Love and the Art of War

by Dinah Lee Küng

  ‘But—’

  Baldwin laid a parchment hand on her plump one. ‘Wait. The Chinese sage Hong Zicheng said, “You must not have a heart that harms people. But a heart that is wary of people is indispensable.” Now as far as I can see, your heart is quite intact. You claim intellectual ownership of your programme idea and it’s your right to determine its outcome. So far, you haven’t told me anything that will harm Joe in the long run, although in the short term, it might disappoint him for his own good. So, as far as my class is concerned, you should ask yourself, is it a damage stratagem, a destructive ploy, a service tactic, or a joke?’

  ‘You’re saying it’s a service stratagem, although it seems like a damage one? It’s all right to try?’

  ‘Consider it homework,’ he smiled.

  ***

  It was astonishing how eager Camille was to set some time aside to see her old friend Jane, think of it, after all these years—anyway, things were slow over the days before Christmas.

  Jane braced herself for a return to her past. She dreaded bumping into one of Joe’s or Bella’s colleagues. She wondered how former office mates might greet the discarded Jane—with indifference or over-effusive pity? It would be hard enough to mingle later, if she got a job. Without one, she was an untouchable.

  She prepared herself for a shock but not a complete Rip Van Winkle trauma. Taxiing up to her old office building, the BBC’s Kensington House, she discovered a sleek businessman’s hotel in its place. Well, that said it all. Joe had so forgotten Jane’s old career there, he’d never mentioned that even Ken House was no more.

  She lost valuable minutes phoning Camille’s office and getting another cab to the White City headquarters. She announced herself to reception and then proceeded down the corridors with a Ninja’s stealth, dodging the doorways of gossipy PA’s and at one point, retreating into the ladies’ like a cat burglar when she spotted the head of Science Programmes, five stone heavier than she remembered him, rounding the corner, beer belly first.

  Even with all the dips and detours, she reached Camille’s office too soon. She sat on a small chair in the outer office while Camille’s personal assistant and secretary silently appraised her dull skirt and sweater.

  Camille finally blew in, a decade older, yet with her hair—no, actually her face—pinned back against her temples as if she were re-entering the stratosphere. She wore a concoction of garments far trendier than Bella’s staple cashmeres. Years ago, Camille might have relied on power suits and expensive jewellery to compete with department heads, but she didn’t need shoulder pads now. A quirky antique brooch fastened her bodice with artful casualness underneath a hand-knitted bolero. Camille must have become a very powerful fifty-year to shun office garb for the dress of an heiress doing graduate studies in Early Norse.

  She’d reverted to her original artsy style. On first meeting Camille at a dinner party given by a World About Us producer—a dinner in honour of an Igbo Nigerian activist—Camille had worn a velvet drop-waist sheath and dramatic make-up of a wealthy adventuress from the 1920’s. ‘Gudrun,’ Jane privately tagged her as she watched Camille demolish the arguments of her dinner partner with the appetite of a hungry lioness. Women in Love. Camille is a D.H. Lawrence heroine so eager for experience she self-destructs.’

  After all these years, Camille’s hair was still the same, a preternaturally shiny Louise Brooks bob with silicone conditioner but smelling, this afternoon, of Bolognese sauce and red wine.

  ‘Jane! Jane! Jane! I was so touched you rang me.’

  In Chanel slippers festooned with black velvet piping, Camille paced her office and chattered away at least five of Jane’s precious allotted twenty minutes. She regaled Jane with details of a shoot in Tunisia that went so badly, they had to helicopter in their own medecin sans frontième under his earphones. He was ose res. ‘So much aggro, you can’t imagine.’

  Camille finally fell back into her leather throne and examined Jane across her broad desk. ‘You’re very brave. I know it’s not easy to ask for work.’

  This was a little rich. How could Camille know anything about it? Camille had worked non-stop at the BBC since coming down from Oxford as a production trainee. She’d climbed up the Beeb’s greasy editorial pole and just stayed put, while dozens like her left to form independent production companies. She was like those bright things who get a fellowship and while everyone else goes down to work in London, looks up one day and finds herself middle-aged, still coaching Oriel undergraduates in Thomas Hardy.

  Camille ran her finger down Jane’s updated but still slight CV and mumbled, ‘I don’t really need to look at this. I know how good you were. These library cuts. Dreadful really, Melvyn was up on his hind legs droning in the House of Lords about it.’

  Camille was stalling. ‘You know darling, this place has really gone to the dogs. Good people come and try to put Documentaries back on top, but they leave after a year or two. Anything we want to do in depth, you know, really commercial film quality, is given to Current Affairs . . . ’ She was lining up ways of giving Jane a gentle no. ‘It’s all about the bottom line now. I mean, these days what is television for when the kids are watching YouTube? That’s what we should be asking ourselves. But do they know that over at Broadcasting House?’

  Camille twiddled nervously with a wrist bangle. ‘I mean they keep handing down new slogans as if Stalinistic thought campaigns could change anything.’ She wiggled quotations marks in the air, ‘Making It Happen? What does that mean when I’m fighting for intelligent programmes? Does that give me better audience share? My God, even Television Centre is up for sale!’

  Jane knew she should exit with dignity. Camille’s performance would soon embarrass them both. But she felt trapped in her chair. Camille chattered, ‘They’re losing 490 slots in the news divisions alone. Delivering Creative Futures, they call it. In other words, Think up a new future for yourself, mate, coz you haven’t got one here.’

  Jane thought of the poor library in Bow now tagged The Ideas Store. Did bureaucracies always cover up their demolition of civilization with jazzy branding?

  ‘Creative Futures . . . Is that the latest slogan?’ Jane whispered. She really must go now.

  ‘Darling, I can’t even recall the latest, they change with every new regime.’ Camille’s subject became the larger Decline of Western Culture. How could she offer work, when the BBC corridors ran red with the slaughter of hundreds of ambitious egos, sacrificed to the Great God of the Digital Future? There was Dantean wailing and gnashing of teeth from every studio.

  Joe’s name hadn’t come up. Out of Camille’s sense of discretion? Embarrassment? Some wacky worry about management guidelines on employing couples? Camille should have remembered she wasn’t dealing with a married couple. Jane was about to remind her, when Camille rose from her chair like a hardened general dismissing the doomed.

  Jane’s twenty-minutes were up.

  Jane sat tight. She forced a breezy smile. ‘Camille. Joe has left me, the Library is cutting back, the Council taxes are in question, my mother’s bladder is acting up, my child is applying to university. I’ll take anything.’

  The force field of Jane’s determined inertia broke through Camille’s defences.

  ‘You don’t mean anything?’ Wouldn’t you feel humiliated with a three-month free-lance contract?’

  ‘Sounds brilliant. I only get three days at the library as it is.’

  ‘You’d work from home? I only ask, as the alternative is sharing an office with a 21-year-old git who thinks he knows everything, thanks to a 2.2 in Media Studies from Loughborough.’

  ‘I don’t need a desk.’

  Camille sank back into her chair. ‘Really? There was an idea, but it was a bit feeble when we tossed it around.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘About posting whole books on the Internet. We’ve already done the Downside of Downloading music but it occurs to me this is a baby you might rescue. You could look into the Author’s Guild who su
ed Google, copyright lawyers, that talking-Kindle thing and audio rights, rhubarb, rhubarb. That brouhaha about something called The Hathi Trust robbing everyone’s copyright—’

  ‘I can start tomorrow.’

  Camille’s carefully re-contoured eyes opened wide. ‘You’ve changed, Jane. You were always clever, but a bit of a doormat. You seem to know what you want now. What did Germaine Greer promise us in our failing years? Oh, right, Crone Power.’

  With malicious warmth, Camille went on, ‘I could almost imagine you giving Bella the cold shoulder in the canteen. Oh, don’t worry. She lives in her own Battersea bubble these days and she might even be moved up to Manchester. With cooking shows, it’s not only the food that has a short shelf life. Mince from a tin? Delia should stick to her beloved footballers.’

  To think Jane had suggested to Bella over lunch months ago that there might be a changing of the guard. Was Camille Harper actually hinting that Bella might really get the boot?

  Camille continued, ‘Course the threat of cancellation isn’t the only thing that has Bella’s knickers in a twist. I heard she’s seeing some fertility man on Harley Street. She’s a ticking womb.’

  With machine-gun relentlessness, Camille was testing Jane’s resilience. The subtext of all these references to Bella was clear: Are you tough enough to come back to work? Girls like us have to compromise with reality, even passing a pregnant Bella in the ladies’.

  Jane didn’t flinch.

  ‘You know, Jane, I’m truly sorry about what happened. Just to get that out of the way, as you’re here.’

  Jane would ride out this Bella humiliation, starting now. ‘It happens.’

  Camille explained, ‘It didn’t mean anything. Not to Joe. It came close, but in the end, he got cold feet. Because of the baby, he said. But I knew better. He was going to get back at you for not marrying him. Then he turned all honourable on me. Well, what did I expect? We’d just finished that Wayward Priests thing.’

  Shock spread across Jane’s brow but Camille ploughed on.

  ‘You know what happens on these shoots, Jane. Anyway, as I said, we didn’t actually do the dirty. When we got to the Big Weekend, he declared his love for you and retreated to the sofa. Such a gentleman! Don’t laugh, Jane. Oh, you’re not laughing . . . well, anyway, I was furious! And I certainly didn’t expect our flirtation would damage his career.’

  ‘How exactly do you mean?’

  ‘Well, don’t you remember? He wasn’t on the job that election night. He was in Birmingham with me—well, on my sofa. That’s why he got bounced to obits. I’m not surprised he packed it in and went independent.’

  Camille’s unexpected confession slammed into Jane like a lorry out of a blind alley. Joe had been bounced from Panorama for missing election coverage because he was almost having it off with Camille? In Birmingham?’

  ‘But now, you come to me,’ Camille cooed. ‘I’m touched. You turn to me. You trust me. This means more than you know, Jane, offering me this closure. Joe still has loads of good ideas, but I had to turn them down, you see? I’ve recovered from sitting in my Janet Regers watching him snore on the sofa, but . . . I didn’t want to worry you.’

  Words froze in Jane’s throat. Now she recalled phone calls in the night from mystified reporters looking for Joe and production assistants hanging up when they heard he wasn’t home.

  ‘God, I feel better! It’s all right now, isn’t it? Let’s look at his famine pitch. Mind you, I don’t care for the book tie-in.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Jane squeaked.

  Camille fished around the bottom of her in-tray. ‘You know. Bella’s recipes mixing milk powder, aid supplements and dried roots. Here it is: Cooking from the Refugee Larder. I ask you. Does that woman have a scintilla of shame?’

  Jane’s thoughts raced elsewhere. How would Joe feel if he knew that all of his pitches were queered by Camille and her colleagues out of worry for Jane’s feelings?

  Then she thought of that comment about Bella’s ticking womb.

  Bella wanted Joe’s baby? The devil’s spawn, indeed, with Bella casting poor old Joe as Rosemary’s Sperm Bank. Primeval anger surged through Jane. Riding on Joe’s filming talent and filching Jane’s famine outline—these were mere hors d’oeuvres compared to the theft Bella really desired. Jane’s last hesitation about Christmas spirit disappeared.

  She leaned across Camille’s desk and smiled at her new ally. ‘Actually, Camille, before we go over your Internet idea, and I am taking that assignment, I’d like to talk to you about that famine pitch . . . ’

  ***

  Stratagem Twenty-three was really easy once you got started. Without further compunction, she telephoned Joe’s brother as soon as she got home.

  ‘Joe wouldn’t dare bring this woman along, Sterling, and it would be just bearable for me to know that if we three, well four with Lorraine, if we can’t be together for Christmas, at least Sammie would have a real break with her father and genuine relatives.’

  It was marvellous the way Sterling said yes—he’d love to see little Sammie again. He’d talk to Susan tonight and put it to his little bro’ tomorrow. Joe would do the right thing, at least on this one. The small distant ally came through.

  Putting down the phone, Jane slumped her head on the kitchen table in relief. She had hated the idea of Bella waking up with Joe on Christmas morning, showering Sammie with expensive gifts, and then, of course, feeding them something extra-terrestrial for ‘their first family Christmas together:’ roasted swans in cherry-meringue sauce or buffalo filet mignons garnished with Perigord cheese curdled by the virgin breath of cloistered nuns.

  A flood of goddamn holiday season tears welled up, unleashed by tapping into an unexplored well of old-fashioned Canadian solidarity. Jane felt the larger spirit of Christmas, the balm of forgiveness, and the strength of clan solidarity. Sterling and Susan, with their modest dreams of new snowblowers in December followed by January blow-out bargains on winter tyres for the delivery fleet, had accepted long ago that they lived on the very margins of Joe’s glamorous television life in London. That Sterling didn’t hesitate at such short notice to host his brother and niece for a spell was kindness beyond the London Gilchrists’ deserving.

  Sammie looked over her shoulder as she collected warm clothes from the back of her wardrobe and jabbered on and on, about skating and real maple syrup. The days moved by swiftly, as Jane spent the break from Baldwin’s class and library duties running up and down Oxford Street getting presents to shove into Sammie’s bag. Joe could hardly say no, and with an almost miraculous ease, an airplane carried father and daughter off for one whole blessed week without Bella.

  Christmas morning finally dawned on the square.

  Jane heard her mother’s marabou slip-ons tattooing back and forth across the ceiling as she readied lunch for her daughter. There would be chilled prawns in tomato-chilli sauce, Five-Minute Beef Wellington clipped from a McCall’s magazine abandoned backstage in 1972, and Rocky Road ice cream smothered in warm Hershey’s chocolate sauce.

  Lying alone in bed, Jane started the merriment with a very delicious weep. It felt like Christmases of long ago, Christmases spent taking the coats of understudies who had nowhere else to go and pouring Manhattans and Bull Shots for tipsy ‘aunties’ while dodging the caresses of fawning ‘uncles’.

  Come to think of it, had there ever been a Christmas with only Lorraine—no uncles, no understudies, no Joe? Well, it was about time, Jane thought, as she carried her mother’s requisite Youth Dew gift set upstairs. There stood Lorraine in a lamé caftan mixing up cranberry martinis. The rosy prawns waited on their cushions of crushed ice next to hot nibbles made by slathering Campbell’s condensed mushroom soup on slices of white bread which were rolled up and grilled into bacon-wrapped bundles studded with toothpicks.

  It looked absolutely delicious, a virtual take-away from the Rainbow Room circa 1963. Jane looked out her mother’s dormer window and saw, like a benediction rare for NW1—a sprinkling of
falling snow.

  Anyway, there was one further consolation. If Jane’s day was a territorial flight into the past, Bella’s Nösel celebration sans Sammie and Joe to admire her imported Blue Spruce designer tree was surely a signal defeat.

  Chapter Twenty-four, Jia Dao Fa Guo

  (Attack Guo by a Borrowed Path)

  Jane felt no victory flush when reading Camille’s e-mail promise to rustle up a short-term contract for breadcrumb pay. One knew exactly what such temporary stints were worth during a recession. It would be up to Jane to prove through hard work and even harder lobbying that she could keep that series afloat or contribute something better after March.

  Camille’s ‘closure’ over Joe surely had a sell-by date.

  Jane still felt nettled by the humiliation of Camille’s back-handed confession, but less burning fury than the kind of indignation a librarian feels handed back a book that’s a decade overdue—the news was too stale to provoke rage.

  What she did see now was that Joe had more emotion invested in that proposal by her hospital bed than she had ever appreciated. He’d made it sound like an offhand suggestion, phrased as a joke that deserved nothing more than her scoffing mistrust. But if Camille’s memory was even vaguely intact, Jane had scorched Joe’s straightforward pride right into a flirtation costing him his professional reputation. She had not understood at the time that Joe was so proud.

  Why, even Mr Darcy took Elizabeth Bennett’s first rejection on the chin and proposed a second time.

  The next day, Jane was running Thursday errands up in Hampstead when her brisk step slowed outside Daunt’s. She stared unseeing at the new books display. Her spirits diminished to a morsel of shame. She had to admit, Camille’s revelation about Joe wasn’t a shock, more a revealed truth she’d elected to ignore so many years ago. Hit with catty rumours about Joe and Camille drifting down Ken House’s draughty corridors, Jane had ducked and hid from everyone—including herself.