Shylock Is My Name (7 page)

U
ntrue what Strulovitch said about not exactly tailing his daughter.

It had been going on a long time. She was thirteen when it started. Thirteen in fact, twenty-three in appearance. Luscious. A Levantine princess. A pomegranate. She was luscious to herself, too. He had caught her looking at her reflection in the mirror once, pouting her lips and laughing at her own fullness, smoothing her thighs, pushing out her breasts, amused by the too-muchness but overwhelmed by it at the same time. As though it imposed a responsibility on her. Was this really her? Was this really
hers
to do with as she chose? He could understand it only too well. When he was thirteen and untouched he felt he had already gone to waste. A great prince in prison lies, he would say as he went alone to bed night after night. And he was no pomegranate. Of course she had to deploy herself. Of course she had to feel her beauty had a purpose beyond her own gaze and, yes—because she knew he tailed her, knew he followed her into her own bedroom even—beyond
his
.

He got it. He got it all. But he couldn’t allow it. It was the waste he couldn’t bear. The
other
kind of waste. The waste of his and Kay’s ambitions for her. The waste of their love. The waste of that excitement he’d felt when he saw her for the very first time. The betrayal of the covenant. The waste of her, not as a pomegranate but a promise.

She was throwing that promise away. On boys who were beneath her. On crazes that demeaned her. On drinks and drugs she didn’t need. On music that didn’t merit a second of her attention. She had grown up in a house that was filled with Mozart and Schubert from morning to night. How could she not tell the difference? The first time he tailed her was to a party in a stinking house in Moss Side where a disc jockey scratched records with his dirty fingernails and shouted “Make some noise!” It was that injunction—
make some noise
—that brute invitation to the inchoate, that enraged him even more than the sight of her sitting cross-legged on the floor, smoking weed and stroking the matted hair of a half-conscious troglodyte lying with his head in her lap. “Make some noise,” Strulovitch hissed into her ear as he dragged her down the stairs, “have I brought you up to value noise as an entity—just noise for the sake of it, Beatrice—while some chthonic arsehole fondles your breasts!”

She fought him on the stairs and fought him as he dragged her into the Mercedes while the chauffeur looked on, saying nothing. “That’s what this is really about, isn’t it,” she said. “It’s not the music, it’s got nothing to do with music, it’s the fondling. Well no one was fondling me as it so happens. I was fondling him. The only fondling of me that was going on was in your head.”

He slapped her face. You don’t accuse your father of having sexual fantasies about you. She got out of the car. He ran after her. A stranger shouted “Hey!” when he saw them struggling. “Fuck you!” Strulovitch said, “I’m her father.” “Then try behaving like it,” the stranger said. It was a line Beatrice was to borrow. “If you want me to behave like your daughter, try behaving like my father.”

A couple of days later she walked into his study laughing like a witch. “I’ve just remembered your description of the boy fondling me,” she said. “A chthonic arsehole. Congratulations. You make me proud to be your daughter. No other girl has a dad who could come up with a phrase like that.”

Strulovitch felt a twinge of pride. It wasn’t a bad phrase for the spur of the moment. And it had the merit of being deadly accurate. “I’m grateful for your appreciation, Beatrice,” he said. “I’m sorry I hit you.”

“You’re sick,” she said. “
Chthonic arsehole
. What you really mean is a goy boy. You wouldn’t have minded if he’d been a Jew.”

“Not true.”

“True!”

“All right, I might have minded less. Not on religious grounds, but because a Jew isn’t interested in the idea of making noise.”

She laughed again. “Shows what you know,” she said.

Was she right? Was chthonic arsehole just a euphemism for a non-Jew?

He didn’t think so. When he saw a Christian he didn’t see a creature of the prehistoric dark. That, surely, was more what Christians saw when they saw him. Why, it was sometimes what he saw when he saw himself.

The fact remained that a Christian husband was not what he wanted for his daughter, any more than his father had wanted a Christian wife for him. Yet it was with him exactly as it had been with his father. They both took non-Jews as they found them, enjoyed cordial relations with them, respected them, loved them—his father’s trustiest pal was a chalk-white Methodist from Todmorden; his partner, a man he cherished like a wife, an ultramontanist from Wells—and they both, father and son, reserved their highest admiration for Gentile geniuses—Mozart and Beethoven, Rembrandt and Goya (
Goy
a!), Wordsworth and Shakespeare (whether he was a Shapiro or he wasn’t). With what the Gentiles were in themselves Strulovitch had no quarrel. Only when it came to who his daughter would marry (and maybe sleep with) did he have reservations. Only when he thought of the covenant did a Christian become a troglodyte.

So in the name of that covenant, how many more times did he bundle her into the Mercedes?

He was lucky she never ran away with any of the freaks—he felt he needed another word—who fondled her breasts, even for one night. When he hated her he said that was because she knew which side her bread was buttered, when he loved her he said it was because beneath it all she was a young woman of profound good sense. Either way, he went on tailing her until she grew so accustomed to his presence in the shadows of a car park or at a table in the far corner of a bar wearing dark glasses and reading the
Financial Times
that she would turn and ask him for a ride home when she felt she’d been out long enough, or a loan when she ran out of cash.

One bank holiday Monday he followed her to the Notting Hill Carnival. She’d said she was going to stay with cousins in Hendon—he’d even put her on the train—but he got wind of her plans. He knew it wasn’t going to be easy finding her in the crowds but went, despite his loathing of street parties, public nudity, jungle music—
jungle music
? yes, jungle music—drunkenness, and masquerades, fearing the worst. The worst being? A Rasta junked-up to his eyeballs, swathed in a kafia and making noise on a steel drum. In the event it was Beatrice who found
him
. His anxiety must have lit him like a beacon. Boldly—and ironically because she knew his fears—she introduced him to a white man in a suit, pretty much his age, who shook his hand and said, “An honour to meet you Mr. Strulovitch.”

“Do you know how old my daughter is?” Strulovitch asked him.

“Twenty-four.”

“Is that a guess?”

“It’s what she told me.”

“You don’t ask people of twenty-four what their age is. You guessed, and you guessed wrong. She’s thirteen.”

“Thirteen and seven eighths,” Beatrice corrected him.

“Out of the mouths of babes,” Strulovitch said.

“Jesus!” the man cried, leaping from Beatrice’s side as though he’d just learnt she had leprosy. Strulovitch was half-inclined to feel sorry for him. He nonetheless said, “If I discover you’re still seeing her I’ll cut your heart out.”

For some reason this threat didn’t upset Beatrice. “Well
he
was hardly what you’d call chthonic,” she said, when Strulovitch got her home. “He’s the deputy mayor of Kensington and Chelsea.”

“Doesn’t stop him being chthonic,” Strulovitch said. “I can name you a dozen chthonic mayors, never mind deputy mayors.”

But the only reason his threat to eviscerate the bastard hadn’t upset her more was that she didn’t love him. Once the loving kicked off in earnest he knew he’d have his work cut out.

And then it did. He recognised the signs. Loss of appetite, absent-mindedness, teeth marks in her neck. One night he followed her to Levenshulme—a suburb no daughter of his should have been seen dead in—kicked down the door of a council flat and began throttling the first person he encountered inside. He was someone’s grandfather, too old to ravish Strulovitch’s daughter, though he might easily have been acting as a lookout while some younger person did. It took five people—one of them the putative ravisher, too puny, in the event, to have ravished a mouse—to pull him off. You were lucky, Beatrice told him, that you didn’t kill him or that no one called the police. “As far as you’re concerned,” he retorted, “I
am
the police.”

It was at this time—otherwise Beatrice would surely have fled for ever—that Kay had her stroke. One of her doctors was a friend of Strulovitch’s and assured him that while his running battle with his daughter could have contributed, other factors played a more important part in the aetiology of her sickness. She had always been a frail and nervous woman. The stress brought on by the long wait for Beatrice, and then her own anxiety for the girl’s welfare, would also have contributed. Strulovitch knew it. You can want something too much.

But he was a superstitious man. If you do wrong, you suffer—that’s morality. Superstition, which operates on a grander scale, has it that if you do wrong, someone else suffers. Someone you love. Would his wife have been with him still had he allowed Beatrice to throw her life away on whom she chose?

Which he doesn’t doubt she is going to do anyway.

Feather-bedded, cocooned in silk, the apricot and indigo of the Chihuly chandelier reflected in his narrowed eyes, Shylock lay awake within the force field of magical influence emanating from Alderley Edge, thinking of Jessica. Wizards or no wizards, he could not unbury her or uncurse her. Nor could he abruptly unfather himself of concern for her. The story ended where the story ended, but while he grasped the finality of that for him, he could not stop himself imagining the misery waiting in store for his daughter.

This much he knew:

Those who hated him so much as to profit from his loss of her and laugh openly at his sorrow would never reconcile themselves to the fact that she was Jewish. Blood would out. She was not daughter to her father’s manners, she said, but Lorenzo, the rascal who pilfered her, along with those who conspired in the misappropriation, could not stop commenting on her difference from the man she was ashamed to call father, her gentler (for which read more Gentile) disposition, her greater chance of making it to heaven, the fairness of her looks—ivory to his jet—and when all you can remark is difference then all you are aware of is similarity. That she came bucketed in his ducats only went to show how present he was in their estimation of her. How long before Lorenzo woke to find his limbs stretched out by Shylock’s?

The naivety of daughters! To think that Lorenzo’s love would make her Christian when nothing in his character or behaviour bore the notation of Christian as a Christian would describe Christianity. Was it Christian to avail himself, without pausing long enough to scratch his backside, of her father’s gold and jewels? Was it Christian to make merry with her betrayal and watch her empty her pockets in a single mad night in Genoa? A subtle gradation of morality attaches to profligacy: to blow a fortune of one’s own is reprehensible, to encourage another to squander hers is iniquitous. Or is that iniquity what Christians mean by virtue? Virtuous to divest another of his worldly goods so long as you deplore the means by which he came by them…?

He remembered her as a child in Leah’s arms and mourned her as he mourned her mother. What had he done to make her hate him? “Hatred” was not too strong a word. The monkey proved that. To buy a monkey with the ring Leah had given him was a profanation of them both. But whatever she had sold to buy it with, a monkey was a profanation of her ancestors and education, everything he and Leah had taught her since she was a child. Not for a wilderness of monkeys would I have sold that ring, he told Tubal, and as he said it he saw the wilderness, the vast expanse of feral nothingness, lawless, godless, governed only by greed, hyenas, and the blind impulse to reproduce.

Was that what Jessica hated, not him or the mother who’d prematurely left her, but the idea that the wilderness should be civilised—the wilderness in her heart and the wilderness that was the company she kept? Christianity, when all was said and done, counted as no more than an interregnum: the only true distinction was between Judaism and paganism, and when a Jew felt the old paganism itching in his blood he had no choice but to reject the interdictions he’d been brought up to listen to. Jessica wasn’t interested in Christians. What she wanted was to be back in the wilderness with the monkeys.

Strulovitch found his guest in the garden when he woke. It was still early. And cold. He was wearing his overcoat, with a black scarf around his shoulders—to Strulovitch’s eye not unlike a prayer shawl—and was sitting on his Glyndebourne stool talking to Leah. A few remaining droplets of dew sequinned the lawn, lighting him up from below like footlights.

“So, Leah, it would seem that I am presently to become a Christian,” he’d been saying.

This was a familiar theme between them. He had waited for her, as always, to say something in return. But presumably she was too amused for words. “Some Christian you’ll make!” he knew she was thinking.

He couldn’t resist indulging her sense of humour. “You can just see me, Leah,” he liked to go on, “taking my pew, gowned in white for when the sacred moment of baptism arrives, my head bowed, waiting in beatified gratitude for the sermonising to start. ‘We have in our presence today, by the grace of Jesus Christ, a Jew notorious for…’ ”

He rose from his stool and did a stately dance for her, rubbing his fingers together—the Waltz of the Money-grubbers.

But there it had to come to an end. He sat down again. His conversion to Christianity was the ultima Thule of their graveyard pillow talk. They might approach it forever, nose it like sharks circling the smell of blood, but they would never be able to move in for the final kill. Before Shylock had been able to convert, or pretend to convert, the footlights dimmed.