Love and the Art of War

by Dinah Lee Küng

  Indeed, Lorraine looked every inch the Princess. The wash-and-dry bleached bob was now a platinum bouffant topping bejewelled, be-hosed, and be-heeled blue blood. The complexion was powdered to a porcelain sheen and the red lips covered with pearly gloss. The putty nose was regal but just short of beaky.

  ‘Listen to this.’ Lorraine’s tightened her jaw and clenched her teeth. ‘I’m so gled to be here, among you ell, on this very, very, emportent occasion.’

  ‘Works for me, but I’ve never heard Princess Alexandra. Do you know what she really sounds like?’

  ‘Yep, thanks to archives fished out by Lloyd’s cousin over at Bush House. She was recorded during a ribbon-cutting in Yemen in 1961, to break wind over some new town.’

  ‘She might have changed in fifty years.’

  ‘Royals don’t chenge their eccent. Their range might drop a bit. Now tomorrow the car for Bermondsey picks me up at eleven—’

  ‘Oh, Lorraine, I’ll miss that. I have to be at the library tomorrow—’

  ‘I thought it was closed on Tuesdays. Oh, don’t worry, you’ll hear all about it when you pick me up. You wouldn’t want me to make my exit in a carriage pulled off by mice, would you? Here are the directions. Be there by two. We’ll have a late lunch, a real post-matinee blowout. You know, darling, I’m actually nervous. How can that be? Stage fright over an audience that can’t see me! Now I’m just stepping out to the High Street to give these heels more breaking in. Give the locals another shock. I’ll try the newsagent next. One last dress rehearsal.’

  Lorraine bestowed an aristocratic nod to their neighbour as she exited on to the kerb.

  ‘Friend of your mother’s?’ Sir Bernard asked Jane.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jane. ‘Theatre nobility.’

  ***

  The Bookworms’ Frosty contest was swiftly underway. Camden Authority offered no objection and Rupert’s old Winchester mate Colin planted a nice little mention in The Sunday Telegraph. Now they’d gone public, the pressure was on. They whittled away at the short story contenders like pros—but all the Booker badinage and Orange orations couldn’t hold the fort against Carla’s obstinate defence of ‘My First Husband’ by one Mrs Evelyn Smith.

  Rupert battled for ‘Text Me Now and Forever’ by retired civil servant Peter Ffaulks. Rupert felt that Smith’s story of a marriage cut short by war was too old-fashioned and too sentimental to attract the publicity Chalkwood Library needed. ‘The Frosties Contest should be all about proving we’re grey-headed but with it.’

  ‘Indeed, Rupert?’ Carla retorted. ‘I know we want to make a splash but with all those e-mails in unreadable spelling and text messages, it’s too trendy to be credible as our choice.’

  ‘Anything we choose is credible, Carla, if Mr Ffaulks is our age,’ Rupert protested.

  Jane worried a bit. ‘Chris ran this workshop alone. We’re taking his word for it that these authors were genuinely old. Anyone reading ‘Text Me’ might suspect a ringer of thirty crashed our list, just for the publicity.’

  ‘I agree with Carla,’ Catherine shouted. ‘My First Husband moved me to tears. I read it over three times before I passed it to Alma. I was determined to find fault with it. Here are my notes:’ Catherine fished out her reading glasses. ‘Simplicity of language. Sincerity. Authenticity. Believable dialogue.’

  Catherine continued, ‘Not to mention searing honesty about the loneliness of all those years after he died. She doesn’t sentimentalize the facts, Rupert. The husband died an ugly, wasteful death. Because that’s what you did in our day. Did your duty.’

  ‘Thank you, Catherine.’ Jane glanced at her watch. ‘I’m afraid we’re not moving ahead. We’ve tallied it twice now, but we can’t end with a tie. Everyone’s second choice is ‘The Examined Life.’ It’s well crafted, but just a bit too self-conscious to be my choice. I don’t like being so aware of language that I can’t lose myself in the story.’

  They went at it through two more brews of Rupert’s herbal tea without heeding the passing hours.

  Mrs Wilting tried, politely, to deflect Carla from championing the Smith story, but for once, Jane was unimpressed with Ruth’s superior ear for language or pace. Carla shook the other Bookworms’ opinions away from them like a dog yanking at a soggy towel. Even Jane lost her patience with Ruth. Why was she using her last ounce of strength to make sure that Carla’s choice took no prize?

  Finally, Carla blew a gasket. ‘I’m afraid I just have to spit out my mind this once without any sugary coating. No, Jane, I will say it. Ruth, you don’t know the first thing about good writing. You never have. Sorry, but it has to be said. A “good read” just isn’t enough. You’re only pretending to enjoy all that modernistic rubbish, just to side with Rupert against me. Or to prove you’re not ready for the crypt.’

  There was an awful silence. Ruth looked close to breaking down. Carla braced herself to take on the rest of them, but no one defended their most aged colleague. The looming deadline of last trains, the eyestrain caused by the overhead strip lighting, and the hour for bedtime medications approached.

  There was only time for one last vote.

  Reaching into Alma’s rain hat, Jane unfolded their ballots with discretion.

  ‘One for ‘Text Me.’ A second for “Text Me.’ One for ‘My First Husband,’ and a second for Mrs Smith. A third for Mrs Smith and. a fourth for Mrs Smith. That’s it. Two to four. First Prize goes to Mrs Evelyn Smith. Whew!’

  ‘Read us a bit again, Jane, just to formalize our decision,’ Alma entreated, to give Ruth Wilting and Rupert time to recover from defeat.

  Mother said she might cling to the leftover facts, to help her endure later on. As soon as they’d left the registry, he’d held her tight against his serge and gold buttons, and asked with flippant bravado, ‘So how’s the first wife?’ He was her first lover and her first husband. Now Clarissa resolved to content herself, for the rest of her life, to reading of suffering or loss and to experience the rest of her life only through books. To live a quiet life, a shadow’s life among books. That kind of contentment had fallen out of fashion these days, but it wouldn’t be passive. Her energy would go to keeping the books alive and for his sake, to prevent yet more death of the spirit.

  That first afternoon Clarissa turned the heel of a sock he would never wear. She tried not to notice how the hardly-worn band on her finger lolled around her slender finger as she counted stitches.

  As the years passed, the ring held faster to her thickening finger. Finally, as its gold wore down, a fraction of a gram with each decade, time lightened the pain in her heart. She grew frailer and the ring fell loose again, but was ever that much lighter. Pain survived and promises were lost, but both fell into a bearable balance.

  Jane looked up. ‘I love that phrase, “a bearable balance.” Too bad the pensioners’ workshop fell apart but next year we’ll have time, for a long list.’

  ‘And a real publicity campaign.’ Rupert had loved his few days as promoter.

  ‘But at least we have a winner. Well done!’

  They needed to get the word out fast, to locate and congratulate Mrs Evelyn Smith and confirm the celebrity author. Rupert would start calling his contacts tonight.

  Alma scraped up the last bits of cake icing. ‘Why Ruth, don’t sit there so angry. Carla didn’t mean that bit about the crypt.’

  ‘I put it too strongly,’ Carla huffed, the head girl generous in victory. ‘Sorry, Wilting.’

  Catherine grabbed Mrs Wilting’s hand and yelled, ‘Feeling all right, dear?’

  Tears poured out of Ruth Wilting’s rheumy eyes in salty torrents. She’d lost control of her hands. Her right hand kept turning and twisting the old gold band on her left.

  ‘Oh, good Lord,’ Carla barked. ‘What’s got into you? Don’t be so wet! I apologized, didn’t I?’

  Should Jane call a doctor? She stared at Ruth’s compulsive fingers twisting round and round and the terrified expression on her crumbling face. Or—with sudden dismay and deli
ght, Jane recalled Ruth’s admissions of ‘snatches of writing,’ her allusions to ‘bits tucked away in a drawer.’

  It couldn’t be. Chris should have warned her.

  ‘Carla, shut up. Ruth. Evelyn Smith is your nom de plume, isn’t it? You were in Chris’s workshop last year. You wrote this story?’

  Mrs Wilting nodded.

  ‘You’re the winner?’ Carla bellowed.

  Alma rounded on Carla. ‘And all these years you’ve treated her as if she had nothing left in her head, nothing at all.’

  ‘Well, she certainly fooled me, sitting there, half-vacant every Monday night,’ Carla sputtered.

  Rupert hissed like a wizened tomcat, ‘It’s called modesty, Carla.’

  Ruth’s shakes robbed her of speech. Jane held the frail woman in her arms for a long minute until Mrs Wilting managed, ‘Oh, thank you. Thank you. Of course, I must recuse myself from the competition. The Frosty must go to the one about the professor. It’s enough, well, it’s really wonderful, actually, to know that I won in your eyes. Thank you, Carla.’

  Rupert insisted, ‘You shall present the award, Mrs Wilting, as you are the first choice.’ They pestered her with questions: How long had she worked on her story? What was her ‘process?’ How many rewrites did it take? Had she ever tried to get published? Were there more stories, even enough for a collection?’

  Ruth took some pills to steady her heart. With notable humility, Carla held Ruth’s walker as the older lady struggled into her coat. Rupert and Alma insisted on escorting her the short distance to her front door. Jane watched them go, worried that their decision would overwhelm its author. If Jane had felt over the last few months that she herself might waste away from the low simmer of an aching heart, she recognized that Ruth was near drowning in happiness. What a triumph for the tiny woman who had prevailed over Carla’s blustery expertise by instinctive use of Baldwin’s stratagem of feigned harmlessness.

  Later that night the Bookworms learned, one by one, that Jane’s worst fear was borne out. The dependable Mrs Goodchild, the ‘home help’ who first urged her elderly charge to get some fresh air away from her desk, had discovered Mrs Wilting in her bed, her frail heart stopped.

  ‘My First Husband’ would take First Prize after all. Rupert rushed the news to editors’ desks.

  By early Tuesday morning, The Telegraph’s graveyard shift had signed off on the lead for the Arts Section announcing the late Mrs Edward Wilting had won the first-ever Senior Story Prize awarded by the Camden Library Authority’s community outreach programme. Rupert had supplied the subs with a framed photo of the shy bride over-towered by her Edward in uniform discovered at Ruth’s bedside.

  Not every Bookworm was pleased. Carla pounded on the locked door of Chalkwood Library after breakfast, shouting through the window, ‘Jane, did you see this morning’s Telegraph?’

  ‘Oh, Carla, isn’t it marvellous? With passages from the story, a mention for our branch and that quote Rupert got beforehand from Lady Antonia Fraser about next year’s contest! How did he do it?’

  ‘Won by the late Mrs Wilting, indeed! Like we gave our prize to a corpse! Next year Rupert gives our exclusive to The Guardian!’

  Jane laughed. ‘Camden called this morning to say that Chris can reopen the senior short-story workshop with the motto, Stories From the Oldest and Boldest.’

  ‘Humpf. Well, better that than The-Kiss-of-Death Prize!’

  Jane printed out the Telegraph’s story. She centred it on the display board next to a sign-up sheet for the next workshop.

  True to her love of the written word, Ruth would have been the first to twinkle at what so outraged Carla: The Telegraph had been kind to the Bookworms, true, but the editors had had their mischief with the headline: UNEXPECTED FROST FOR WILTING AUTHOR.

  Chapter Thirty-three, Fan Wen Ji

  (Turn the Enemy’s Agents against Him)

  Tuesday morning had mingled enough excitement with sadness for a week, but Jane still faced a full day of grim library duties. The freakishly warm weather threatened rain and lightning.

  All over England, libraries faced closure. Forty libraries across the country had locked their doors for good in 2007 and the disappearances only worsened with the coalition government’s current cuts. In the West Midlands, Dudley Council marched another five on to the tumbril. Southampton readers protested a cut in library hours, the Croydon Council slashed another £12,000 from its budget. In Dorset, community volunteers were all that stood in the way of the closure of thirteen branches. In Kent, seventy-seven librarians received letters saying their jobs were going.

  If 2011 was bad, 2012 looked worse. Dozens more branches lay exposed. When even the minister responsible for libraries asked how the needs of literate residents would be met, there seemed little that humble part-time librarians could do.

  A letter for Jane arrived in the branch’s post.

  ‘Well, we knew it was coming. It was just a question of which arrived first—my letter or Mr Gumble’s one-man pod. So Chris, I guess it’s over to you.’

  ‘I didn’t study library science to run a DVD outlet. Look at this, Jane,’ Chris read The Daily Mail: ‘The Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families declares this The Year of the Book. He says parents should spend ten minutes a day reading to their children. Reading what? Page Three?’

  ‘Chris, read the rest of my letter. Not satisfied with cutting me, they’ve ordered us to cull twenty per cent of our books. I mean, the ones we can’t sell.’

  ‘Which books?’

  ‘The letter doesn’t say.’ Jane’s eyes widened. ‘So there goes GB Shaw, and Keats.’

  ‘Voltaire, Turgenev, Lawrence.’

  ‘Trollope, Ibsen, Eliot, Poe, and Stevenson and, oh, Chris, how do we decide?’ The stacks echoed Jane’s despair. Her last act as a staff librarian was the destruction of books?

  Chris put a hand on her shoulder. ‘It’s Sophie’s Choice. Condemn some of your children. How about a full-fledged auto-da-fe with Barbara Bradford? Or do we do a Ray Bradbury? Call a book-burning squad in flameproof suits for a controlled blaze? Death to the Underborrowed?’

  ‘Chris, do you remember how Fahrenheit 451 ended? People like you memorizing Norman Mailer and Ian McEwan, and me repeating Emma over and over to myself, Human Books hiding out in a forest, keeping literature alive?’

  ‘Jane, what was that discord tactic you mentioned the other day? Turn the Enemy’s Agents Against Him?’

  ‘Bribe enemy agents, feign ignorance, feed false information, but I don’t see—?’

  ‘Lead the enemy into his own trap. Do you realize, the Authority has just given us an excuse to cleanse this branch of all the dross we truly, madly, deeply loathe.’

  Behind locked doors, they set to their task, ripping the covers off celebrity bios, Dukan diet books, and anything embossed with shiny letters. Children’s classics were sacrosanct.

  ‘We keep Lord of the Flies,’ Chris passed judgement, ‘Catcher in the Rye, The Diary of Anne Frank.’

  ‘Replace the enemy’s flags and banners with your own,’ Jane chanted.

  The rain subsided and the skies cleared a little. Just before eleven, Jane raced to the top of the square in time to wave good luck to ‘Princess Alexandra’ headed to her ‘appearance’ at the Blind People Factory.

  ‘Here I go, darling!’ Lorraine shouted across the square. Jane exulted to see a doppelgänger of the Princess waving her royal salute across the square as a dark sedan passed Jane still panting as she reached the bollards a few steps from Joop’s painted angel.

  ‘Break a leg,’ Jane shouted. ‘Pick you up at two!’

  A young man in polished black shoes eased her mother into the car. Wasn’t it like old times, watching unseen from the stage wings as Lorraine made an entrance on the arm of her leading man? The years bounded past Jane like fleet-footed deer. ‘Overture and Beginners, darling,’ she whispered to herself, her youthful miseries now softened by the years.

  Back at the
book purge, despair was turning to glee. Management books would be sold. Keeping careful tally, Chris tossed outdated Lonely Planets and three copies of Do Ants Have Arseholes? He was determined to make the quota without risking Ian Rankin.

  They ordered noodles from the Moonbeam, which Cecilia delivered on a motorbike still splattered with raindrops. She dropped to her knees at the edge of the book mountain. ‘The Kitchen God’s Wife? You can’t!’

  So Amy Tan survived for sale, along with Jung Chang’s Wild Swans. Jane pulled the plug on classics too long on life-support, including prizewinners only Carla admired. With a sense of fair play, a regretful Chris eliminated ‘new’ writers best known to Granta editors.

  Time flew to the sound of covers ripped, tomes tossed, and the sound of bin bags filling up. Should they sell off Life of Pi? Did they need three copies of The Autograph Man? Did they need one? Suddenly Chris asked, Jane, ‘Aren’t you picking up your mother?’

  Grabbing her bag and coat, Jane hurled herself into the path of a cab descending Primrose Hill Road but the traffic took forever. Princess Alexandra mustn’t be seen—or heard—standing in a bus queue! The royal bouffant would end up clumps of peasant fluff.

  Jane’s cab pulled up at the Factory just as Lorraine waved in the direction of applauding blind workers. She hurried towards her daughter. ‘Thank heavens you’re here, darling. That silly aide Frederick had to go pick up the real princess ten minutes ago. First, find me a ladies’ room.’

  A jolly lady from the Action staff who was folding chairs told them, ‘You know the way, Your Highness, to the director’s? Hasn’t changed since last year.’

  Jane muttered, ‘You must’ve been damn good. Is she blind, too?’

  ‘Of course I was damned good,’ Lorraine turned her back on the dispersing gaggle. ‘These shoes are killing me. Let’s find the Royal Flush. Maybe this way—?’ They headed towards a side entrance.

  They were just entering the building when Jane felt an attacking whoosh behind her mother’s back.