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.
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
Lao 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,’
