Shylock Is My Name (19 page)

And he signed it with that flourish of which Strulovitch had already seen an example.

He wished he could have included
Love First’s Lesson
in the deal—
I ask for no alleviation but would appreciate your throwing in Mr. Solomon
—but it was important Plury remained in ignorance of any of that.

D’Anton sighed. How weary he had grown of these entanglements in the love affairs of others. How he wished he had never introduced anyone to anyone. How high the price of friendship had become.

“You really are a saint,” Plury repeated when he showed her what he’d written. “Though no saint I was ever told about at school had your gift for language.”

Some mole of probity in his nature—or maybe it was simply impatience—compelled him to shake off her praise. “If you knew more,” he said, “you wouldn’t say that of me.”

Plury looked intrigued. “Tell me,” she said.

He looked deep into her troubled eyes. “Can I count on your absolute confidence?” he asked.

“I swear,” she said, “upon our friendship. I swear on the sacred melancholy that binds us.”

“Not a word to another soul, your promise. Not even to Barney.”

“Not a syllable even to him.”

Whereupon he drew her to him, much as a lover might, and whispered words of wildness in her ear.

Anyone close to Plury would have marvelled at what she did then. She threw back her head and roared with laughter. It could have been enough to cure her of her sadness for ever.

“I can’t wait,” she said, between gasps of unaccustomed merriment, “to see the bloodsucker’s face.”

“The Jew’s you mean?”

“The Hebrew’s, yes,”

“You must be referring to the Israelite.”

“The Christ-Killer, yes. The crooked-nose…”

“Plury, stop that!” D’Anton laughed.

There had not been so much mirth heard in Plury’s Utopia for many a month.

Because she wanted to be certain the pledge would be received, because she knew herself to be no less culpable than D’Anton, because she wanted to see the devil with her own eyes, and because she was devising a little something extra of her own, Plurabelle delivered D’Anton’s note in person, driving the short distance to Strulovitch’s house—she was surprised to discover they were such near neighbours—in her housekeeper’s Vauxhall. She couldn’t have explained to herself her decision not to take the Porsche or even the Volkswagen Beetle, but she was miffed to discover a Mercedes in the drive.

She shuddered when Strulovitch himself opened the door to her. The hand with which he took what she handed him all but froze hers. This was a further surprise. She had come prepared to face the fires of hell. In her mind’s eye Strulovitch was a man with the complexion of a devil and a scaly hand. What she hadn’t expected was this icy blast. No wonder poor Beatrice had fled. I was right to have taken her in and warmed her through, she thought, and I am right to assist her now. God help us all.

But she was wrong about one thing. The person to whom she handed D’Anton’s sainted offer was not Strulovitch.

It was Shylock.

A
lthough he was used to her being away—at the academy in the day and the Devil knew where else at night—Strulovitch had begun to miss Beatrice. Yes, they fought the minute they found themselves together, but fighting was an expression of love, wasn’t it? If truth be told, he couldn’t remember a time when they hadn’t fought, but since Kay’s stroke the warfare which was another name for love had intensified. So he had to put a delicate question to himself: had she become a sort of wife to him?

He must have answered that affirmatively, because from the moment Beatrice decamped he had begun to spend more time with Kay. Loneliness, was it? Or guilt? He thought both. But then it was a habit of his mind to think both. Hence his being an on-again off-again Jew. Being a Jew was everything to him, except when it wasn’t. Which is a debilitating characteristic of the Jewish mind; unless it is a strength. As far as Kay went, he felt every feeling it was possible to feel, while sometimes thinking he felt nothing. There was an advantage in feeling nothing; it enabled him to get on with his life and help Beatrice get on with hers. But if he’d failed with Beatrice then he’d failed half the opportunities that feeling nothing for Kay had given him. It behoved him, therefore—since it looked as though he
had
failed with Beatrice—to return to Kay a proportion of what was owing to her.

After calling on D’Anton and delivering his ultimatum, he returned home and went immediately to sit with her. He acted as though she must have been waiting impatiently to hear what had transpired. He sighed deeply and breathed out. As though to say, Just give me a moment to catch my breath. “Well we’ll have to wait and see what that yields,” he declared at last.

Though there was concern about her chest, her windows were open in all weathers. If one of her carers closed them, she was able to convey to another that she wanted them open. After he’d delivered her his news, Strulovitch sat in silence and watched the curtains flutter as though they were the only things of living interest in the room. He held her hand absently and was surprised to feel the gentlest squeeze from her fingers. He turned his attention from the window to look at her. Had she understood him? Did she register his anxiety? Did she know Beatrice was missing?

“Are you all right, my dearest love?” he asked, and strangely it was his own words, not any movement she had made or any expression in her dead eyes, that caused his tears to flow. Was he weeping for himself?

He had shut his senses down, sealed his entire apparatus of memory and affection off from her, otherwise he would not have been able to function, and where was the point in both of them being as Kay was? Had he allowed himself to remember what he’d loved in her he’d have come into her room each morning, wrapped his arms around her legs, and sobbed until nightfall. You remember and you die; if you want to live, you forget.

But he had called her “my dearest love” and for a moment she was his dearest love again and he could even dare to persuade himself that he was hers.

And if he was—if somewhere locked away in there a memory of what she’d felt for him stirred as faintly as her sun-yellow curtains—was it to be welcomed? Was it of the slightest earthly use to her for such a buried remembrance to be disturbed? Or would she too have wept for the sadness of it had she been able?

He held her hand more firmly. He had no right to take such a risk with her feelings but he took it nonetheless. “You look pretty today, beloved,” he said, and kissed her brow.

No response now from her fingers. If she had felt what he’d felt she’d dealt with it, shut herself down again because that was the only way any of it could be borne.

“Yes,” he said. “We’ll wait and see what my visit yields.”

He continued to sit with his head down, letting the cold air graze his cheeks. He owed the woman whose dead hand he held in his some recompense. She’d given him a few years of happiness. She’d given him a daughter. She’d helped seal the rift between him and his father and in that and many other ways she’d improved his relations with his mother too. More people to whom he owed recompense. Over a year had gone by now since his mother died and what had he done to honour her memory? He’d allowed the plan to open a gallery in his parents’ names to lapse. He’d put up little or no fight against D’Anton. He was a defeatist—an on-again off-again everything, son, father, husband, defender of the faith. In tearing at himself, his soul hardened against D’Anton.

Was there more soul-hardness to feel against D’Anton than he already felt? A soul can always harden more.

D’Anton: the Jew-hater who had stolen his daughter, interfered in the expression of his love for his parents, and bore responsibility—by implication, by association, by retrospective malice, by the simple fact of his sort existing—for the wreckage that was his wife.

“If I could kill him I would kill him,” he told her.

He thought he saw alarm in her eyes. He imagined that she shook her head.
Don’t, Strulo!

If only.

“Then if you don’t think I should, I won’t,” he said.

The idea that D’Anton owed his life to Kay only made Strulovitch more murderous towards him in his heart.

The note, when Shylock handed it over, disgusted him. How did D’Anton manage to beg and yet not beg? By what power was he able to turn a grovel into an insult?

“If I could destroy him I’d destroy him,” he told Shylock. “But at least this way I will spill blood.”

Shylock shook his head. “I’d proceed carefully,” was his advice. “What D’Anton proposes neither brings back your daughter nor requites the footballer the wrongs he has done her.”

“What about the wrongs they have done me?”

Shylock looked away. It was as though he wanted to spare Strulovitch the fires burning in his eyes. “I fear you are putting yourself at the forefront of this,” he said. “It strikes me that you are allowing it to get too personal.”

“Too personal? What’s
too
personal?”

“Killing D’Anton is too personal.”

“Too personal for D’Anton maybe. Not for me.”

“But your argument is with the footballer.”

“That clown? For him I feel only a minor contempt.”

“Despite his violation of your daughter?”

“I know Beatrice. She is more than capable of leading a man on. And if he were to argue in a court of law that she struck him as ten years older than she was he’d as likely as not be believed.”

“I commend your forbearance. But why then your insistence on his return? If you can allow what happened a year ago, when it was illegal, why can’t you allow it now when the law has nothing to say against it?”

“She is still a child.”

“In fact, though hardly in appearance. Or in assurance come to that.”

“And he is still a Gentile. Didn’t you say of Jessica that you would rather any of the stock of Barabbas had been her husband than a Christian?”

“You take me out of context. Those Christian husbands were falling over one another to shed their wives, so they could rescue Antonio from my clutches. A father wants his daughter to marry a man who values her above his friends. It was more the loyalty they swore to one another than the icons they prayed to in church that rendered them undesirable. And anyway…”

“Anyway what?”

“Though I can no more reasonably regret than I can look forward, I do from time to time wonder whether I’d have been better advised to let her marry a Christian than lose her altogether.”

“That’s for you to ponder. As things stand with me, I neither have a daughter nor approve her choice of husband.”

“That could change if you signalled that you had changed.”

“If I welcomed them back with open arms, you say?”

“You needn’t throw wide your arms. A handshake would do as well.”

“And what would that handshake denote? That he’s forgiven? That I love him? That he may keep his foreskin?”

“It may have to be you who forgoes the foreskin.”

“You will deny me my merry jest?”

“I don’t deny you anything. The man presently cohabiting with your daughter denies you. Your daughter denies you. The opinion of the world denies you.”

“You forget D’Anton’s offer.”

“But how would circumcising D’Anton serve your purpose?”

“It would serve my jest.”

“Only in a spirit that would negate the jest.”

“Look into your own heart and you will know mine. I too have a black humour. My first wife told me that. My second wife has found a way of telling me something similar.”

“There is neither purpose nor profit in circumcising D’Anton.”

“It might not come to that. The threat of it might result in his returning me Gratan.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Then I will have my satisfaction.”

“This is exactly what they expect you to do.”

“Then I will give them what they expect and be gleeful in the doing of it. Their expectation won’t take from my gratification.”

“I repeat, you are allowing this to grow too personal.”

“Must I be denied my satisfaction?”

“If satisfaction is all it is. Yes.”

“Then I will change the word. Must I be denied my bond?”

Well that didn’t work out too badly, Shylock thought.

“If it were done when ’tis done then ’twere well it were done at my place,” Plurabelle had told Shylock.

She had rehearsed several times in front of the mirror before leaving home, knowing Strulovitch to be a fiery Shakespearean and hoping by this means to soften him into agreement and maybe even admiration. By the time she came to deliver the words she had realised it wasn’t Strulovitch who had opened the door to her, but she wasn’t going to waste them. Who exactly it was she was talking to she didn’t know, but his austere and belligerent demeanour declared him to be a person authorised to deal with whatever arose, a man privy to Strulovitch’s affairs, a lawyer, perhaps, given his dress, retained to advise on the very business that brought her here.

“Hasn’t too much already been done at your place?” Shylock had answered.

Yes, a lawyer fully conversant with the matter on which she’d called. Plurabelle had been in better spirits over the last hours than she had been for days, but a cold chill seized her now. If Strulovitch had employed and briefed a lawyer then the legal process to implicate her in scandal and turn her Utopian dream into a nightmare had begun in earnest.

Plurabelle had not spent a fortune plumping up her lips for nothing. She threw Shylock her most ravenous Venus flytrap smile. A beast in the courtroom he might be, but let him beware a flesh-eating beauty like her.

So much for Plury on the outside. Inside all was tumult.

Two ambitions fought within her breast. A) To keep all this as confidential as possible. B) To seek as much publicity as the disputants themselves would allow her. Though a deeply private person, Plurabelle was also a deeply public one. I have never lost by being indiscreet, she thought. I have always been applauded for my candour and sympathised with for my pain. On the side of confidentiality was the truism least said, soonest mended. On the side of publicity was the shaming of Strulovitch. How that was to be effected she wasn’t as yet entirely sure, but she was confident he would show up badly in any public confrontation and in the process discredit his own testimony. Who could blame Beatrice, or those who encouraged her, if she fled from such a father and sought affection in the arms of a man not ideal in every respect, it was true, but at least a man who loved her. Whether the other piece of information to which she was privy would discredit Strulovitch still further or simply make him look a fool she couldn’t say, but she anticipated either outcome with eagerness.

And D’Anton? Which side of the confidentiality/ publicity debate was he on? She hadn’t canvassed his opinion. He didn’t know himself, she believed. Had she asked he would have said the quieter they kept this the better, but once she presented him with the fait accompli of Strulovitch abased, she didn’t doubt he would be pleased with her. Sometimes you know a person’s interest better than he knows his own.

Meantime, unmoved by her labial allure, this grave, legal figure stood between her and the effectuation of her plan.

“I hope I am not misunderstood,” she said. “My offer to make amends is not to be taken as any sort of admission of guilt. I befriended the girl. She was obviously unhappy at home. I had no idea that she had formed an unsuitable relationship under my roof. I would never have allowed it had I known. My close companion and advisor D’Anton feels the same, hence his brave acceptance of your client’s demands.”

“I’m an acquaintance of Mr. Strulovitch,” Shylock said. “I do not represent him or work for him.”

“Might I speak to him in person in that case.”

“He isn’t here. You can speak to me. He thinks of me as his conscience.”

Plurabelle knew not to say “Conscience! Are you telling me that man has a conscience?” Instead, she said, “Then you will gather that what he asks for is extreme. Nothing less than bodily and emotional injury to my dear friend D’Anton. It would appear to be a public humiliation he seeks, which is why, in order to satisfy that strange craving, I’m prepared—should it come to this—to host the event in my gardens.”

“The event?”

“It is Mr. Strulovitch himself, I gather, who would rather the course of action he proposes to take did not go unnoticed. Were he prepared to debate the rights and wrongs of what he asks with the person of whom he asks it, I’d be prepared to film that debate for my television show—”

“You have a television show?”

Plurabelle was dismayed. She didn’t think anyone was unaware of her television show. If this man did not know of it, it only showed how remote and eminent he was. “
The Kitchen Counsellor,
” she said.

“It’s a cookery programme?”

“Yes, but not only that—”

Shylock put up a hand to stop her telling him what else it was. “Mr. Strulovitch, to my certain knowledge, doesn’t think of himself as being party to a debate, doesn’t recognise an answering grievance to his own, and is therefore unlikely to be tempted to discuss the matter on a television programme of the sort you describe. I’m surprised you think your friend would be a willing party to it either. Circumcision is not a culinary happening.”