Zoo Time

by Howard Jacobson

  Was it to surprise me, too, having been apprised of my desires, that you employed my mother-in-law – in whatever capacity? Never mind common decency, Francis, you must have known that the very heavens forbade that.

  But that was just as much a question for Poppy.

  How could you do that to me, Poppy? I’m your . . . I’m your . . . What was I? I’m your fucking son-in-law.

  Would I call her a whore? Probably. I liked the word. I liked the sensation of saying it on my tongue, the vibrations on my papillae that emitting it occasioned. Whore. It’s a word that heats the mouth up. But it had fallen out of fashion at about the same time as modesty. De Sade’s sodomitic whores would simply pass today for girls out on a hen night. A man felt foolish now calling a woman a whore. The word had been reclaimed. There were places in the world where the most sedate matrons painted their faces, hitched their skirts and went on ‘whore walks’, though had one of them been asked to turn a trick for money she’d have gone back to being an easily affronted matron on the spot. Not to be entered into lightly, whorishness. Not for the faint-hearted, whatever their sexual politics. On balance I was prepared to risk it on Poppy, but what would I say when she asked me what was so whorish about working as a receptionist?

  And was that all there was to it? I didn’t think so. If Poppy was installed as Francis’s full-time secretary, or full-time anything else, she couldn’t still be living in Shipton-by-Wychwood. Too far to travel every day. So where was she living?

  Vanessa would surely have known. But how was I going to broach the subject with her? So where exactly is that whore your mother making the beast with Francis, Vee?

  For the reasons I have already given, such an interrogation was out of the question.

  In the meantime I lay there with an erection half in Poppy’s honour, half in her daughter’s, and might have stayed that way for another year had I not received a call from Jeffrey.

  ‘Dad,’ was all he said.

  ‘I’m not your dad.’

  ‘Not you, him. You should be here.’

  ‘Is he ill?’

  ‘We’re all ill.’

  ‘How ill is he?’

  ‘How ill does he have to be? He’s your father.’ With which he put the phone down.

  An hour later he rang again to apologise for his abruptness. An apology was an extraordinary event in our family and itself told me that something serious was afoot. My mother once ran over a neighbour’s cat, almost certainly deliberately, forwards and then backwards, then forwards again, and that was the only time I ever heard her or any one of us apologise. ‘Oops, beg its pardon,’ she said.

  ‘I’m on my way,’ I told Jeffrey. ‘I’ll be there in a few hours.’

  But I was mystified by a couple of things I thought Jeffrey had said. ‘Brothers are born for adversity’ – could he really have spoken those words or did I dream them? And if I wasn’t mistaken, he called me Gershom.

  I took a taxi from the station and asked to be driven round the town a couple of times. Sometimes the place you grew up in can hold the answer to the question of why you have not made as much of yourself as you should. I got the driver to wheel by the school, and then the Scouts hall, and then the library where I always took out more books than I could read, kept them for months, and amassed enormous fines. We drove slowly past Wilhelmina’s where the shutters were down. I loved and hated that boutique, and remembered I had first seen Vanessa and Poppy there. I had wanted out but it was upsetting to see it closed and, it seemed to me, uncared for.

  The door to my parents’ plush sanatorium of senility being unlocked – ah, the open-hearthed and open-hearted north! – I went straight into the bedroom where I expected to see my father laid out. He was sitting up in his bed, attached to a simple drip, with a rabbi in attendance. When he saw me he gave me a sardonic thumbs up – my father I’m talking about, not the rabbi. He had never made such a gesture to me before and I found it oddly affecting. Were we going to become chums at the last?

  ‘Ah, so you’re Gershom, the oldest,’ the rabbi said, extending a hand.

  ‘Older,’ I corrected him. ‘There are just the two of us.’ First things first. ‘And my name’s not Gershom.’

  He shook my fingers. ‘Well, I know you’re not Yafet,’ he said. ‘Your brother Yafet I am acquainted with.’

  ‘Yafet! I have a brother called Yafet?’ It came out sounding wrong. I didn’t know my own brother!

  I thought I knew my brother well enough. He was a sexual pervert called Jeffrey with a dirty bomb in his brain. The dirty bomb was his brain. When it went off it would pollute half of Cheshire. Even Jeffrey was too good a name for my brother. And now Yafet? What was happening to me? Had my nervous breakdown lasted longer than I had known? I felt I’d gone to sleep waiting for Vanessa to do something about my erection and woken up two thousand years previously in the Holy Land.

  The rabbi, a heavily bespectacled American about half my age and height, who could have done with pulling a few hairs out of his moustache and beard himself, appeared to grasp the reason for my confusion. ‘Your parents have explained to me,’ he said, ‘that you’ve never set much store by faith – as a family.’

  He touched the brim of his Homburg when he said ‘faith’.

  ‘Is my father having a deathbed conversion?’ I asked, uncertain whether I could ask the old man himself, uncertain whether he could hear or understand. He had never understood much.

  ‘It’s hardly a conversion,’ the rabbi said from the side of his mouth. He had a wonderfully city-smart way of spitting out his words, more like a gangster than a rabbi, which was at odds with his dishevelment. To do justice to a voice like that he should have been wearing a striped suit by Brioni, with leather piping up the lapels, and two-tone alligator shoes.

  ‘What is it, then?’ I asked. ‘Are the Lubavitchers holding him hostage?’

  He seemed impressed that I knew him to be a Lubavitcher. In fact, I didn’t. It was a guess. The Lubavitchers were the only Jews I’d heard of who dressed like this and who converted Jews to Judaism.

  ‘The word for it is bal-chuva,’ he told me, enunciating it with great care. Maybe he wanted me to repeat it after him. Bal-chu-va.

  ‘And that means?’

  ‘Returning to the way of righteousness.’

  Leaving aside the sentiment, the last time I’d heard anyone roll words like that was in a 1930s movie about a Chicago hood. ‘Happy boithday, Louis,’ he had said, spraying sub-machine-gun bullets everywhere. Happy bal-chuva, Louis, you righteous bastard.

  For a writer of impious disturbances I was and always had been unaccountably respectful, even obsequious, in the presence of men of God. In an odd way I felt we were in the same business: reverence and irreverence, the construction and destruction of icons – neither of us could function without the other. But I didn’t appreciate a rabbi from the Bronx hovering, at this late hour, around the spirit of a man who could not conceivably be said to have returned to the way of righteousness, never having done a righteous deed or entertained a righteous thought in his entire life.

  Worthless my father might have been, but it was his own worthlessness. And now they were taking that last dignity away from him.

  ‘What’s happening, Dad?’ I asked.

  He gave me another mute thumbs up.

  ‘He’s resting,’ the rabbi said, as though I needed to be told what my father had been doing as long as I had been alive.

  I lacked the courage to ask the rabbi how he came to be here. To administer the last rites? Did we do last rites? Had the poor bastard called for a rabbi because he was afraid? Could he possibly have known there was such a thing as bal-chuva and that the time was now right for it?

  I enquired after my mother. She was in the kitchen doing a jigsaw, the rabbi thought. Which I took to mean that my father’s death was not imminent at least. But then again, a jigsaw was a jigsaw.

  ‘Look, whose idea is this?’ I finally found the bravery to say.

  �
��This?’

  ‘You.’

  ‘Well, originally, my friend, the idea is the Almighty’s, blessed be He. But I had a bit to do with it.’

  You start a conversation with a rabbi of this sort at your peril. And I wasn’t ‘his friend’. But I gathered that he was new to the area and was stepping up the provision of pastoral care. Did I know the word rachmamim? No, I did not. First bal-chuva, now rachmamim. How long before I spoke fluent Hebrew? Well, rachmamim was something like compassion. And in the dutiful spirit of rachmamim, to which no Jew, never mind a rabbi, could be oblivious, he visited the Jewish sick and elderly. I wondered how he knew of our existence as a Jewish family. We kept ourselves apart, subscribed to nothing, never went near a synagogue. We were on no lists, that I knew of. He threw me a God, blessed be He, works in mysterious ways shrug. Meaning, if there’s a Jew in need out there, He will find him. Yes, well, I’d heard that one before. And how interested would the rabbi be in my father, how interested would God be, come to that, were he to recover his senses sufficiently to offer them a share in my mother?

  ‘I might just go and find her,’ I told the rabbi. ‘My mother.’

  He inclined his head. ‘Go, my friend.’

  She was indeed in the kitchen doing the Chester jigsaw, the surprising part being that she was doing it with Jeffrey. But there was something more surprising than that. My brother, last seen in an Alexander McQueen jacket with metallic lapels, had now grown a full beard, wore a black Homburg and had fringes hanging from his shirt. He rose to greet me. ‘Tzohora’im tovim,’ he said, putting his arms around me and kissing me on the neck.

  My mother, dressed as ever to receive signals from another world while flirting with the ship’s captain, did not look up from her jigsaw. Imaginary ash hung perilously from the tip of her electronic cigarette.

  ‘What the fuck, Jeffrey?’ I said.

  But I knew what the fuck. The family had finally lost its collective mind.

  Though it wasn’t a subject that interested her, Poppy alluded once to the Jew thing.

  We were in the garden of her Oxfordshire cottage. My second and final visit. Nothing untoward. I had been invited to address an undergraduate society in Oxford and Vanessa had asked, since I would not be far away, if I’d drop a dress off at her mother’s. Vanessa had bought it for herself but then decided it would look better on Poppy. I agreed. ‘Try it on,’ I said when I got there, ‘I’ll look away,’ which I suppose was tentatively untoward, but she pretended not to hear.

  ‘Be a darling and cut me some mint,’ she said, handing me scissors. ‘I’ll make us tea.’

  ‘Which is mint?’ I asked.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ she said, ‘I forgot – you’re a Jew.’

  ‘A Jew!’

  ‘Am I mistaken?’

  ‘No, just blunt. But what’s being a Jew – if you have to put it like that – got to do with mint?’

  ‘Absolutely nothing. That’s my point.’

  ‘I’m not aware,’ I said, ‘that Jews have a blind spot when it comes to herbs. We probably invented mint tea. I don’t know what it looks like out of tea only because I grew up in the city and never had a garden.’

  She laughed. ‘Wilmslow is hardly the city, Guy.’

  ‘It was, the way we inhabited it. When we weren’t in the boutique we were away buying clothes for it in Milan and Paris. I’d been to a hundred fashion shows before I was twelve. Catwalks I knew – country lanes I didn’t. As for mint – wasn’t that the name of a model? Mint. I suspect I even dated her. She had green eyes and tasted –’

  Poppy put up a hand. Some things, she mutely reminded me, were not to be discussed with your mother-in-law.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘talking about the boutique – why have I lost contact with your mother?’

  ‘You moved away.’

  ‘Before that.’

  ‘She went dotty.’

  ‘It wasn’t to do with you and Vanessa?’

  ‘I don’t think she liked Vanessa. But then I don’t think she liked any of the women I brought home. Not because she didn’t think any of them was good enough for me. It was more because she didn’t like me.’

  ‘Vanessa isn’t easy to like,’ she said, bypassing me.

  ‘Poppy!’ We were sitting in deckchairs. I almost fell out of mine.

  ‘It’s true,’ she said.

  ‘I like her,’ I said.

  ‘You love her. That’s different.’

  ‘And you’re her mother – that’s also different. A mother can’t say she finds her own daughter unlikeable.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Why not. I leaned back and let the sun warm my face. ‘Because of this,’ I said, with my eyes closed, gesturing to her garden, the trees, the grass, the birds, the mint. My subject. ‘Nature.’

  ‘Oh, nature!’ she said.

  ‘It isn’t even true,’ I went on. ‘I’ve seen you together. I’ve watched you make music together. You look like sisters.’

  ‘And you think all sisters like each other?’

  I didn’t have a sister but I had Jeffrey. ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘And at least if you’re sisters people expect you to be rivals. When it’s mother and daughter the mother is expected to move over.’

  I shrugged. Seems fair to me, my shrug said. Though I could never have been accused of expecting Poppy to move over. Roll over, maybe. ‘There’s room for both of you,’ I said.

  She shook her head. ‘Before you know it you have a beautiful daughter,’ she said. ‘You’re still a girl yourself and suddenly you’re a mother. I didn’t do girl enough. I didn’t do it well enough or long enough.’

  ‘I seem to remember something about a naked photo shoot in Washington,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, that. Five minutes of my life, and then all hell to pay. Vanessa loses another father and I’m another ten years making it up to her. And even then I’m not sure I’m forgiven.’

  I formulated a theory on the spot. You aren’t meant to forgive your parents. And they aren’t meant to expect to be forgiven. You go on your way. Goodbye, Mother, goodbye, Father, thanks for nothing. Seventy years later you kiss and make up, but at least in the meantime you aren’t a living torment to each other. Torment too strong a word? Reproach, then. Vee and Poppy had spent too much time together. That was the unnatural part. No wonder they couldn’t quite like each other.

  ‘I have not,’ I said, ‘heard Vanessa say she can’t forgive you. For anything.’

  Which was true. I had heard Vanessa call her a slut and a pisspot, but that was another matter.

  Or was it? In so far as calling her mother a slut pointed to one of the ways her mother did not behave as a conventional mother should – that’s to say to act her age and move over – well, I supposed there was reproach in that. Indeed, given the thoughts Poppy had inspired in me, to say nothing of Jeffrey Braindrain, well, Vanessa had a point.

  So did they hate each other? Was that what that bouncing along arm in arm in identical cork sandals actually amounted to – hate?

  And had I, in my own foolish way, been an instrument of that hate? A bit-part player in their psychodrama? A mere tool?

  ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ Poppy continued. ‘I think Vanessa’s great. I think she’s wonderful. I think she’s wonderful for you. Born to be a writer’s wife –’

  ‘I wouldn’t let her hear you say that. As she sees it I’m born to be a writer’s husband.’

  ‘Well, there you are, precisely. She isn’t easy.’

  ‘Must she be?’

  ‘It would be nice if she had more patience. I don’t feel I can count on her. If I had a Jewish daughter she would be more considerate.’ She made it sound as though she’d chosen badly. If only she’d picked the Jewish daughter when she had the chance.

  ‘She has sent you the dress I’ve just brought. Are you sure you don’t want to try it on? I’ll look away.’

  Once a tool always a tool.

  ‘Stop it,’ she said. But then added, ‘You s
ee – you’re considerate. I think that’s because you’re a Jew.’

  A terrible thought struck me. Was that what Poppy had all along supposed I was being – considerate? Considerate the night shooting stars dropped into the Indian Ocean and I slipped my smoking fingers between her cellist’s thighs? Considerate when I’d stood with my arms around her and my foot on the throat of the tarantula? Considerate as my eyes met hers in shocking knowledge on the uppermost rung of Broome’s Staircase to the Moon? Considerate!

  ‘I’m not considerate to my mother,’ I said.

  ‘You probably are,’ she said dismissively, ‘but even if you aren’t you have a brother to share the responsibility.’

  My brother Jeffrey. Had she thought he too was being considerate the night he kissed her, or whatever else he did, by way of solemnising my marriage to Vanessa?

  ‘So is that the problem with Vanessa – that there’s only her? That’s a bit tough on her.’

  ‘And a bit tough on me.’

  ‘Tougher on her.’

  ‘No, tougher on me.’

  I wondered if we might make a game of it. Tougher on her, no tougher on me, no tougher on her, and end up falling in a heap together in the bed of mint, wherever the mint was.

  But the conversation had not been heading in the direction of illicit sex. And to my dismay I realised it relieved me to think that. I don’t say I didn’t want her still, but she was not as irresistible as I remembered her. Could have been the clothes – jeans, flip-flops, sloppy sweater. I had always preferred her ‘dolled up’, to use a favourite expression of my mother’s. Hoisted high and painted, the cleavage starting just below her chin. She looked a touch weary, too. A little flushed in the face and red around the neck. She pushed her face forward, I noticed, as though to assert mastery over her jaw. Her head seemed heavy for her. It looked like hard work keeping herself straight.

  ‘I’m getting older,’ she said, as though reading my mind.

  ‘You don’t look it.’

  ‘I’m getting older.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Vanessa doesn’t have the patience. So who will look after me?’