A left-hand drive camper van with German number plates that had been parked in the Crescent had its offside front window broken.
b) Mr Tomkins reported that the mystery of the unidentified dog that had been seen wandering up and down the Crescent for a fortnight towards the end of June, about which Police Constable Carson had been called, had been solved. The dog, who was called Kevin, belonged to a Mr and Mrs Hildon from Gallipoli Row, near the train station. Mr and Mrs Hildon’s son Rory had returned from college for his summer holidays having become a vegetarian and he had insisted that the rest of the household become vegetarians too. This Mr and Mrs Hildon had been willing to do because otherwise Rory would move out for the whole of the holidays and they see little enough of him as it is, but the special vegetarian dog food had been too much for Kevin and he had run away. He had been found because Mrs Palmer saw a notice in the big post office beside the train station where she had gone to pick up an application form for a new car tax registration thingy when the first one was stolen. The Hildons had been very pleased to be reunited with Kevin and Rory had then and there sat down and had a bacon sandwich.
c) The question of graffiti on the sign for Wilmington Park was raised and it was agreed that Mr Tomkins would write a letter to the council on behalf of the Wellesley Crescent Neighbourhood Watch, asking that something be done.
d) Mr Davis-Gribben brought up the issue of the noise from the aircraft passing overhead in the small hours of the morning to land at Heathrow. He said that he had written to the British Airports Authority and to the local MP and to the council and had been fobbed off with standard replies. He said that everyone he knew felt at the end of their tether about the noise and that he hadn’t had a night’s sleep in months, and although it was not an expression he often used, he agreed with a minicab driver he had spoken to the other day who said that the noise was doing his head in. He asked if anyone had any suggestions for further action.
Mr Cartwright said that his brother who was in the Army had been to stay and had been woken up by the noise every night for a week. His brother had then suggested that they should get hold of a ground to air missile and shoot an aeroplane down. He said that air traffic into Heathrow would drop away dramatically afterwards. Mr Cartwright said that he had been looking into the possibility of acquiring a ground to air missile, purely from the feasibility point of view, and that the most promising source appeared to be the Stinger missiles which the CIA had given to the Mujahedeen guerrillas fighting the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan during the 1980s. He said that the CIA had supplied a thousand missiles, of which about 700 had been used and that they had shot down over 500 Soviet planes and helicopters, which was an impressive strike rate. The CIA had tried to buy back the missiles at a rate of US$1 million each but many of them were still in the hands of the guerrillas.
Mr Phillips reminded other members that the budget for Wellesley Crescent Neighbourhood Watch for the current year was £47, most of which went on photocopying and biscuits.
Mr Cartwright conceded the point but said that the Mujahedeen might be willing to give them a missile once they explained what it was for. He added that the guerrillas could be shown a map of Wilmington Park, just at the end of the road and always deserted at night, and they would see that it was an ideal point from which to launch a Stinger missile at a plane flying only a couple of hundred feet overhead.
Mr Davis-Gribben wondered who would go and get the missile and how it would be brought back.
Mr Cartwright said that he would go and get the missile. His first wife, with whom he was still on good terms, was a Mrs Khan whose family were from Lahore. He could go and visit them before making a side trip to Afghanistan. He said that he had consulted a map and that it was not far. He would smuggle the missile over the border into Turkey where it would be collected by his cousin Roger, a long-distance lorry driver who often did the Ankara route.
Mr Tomkins wondered what would happen if the plane were shot down and it landed somewhere inside the borough of Wandsworth. If there were a disaster in the borough would it not place enormous financial strain on local services and result in much higher council tax bills?
Mr Phillips said that to the best of his knowledge the cost of these sorts of disaster was borne by central government. He wondered if the Wellesley Crescent Neighbourhood Watch ought to send a warning as to the action they intended to take, so that it was correctly interpreted as a protest against the aircraft noise and not claimed for their own handiwork by unscrupulous terrorists? Mr Cartwright agreed but Mr Davis-Gribben and Mr Morris did not. Mrs Wu pointed out that there was no hurry to resolve this point.
1.3
Mrs Phillips shifts in bed and Mr Phillips holds still so as not to wake her. The bed this morning smells warm and slightly sweaty, though not of almonds. That smell is much, much less common than it had once been. These days there is probably no need for the spermicide, Mr Phillips thinks, given that he is fifty and Mrs Phillips is … forty-six. (When he thinks of his wife’s age he always has a split-second flash of panic while he checks the date. Birthday, 14 October 1948; today’s date, 31 July 1995 — phew. Two months plus still to go. And nearly six months till the wedding anniversary, 14 January. Mr Phillips has a recurring fear that one day he will remember one of these dates only to find that it is too late, he has already forgotten it, notwithstanding its red-inked presence in the diary and in the reliable memory of Karen, and he will be involved in an orgy of self-abasement and apology and also the nagging doubt about why he had forgotten — was the marriage running out of steam, or was his memory fading, or both? Marriage being, like the religion Mr Phillips gave up long ago, a matter of both faith and works, of sustained will-to-belief and routine observances, both being necessary and neither sufficient.)
One day the almond smell will become a thing of the past, gone for ever. Is anyone to blame, wonders Mr Phillips, or is this just what happens? He has discovered that there is a great secret about sex, a secret that far exceeds the other secrets that surrounded it when he was looking forward to it in youth — when sex was a country of possibility, the territory of films and pop music, the most forbidden, most exciting thing in the world. Sex itself was a secret into which you were initiated once and for all; everything about it was to do with secrets, some of which weren’t true (‘a girl can’t get pregnant unless she comes’, ‘if you wank too much you’ll go blind’) and some of which, it turned out, were true (like the fact that it was the best thing in the world). But all those secrets are as nothing compared to the real secret, the truth no one wants to tell you and which even adults don’t discuss or admit, and which, like all important secrets, is surprising and radical and obvious: it is that no one ever does it. This isn’t strictly true, of course: some people do do it — but as a maxim, the idea that no one ever does it is certainly much, much more true than the opposite claim, that everyone does it all the time. No one Mr Phillips knows ever does it, anyway; not his horrible immediate boss Mr Mill or his horrible ultimate boss Mr Wilkins, not his colleagues, Aberdonian Mr Monroe or young Mr Abbot or drunk Mr Collins or bald Mr Austen; not his neighbours, the Cartwrights on the left (who instead have noisy, drunken bi-monthly Friday or Saturday night arguments) and the Cotts on the right (who are, however, in their seventies, so their obviously-not-doing-it-ness is both taken for granted and gratefully received, and you don’t even have to think about them doing it), certainly not the Davis-Gribbens’s opposite, who not only don’t now do it but to judge by their childlessness have perhaps never done it, not even once, experimentally or to get it over with or by mistake. What is that brutal old wives’ adage? If you put a penny in a jar for every time you did it during the first year of being married, then took a penny out for every time you did it thereafter, the jar would never become empty. Cruel but fair, thinks Mr Phillips. The accountant in him likes the fact that the size of the jar doesn’t have to be specified.