Collected Columns

by Michael Frayn

  Act Three, Scene Four – A Chamber in the Treasury

  (Sennets and tuckets. Enter the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Lord Privy Purposes, and the Lord Footstool, followed by Under-Secretaries, Parliamentary Private Secretaries, Joint Permanent Secretaries, Under-Secretaries’ Private Secretaries, Joint Permanent Secretaries’ Under-Secretaries, Fools, and Knaves.)

  Chancellor:

  I saw it in his eyes: he turn’d his gaze

  Upon me, wondrous soft, avuncular,

  Beseech’d me with those pouched eyes of his

  As might a, man urge on his faithful hound

  To some high eager feat of houndly valour,

  Yea, with an uncle’s smile he bade me forth

  To save beloved England’s tottering cause

  With one bold coup-de-main of fiscal arms!

  Under-Secretaries, etc.:

  Hurrah!

  (Trumpets, cannons, etc.)

  Lord Footstool:

  ’Tis well said, Chancellor, for Fortune frowns:

  And faceless men do undermine the boroughs,

  Unsettling vacant loons we once call’d ours.

  Lord Privy Purposes:

  You mean to take a budget to our woes –

  To beat from metal tempered by the times

  And edg’d upon Necessity’s hard stone

  A budget e’en to budget them to death?

  Chancellor:

  I do. And with such high intent this day

  Are we three met to forge the cutting steel.

  Lord Privy Purposes:

  Acquaint us with your stratagems.

  Chancellor:

  Then hark:

  First will I ease the groaning discontent

  Which freights unjustly those our countrymen

  Whose lawful aspirations soar no higher

  Than purchasing a humble toasting-fork.

  Eleven per cent off toasting-forks, I say!

  Lord Footstool:

  This is a wise and bounteous act: the poor

  Will count your name as blessed this day forth.

  Chancellor:

  Then will I buy the love of every man

  Who holds the common mousetrap dear: the tax

  On mousetraps swoops from nine to eight per cent!

  Lord Footstool:

  O admirable Chancellor!

  Chancellor:

  But now,

  Our forces swoln by loyal mousestrap-men,

  And grateful liegemen of the toasting-fork,

  We fall like falcons on those jack-a-dandies

  Whose foul-brained appetite doth feed on hats,

  And scourge them with an added four per cent.

  Lord Privy Purposes:

  ’Tis well. A hatted man is gallows-bait.

  Chancellor:

  And yet my devious stratagem goes further –

  Makes pepper-mills more dear, salt-cellars cheap,

  Brings Jew’s harps down, sends plated shoe-trees up,

  Puts two per cent on fire-dogs, cheapens pins,

  Tacks tax on tacks, attacks the tax on ticking.

  Lord Privy Purposes:

  Hurt barrel-organs, Chancellor, I pray –

  Their monkeys satirise us publicly.

  Chancellor:

  Why, so I will. Yet list, we do proceed,

  These hair’s-weight-balanced dispositions made,

  These plots complotted, nimble gin-traps sprung,

  At last to strike the boldest blow of all!

  And gentlemen not in the Treasury

  Will count themselves accurst they were not here

  To ride forth on St Crispin Crispian

  And cry: Fifteen per cent on lollipops!

  Under Secretaries, etc.:

  Hurrah!

  (Trumpets, cannonades. The Chancellor of the Exchequer draws his red dispatch-box from its scabbard, and holding it aloft gallops off in the direction of Agincourt.)

  Lord Privy Purposes:

  Such hair-springs drive the clock of destiny:

  Small wonder it still stands at ten to three.

  (1962)

  The long and the short of it

  British Telecom, out of the goodness of their hearts, are running a major advertising campaign to persuade men to be more communicative. We don’t talk for long enough on the phone; this is our problem, apparently. We compare unfavourably, in BT’s view, with women, who are quite likely to sit down for chats with each other lasting half an hour at a time. BT approve of these ‘simple joys’. They are pained by men’s propensity to be ‘short, sharp and to the point’.

  A characteristic man’s telephone conversation, they say, runs like this: ‘Meet you down the pub, all right? See you there.’ They find this ‘abrupt’. I find it distinctly garrulous. ‘Meet you there … see you there’ – the poor fellow’s saying everything twice. He also appears to be arranging to exchange a lot more conversation. Curious that this doesn’t elicit BT’s approval. Perhaps its beneficial spiritual qualities will be more appreciated by the brewers.

  I can’t imagine my friend W rambling on like this. BT would be even more deeply pained by his telephone calls – they’re almost subliminally short. This has never been a problem between us, so far as I know. Quite the contrary. We have been good friends for thirty-seven years now and in all that time we’ve never had a cross word. There wasn’t a chance. The receivers were back on their rests before either of us had had an instant to check whether we had any grievances outstanding.

  The last call I had from him was entirely characteristic. He announced his name and asked me for a telephone number he needed. I told him the number. He said thank you, and put the phone down.

  I have run through it again from memory, stopwatch in hand, and it lasted for approximately thirteen seconds. Thirteen seconds of pure communication – it seems to me to come close to the ideal. He could have left out telling me who he was, now I come to think about it, since I know that, and the ‘thank you’ was a rather time-consuming concession to convention. I suppose we could have got it down to about seven seconds, with a little more ruthlessness. But in an imperfect world thirteen seconds is not bad.

  I can claim little of the credit for this exemplary brevity. The determining factor is W’s iron self-discipline. Note, in the conversation recorded above, that he did not begin, as a less self-controlled person might have done, by asking if I was well. Nor did he finish up by doing it. A lot of people manage to stay off the subject until the last moment of a call, when their nerve suddenly goes. ‘Oh, and how are you, by the way?’ they say, with a concern so belated as to be insulting.

  What you can’t see, in the transcript above, is that W left no pause, either, between his courteous ‘thank you’ and his putting the phone down, for me to weaken, as I might well have done otherwise, not having his character and determination, and enquire after his health. ‘Are you well?’ I should have said, if there had been a finger’s width of opportunity to say it in, in spite of not having the faintest desire for a medical bulletin. Why should I suddenly want to know how he was? He’s been well for thirty-seven years now – and even if by some remote chance he’d suddenly stopped being well he wouldn’t have dreamt of telling me.

  ‘Very well,’ he would have had to reply – simultaneously, for all I should have known at my end of the phone, trying to apply a tourniquet to a severed artery. Only four or five more seconds lost, it’s true – but once we’d got this far politeness would have required him to add at least two more syllables. ‘And you?’ he would have had to enquire. ‘Fine,’ I should have been obliged to inform him, for all he knew with only my mouth still functioning among the bandages.

  One more word from him – ‘Good’ – and we could have got back to what was left of our lives. But by this stage it would have been difficult for him to put the receiver down without an infinitesimal pause to see if I was proposing to say anything else. I shouldn’t have been proposing to utter another word, of course. But now that
this small hole had opened up in the fabric of the universe I should have felt compelled to fill it. I should have found myself telling him that it was very nice to hear from him. Before either of us knew what was happening I should have been enquiring after his wife and children, and various mutual friends. I should have forgotten the names of some of the people I was enquiring after, and should have had to filibuster in the hope of recalling them, or at any rate of making up for my apparent lack of concern in forgetting their names by the sheer amount of time I devoted to discussing them.

  Somewhere around this point I should have remembered that we hadn’t seen each other for some time. He would have felt obliged to suggest that we must bring this state of affairs to an end. We might even have got out our diaries, and negotiated vaguely back and forth over various more or less unsuitable dates in an indeterminate number of the weeks to come.

  By now it would be dimly coming back to me that there was actually something of importance that I’d been meaning to tell him. So then I should have had to keep the conversation going until I’d remembered what it was.

  It’s even within the bounds of possibility that I should have asked him what the weather was like at his end. Admittedly he was not phoning from another country, when mutual enquiries about the weather are required by international law. But he was on the other side of London. It’s not particularly surprising if the weather’s different in Australia, but it would be worthy of note if some completely different weather system had moved in on another Inner London borough.

  Now that the conversation had acquired this much momentum, bringing it to an end would have been as difficult as halting a fully-laden container vessel. Eventually, however, driven by growing hunger if nothing else, one or the other of us would have had to make preliminary moves towards coaxing the great craft into its moorings. ‘Well,’ my friend might have said, ‘I must get back to work.’ And in the slight regretful pause that would naturally have followed this I should have heard myself asking: ‘What are you working on at the moment?’

  He would have told me. Very succinctly, of course, given his character – so succinctly that I should have had to pose a number of polite supplementaries.

  Whereupon he would have had to ask me what I was working on. I should have given him a brief outline. As I did so I should have found myself warming to my theme. I should have begun to recall various small professional triumphs which had been insufficiently appreciated elsewhere, various major professional injustices to which I had been subjected, and for which I had not yet had sufficient sympathy.

  I should have told him how difficult my life seemed to have become these days – how little time there was to get anything done. He would have told me how little time he had. By now everyone but us would have left their workplaces and gone away to the country for the weekend, so it would have been too late for him to make the telephone call he had originally wanted the number for.

  By now in any case, night would have fallen. In the darkness, the scrap of paper on which he had noted down the number would have got brushed off his desk, and have disappeared behind some piece of furniture. He would not have instituted any search for it, because by this time he would have forgotten that he had ever wanted it.

  As the dawn came up we should have told each other how nice it had been talking to each other. We should have asked each other to give our respective love to wives, children, aunts, neighbours. Just after he had finally managed to put the phone down I should have remembered what it was I had been meaning to tell him.

  Crucial pieces of work now having been ruined on both sides, our respective careers would have languished, and we should both have fallen upon hard times. Since neither of us would have known about the other’s plight, each of us would have been too proud to reveal his own, so we should never have rung each other again. Our thirty-seven years of friendship would have come to an end.

  Thinking gratefully about how my friend’s firmness of character had saved us from all this, I rang one of my daughters on some small point of information, and while I was about it I asked her for all her news, and she told me, and she asked me for mine, and I told her. In fact we gossiped away for the best part of an hour. British Telecom thought it was wonderful.

  So did I, curiously enough.

  (1994)

  The Magic Mobile

  When the curtain rises on Act Two of my opera The Magic Mobile the scene is set in the Check-In Hall of a major international Airport.

  Solemn Muzak is heard, and Sarastro, the Airport Manager, enters. He informs the assembled Staff that a Traveller is approaching the doors of the Airport, seeking admission to their Mysteries. The Traveller, he tells them, wishes to throw off everything that shackles him to the Earth below, and ascend towards the Light and Purity of Heaven.

  The Airport Staff remind the Manager that in a major international Airport this Goal can be reached only through diligence and suffering, and they question whether the Traveller will be able to endure the process. The Manager tells them to perform their sacred office, and to test the Traveller’s resolve by a series of rituals and tests, so that he progresses towards his symbolic Enlightenment only by gradual stages.

  The glass doors now slide back, and the Traveller, Papageno, enters. He is carrying a Mobile Phone, and as he hurries distractedly towards the Ticket Desk, which is the first stage of his Ordeal, he is playing a cheerful little tune upon its musical buttons. He is ringing his partner, Papagena, and explaining to her in a dramatically charged aria (‘You’re not going to believe this, but’) that in Act One he had to leave home in too much of a hurry to use public transport, as he had planned, and that he has been forced to take the car instead, which he knows she is shortly going to be needing herself, for some spiritual odyssey of her own.

  But before Papagena in reply has had time to develop her feelings about this musically, Papageno is undergoing his first ritual purification at the hands of the Ticket Staff. In a short cavatina (‘The flight is heavily’) the Sales Person makes a preliminary assessment of the Traveller’s seriousness of purpose by declaring that there are now only Euro-Business seats available, at a substantial premium. After some earthily comic hesitation, Papageno expresses resignation to his fate, and is quietly relieved of a substantial proportion of his worldly wealth.

  He is rewarded with a Passenger Ticket entitling him to proceed to the second stage of his Initiation at the Check-In Desk. The jaunty little theme for mobile phone is heard several times more, but before he can get through to Papagena and clarify their evidently now troubled relationship he has to present the Ticket, find his Passport, and answer a solemn ritual Interrogation about the Contents of his Suitcase. His answers proving satisfactory, the symbolically burdensome suitcase, and the various pieces of Electrical Apparatus he has confessed it contains, is spirited away, and his Passenger Ticket is returned, now accompanied by a Boarding Card marked with certain cabbalistic signs. Armed with Ticket, Passport, and Boarding Card, he proceeds to the Bank to acquire Currency suitable for the world he is hoping to reach. Again and again the Mobile Phone theme is heard, until he is at last able to explain with breathless haste to Papagena in the prestissimo ‘Listen, listen, listen’ that he is going to post the Parking Ticket to her, so that she can come down to the Airport at her leisure and collect the car.

  His relations with Papagena seem to be still in a somewhat equivocal state as he runs back and forth trying to find where to buy an Envelope and a Stamp, and then hastens to the barrier of the Inner Sanctuary, beyond which only Postulants holding a Boarding Card are admitted. Papageno is indeed, as we know, holding the precious Boarding Card, but since he is also holding the Passenger Ticket, the Passport, the Foreign Currency, the Parking Ticket, the Envelope and the Stamp he has the opportunity for further comic business, accompanied by the delightfully desperate ‘I know I had it when’ before he is allowed to proceed, and is consequently in a state of some confusion at his next Ordeal in Security Control, as the Body Scann
er plays the ominous Body Scanner theme, and he is forced to empty his pockets of the Mobile Phone, his Pocket Calculator, his Keys, and his remaining Small Change.

  It only remains for him to have his Passport checked once again in Passport Control before he is rewarded by admission to the manifold delights of the Departure Lounge. Here he is offered food and drink, and gratefully accepts a Takeaway Coffee and a Freshly Baked Croissant, since he missed breakfast, before he hastens to purchase a small phial of Duty-Free Perfume to enclose with the Parking Ticket in the hope of rescuing his threatened relationship with Papagena. Sarastro and the secretly watching Security Men almost give up hope for Papageno when he seems tempted by some of the other earthly goods on offer, and for a moment contemplates purchasing a duty-free 48-inch television with quadrophonic speakers, which they doubt can ever be got airborne. But he is saved by the disembodied voice of the Queen of Flight singing the famous coloratura aria ‘This is the final call for passengers on’.

  He now enters the most arduous stage of his Initiation – the long walk to Gate 73, checking as he goes that he still has the Passenger Ticket, the Passport, the Boarding Card, the Foreign Currency, the Parking Ticket, the Envelope, the Stamp, the Pocket Calculator, the Keys, the Small Change, the Takeaway Coffee, the Freshly Baked Croissant, and the Perfume. Many times he almost forgets where he is going. Many times he is tempted to settle for Gate 35 and Helsinki, or Gate 51 and Philadelphia. All that drives him on is the need to find somewhere to sit down for a moment and lighten his burden by putting the Passenger Ticket in the Envelope, and the Parking Ticket in the back of the Passport, after which he will need only a Rubbish Bin where he can post the Envelope, and a Post Box where he can dump the greasy remains of the Croissant.

  A trio of smiling sopranos greets him as he at last totters up to Gate 73. ‘Boarding Card and Passport,’ they brightly sing. As he spreads all his possessions out over the floor to locate them once again, they inform him that the nearest Post Box is in the Check-In Hall – part of a profane world that has long since closed behind him forever.