The Digested Twenty-first Century by John Crace Page B

guest change into his pressed silk undergarments.’
    ‘Don’t worry, Mrs Sawle,’ Cecil replied. ‘I’m happy to read some of my own verse after dinner. But first George and I should go for a stroll to ponder the imminent war with Germany.’
    ‘Few people ever enter this area of the woods,’ said George.
    ‘Then let me take you the Oxford way,’ Cecil smiled, stripping naked.
    ‘I thought you would never ask.’
    ‘Your poetry was wonderful,’ Daphne said.
    ‘You’re very beautiful,’ Cecil gasped, forcing his tongue into her mouth.
    ‘No, no! That’s not nice!’ Though in a way she felt it was.
    The Sawles felt a sense of deflation in their humdrum lives after Cecil’s departure. ‘Oh look,’ said Daphne. ‘Cecil’s left me a poem: ‘I’ve written a poem / That’s not very good / Though after I’ve died / It will give everyone wood.’
    * * *
    ‘Come on,’ said Lady Valance to her children, Corinna and Wilfie. ‘We must prepare for the great weekend when SebbyStokes comes to Corley to talk to us all for his biography of Cecil. But we must not keep Sebby too long as he has to deal with the General Strike.’
    As the guests arrived, Daphne felt a sense of dread. It had felt normal in 1917 to marry Cecil’s brother, Dudley, after Cecil had been shot on the Somme, but she was now embarrassed by the attention she received as the person for whom the greatest ever war poem had been written. And Dudley had turned into such a brute, and was almost certainly having an affair with Eva.
    George looked sadly at Cecil’s tomb, remembering the length and strength of Cecil’s membrum virile. ‘Ah there you are,’ said his dreary wife.
    ‘I want to make love to you,’ said Eva to Daphne.
    ‘Good lord, you’re a lesbian, after all. I’m very flattered, but I shall have to decline as I’m hoping to elope with Revel, who I suspect may be a queer, but I’m hoping to turn him.’
    ‘I wonder what Sebby will put in Cecil’s biography,’ Dudley sneered brutishly. ‘I bet it’s not as funny as my book about him.’
    Daphne reflected on how the war had changed everything. It didn’t matter if Cecil had been a good or bad poet, Sebby would laud him anyway. After all, he’d almost certainly fucked him as well.
    * * *
    Paul Bryant looked at a colleague in the toilet. Once the Sexual Offences Act was passed, he’d be able to do what he liked with him.
    ‘I need some help in the garden,’ said Mr Keeping. Paul thought this was an unusual way for a bank manager to deploy his staff, but demurred.
    ‘I’m Corinna,’ said Mr Keeping’s wife. ‘Why don’t you come to my mother Daphne’s 70th birthday party?’
    Paul was transfixed as Corinna and Peter Rowe played a duet. ‘I love Cecil Valance’s poetry,’ said Paul.
    ‘Well, it just so happens that I teach at Corley, which is now a boy’s boarding school,’ said Peter, ‘so if you’d like to visit, we could bugger one another behind Cecil’s statue.’
    ‘Did you know that I went on to marry Revel before marrying someone else, leaving an impossibly complicated family tree that I don’t expect you to follow?’ said Daphne.
    ‘That’s just as well,’ said everyone.
    * * *
    ‘Did you hear about Corinna and Mr Keeping?’ said Paul. ‘Terrible news.’
    ‘I can’t say that I had,’ Peter replied. ‘And neither will anyone else, because that’s the nature of other people’s lives. You seldom find out everything.’
    ‘The trouble is that now we’re in the 1980s, the reader has realised we’re not nearly as interesting as the characters in the first half of the book. Still, I’d better press on with my biography of Cecil. My hunch is Corinna might have been Cecil’s child, even though that would mean she had a 14-month pregnancy.’
    ‘Cecil would fuck anything,’ said George, ‘though you’d better not trust me, as I’ve got Alzheimer’s.’
    * * *
    Rob was looking for someone to cruise at Peter’s funeral. ‘Isn’t