Love and the Art of War

by Dinah Lee Küng

  Exhausted, they lay at last quite still on the sofa. Dan brushed Jane’s hair from out of her mouth and eyes. Thank goodness he wasn’t the sort of guy who did something contrived, like kissing your eyelids or asking stupid questions. He tucked her curls behind one ear and then the other, which was what she was dying to do anyway.

  Jane rose as gracefully as a short, middle-aged and—regrettably at this moment—not very fit, woman could leave her couch of love. Was Dan gentleman enough to not eyeball her self-conscious glide out of the room? She fetched Joe’s laundered bathrobe from the bedroom closet and tossed it to Dan. Knowing Joe had bought a new one to swank around Bella’s flat didn’t bother her tonight.

  The plumbing groaned behind the wall as the water coursed over her. Dan was a sexy man. Dripping wet, she felt like ringing up Joe to tell him of a nice new body in her bed—well, on her sofa. She rubbed her dimpled thighs until they were pink and dried off her soft shoulders. How Rubenesque.

  She found Dan watching TV. Although he kissed her again as she folded, tousled, perfumed and kimono’ed, into his waiting arms, did Dan really think the eleven o’clock news was ideal after-play? It was early days for the damp towel of suburban domesticity, but Dan watched so intently, so Jane stared, too. A crisp-suited blonde read to them, ‘Failed Terrorist Attack on the Circle Line, Two Arrests, One More Under Suspicion.’

  Jane gasped at the shots of floodlit police cordons, sirens and curious crowds pressed against police tape opposite the Tottenham Court Road Station.

  Dan fell back against the sofa cushions, gratification spreading across his serviceable features. Jane hadn’t witnessed so much satisfaction since Lorraine saw Sylvia Fingerlake fall flat on her drunken bottom in the middle of a Tony Awards ceremony, although Dan expressed his elation differently.

  ‘Bingo.’

  She whispered, ‘Our bookstore people?’

  ‘Yup. There they are, stupid turkeys.’ Three mug shots flashed on the screen in a photographic bewilderment that would make Pollyanna resemble a heroin smuggler. One was none other than the young man who had addressed her on the kerb.

  ‘I saw him coming out of the bookstore last October. He talked to me! I would never have guessed, unless . . . ’

  She stared at Dan. ‘You knew they were going to bomb the station and you stayed here and—I don’t understand.’

  ‘Yes, you do, if you think about it.’ His gentle hand ran her wet mop up off the back of her neck. ‘You know, I love your hair. I can’t tell you how often I’ve been listening to old Baldwin drone on and on, and just imagined doing this to these curls.’ He bent over and kissed her neck, ‘That’s the perfume you wore when we had lunch in Camden.’

  Joe had given it to Jane for her birthday, back when Joe bought presents she actually wanted—not just books on a three-for-two deal. Jane had wondered if her present was the third book.

  The television news scene shifted to a stand-up report in front of Scotland Yard. Jane murmured, ‘That boy seemed so nice, I thought he was your informer, Gilbert. To think he was one of the bad guys.’

  And to think that Joe or Sammie or Lorraine or—oh dear, you couldn’t think that way—you had to worry that any human being might have been hurt or killed. Then you realized that somewhere on the planet, someone else’s child or parent was injured or killed. If not a rider on the Central Line, then some poor sod in a hellhole you’d never know about . . .

  ‘That is Gilbert Sullivan.’ Dan went into the kitchen. He settled for a banana, peeling it slowly and watching Jane with an amused expression. With a formidable chest covered in dark hair, he was like a forest animal, more badger than buck. Joe’s torso had gone slack, weighed down over the years with long shoots, bad mattresses, late editing nights, and irregular meals. Then Jane felt a tender rush in absentia for Joe’s familiar body.

  ‘I’m so confused.’ She wrapped her arms around her knees and took in the news report—the names, the talking heads, and the wrap-up without any better comprehension of why Dan’s ‘man’ would blow up London.

  ‘Jane, didn’t I tell you, I did my homework with a team this week?’

  He was pulling on his slacks with no more grace than Jane had mustered on her naked exit for the shower. There were moments when experience couldn’t compensate for the clumsy readjustments of Hominem Post-Coitus. When his zipper snagged on his shirttail, Jane felt a swanlike superiority.

  ‘I got it! You changed the beams. You changed something—wait, wait—you knew the explosion wouldn’t go off. You knew nobody would get hurt. Of course! Because you changed their chemicals, didn’t you? And you’ve only arrested Gilbert as a cover.’

  She got out eggs to scramble, whisking them with cream and some sherry. ‘And the whole time these boys were setting off to blow up London, you were making love like that?’ She laughed and asked, ‘How are you going to share your homework next week with Keith and Kevin and the other two?’

  ‘Making love? I suspect they’ve mastered that without instruction from Baldwin or me. Except Winston. I worry about him.’

  ‘I meant your Stratagem Twenty-five.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll make up something else. I always do.’ Dan sighed. ‘And anyway, the game’s not over. That was the fun part. They’re jerks, not even Grade B terrorists. Just wannabes. But the man that set them up is bound to be furious, losing three guys to interrogators, even losers like his New Jersey recruit. The boss, whoever he is, will want to recover his face, to protect any other cells.’

  ‘Other cells? Other plots?’

  Dan nodded. ‘Even the good imam can’t know everything. Other cells might not be such clowns.’

  ‘What stratagem can you use against that?’ Jane said, her whisk slowing down as she took in the implications. ‘Await the Exhausted Enemy?’

  ‘The NYPD doesn’t pay per diem in British pounds for me to sit and wait.’

  Joe hated paprika. Dan loved it. She added a tablespoon of Hungarian Hot. ‘Beat the grass to scare them into betraying themselves?’

  Dan turned sombre. ‘London’s a pretty big lawn for any snake to hide in. And we hear rumours of a pretty big target. It might be only a matter of days or hours. Umm, that sure looks delicious.’

  Jane smiled, ‘So do you. You know, I think you put your trousers back on too soon.’

  Chapter Twenty-six, Zhi Sang, Ma Huai

  (Point at the Mulberry and Abuse the Acacia)

  Late into the night, Jane and Dan snuggled and snogged, a pleasure for new couples that knows no age limit—though when the couple is older, the chatter may be more prolonged and the physical interruptions less frequent.

  It was bliss for Jane to be in bed for the first time in the last six months without tormented thoughts of Joe and Bella. She could finally stop thinking of herself as the shortest side of a triangle.

  They named their favourite cartoonists, the most disgusting ice cream flavours ever invented, how they voted, and the years they hadn’t bothered.

  Deeper feelings surfaced amid the rumpled sheets. Jane confided her worries about Sammie’s self-destructive gestures and Dr Landis’s encouraging treatment. Dan talked about daily life on the police force amidst the tribulations and aftermath of divorce—and with a conspiratorial trust—what Dan’s London colleagues would do next about terrorist plots.

  He rested comfortably against the headboard, holding her in his arms. ‘The thing to remember is that anybody looking forward to blowing himself up must be off-kilter. You’ve got to spot that.’

  ‘But some of them are smart—doctors and pilots—training to be inconspicuous?’

  ‘Nothing to do with education. Education’s not the same thing as wisdom or sanity. There’s something in their soul—like a piece of gravel in their shoe—that throws them off. Makes them walk funny, so to speak, and you’ve got to spot it. They’re needy or megalomaniac or just young. There’re a lot of dumb clucks out there looking for a father figure. Not that everybody wearing a robe is an asshole. Thank God our fri
endly imam tipped us off. We just did the leg work.’

  ‘You can’t be that modest.’

  ‘I don’t want to spook you, but tonight was chicken feed. Amateur hour. For about ten minutes, you pat yourself on the back, go whoopee, something didn’t go off, hundreds of people weren’t maimed. But that wears off pretty quick. All in a day’s work.’ He hugged her. ‘You’re the real buzz of my news cycle.’

  Jane pressed her head into the crook of his shoulder and echoed into the darkness, ‘All in a day’s work? That doesn’t make me feel better.’

  Did Dan hope to stay the night? That would be nice, but odd. What if she started snoring? She fought off her drowsiness. ‘If you can’t use the snake tactic to find out what they’re going to do next, didn’t Baldwin say that Twenty-six was the only disclosure stratagem left? You could lay charges to flush out the real culprits behind this gang?’

  He sighed: ‘Don’t tell Baldwin, but I think ancient Chinese wisdom might take a back seat here to good old-fashioned surveillance, twenty-four-seven.’ He nuzzled her ear. ‘I feel nineteen years old with you.’

  She loved chatting to Dan about Baldwin’s class. Although everyone had done their homework this week, all but one had preferred Stratagem Twenty-five, the one about shifting beams and pillars, or proposals and inventories in order to wrong-foot their enemies. Nobody had used Twenty-six, no matter how hard Baldwin tried stoking interest:

  ‘As one of the “indirect action stratagems,” Pointing at the Mulberry can be quite subtle, Why the mulberry? Its leaves are used to feed silkworms. In China, the mulberry is very often compared to the acacia, a far nobler specimen. Your objective might be to criticize the acacia but in a way that only those around it understand your attack. Or the opposite, to convey criticism in such an oblique way that only the acacia itself takes your point to heart.’

  ‘What if everybody, including your noble acacia, misses the point?’ Keith asked.

  ‘Isn’t this just another version of killing the chicken to scare the monkeys?’ Nigel pointed out.

  ‘Your target might not be your competitor, Nigel, or your enemy, Keith, but your friendly consumer base.’

  ‘I get it. I’ll have a go,’ Kevin perked up. ‘Used to be, if you targeted the teen market with sporty clothes, they’d go for it. But recently the younger girls started buying the career line, you know, office gear. So we’ve restyled the older stuff with a hint of vintage—Paris Resistance photos, fifties neck scarfs, old photos of the Royals on 1920’s hunting jollies, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Exactly! Twenty-six is about innuendo, analogies,’ Baldwin said. ‘You see, Kevin didn’t photograph teen-agers wearing business suits to school. He insinuated the romance of dressing more formally into a hidden message just within his targets’ reach.’

  ‘Too hidden from me. This one’s too subtle,’ Winston moaned.

  ‘The implied message of Twenty-six might be indirect criticism, or strength and resolve, or as in Kevin’s case, the lure of nostalgic sophistication.’

  At which point, Winston dropped his head on to his desk with a strangled gurgle. Dan patted his spikey locks. ‘Hang in there, li’l buddy.’

  ‘Pretend to pursue one objective while going for another—or even its opposite.’

  Baldwin tried one last angle. ‘Think of it as the shadowboxing tactic. Or chaos theory? You know, the butterfly flapping its wings in China causing a rain storm in Los Angeles?’

  Thus Stratagem Twenty-six had concluded on a shared note of bewilderment for six colleagues that morphed into a wonderful evening for two new lovers. Dan’s eyes were closed and his breath slowing as he fell into a doze. Jane stroked his chest and leaning on one elbow, whispered, ‘Did you really need Lorraine’s window to watch the bookstore tonight?’

  ‘Nope. Stratagem One.’ He mumbled happily into his pillow. ‘Lucky for me you haven’t reviewed much for your final.’

  ***

  Jane’s eyes popped open Saturday morning to the racket of Lorraine and Joe squabbling just outside the very bedroom where Dan now lay, a contented love bear snorting beside her. A carpet of plush stubble darkened his jowls. There was some touching moistness on his lips, and only an unkind soul would say he was actually drooling.

  On the other side of the door, Lorraine jangled her set of keys like the watchdog Cerberus shaking his chains in warning. ‘The child can’t remember everything, Joe, not all the time, not with all this switching back and forth between houses, not to mention slaving as an unpaid assistant to the Queen of the Night! It was bound to happen, so don’t raise your voice to me.’

  ‘You’re not helping, Lorraine. Sammie, how many times have I told you to keep lists? I don’t have time for this.’

  ‘I know it was here, Dad. I’d almost finished it when I left it on my desk. Or maybe . . . ’

  Lorraine: ‘Can you call one of your friends, darling?’

  Joe: ‘Yes! Ring up a girlfriend before dragging me all the way across the city.’

  Sammie: ‘Do I have any time for friends? Now I spend my entire life on the tube!’ Lorraine’s reference to the Queen of the Night then triggered Sammie to give her rendition of Mozart’s famous aria. Her high C’s at ear-splitting pitch blotted out her father and grandmother’s row.

  Joe only shouted louder and Lorraine tried to hoot them both down. Tra-la-la’ing, Sammie kept hunting for her Latin textbook in her old room.

  ‘Thanks very much, Lorraine. Sammie, we got the point. Now, shut up. Did you take her to see that?’

  ‘The Magic Flute is part of her education. Kenneth Branagh’s work is important.’

  ‘More important than mine, you mean. Yes, I know, Lorraine, I’ve never been an artiste like you or an intellectual like your daughter. By the way, how’s your no-name royal impersonation coming along?’

  Jane lifted her head from her pillow and calculated exactly how wide the yards and how thick the lumber barricading mother, child, and Joe on the nether side of the door from Dan’s furry rump exposed by the duvet slipping gently off their steaming percale love nest.

  The quarrel hit a pause for air while Sammie’s singing tooted solo from the depths of her cluttered closet. Jane heard shoeboxes hitting the other side of the wall.

  Joe’s voice broke the quiet with an ominous, ‘By the way, where is Jane?’

  ‘Jane?’

  ‘Yes. Jane. Your daughter.’

  ‘Am I my daughter’s keeper?’

  ‘No. She’s yours. Where is she?’

  ‘She’s due at work by ten. Maybe she went early. Sammie, hurry up! Come upstairs, Joe, and I’ll fix you something. A Bloody Mary?’

  Nearly ten! Jane slipped out of bed and fumbled through her discarded jacket for her mobile. She would ‘ring’ from the library. Then she realized the phone was in her bag hanging right now from the coat stand in the hall.

  ‘Lorraine. Jane’s bag is hanging right there.’

  ‘She has more than one purse, Joe.’

  ‘Yeah. Sure. And each one contains, let’s see, here’s her wallet, Oyster Card, mobile, reading glasses.’

  Joe bellowed through the bedroom door, ‘JANE, COME OUT OF THERE AND GET YOUR DAUGHTER SORTED OUT! WE’RE DUE ON SET NOW!’

  Dan leapt up, bug-eyed, all his manly assets shrivelling in seconds from languid torpor into panicked nothingness. Jane was sure she could see the wooden bedroom door bending in its frame under the force of Joe’s pounding. Suddenly, Joe stopped thumping. After a few seconds of murderous suspense, the doorknob turned, and the door swung freely open.

  Joe stared at Dan and then at Jane.

  Standing behind Joe in her nightie, Lorraine shuddered at the sight of two naked bodies. She scuttled away like a crab in powder-blue lace.

  ‘Great,’ Joe heaved. ‘My old bedroom. My old bed.’

  ‘Your old Jane.’ It wasn’t fair to expect a rejoinder out of Dan, more exposed than anyone else. If ever there was call for a gold-embossed ceremonial robe garnished with two-foot plu
mes or a flame-coloured satin train, this was the moment, but Chinese wiles didn’t supply wardrobe changes.

  Joe’s breath exploded in short warning snorts. He strutted back and forth like a peacock and spouted like Vesuvius. If he had been a deer with antlers, they would now be knocking against Dan’s head. It was a mating standoff worthy of David Attenborough’s cameras.

  Dan rose to the occasion. He straightened himself, one foot forward, in a Florentine pose somewhat David-like in its naked pride. He held this duelling posture until Jane tossed him a threadbare bed throw. He wrapped it around his waist and braced himself again, a proud barbarian girding his loins in cherry mohair fuzz. Even under challenge without the benefits of a strong coffee, he mustered a respectable, ‘Morning, Joe. Nice mattress,’ barely audible over Sammie’s squeaky soprano, ‘Rejected . . . Neglected . . . Unprotected . . . ’ Her shrill voice trailed off again as her search led her through the cookbook crannies of the kitchen.

  Dan gestured towards the bathroom with a polite, ‘Do you mind?’ It wasn’t elegant, but at least he had the style to navigate through Joe’s fumisphere without the indignity of placing hands over private parts. No, his vulnerable bits swinging away under great loops of pink yarn, Dan waited for Joe to step aside.

  Joe hissed at his back. ‘Is this what you want your daughter to see? Some hairy ape coming naked out of our bedroom?’

  ‘Our bedroom? Reality check! Earth to Joe? Earth to Joe?’

  Dan flushed the toilet. Jane hoped the threat of outright violence had passed with the gestures of banal human need. What would Baldwin advise? Not that Baldwin would ever find himself in Jane’s predicament. This was a pretty tacky dilemma for Baldwin’s erudition. His romantic triangles would feature smoking jackets and Noel Coward quips. Instead of being a seedy Sinologist with fantasies of solving other people’s problems with a few proverbs, better he were Gandalf the White descending on his stallion Shadowmail to vanquish all awkwardness . . .