Shylock Is My Name (16 page)

But Strulovitch is asleep in his chair, worn out by too much anger and frustration, too much alcohol, and not impossibly too many questions.

Shylock, though, has another explanation.

This Strulovitch has a profound moral reluctance to stay awake, he thinks.

This Strulovitch asks but he doesn’t want to know the answer.

Jews are sentimental about themselves, and this Strulovitch, though he can’t decide if he’s a Jew or not, is no different. A Jew, by his understanding, is not capable of what non-Jews are capable of. A Jew does not take life. I am a hero to him by virtue of what I permitted to be done to me, not by what I did or might have done. Good Jew—kicked. Bad Jew—kicks.

If you prick us do we not bleed, but if we prick back do we not shed blood?—he would rather not know.

These famous ethics of ours have landed us in a fine mess, Shylock would like to say to his wife. If we cannot accept that we might murder as other men murder, we are not enhanced, but diminished.

Do you agree with me Leah, my love?

But it’s too late, and too cold to go outside. Always cold where she resides.

And anyway, he knows that Leah will point out the sophistry in the account of himself he has just offered Strulovitch. Antonio had been his to kill. “The law allows it, and the court awards it,” the little lawyer with the squeaky voice had told him. That was the moment when history was his to make, and never mind “I cannot tell you what the act of murder feels like because it didn’t come to that”: it didn’t come to that because he didn’t let it. Give me my money and I’ll go, he’d said instead.

Cowardice, was it? Or a pious adherence to Jewish law? The Almighty had fixed his canon against self-slaughter and self-slaughter it would assuredly have been had he shed a drop of Antonio’s blood.

Either way—faint-heartedness or piety—does this mark the limit beyond which a Jew, with all his brave talk of vengeance, dare not go?

No wonder Strulovitch, otherwise so eager to keep him to the mark, has chosen to fall asleep.

Despite the lateness of the hour and the cold, he goes outside to face Leah’s reproach after all. He had chosen to stay alive when there was nothing left for him to stay alive for. He could have killed his enemy and joined his wife. So why hadn’t he?

“D
arling! I’ve rushed back. I wouldn’t even let them finish me.”

Anna Livia Plurabelle Cleopatra A Thing Of Beauty Is A Joy Forever Wiser Than Solomon Christine skipped into the room carrying a posy of hand-tied forget-me-nots and roses. She had a bandage over one eye, like a pirate. The rest of her was lipblistered.

“You look like a bridesmaid,” Beatrice cried, not knowing what else to say.

“Darling, I feel like a bridesmaid.”

She searched the bed sheets with her one good eye.

“You can’t be looking for blood?” Beatrice cried.

“Of course not. I’m looking for Gratan.”

Then she nodded interrogatively in the direction of the bathroom.

“He’s not here,” Beatrice said.

“You haven’t…?”

“No, no we haven’t…”

“So you are still…?”

“Yes, we are still. But he hasn’t been here much since we arrived.”

“That was only yesterday, wasn’t it?”

“Correct. He’s done a lot of nipping down and slipping out in that time. He’s just popped off again. I’m not sure why.”

“Maybe he’s making arrangements.”

“What for?”

Plurabelle made as though to wink at her. “You know.”

Beatrice scowled. “I can’t promise you a wedding any time soon,” she said.

The expression of disappointment that swept across Plurabelle’s beleaguered face made Beatrice doubt the resolutions she had made the night before in Gratan’s absence. He had come home, as he had promised, at a reasonable hour—supposing there was any reasonable hour for a man in his position to be out until—and, again as he had promised, as sober as a newt. But she had decided not to stay awake—and then, in a
coup de théâtre,
not to stay alive for him.

It did occur to her to wonder, as she lay there listening to the boards creaking outside the bedroom, that it could have been her father come to rescue her. In which case—but no, she decided against covering her nakedness. Let them all see what they had done to her. And how well she could perform it.

In the event it was Gratan.

That bloody father of hers. Never there when you wanted him.

She’d had a strange evening, lying there on pillows as fluffed as Plury’s lips, sipping champagne like a thirsty bee, alternating glugs with macarons, and thinking about life’s paradoxes.

However much of a fight she’d put up against her father’s covenantal obsessions—a fight that seemed to her to have gone on all her short life—in some corner of her soul she respected them. Them, or her father’s fanatic embrace of them? She wasn’t sure that a bridal bower lent to her by Plury was conducive to the making of such fine distinctions. But she had read about hostages falling in love with their captors and their captors’ ideologies, and she did wonder if that was what had happened to her—the captor being her father, not Gratan. Explain it she could not, and approve it she could not either, but now that the argument with her father had finally boiled over into flight, she saw him differently and thought he might be right. Not right in how he’d brought her up, exactly, but right in how he hadn’t. She had girlfriends she could easily have envied for their freedom to come and go as they pleased. One, the daughter of atheists, had been sleeping with her boyfriend in the next room to her easy-thinking parents since she was thirteen. Another, the child of poets, was allowed to throw parties at her own home—parties her mother and father and even her grandparents attended—at which substances that Beatrice had never heard of were ingested through parts of the body she had never seen, and sexual practices she would not have thought practicable were openly encouraged.

So why didn’t she envy them? Queer for her to hear herself say this but the reason she didn’t envy them was that they lacked example. They swung free like gates come off their hinges, whereas she had had to learn resistance. Better your father be your adversary than your friend, she reasoned.

Don’t waste yourself on chthonic arseholes, Beatrice, he’d told her. Wasn’t she lucky having a father who thought like that? Less lucky, she thought, having a father who distinguished between Jewish chthonic arseholes and Gentile chthonic arseholes and measured the time she wasted on them differently. Wasn’t waste waste?

She had never been happy with the Jew thing. “It’s such a horrible little word,” she remembered saying to her parents when she was just a little girl. “
Jew
. It sounds like a black beetle with spikes.”

It was her mother who had smacked her then. Her father, she recalled, had laughed.

“So if we don’t do Jewish things, and we don’t have Jewish friends, and we don’t eat Jewish food, and we don’t celebrate Jewish festivals, why must I go out with Jewish boys?” she asked him later.

“For the sake of continuity,” he told her.

“What do you want me to continue?”

“The thing you were born to be.”

“Jewish?”

“Continuous.”

“I just don’t know what that means.”

“Neither do I. But I do know you weren’t born to toss yourself aside. You aren’t random, Beatrice. You didn’t begin with yourself so you can’t end with yourself. Life is a serious business. You can’t be shaken by every passing fancy.”

You aren’t a gate that’s come off its hinges.

And now, to preserve that continuity—though he wouldn’t be genuinely continuous even then—her Gentile chthonic arsehole boyfriend has to bleed. Maybe bleed to death. Explain to me how that works, Daddy…

He might love me but he’s a butcher, Beatrice thought. His mind’s an abattoir.

“So what’s wrong?” Plurabelle wanted to know.

And Beatrice told her.

It was important to D’Anton, when it came to helping friends, to be even-handed. He now had two things to do for Barnaby. Get him the Solomon Joseph Solomon sketch and lie to Plury for him about his ring. So what two things could he do for Gratan? Extricate him from the mess with Beatrice was one, but Gratan appeared to have his heart set on the girl. Get Strulovitch to relent was a second, but he didn’t immediately see how he was going to achieve that. Apart from Beatrice herself, he had nothing that Strulovitch wanted. And even if he found a way of prising her from Gratan and delivering her back to her father, what would that achieve for Gratan? Procuring a top-class surgeon to perform the operation—say the surgeon who attended to royal circumcisions, assuming they were still performed—was of course a third, but his gorge rose at the prospect of being in any way instrumental in this. I am not going to pimp for that Jew, he decided.

Then he remembered that several years before he had stood in the way of Strulovitch’s opening a gallery of Anglo-Jewish art in memory of his parents. What if he were to say he would stand in the way of it no more? What if he were to go still further and offer to use his not inconsiderable influence to facilitate it?

I’ll do that for you, Mr. Strulovitch, and all I want in return is—what? He did his sums again and came up with two things he wanted from Strulovitch. The Solomon Joseph Solomon and Gratan’s release from the threat of dismemberment. What if Strulovitch would do a deal on one and not the other? What if it fell to him, D’Anton, to prioritise? Gratan’s plight was clearly far more serious than Barnaby’s, but if truth be told D’Anton preferred Barnaby to Gratan and felt more sympathetic to his suit. Gratan had got himself into this mess, blindly following that part of himself which, quite frankly, deserved to suffer retribution. Whereas Barnaby was just trying to please a lovely if whimsical lady. There, too, lay the other basis for his preference: he would rather be the indirect cause of Plury’s felicity than Beatrice’s, Beatrice Strulovitch being…well, a Strulovitch.

Solomon himself—the other Solomon—D’Anton thought, would have trouble sorting this one out. The irony was that Plurabelle’s own television show,
The Kitchen Counsellor,
was the perfect place to adjudicate between these claims on D’Anton’s givingness, but the Solomon Joseph Solomon was to be a surprise to her and a discussion of the rights and wrongs of circumcision would surely have a deleterious effect on ratings. Which left him back where he began, wanting to be even-handed but not knowing how.

He was being premature in his calculations, anyway, he reminded himself, in assuming that Strulovitch would play ball with him at all. He didn’t doubt that his own loathing—no, he didn’t loathe Strulovitch, did he? His natural aversion then, his discomfort, his reluctance to like—was reciprocated. What if Strulovitch would rather keep the Solomon Joseph Solomon
and
risk losing his daughter than accept D’Anton’s condescension—as he would no doubt view it—in a matter that had once raised so much bitterness between them? Had there ever been a Jew yet—just a question—that was not inflexible and vengeful?

Thinking it over, D’Anton was pleased he had not yet sent Strulovitch the letter. Better not to show his hand yet. Better not to let Strulovitch know what he wanted. Did this not prove, once more, that time taken to plan a move was never time wasted? He went to look again at the letter, with a view to toning down any note of imploration, only to discover that it was no longer on his desk. There was only one explanation for this. His assistant, desirous as always to please a man so busily engaged in pleasing others, had hand-delivered it to the address on the envelope.

D’Anton bent over his desk as if in pain. He felt it was he who had been hand-delivered to Strulovitch. In his mind’s eye he saw his mortal enemy, hunched as though over a money bag, fingering his words with diabolic satisfaction.

D’Anton shuddered. It wasn’t just Gratan Howsome who had something to fear from the Jew’s malevolence.

T
iming, thought Strulovitch, is everything.

If he’d received D’Anton’s letter before seeing him at Ristorante Treviso hugger-mugger with Gratan Howsome he might have looked kindly on the request. Well, “kindly” would have been to overstate it, but with an irony-drenched beneficence at least. How amusing that such a man should come cap in hand to him. And how amusing it would be to do such a man a kindness in return: sell him the Solomon Joseph Solomon for exactly what it had cost him, thereby depriving D’Anton of the pleasure of calling him a usurer and rogue. He liked the study for its pictorial flair and anatomical attention, but not as much as he’d have liked the sumptuous work it originally became. No one would have got
that
from him for any price. But the first attempt—yes, lovely as it was, he could bear to let it go, especially when the reward was so sweet. Here, D’Anton, my dear fellow, you must have known you had only to ask. I cannot tell you how delighted I am to learn you are a convert to Jew art at last.

Why, he might even have made him a gift of it.

But Strulovitch now knew him to be a friend and possibly a co-conspirator of Howsome’s. Difficult to see what the men could possibly have in common, but that wasn’t his affair. Companions in nefariousness they clearly were. Who was to say D’Anton hadn’t played a part in Howsome’s making off with his daughter? They’d been together, looking shifty, on the evening of the day Beatrice had decamped, which strange occurrence suggested D’Anton might have given the lovers shelter that very night. Who was to say that they weren’t there still, enjoying D’Anton’s florid hospitality—Strulovitch guessed it would be florid; florid and abstemious all at once—drinking sake from fine Japanese porcelain and toasting Strulovitch’s displeasure in Bellinis?

Strulovitch read D’Anton’s words again. Had he missed the tone of them? What at first had looked like a begging letter now looked like a vicious leg-pull. He’d been planning the most deliciously ironic response, but what if the irony was all in D’Anton’s court and he, Strulovitch, was its object?

That unnamed man, the “young and impressionable friend” who wanted the picture as a token of his devotion to a woman—there could be no doubt about his identity now. He was unmistakably Howsome.

Which meant that the woman to whom he was devoted—
devoted
!—was unmistakably Beatrice.

Which left only the title of the painting itself to consider.
Love’s First Lesson
! The lubricious innuendo was unmissable. The young woman—Howsome’s pupil in the erotic arts—would cherish the picture every bit as much as he, Strulovitch, would want her to, D’Anton had written. Meaning what? Either those words were rank sarcasm or they gestured at some lubricity locked away in Strulovitch’s fatherly concern.

The joke’s on me, Strulovitch realised.

He paced his drawing room, waving the letter in front of his face as though fanning himself with it.

Well we shall see about that, he said aloud.

Out in the garden Shylock was talking to his wife.

“I’ve been thinking,” he was saying, “how our refined morality has left us incapable of enjoying that spontaneity of action other men enjoy.”

“How so, my love?”

“Well take this man Strulovitch. What am I to him? I catch him staring at me sometimes when he thinks I’m not aware of him. A stare that seems to start from the deepest recesses of his mind and finishes I have no idea where. It disturbs me. Not even by you, my dearest, was I ever looked at with this intensity. I do not call it love. It isn’t admiration either. It’s an intensity of curiosity such as a parent might feel for a child, or a child for a parent, a sort of baffled pride as though anything I do, or have done, reflects genetically on him. I either bear him up or I let him down. He is not capable of indifference towards me. I am all lesson. I am all example. I need you to tell me I was never a trial of this sort to you, Leah. Or to Jessica.”

It was always hard for him to mention Jessica by name. So much to hide, so much not to say, so much grief. Did Leah hear that? In her infinite tact did she detect how much this withholding of her name cost him? And was it costly for her as well?

“Anyway,” he ruminated after a period of quiet, “it puts me in a false position to be an exemplar—not a role I’d ever have chosen for myself—the foundation of whose exemplariness has always to be kicked from under him. These Jews, Leah, these Jews! They don’t know whether to cry for me, disown me or explain me. Just as they don’t know whether to explain or disown themselves. They wait for a sign that they are not as cringingly passive as they have been described, and when it comes they tear their hair in shame. ‘We are a people on the verge of annihilation,’ Strulovitch is fond of telling me, when he remembers. ‘We cannot look to anyone to help us but ourselves.’ Yet the moment a Jew raises a hand to do just that his courage fails him. Better we be killed than kill, I see him thinking. Look at him now, pacing his floor, plotting a revenge he won’t in the end have the courage to carry out. The man lacks resolution, Leah. Tell me what I should do—spur him on or let him be?”

He waited for her to tell him what she thought. They spoke so often for so long when she was alive. They spoke and spoke. When she was no longer there to speak to him it was as though a cord connecting him to life was severed. He would go to the synagogue to speak to other men but their company could not replace hers. Theirs had not been a synagogue marriage. They spoke ideas, not faith. Leah had never been circumscribed by convention or tradition. She was like a fountain of clear, fresh thought. So when she went, his throat dried and his mind atrophied. He didn’t want to see anything, because where was the value of sight if what he saw he could not share with her? He closed his ears to music. He stopped reading until he began to read to her again at her graveside. He saw no point in activity, and would sit for hours, thinking nothing, in a vacancy that was nearer to non-existence than sorrow. What had his life been to him before Leah? He couldn’t remember. There was no before Leah. That his house became a hell for his daughter who couldn’t rouse him or interest him in her life he accepted. Leah’s death made him a bad father. Or, if he’d been a bad father before—a man who lived only for the love he bore his wife—the death of that too-loved wife made him a worse one. Poor, poor Jessica then, doubly deprived. No wonder. No excuse, but no wonder. And when he did rediscover some of his old energy it hadn’t been out of any renewed concern for her well-being. He wished he could have lied to himself. And to her.
I lived again for you, Jessica, I remembered what I owed you.
But the truth of it was different. It had been the Gentiles who had pricked him back into animation. In their contempt he found the twisted stimulus to live again.

It is rage not love that propels a man to action.

When he looked up he saw Strulovitch occupying his own patch of garden, walking to and fro, a man without a wife to talk to, lost in reflection, moving his lips soundlessly.

He had no trouble reading what Strulovitch was saying. “I will do such things…”

He was sympathetic to the frustration. He too would once have done
such things
.

What they are, yet I know not…

But at least Strulovitch had what was still to come to look forward to. What things they were, yet he knew not. Whereas Shylock was busted. What he’d done he’d done, and what he had yet to do, he never would do now.

I miss the future, Shylock thought.

“So tell me,” he again asked Leah. “Do I restrain him or whip him up into the vengeful rage he’s been longing for all his life?”

The cold earth in which Leah was rolled around gave its deepest moan.

“Very well then,” Shylock said. “In this, as in everything else, I will be guided by you.”

“What do we do about it? What we do about it,” Plurabelle said, “is this.”

She made a sign with her thumb, meaning get them the hell out of here, on a train, a ship, a plane, anything. Just get them away.

D’Anton wasn’t sure. “Do we want to rile a man as vile as this?” he wondered.

“The Jew?”

“The wealthy Jew, yes.”

“The Hebrew?”

“E’en him. The moneybags, who else?”

They laughed. It was fun, even in worrying times, to play Jewepithets.

“Now I’ve lost my thread. Would you be so good as to repeat your question,” Plurabelle begged.

“I asked how good an idea it was to rile the Jew.”

“You mean the inexecrable dog—”

“Stop it, Plury!”

“Must I?”

“You must. I ask again: how good an idea is it to rile him?”

“Do you care about our friends?”

“I care about Gratan. Forgive me if the Jew’s daughter means a little less to me.”

“Well she means a great deal to me. I won’t have her judged by that pig she calls a father.”

“Pig refuser, surely.”

“A pig can refuse a pig. But take my point. She is not him, any more than I was mine.”

“Yours, I imagine, was another order of father,” D’Anton said.

“Well he wasn’t an Israelite, a werewolf, a castrator and a bloodsucker, if that’s what you mean.”

“I mean something along those lines, yes.”

“But I love her despite her father the thick-lips—I assume he has thick lips, I haven’t seen him.”

“Thick and wet.” He was careful not to look at her lips.

“As I suspected. Whereas hers are full and voluptuous.”

“Like yours.”

“Thank you. But stay focussed. Gratan loves her. And I demand that you love her.”

“So why can’t they stay here until the storm blows over.”

“Because the storm might not blow over, and I don’t want that hook-nose—I assume he has a hook nose: don’t answer—banging on my doors. You know the press—they will love this. Besides, the lovers need some time on their own. Beatrice is looking a little flaky to me. She and Gratan have been fighting already. She could easily decide she’s made a big mistake. And you know what Gratan’s like. Two minutes of not getting all he wants and he’ll be off looking for another wife.”

“But how can they go away anyway? He’s got a team to play for. He can’t come running back every weekend.”

“Isn’t he suspended for that salute thing?”

“That was a year ago or more.”

“Couldn’t we get him suspended again? Get him to use the ‘n’ word? Or punch someone?”

“Only too easily But he wouldn’t thank us for that. Another suspension could be the end of his career.”

“Then let’s get him compassionate leave. I know all the managers. There isn’t one of them that doesn’t want to be on my show.” She tossed her hair, knowing how silly she could be about herself—“Or in my bed. Trust me, I already have him in my pocket. What’s his name?”

“I just don’t know about this,” D’Anton said. Things were getting complicated. He could no longer work out how any course of action impacted on any other. Where did this leave Barnaby’s hopes? What would squirrelling the pair out of the country do to D’Anton’s own plan of wrong-footing Strulovitch by promising to support his application for a gallery in return for the Solomon Joseph Solomon? Suddenly, everyone was looking the loser.

He wasn’t sure either what removing the lovers from all society but their own would do to their feelings for one another. Plury was right: Gratan bored easily. And Beatrice, with no intrigue to distract her, and no father to fight, might discover that Gratan wasn’t all that interesting a conversationalist. She might even tire of him erotico-aesthetically and decide that circumcision had much to recommend it after all. Leave aside the religious aspect, and D’Anton—a lover of beauty in all its forms—preferred the look of the foreskin gone to the look of foreskin intact. How it was that the Jews—a people with no instinct for beauty whatsoever—should have reached that conclusion all on their own, D’Anton couldn’t understand. If anything he’d have expected them to go the other way—append a foreskin where nature had not intended one to be. Make ugly what had originally been lovely. He could only assume that somewhere in the course of their rejection of the ancient world they’d encountered a few pagan connoisseurs of male pulchritude. Whatever the explanation, it wouldn’t surprise him if Beatrice before too long came around to his way of seeing. And then what?

One possibility was that Gratan would be persuaded by her pleas, Beatrice would be reconciled to her father, whereupon, all honour satisfied, a grand Jewish wedding would be held in Haddon Hall or Thornton Manor or even, given Strulovitch’s labyrinthine contacts, Chatsworth.

For reasons he could not have put into words, such a prospect plunged D’Anton into the deepest gloom.

“I just don’t know,” he repeated.

At breakfast Shylock said, “I can’t help noticing that you appear dishevelled and perturbed. I take it you have had no sleep and that your emotions are in disarray.”

“You could just say I look like shit.”

“I have seen you looking better. Can I be of assistance?”

“I am on a sea of indecision,” Strulovitch said.

“Whether to return to port or steam ahead…”

“That’s what a sea of indecision means.”

“Which course would you prefer to take?”

“If I knew that I wouldn’t be on a sea of indecision.”

“Not necessarily. Your indecision might be to do with practicalities rather than preferences.”

When are you leaving, Strulovitch wondered. Why did you come and when will you be going?

He didn’t mean it. He remained awed by Shylock in his soul, and still sought his friendship as an idea, but in a day-to-day way, and especially given what was happening with Beatrice, he could find his linguistic exactingness, or was it his moral exactingness, or should he just call it his all-round Jewish exactingness, exacting…

“My indecision,” he answered with a sigh, “is neither about preferences nor practicalities.” He took a long time bringing out those words, as though their length were a severe trial to him. “It’s about morality. My rights and entitlements as a Jewish father versus my daughter’s rights and entitlements as—well, I don’t know what as. Do I have a right to pursue Beatrice and drag her home? Does she have a right to go off where and with whom she chooses? Am I entitled to insist she has a Jewish husband, or at least the nearest to a Jewish husband I can manufacture for her? Would she be within her rights to get me certified? Are her new friends entitled to laugh at me? Would I be justified in paying their laughter back with interest, tenfold or a hundredfold, by fair means or foul? That too is a component of my indecision—what weapons to employ to make them suffer.”