‘Well!’ said Honor briskly, when I arrived home that evening and told her something of what was on my mind. ‘This Miss Sumpter has certainly stirred things up!’ There was grilled mackerel for tea. Honor buys it whenever she can, fish oils being so much better for the body than animal fats. The fish shoals are more plentiful now that the human populations of the world have fallen. They are no longer trawled out of existence. I am not fond of fish myself, as a dish, but appreciate their nutritional value. Even so, I am sorry to say, I left the roe on my plate, pushing it under the skin of my baked potato in the hope that it would escape Honor’s concerned eyes. To no avail.
‘The roe is full of natural goodness,’ Honor said, ‘do try to eat it. You need the skin of the potato for roughage. Besides, you know how you love potatoes.’
Indeed I had been very fond of potatoes in my youth, before butter was recognised as a health hazard and pepper was banned altogether as a carcinogenic agent. And of course, kind and generous as she is, it is natural for Honor still to see her husband as a young man. So I ate up without fuss.
‘There, now,’ she said, when I had finished, ‘You’ll live for ever, and have all the time and energy in the world to reform the GNFR.’
‘It is not a laughing matter,’ I said.
‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘Let the Muse of Comedy descend, and may all our prayers go to ensuring happy endings!’
She was ideologically correct, of course, so I let her frivolity pass. But later, when we were jogging around Hyde Park, I returned to the theme.
‘It is quite clear to me,’ I said, ‘that the GSWITS allocated to us mortals is a mere B-feature writer.’
‘So you keep saying,’ she said. Honor pants rather, when jogging, but then is of heavier build than I. We stopped, on her behalf, and rested our backs against one of the great new fast-growing deciduous oak trees which these days make our parks so attractive. If only science could do as much in its search for the vaccine as it has for horticulture!
‘The evidence is’, I said, ‘that the GSWITS has the unhappy tendency of His kind to introduce disasters – cyclones, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and man-made explosions to get Himself out of narrative difficulties.’
‘I hope no one can overhear us,’ said Honor. ‘This talk smacks of blasphemy.’
‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘It is a perfectly legitimate area for discussion, and no pinner priest will deny me my right to interpret my god in my own way. Besides, I hardly imagine they have the oak trees bugged. I am not denying the GSWITS in any way, let me make that clear; on the contrary, I maintain only that the effort of His creation must be to see that He takes His task seriously, and fulfils His brief accurately.’
‘Quite so,’ said Honor. She is a good girl.
‘One day everyone will recognise it. I have known it from an early age – it dawned upon me in my youth: full up to here with Watergates, Irangates, plummetting Boeings, Titanics raised, Three Mile Islands, Chernobyls and the first rumbling of AIDS, it came to me that the writing in the skies was nothing to do with art and literature, but the simple narrative of commercial sensationalism. That here was not even a main-feature but some kind of hotch-potch of a supporting fictional exercise.’
‘Shall we continue?’ asked Honor. ‘We have four more laps to do. If we fill our cards tonight we can have the weekend free.’ Exercise of a regulation kind is compulsory, if excess taxes are not to be paid. To be elderly is not to be exempt. It is the citizen’s duty to stay healthy, and our ageing population is remarkably fit.
‘We will be happier when we can accept the flawed nature of the GSWITS,’ I said, as we ran. ‘We will have fewer expectations and more sense of free will.’ We rounded the pleasant corner where the purple Bougainvillaea streams from the giant Redwoods – who ever thought to see such sights in Hyde Park! – and padded through the glowing flowered tunnels of the underpass (in the last five years they have induced even tropical flowers to bloom in the cold half-dark).
‘A new race of pinner priests will presently arise,’ I proclaimed to my panting witness, ‘and the RGNFR will be triumphant!’
‘The RGNFR?’ she enquired.
‘The Revised Great New Fictional Religion,’ I explained.
‘And I suppose you’ll be the Lord High Priest.’
‘Naturally,’ I replied. I hoped she was not being facetious. My wife is a serious and practical person, but I sometimes think offers too much at the shrine of the Muse of Comedy. At any rate the muse tends to descend at inappropriate moments.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘when you are, will you re-call the likes of Gabriella Sumpter, or will you let her rest in peace?’ I gave the matter some thought.
‘I will re-call her,’ I said, ‘but when I do, it will be with the whiff of sulphur, not the taste of ambrosia.’
‘You mean you will re-invent hell?’
‘I certainly want her punished,’ I said to my own surprise. ‘Oh yes. I want her punished.’
Honor, wisely, did not pursue the matter. We rested and talked about the dowry we would give our granddaughter to take with her to Scotland. The young cannot take out insurance these days, and it has become the custom for the older generation to make these new starts in life, as and when they become inevitable, as pleasant as possible. There is travel into Scotland, but not, of course, out of it, and though the new communications technology can make the actual physical whereabouts of the friend or relative all but irrelevant the new technology must be afforded. Even something as simple as the holograph telephone is expensive. Fortunately we pulp priests of the GNFR are well rewarded for our pains. And pains they are.
I arrived at the Museum the next morning to find Playback Temple No 3 already occupied, and had to make do with cubicle No 5, where the console has seen better days. I was irritable and my calves ached, but at least, thanks to Honor’s encouragement, we had filled our cards and could presently enjoy a weekend free of exercise. What would I do without my dear wife?