‘Their numbers matter, you see. And on this very island, in this great nation, a great unplanned experiment is under way. Let me say it. Someone has to say it: as a species, regarded as a species, chickies impute a so-far-unmeasured pressure upon this island’s ecosystems. It is not a matter of what they might intend. Such concepts are wholly irrelevant. It is, simply, a question of what the chickies are.’
I leaned towards the girl beside me and said, under my breath: ‘He doesn’t know what “impute” means.’
She shot me a flat glance and looked away. Her rejection was total, as though I had poked my head around a door into a room in which I was not welcome.
On the other side of me, a hand shot out and gripped my own. I turned, and was confronted by magnificent breasts and a freckled décolletage adorned with a single silver medallion on which an aeroplane rose above a stand of palms.
I raised my eyes. ‘Stella.’
‘Naughty boy. Why haven’t you said hello?’ This in a much louder, gayer voice than the girl had employed; it put even Chernoy off his tracks.
‘So that, erm, we might consider them – the chickies, I mean. I mean, how should we regard them? As we attempt, for instance, to control the spread in our southern waterways of American signal crayfish—?’
‘Good God,’ a man in a dinner jacket exclaimed, sliding his hand around Georgy Chernoy’s shoulders, ‘in my local restaurant we eat them.’
Georgy Chernoy blinked at the interruption, before smoothly joining in the general laughter. ‘Well, that isn’t quite—’
‘Happily,’ the man in the dinner jacket went on, assuming control of the party – I think he was a junior minister, something to do with the Arts, or Sport – ‘we have no culinary plans for the chickie race this evening. I have just been informed that our somewhat more conventional menu is ready for serving. Friends, would you take your seats?’
Aunt Stella, her hand tight around my own, led me along the room to where about a dozen round tables had been laid for dinner. ‘Come with me.’
Bootless to point out that there was already a seating plan. Stella placed me firmly in the seat to her left and brushed off the small confusions this generated with a charm she had learned years before on the stage, steering repertory performances in which she alone had properly learned her lines.
‘So come along,’ she cried, settling herself beside me. ‘How on earth are you?’
‘Well.’ I was in love with her; so were most people, irrespective of gender. As is often the case with actors whose power resides in declaiming their lines as though they were poetry (a dying and undervalued art), she was magnificently sexual. Putting everything into every line tends to leave everything on show afterwards. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I think I’m here to represent Architecture. I feel a complete fraud.’
‘I think it’s rather sweet,’ Stella said, picking up and examining the tableware with a critical eye. ‘The government hasn’t a clue about what any of us do and thinks we all subsist on air and sunlight. Come a crisis, though, they gather us up and rally us over the top like the good little foot soldiers we secretly long to be. Oh, to belong to society! Imagine! The vanguard of soft power. Good God.’ She peered more closely at her fork. ‘“John Lewis”. Really?’
Her clipped delivery was hard to parse. Painfully, I ascended the ladder of her logic. ‘Crisis?’
‘What?’
‘You said there was a crisis. That we were here because of a crisis.’
‘Oh. That. The spaceships, I mean. The whole Woomera effort.’
‘That is a crisis?’
‘Not for us, dear. For us it’s a red-letter day. But for the Bund…’ Her eyes widened. ‘For the Bund, well…’
‘Well what?’
‘If the Victory reaches the Moon and the Bund are already there…’
I shook my head. ‘The Victory is not even built yet,’ I told her. ‘And even the Bund aren’t on the Moon yet.’
‘Their machines are.’
‘Exactly. Their machines.’
Stella pulled one of her little-girl-lost faces. ‘Well, I don’t pretend to understand the details,’ she said.
‘And you?’ I asked her, backtracking. I wasn’t equipped for a political conversation, and not in the mood to be bested in it.
‘Me?’
‘What are you doing here? You’re hardly “a young person of promise”.’
‘Well, thank you for that.’
‘More a woman of glamour and accomplishment.’
‘You stepped around that hole very neatly, dear.’
‘Thank you.’
‘But if I hear you utter the word “mature” I will stick this fork in your eye.’
‘So?’
‘So, what?’
‘So what brings you here? Presumably there’s a production on the way I should have heard about?’
Stella laughed and patted my hand. ‘Dear Stuart, don’t you ever read the papers?’
‘Not really, no,’ I said. I didn’t want to say that I had taught myself to read a better sort of newspaper these days than the ones in which she regularly featured.
‘Well, if you had, you silly boy, you would know I am your hostess this evening.’
I frowned.
‘In a manner of speaking.’ She gave me a big false grin. ‘In that I’m Georgy’s fuck.’
Over the years, Stella’s promiscuity had likely earned her more column inches than her acting. How plain Sue Cosgrave had escaped the confining expectations of Yorkshire’s West Riding in the first place was the stuff of a dozen gushing articles in a dozen different magazines, to the point where she had reduced the entire saga (Pye Nest Methodist Church, the Halifax Victoria, Leeds Rep, Birmingham Rep, Liverpool, Bristol, the Manchester Tivoli) to one of her pithier one-liners: ‘I owe my career to three things: a gift for mimicry, a vice-like memory and an inability to conceive.’
She saw nothing salacious in the way she had arranged and rearranged her domestic circumstances over the years, and as for the men she had supposedly exploited, well, she never approached the role of muse with anything other than perfect seriousness. This had made her one of theatre’s more notorious femmes and, until the recent decline of the West End, one of its more powerful players. Only the youngest commentators ever took her to task: earnest, unattractive young people from provincial stage schools, sharpening their wits on Stella in between, say, a casual catering job and a devised theatre production in the basement of an Islington pub. Newcomers imagine theatre runs on talent. Stella learned early on that it runs on morale.
‘I can’t imagine there are many theatres in the Bund.’
‘Stuart, don’t be an anti-Semite.’
‘Are there?’
‘There’s television, you silly boy.’ She let me mull over that as the waiters brought the soup course. Then: ‘Georgy’s very interested in a concept I have for a show about unidentified flying objects. They get a lot of them in Wales.’