Zoo Time

by Howard Jacobson

  How I manage to connect so well with everybody I can’t explain. But then I can’t explain anything.

  How it is, for example, that I have readers when there are no readers. That’s what luck does: it calls black white, it makes a nonsense of the actual state of things, it excepts you from the general, and only what is general is true. So, although there is no reason for reading groups or Oxfam or the bookshops whose assistants were once unable to spell my name to love me – me – any more than they ever did, they do. Luck blinds, is all one can say.

  I travel the world, anyway, saying what I always said, but now to crowded rooms and warm applause. I won’t pretend I can have any woman I want – because the particular women I do want I most definitely cannot have, and the rest are usually in tears or blowing their noses when I meet them – but I do all right for a man not in the bloom of youth who used to walk the streets of London talking to himself and pulling his hair out. I am still envious of other writers’ success, but this time the success I am most envious of is my own.

  And I am not a little contemptuous of that success, no matter that it’s mine. Where was it before? I ask. Where was it when I needed it far more, and deserved it no less? If you’re a writer through and through you don’t turn cheerful overnight just because the fates have finally decreed in your favour. Taste success when you have known failure and the memory of failure grows more bitter with every new laurel you win. Success is arbitrary and wayward; only failure is the real measure of things.

  But I am not accused of ingratitude or acerbity. I smile and am smiled back at. I sign and sign. Suddenly, those are the two words they can’t get enough of. Guido Cretino. I can do no wrong. When I expostulate the case against me and my shameful capitulation – though I abhor the expostulatory as much as I ever did – they applaud my words. And of course they don’t believe it when I tweet against the crime novel, the detective novel, the crossover novel, the children’s novel, the zombie novel, the graphic novel, the schmaltz novel, the debut novel (with one exception), iPads, Primark, Morrisons, Lidl (I purposely don’t name the supermarkets which stock me: why rock the boat?), three-for-two, and Sandy Ferber’s instant bus-queue fiction, now selling in its millions. Ladies and gentlemen, I say to them – ladies, gentlemen and children – you will clap me to an early grave.

  They laugh at that, knowing that if mine were to be an early grave I’d have been in it long ago.

  Like Poppy Eisenhower, my mother-in-law.

  37

  The Good Husband

  I will not dwell on Vanessa’s novel. Not because I begrudge her but because she would not allow that I could ever do it justice. And all considering, she is surely right.

  ‘Just don’t ever think of reviewing me,’ she had said.

  This, though, I can say: despite encouraging notices, it did not score any great success until it was made into a film. That the film was produced and directed by Dirk de Wolff will surprise no one who understands the way a good narrative works. Why would I have brought him onstage in Monkey Mia had I not had further use for him? There were many people Vanessa and I met in Australia about whom I have said nothing. I don’t say I invented de Wolff, only that his turning up in Shark Bay lends his reappearance a premonitory inevitability. An astute reader – whether of books or life – must have known he was there only because he was coming back.

  I recall with sad fondness, anyway – also of the premonitory sort – the exhilaration with which Vee and I read the billboards on the Underground:

  ARE THERE MONKEYS IN MONKEY MIA?

  directed by

  Dirk de Wolff

  and in smaller letters, but still large enough to read:

  Based upon the novel

  by

  Vanessa Eisenhower

  ‘Darling, how wonderful,’ I said, the first time we went down onto the platform at Ladbroke Grove Tube to stare at a poster.

  She glimmered at me from on high and trembled like a galleon. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  I was being a fantastic husband. Had been from the moment I saw there was no point trying to be anything else. Once your wife’s name is up in lights you might as well enjoy it.

  We kissed passionately. We could have made a baby there and then. By preference a girl, so we could have called her Mia. Mia Ableman. The little monkey. Or maybe Mia Eisenhower, now that Eisenhower was the name to conjure with.

  ‘You don’t mind?’ Vanessa, all sweetness, had asked me, once there was no longer any concealing that her book was finished, that an agent – my agent! – had read it, that it would soon be published, and that she was now Eisenhower, not Ableman.

  ‘Of course not,’ I had said. ‘I think it’s a smart move. Clinton or Obama would have been even better, but Eisenhower is good.’

  In fact, I suspected that it was only when she decided to change her name that she’d been able to get cracking. It meant she had broken through the false allure of factuality which for so long had held her back. ‘I only hope you’ve changed everybody else’s names while you’re at it,’ I said. ‘Including mine.’

  ‘How many times have I told you you’re not in it?’ she said. ‘I’m not writing about us.’

  It was exactly what I’d always been telling her. A novel isn’t the intimate diary of my life, Vee. It’s not us. But in her case – not because I patronised her, or thought she lacked imagination, but because she had always argued so forcibly for writing things exactly as they were – I believed it was.

  ‘Of course I’m not in it,’ I said. ‘So what have you called me – Guido Cretino?’

  Monkey, as we referred to it – and no, the irony wasn’t lost on either of us – became a film almost before it was forgotten as a novel. The only way of explaining the speed of it, in my view, was that Dirk de Wolff had put in an appearance earlier than Vanessa had let on to me, long before he’d ‘stumbled’ on the book, ‘recalled’ the author, and, as someone who knew the location well, believed himself to be the ‘only man’ to make the movie. My theory was that Vanessa had got me out of the house because de Wolff was in it, I don’t say uprooting me as a husband, but certainly uprooting me as a literary mentor and influence. He had spurred her on to write the novel, was my guess – hence her uncharacteristic celerity – with a view from the very start of what he wanted from a screenplay. I presumed that on a prearranged signal – ‘Come! The work is done and I am ready for you!’ – he had followed her to England, as it was agreed he would during discussions of a creative nature on his vulgar boat in Monkey Mia, either on the first visit with her tipsy ma, or when she returned to it alone while I was standing on her maman’s spider – that’s if that indeed was what she’d done, though it was immaterial now.

  I say I was a fantastic husband – supportive, selfless, unsuspicious and above all non-competitive – but there was a brief time, just after Poppy’s defection and the first inkling I had been given by the Querreys of how Vanessa’s life was about to change, when I faltered. The period preceding the publication of Vanessa’s novel should have been one of high excitement, but I spent most of it in bed. The thing they don’t tell you about nervous breakdowns is how calming they can be.

  ‘That,’ Vanessa said, ‘is because you’re not having a nervous breakdown. I’ve had a nervous breakdown and I can tell you it was nothing like what you’re having. What you’re having is a pet.’

  ‘A pet? You call this a pet? Vee, at the corner of each eye I see parallel lines and flashing lights. My family is disintegrating. My publisher has died. I am in print only on demand. This is not a pet.’

  And I hadn’t even mentioned Poppy or my agent.

  She didn’t argue with me. Things were different now. She didn’t argue with me because she didn’t need to argue with me. Any argument of consequence she’d won.

  ‘And by the way, when did you have a nervous breakdown?’ I asked.

  ‘From the day I married you until very recently.’ Even that she made sound complimentary.

 
‘I’m glad to hear you’re all right now.’

  ‘I would be if you’d get out of bed.’

  She couldn’t bear my lying there all day, licking my teeth, clawing at my fingernails, drinking Lucozade and listening to Radio 4, though there’d been a time when she’d have prayed for such an eventuality. Once, my lying in bed all day would have meant she could get on with her novel without the distracting sounds of me getting on with mine. But things were not what they had been. I was not writing and she had no need to. She had written. ‘It’s a wonderful feeling,’ she said, ‘having done it.’

  ‘You’ve never “done” it, Vee. It’s never over. You should be writing another one now. Just in case.’

  That a screenplay was brewing, that by some means she was in contact with de Wolff, I had no idea.

  ‘Just in case what?’

  ‘Just in case – and I speak from experience and with love – just in case what you’re hoping for doesn’t materialise. Novel two is an insurance policy against the failure of novel one; novel three is an insurance policy –’

  ‘I get the idea, Guido. But I don’t want to be like you, never satisfied, always chasing your tail. I’ll take my chance. Now get out of bed.’

  There was a new purposiveness about her, as of a person who had completed a long and demanding enterprise – climbed a mountain, saved a country – and now wanted to live a little. In Vanessa’s case, to live a lot. ‘Let’s go to the markets today,’ she’d suddenly suggest. ‘Let’s buy a new carpet. Let’s nip over to Rome.’

  I pulled the duvet over my head. ‘Too ill,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Guido, get up.’

  ‘Can’t,’ I said.

  ‘I finish and you go to pieces. Now you know how it’s been for me.’

  ‘My going to pieces – and in fact I’m not going to pieces: if anything I am coming quietly back together – has nothing whatsoever to do with your finishing. Which is why I ask you, as your beloved husband, to start another. I’d be delighted to have you starting and finishing every day of my life. It means I can lie here and mend.’

  ‘Mend from what? What broke you?’

  I rolled my eyes. What hadn’t broken me?

  ‘Can’t I just be ill?’ I asked. ‘Can’t I just be unwell?’

  ‘You’re never just unwell. You’re the healthiest person I’ve ever met – in body. It’s your head that’s sick.’

  We both fell quiet, thinking of Jeffrey. Did brain tumours run in the family?

  Vanessa read my mind. ‘No,’ she said, ‘they don’t.’

  I asked for tea. She said she’d buy me tea out. Claridge’s. I reminded her you needed to book Claridge’s a year before you wanted tea. How people knew that far ahead when they’d feel like tea had always been a mystery to me. The Ritz the same. There were people in rural Hampshire making reservations for a birthday tea at the Ritz twenty years hence. It was like putting your son’s name down for Eton before you’d met the woman who would conceive him. Vanessa, twice the wife she had ever been, listened to me list my objections. Paris, then. Madrid. Casablanca. Let’s fly to Casablanca.

  To her credit she never said, ‘Then stay where you are while I go to Casablanca with Dirk.’

  ‘This advance of yours must have been quite something,’ I said, with a deliberate absence of pettishness. ‘Someone clearly did a good deal for you. Francis, was it?’

  For a million reasons, all of them sound, the details had not been discussed. Not the title, not the contents, not Slumdog, not the deal, not the part Francis had or hadn’t played in it, and if not him, who? When a call came for her about the book she closed the door. Tactful of her. But the more pain I was spared, the more time I needed to spend in bed.

  She ripped the duvet off me. Embarrassing. I had an erection. I always did get an erection when I was depressed. Flu and depression invariably engorged me.

  ‘What’s that?’ she said.

  ‘Evidence that I’m pleased for you.’

  ‘What will it be like when I start bringing prizes home?’

  ‘We can only guess, Vee.’

  ‘Say you’ll come to the market with me and I’ll suck you off.’

  ‘I’ll come to the market with you.’

  ‘You have to mean it.’

  ‘I mean it.’ And to prove it I opened my arms and sang ‘I’m in the Mood for Love’.

  Here was the measure of how things had changed: once upon a time she’d have said, ‘No, you’re not,’ and walked out of the room; today she bent her head towards my feverish erection and joined in. We were both, though it hurts me to recall it now, in the mood for love.

  By our standards, and allowing for my nervous breakdown, these were idyllic times. I had never seen Vanessa more happy or more beautiful. She whistled as she did housework. She cooked casseroles for me, sometimes one for lunch and another one for dinner. And what is more she served them wearing her highest heels and very nearly see-through blouses. She read me things that interested her from newspapers. She told me stories, jokes. The only thing she never talked about was the subject of her book. And this I took to be the proof that a nasty shock was waiting for me. But that didn’t matter. I was shocked-out. Let her do her worst if it made her happy, and there was no mistaking that it made her happy.

  Not impossibly, a contributory factor in my collapse was guilt: I had come to see how cruel I’d been to her throughout our marriage, what pleasure I’d been denying her by putting me first, by letting it be felt that I was the centre of all marital operations, that it was my career that counted, my flame the one that had to be fed and kept alight at all times. When you see a person you love happy for the first time, you must ask yourself what part you’ve played in all the misery that went before.

  But I worried what would happen when this period of excited anticipation came to an end and she had to face the inevitable anticlimax: no readers, no sales, no book visible in a single bookshop, no Richard and Judy, fatuous reviews, no back list, no front list, the black hole . . . I tried to prepare her for it but on her impossibly volatile nature no warning would stick. Tra-la-la, wasn’t the writer’s life grand! Partly, of course, she was showing me how to do it. You and your endless complaining. You and your ‘literature’s finished’. Look how easy it can be. Look what a good time we could have been having – the pair of us. Instead of just you you you and your long face. Forgetting that I too had been like this at the beginning, and that we had danced around the living room when I got my first royalty cheque, and then spent the lot on a holiday in Taormina, where we found plaques to D. H. Lawrence. ‘One day it will be you, my darling,’ she had said, and we had danced in Taormina too.

  It would all come to no good, but for the time being, yes – and even though I was throwing a minor nervous breakdown – life was sweet. Anyone coming into the house would have smelt it immediately – the sticky aroma, like lilies just before the turn, of a man and his wife in love, the man, maybe, just a little bit more so.

  As for Poppy, nothing was alluded to. They had fallen out, that was all I knew. And not – not ostensibly – over me. Had they fallen out over me I’d have known about it. I had to assume they had fallen out over Francis. That Vanessa, who could be prudish when it suited her to be, disapproved of whatever it was that was going on there. And what is more felt that Poppy’s grabbing Francis for her purposes, just as she was grabbing him for her own, smacked a little too much of naked competition. No sooner did Vanessa have an agent than her mother had to have the same person for her . . . for her whatever she had picked him for. It was indecent. Vanessa didn’t put it to me like that; indeed Vanessa didn’t put it to me any way – but with my nose for indecency and how it was perceived by others, I just knew it.

  What I didn’t fully understand until I read Vanessa’s novel was that the breach had already been made in her own mind. The book would finalise that breach, but was also the history of it. Mothers and daughters – a rivalry that exceeded even that of novelists a
nd novelists.

  38

  Whore

  With Poppy out on the night with Francis, bed was the safest place for me to be. Whether they were in any real sense out on the night or even just out – under what terms she had entered his employment and/or his affections – I had no idea, but the expression describes the coloration of my fears. I knew my jealous nature and knew that if I didn’t disable myself I’d be hammering at Francis’s office door demanding an explanation. Not least for taking on my wife as a client.

  How could you do that to me, Francis? I’m your fucking client. I was your fucking friend!

  He, of course, assuming I could get to him, would pretend not to know what I was talking about. There was no law that said an agent couldn’t represent a husband and a wife. Yes, common decency opposed it – boundaries, Francis! – and at the very least you asked the existing client how he stroke she felt about your taking on the spouse; but I knew what Francis would say. Hey, never for one minute did I think you would mind. People have family doctors and family lawyers – think of me as your family agent.

  As for why he didn’t mention it – he was enjoined to secrecy. Vanessa wanted it to be a surprise.