Zoo Time

by Howard Jacobson

  She nodded her head as she spoke, as though in complete, if surprised, agreement with herself.

  ‘That sounds more like a medical treatise than a novel,’ I said.

  She laughed again, this time at a higher register than I’d suspected the human voice capable of reaching. ‘The last thing I aim to be is didactic,’ she fluted. ‘Ask the children who devour my books.’

  I wanted to ask whether devouring her books might not carry as many dangers for a young girl as devouring semen, but decided against.

  ‘The important thing,’ Heston said, returning to himself, ‘is not where your story is set. It doesn’t matter in the slightest whether it’s in a mixed comprehensive in Banbury or on a battlefield in Bosnia. What matters is that children are able to recognise themselves.’

  ‘Identify, you mean,’ I put in.

  You don’t bring irony – even steamroller irony – to a symposium on the role of children’s literature. You bring innocence or you’re a dead man.

  ‘Yes,’ Heston agreed. ‘Learn to see themselves in foreign situations.’

  ‘Or to see themselves differently in only too familiar ones,’ Sally added.

  ‘But isn’t the whole point of reading,’ I asked, ‘to take you far away from what you know about yourself already, to send the mind out on a wonderful journey of discovery? Shouldn’t a child’s imagination be fed by all that’s alien to it?’

  (Maternal spit-roasting in Wilmslow, for instance.)

  ‘Fantasy, you mean,’ Heston said, laughing horribly. ‘The very quality you decry.’

  ‘I think he has you there,’ the author of Fetch, Fetch said.

  And that’s when you know you definitely are a dead man – when someone says ‘he has you there’, no matter that the little bastard doesn’t have you here, there or anywhere else.

  The audience applauded his knockout blow and threw their heads back with spiteful laughter, showing me their scarlet throats. Another enemy of the child sent packing with a bloody nose. Had I rolled off the platform they’d have gathered round and kicked my brains out.

  And left them for Fetch to fetch.

  33

  Read Me, Read Me, Fuck Me, Fuck Me

  ‘So you’re Poppy Eisenhower,’ Francis said, taking her hand.

  ‘What’s with the so?’ Vanessa asked.

  What’s with the you’re? I wondered.

  They kissed. Francis and Vanessa, I mean. They had always got along well. For Francis, Vanessa was a means of relating to me without the strain of having to relate to me, and for Vanessa, Francis was the opportunity to do something similar. They gave each other a holiday from the person without whom they would not have known, or had any need to know, each other. They flirted, is another way of describing the manner in which they got along. So Vanessa could, without intending much by it, charge Francis with taking too great an interest in her mother. But I was still alarmed. I didn’t want Francis, in his excitement, to show how much he knew.

  ‘So as in so why haven’t I met her before,’ Francis said.

  ‘Because I want to keep you to myself,’ Vanessa said.

  The women joined us at our table.

  ‘I promise you I had no idea you were going to be here,’ Vanessa hissed at me. She felt that finding me here put her in the wrong, and so blamed me for it.

  I told her it was all right. We had finished talking business. And it was nice to see her out with her mother for the first time in many months. Indeed, nice to see her mother after such a long sequestration in the country.

  Poppy greeted me with just sufficient affability not to arouse suspicion. Francis’s company appeared to intoxicate her, which reminded Vanessa, lowering her voice – ‘No, Maman, you promised, remember. Not at lunchtime.’

  ‘Oh!’ Poppy waved her daughter’s fussiness away and accepted Francis’s suggestion of a mojito.

  They’d been out shopping at Abercrombie & Fitch together.

  ‘Buying T-shirts or ogling young men with bare chests?’ I asked.

  Francis didn’t pick up the allusion. ‘It’s a shop at the Royal Academy end of Savile Row,’ I informed him, pointing to the soft-porn carrier bags the women had pushed under the table. ‘It’s for tourists, the gullible, and women of a certain age willing to queue for hours to get a look at pretty boys with their tops off.’

  Jeffrey, I was thinking.

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ Francis laughed.

  ‘What’s this “women of a certain age”?’ Poppy wanted to know.

  ‘Don’t rise to him, Maman,’ Vanessa said. ‘He’s just jealous.’

  ‘Of pretty boys with hairless chests?’

  Jeffrey.

  ‘Of the business they do. There were no queues outside Wilhelmina’s that I remember.’

  I saw a queue. Where? In my mind’s eye, Horatio. In my mind’s eye I saw my wife and her mother queuing to be let into Jeffrey’s attentions.

  Francis wanted to see what they’d bought. There followed some horseplay with leggings and skimpy knit tanks and camis, Francis saying, now to my wife, now to her mother, that he wouldn’t mind seeing her in that.

  ‘Hold that one up to yourself. God, yes, I can see why you bought it. Now you, Poppy.’

  I eyed the three of them narrowly. Francis beside himself. Vanessa holding up a striped Henley top to go with a little floral skirt. Poppy a rose-covered sundress with cross-back straps, dancing her shoulders behind it like a girl.

  Were the two women capable of wooing a man so to speak in tandem? Were they able to flirt as a team? Foolish question. Capability didn’t enter into it. Flirting as a team was what they did. It was their thing. It was, now I came to think of it, what they’d done in the course of wooing me.

  A dreadful thought descended on me: what if I was the only man out there who hadn’t enjoyed them in concert?

  ‘So how do you spend your days?’ Francis asked, looking Poppy in the eye.

  I was interested to hear the answer. My mother-in-law had not returned to the bosom of her loving family as she’d originally promised she would. She had stayed in Shipton-under-Wychwood. She came up to see Vanessa frequently, so that they could go shopping or to a concert on each other’s arm, and Vanessa regularly visited her, or said she visited her, but our hot little unspoken pact of togetherness was broken. I saw her rarely, and on my own had seen her only on two further occasions after the day of the murderous symposium on children’s literature – one comment-worthy, one not.

  How did she spend her days? ‘Oh, doing this and that,’ she answered, already halfway to being drunk.

  ‘This being?’

  ‘Gardening.’

  ‘And that being?’

  ‘More gardening.’

  ‘No cello?’

  I glared at Francis.

  Poppy glared at me.

  Vanessa glared at Poppy.

  Francis smiled at us all.

  ‘Music’s fucked,’ I said.

  ‘How do you reckon that is?’ Francis wanted to know.

  ‘He thinks everything’s fucked,’ Vanessa said.

  I mouthed the words ‘You included and I know by whom’ at her.

  I saw Poppy trying to lip-read. ‘And you,’ I’d have added had I dared.

  ‘He thinks everything’s fucked,’ Vanessa went on, ‘because the world suits him that way. A fucked world explains Guido to Guido.’

  ‘Who’s Guido?’ Francis asked.

  ‘It’s my wife’s pet name for me,’ I told him.

  ‘That’s nice. Do you have a pet name for her?’

  ‘Two-timing bitch of a whore,’ I said. But the words came out as ‘Vee’.

  ‘And you?’ he asked, turning to Poppy.

  ‘Do I have a pet name for my son-in-law?’

  ‘No, do they have a pet name for you?’

  ‘Popsicle.’

  Vanessa and I had never been more together. ‘We do not call you that.’

  ‘My second husband called me Popsicle.’

&nb
sp; ‘Mr Eisenhower?’

  ‘Yes. And I called him Toblerone.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Because his family was Swiss.’

  I saw Francis shaping up to do something with the idea of not minding her taking a bite out of his bar.

  ‘No, Francis,’ I said.

  ‘No what?’

  ‘You know what.’

  ‘I was just going to ask your lovely mother-in-law whether she’d object to my calling her Popsicle.’

  Poppy fanned her face with her hands as though all this gallantry had made her hot. ‘If you like,’ she said.

  I examined Vanessa’s expression to see if she was/were jealous. A mother is meant to give way and leave the field clear for her daughter. But Poppy was still on active service. Was that bound to be the way of it now that women had discovered how not to age: were mothers and their daughters doomed to slug it out until one of them was finally pitched, made-up and manicured, into the unresponsive earth?

  And did this explain why Poppy hadn’t blown the whistle on me? Because all was fair now between the generations?

  Vanessa was aware of my scrutiny. ‘I hope you don’t think,’ she said in a quiet voice, though with Francis and Poppy hugger-mugger there was no need of one, ‘that I came here deliberately to sabotage your lunch.’

  ‘Why would I think that?’

  ‘Because you usually think ill of me.’

  I felt sorry for her suddenly, mistrusted by me, eclipsed by her mother. ‘I don’t usually think ill of you at all,’ I said, patting her hand. ‘I think well of you.’

  She opened her palm so that I could slip mine into it.

  ‘I do, however, think ill of my brother,’ I said.

  She didn’t move a muscle. ‘You shouldn’t,’ she said. ‘He’s ill enough already.’

  ‘Will my thinking make him worse?’

  ‘You know my theory of illness.’

  I did. Vanessa’s theory of illness was that illness was all in the head – in your own head or in the heads of others. You made yourself ill if you wanted to be ill and other people made you ill if they wanted you to be ill, and your being ill explained everything you did. In this way we were all entirely innocent of our actions while being entirely to blame for them.

  ‘And you?’ I asked.

  ‘Me what?’

  I turned my face into a blazing interrogation mark. ‘How are you?’

  ‘In relation to what?’

  ‘In relation to everything. In relation to me, in relation to Jeffrey, in relation to life.’

  ‘How do you think I am? Ill.’

  ‘Your illness being specifically what?’

  She didn’t hesitate. ‘Erotomania.’

  I looked around the room and made a sign suggesting she keep her voice down. Not that anyone was listening, least of all Francis and Poppy who were trapped like baby rabbits in the headlights of their tipsy fascination.

  ‘I hadn’t realised it had gone that far,’ I said.

  ‘You hadn’t realised what had gone that far?’

  ‘You. I hadn’t realised you had gone that far. You and –’

  ‘I’m not talking about me. You’re the erotomaniac.’

  ‘Me? An erotomaniac? I barely have a sex drive when I’m writing, as you know.’

  ‘I know the theory, Guido. Words drive out longing. But they don’t in your case. In your case words are longing. They sit up and beg for it. Read me, read me, fuck me, fuck me.’

  I slapped my forehead in exasperation. ‘How has this got back to me? I thought we were discussing your illness.’

  ‘You are my illness.’

  ‘I’m your illness? Well, that’s convenient for you, Vee. Convenient for Jeffrey, too. So does it follow that you’re my illness?’

  ‘How can my illness not be your illness if it was your illness to begin with?’

  Was it because I’d slapped my forehead that my brain suddenly felt very tired? But I tried to stay on track. ‘So it was my illness that made you sleep with Jeffrey?’

  ‘Who said I slept with Jeffrey?’

  ‘All right, I get it. You gave him one of your famous spur-of-the-moment blow jobs.’

  ‘Did he say that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He didn’t. He just stared in a particular way.’

  ‘A way that made you think I blew him? What did he do – puff out his cheeks?’

  ‘The details aren’t important, Vee.’

  ‘Then why are we having this conversation?’

  ‘Christ – Jeffrey’s my brother.’

  ‘Ah, family now! Since when did you care about things like that? You’re unconventional, remember. You’re a novelist, a free spirit. The Wilmslow Debauchee.’

  ‘It’s not a matter of what I care about. Didn’t you care about things like that?’

  ‘Me? I’m third in this pecking order. There’s you, and you don’t care. There’s Jeffrey, and he has certainly never cared. That’s the blood is thicker than water part of it dispensed with, and then there’s me – no blood relation to either of you.’

  ‘Wife, Vee? Wife!’

  ‘Oh – wife! What about husband, Guido, husband?’

  ‘Meaning?’

  We had been holding hands throughout this. Only now did she release mine. ‘Meaning, Guido, whatever you want it to mean.’

  An indirect answer to what had been, no matter how colourful my language, essentially indirect questions. I’d charged her with sleeping with Jeffrey but then again I hadn’t. You have to be blunt when it comes to getting to the truth of a suspected infidelity. Do you or didn’t you? When did you? Where did you? How often did you? How much did you enjoy it? When are you planning to do it next? Anything less and you let the person you believe to have betrayed you off the hook. You talk dirty but you don’t get the answers you are looking for, assuming answers are in fact what you are looking for.

  You expect the accused to prevaricate, but why would the accuser do the prevaricating for her? Because directness was not in my nature or my profession. Actually to ask my wife when and where and how often would have been too crude. To intimate suspicion was one thing, to demand an explanation another. I was a novelist: I didn’t want an explanation, I wanted a spiralling narrative of uncertainty, nothing ever known for sure, the story going on for ever. It’s why I don’t read whodunnits. I take no satisfaction in knowing who dun it. A mystery capable of being solved isn’t what I call a mystery.

  Whereas Jeffrey and Vanessa, Jeffrey and Poppy, Jeffrey and Poppy and Vanessa . . .

  Ah! Or rather, Ah?

  The interrogative mark beating the exclamatory any time.

  Was Vanessa’s saying I could take her to mean whatever I wanted her to mean her way of showing that she knew about me and Poppy? Had Jeffrey been her quid pro quo?

  But if it was a quid pro quo that barely seemed to matter to her, did Poppy and I not matter to her either?

  Or was the whole performance simply to put me off the scent of the real crime, which was Jeffrey and Poppy? And if so, why? Who or what was she protecting? Her mother’s reputation? My feelings?

  A crazed thought sought brief shelter in my disordered mind. Vee loved me, Vee knew about me and Poppy, Vee understood – I was a writer: Vee got that – but I was also a man, and Vee didn’t want to see that man hurt.

  See the advantage of having nothing ever spelt out clearly? See what vast territories of outrageous speculation it leaves you free to roam?

  I must have been mouth-writing again because Vanessa said, ‘Planning a book about it, are we?’

  ‘No,’ I lied. ‘Why don’t you write it, since you know so many more of the details?’

  ‘Who’s to say I’m not?’

  I stared at her. She threw her head back, showing me her throat, laughing like a temple prostitute. It worked with me every time. Had she done that more often I might have thought about her mother less.

  ‘What do you mean who�
�s to say I’m not?’

  ‘You ask why don’t I write about it, I reply who’s to say I’m not writing about it – whatever the “it” is.’

  ‘Well, you should know what the “it” is if you’re writing about it?’

  ‘One thing’s for certain, Guido – my “it” won’t be your “it” .’

  We’d been here a thousand times. I’m writing, I’m not writing. I’ve started, I’ve not started. I’m writing about this, I’m writing about that, mind your own fucking business what I’m writing about. So what made it different now? I couldn’t have said. It just felt different. I’d been asked once why I didn’t write crime, since crime writing was where it was at. Because, I’d answered, I wasn’t interested in crime, I was interested in punishment. So was this the punishment I’d been expecting, the punishment it could be said I deserved – Vanessa finally with the wind in her sails, Vanessa victrix?

  ‘Been keeping a little diary?’ I asked. Insulting of me. But bravado was at work. The bravado of a drowning man, waiting for his punishment. Some might say inviting his punishment, for every truly moral man is a masochist.

  ‘Think that if you like.’

  It worried me that she hadn’t called me a patronising prick. It worried me how sweet-tempered she was being.

  ‘So come on – writer to writer – what have you been writing?’

  She looked me directly in the eyes, hers as wild as the stars that fell from the skies over Monkey Mia. ‘What’s sauce for the goose, Guido.’

  That meant only one thing in our house.

  ‘A novel? Don’t tell me you’re writing an unchaste novel about my family?’

  ‘Why would it be unchaste?’

  ‘Just a feeling I have.’

  ‘And why shouldn’t it be unchaste anyway? You’re always writing unchastely about mine.’

  ‘That’s not true. I have never written about your family unchastely or otherwise. Anyway, you don’t have a family, apart from Poppy.’

  ‘It’s true if one knows how to read you, and I know how to read you.’

  I didn’t rise to that. If she thought what I’d written so far was improper, she should get inside my head. Or was that her point: that she was inside my head? Unless she’d stolen a look at what was on my computer. But in that event she wouldn’t be here, toying with me now.