‘Well, he has always been my hero. I loved him, for his causes, his crusades. Now he just can’t accept a world that doesn’t need his heroics. Take that away, and what’s left is tarnished pride. He’s lost all sense of his place in the world. I suppose Bella helps him find it. She might give him the audience he feels his projects deserve.’
‘Well, if you’re thinking of divorce, I’ve been there.’ He paused. ‘It isn’t pretty.’
Jane shook her head. ‘Well, that’s not an option.’
She suddenly threw her head back, and gasped. Because, with his few questions, Dan had just done his ‘homework’ for Stratagem Thirteen on her, ‘beating the grass’ until she was on the verge of confessing the very thing that spiced her tears over Joe’s ‘adultery’ with such a salty burn. She didn’t stick by Joe just because she believed in him or loved him. She was proving something to the world, to herself, and especially to Lorraine.
‘Oh, Dan, that’s the wretched irony. I can’t get divorced. When Joe proposed in the maternity ward, the very hour our beautiful Sammie was born, the happiest moment of my life, I turned down his proposal. I spurned him. ’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. I was so stupid! I’ll never forget the look on his face. I didn’t want to end up divorced like my mother. I didn’t mean to reject him, just the idea of being married. Of course, I told myself I was hip, independent, cool—but Joe didn’t see it that way. He said he’d never ask me again.’
‘So. You never got married.’
‘No. I was self-destructive and fearful, and now it’s too late.’
Chapter Fourteen, Jie Shr, Huan Hun
(Borrow a Corpse, Return a Soul)
Since Jane’s admission to Dan that she was, technically, a single woman, the air between them buzzed with heightened static. Baldwin’s mood was also much improved by caffeine or perhaps the flattery of Dan barrelling back in time for the second half of his class. The two men let down their guard and all but turned the discussion of Stratagem Fourteen into a Sinologist’s graduate seminar. This was a lucky break for poor old Fourteen, whose ghoulish aspects would put off any amateur’s enthusiasm; no matter which version Baldwin cited from the classics, Stratagem Fourteen involved some dead loser donning the decaying flesh of someone else to nab a second chance.
‘ . . . So we have the deceased Xu Bitao borrowing the corpse of her dead sister in order to return to life and marry.’
‘Some wedding,’ Winston shuddered.
Nigel sat up. ‘If she can bring her dead sister’s corpse to life, why can’t she just revitalize her own?’
‘Let’s not get literal with figurative legends, Nigel. Here’s another example. A corrupt official Yue Shou dies. The Prince of Hell gets ready to spear him with a pitchfork and dip him into a vat of boiling oil when the Immortal Lü Dongbin asks that Yue be handed over as a disciple. The Prince of Hell says why not? Unfortunately, back up on earth, Mrs Yue Shou has already cremated her husband, so our dead man must borrow someone else’s body. Luckily, a crippled butcher in his town has also died and his body is available. Thus, Yue Shou returns to life, but with a lame foot supported by a crutch—’
‘What is the Chinese concept of the soul?’ Jane interrupted. By now, Baldwin’s students realized he was capable of disgorging many stories if someone didn’t move the lesson along. ‘I mean, if this is a Daoist story?’
‘Excellent question! In these cases, the Chinese use hun for soul.’ Tapping out the word hun on the board, Baldwin explained, ‘Hun is your personality. It lives on after the body’s death and watches over your loved ones. The po is closer to the biological, electrical feeling some people feel around a deathbed.’
‘That’s rather useful,’ Jane said, thinking Joe’s po was intact these days, but his hun had left the household, while her hun was struggling along but her po had all but drained away.
‘Yes, but what does all this mean?’ Baldwin leaned forward on his battered desk and one of its legs broke right out from under him. He fell into Winston’s arms and they tumbled to the floor. Jane and Dan untangled the two gawky scarecrows.
Nigel sneered, ‘This room is a death-trap. We should get a refund on the course fees just for sitting in this dump.’ He dusted off his bespoke Gieves and Hawkes trousers.
‘I see I’ll have to adapt my lecture style to the new environment.’ Baldwin flexed his bony knee, checking for damage, and then forged on, ‘Where was I? What does it mean, Fourteen? You revive something from the past by giving it a new purpose, or reinterpret it, or bring to life old ideas, customs, traditions.’
Dan said, ‘I get it. You’re a new leader who wants to attract followers or impress converts, so you claim the mandate of the imprisoned or exiled leader.’ He winked at Jane.
‘I could use this one,’ Winston piped up. Jane noticed his pink-streaked hair was growing out. ‘I tell my father that a family company named Chu Printers has to keep the name Chu, so his legacy is preserved for generations.’
‘Good,’ Baldwin prompted.
‘You see, Nelson is dating that Malaysian chick Selina from Sultana Software, the one he only started dating after I mucked up Strategy Three? Now, if he marries Selina, they might rename the shop. Worse, Selina’s mother might take over everything. You know how Malaysian-Chinese women can be? Wah! Watch out! My father’s legacy would go from being Chu Printers to a subsidiary of Sultana Software.’ Winston turned to Nigel, ‘Those Malaysians undercut everybody. Suppose I employ Fourteen? I borrow the weight of ancient custom—that’s the idea, isn’t it, Professor?’
‘What? Ten years of honourable printing in Belsize Park?’ Nigel sniggered.
‘Well, Nigel, it means something to my father,’ Winston spat back. ‘The patina of the old must be preserved. Or my father’s business ends up named after a raisin wearing an orange turban.’
Baldwin said, ‘But Winston, this tactic asks that the old be borrowed, forgotten or discarded, not legitimately inherited, like your name; that you take an institution, a technology, or a method from elsewhere for your own purpose. But I quibble.’
Nigel perked up. ‘Like a shelf company? Could the corpse be a shelf company?’
‘Yes, Nigel! Perfect!’
‘A shell game?’ Winston was miffed his ruse hadn’t pleased Baldwin more.
‘No.’ Nigel sighed. ‘A shelf company is a pre-registered business entity. It has no assets or liabilities and has never done business. It’s registered with the sole purpose of being sold.’
‘Well, what’s the bloody point of that?’
Nigel sighed. ‘I thought you were a businessman, Chu.’
‘Well, funny, that. We actually run a business. We don’t just shuffle options and warrant things around. We add value. We provide a service. And would you stop calling me Chu? You’re not head boy. You may call me Winston.’
‘Fine, Winston. A shelf company is the fastest way of getting a business up and running. There are whole warehouses of such companies sitting in cemeteries of usable corporate corpses. You buy one, appoint new directors, open a bank account, and start trading.’
‘Trading. Trading.’ Winston took no notice of Jane’s calming hand on his arm. ‘You mean pushing assets around in circles so you can take a juicy cut? At least in my business we deal in real print, real paper. We’re not financial parasites.’
The lesson was stumbling towards its end. Jane regretted her admission to Dan even before Baldwin previewed the next week’s assignment. Sweating in that silly anorak, (so unnecessary in the unseasonable November warmth that unleashed torrents of rain day after day,) Dan spent the final hour gazing at her oddly. She did look a sight.
During her rackety tube ride home, the mortification still stung. Given the normal energy level on the Northern Line after ten p.m., no one would notice a mousey woman with unkempt hair, fringed ethnic scarf, and frazzled expression. Inside, Jane was afire with shame. Would Dan think her confession was a pointed hint that she was more avai
lable than he’d assumed?
She’d never felt less available in her entire life. She was becoming less substantial with each passing day. Soon she’d look in the mirror to find she’d turned semi-material, like some pale Henry James ghost in black Victorian mourning dress found weeping on the Bridge Approach, like in The Turn of the Screw.
During Sammie’s infancy, Lorraine had begged Jane to marry Joe. She had cajoled Joe behind Jane’s back as it dawned that she, Jane’s much-married mother, had debased the institution in Jane’s eyes and she was right. The very word marriage summoned up in Jane a vivid brew of potent romances, sterile separations, and Act III curtains slamming down hard on her youthful sensitivities.
Back in the early days, Jane had stoutly defended her unmarried state to Lorraine as independent and liberated. The tussle had died down. Over the years of play dates, work shifts, and retirement from television research, Jane’s decision rusted into vestigial irrelevance. Most people assumed Jane and Joe were married, anyway, Lorraine finally rationalized. In the end, Jane stopped insisting on her maiden name.
As threatened, Joe never proposed again. So now she couldn’t whimper like some suburban discard, ‘How can you do this to me? After all, I’m your wife!’
Walking home through a moonless night, Jane imagined what any wedding would have looked like at the height of her passion for Joe, and what any ceremony might look like now—a cringe-making middle-aged ‘celebration,’ all gathered together before God to toast loyalty, not love, and everyone getting sloshed and fighting the urge to remark how the ‘bride’ has weathered well.
Wouldn’t any ceremony now resemble Baldwin’s reheated corpse, rouged up and warmed-over in a bid for resuscitated romance? Talk about reviving a dead body to reclaim a soul! Taking vows now would be all about claiming legitimacy. That’s not how she wanted to keep Joe. Even if by some miracle, he did dump Bella and ask just one more time . . .
She didn’t like Stratagem Fourteen. She’d skip any homework involving snakes or corpses and move straight on to Fifteen and Sixteen.
The rain was letting up and a warmish night falling against the soft thrum of the city from the south. Crossing the Bridge Approach, Jane heard a set of footsteps some twenty feet behind her. She didn’t panic, just kept up a steady stride across the metal bridge, then hastened a little. The Council Estates weren’t far away and only one station north of Camden Town, all the gentrification in the world couldn’t bar the nightshades of addiction from having a grab at her wallet.
The steps didn’t hurry. She turned left on to Berkley Road, and was just passing Eglon Mews, when she chanced a backward look and gave a sigh of relief.
It was only the painter trudging in her wake, with his beard pressed into his chest under an overloaded backpack jutting up behind his shoulder blades.
She would have continued straight into the square, but with her momentary stop at his darkened window, he caught up with her and asked, ‘Seen this?’
The Painted Angel’s glass feet were smashed in.
The artist dropped his pack on the wet sidewalk. ‘I got to the hardware store before it closed.’ Plywood was roped to the bottom of the pack and the sharp angles of tools poked from inside of the canvas. He shrugged. ‘It’s happened before, back home.’
His cadence—Continental, thick, northern?
‘I painted an angel on my studio window in Rotterdam with “Thou Shalt Not Kill’ after the murder of Theo van Gogh. Some guys walking past my window, they see the painting and they get mad. They even come to the door, ja, and tell me wash off your painting. Wash off your racist words.’
‘The Sixth Commandment being a racial affront?’
The Dutchman smiled. ‘The Rotterdam police call me. They don’t want trouble, community sensitivities, ja, ja, ja. So finally even the mayor orders me; Joop, wash off your angel. I say, no way! He sends firemen with big hoses. The pigs start to wash off my fucking angel. And the crowds are yelling, the Muslims yelling, and the old women, everybody yelling for my angel. Which was much better than this guy . . . Better aqua.’
‘You’re making this up?’
‘No, I’m telling you. Everybody comes, even the TV guys. A reporter says, I come to talk about your angel, but when he sees the hose, he tries to protect my painting, you know, because he’s so famous, nobody going to spray him. And he gets fucking arrested! Then they put this video of him and me and the angel on YouTube, and man . . . ’ Joop sighed.
‘What happened then?’
‘Oh, the mayor apologized to the reporter who made the mayor apologize to me, but he made me apologize to the Muslims, except some Muslims on my side made the police apologize to the community. Everybody won.’
‘Except the angel.’ Jane looked up at St Michael’s scarred face. Was this a new angel, or the Rotterdam one reborn, borrowing the washed-off form of the other version to offer his message of peace new life?
Like Baldwin’s lesson, borrowing a corpse.
The Dutchman pulled on his soft blond whiskers. ‘The police tell me I’m in the shit with the mosque guys, real shit. They say, one morning, you watch out. You’re going to be on your bicycle and somebody will stab a message into your chest just like with Theo. So I come to visit here with my uncle.’
‘I like the electric blue door. Wasn’t it brown before?’
‘You should have seen my aunt’s face when that rock hit her flat-screen TV! I tell her, man, the fucking news is not on that box, the fucking news is coming through your window.’
Jane said, ‘You make me laugh. Make your angel laugh. He looks so vindictive that way. Laughter conquers all.’
‘Ja,’ the painter nodded. ‘Goed, goed idea. He will be a laughing angel.’
Jane carried Joop’s wash of laughter into the square and up the stairs. She checked on Lorraine, who’d fallen asleep while watching Sammie do her homework.
She returned downstairs and started her bath in preparation for a long, good read. While the bubbles mounted, she went to hang up her jacket. It was only then she saw a letter on her pillow and realized that while grandmother and granddaughter had whiled away their evening in peace and ignorance in the attic above, Joe had stealthily moved out.
Chapter Fifteen, Diao Hu, Li Shan
(Lure the Tiger Down Off the Mountain)
The rest of Jane’s Friday consisted of shock and slow-moving numbness at the sight of a long wooden rod holding only jangling clothes hangers.
She took a very hot bath—the kind favoured by Tale of Genji heroines—scalding steam and purging loofah—then crawled into bed.
She would survive the empty darkness with the help of books. Folding her broken spirit between the pages of a book hadn’t failed her yet. Not when Lorraine forgot to pick her up from Grand Central Station at the close of summer camp nor when a rejected Joe had raced off in anger from the maternity ward to shoot some reaction footage on a police-beating-suspect verdict in LA.
She’d been abandoned before.
Like a watchtower of paper and cardboard comfort, new library books sat stacked on her bedside table. A story set in the Canadian wilderness just reminded her of Joe. No more Joe.
Bulgakov pumped the soft furrows of the duvet with his claws.
Jane stroked his coat. ‘What’s wrong with you, furball? Why haven’t you walked out too?’
She spread the other books across her lap: Ian Rankin, a new Will Self, and a hefty royal biography. Nothing suited. Her Great Wall of Solace threatened to give way.
She hunted down a much-thumbed The Severed Head that she knew made light of adultery. The two draped bedroom windows curtained her off from the cold world outside like two reliable guards. Instead of seeming emptier without the smells and sounds of Joe’s settling his labours to rest, the space contracted. She hadn’t really seen their bedroom—the chipped bookcase, exercise dumbbells, twisted shoe tree and the armchair with its loose stuffing—for years.
The bedside phone rang at eleven. It was Joe. His voice wa
s muffled by remorse or drink as he announced he was spending that night away. Not in Bella’s plumed and downy boudoir, it turned out, but in Fergus’s spare room. If the guest bed matched the Fergoid wardrobe, Joe was facing a lumpy slumber.
‘I think you know what I’m trying to say.’
‘No, Joe, I don’t.’
‘You read my letter?’
‘No.’
She’d dropped it unread into the bin, along with enough slimy day-old quiche to make it impossible to retrieve and told him so.
‘I need to think things through, Jane. Get some perspective. I’ve been really confused lately.’
‘I’m not confused. Telephone Sammie tomorrow.’ Her dry, cool voice surprised her. Would she hold up for another sentence?
‘Look, I’m sorry. Maybe I’ve changed too much without realizing it. I don’t want to hurt you for anything in the world. We have to talk, I guess.’
She had held it all in, but any more conversation would be pushing her luck. ‘Not now. I’m tired. Give Fergus my best. Goodnight.’
Total relief swamped her. A huge calm pervaded the room. A concrete slab of waiting had fallen off her back. She stretched out both arms and legs to touch both sides of the bed. Her feet caught a pair of Joe’s boxer shorts wadded up at the bottom of the sheet. She fished them out and slung them on top of the quiche.
The next morning Sammie came to breakfast with swollen eyes and pushed her cornflakes around in circles. Jane was already on her second pot of coffee, figuring out how to tell Lorraine that Joe had done a bunk at last.
‘Dad called me this morning. He’s with Uncle Fergus. I told him not to stay there too long or he’ll bring home fleas. Isn’t he coming home, Mum?’
‘It’s just for a while.’ She reached for Sammie’s waist to hug her. ‘He loves you more than anything in the world.’
Love and the Art of War Page 14
