he thought we might get to Sarajevo. He deflected the question with an offer for ‘one of you nice couples’ to join him for dinner with some other guests. Penny and I said farewell to Cally and Von, who winked at me lasciviously like he’d dodged a bullet, and we followed Ronnie to a nearby hotel.

  Ongoing renovation meant that the handsome art deco private dining room was divided in two by a large plastic sheet, secured with beige fabric tape to the walls, ceiling and floor. Ronnie complained to a manager, but there was nothing to be done apparently, and we all settled down as Ronnie made jokes about the partition of Yugoslavia and our plasticised Iron Curtain.

  He placed me and Penny amid the other six diners like cooling rods in a reactor. The hub of the event appeared to be a lithe young man with a perm and a quick smile who carefully shook each person’s hand and thanked us for coming, while Ronnie, at his side, whispered a briefing about each guest into his ear.

  Among the most voluble diners were an American academic with a great bulbous nose honking red with a danger warning and a trim acerbic ex-Conservative MP, who started the conversation by inviting general career overviews of Nixon, who had died a month or two back.

  ‘Of course, his greatest crime for liberals was ending Vietnam, the exquisite wound they liked to prod. They couldn’t forgive him that,’ the ex-MP said, kicking things off.

  My brain froze. What did I think of Nixon? Nixon. Bad? Nixon was . . . bad? That was as far as I was getting.

  ‘He was a certain kind of genius,’ the academic said, a smile playing around his lips. ‘He was, as Melville said of the Nantucketeers, “a Quaker with a vengeance”. His loyalty was his downfall.’

  I looked at Penny to see if she thought we needed to say anything.

  ‘His only real demerit, with hindsight, was that he acquiesced to the final severing of the dollar relationship with the gold standard,’ offered Mark, a Canadian banker in his late twenties with a serious, beaky look.

  As the conversation developed, it seemed there were a number of things that were commonplace truths for the group that I was not aware were generally accepted: that the First and Second World Wars were the same war; that both were a disastrous error for the West (but probably the Second more than the First); that Nixon was a great guy; that civilisation as a going concern would end within the next hundred years – indeed, that it sort of already had.

  Professor America took an optimistic view. He believed that monkeys might survive the coming resources/nuclear crash and, ‘with a fair wind’, they might be capable, within less than ten million years, of evolving back into a form of humanity.

  The ex-MP demurred: ‘Only lice, and molluscs, will persist.’

  The first course was presented on a silver salver, pink gelatinous rolls filled with a white mousse and a sprig of green on top. We were invited to serve ourselves as a waiter offered us the tray. I took two of the little things, put one on a piece of baguette and scoffed it whole.

  ‘Delicious,’ I said and Penny looked at me with widening eyes. The salver had finished its journey round the table and it was now clear there was one starter each. I began to scoop my additional roll onto my fork to offer across the table when Penny put her hand firmly on my arm. The waiters conferred in the corner as my fellow diners studiously ignored my greed. Then, after a brief agonising delay, a single additional starter emerged from the kitchen. Ronnie took a nudge from the permed guest of honour and led the conversation to the situation in the Balkans.

  ‘I think the Clintonistas are going to tire of Yugoslavia as a bedroom in which to demonstrate their ardour,’ Professor America said, bringing news, it was implied, from Washington. ‘I think Lift and Strike will wither on the vine, in the long run.’ He presented himself, mournfully, deprecatingly, as super-liberal and had a habit of saying he was ‘very worried’ about issues that he then framed dismissively in a way that suggested he didn’t give a solitary shit.

  ‘The US has often been bilked by its Anglophile presidents. That’s why we ended up in two world wars,’ he said.

  ‘Halifax’s sole mistake in public life was to believe Churchill would fail more quickly than he did,’ the ex-MP countered – or added – I wasn’t sure which.

  ‘But then the worst president we ever suffered, of course, was Lincoln. At least that imp Milosevic has a hope of keeping his republic together. Lincoln had no hope. His success was dumb luck.’

  ‘If Halifax could have made a decent peace with a trustworthy National Socialist, then there could have been a British imperial Indian summer of extraordinary capital accumulation.’

  ‘He had a quasi-mystical view of the Union out of all proportion with reality. Milosevic is a Girl Scout compared to Lincoln in terms of his commitment to keeping his nation intact.’

  ‘If you quantified it in terms of loss of global authority, territory and capital reserves, there is a strong argument Churchill should have been hanged for treason,’ the MP said, relishing the ruffle in the room.

  ‘The road from Appomattox leads directly to the Watergate Hotel,’ the professor said.

  ‘What about the – Jews and the slaves?’ Penny piped up, and some of the adults smiled at her like a child in the room had asked if she could marry her mother when she grew up.

  ‘I’m very much afraid that Churchill was an anti-Semite and Lincoln was a racist,’ the professor explained.

  ‘I don’t accept those terms,’ Ronnie said with an irritating smile.

  ‘
But – they . . .’ Penny started.

  ‘Churchill did nothing about the Holocaust and I think the worst thing that has ever happened to the African American community was the Emancipation Proclamation. An internal revolt would have produced a different America,’ the professor said.

  ‘Could the US afford it? A Balkan deployment?’ Ronnie asked.

  ‘The global reserve nation can afford anything it likes,’ said the banker.

  ‘But the thing about the Clintonistas is they don’t understand war. They weren’t forged in it, so they fear it too much,’ the professor said.

  ‘A coward is much more likely than a bully to get into a fight,’ the ex-MP warned, and everyone nodded at the wisdom, including myself – although I was pretty sure this definitely wasn’t true. ‘But, as regards intervention, the UK’s pragmatic check will hold, I think. Thank God.’ He smiled at the man in the perm and then at Penny. ‘Give my very best wishes to your father, won’t you?’ he said.

  Quite early, at eight or so, the coffees over, Ronnie guided the permed host to a corner meeting with the ex-MP and an older man who had said almost nothing through dinner. There was a good deal of clasping of forearms, hard jokes and laughing. Ronnie walked away with a look that said his work was done. Penny and I were marooned, the ones no one needed to seduce, until Ronnie guided us to the door and brought the permed man over to say farewell.

  ‘Your father’s work on behalf of Yugoslavia is very much appreciated. Would you tell him “The Group of Industrialists” send their thanks,’ he said to Penny.

  Then Ronnie smiled at us as if we’d done a good job and pulled from his jacket pocket an ungummed cheap white envelope which contained a thick, folded piece of paper bearing the UK coat of arms and offering a few paragraphs of assurances of the ‘allow the bearer pass without let or hindrance’ variety – with Penny’s and Von’s names and ‘Charity’ in bold type.

  ‘You should go in through UN Sector North, OK? North.’ He kissed Penny on the cheek, took me in one last cool time, smiled a lips-but-no-eyes smile and made it clear it was time for us to fuck off.

  Chapter 14

  OUTSIDE, RUNNING ON white wine for blood, the pavement bounced up to meet my feet and one question went round and round my head like a novelty hit. Did she like me? Well. She’d let me stay at her house. That was a foothold. She didn’t hate me. It implied safe-haven rights, at least. That if I took a leathering, or my leg was damaged by a Land Rover mounting a kerb or some other weird urban mishap, I could go to her door in Hammersmith and legitimately claim a phone call, a toilet visit and a glass of water. But it was quite a leap from that to imagine her letting me put part of me inside her.

  We walked around the proud pimple of the National Theatre and down towards the railway station, and talked for a while, drunk and fast, about Shannon. Shannon and Sara, what Shannon was like, what she was really like, what she seemed like, what we liked most about her and what we liked even more than that. Our boozy chat went along fine, but I felt like I was stealing my electricity from next door. I could always get us sparked up talking about Shannon. She pulsed energy. What was harder was making heat by just rubbing ourselves together.

  Our arms brushed from time to time, a little tacky from the sweat cooked up by the evening, and we took a detour through the botanic gardens. It was nearing nine and they were closing up, but sprinklers still spurted into the air, looping splutters of water like lazy tracer bullets. The broken-down glass houses glittered. I looked at Penny’s smooth coffee-coloured skin as she debated for us the odds of successfully making it into Bosnia. Or was it coffee? I guess all skin is coffee-coloured. It depends on how much milk you put in. It was lovely – that was the thing. And those soft un-lipsticked lips, the vertical gullies washed with a dye of red wine. Her hair a mass of slightly unfurled braids. Dark brown eyes with a lively zip which twitched about looking out for the new. Jesus, how I wanted to lie down on the grass with her.

  If you find someone intimidating you’re sometimes told it helps to think about them standing before you naked. I swallowed, dry-mouthed. That didn’t apply in this case. Instead, I told myself, searching for composure, that her face was really only a collection of features, when you thought about it. She, in common with Mr Potato Head, was in possession of a pair of ears, eyes and lips, etc. Perhaps it was even possible to imagine that somewhere in the world there were men who weren’t my rivals? Dolts who would rather pursue some big blonde?

  ‘So can I ask. Dirty Ron . . .?’

  ‘Ronnie? He was just someone who was around. There are always people around. Ambassadors and ministers and . . . you know?’

  ‘Yeah. God, right,’ I said, then thought I’d better add, ‘I mean, I have absolutely no idea what that would be like.’

  ‘All right! Sorry – Little Andy from the slums!’ she said merrily.

  ‘No – just . . . I just don’t. I’m not being –’

  ‘It’s OK. No. My house is just very social. I’ve been having this feeling, actually, ever since I went to Manchester, that when I come home – that I’m – imposing.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Because . . .’

  She picked up a piece of wood, bone-dry and crumbly from the path, and threw it underarm towards a rubbish bin.

  ‘It’s a feeling around the house that’s crystallised something I think I’ve felt all my life. That I’m this really really really well-liked guest. Loved. That I can do almost anything. But in the end, if I’m too irritating or troublesome, someone might ask me to leave. And inside, I think I’ve always felt a certain amount of – gratitude. I had a cat that used to shit all over the place and I felt just . . . terrible. Von, his dog, well, that was just fine, chewing the shit out of my mum’s expensive shoes. But my cat, you know, that felt like a problem? Von was never grateful. He pretended to be, but he wasn’t. And for a while – fourteen, fifteen – I pretended not to be, but really I always was. And he never was. He just says words.’

  I felt so far out of my depth that the best thing I could do was furrow my brow deep enough to plant beetroot and nod. But after a while my silence became noticeable.

  ‘It’s difficult. Parents are – it’s a difficult relationship – even when . . . you know?’ I observed. ‘But yours, that’s – it doesn’t sound good?’

  ‘My grandmother once offered me two hundred pounds to lose half a stone. I think her dead husband might have supported Mosley. But Granny was a very committed Christian. So is my mother.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I offered.

  ‘They’re good people. They are.’

  Something about the way my face was going made her repeat it a few more times until I had to say, ‘No, I think they are.’

  ‘But their approach to dealing with having a black daughter was to pretend they hadn’t noticed. I think that really was just the most – gracious – and enlightened way they could imagine of interacting. They never told me anything about where I came from, or who, and I got the strong feeling it would be rather rude to ask. So I used to look – in my dad’s study there was this big multi-volume set, Peoples of All Nations, from before the First World War, people from Papua New Guinea with their dongs out. That sort of thing. And I used to look at the pictures of Africans and I’d try to figure out who I was, where my people came from.’

  ‘Ohhh. That’s not right,’ I said firmly.

  We walked into an area where long-stemmed white tobacco flowers surrounded a frothy carpet of blue periwinklish stuff. Above us the wide arms of a copper beech made a grotto of a bend in the path. The air was gold and summer held still; calm, clear, soft and ebbing. Penny let her arm form a loop I passed mine through and we walked the path among the flowers.

  I was stuck on a cusp. An extra act, a further shove just outside the comfy, was needed to get me over the edge. Up ahead, there was an expanse of raked, open sandy ground. A single eucalyptus trunk thrust up from it. Our grotto loop was about to end: we were leaving heaven. All things must pass and I shouldn’t let this, so I angl
ed Penny round with my arm and leaned in to suggest that, if I was allowed, I would kiss her.

  I would like to write a small companion volume on the kiss. Maybe three. The Circumstances, The Aftermath and a brief hundred pages on The Kiss itself. To condense brutally, what can I say? It was nice. It was soft. If something is able to be both all-consuming and ever so slightly perfunctory, it was the kiss. For while it was a proper kiss, not some goodnight bullshit, when it started to break, she gently eased me back so we were marching again two abreast – and we just walked on as I wondered if round Hammersmith and Notting Hill people did a lot of kissing, a lot of fucking too maybe, and so you could kiss someone pretty hard in a botanical garden and it needn’t mean much.

  I wanted to say, ‘We did just have a kiss, you know. That happened, may I record?’

  ‘So. Shannon is thinking of breaking up with Sara,’ Penny said, instead.

  ‘Oh God. Really?’

  She had taken Penny for a gritty coffee last night while Von and I were drinking and told her all about it. ‘Apparently, Sara’s possessive and has a diminished libido.’

  ‘What’s Shannon going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. Do you want to toss a coin for her?’ Penny smiled.

  ‘Oh, I – you know. You go first!’ I said. ‘I’ll wait in the queue.’

  ‘Do you think we’ll do any good, Andrew? My dad said on the phone all we were was a vanity project.’ I was still stuck two conversations back, thinking about the kiss. ‘Can you think of one single piece of art that has ever changed anything?’ she asked.

  ‘Well.’ I turned to look at her dead straight. Lining up for another kiss. It wasn’t going to work. ‘Penny,’ I said, ‘art works below that level. You’re doing something else – it’s about – possibilities, not direction, isn’t it? Otherwise it would be propaganda, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Karadzic is a poet, you know?’ she said, and walked on.

  ‘Hm. Like Simon,’ I said and looked up into the darkening sky innocently.