Was the nightmare over?
Had Jane won?
Was there any point in continuing with Baldwin’s class?
It seemed a shame to quit—to abandon Winston to Nigel’s barbs and stick Dan with lonely walks back to his bedsit. They’d become friends and what’s more, Jane felt they both needed her. Baldwin’s final instruction as he wrapped up the most recent class was, ‘Sun Tzu says, remain flexible. Take advantage of any opportunity that presents itself, however small. In a nutshell, that’s also Stratagem Twelve, Lead the Sheep Downstream by the Hand, the ruse of serendipity.’
He continued: ‘That means, Nigel, avail yourself of any profit, however slight. As the CEO of Southwest Airlines said, “Be ready for change.” The objective is fundamental alertness to every possibility on the battlefield.’
Scanning her battlefield, one drooping banner on the skyline caught Commander Jane’s eye. Foot soldier Sammie was not herself. She was skinnier than ever, but she wasn’t sullen anymore. Neither was there any more back-talking or flippancy or, sadly, Bolshie light-heartedness. Sammie had buckled down to her homework with an industry that should have heartened her mother.
One day, Jane found the Italian red boots crushed at the bottom of the bathroom bin.
‘Was it fun rooming with Bella in Italy?’ she asked.
‘I shared with Rachel.’
‘I thought Bella was going to share with you, you know, for a little godmother quality time.’
‘No. Bella did play cards with me when the light was “off” and they couldn’t shoot her butchering baby lambs the Italian Way. Just as messy as the English way, if you ask me.’
‘What did you play—Hearts?’
‘Gin rummy. She cheats. But I still won. Anyway, her mind wasn’t on the game. She called it, “Our chance to have a little talk”.’ Sammie avoided Jane’s gaze and looked at the kitchen floorboards.
‘’Talk about what?’
‘She hasn’t fulfilled her promise.’
‘To do what?’
‘Not to do, to be. I don’t know. Something about being a true symbol of hope, instead of a cooking icon. Or was it about being a true woman? Maybe she said a true human being. Anyway, she spent a lot of time talking to Dad about it in their room.’
The teenager’s brave banner swayed and tossed in a sudden emotional wind, as if the French doors in the kitchen had just been blown in on them by a freezing gust walloping the air.
Jane looked at her Sammie’s lowered head and realized the tremendous courage her daughter had just showed with those three indiscreet words—protective, pitying, and wise beyond even her grandmother’s years. Jane’s shoulders shook with the stress of months of repressing her fears.
She burst into violent tears and reached for Sammie. Sammie fell, sheepish, down into her mother’s outstretched arms and huddled over her mother’s head as if she could protect her from all the heartbreak raining down. She enveloped Jane’s face in her fleecy midriff smelling of Top Sixty perfume.
So far from Joe, Jane hadn’t felt this close to Sammie in years, not since a frightening night spent at the Royal Free’s emergency room after a close shave between Sammie’s bicycle and a meat delivery van.
‘Don’t hate him, Mum. Please don’t hate him.’ Sammie stroked her mother’s hair through her own sobs. ‘That telly scene is awfully seducing. Strangers are always slobbering to please you. Everything laid on by other people. There’s no faffing about, no queues, no aggro. Celebrities don’t live on our planet. After all these years, Dad couldn’t help himself.’
‘I see.’ Jane clung to her daughter’s tiny waist. At least she had her daughter back, heart and soul. Was it a consolation to cling to the sheepish girl and press on her all this adult despair? She moaned her misery into Sammie’s comforting fleece and knew her tears weren’t wrong when she heard Sammie’s apologetic: ‘I wasn’t fair to you, Mum. Of course, I like it better when Grandma and Dad let me do what I want. I always feel like I’m disappointing you—’
‘Oh, Sammie, no, no—’
‘You want me to be smarter and read more and work harder.’ Sammie choked through her own bitter tears, ‘But I didn’t understand until now, that’s because you love me. You never tried to buy me off with a rubbishy pair of boots. I don’t care if Bella is my godmother. I realize now she’s a selfish bloody cow. Sooner or later, Dad’s going to realize it, too. And that’s my promise.’
PART II
After the rulers of the Zhou Dynasty were compelled to move east to Luoyang in 770 BC, they gradually lost control over the feudal lords. The next three hundred years, the Spring and Autumn Period, unveiled a turbulent drama of usurpation, annexation, treason, and murder, but also wisdom, courage, and loyalty.
Chapter Thirteen, Da Tsao Jing Shr
(Beat the Grass to Startle the Snake)
Even on the rare nights Joe now made it home for dinner, conversation at 19 Chalkwood Square congealed like stale gravy. Jane had promised Baldwin that she wouldn’t confront Joe, but since Sammie’s confirmation that Joe and Bella shared a room in Tuscany, this silence required Olympian willpower. It was at last real war, after a Phoney War of false accommodation and denial.
More evenings than not, Joe excused himself entirely from the family table, saying he’d already grabbed some mash at the Beeb’s canteen. His clothes smelled of the far more exotic scraps of The Travelling Kitchen. Each night, he crawled under the bedclothes with a theatrical yawn, in case Jane still lay awake.
Jane laced her frosty lack of interest in any studio anecdotes with only the most impersonal bulletins about Lorraine’s health or Sammie’s maths scores.
The Gilchrists’ ability to trundle along this joyless plain disconcerted Jane even more than Joe’s depression had oppressed her. At least sharing his career miseries had kept them intimate. They must’ve subsisted for years on nursing his fractured self-esteem. Somewhere along the way, Joe had taken his distance from Jane’s concerns—leaving her more and more to Lorraine as confidante—and taken his parental pleasures raising Sammie on a parallel track. He hadn’t registered that Jane’s Bookworms were threatened by a shrinking Council budget. He hadn’t once noticed that since September, she’d been following an ‘information management class’ that required not one single textbook.
Worse, Joe knew it, of course, and resorted to clumsy gestures. He brought Jane imported tulips—out of tune with both the season and her spirits—and then Sammie let out that they were used flowers from the ‘New Ideas for Dutch Ovens’ episode. Jane hid her fury behind the covers of The Hare with the Amber Eyes.
Most painful, Joe displayed a more generalized, (if glazed) contentment than Jane had seen in him in years. You’d think their mantelpiece had sprouted a regiment of BAFTA masks, Golden Globe statuettes, Screen Actors’ Guild trophies and Critics’ Circle accolades. Instead, now all it took to thrill Joe down to his new sienna cashmere socks from Italy was the news that Jacques Pepin was descending from the culinary clouds for Bella’s week of ‘French Saveurs du Nord.’
‘The Italian week turned us around. Did you see our Barb figures? The show’s picking up!’
Jane wasn’t interested in Broadcasters’ Audience raves for Bella. ‘Any news from the food people in Rome? I thought they liked our idea.’
‘Absolutely, sweetheart, they were very keen. Still in the works. Just takes time. I’ve got another phoner lined up for next week.’
The world seemed to demand nothing of Jane but tongue-biting endurance. The throes of jealousy, betrayal, and frustration were like a persistent thrumming underneath each day’s countable hours—an engine of hurt grinding its gears at the pit of her stomach.
Some mornings after Joe left for work, Jane set herself a written list of things, starting with: get out of bed, brush teeth, wash hair, make bed—easier to follow instructions than leave herself any choice. Pretty soon she’d hire a personal trainer to keep herself breathing.
Then she cried herself back into a tem
porary calm, all her wailings well-muffled from Lorraine’s ears by Polish carpenters hammering at 17 Chalkwood Square’s basement wall. In the afternoons, Jane heated quick soups and instant noodles, set Lorraine’s tray, and dished up Sammie’s supper, her exposed nerves frayed by Green Day’s bass line pounding from behind the girl’s locked door.
It was a season of damp wool, churning dehumidifiers, and secret tears. It was the winter of everybody’s discontent—except Joe—made even less glorious by the looming prospect of Sammie’s exams.
If anyone noticed Jane’s clenched heart, what could they do? Chris never remarked that her Monday morning reading of nursery rhymes sounded like a dirge or asked why her Tuesday “off” was spent in the darkened reading room scraping rocks of chewing gum from under battered reading tables. Lorraine watched in silence as Jane scrubbed away her Furies on Wednesday and Thursday, cleaning the attic flat while crying, then shopping for food while crying, and then just crying.
Her eyes were like purple gooseberries.
Despite the onset of the damp season, Professor Baldwin remained as fluffy and dry as an old drake, determined as ever to keep his shrinking class swimming along behind him through the Warring States Period; only Nigel, Jane, and Winston huddled in attendance. Kevin had accompanied buyers to Manhattan on business, Dan was late returning from a ‘business trip’ to Birmingham, while poor Keith hadn’t been able to insure himself at any premium against a sore throat.
‘Ah, the common cold, against which there is no effective stratagem except Mrs Ng’s fish ball soup,’ Winston said.
No sooner had they sat down to Stratagem Thirteen than one of the school’s factotums had barged into their room with an order to decamp. Baldwin’s tiny team found itself shunted from its large and chilly classroom into a tiny room used for tutorials.
They resettled their bags, coats, and briefcases in a space scarcely bigger than two broom closets. Nigel relegated one broken chair to the corridor as a retort to the management. They squeezed into the remaining chairs with their elbows touching. The linoleum stank of Dettol.
Jane was amazed at the professor’s fortitude. It was as if Baldwin expected worse treatment and was almost relieved. ‘Our ranks are thinned, our territory reduced, but nothing will deter us from launching our third group of six, The Attacking Strategies!’ He punched the frigid air with frantic conviction.
You had to admire Baldwin, trying to animate three tired adults with ancient Chinese philosophy. He looked like Don Quixote without even a Sancho Panza.
‘Jane, when you cannot detect the opponent’s plans, what do you do?’
‘Wait and see, like you keep telling me.’
Winston intoned, ‘The Honourable Wily Hedgehog Librarian Stratagem. Do Nothing and Hope It All Just Goes Away. Ommmmmm,’ He extended both arms into a Buddha gesture of blessing but there wasn’t much room without hitting Nigel in the nose.
‘Halfway there, dear lady, but there must be something to see. And you can’t sit around forever. Your troops must eat, your communications might fall under attack, and the weather might turn against you.’
Winston nudged Jane to study Baldwin’s chalky calligraphy on the old-fashioned blackboard.
‘Oh, I don’t know. Scare them with a snake?’
‘Oh, dear lady! You launch a direct, brief attack! You “beat the grass” and force the snake out from under the rock to measure its weakness and shed light on its secrets.’
That afternoon, Jane had soothed her red eyes with lotion and dressed her hair for evening class, but underneath she felt so beat-up, the idea of beating anything else exhausted her. All she could do these days was weep deeper into her armchair or throw her miseries into installing a new browser in the fast-ageing library computer systems. Why couldn’t Baldwin let her alone tonight? Instead he urged her at last to attack—to scare Bella or Joe himself?—into revealing their next step.
‘But Professor Baldwin, whatever happened to common sense, Western-style, as in let sleeping dogs lie?’ Jane asked.
‘Don’t stir up a hornet’s nest?’ Nigel suggested.
‘Thanks, Nigel. That’s what I meant.’
‘You’re recommending a warning shot, professor?’ Winston asked.
‘Exactly. Say you float a “sounding-balloon” or “test-run”, to show your father what hell his life would become after Nelson’s coup d’etat? Those of you who know the history of modern China will be put in mind of the Hundred Flowers campaign? 1957?’
Three blank faces looked up at Baldwin.
‘A call to Let a Hundred Flowers of opinion bloom? The Communist Party’s device to bring critics in the open, only to cut them down ruthlessly?’
No one leapt out of a chair.
‘O’Neill would know what you’re on about,’ Nigel said. His note taking had slackened during the last few classes.
‘Really, class, you ought to be able to find a use for Number Thirteen—it couldn’t be more flexible in practice. The Chinese classics say, “To ask a general to act is not as good as provoking a general to act. You can use it on your own side where the so-called snake is your own reluctant boss instead of a rival or opponent—’
‘That would be combining it with Number Three!’
‘Very good, Nigel. For example, your bank manager might hesitate to issue a guarantee for his client. He might need your prompting.’
At least Nigel jotted that down. Clearly the lack of Dan’s erudite assistance left Baldwin exasperated. Provoked by the dullards he faced this evening, he shook his head.
‘The point is, you act. You gain information using a well-tailored provocation. Or you protect yourself when someone starts pounding on your grass.’
Nigel shrugged. ‘All rather obvious.’ The cold November rain hammered outside.
Annoyed, Baldwin pounded on his rickety table. ‘Commanders succeed because they get information early and use it quickly. Even in fifth century BC, Sun Tzu’s army was what you bankers call information-centred. Banks should reduce the overload of unread reports and interoffice e-mail and concentrate on information flow in and out of headquarters.’
Nigel raised his voice over the pounding storm. ‘With all due respect, I don’t need a Chinese tactic to tell me information centricity is a basic tenet of organization theory, particularly anything associated with TQM. Sorry, Winston, TQM means total quality management.’
‘Total Quality Moron,’ Winston muttered to Jane.
‘I heard that, Chu.’
The class broke for coffee as bedraggled as it had begun. The canteen smelled of fresh floor polish and old fried bacon. Jane’s spirits rose at the sight of Dan in his soggy anorak hunting down their new classroom.
‘What are you guys doing down here? What have I missed?’ he whispered.
‘Number Thirteen. Beating the grass—’
‘—To force the snake to reveal himself.’ Dan scrutinized her dark-circled eye, ‘Everything okay?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Because you always come to class looking quite together. But tonight, uh—’
‘I look not quite myself.’
Dan stood back a foot to gauge the damage. ‘Not your rosy-cheeked self. More hit-and-run. Not quite drive-by, but definitely victim.’
‘What a very blunt American compliment.’
‘What a very cool English response. What’s the problem?’
‘A family drama. Teenager headaches.’ Jane dumped a cube of sugar into her beige tea. Her clothes were feeling a bit loose these days, but anyway, it no longer mattered whether she grew as wide as a house. ‘Let’s not talk about it and say we did.’
‘Oh, let’s talk about it and say we didn’t.’ Dan forced her to sit with him, many tables away from Winston who was looking to place himself as strategically far from Nigel as possible. Baldwin sat surrounded by the biddies from Mending Marriage.
‘—Your tales of woe can take my mind off the appalling misuses of Number Thirteen in the West Midlands. It seems th
e Birmingham police are quite capable of beating the grass, catching half a dozen baby snakes but letting the cobra slither clean away. Possession of videos, inflammatory DVD’s—that’s not enough. You stake out a house, surround it with armed men, risk the lives of dozens of officers, not to mention neighbourhood housewives, toddlers, and teens, but it’s all no good without proof of incitement, even if it means incite on assignment.’
‘Isn’t that entrapment?’
Dan sighed with pity at Jane’s innocence. ‘Oh, shit, it’s only a theory, remember? So what’s your kid’s problem?’
‘Her father’s having an affair.’
‘Your problem, then. Sorry, I don’t mean to upset you. You cheat on him?”
‘Never!’
‘You still want him?’
‘Of course! We’re a family!’
Dan cleared his throat and stirred his coffee. ‘Well, he must be some kind of jerk. Take this Kleenex. You’re looking kind of raccooney.’
Jane wiped the mascara off her cheeks, and thought: why was she willing to fight for Joe? Her anger blotted out almost all her love. Of course, she’d never been unfaithful to Joe but there hadn’t been any offers to refuse. No, the harder loyalty was always taking his side—even when he brought his Panorama problems on himself. Jane had convinced herself that Joe was heroic to keep on pitching and to keep on fighting for his stories to be heard.
Her voice cracked with tears: ‘I admire him. He’s always fought injustice and corruption—’
‘—And evildoing on Planet Earth. You make him sound like Batman.’
‘Yes, he adored working on Panorama—’
‘Never seen it.’
‘Like 60 Minutes, with investigative exposés.’
‘So only he could save the world? Me, Megatron Megadude.’ Dan turned grave, ‘It’s very seductive until the day somebody outdoes you, goes off to save the world and comes back in a pine box covered with a flag. You never feel quite so heroic again.’
Love and the Art of War Page 13
