Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks (10 page)

To return to specifics. I sloshed the coffee into a brace of Coronation Mugs, and, my upper lip a ridge of steel, padded into the bedroom to shore up my wife's wilting spirits with a few well-chosen words about the unconquerable will and study of revenge and similar snippets culled from our immortal heritage. She lay palely between the sheets, like one whose life has been frittered away on over-attention to camellias, listening to the newscaster reeling off reports of motions of censure on the Government, the wasting sickness of our gold reserves, the current protest march of aircraft workers, the latest lurch in the cost-of-living index, and other gobbets calculated to stick in the most optimistic craw. As the minutes flashed by, loaded to the gunwales with disaster, our commingled gloom deepened to a rich ebony, and I was on the point of hurling the radio through the window in the hope, perhaps, of felling a passing Volkswagen (a distinct statistical possibility), when the announcer paused suddenly, caught his breath, and said

‘Mr. Denis Healey, the Minister of Defence, promised today that Britain would not lose her world lead in the development of vertical take-off aircraft.'

There might have been more news after that, but we didn't hear it. My wife sat bolt upright in bed, the colour hurtling through her cheeks, her eyes uncannily bright, and clutched at my arm with that reserve of energy normally associated with drowning men in the presence of a sudden boathook.

‘Can it be true?' she whispered.

I bit my lip.

‘It has to be true,' I said.

‘A world lead? Of our very own?'

‘And we have it already!'

‘Pray God we can hold on to it!' she muttered. We looked at one another with new hope. Horizons began to open before us, albeit vertically.

‘I think –' I said, very slowly, ‘– I think it's all going to be all right, after all. I think we're going to come through.'

We drank our coffee in one draught, flung the cups over our shoulders, and offered a brief prayer for those in peril on the drawing-board. We had seen, at last, the thin end of the wedge, and it was a good wedge. Without a weapon of one's own, you see, without an original working weapon, it's impossible to hope for greatness. All very well to moan about defence expenditure and the lack of funds for schools, hospitals, pensions, roads, universities and all the rest of that pointless paraphernalia. All very well to brag about your Shakespeares and your Dantes and your Racines and your Ella Wheeler Wilcoxes. But when the chips are down, the chap from Smith and Wesson is the one we turn to. Weapons are the only true curators of our culture, and what in recent months has sapped the vitality of the Island Race has been the increasing doubt as to whether our independent deterrent was worth the sack it came in. While other nations proliferated their Polarises, or lobbed their ICBM's willy-nilly between Novaya Zemlya and the Pole, we in Britain have gradually come to feel that the idea of having our own personal overkill was but an idle dream. We know that, called upon to swop punches with an Unnamed Foreign Power, we'd be hard put to to raise one megadeath among the lot of us. In all probability, the first day's hostilities would turn us into mere froth and flotsam; we should go down in history as no more than a patch of choppy water off the Irish coast. But not now. Now that we possessed a weapon in the development of which we led the world, to what glorious heights might we not rise?

‘They ought to ring the churchbells,' said my wife, mopping her tears with a sheetcorner.

‘By heavens!' I cried, smiting the mattress till the springs sang, ‘The old lion lives to roar again! Let Russia tremble! Let China quail!'

My wife looked at the ceiling with passionate calm.

‘And gentlemen in Osh Kosh, now a-bed

Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap . . .'

She lit a cigarette with a trembling flame. ‘I say, my love, do you suppose it's too late to get the Empire back? Or, at least, some of the nicer bits?'

‘Never!' I shouted. ‘We are just entering the period familiarly known as the nick of time, and from here on in the going cannot be anything but good. Before the year is out, vertical take-off aircraft will be dropping like archangels all over the uncivilized world. Natives will run from the bush, crying ‘What is that great shining bird that drops from the skies like Ukkra, God of Sleet?' and we shall answer ‘It is a British vertical take-off aircraft, you heathen bastards, sent from the Great White Queen across the oceans, and you have ten seconds flat in which to start the grovelling routine.'

She clasped her hands ecstatically.

‘Oh, think of it! There is trouble in the Straits . . . the natives are running riot through the rubber . . . mud has been thrown at the Flag . . .'

‘. . . ten thousand miles away, a tall figure in mutton-chop whiskers hails a cab in Downing Street and clops rapidly . . .'

‘Clops?'

‘All right, roars. Roars rapidly through the night to Buckingham Palace . . . the Imperial Presence . . . the curt nods . . . the rasp of pen on parchment . . .'

‘We have decided to send a vertical take-off aircraft!'

‘Ah!'

‘Ah!'

I strode to the window, hands clasped behind me, and looked into the coruscating future.

‘What about this? De Gaulle criticises the movements of British hussars in the Sudan . . . our Ambassador hurries to Colombey-les-deux-Églises . . . the slap of glove on cheek . . . next morning, when the population of Marseilles awakes, there, bobbing on the tide, is a fleet of British vertical takeoff aircraft . . .'

‘Bobbing on the what?'

‘I don't know why you have to quibble. Bobbing in the air, then. Shooting vertically up to five hundred feet, and shooting vertically down again, like great silver yo-yos, like . . . what's the matter?'

My wife was looking at me with every sign of fear.

‘These vertical thingummies,' she said, quietly. ‘What do they do except . . . except bob up and down?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I mean, do they carry Ultimate Deterrents and stuff like that?'

‘I suppose so.'

‘But we haven't got any. Not anything Ultimate of our own.'

I said nothing. Something prickled against my tonsils.

‘There isn't much percentage in just bobbing up and down, is there?' she said. ‘Not unless you're in a position to improve on it. I mean, you're going to look pretty bloody ridiculous if in the middle of the yo-yo bit an Intercontinental Whatnot comes along horizontally and bowls you over like a row of skittles, aren't you?'

‘They do fly on the level too, you know,' I said, with a scorn I was rapidly ceasing to feel.

‘How fast?' she pressed.

‘I don't know,' I said weakly. ‘Quite fast, I suppose.'

‘Fast
enough
?'

I looked down at the citizens romping about in the street below. There was a new bounce to their step, a new light in the communal eye. Here and there, a Union Jack fluttered. I turned away, pity and panic wrestling in my breast, to see her knuckles whitening on the edge of the blanket.

‘It's all – it's all just another noble gesture, isn't it?' she whispered.

Slowly, I nodded. But the light, though waning fast, had not altogether passed from my eyes.

‘All is not utterly lost, my love,' I said. ‘One truth remains. When comes to noble gestures, Britain still . . .'

‘Leads the world?' she murmured.

‘That's right,' I said.

10
Mao, He's Making Eyes At Me!

Love is a ‘middle-class prejudice', a ‘capitalist weakness',
and a time-wasting ‘psychopathic occupation', according
to the latest Chinese Press pronouncements. In the Maoist
view, married life is an opportunity for studying the
works of Mao Tse-tung and maintaining a ‘permanent
atmosphere of ideological struggle and criticism in the
home'. Attempts to reconcile family quarrels are considered
unMarxist.

Daily Telegraph

L
ao Piu-Fong was singing as he walked up the grimy staircase of his concrete apartment block. He was singing a song about the need to produce more 3.2 millimetre rivets, thereby prolonging the life of Chairman Mao by at least another two thousand years. He was singing despite the fact that a bus had just run over his foot and a rat had eaten his ersatz prawn during the five minute Thought Break at the factory and his best friend had been decapitated by the authorities for losing his spanner down a drain. He was singing, above all, because it was seven p.m. in Peking and five million people coming home from work were singing, and it was a thing it was wise to do if you had any plans about waking up the next morning.

He reached the scrofulous hell of the upper landing, where he paused to thank a kindly Red Guard for spitting in his eye and bayonetting his hat, and passed on into his tiny, dark flat.

Lao Piu-Fong had been uneasy all day. That morning, on leaving for work, he had failed to remember not to kiss his wife goodbye, which was something which always upset her. What made it worse was the knowledge that he would be unable to apologise to her, since reconciliation was also unMarxist. The only course open to him was to hit her.

She picked herself up off the floor gratefully, took his threadbare hat and coat, and threw them on the fire. Lao Piu-Fong bowed, and began singing a song about the shortage of glue in Maintenance Area Fourteen, and how it was directly attributable to the presence of Chiang Kai-Shek on Formosa. Then his children came in and swore at him until it was time for bed; the main target of their abuse was the fact that in order for him to have become their father at all, he had found it necessary to indulge in a spot of capitalist messing about with their mother, whom they similarly reviled for allowing him to pull his right-wing deviationist tricks in the first place. With happy cries of ‘Psychopath!' and ‘Warmongering Revanchist Tart!' they ran off to bed, leaving the Piu-Fongs despising one another in front of the fire.

‘Excuse, most horrible fragment of dung,' said Mrs. Piu-Fong, ‘but what is this I am hearing from many comrades concerning your filthy neo-Wall Street practices behind factory canteen with Worker-Waitress Eighteen?'

‘Is vile slander put about by agents provocateurs for purpose of sabotaging output,' said Lao miserably. He sighed. He found himself unable to put his heart into vituperation this evening; much as he recognised his marital responsibility in reducing his wife to the level of a treacherous maniac, his mind kept wandering to subversive memories of lip and thigh. Tiny beads of sweat squeezed out of his forehead, slid down his nose, and splashed onto the thumb-stained copy of Mao's Thoughts open on his lap. It was not easy being a perfect husband. But he tried.

‘Sickening poisonous capitalist toad,' he said, ‘I am also hearing of your politically destructive laissez-faire policy with the riceman. What have you to say, dissolute cow?'

Mrs. Piu-Fong flushed angrily.

‘Is loathsome lie!' she cried. ‘Riceman T'song and I are merely discussing Chapter XVIII, paragraph IX—'

‘SO!' shrieked Lao. ‘While back is turned, you are considering question of leek-rotation with Riceman T'song! While honourable first-class riveter husband is slaving over lathe all day, worm-eaten petty bourgeoise wife is sharing same sentence as pigfaced ricemonger!'

Mrs. Piu-Fong looked up at him, and sneered triumphantly.

‘Now,' she smirked, ‘we discuss cheap lousy middle-class jealousy of failed husband unworthy to sit in same room as genuine sepia-toned portrait of Chairman Mao, immortal father of his people. Please to begin, small thin dolt!'

Lao ripped his shirt, and began to keen.

‘I have been jealous,' he moaned, rocking on his heels.

‘True.'

‘I have been possessive.'

‘And worse!'

‘Worse?'

‘You have been guilty, unworthy morsel, of interfering in discussion of matchless gem-like Thoughts of Chairman Mao, and of attempting to subvert spiritual development of me and Riceman T'song.'

‘Ah, so. I have been guilty of interfering in discussion of matchless gem-like Thoughts of Chairman Mao, and of attempting to subvert spiritual development of wife and Riceman T'song.'

‘And?'

‘And I have been having middle-class thoughts about female bus-travellers. And capitalist ideas about Postwoman Cho.'

‘You are a psychopath.'

‘I am a psychopath.' Lao Piu-Fong stared at the flickering grate. ‘Mind you,' he murmured, ‘I have not indulged in any perverted deviationist private enterprise for eight months. Is this not worthy?'

Mrs. Piu-Fong spat.

‘You are complacent,' she snarled.

‘I am complacent.'

‘Also you have been guilty of not repairing leaking tap in kitchen, contrary to Chapter MCDXVI, sub-section IV, lines II–V:
Urban progress possible only if each individual citizen-soldier
recognises responsibility to maintaining roof placed over head through
foresight and generosity of Chairman Mao
. Similarly, you have neglected your duties with regard to faulty ball-cock, hole in bedroom window, and short leg on dining-room table.'

‘All this I have not done,' groaned Lao Piu-Fong. ‘Indeed, I am guilty of betraying great principles formulated on Long March.' His stomach rumbled. ‘When are we eating?'

‘First we sing magnificent chart-topper describing the joys of building new wing on public library,' said his wife. ‘For has not peerless Chairman Mao written:
Hunger of soul cannot
be satisfied with noodles
?'

‘Probably,' muttered Lao,
sotto voce
.

After the song had died away at last, he looked down at his small wooden bowl.

‘Excuse, please, obscene disaster in human form,' he said to his wife, ‘but what is this esteemed muck I am supposed to eat?'