‘Just so. The gestalt is now most definitely “on the floor”. We have to prepare ourselves for an assault on new forms of reality.’ The Architect clawed back; causing Professor Catling to raise the tablecloth, fearful he had missed out on some notable side dish. ‘Flanagan’s latest proposal excitingly combines a performance element with his always scrupulous truth to materials. He wants us to validate — bear witness to — the construction of a hole in the water. This would have such a miraculously transitional quality, a metamorphosis of liquid into air… an anomaly, I believe, of enormous resonance.’
‘If you think the Widow wants her saintly husband remembered by a hole in the water, you must have a hole in the head,’ snapped the Chair, muttering something further to an attentive aide, who instantly passed the message on to a pocket tape-recorder. (The Architect was on his way back to the Masonic one-night stands.) ‘Look here, haven’t we got a couple of these johnnies on the payroll? They should do something to earn their gravy. The Civil List’s not a gentleman’s club for bloody civilians.’
‘Sir Eduardo,’ said the Architect, eager to stay on the ball, ‘is occupied in laying out an Aztec mosaic somewhere beneath the Elephant and Castle. Sir Anthony, it was felt, had done such sterling service at Millbank that he should be considered for compassionate leave — before he suffered the debilitating effects of front-line trauma. He’s an artist, first and last; not an administrator.’
‘I think,’ said the irrepressible fenland châtelaine, ‘we are all in danger of forgetting the true purpose of this gathering.’ Her remarks were floated in such soft but narcoleptic tones that the disadvantaged drinkers (male) froze in mid-hoist. An unconvinced frog’s leg jerked spastically from the Architect’s open mouth, as if deciding to make one last pathetic leap for freedom. ‘Our brief is to commemorate the aviators who died protecting these factories, deepwater docks, and mean streets.’ She dangled a bloodless hand (so white it seemed to have been kept in a bath of milk) in vague benediction towards the shapeless mounds of masonry that hid the river from their privileged viewing station.
‘We are required,’ she continued, with all the confidence of one who has received absolution from the highest court in the land, ‘to offer our suggestions for the erection of a National Shrine; a place of quiet and meditation, a place fondly to recall those who have gone before, an inspiration to those who will follow.’
‘What did the old boy do in the last show?’ enquired the Chair, ‘apart from blasting out a few craters on the golf courses of the Cinque ports?’
‘Not known,’ the Architect, subdued, whispered into his hand, ‘stricken from the record. “Mentioned in despatches”, certainly. Something biological. And intelligent. Very hush-hush.’
Flash frames of shredded files. Laser-enhanced index cards. Chemically-inspired memory transfusions. They swept over the gob-struck assembly like a hazchem plague. Take your pick: droplets of blood beading the windows, dead fish pelting from the clouds, black and gungy smoke belching in spasms from the fluted stacks of the Silvertown Sugar Mills. And now, operatically, as if orchestrated by Leni Riefenstahl, at this moment when all the secret nightfears of the heart lay exposed on the linen table, a silver chopper skimmed in over the dock, ruffling the hide-thick surface, to land within sight of the petrified diners, on the uncropped grass of the man-made isthmus. Goons, too highly strung to wait for ladders, leapt to the deck, wheeling as they fell, scanning dim horizons, shrugging and twitching inside their Burberrys; patting themselves for the reassurance that they weren’t toting an empty holster. A child, scrubbed and pink, backlit, emerged from the open door of the Sikorski, as if for his first day at prep school, clutching an executive-size briefcase (from which the price ticket was clearly visible) to his bosom. He was dressed in unbruised cricket flannels. A wet bob faking it for the parents’ match.
‘The Minister,’ announced the Chair, ‘early as usual. Come to take our soundings back upstairs.’ Surreptitiously, he slid a magnum Havana back into its pigskin case.
Before the guilty reflex was complete, the praetorian guard were hustling their juvenile lead into the open-plan dining area, were taking up crouched positions among the rubber plants, and gibbering killspeak into faulty handsets.
The Chair was not alone in his guilt. The Lady from the Fens had a distinct ‘thing’ about men in cricket gear. It began when she’d been dragged along to Lord’s, because her husband, after some characteristic reverse, needed to maintain a high profile, show himself, rub shoulders with the nabobs, share the banter and the chocolate cake of the radio box. She had been bored out of her skull, until she had taken up the fieldglasses to watch this beautiful black fellow (Michael Holding?) walk back to bowl, rubbing the ball in the most intimate way on the side of his thigh. There was an awful, addictive languor about the whole performance. The slow build-up. The springy stride into the wicket. The ball fired like a bullet. The cringing batsman. Ahh!
This sense of innocent eroticism was not shared with her husband (nor indeed with the Minister — who had not enjoyed his compulsory charity match: either under siege, and in danger of voiding his bowels, or banished to the mindboggling inertia of the outfield). Did nobody share her dream? A wide bed, her lover helping her to change the sheets. Christopher Martin-Jenkins on the radio. Describing, let us say, Imran Khan’s flight to the wicket. The leap. The delivery. Her lover in white. She is in lacy black underwear. Neither one touching the other, separated by the bed. And he is dressing to leave. As she undresses, a warm afternoon, to lie back, listening to the cricket. The curtains flap. He hesitates. He cannot bear to turn away. Apple blossom in the orchard.
‘Did you score, Minister?’ She blushed, as the Chair put his toadying question. ‘Pick up any wickets?’
The flustered youth ignored him. (He hadn’t; but that was nobody’s business.) ‘Your deliberations are complete, Mr Chair.’ It was not a question. The youth lisped in a still small voice; implying that if he did not get his way he was quite capable of ‘screaming and screaming and screaming until he was thick’. He was under visible pressure. One of those who feel they should be somewhere much more important; and who keep glancing down to check the zip of their flies. He squeaked, like a cheeky cartoon mouse being dubbed by a seventy-year-old actor who has not yet been told that the polyps in his sinuses are malignant.
Closer inspection, in the hush that followed this incursion, revealed no youth, but a shrink-wrapped young man — who had forgotten to climb out of his lightweight suit before sending it to the cleaners. Or some kind of quantum leap in the field of headshrinking. The Minister looked like a ventriloquist’s dummy — which, in a sense, he was: the latex exception that proves the rule. The rest of the Widow’s gang split neatly into the Uglies (shifty, weasel-twitching Goebbels clones who breakfasted on razor blades and seven-week embryos) and the Bunters: smooth, fleshy, near-identical, bum-faced nonentities in Savile Row suits and bulletproof spectacles. Apocalypse-resistant unflappables. The Uglies had lost ground recently, the time for cracking skulls was past. They were ennobled, sent to the city like feral cats. No longer the nights of broken glass, lycanthropes and zoo-rejects with burning brands: it was the mid-term era of soft sell, Brylcreem condomed, safe-handed boys, and public men of conscience (and private fortune). We gloried in the exploits of the agitated one (nicknamed ‘The Albatross’), the Sumerian fish-totem, whose role it was to be seen wandering, gape-mouthed in pin-stripes and hard hat, from one disaster to the next, blinking like a nocturnal animal caught in the harsh lights of the rescue services; lips trembling, ready to blub out his patent sincerity. A scapegoat begging for slaughter.