Shylock Is My Name (14 page)

In such a night as this, Beatrice thought, I shouldn’t be sitting on my own looking at the moon.

Strulovitch had been right in this, if in nothing else: his daughter had not gone far. After leaving home with her boyfriend and her bags, she had gone straight to the Old Belfry to seek Plury’s protection. Gratan’s idea. They had met at Plury’s, twisted eyebeams at Plury’s, made philo-Semitic love at Plury’s, and would now shelter at Plury’s. Plury herself was away for a few days having corrective surgery to her corrective surgery, but in a phone call to Beatrice expressed her excitement and readiness to help, in a phone call to Gratan reproved his naughtiness but applauded his choice, and in a phone call to her house manager ordered the prettiest room to be made ready for the pair. Not the one she’d set aside for their personal use before, which had been pretty enough, but something more respectable and romantic. “Connubial” was the word she was looking for.

When Beatrice and Gratan arrived they found the pillows in what they were now to think of as their boudoir freshly fluffed, bridal flowers in a vase, a bottle of Perrier-Jouët Belle Epoque on one bedside table and a box of Ladurée macarons on the other. They would also have found, had they gone looking, D’Anton in demi-residence, rehanging paintings in Plury’s parlour—Plury loved to come home to D’Anton’s reconfigurations—though he was too preoccupied to see the lovers arrive. Gratan was glad of that. He wanted to break the news in stages to D’Anton, whom he looked on as a sort of guardian, and from whom he expected sympathy but not necessarily encouragement. It had been D’Anton who had originally introduced Beatrice to their little world, and it was possible he would not look kindly on Gratan’s appropriation of her. He could hear what D’Anton would say before he said it. “I didn’t bring the girl here for you to make off with, Gratan. Not everything exists for your pleasure.” A reprimand made out of affection, but a reprimand nonetheless. “Just don’t do that again,” D’Anton had warned after Gratan’s Nazi salute. He had pointed to Gratan’s head. “Use that in future.”

His manager at Stockport County had often said the same.

Of course D’Anton might have guessed what was afoot—he was a man lost in gloomy self-abstraction, but there had been enough whispering in corridors and clumsy disappearances for even him to notice. Failing that, Plury might, in her vicarious erotic excitement, already have told him. But if he still didn’t know, Gratan figured it would be best to keep him in ignorance for as long as possible, not to say what he had done exactly, and in particular not to give the person he had done it with a name. It would be more prudent to talk in generalities—she, he, the father, circumcision, stuff like that. D’Anton was a man of the world and would be able to tell him whether, in an abstract way, circumcision was something all Jewish fathers demanded of Gentiles who wanted to marry their daughters; whether they were within their legal and moral rights to do so; whether there were officers of the law who could enforce it; and whether it was likely to be painful.

Having carried Beatrice over the threshold, he had deposited her on the bed with less ceremony than she felt the occasion warranted, hurriedly explaining that he needed to nip downstairs a second.

“Where are you going?” Beatrice shouted after him, but he was already gone. “Just make sure you nip back up again,” she added to herself.

D’Anton was up a library ladder when Gratan found him. “Does that look straight to you?” he called down without looking round.

Gratan was too caught up in his own troubles to know whether a picture was straight or not but he chose the easy option and said yes.

“So,” D’Anton began when he was off the ladder. He could tell from Gratan’s flushed appearance that he had something urgent to say. It was then that Gratan had poured out the edited contents of his heart, in response to which D’Anton had invited him to the restaurant…

“I don’t know,” Gratan said to himself as he ran back up the stairs, “whether I’m coming or going.” To Beatrice, who was standing at the window, as though awaiting his return by that route, he said, “Sorry, but I just have to slip out for a short while.”

Beatrice stared at him in disbelief.

“First you have to nip down and now you have to slip out. Anybody would think you don’t want to be with me.”

She was not remotely sentimental. She hadn’t supposed this was to be their honeymoon night. They had slept together many times already, and the evening wasn’t otherwise to be sanctified by what had gone before. It was a night to get through, that was all. But for him to be nipping down and slipping out before she’d even had time to unpack her case was not how she, or indeed how any woman, would have expected things to go.

“Of course I want to be with you,” Gratan said. He appeared hurt that she should doubt it.

“Gratan!”

“What?”

“We’ve only just got here!”

“I’m not going to be long.”

“Where have you been?”

“I can’t say.”

“Where are you going?”

“I can’t say.”

“This isn’t a good start, Gratan. Not after the day I’ve had.”

He led her to the bed and embraced her in a manner that made it possible for him to keep an eye on the time. “It hasn’t been easy for me either,” he reminded her.

“No but you’re bigger and more experienced than I am. And he isn’t your father. Please don’t go out tonight. Not tonight.”

But Gratan had his appointment with D’Anton at Ristorante Treviso to keep. He needed D’Anton’s advice—not later, not tomorrow, but now, in advance of his first night with Beatrice as runaways. It had dawned on him, in the course of the brief but fraught drive from Beatrice’s house to Plury’s, that however enraged and determined Beatrice was today, she might well feel differently about things—including him—in the morning. A father was still a father, no matter that he was a monster. And a Jewish father, from all he’d heard, even more so. He couldn’t take anything for granted. What Beatrice said was not necessarily what Beatrice thought. He was pleased with himself for these insights into a woman’s psychology. On Beatrice’s behalf, as well as his own, it was important he talk to D’Anton. Otherwise he could easily make a false move. Say something he’d regret. Do something he shouldn’t.

“Don’t ask me to tell you where I’ve been or where I’m going,” he pleaded. “Just trust me. When you know, you’ll agree I was right to go there. It’s for us.”

“It sounds as though you’re going to fetch a priest. Don’t.”

“I swear I’m not,” Gratan said, putting his hand to his heart in a gesture that reminded Beatrice ever so slightly of his notorious Nazi salute.

“You haven’t got another woman already?”

“Another woman! We’ve only been here an hour.”

How long did it take, Beatrice wondered. “And you’ll be back soon?”

“I promise,” he promised, raising his arm to his chest again.

“You needn’t do that,” Beatrice said. “Just come back sober.”

“As a lord.”

“It’s as drunk as a lord. A judge is what you mean. Never mind. Just assure me you are coming back. You haven’t brought me here to leave me here?”

“Why would I do that?”

He kissed her with fierce passion. The first time he clapped eyes on her she’d been dressed as an urchin. Plury’s doing. “My little Jewboy,” Plury had called her. She looked a little like that again—more petulant than angry, more of a girl than a woman, more oriental than western, cross-bred, out of place, neither one thing nor another, a confusion to him. Was there nothing he wouldn’t do for her?

“I won’t be long,” he said.

So Beatrice, on such a night, was left alone to reflect on what she’d done.

Was it any surprise she shed a tear?

She wiped her eye and wondered if Gratan had slipped out to kill her father. Would she have minded?

And what if, in the ensuing fight, her father were to kill Gratan? Would she have minded that?

Questions, questions…

She opened the champagne, though she didn’t much like champagne, starting when it popped. Was that Gratan’s gun going off? Or her father’s? Her house was only a mile and a half away. On such nights, in the quiet of the Golden Triangle, sound travelled.

By the time I’ve finished this bottle, she thought, I will have forgotten who Gratan Howsome is. But I will not have forgotten my father.

My whole life, she thought, has been made a misery by him. She tried to remember a time when he hadn’t pursued her, dragged her out of parties, punched her boyfriends, wiped the lipstick off her face with the back of his hand, pulled her down the street by her hair while clutching at his heart, as though to threaten her with cardiac arrest.
Look what you’re doing to me. You’re killing me.
Though it was he—wasn’t it?—who was killing her.

Was it any surprise she laughed?

Once, she remembered, he threw her phone into a lake. The boy who’d rung her was talking as it drowned. That must have been two years ago. Was he still telling her how he couldn’t wait to see her again, still guggling his appreciation of her breasts under water?

Once, her father jumped up and down on her laptop. Once, he kicked down the bathroom door and smashed his fist into her mirror. Once, he threatened to put out a contract on a boy she was seeing. She was just fourteen at the time. The boy a year older. Once he jumped on to the bonnet of an older boyfriend’s car. Just keep driving, Beatrice had said, he’s got no sense of balance, he’ll fall off in the end. Once, he burst into a hotel room pretending he had a pistol in his pocket.

How could any other drama in her life compete with that? How could Gratan engross her to the degree her father had?

To show her how much he loved her—was that what it had all been about? To stop her falling in love with someone else?

Was it any surprise she shed a tear again?

The mad thing was—the maddest thing of all—it had worked. She couldn’t fall in love with anyone else.

She tried to concentrate the tears upon her mother, but she could think only of her father.

Why hadn’t he come after her?

He always came after her, so why not this time—the one time it mattered. If it mattered.

Had he given up on her? She had heard the story of how his father, her grandfather, had buried him on the eve of his marriage to a Gentile. Had he now decided to bury her?
You marry a man with a penis like mine or I bury you!

Was it any surprise she laughed?

Laugh over it or cry over it, such a commandment could mean only one thing: he loved her.

She put an unexpected question to herself with her fifth Ladurée macaron: were Gratan to agree to his demand would her father want the operation to be a success or would he prefer that Gratan bled to death?

D’Anton was unable to believe his ears. “He said that?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

“He said it.”

“In so many words?”

“I didn’t count the words.”

“He said, ‘Get yourself circumcised and you can have my daughter’? He definitely said that?”

“He said, ‘Get yourself circumcised and we can talk again. Until then there is no more to say.’ ”

“And you’re sure he wasn’t being figurative? He didn’t say anything about circumcision of the heart?”

“What’s circumcision of the heart?”

“Once upon a time, when this was a Christian country, a young man of your class would have gone to Sunday school and been taught about St. Paul. We can be better Christians, St. Paul argued, by understanding circumcision metaphorically, not following the letter of the law, but the spirit. We can be circumcised in the heart. Do you understand that?”

Gratan Howsome first nodded his head, then shook it. Whatever D’Anton was talking about, it didn’t apply in this instance. “Why,” he said, “would he want me to be a better Christian? I’m already too much of a Christian for him. He wants me to be a better Jew…Well, any Jew.”

“That’s what I mean. A Jew in the heart. Are you sure he wasn’t asking you to be that?”

“There was no mention of circumcising my heart. I certainly wouldn’t have agreed to that.”

“So are you telling me you have agreed to something?”

“I said I would talk it over with Beatrice.”

“
Beatrice
!”

Howsome slapped the side of his head.
The fool I am!
Two minutes with D’Anton and he’d blurt out anything. He wondered if he could invent another Beatrice, but saw that that would only make things worse.

“Yes, Beatrice.”

“Plury’s Beatrice?”

In for a penny, Howsome thought. “Well she’s my Beatrice now. You have to understand, D’Anton, I’m in love with her.”

“Since when?”

“Since I first saw her.”

“Howsome, she’s a child!”

“That’s what her father said.”

“Well don’t you think he has a point. You’re twice her age.”

“So you think I should agree to let them castrate me?”

“I think you should agree to leave the girl alone.”

“It’s too late for that. She’s run away with me. She’s at Plury’s now, waiting.”

“Plury knows?”

“Yes. She rang to congratulate us. She left us a bottle of champagne.”

“Well I’d give you almost anything, as you know, but I wouldn’t give you champagne for this. Have you decided what you’ll do if the father comes after you?”

“That’s what I’ve come to you to ask. What should I do?”

“Give the girl back.”

“I’ve told you, I can’t. We love each other.”

“And how does she feel about her father’s demands? Does she want you to agree to them?”

“She thinks he’s a fucking maniac. She hates him and his Jew money and his Jew foundation.”

“Foundation! What foundation?”

“I don’t know, D’Anton. The Whatsitcalled Foundation. The FuckedifIknow Foundation. The Strulovitch Foundation, I suppose. Don’t ask me.”

D’Anton threw back the contents of his glass and let his eyes bulge.

“Did you say Strulovitch?”

“I think that’s how you pronounce it. I don’t think I’m obliged to know a man’s name just because I’ve run off with his daughter.”

D’Anton released his mind so that it might wander where it would. Beatrice Strulovitch…Beatrice Strulovitch…Had he known that? Had he known that was her name when he first recommended her to Plury, as an innocent diversion for Howsome, whose weakness for Jewesses so amused them both? Was he, in ways that were not clear to himself, a party to this mess? Had he connived at it, knowing or half knowing who Beatrice was?

Whatever he’d intended, he hadn’t intended that Gratan would fall in love with the girl and either lose his foreskin or elope with her.

Unless he had…Unless, well unless breaking the father’s heart had always been what he intended, no matter who else suffered along the way.

He raked through the history of his rancid relations with the art collector, benefactor, upstart, sore loser, moneybags, bloodsucker and vampire, Simon Strulovitch. Was this—for him—its lowest moment or its highest?

Unable to decide whether Gratan Howsome’s bombshell served his cause or impeded it, unable at this moment to remember what that cause was, he ordered more brandy.

When Gratan finally returned he found Beatrice stripped naked, dead upon the floor.

He let out a cry so fearsome that Beatrice had no choice but to open her eyes and tell him she was acting out the space he’d left when he deserted her.

“How can you act a space?” he wanted to know.

“In such a night as this how could you have deserted me?” she asked.

But he was too transfixed by the sight of her breasts to answer.

The man has no feeling for art, Beatrice thought, yielding herself reluctantly to him.