Shylock Is My Name (4 page)

“Swear.”

He swore.

Swore to keep the covenant.

Not without looking about him to see if anyone was watching—in particular Kay, for whom this moment of supreme motherly love was complete as it was, and who wouldn’t have wanted it scarred with whatever it was that had taken possession of her husband: superstition, fanaticism, tribalism, a seriousness too great for mortal flesh to bear—but he swore nonetheless.

D
’Anton performed a secondary function for Plurabelle in that he was well and variously connected and could extend her circle to people she would not in the normal course of things encounter, no matter that many were her neighbours. The models and actresses, bankers, rappers, star footballers and breakfast TV astrologers—the obvious ones—she could find herself. And when she didn’t, they found her. But cricketers and rugby players, accountants, architects, designers, life coaches and even the odd free-talking bishop (for D’Anton’s family had Church connections that went far back)—such B-listers, who were not entirely without glamour, she was soon relying on D’Anton to provide. He knew people of this sort because they paid him to fill their houses with beauty and sometimes even hunt out specific paintings for them. “Anything you can get me from the Sistine Chapel,” was one request. “A painting of gay men screaming at one another in the lavatory by that guy they say wrote Shakespeare,” was another. Plurabelle marvelled at the breadth and variety of his connections.

Sometimes he rolled his eyes in her direction when he brought them to her parties, as though to say they were unaccountable for by him, not of his doing or acquaintance, and she would do well to have security staff keep watch on them.

Once he introduced her to Mehdi Mehdi, a French Algerian ventriloquist who was in hiding from the French and Algerian police on account of the Nazi ideology his dummy espoused, though he persuasively argued, in D’Anton’s view, that as a ventriloquist he had neither person nor ideology of his own and employed his dummy to comment critically (though it wasn’t strictly speaking his business to be a critic either) on the ideology in question. When quizzed by journalists as to the fondness he appeared to feel for his dummy, and indeed the fondness it inspired, he offered no reply in his own voice but left it to the doll to say that if the unintended consequence of his fame was that half the youth in France was giving Nazi salutes that was better than their making the Star of David.

Plurabelle was astonished to learn that half the youth of France had been making the Star of David.

D’Anton waved away her concern. “He’s amusing,” he said, “in a vindictive and perhaps even mendacious way, but he’s essentially sound and good value to have at a party.”

Plurabelle understood the distinction and told D’Anton to bring him and his dummy along. She was pleased to discover they were both good dancers. But for his being wanted by the police she would have had him, or at least his puppet, on
The Kitchen Counsellor
in argument with a rabbi.

A rabbi, ideally, who was also a ventriloquist, so that their dolls could have gone at it hammer and tongs.

What it was about him that appealed particularly to sportsmen neither she nor D’Anton could have said, but his puppet’s hallmark Nazi salute was soon being copied in France by footballers who had been to see his act in underground cabarets in Marseilles, and in Cheshire by footballers who thought it chic to do what the French did, though of these Gratan Howsome—the latest of D’Anton’s invitees—was the only professional so far actually to perform it on the field of play.

“He’s the godson of a very dear friend of mine, now deceased,” D’Anton explained, when Plurabelle expressed surprise at the affection there seemed to be between the two men. She had a fondness for tattoos and piercings herself, and liked men who padded around you like a dog and turned up with a different haircut every time you met them, but she wouldn’t have imagined any of this would appeal to D’Anton. It seemed, however, that their goodwill—and something even stronger than that—was of long duration. “It’s complicated,” D’Anton told her, “as explanations of deep but apparently incongruous affections often are. I inherited an obligation I would go so far as to call sacred from a friend who had inherited it from a friend of his. If I say that poor Gratan is something of a football in all this I don’t want you to think I’m being flippant. He is, in all but name, an orphan. In a manner of speaking I stand in watch and ward over him.”

“He would seem to me to have more people watching over his welfare than most orphans,” Plurabelle said with an irritation that surprised herself.

Could she have been jealous of Gratan for enjoying a protection she had come to see as hers alone?

“Then I have not explained myself well enough. His mother left him. His father maltreated him. He was abused by an uncle. But for the intervention of Federico and then Slavco there’s no knowing what would have become of him. I must continue where they left off.”

“You make it sound like a chore.”

“Not a bit of it. The obligation I’ve inherited I undertake willingly. What else are we for if we do not answer when the helpless call? Especially if, by so doing, we go on remembering friends who have been taken from us. In Gratan I see something of the gentle temperament of those who cared for him, no matter that he might sometimes strike some people as a bit of a brute. In fact, he has a physical vulnerability rare in a footballer. And a sweet nature for all his reputation as a womaniser.”

“And his reputation as a Nazi?”

D’Anton laughed and shook his head. “Oh, that’s only recent,” he said. “Since his coming here and meeting Mehdi Mehdi, in fact. He has a twitchy arm, that’s all. I think the world of him.”

According to Gratan himself, the salute was a misunderstanding. Given that other players (no names) were performing it surreptitiously, pretending they were scratching their ear or taunting the opposition with rabbit signs, there was, in his view, a necessity to bring it out into the open. He wasn’t a racist in general—when had he been booked for taunting a black or Asian player?—and he could prove categorically that he wasn’t an anti-Semite. Name a single occasion on which he’d been booked for fouling a Jewish player. And at least one of his wives—he wasn’t sure offhand which—had been a bit Jewish.

“He has a thing for Jewish women,” D’Anton told Plurabelle. “He thinks they’re hot. There’s no accounting for taste.”

“Does he have one at the moment?”

D’Anton thought about it. “Not that I know of.”

“Then we should try to find him one. We owe that to your friends.”

Some time after D’Anton’s installation—say eighteen months—Plurabelle fell in love. Not with D’Anton and certainly not with Gratan or the wanted Algerian ventriloquist or his dummy, but with a person she saw first—feet first, as it happened—underneath the chassis of her Volkswagen Beetle. Her Porsche Carrera had needed servicing, but the mechanic who’d been sent (the garage went to her, she didn’t go to it) decided he would much rather recline a while under the Beetle, a car that was rarely seen in the Golden Triangle whereas Porsche Carreras were ten a penny.

Informed by her house manager that the gentleman, who in plain truth didn’t much look like a mechanic to him, hadn’t given the Porsche a second look but had made a beeline for the Beetle, Plurabelle squealed with the consciousness of her good fortune. Found him—found him at last!—a man not to be deceived by ornament. If he were to turn out to be even marginally well favoured when he rolled himself out from underneath the meanest of her cars, she would give herself to him on the spot. No matter that the spot was a gravel drive.

She ran inside to wash off her make-up. Fifteen minutes later, wearing her oldest clothes, she returned to the gravel drive. “Let me see you,” she called out, clapping her hands. A woman used to being obeyed. But who also wanted someone to obey.

And when he did, inch by inch appear, smudged with engine oil and more than a little bashful to be seen not in overalls but in his shirtsleeves—Plurabelle noted that he hadn’t even rolled them up—he presented as pretty a picture of innocent manliness as ever delighted a maiden’s eyes…

To the mind of a cynic the word “opportunistic” might have occurred sooner than “innocent.” He who would win the heart of an heiress known to be wary of flattery from men with a marked taste for the meretricious must surely, if he has a brain in his head, choose to please her by preferring what is plain over what is gaudy. Those chumps who fell at the first hurdle, blinded by sparkle, deserved to be sent packing. Wherein did they suppose lay the test of their mettle if all that was required of them was to be predictably loquacious on the subject of glitter? And why hadn’t a woman who could be won by such banalities been won a hundred times already?

Some such calculation would have saved many a suitor expense and bother.

Against the charge of opportunism, however, must be laid the intriguing fact that this heiress wasn’t at home when the gentleman slid underneath her Volkswagen, wasn’t at home and wasn’t expected to be home any time soon, leaving open the question of how he knew she would find him there unless he intended never to move until she appeared. A calculation, or absence of calculation—they can amount to the same thing—which while it might not save him from the charge of contrivance does bespeak wholeheartedness. So either way he had qualities to recommend him to Plurabelle.

That it was his friend D’Anton (his dear, dear friend D’Anton) who tipped him the wink—a couple of winks, to be precise—a) to the fact that Plurabelle’s heart was unoccupied, and b) as to the means to occupy it—did him no disservice, either, once it was discovered, for to be a dear, dear friend of D’Anton was an endorsement of his character in itself. Though when Plurabelle was apprised of all there was to be apprised of she wondered less that D’Anton was so sad. For who, once they had seen him, could not love Barnaby?

Or Barney as she called him in her heart at once, and then later in the company of everybody but the servants.

Had she been more certain of the codes that governed the pastoral ideal she meant to live by, she would have considered clasping both D’Anton and Barney to her bosom and seeing what transpired. Sleeping with two or more men was not unheard of in the Golden Triangle, and she had more than once slept with two women in the aftermath of her first disillusionment with the other sex. But while she had no fear of losing Barney to D’Anton, who didn’t own a Volkswagen Beetle for him to tinker under, she did worry how the former would view such unconventionality on her part. Just because he didn’t idealise wealth, or see purity in gold, didn’t mean he didn’t idealise and see purity in her.

D’Anton the same, if from a different perspective.

One night, at a local restaurant, she asked the two men how they met. They gave conflicting answers. Barney said he didn’t remember. D’Anton said he would never forget. They met, D’Anton recounted, by the pig roast at an agricultural fair in Alsager. D’Anton was not a big pig-eater himself but he was escorting a visiting Japanese glass-blower, whose favourite dish happened to be pork. This was the third festive event in Cheshire he’d taken Takumo to and his guest had made straight for the pig roast at every one of them. Barnaby seemed just to be sauntering, neither curious nor incurious, neither hungry nor not. The day was warm, he was idle, and agriculture was in his veins. He was wearing an oatmeal coloured suit, loose-fitting like a hay bag, his hair the colour and texture of the straw D’Anton imagined spilling from it. Cloud-filtered light cast the glow of late summer on Barnaby’s face, making him resemble the Hireling Shepherd in William Holman Hunt’s painting of that name. Plurabelle knew the painting, she was quick to say—it hung in the Manchester Art Gallery. Often she had stood before it in a sort of rapture, imagining herself to be the shepherdess. Her interruption appeared to distress D’Anton, perhaps for the reason, Plurabelle reasoned, that in his picture there was no shepherdess.

Barney laughed a shepherd’s laugh. “I don’t recall any such fair and I have never owned such a suit,” he said.

“You wore an off-white linen shirt under it,” D’Anton went on. “It had a button missing.”

“Never owned one of those either.”

“And you were carrying a straw panama.”

“Not me guv’nor.”

“So what’s your version?” Plurabelle asked him, aroused by the mention of the missing button.

He shook his head. “D’Anton was just somehow always there or thereabouts,” he said. “You might as well ask me when I first saw the sky.”

D’Anton’s expression brought to Plurabelle’s mind another painting by William Holman Hunt.
The Light of the World
. Jesus with the moon behind him like a halo, knocking on a door with no expectation of its being opened, his lips pursed almost pettishly, his eyes downcast, a lonely, self-pitying man—“Behold I stand at the door and knock; if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me”—all the while knowing that the door will remain unanswered.

There seems to be something about all this being rejected that D’Anton quite likes, Plurabelle thought. Could it be that he hopes Barney won’t give him whatever it is he wants?

Or was it she who was hoping Barney wouldn’t give him whatever it was he wanted?

“I
have to take this,” Strulovitch said, reaching for his phone.

“It’s your daughter, of course you do,” Shylock told him.

“How do you know it’s my daughter?”

“I recognise the ring,” Shylock said.

The two men were strolling with a forced companionability out of the cemetery towards the car park. Strulovitch had invited Shylock home—get out of the cold, have a bath, drink Scotch, stay the night—and Shylock had accepted with a rough alacrity that surprised and flattered Strulovitch. Despite his wealth and influence, Strulovitch was a man of modest origins and expected his invitations to be turned down. People surely had better things to do with their time than spend it with him. “Good, good, very good,” he’d said, with something too like a bow. And Shylock—a man vexed in the matter of giving and receiving hospitality himself—had patted his shoulder. It was as though—without strong instincts for such a thing on either side—they felt they needed to accelerate the process of friendship.

Quite why, Strulovitch would have been unable to say. He was not a man who made friends easily with other men. A mother, a wife, a daughter—these were the loadstones of his life. Possibly, then, he missed what he had never had. As for Shylock—Strulovitch would not have dared ask what
he
missed.

He liked it that Shylock took his arm, even though the grip was fierce. The gesture made him feel European. He hoped an observer would have taken them for professors of fine art at the University of Bologna, discussing how to improve the architecture of Jewish cemeteries.

“It’s evident you spoil her,” Shylock said, when Strulovitch rang off.

Strulovitch detected emotion in the other man’s voice. How could it be otherwise? But which emotion—sorrow, envy, bitterness?

Did each of them envy the other?

Or was it just his own fatherly pride and sentimentality he was listening to?

“Her mother is too sick a woman to care for her as a mother should,” he said. “The responsibility for her falls to me. It’s not something for which I’m suited.”

“Is any man?” Shylock interposed.

“Without a wife—probably not. So yes, I spoil her—spoil and deprive her in equal measure.”

“That too I understand.”

“I praise her and then I castigate her. What I give with my left hand I take with my right. It’s all indulgence followed by exasperation followed by remorse. I feel as though I’m confined in a small space with her—impeding her movements one minute, too intimately aware of her presence the next. And then I punish her for feeling what I feel. I can’t find any equilibrium in my love for her.”

Shylock tightened his grip on Strulovitch’s arm. Through the taut fingers Strulovitch could feel memory vibrating.

“Your words are daggers,” Shylock said. “But so they would be to any father. It’s an invariable law that fathers love their daughters immoderately.”

He made it sound like a terrible duty enjoined by a God who’d done no better bringing up his own children. An exaction of affection more than a bestowal of it. To be loved by Shylock, Strulovitch saw, would be an arduous experience. But his words consoled as well as frightened him. So he wasn’t the only one. The universe decreed that fathers should love their daughters not wisely but too well. And that daughters should hate them for it.

“I want to let her alone but I can’t,” he said. “I fear for her. I wish she would go to sleep and wake up ten years older. A daughter studying at college is a living torture. She comes home addled.”

Shylock could barely wait for him to finish. “You think it would be any different if she never left the house? A daughter doesn’t have to have an education to be taught how to hate her father. She can learn rebellion through an open window. It’s in the nature of a daughter.”

“It’s in the nature of an open window.”

“It’s in the nature of nature.”

“Then I am not for nature.”

Shylock made a noise in the back of his throat that sounded like a laugh dying. “I wish you luck with that,” he said, slowing their pace and looking beyond Strulovitch as though to be sure nature wasn’t following them. “We’ve been battling nature a long time. How many jungle Jews do you know?”

Offhand, Strulovitch could only think of Johnny Weissmuller.

Shylock slapped the air, as if he meant to swat away a fly. “Him I can’t comment on, but Tarzan, let me tell you, wasn’t one of us. We don’t hang out with apes. It’s the gibbering of primates or it’s the law. We chose the law. You read Stefan Zweig? Of course you do. There’s a story that when he was a young man he used to expose himself to women by the monkey house in the Schönbrunn Zoo in Vienna. So why did he choose the monkey house? To deride the sexual imperative to which he was enslaved. I am no better than a monkey, he was saying. He grew out of it. That’s the whole story of the Jews. We grew out of it. You have to draw a line under where you’ve been. Christians like to think they’ve drawn a line under us.”

“We aren’t monkeys.”

“In their eyes we are. Apes, curs, wolves.”

“That’s nothing more than invective. Their real argument with us is that we drew the line too strictly under nature.”

“Their argument with us is whatever will serve their purpose at any given moment. They don’t know what it is they can’t abide, only that they can’t. I am more precise when it comes to what I can’t abide about them. We lack charity, they say, but when I ran out on to the streets calling for Jessica children jeered at my distress. No
charitable
Christian parent dragged them home and admonished them for their cruelty.”

Christ, Strulovitch thought admiringly, he doesn’t lack outrage or intransigence, or come to that celerity, my new friend.

Then again, though he didn’t mean to be critical so early in their acquaintance, wasn’t it reported that Shylock ran out on to those very streets calling at the same time for his ducats? Strulovitch knew never to trust what was reported, but what if, in this instance, it were true?

He wanted to be fair. It was, after all, as an object of material worth that Shylock’s daughter had been stolen. But you can’t—can you?—put everything down to the prevailing mercantilism of your society. Strulovitch lived in a wealth-crazed world himself; he hoped, however, that he knew the difference between his daughter and his bank account. Yet this, too, he understood—that in the outrage of loss, objects and people lose their delineation. The robbed commonly speak of violation, feeling the theft of things as keenly as an attack on their person. He couldn’t say he would feel the same, neither could he say he wouldn’t. But he wondered if he cut a similar figure as a father. Obsessed. Wolf-like. Enraged into possessive befuddlement. Was it just as arduous to be loved by him? Was he just as laughable a father in the cruel eyes of Christians?

“I can read what you’re thinking,” Shylock said. “All very well drawing a line under where we’ve been, but how do you draw a line under where your daughter wants to go? The answer is you can’t.”

Both men paused and looked down into the cold grey sludge they’d been sploshing through. They could have been back in the cemetery, hanging their heads in sorrow over the graves that contained people they loved.

They resumed a normal speed for a minute or two, until Shylock slowed them down again. “You know,” he said, as though they’d been discussing such things for weeks, and only this minute had a new thought come to him, “it wasn’t just to spite me that Jessica bought the monkey…” They were at a standstill now, close to the chapel with its Star of David over the door. It was in here that the young rabbi officiating at Strulovitch’s mother’s burial had mispronounced her name and Strulovitch had vowed never again to attend an event, solemn or light, at which a rabbi officiated.

“So why did she buy the monkey?”

“Excuse me, we wash our hands here,” Shylock said. Strulovitch stood his ground, perhaps a little too obdurately. Shylock went over to the washbasins at the rear of the building and poured water over his hands from a tin cup. Strulovitch knew the meaning of the custom. With water did you wash away the foul impurities of death. It made sense whether you were religious or not. But to Strulovitch it still smacked of fanaticism.

He had the grace to laugh at himself—Strulovitch the moderate.

Shylock picked up the conversation where they’d left it. “You were asking me why Jessica bought the monkey…”

“Yes.”

“To disavow the Jew in herself. I do well not to say ‘cursed be her name.’ ”

You are dead to me.

Dead at my foot.

“A lost daughter doesn’t have to be a dead daughter,” Strulovitch said. Wasn’t he a lost son who’d been found again?

Shylock dug his fingers into Strulovitch’s arm. “May you never come to understand the wrongness of those words. The loss I suffered I wouldn’t wish on my enemies.”

Strulovitch rode the rebuke. But he knew Shylock was lying. He
would
wish such a loss on his enemies.

He felt he’d joined his dad’s old club. The Rot-in-Hell Jewish Fathers’ Society. Much as he welcomed and was flattered by Shylock’s companionship, he wondered how much of this naked wrathfulness he could take. Back in the days when she had words, Kay would accuse him of bringing ancient theological disputation into the house. Ironical that he wanted to say to Shylock what she had said to him. Lighten up, Shylock.

They walked the rest of the short distance to Strulovitch’s hearse-like black Mercedes in silence. “Ah! I’m surprised,” Shylock commented when he saw it.

A black chauffeur was holding the door open for them. Strulovitch handed him Shylock’s Glyndebourne stool. “In the boot, Brendan,” he said.

To Shylock he said, “Surprised by what? That I have a driver?”

“That you have a German car.”

“I thought you believe we have to draw a line.”

“That’s another sort of line.”

“A line’s a line. We must let bygones be bygones.”

“I’m surprised you believe that.”

“I don’t.”

And so, sitting side by side in the back seat of the unexpected Mercedes, they’d dropped into the usual pattern of conversation between fathers on the pains of bringing up a family, especially fathers on whom the burden of bringing up a daughter had exclusively fallen.

“This may surprise you,” Shylock said, “but I half expect to hear from my too dear daughter every hour. I buried her in my heart the day she left, but a daughter doesn’t stay buried. Even a daughter that steals her father’s most precious possession…apart, that is, from herself.”

Strulovitch felt it behoved him not to present himself too alacritously as an equal in distress. Beatrice was giving him trouble but she hadn’t yet bunked off through a window with a thieving lout. “You haven’t heard anything so far then?” was the best he could think of saying.

Then he heard how ludicrous it sounded.
So far
!

“I say I half expect,” Shylock went on, staring beyond him as he spoke, looking but not looking at the Cheshire countryside, “but I confess there’s no volition in it. That’s simply a description of the state I’ve been left in. I am in expectation because that’s what follows when nothing does. But hope is idle because the story ends where the story ends. She could be on her way to me today, she could be knocking at my door this hour, but that’s a disallowable supposition. Today is always yesterday. There’s no Act Six. For me there wasn’t even an Act Five. But at least no resolution means no final rejection. Anything could be. There’s no knowing. Wounding doubt wounds not as fatally as wounding certainty. I am toyed with but I breathe.”

“So there is no looking forward?”

“None.”

“Are you telling me you don’t ever wonder how she is?”

“I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t wonder that. Some days I think I only want her to be happy. Some days I don’t. But it’s vain. There is no ‘is.’ Her story, too, stopped when it stopped. She and the vile layabout she ran off with—and for all I know their monkey—inherit my wealth, but they won’t ever see it. That’s some consolation. But I can’t help myself. I imagine her remorse. I am ashamed to say I pray for her to suffer agonies of remorse. I picture it. I see her ravaged face. But that’s to ask for something that can’t eventuate—might never have been, and certainly won’t ever be now.”

Strulovitch shook his head. “There must have been the seeds of remorse in her actions even as she took them. Who can set out on any journey without at the same time wishing they’d stayed at home? She must at times have looked back longingly.”

“Those are Old Testament misgivings.”

“Well who’s to say Jessica didn’t give in to them the minute she left the house?”

“The minute she left the house she bought a monkey.”

“That’s a sort of looking back.”

“Yes, but not a looking back to me. The monkey once and for all made her not my daughter. She found living in a Jewish house something worse than prison. But yes, yes, it’s always possible she didn’t like what she had become when she became it and experienced, if not remorse exactly, then something like the regret you speak of, if only for her dear mother’s sake. But I mustn’t give in to fancy. She grew to hate me and I dare say her mother too for dying. It’s crossed my mind to wonder whether the manner of her leaving was meant to mimic the manner of her mother’s—for she died abruptly, my beloved Leah. As was done to Jessica, in her perception, so Jessica did. Certainly the manner in which she eloped was cruel to the highest degree. Cruel, disdainful and blasphemous. Had she wished to show me how badly she’d fared without a mother, or a father who could better play the mother—how inconsiderate she’d grown under my tutelage and example, how brutal even—she could not have made a better job of it. My hope now is that the ill treatment she’s receiving makes her see things differently, though I will never know if it does or doesn’t. But this is not what a father should want—for his daughter to suffer so that she should understand how much suffering she has caused. I should wish her happiness, should I not?”

“You should. But now you are asking too much of yourself. No father can completely want his daughter to be happy.”