Comfort Zone. Brian Aldiss
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things flourished here by chance. ‘My secateurs are the guardian angels.’ He persuaded himself to wander back to his desk. What he had written so far was,
In the years when the Han emperors ruled China, two centuries before the birth of Christ, the Chinese perfected the crossbow, with which to defeat the barbarians beyond their gates. The barbarians did not possess the skills necessary to cast the bronze locks which the crossbow required. And so, with the barbarians taken care of, an era of peace commenced within the newly united states of China.
It might have been like that. He could not be sure. His belief was fortified by his admiration for the Chinese people – despite their invasion of Tibet. They still quoted Confucius. Justin recalled an old school Confucius joke: ‘Confucius he say panties not best thing on earth, but next to it.’ He decided it was wiser not to quote that one to the ladies he was to address.
The West also was able to maintain its institutions. The Magna Carta of the thirteenth century still served as the basis of much law. NASA had sent off a probe to investigate Pluto. Not so countries of Africa and the Middle East, which had in the main still to advance to the water closet. Did they give a fig for Saturn or Pluto? They were not reliable, he thought. As Om Haldar had proved unreliable.
So he allowed his cogitations to wander.
Justin continued to tap sentences into his old computer, the Quadra – still working after fifteen years of constant use.
So from this Chinese crossbow developed one of the great culturing factors by which civilization itself is judged. I refer to the restaurant – and here admittedly I am guessing. But imagine the civility, the security, the confidence, the prevailing peace required for people firstly to come to a strange table – imagine a shady courtyard in Loyang – and to sit down with others whom they did not know, or perhaps only remotely knew, without fear of being attacked or stabbed to death.
Furthermore, an unknown chef then serves food which they eat without fear that it might be poisoned … It’s a revolution! One giant step forward au fond for mankind.
Nowadays we may eat at the Café Noir in Headington or the Quod in Oxford every evening, without a qualm. We take restaurants for granted. But that first one … The restaurant opened a new phase in social discourse.
Furthermore, in restaurants one does more than eat. One converses. And from conversation, minds are changed and new ideas are born.
Justin was pleased with this. He was inclined to contrast restaurants favourably with churches and mosques. He went to sleep for half an hour in his armchair as a reward. He awoke as before, with an uneasy feeling that someone had been standing looking at him. Janet? Are you there, darling?
Later, he added to the list of ancient inventions the orchestra and writing itself. Of writing, he spoke of ‘the long route from cuneiform to Jilly Cooper’. By lunchtime, he had produced a passable script. Since Kate still had his Toyota, the chair of the Wives’ Fellowship came to drive him down to the church. She was a lady by the name of Christine Bower, very active and three years older than Justin. At the church, she left Justin and went about other duties. He was stranded alone in a large lecture hall. After a few uninteresting minutes, women began to flock in. All were delighted to see friends, and paid no attention to their guest speaker. Justin went to sit down and rest his leg. Then a woman came and talked to him out of courtesy. She remembered the time when Justin and Jan lived in Chalfont Road nearby; she proved an interesting person to talk to.
Eventually order was called. Justin was introduced. He launched into his talk, remembering the sound advice his friend Harry had given him long ago: ‘Always start with a joke. Then they’ll stay awake hoping you will tell another joke later.’ Justin was cautious about that; after all, these ladies were or had been academics, or the wives of academics. They were accustomed to being talked at, with never a joke at all. All went well. Listening to talk of restaurants and their origins was not obnoxious to them. When Justin concluded, question time began. What most interested the assembled ladies was the question of how and where restaurants began and prospered. Justin defended his choice by saying that Chinese cuisine was generally considered the best in the world because the Chinese had had longer to practise. Furthermore, there had long been the puzzle of why, when the Chinese had begun so briskly in many arts (printing, landscape painting and pottery were named), they seemed at one point to have developed no further. That, Justin claimed, was because they were too busy sitting at, or serving at, table. He made this bit up on the spot and was proud of it. It seemed to prove his point.
All kinds of contradictions were offered up by his learned audience. The Arabs were noted for giving great feasts to visiting strangers. Queen Elizabeth I threw luxurious banquets. Hindus loved to bankrupt themselves on marriage feasts. And of course the French had been sound on restaurants for some centuries. Surely the ancient Egyptians had included grand banquets in their ceremonies. Such suggestions indicated how learned and well-travelled the Wives were. But one woman settled the question. She said that the prevailing characteristic of a restaurant was that you had to pay for your food; and unless the food was good, you would not return and so the chef would not prosper. At banquets you did not pay. Why had that point never occurred to Justin? Afterwards, all were friendly and came to have a personal word. Not only were the women nice to him, they brought him tea and biscuits and an envelope containing an unexpected cheque. They were friendly and equable – like an ideal family, Justin thought. And another lady drove him back to Old Headington and St Andrews Road. She was a local councillor, by name Annie Fanthorpe. She asked him what he was doing now he was retired. ‘I’m working on a theory of Chance. On the whole, we don’t think chance is a good thing.’
‘The fortuitous …’
‘No, that word has come to mean lucky, in a confusion with fortune. I don’t use it. Its etymological meaning is “happening by chance”. And what happens by chance is like breaking your leg – generally unpleasant.’
Annie Fanthorpe was a polite person; she did not tell Justin he was a pedant. ‘On the whole, I must agree, chance is not pleasant. I suppose you have heard that the site of the old Anchor pub has been sold by chance to an international consortium.’
‘I hadn’t heard about the consortium, no.’
She cocked an eyebrow at him. ‘But you live very near there. It’s gone to the KIC.’ He did not like to admit that he had not heard of the KIC, and they completed the drive in silence.
It happened that on the following morning, Ted Hayse came round collecting for Christian Aid. Justin told him about the talk, which Ted’s wife had asked him to give in the first place. ‘They were kind to you, were they?’ said Rev. Ted. ‘They have the reputation of being a pretty savage lot. They have eaten academics for breakfast and reduced strong soldierly types to tears …’
‘Then I got off lightly. Maybe it was because I told them that the history of writing ran from cuneiform to Jilly Cooper.’
‘That could very likely have saved your bacon,’ said the vicar, gravely.
‘Did you know that the Anchor site had been sold to a consortium?’
‘It was in the local paper yesterday. You should read your local paper, my dear Justin! The Kuwaiti International Consortium.’
In Pen to Paper, Justin discovered a funny penguin postcard. A penguin was falling off a tall iceberg. Other penguins, watching from the top of the iceberg, were saying, Monty was always one for fooling about. Justin bought it. He knew his son Dave liked funny penguin cards. In no time, he posted this card to Eagles Rest, where Dave lived. He walked down Logic Lane to see Ken and Marie, where he found they had a visitor. They often had visitors; this was a particularly distinguished one – a cousin of Ken’s, the Very Rev. Milton Milsome, just passing through Oxford on his way to the BBC in London, where he was to give the annual Emmanuel Graves-Janes Lecture. Milton Milsome was sitting in the shade in one corner of the garden, a large self-confident man in a panama hat, taking an occasional sip from a glass of Pinot Grigio which stood by his blazer-clad elbow. Ken and Marie were being attentive. Once Justin had been introduced, without much effect, he sat quietly to listen to the tail end of a lecture.