by George Mann
-New Statesman, 25 June 2007
Maria Amis, Julia Barnes, and Iona MacEwan, the greatest lady novelists of their day, were taking tea in Liberty one afternoon of the summer of 2005. They had all been close friends at Girton in the same year and had shared many adventures. As time passed their fortunes prospered and their interests changed, to such a degree, in fact, that on occasion they had “had words” and spent almost a decade out of direct communication; but now, in middle years, they were reconciled. Love’s Arrow had won the Netta Musket Award, The Lime Sofa the Ouida Prize, and Under Alum Chine the Barbara Cartland Memorial Prize. All regularly topped the bestseller lists.
In their expensive but not showy summer frocks and hats they were a vision of civilized feminity.
The tea rooms had recently been redecorated in William Morris “Willow Pattern” and brought a refreshing lightness to their surroundings. The lady novelists enjoyed a sense of secure content which they had not known since their Cambridge days.
The satisfaction of this cosy moment was only a little spoiled by the presence of a young man with bright shoulder length black hair, dark blue eyes, long, regular features, and a rather athletic physique, wearing a white shirt, black car coat, and narrow, dark gray trousers, with pointed “Cuban” elastic-sided boots, who sat in the corner nearest to the door. Occasionally, he would look up from his teacakes and Darjeeling and offer them a friendly, knowing wink.
11. LES FAUX MONNAYEURS
Things were happening as we motored into Ypres. When were they not? A cannonade of sorts behind the roofless ruins, perhaps outside of town; nobody seems to know or care; only an air-fight for our benefit. We crane our necks and train our glasses. Nothing whatever to be seen.
-E.W. Hornung, New Statesman,
30 June 1917
Jerry’s head turned in the massive white pillow and he saw something new in his sister’s trust even as she slipped into his arms, her soft comfort warming him. “You’ll be leaving, then?”
“I catch the evening packet from Canterbury. By tonight I’ll be in Paris. There’s still time to think again.”
“I must stay here.” Her breathing became more rapid. “But I promise I’ll join you if the cryogenics…” Her voice broke. “By Christmas. Oh, Jesus, Jerry. It’s tragic. I love you.”
His expression puzzled her, he knew. He had dreamed of her lying in her coffin while an elaborate funeral went on around her. He remembered her in both centuries. Image after image came back to him, confusing in their intensity and clarity. It was almost unbearable. Why had he always loved her with such passion? Such complete commitment? That old feeling. Of course, she had not been the only woman he had loved so unselfconsciously, so deeply, but she was the only one to reciprocate with the same depth and commitment. The only one to last his lifetime. The texture of her short, brown hair reminded him of Jenny. Of Jenny’s friend Eve. He and they were together through much of the 70s when Catherine was away with Una Persson.
Looking over Eve’s head through copper hot eyes as her friend moved her beautiful full lips on his penis, Jenny’s face bore that expression of strong affection which was the nearest she came to love. His fingers clung deep in Eve’s long dark hair, his mouth on Jenny’s as she frigged herself. The subtle differences of skin shades; their eye colors. The graceful movements. That extraordinary passion. Jenny’s lips parted and small delicious grunts came from her mouth. This was almost the last of what the 60’s had brought them and which most other generations could never enjoy: pleasure without conflict or fear of serious consequences; the most exquisite form of lust. Meanwhile, taking such deep humane pleasure in the love of the moment, Jerry could not know (though he had begun to guess) what the future would bring. And were his actions, which felt so innocent, the cause of the horror which would within two decades begin to fill the whole world?
“Was it my fault?” he asked her.
She sat up, smiling. “Look at the time!”
12. HOME ALONE FIVE
I learned from Taguba that the first wave of materials included descriptions of the sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees. Several of these images, including one of an Iraqi woman detainee baring her breasts, have since surfaced; others have not. (Taguba’s report noted that photographs and videos were being held by the CID because of ongoing criminal investigations and their “extremely sensitive nature.”) Taguba said that he saw “a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.” The video was not made public in any of the subsequent court proceedings, nor has there been any public government mention of it. Such images would have added an even more inflammatory element to the outcry over Abu Ghraib. “It’s bad enough that there were photographs of Arab men wearing women’s panties,” Taguba said.
-Seymour M. Hersh, The General’s Report,
New Yorker, 25 June 2007
Portobello Road, deserted except for a few stall-holders setting up before dawn, had kept its familiar Friday morning atmosphere. As Jerry approached the Westway, one hand deep in the pocket of his black car coat, the other, still in its black glove, resting on the handlebars of his Gent’s Royal Albert bicycle, he glanced at the big neon New Worlds Millennium clock, in vivid red and blue, erected to celebrate the magazine’s fifty-fifth birthday. Two doors closer to the bridge, and not yet open, were the Frendz offices and nearby were Time Out, Rough Trade, Stiff Records International, Riviera Management, Mac’s Music, Trux Transportation, Stone’s Antiquarian Books, Pash’s Instruments, The Mountain Grill, Brock and Turner, The Mandrake, Smilin’ Mike’s Club; all the great names which had made the Grove famous and given the area its enduring character.
“I remember when I used to be a denizen round here. Glad to see the neighborhood has kept going.” Jerry spoke to his old friend, Professor Hira, who had remained behind when the others had gone away.
“Only by a whisker,” said the plump Brahmin, shaking his head. “By a lot of hardwork and visionary thinking on the part of those of us who didn’t leave.”
Jerry began to smile, clearly thinking Hira was overpraising himself and being slightly judgemental at the same time. But Hira was serious. “Believe me, old boy, I’m not blaming you for going. You had a different destiny. But you don’t know what it’s like out there any more. North Kensington is all that remains of the free world. Roughly east of Queensway, north of Harrow Road, south of Holland Park Avenue, west of Wood Lane, a new kind of tyranny triumphs.”
“It can’t be much worse than it was!”
“Oh, that’s what we all thought in 1975 or so. We hadn’t, even then, begun to realize what fate - or anyway The City - had in store for us… Ladbroke Grove is the only part of Britain which managed to resist the march of the Whiteshirts from out of the suburbs. We keep the night alive with our signs. That’s a battle we’re constantly fighting. Thank god we still have a few people with money and conscience. All the work we did in the 60s and 70s, to maintain the freeholds and rents, successfully kept the Grove in the hands of the original inhabitants so that, at worst, we are a living museum of the Golden Age. At our best, we have slowed time long enough for people to take stock, not to be panicked or threatened by the Whiteshirts. Here, the wealth is still evenly distributed, continuing the progress made between 1920 and 1970, and, through the insistence of our ancient charters, the Grove, along with Brookgate in the east, like London’s ancient Alsatia, has managed to keep her status as an independent state, a sanctuary.”
“Ruritania, eh? I thought the air smelled a bit stale.”
“Well, we’ve developed recycling to something of a fine art. Out there in the rest of the country, as in the USA, where the majority of the wealth was incouraged by Thatcher and her colleagues to flow back to Capital, things of course are considerably worse for the greater middle class. Thatcher and her kind used all the power put into their hands by short-sighted unions and their far-sighted opponents. Every threat. Every technique. Those who resisted made themselves hel
pless by refusing to change their rhetoric and so were also unable to change their strategies. It’s true, old boy. For thirty years the outside world has collapsed into cynicism as the international conglomerates became big enough to challenge, then control, and finally replace elected governments. You’re lucky you were brought back here, Mr. C. Outside, it’s pretty unpleasant, I can tell you. Most Londoners can’t afford to live where they were born. Colons from the suburbs or worse the country have flooded in, taking over our houses, our businesses, our restaurants and shops. Of course, it was starting in your time: George Melly and stripped pine shops. But now the working class is strictly confined to its ghettoes, distracted by drugs, lifestyle magazines, and reality TV. The middle class has been trained to compete tooth and nail for the advantages they once took for granted and the rich do whatever they like, including murder, thanks to their obscene amounts of moolah.” Even Hira’s language appeared to have been frozen in his dog years. “At least the middle class learned to value what they had taken for granted, even if it’s too late to do anything about it now!”
“Bloody hell,” said Jerry. “It looks like I was better off in that other future, after all. And now I’ve burned my bridges. Who’s Thatcher?”
“We call her The Goddess Miggea. Most of them worship her today, though she was the one who formulated the language used to place the middle class in its present unhappy position. She was a sort of quisling for the Whiteshirts. She’s the main symbol of middle class downfall, yet they still think she saved them, the way the yanks think Reagan got them out of trouble. Amazing, isn’t it. You said yourself that the secret of successful feudalism is to make the peasants believe it’s the best of all possible worlds. Blair and Bush thought they could reproduce those successes with a brief war against a weak nation, but they miscalculated rather badly. Too late now. Remember the old scenario for nuclear war which put Pakistan at the center of the picture? Well, it’s not far off. Religion’s back with a vengeance. I’d return to India, only things aren’t much better there. You probably haven’t heard of Hindu Nationalism, either. Or the Mombai Tiger. The rich are so much richer and the poor are so much poorer. The rich have no sense of charity or gravitas. They enjoy the power and the extravagance of Eighteenth Century French aristocrats. They distract themselves with all kinds of speculative adventures, including wars which make Vietnam seem idealistic. How the people of Eastern Europe mourn the fall of the old Soviet empire, nostalgic for the return of the certainties of tyranny! Am I boring you, Mr. Cornelius?”
“Sorry.” Jerry was admiring a massive plasma TV in an electrical shop’s display window. “Wow! The future’s got everything we hoped it would have! The Soviet Union’s fallen?”
“I forget. I suppose that in your day so much of this seemed impossible, or at least unlikely. Thirty five years ago you were talking about zero population growth and the problem of leisure. Here we are at the new Smaller Business Bureau. Lovely, isn’t it? Yes, I know, it smells like Amsterdam. I work here now.” Carefully, he opened the doors of Reception.
KATRINA, KATRINA!
It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was the faith that was abused? They were among the most noble instincts of the human heart - the love of peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamor.
-Winston Churchill to Parliament,
November 12 1940
1. WHY YOU SHOULD FEAR PRESIDENT GIULIANI
Parts of rural China are seeing a burgeoning market for female corpses, the result of the reappearance of a strange custom called “ghost marriages”. Chinese tradition demands that husbands and wives always share a grave. Sometimes when a man died umarried, his parents would procure the body of a woman, hold a “wedding”, and bury the couple together.
-The Economist, 28 July 2007
“There are no more sanctuaries, m’sieur. You are probably too young even to dream of such things. But I grew up with the idea that, I don’t know, you could retire to a little cottage in the country or find a deserted beach somewhere or a cabin in the mountains. Now we’re lucky if we can get an apartment in Nice, enough equity in it to pay for the extra healthcare we’ll need.” Monsieur Pardon stood upright in the barge as it emerged from under the bridge on Canal St Martin. “And we French are increasingly having to find jobs overseas. Who knows? Am I destined for a condo in Florida? This is my stop. I live in rue Oberkampf. And you?”
“This will do for me, too.” Jerry got ready to disembark. “How long have you lived in Paris?”
“Only for a couple of years. Before that I was a professional autoharp player in Nantes. But the work dried up. I’m currently looking for a job.”
They had reached the bank and stood together beside a newspaper kiosk. Jerry took down a copy of The Herald Tribune and paid with a three-euro piece. “You seem lost, m’sieu. Can I help?”
“Thank you. I’m just trying to follow a story. I wonder. May I ask? What makes you cry, M. Pardon?”
The neatly dressed rather serious young man fingered his waxed moustache. He looked down at his pale gray suit, patting his pockets. “Eh?”
“Well, for instance, I cry at almost any example of empathy I encounter. Pretty much any observation of sympathetic imagination. And music. I cry in response to music. Or a generous act. Or a sentimental movie.”
M. Pardon smiled. “Well, yes. I am a terrible sentimentalist. I cry, I suppose, when I hear of some evil deed. Or an innocent soul suffering some terrible misfortune.”
Jerry nodded, almost to himself. “I understand.”
Together, they turned the corner in Rue Oberkampf.
“So it is imagination that moves you to tears?”
“Not exactly. Some forms of imagination merely bore me.”
2. SOUTH RAMPART STREET PARADE
Presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani recently fumbled one of the dumbest questions asked since “boxers or briefs?” Campaigning in Alabama, he was asked, “What is the price of a gallon of milk?” He was off by a buck or two, thus failing a tiresome common-citizen test. But far more important questions need to be posed. Let’s start with asking our future leaders about how affordable PCs, broadband internet connectivity, and other information technologies are transforming the lives of every American.
-Dan Costa, PC Magazine,
7 August 2007
“Angry, Mr Cornelius?” Miss Brunner unpacked her case. Reluctantly, he had brought her from St. Pancras. Mist was still lifting from St. James’s Park. He stood by the window, trying to identify a duck. From this height, it was difficult.
“I’m never angry.” He turned as she was hanging a piece of complicated lingerie on a hanger. “You know me.”
“A man of action.”
“If nothing else.” He grew aware of a smell he didn’t like. Anaesthetic? Some sort of spray? Was it coming from her case?
“When did you arrive?”
“You met me at Eurostar.”
“I meant in Paris. From New Orleans?” That was it. The perfume used to disguise the smell of mold. Her clothes had that specific iridescence. They’d been looted.
“Saks,” he said.
“You can’t see the label from there, can you? You wouldn’t believe how cheap they were.”
“Laissez les bon temps rollez.” Jerry had begun to cheer up.
“I’m so tired of the English.”
3. POMPIER PARIS
Defenses are tough to predict in fantasy football.
-Fantasy Sports, September 2007
“Hot enough for you? Everyone’s leaving for the country.” Jerry and Bishop Beesley disembarked from the taxi at the corner of Elgin Crescent and Portobello Road. All the old familiar shops were gone. The pubs had
become wine bars and restaurants. Tables and chairs stood outside fake bistros stretching into the middle distance. The fruit and veg on the market stalls had the look of mock organics. Heritage tomatoes. The air was filled with braying aggression. If the heat got any worse there could be a Whiteshirt riot. Jerry could imagine nothing worse than watching the nouveaux riches taking it out on what remained of the anciens pauvres. The people in the council flats must be getting nervous.
“Apres moi, le frisson nouveau.”
“Do what?” Bishop Beesley was distracted. He had spotted one of his former parishioners stumbling dazedly out of Finch’s. The poor bugger had tripped into a timewarp but brightened when he saw the bishop. Sidling up, he mumbled a familiar mantra and forced a handful of old fivers into Beesley’s sweating fist. Reluctantly, the bishop took something from under his surplice in exchange. Watching the decrepit speed freak stumble away, he said apologetically. “They’re still my flock. But of course there’s been a massive falling off compared to the numbers I used to serve. Once, you could rely on an active congregation west of Portobello, but these days everything left is mostly in Kilburn. Not my parish, you see.”
Jerry whistled sympathetically.
Beesley stopped to admire one of the newly decorated stalls. The owner, wearing a fresh white overall and a pearly cap, recognized him. “You lost weight, your worship?”
“Sadly…” The bishop fingered the stock. “I’ve never seen Brussels as big.”
“Bugger me.” Jerry stared in astonishment at a fawn bottom rolling towards Colville Terrace. Who needed jodhpurs and green wellies to drive a Range Rover to the Ladbroke Grove Sainsbury’s? “Trixie?” Wasn’t it Miss Brunner’s little girl, all grown up? Distracted, Jerry looked for a hand of long branches which used to hide a sign he remembered on the other side of the Midland Bank. The bank was now an HSBC. Who on earth would want to erase his childhood? He remembered how he used to have a thing against the past. Maybe it was generational.
