Shylock Is My Name (10 page)

Strulovitch showed him all his ten fingers. If he were to count the reasons for his anxiety they would both be here till Judgement Day.

But he had to begin somewhere. “Here’s the ridiculous thing,” he said. “The last time she brought someone round I was expecting an uncombed boy in trainers and nose rings and the politics of…well, an uncombed boy in trainers and nose rings. He turned out to be a tutor whose politics were no better but at least he was clean.”

“And ‘not’…?”

“Of course ‘not,’ Beatrice only does ‘nots.’ I say he was clean. I should have said he was too clean. When he called me Mr. Strulovitch he gargled the word. It was as though he were washing his mouth out. The joke is that while I’m plotting ways to put Beatrice off him, she gets rid of him herself…”

“…and finds someone worse…”

“Far worse. Here I’ve been, steeling myself against the next over-principled, money-hating, ISIS-backing Judaeo-phobe with an MA in fine art she’s going to bring back from college and she hits on someone who’s probably never opened a book and certainly never heard of Noam Chomsky—a hyper-possessive uneducated uber-goy from round the corner. I’ve no idea how or where she met him. At a wrestling match, is my guess, or on the dodgems. But it’s my doing. I was looking for danger in the wrong place. If I hadn’t frightened her off Jewish boys by telling her she had to find one she might have met a nice quiet embroiderer of skullcaps.”

“She was never going to satisfy you. What if your embroiderer of skullcaps had been a woman?”

“I wouldn’t have minded. I don’t hanker for grandchildren.”

“You would have found something not quite right about her.”

“Maybe. But there’s something not quite right and then there’s something in every way wrong.”

“How serious is it?”

“Very, or she wouldn’t be bringing him over. She wants my blessing. That’s serious.”

“So they’ve known each other a long time.”

“She hasn’t been alive a long time. But too long for comfort. She might be sixteen now, but how old was she when she met him? And how far has it gone?”

“You could ask her.”

“She wouldn’t tell me.”

“I assume you’ve looked on her phone.”

“And on her computer. But it isn’t easy. She is guarded with more passwords than a bank vault. And I daren’t leave any trace I’ve been there. Otherwise”—he made as though to cut his throat—“I’m a dead man.”

“It could be that she isn’t hiding anything. You might find you like him.”

“It doesn’t matter whether or not I like him. He’s beyond the pale for all the obvious reasons. And then for several more.”

“So you’ve already met him?”

“Met him, no. Know of him, yes. Everyone round here knows
of
him. He’s a roué of repute and plays football for Stockport County.”

“And that’s bad?”

“From a football fan’s point of view it’s very bad. Stockport County isn’t even a League club. Though as a local personality he enjoys a modicum of fame. In the north anyway. He behaves badly on the field of the play, appears on television quizzes in the company of comedians, laughs like a ninny at their jokes, makes none of his own, and advertises underwear and trainers. Can you imagine having a man who advertises underwear for a son-in-law? Only on local buses, I grant you, but that somehow makes it worse. On top of everything else he has going against him he’s provincial.”

“You would prefer your daughter’s suitor to be metropolitanly unsuitable?”

“Don’t worry. He’s that too. He makes it into the gossip columns and has had I don’t know how many wives. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s married to at least one of them still. Not all that long ago he was slapped with a seven-match suspension—itself suspended—for giving a Nazi salute after scoring a goal. Apparently it was his first in two seasons.”

“His first Nazi salute?”

“His first goal.”

Shylock took a moment to digest all he’d heard. Then he asked, “Have you decided what you are going to say to him?”

“I will ask him what a Nazi’s doing with a Jewish girl?”

“I can tell you what he’ll answer. He’ll say he’s saving her from the stain of having a Jewish father.”

“Times have changed. He’ll be both too stupid and too smart to say that. He has already publicly apologised for the salute which he puts down to a moment of excitement. He says he only intended to punch the air. He says he doesn’t know where the Nazi bit came from. And he’s promised he will never do it again. What if he sees Beatrice as a way of making amends?”

“He could be genuine.”

“Genuinely what?”

Shylock looked out towards Alderley Edge, as though the word he needed could be out there. “Penitential?”

“It’s not a term I associate with him, I have to say.”

“You could be wrong.”

“And how will I ever know that?”

“There are ways of finding out.”

“What? By putting the question to him directly?
Are you penitent, Mr. Howsome?
He’ll think that’s a fancy way of asking him to take a penalty. Score and you get to sleep with my daughter.”

“Which isn’t all that wide of the mark. You could tell him if he really wants your blessing there’ll be a price. He will have to make himself suitable.”

“Suitable? What—divorce his other wives? Take elocution lessons?”

Shylock didn’t bother to reply. There was mischief, Strulovitch thought, in his silence. A make-believe malevolence.

Strulovitch raised an eyebrow. “You’re not saying he should convert?”

“Begin the process at least. Show willing.”

Strulovitch laughed. “There are a few more obstacles in the way of his converting than there were in the way of yours.”

“There was only one obstacle in the way of my converting—my invincible hostility to Christianity. Your future son-in-love has a soft spot for Jewish women, you say, which is likely to make him more malleable. And his not reading is also to your advantage. It helps to be theologically illiterate.”

“This isn’t only about what
he
might find acceptable.”

“No indeed, there are the father-in-law’s wishes to be taken into consideration also. I don’t minimise the difficulties. But they are not insuperable.”

And with that he made a scissors motion with his furred fingers that caused Strulovitch to think first about Matisse, and then the red-legged scissor-man in
Struwwelpeter
, and finally the Jew of the fevered medieval imagination who kidnapped Christian children and castrated them.

“God fucking Almighty!” he said.

W
hen last encountered, D’Anton was giving vent to a sigh. What now needs to be told, before the depths of that sigh can be plumbed, is the true history of D’Anton’s feelings, not about Barnaby but about Simon Strulovitch, and the true history of Strulovitch’s feelings about him.

The two men grew up at more or less the same time in more or less the same part of the country (though D’Anton had been born to wealthy, missionary-minded parents in Guinea), and given their instinct for beautiful things and talent for acquiring them might have encountered each other sooner than they did, if not as schoolboys—for D’Anton very obviously went to a public school and Strulovitch very obviously did not—then in places where comfortably-off aesthetes congregated, at charity dinners and prize-givings, at openings of exhibitions and in the studios of artists, at private sales and in the drawing rooms of collectors. But neither was a fully committed northerner, Strulovitch spending a great deal of his time in London and D’Anton much of his in West Africa and the Far East, which was why they also missed each other at functions at the Golden Triangle Academy, to which Strulovitch loaned the odd painting and where D’Anton gave the odd lecture. Though it must be supposed, given this coincidence of academy and geography, that word of the one reached the other from to time, it was only when Strulovitch proposed making a gift of part of his art collection to the people of Cheshire in return for nothing more than some sympathetic easing of planning restrictions in relation to a once fine but now neglected Jacobean house just outside Knutsford, that the two men became overtly aware of each other. The house was at the time in the nominal care of Cheshire Heritage though in fact owned by the local authority which harboured plans of turning it into an ostrich farm and children’s park. To Strulovitch, who wished to honour his parents, especially while his mother was still alive, with a Kunsthaus in their name—the Morris and Leah Strulovitch Gallery of British Jewish Art, he proposed calling it—the property in question seemed a godsend. It was the ideal size, enjoyed an ideal eminence, and it was in the right place, his mother having always loved shopping and taking afternoon tea in Knutsford. A Knutsford Kunsthaus!—how could he better that? To D’Anton, who was often called in to advise Cheshire Heritage in matters that pertained to the fine arts, Strulovitch’s scheme had as little to recommend it as Strulovitch believed it had much. Indeed, where Strulovitch saw the hand of God, D’Anton saw the work of the Devil. His arguments were of the sort usually voiced by guardians of the local environment who are opposed to something for reasons they are unable to admit, namely that it violated bylaws, that it constituted a traffic hazard, that it would bring in more visitors than the Golden Triangle could cope with, that it posed a pollution problem both in regard to noise and appearance, that it dishonoured the distinctiveness of the house itself which was, let it not be forgotten, Jacobean and so enjoyed a history which Strulovitch’s collection, by its very nature, could not match, and that, however it was viewed, it failed the first test of being culturally intrinsic to the area.

Arguing his case at a joint Cheshire Heritage and local council planning meeting, Strulovitch pointed out that it was precisely the “specific nature” of his collection that would preclude such numbers of visitors as might be deemed hazardous or troublesome. As for noise, he could assure councillors and trustees that the art he intended to display was silent in itself—the foster children of silence and slow-time—and would occasion silence in those who beheld it. And finally, with respect, he failed to see that a gallery of British Jewish art was any less intrinsic to North Cheshire than an ostrich park would have been. The painter Emmanuel Levy was born just up the road in Manchester, Bernard Meninsky had grown up a half-hour’s drive from Knutsford in Liverpool, Jacob Kramer across the Pennines in Leeds, and at least three of the sculptures in his collection were done by artists whose grandparents had been born and lived in this very county. Correct him if he was wrong but he was fairly sure that that could not be said of the ostriches.

If the project was going to elicit so little in the way of interest and curiosity as to constitute no disturbance to the environment whatsoever, D’Anton, looking tragic, argued, then where was the advantage to the local community in supporting it? As for the fact that the odd obscure artist whose work would hang in the Morris and Leah Strulovitch Gallery of Jewish Art hailed from the area, that was an argument that could be adduced to support any venture. If he, for example, wanted to build a Museum of Sadism and Torture in North Cheshire, would it advance his cause to show that a number of the perverts featured came from the Wilmslow or Alderley Edge area?

Strulovitch reminded council officers that the works on display would cost the local rate-payers nothing, that they were a gift from him to them, and that furthermore there was no similarity, from a cultural or educative point of view, between an art gallery and a chamber of horrors. D’Anton wondered from whose cultural point of view Mr. Strulovitch was speaking. He could, to be frank about it, imagine many who lived in the Golden Triangle finding more to entertain and instruct them in such a venue as he had humorously conjured out of the air than in that presented with so much heat, aforethought and condescension by the applicant. What evidence indeed was there that there’d be any interest at all in a gallery of Jewish art, British or otherwise—most of which, as he understood the matter, was urban and avant-garde in spirit—in a rural area of outstanding natural beauty with its long history of quiet churchgoing? He wasn’t arguing against the existence of such art—he was something of an avant-gardist himself—nor was he averse, in principle, to such a venture as Mr. Strulovitch proposed. He didn’t doubt that in a more culturally apt place, by which Strulovitch took him to mean Golders Green or the Negev, it would be welcomed. But why, in the name of God, a Morris and Leah Strulovitch Gallery of Jewish art,
here
?

Strulovitch, who didn’t like the way D’Anton enunciated his parents’ names, saw his proposal turn putrid. It hung in the air of the council chamber like a malign presence. As D’Anton talked it even took a form, an incubus that would disturb the quiet of the Golden Triangle by day, and the sleep of its inhabitants by night. Strulovitch could feel its touch, smell it, taste it. He wished he could withdraw all memory of it, in order to spare his parents’ very names the stench of alien malevolence with which they were now associated. But there was no reversing the ancient imputation of interloperie that D’Anton had, with such expertness, laid upon them.
Morris and Leah Strulovitch
—why, even he, the son, was ready to run from such an incantation of evil.
Morris and Leah Strulovitch
—stand on the highest point of Alderley Edge under a full moon and say the names three times and hell itself would open.

As happens when you make an enemy of someone you have never previously met, though you are neighbours, Strulovitch now began to run into D’Anton everywhere—in restaurants in the Golden Triangle, at charitable dinners, at parties thrown by wealthy art collectors, at a concert in the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, even at a Society of Watercolourists’ reception in London. Am I imagining him, Strulovitch wondered. Am I conjuring him up out of the hatred we bear each other? He was careful never to meet his eye and felt confident that D’Anton was no more eager to meet his.

What’s happening to me, Strulovitch wondered. Was he turning into one of those Jews who saw insults to his Jewishness everywhere? God forbid. Such a person only insulted himself. Weren’t there plenty of non-Jews he didn’t like? I will not behave like this, he promised himself. I will not allow myself to feel slighted by the rustlings of a mouse.

And when the mouse was malignant? A malignant, moping, misanthropic mamzer of a mouse? To his rustlings, too, would Strulovitch cultivate a fine Anglo-Saxon indifference.

But one day as he was strolling through Knutsford after a long lunch with an old barrister friend who had chambers in the town, Strulovitch found himself at the edge of a small but ill-tempered demonstration outside the town hall, the object of which, he deduced from the literature being handed out, was a company that had a contract to recycle waste for the local council, but that also made parts for a pipeline that linked illegal settlements on the West Bank with Tel Aviv.

“So the purpose of this demonstration is what?” Strulovitch asked one of the protestors.

“To persuade the council to cancel the contract.”

“For the pipeline in the West Bank?”

“For the rubbish and recycling services here.”

“Here in Knutsford?”

“Yes.”

“So what will happen to our rubbish?”

“There are others who can collect it. And anyway what’s a little inconvenience…?”

“No, exactly,” Strulovitch agreed. But he wasn’t sure how inconvenience to the people of Cheshire would impact detrimentally on a pipeline to and from the illegal settlements in the West Bank.

The protestor helped him out. “You make a noise where you can,” he said.

“Hoping that it will reverberate…?”

“Eventually, yes.”

When a butterfly beats its wings in Knutsford, Strulovitch was thinking…then he spotted D’Anton moving quietly among the demonstrators. There was no time to make a decision one way or another, or remember what he’d promised himself. He simply acted out of impulse. “Hello there,” he called out, and when D’Anton turned, Strulovitch waved at him.

D’Anton also had no time to think. Perhaps he too had vowed never to acknowledge Strulovitch—though he had no reason to think of himself as an aggrieved party—or, to the contrary, promised himself never to be offended by who or what Strulovitch was, but caught like this he could only nod an automatic greeting in return.

“A noisy gathering for our quiet county,” Strulovitch said.

D’Anton turned his sad eyes away.

“Would you say,” Strulovitch continued, “that this is a cause intrinsic to the area?” And when this time D’Anton turned his back, Strulovitch repeated the question in a voice that even to his own ear constituted a violent demonstration in itself. “Culturally, is all I’m asking. Culturally, would you say that this engages the interests of the local rate-payer, honours the area’s long-standing history of gentle churchgoing, keeps the peace and respects the quiet—in a way that, say…”

But D’Anton was gone, lost among his fellow demonstrators.

Later, sitting alone in his garden, watching shadows dance like devils over Alderley Edge, and wishing he had a wife he could consult, or a daughter that wasn’t out French-kissing troglodytes, Strulovitch wondered whether he was glad or sorry he hadn’t emptied his stomach of all the bile it contained and called D’Anton what he believed him—no, what he knew him—to be.

Both, he decided.

Sorry, because the bile needed to go somewhere, and D’Anton deserved to be called the thing he was.

Glad, because the accusation he wanted to hurl at D’Anton’s retreating back was of a sort that always returned to wound the thrower. How, sociopathologically, it had become a foul to cry foul, Strulovitch didn’t know. But that was the state of things. No longer was it the hater who was unhinged; the real madman was the person who believed himself to be hated. Better, Strulovitch thought, when our enemies wore their loathing on their sleeves, called us misbelievers, infidels, inexecrable dogs, whipped us, kicked us, dishonoured, disempowered, dispossessed us, but at least didn’t deliver the final insult of accusing us of paranoia. See how the dog returns to the vomit of his self-pity, happy only when he thinks we wish him to perdition.

For which we wish him to perdition.

That, anyway, with no expectation that anything would occur to change it, was the state of Strulovitch’s feeling towards D’Anton, in the period before Shylock showed up.

And D’Anton?

Well, he had no argument with Strulovitch, if he could remember who Strulovitch was. He certainly didn’t hate him. He hated no man. Least of all did he hate on racial grounds—his French Guinean origins, the breadth of his travels, the number of languages he spoke, his love for Japanese and Chinese art, the natural affiliation he enjoyed with ceramicists, glass-blowers and miniaturists from all ages and all countries—attested to this. Strulovitch—and now circumstances had thrown the fellow into his path, yes, yes he could summon up an unwanted image of the man—had a persecution complex. One of those Jews who was far more conscious of his Jewishness than Gentiles were—indeed it would never have occurred to D’Anton that Strulovitch was a Jew had Strulovitch himself not forced the fact of it down his and everybody else’s throat. But even then, his faith or whatever one was supposed to call it—his ethnicity, for Christ’s sake!—played no part in D’Anton’s distaste for him. He was a sore loser, that was all. Rich, tasteless, intrusive, belligerent, peevish, self-interested, self-pitying and self-destructive, imagining slights while slighting others, endlessly aggrieved, assuming the world owed him recompense for something or other—not qualities that pertained congenitally or irreversibly to a Jew, in D’Anton’s view, until a Jew made them so.

But that being the case, though he would do anything for Barnaby, he knew it wasn’t going to be easy to get Strulovitch to talk to him, let alone part with Solomon Joseph Solomon’s study for
Love’s First Lesson
.

Beneath it all, though, he was quietly confident. If he offered Strulovitch considerably more for the painting than he had paid, would the Jew be able to resist the allure of so quick a profit?