Love and the Art of War

by Dinah Lee Küng

  ‘Did she, now? I’ll put her into my lecture. But running away gives Thirty-six such short shrift! Oh, gin and tonic, thank you. Here’s my version. Surrender is complete defeat, compromise is half-defeat, but escape is not defeat at all. Retreat and regroup. As long as you are not defeated, you still have a chance. Oh, how do you do? You must be Joe! Your delightful daughter looks just like you!’

  Jane eased away. Chatting about Sammie’s studies gave Baldwin and Joe enough grist to move over to the buffet. Mr Ng and Cecilia were spooning out jasmine rice. Selina forked out Singapore noodles, thick with prawns and green peppers, and Nelson was in charge of Sichuanese tofu flecked with ground pork, chillies and black beans.

  Beyond all the dowagers’ humps and doddering grey heads lay the frosty square that would burst into green in a few weeks. Jane felt she was hosting a rather topsy-turvy closing-night party, not just for all these tired troupers, but for her own disintegrating family’s stint in Chalkwood Square.

  Leaving might not be such a tragedy. Lorraine couldn’t negotiate the stairs much longer. Sammie would be heading off to university and as Higgins, Higgins & Wraigth had warned, a fortune in Number 19 might vanish if they waited too long, bursting along with a property bubble already wobbly under NW1’s celebrity weight and the recessionary winds.

  Jane escorted one guest after another to the bathroom. Winston’s little sister Monica stood loyal guard, as professional as any attendant in the Dorchester’s powder room.

  Passing back into the living room, Jane overheard Winston cheering up Nigel; ‘Everybody likes me, Nigel, but I don’t know enough about finance to make a go of it, while you know all about money. Which is not much good on its own, because let’s face it, nobody likes you. I need you! You need me! Look, I’ll be out in Hong Kong by June and I could let you know the lay of the land by, say, the beginning of August? You round up some capital and let your house on a short lease. Join me by October . . . ’

  Through the kitchen’s French doors giving on to the small balcony, the wintry sun was warming up Sammie’s act competing with her grandmother’s: ‘How long can she keep it up, he asked me? I said, Right, Commander, I can see why you’re worried. My grandmother is an old woman with arthritis and a leaky bladder. On the other hand, there’re some things you wouldn’t happen to know about Lorraine King. One, she played the lead in the road company of Applause with a sprained ankle, two shows a day, for ten days, through a record heat wave. Two, this woman went on as Lady Macbeth on fifteen minutes’ notice in Central Park in the rain and not one person,’ Sammie wagged her finger in the direction of StJohn Stevens, ‘Not one single person who had come to see Maggie Smith walked out or asked the box office for their money back.’

  ‘How do you know that, dear?’ asked a painted old dear in a flowered hat and support hose.

  ‘Because she told me so.’

  ‘She told you many times, I’ll bet,’ StJohn chortled from his prime seating in the balcony’s sunniest spot.

  Without warning, Jane felt Joe’s hand settle on her shoulder. Together, they listened to their daughter’s ringing tribute.

  ‘Three. My grandmother played a nude scene as Cleopatra at forty-eight that had Glenda Jackson telephoning her congratulations the very next morning. And I know that because I’ve seen the clippings myself.’

  ‘Dame Glenda. To my beloved MP and her margin of forty-two votes! Hear, hear!’ StJohn Stevens raised his glass.

  Sammie crowed, ‘Four, I told the police, you can rely on Grandma to never go out of character. Dad always tells me, Sammie, your grandmother played the same divorcée for twenty-six weeks straight on a soap opera scripted by chimpanzees just to pay for your braces.’

  The party was truly aloft. Joe standing so close overwhelmed Jane. She felt like escaping the warmth of his chest leaning into her and crawling under all the moth-eaten minks and nicotine-drenched Burberries piled on her bed. Unfortunately, she had to chaperone countless more expeditions to the toilet but just then Rachel came lurching toward them, gurgling, ‘Oh my Gawd, Jane. Look who’s here!’

  The leonine head of Sir Brian MacKelling poked through the doorway. The room parted ways as best they could, limping aside, to make way for the Oscar-winning legend. Monica was jumping at his back in her futile attempt to snatch the camel cashmere overcoat draped across his towering shoulders. He stretched out his endless arms to salute Lorraine and shouted to the entire cast, ‘Happy birthday, darling!’

  Never one to play unfair with his leading ladies, Sir Brian held his entrance pose very patiently, giving Lorraine time to work herself forward and give her line with genuine joy, ‘Oh, Bloody Good Evening, My Sweet Prince!’

  Sir Brian’s ex-machina descent from celebrity heaven and Lorraine’s crowning ad-lib would have won over even the toughest reviewer’s heart, but for an unscripted eruption behind the buffet table. Nelson had fallen on one knee in some kind of public ecstasy.

  ‘Wah! I don’t believe it! That’s fantastic!’

  Elderly faces leaned forward from their rented chairs. Sir Brian turned, all admiring eyes for the princely figure kissing Cecilia Ng’s mucky hand daubed with soy and chilli paste. What was Nelson doing? Even all five-foot-one of Madame Leong strained to take in what possessed this same boy who only the night before had argued that her Nonya princess Selina should toss aside the fabled Malaysian med student for a life of prosperity under the standard of Sultana Chu Pixels.

  ‘You are HeiBai Girl?’ Nelson shrieked. ‘That pink bed is in Belsize Park? You shot those videos?’ His eyes widened with delight. ‘You digitalized and uploaded them all by yourself? Don’t you know half of China is watching you online?’

  Nelson’s frantic eyes searched the crowd, ‘Winston, Winston! Did you hear that? Cecilia is HeiBai Girl!’ He gazed in loving confusion at the waitressing student’s greasy braids and stained rubber slip-ons. ‘But you look so, so, different, I mean, without your black fur tail and bikini.’

  Appreciative murmurs circled the audience of performers. ‘Black fur?’

  Lobster-faced, Cecilia stood exposed to her parents and some fifty senior citizens as a closet Internet temptress. She’d frozen as the room fell silent. Nelson shook her by the shoulders, ‘Say something to me, Cecilia! No, no, please sing something for me. River Runs Black as Your Heart! Or Burn the Red Flagpole for—’

  At which Cecilia dashed past Jane’s withered guests and bolted out the front door. To the indignation of Selina, not to mention a comedian just then holding out his plate for a third helping of choy sum with almonds, Nelson chased down the stairs after his video vixen.

  Jane looked down through the windows and caught sight of the couple as they emerged on the sidewalk below and stumbled across the mud and grass. Nelson caught Cecilia under the plane trees for a very public kiss. At the northern corner of the junction, Jane saw Joop standing on a ladder with a squeegee and bucket. Oblivious to the young lovers, the Dutchman was washing off the Painted Angel for good.

  Jane’s heart leapt at the thought of young love, lost love, deep love, even difficult love, but not the affectionate friendship that Dan offered, not just practical companionship and yes, Stratagem Thirty-six’s solution of compromise.

  The guests fell back into chatting and eating.

  ‘I want to propose—,’ Joe shouted. No one listened, so he shouted louder, ‘Please—?’

  ‘Oh, toasts later!’ Lorraine waved her arms. ‘Let me catch up with my darling Brian!’

  Joe stretched out his hand to smother the hubbub, but a former Caliban thrust a flute of bubbly into his open fingers, with ‘Relax, drink up!’

  Joe persisted, ‘Lorraine, for once, will you please shut up! I’m bloody well going to propose—! Mr Ng banged on the bottom of a clean wok until it sounded so like a gong, it even silenced StJohn’s cronies out on the balcony.

  Joe stared at the glass in his hand. ‘I’m raising my glass,’ he said and took a swallow.

  ‘We can see that, dear,’ said
a biddy who had once understudied a Redgrave.

  And that put-down made Jane burst into tears, for Joe and for all the years he’d tolerated Lorraine and her bitchy buddies, for the mixed blessings of their family, and most of all, for his own lost ambitions.

  Joe stared across the room at Jane’s wet eyes. His expression softened, ‘I want to propose—to Jane.’

  ‘To the hostess!’ The old codgers raised their glasses and went back to buzzing away.

  But Joe would have his monologue: ‘Please, please! Jane, I’ve got backing by an independent for our series, your series, on politics and undernourishment. It starts with a shoot in North Korea, in remote areas nobody’s filmed properly ‘til now.’

  Joe nodded in Lorraine’s direction, ‘It was Jane’s idea for me to segue out of the cooking show back into work that could help change people’s lives.’

  Jane panicked. This was the worst possible Stratagem Thirty-six. Joe was fleeing to Pyongyang? He wanted to get out before she went to the US with Dan. He’s leaving us for good.

  She could barely listen to the rest of Joe’s toast—‘and it’s also a good moment to make a fresh start. I don’t want to do this program without Jane. It was her idea in the first place. She must be my full partner as co-producer for the series. I want her to use one of the visas, to take her with me to Pyongyang and all the other locations. To have her at my side as my wife.’

  All eyes turned from Joe to Jane.

  She wasn’t sure she’d heard him right. He had proposed, again, in front of her whole world. As Sun Tzu promised, the worst thing could become the best thing. Perhaps it wasn’t just the Snow Queen’s blinding ice chip of ambition thawing from Joe’s eyes. Jane herself saw Joe afresh—not as a character in a story—but just the person she’d loved all along, once again excited more about a project than about himself.

  Jane said very softly, ‘I never loved any man as much as you, Joe.’

  ‘Good God, I’ve been upstaged, not once, but twice!’ Sir Brian protested.

  ‘Darling, we’re all just poor players.’ Lorraine patted his shoulder. ‘And I think our little hour is at an end.’

  The End

  Acknowledgements

  The original painted angel was reported by Jane Kramer in ‘The Dutch Model,’ The New Yorker, April 3, 2006. Although that angel appeared in the window of a Rotterdam painter in 2004 on the day the filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was murdered, I see no reason why there shouldn’t be other angels reminding us, ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill,’ in fiction—and in cities other than Rotterdam.

  The Art of War, Sun Tzu, Delacorte Press, New York, 1983

  The Thirty-six Stratagems for Business, Harro Von Senger, Marshall Cavendish Business, Singapore, 2006

  The Book of Stratagems, (Tactics for Triumph and Survival), Harro Von Senger, Viking Penguin, New York, 2003

  Sun Tzu and the Art of Business, Mark McNeilly, Oxford University Press, Inc., New York, 1996

  The Wiles of War, Sun Haichen, Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, 1996

  The Art of the Advantage, Kaihan Krippendorff, Penguin Group, U.K. 2003

  The Art of War for Executives, Donald G. Krause, Berkley Publishing, New York, 1995

  Dinah Lee Küng worked for twenty years as a reporter in Asia writing for among others, The Economist, The International Herald Tribune, The Washington Post, and Business Week. She won the Overseas Press Club’s Award for Best Humanitarian Coverage in 1991 and her comic novel, A Visit From Voltaire, was nominated for The Orange Prize for Fiction in 2004. She is the author of six novels and a number of plays, including the radio play, Dear Mr Rogge, which won a commendation in the BBC World Service Playwriting Contest of 2008. More information about her can be found on the Dinah Lee Küng home page.

  She and her husband, a retired International Committee of the Red Cross delegate, have three adult children and live in Switzerland.

  St John