Love and the Art of War

by Dinah Lee Küng

  ***

  ‘Well, we’re getting there,’ Winston said, checking his revision sheet. The two friends faced each other across a pot of coffee. The kitchen table was scattered with to-do lists for the Grand Production of Lorraine’s eventful eightieth year. Lorraine wasn’t missing her big day, even if the doctor had relegated her to enforced bed rest until the very morning of the celebration.

  As far as Winston was concerned, the party was in the bag—a takeaway bag from the Moonbeam Café. Gone were the fancy canapés promised a year ago by Bella, along with the cocktail menu Chris had patched together from cookery books in the library. With Cecilia’s input and the goodwill of the Ng family’s overworked staff, Winston had completed the menu, hired spare tables, chairs, glasses, plates, and silverware.

  ‘Where are the chopsticks?’ Jane checked his list.

  ‘Your guests are too arthritic to manage anything but spoons.’

  ‘We’ll double the rice portions and slice the spring rolls into bite size pieces. And nobody needs teeth to eat almond gelatine. They’ll manage with chopsticks.’

  ‘I hate chopsticks, Jane. So fiddly.’

  ‘It’s not your birthday, Winston. Put the chopsticks back.’

  Jane still had to sort out the hire cars and small vans for so many luvvies equipped with wheel chairs and walkers. Many would come with caregivers, but thanks to Sir Bernard’s offer to serve sandwiches in his basement kitchen next door to the help, Lorraine’s oldsters could revel a whole evening away from offstage feedings, changings, and nursing. They would return, for one day, to their authentic selves: hero and heavy, dame or ingénue, second banana, gravedigger, porter, and it went without saying, every single one of them a star.

  Winston poured himself another coffee. ‘Stop worrying about the party, Jane. Let’s go over our notes. One week to the practice test. Right. Name all the Simulation Stratagems.’

  ‘Oh, that’s too difficult,’ Jane yawned.

  ‘I did it.’

  ‘You did?’

  Winston nodded. ‘Just run your mind down the list. Which ones involve simulation?’

  ‘Something out of nothing, Number Seven. Your father almost fell for that one, didn’t he?’

  ‘Until Nelson spotted the cards pre-printed and hidden under the desk.’

  ‘Feigning Madness, Decorating a Barren Tree, Opening the Gates Wide, and . . . um . . . ’

  ‘The one you missed, playing hooky being kidnapped. Think masochistic.’

  ‘That reminds me of the party. I’ve got fifty-seven women and only eleven men—’

  ‘It’s Inflict Injury on One’s Self to Win the Enemy’s Trust, the strategy of the suffering flesh. Prince Hu Lu sent his adviser Yao Li to spy on the Wei Kingdom. In order to convince the Prince of Wei that he could trust Yao Li, Prince Hu Lu sliced off Yao Li’s arm, beheaded his wife and children—’

  ‘My God!’

  ‘That’s the tactic. Self-mutilation to win the enemy’s trust. Weaken yourself. Play the victim just to get sympathy.’

  Jane copied Winston’s notes.

  ‘And don’t forget preventive strategies, Jane. Baldwin says I’m good at those. Keep your eyes peeled for self-styled victims, underdogs, or anyone angling for the sympathy vote. And the counter tactic: if you put yourself at a disadvantage, just make sure it’s not irreversible.’

  ‘We’re supposed to be learning survival. Baldwin’s idea of winning is we cut off our limbs?’

  ‘Not to mention committing suicide when your leader wins and you’re unmasked as his spy. That’s what Yao Li did.’ Winston frowned. ‘Not much of a happy ending, is it?’

  Jane sighed. ‘Who expects happy endings these days?’

  Considering his stratagems always backfired, Winston sounded surprisingly upbeat. ‘You know, Jane, I’m going to pass this practice exam and I’m going to pass the final. I’m going to wave my results in my father’s scrawny face and then leave Belsize Park for good.’

  ‘Oh, no!’

  ‘Give up on Chu Printers or Raisin Pixels or whatever Nelson’s going to christen it. I’m leaving the Kingdom of Chu for good. To follow my stars into the property business, my one true dream. An exile in the finest tradition of the ancients.’

  ‘You’re leaving London?’

  Winston had grown up. Just a few faded apricot tips remained of his ‘fun’ fringe. ‘Moving to Hong Kong. I’ll stay with Auntie Lo, daughter of Grandma Two.’

  ‘The monkey owner?’

  ‘The very one. I wish I had some capital, but when I think of Madame Leong as a stepmother, I realize I’m lucky to escape with the shirt on my back.’

  ‘Does your father know?’

  ‘He’s too busy running around like an old rooster in heat. I told Nelson that for all I care, Selina and he can turn the whole shop into a software circus.’

  ‘Was he happy?’

  ‘Yes, but I’m not sure he heard me under his earphones. He was ogling HeiBai Girl’s latest video.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s the right decision? Just walking away is a pretty big sacrifice.’

  ‘Stratagem Thirty-three.’

  ‘My goodness, Winston.’

  ‘Look who’s talking. Didn’t Joe hint that he’d stay the other night, if you had swallowed your pride and asked? That he liked being the three of you again?’

  ‘I couldn’t go back to the way it was, Winston. I see now that it was like there were bits of Joe and me attached, here and there, but always with other people filling in the gaps.’

  ‘So, you let him walk out. Wasn’t that rather a big sacrifice?’

  Jane rinsed the crumbs off their cake plates. ‘I couldn’t take advantage of a crisis and exploit Joe’s sympathy. It would only backfire once the romance of my rescue faded. I could only live again with Joe on one basis, the way it should have been from the very beginning when we were first in love—wholeheartedly, as husband and wife. And that’s not going to happen, even if ironically, my mother’s trail of divorced husbands doesn’t haunt me anymore. That was her life, but not mine. So, yes, I shooed him away.’

  ‘Still, it must hurt. Like Yao Li watching his family beheaded.’

  ‘Actually, Winston, it still hurts like hell.’

  Chapter Thirty-five, Lian Huan Ji

  (Chain The Enemy’s Ships Together)

  A February hailstorm pelted Jane as she locked up the library branch, navigated the slippery pedestrian rail bridge and reached the tube station. She’d stayed up late the night before polishing her proposal for Camille and so muddled through a Friday’s shelving, her tired mind now on Baldwin’s practice exam.

  The course was coming to its end and so was her job. So far the signals on an extension of her BBC contract were good: the outline of episode themes had fallen into place, the proposed summer research trips were almost scheduled, and a pared-down budget stood close to approval.

  A hollow-eyed Dan kissed her with a sigh of relief before they went into the classroom. Over the last ten days he’d attended an emotionally draining memorial service for the heroic Gilbert Sullivan, supervised the bureaucratic mop-up of what was left of the botched conspiracy, and debriefed grieving families in the company of his English counterparts.

  Still, the London team and he had come no closer to building a case of solid evidence against any ringleader. He worked long days with the Brits and spent exhausting nights on the phone to New York. They had to make sure all avenues were explored before concluding that this particular ‘international terrorism’ plot was nothing more than an amateur fiasco turned deadly.

  The latent schoolgirl in Jane hoped to please Baldwin. Nigel wanted to gain more corner office space using the tactics, and Winston dreamed of showing up a father who taunted him for ineptitude in All Things Chinese. Even Keith and Kev planned on finessing their jobs with newfound inscrutability.

  Dan was just along for the ride, and by meeting Jane, he’d solved the loneliness of his empty evenings, even if he hadn’t prevented his Ne
w Jersey quarry from self-destructing.

  Baldwin passed out the question sheets: ‘More than any of the other tactics, I’d like to see Number Thirty-Five.’ Thirty-Five was Link the Enemy’s Ships Together, using a mix of stratagems to achieve a goal.

  Jane scribbled away; she grouped her strategies, worked her defences, listed protective feints, and historical examples. She was doing well until the essay section. She tried writing about the Bookworms, but it wasn’t working, so she tried describing how the strategies had, for a time at least, offset complete domestic collapse at Number 19.

  Finally, halfway through her second draft, her pen slowed as she realized a deeper truth: this hapless band fighting for elbow space in their cramped closet, Baldwin’s own class, had lived the wisdom of the Chinese ancients.

  They had created something out of nothing, Number Seven—weaving a web of affection among strangers to face down a discouraging winter. Baldwin’s assignments had distracted Jane’s attention, leaving her subconscious time to overcome the shock of Joe’s defection, a Noise in the East, Number Six. Over time, Jane and Dan had become lovers, while in class they posed as mere buddies, the proverbial cicadas leaving their skins in place—Number Twenty-one.

  She started over and sped through her essay to the scratch of Nigel’s fountain pen and Winston’s groans. Stumped by the essay, Keith stared into the distance—as if one of his insured lay dying under Baldwin’s stool.

  ‘Don’t sit there on your Jack Jones, Phipps!’ Kevin jabbed his friend. In fact, Kev was working faster than any of them but was cheating; Jane saw Baldwin spot the stratagems coded on the label of Kev’s water bottle, but do nothing. Perhaps Kev would explain his ruse as a stratagem.

  ‘Time!’ Baldwin collected their papers with a paternal pat on Winston’s shoulder. When Winston wouldn’t stop, Baldwin pried the pen from his fist. ‘It’s only a practice, dear boy.’

  ‘Well, that wasn’t so bad!’ Kevin leant back, nearly knocking over the telltale bottle. ‘You all right, Deloitte? Did you link’em up all into one fiendish chain of hedging, investing, disinvesting, merging, and cut-throat robbery?’

  ‘Oh, zip it up, Filgrove.’

  ‘Relax, Nige, it’s just a warm-up.’

  ‘I’ve got other things on my mind right now.’

  ‘Eeoooow, aren’t we touchy?

  ‘Sorry, but I haven’t had a very good week.’ Nigel’s knuckles went from dry pink to blanched bone. ‘If you must know, I’ve been made redundant.’

  Everyone stared at the banker.

  Kevin looked a bit shamefaced. ‘Oh, God.’

  Baldwin shook his head. ‘I’m very sorry to hear this, Nigel. You’ve been one of my best pupils in the entire history of this course.’

  ‘Well, some things are beyond any strategies. The bank’s writing down £1.2 billion because of pricing errors on asset-backed securities. It’s an excuse to clean out anyone in sight of his pension.’

  ‘The bastards!’ Winston slammed his fist. ‘Claim unfair dismissal.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll get a handshake, Chu, though it won’t be golden,’ Nigel said. ‘They promised to carry me for six months, so Joyce and the children should be all right until I find something else.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I guess you all know I was a bit cross at first that this class wasn’t full of City people. Now I admit, I’ve learned from all of you to think outside the box a bit more. From now on, I’ll apply any strategy I can think of. When one fails, I’ll fall back on the next. Unlike the rest of you, I’ve made one fatal error over the entire winter.’

  ‘Assuming that you knew where the battleground was,’ Baldwin said with sympathy.

  Nigel’s snorted. ‘Absolutely correct! I wasn’t leading any attack. I was completely under siege and I didn’t even know it.’

  ***

  Something was up. Bella’s message, an imperial summons, was unequivocal—that Jane collect Sammie from The Travelling Kitchen studio in Battersea without delay. Jane rang Sammie, then Rachel, then Bella’s mobile, to no avail. A secretary said Joe was ensconced in ‘one of those meetings,’ which struck Jane as odd because it was a taping day; Joe should be on the set, not in the production office.

  Why couldn’t Sammie taxi her way to Bella’s flat? Or hop on the Northern Line back to Chalkwood Square? If Sammie was injured, Bella or Rachel should alert everyone on the way to hospital without delay. Jane chugged southwards in a taxi towards the South Bank. Only a forced march to Bella’s cookery temple in Battersea would resolve this mystery. That was motherhood. Whatever lay tattered because of three adults’ ambitions and blind spots, her child mustn’t suffer any more. Sammie had finally started eating square meals again.

  Bella’s refitted factory space was touted on London’s feature pages for being her ‘self-realization sanctuary.’ Its industrial gates admitted only a few privileged souls. Book reviewers of Bella’s Bistros, Bringing Home the Flavours, and Travelling Without a Ticket had all answered the Cooking Queen’s bidding to nibble and gossip—for exactly twenty-nine minutes.

  Joe dismissed it as a ‘girlie palace,’ and worked from Shepherd’s Bush as much as he could.

  Jane trudged up two flights of steel stairs, her tread reverberating up and down the open stairwell. At the top of the third floor landing, she found a mammoth lift for hoisting machinery. After ascending the last two storeys, its cage rattled open. Jane stepped into a minimalist foyer furnished in cinder blocks of heavy blue glass setting off a sleek desktop and chrome laptop.

  Mundane office junk—telephones, filing cabinets, paper cups, cables, ashtrays—all the usual detritus of television studios, was banished from Bella’s universe. Jane thought of Joe’s rough and tumble décor for making documentaries—unwanted celluloid bits ground into the floorboards with old chewing gum and editors’ cigarette butts.

  Bella Crawford products sat in white box displays, lit and framed like precious museum pieces: pastel pepper grinders, hand-painted Tuscan platters, teak-handled woks, Korean condiment trays, Balinese salad forks, even a Mongolian grill sprouting dozens of sharp teeth for hooking shredded sirloin. A battalion of lethal sushi knives stood arranged by length and shape on a special rack near large double doors giving on to the interior studio proper.

  Jane was just recalling Joe’s joke that you needed a licence from Tokyo to wield those sushi slicers, when Bella’s ‘on-air’ voice came from the dark cavern beyond. The star was hidden from Jane’s view by banks of cameras, make-up artists and lighting technicians.

  ‘I can’t manage these gloves. They’re far too clumsy.’

  ‘Bella, can I have another sound level, please?’ a soundman asked.

  ‘I WON’T WEAR THESE GLOVES! Loud enough?’ The amplifier whined its painful feedback.

  Tiptoeing through the doorway, Jane nearly stumbled over two sheet-white legs stretched across her path. They belonged to Rachel, sprawled in a folding chair tilted against the wall.

  ‘Hello, Rachel. Where’s Sammie? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Haf a drinkie, Jane.’ Rachel pulled a bottle out from behind her chair and poured some alcohol into a celadon ‘BC’ mug. ‘Have a shot on the house. Some sort of Sri Lankan whisky. Brilliant stuff. Ordered it in Soho, the place we get the specialty beers. The Kaku—’ she coughed, ‘Sorry, the whatever duck is marinating in a bucket of it.’

  Jane held the bottle up against a powerful spotlight shining above them. Rachel had pickled herself better than the duck. She knelt down to Rachel for a better look. The researcher was a bleached hue most often found floating in formaldehyde.

  ‘Rachel, what’s wrong with you? What’s going on?’

  ‘Joe just called from some meeting. They’ve cancelled the show. Finally.’ Rachel suddenly leered. ‘I’m liberated! Released! I’m not One Bit Sorry.’

  Rachel’s BlackBerry leaped around her ankles on the concrete floor like a Mexican jumping bean, its ring tones silenced for taping. Rachel waved it off. ‘That, no doubt, is Personnel.’

&nbs
p; ‘Have you told Bella yet?’ Jane whispered. From the centre of the kitchen set, Bella was shielding her eyes against the blinding spots with one hand as she argued into the darkness about the dangers of blue crabs.

  A man’s elegant voice came from centre stage. ‘I will wear the gloves. A single crab pinch can cause blood poisoning. Be very careful. Mrs Crawford should step on them like this, you see, and then pinch them with her thumb and index finger, this way.’

  Rachel shook her head. ‘I’m not going to tell her! Not in front of Chef Ragapaksa. He flew all night from Colombo and he’s been such a good sport.’ Rachel hiccoughed. ‘I have a shuper idea.’ She emptied her mug. ‘You tell her. She already hates you, because she thinks Joe still loves you.’

  Joe. This meant Joe was also out of a job.

  ‘What happened, Rachel?’

  ‘Delia’s become flavour of the month with her cheesy all-English meals from packets. Frugal Food’s been reissued. And Jamie keeps hammering on and on, grow your own, don’t buy Hawaiian! Joe said they’re already auditioning for a real English cook up in Manchester. Salt of the earth is what they want now.’

  ‘Rachel, where’s Sammie? I came here for Sammie!’

  ‘Then the sales figures came in and you know, the sales on Bella Bunsen Burners are more important than viewers these days. Orders have just dropped off like that.’ Rachel let a limp hand drop to her lap.

  ‘Why so sudden?’

  ‘Well, Gawd, Jane, do you have to ask? The Burmese street demo was bad enough. And then that photo in The Daily Mail. That’s what did her in,’ Rachel checked the whisky dregs. ‘What’s more hip now—a garlic press with her initials or Barf with Bella Doggie Cushions off the Internet?’ Rachel started sliding off the chair on to the concrete floor.

  ‘You’re pissed, Rachel. Go home.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Rachel moaned. ‘I’m waiting to swab up the festive lamprie segment before they do Duck Padré.’

  ‘JANE!’ Bella’s voice roared out from all four corners of the studio, like the Wizard of Oz’s ‘great and terrible’ from behind his screen. Fully made-up for taping, a vivid Bella materialized, looming at them through the shadows.