Strulovitch resembled Shylock in another way as well. He, too, was denied the opportunity to raise the matter with the girl’s mother.
The stroke she suffered on Beatrice’s fourteenth birthday felt too horribly symbolic to be any such thing. It was the cruellest misfortune, no more. Fate stuck out his hand and idly struck. It could have been any woman on any day. Hold on to that, Strulovitch told himself. Embrace the arbitrary. Otherwise the blaming would start and of blaming there is no end.
Little by little Kay had recovered words—not actual utterances but the will to move her lips and shape a silent sound, and this was enough to make him feel that someone he knew was still in there. They never approached—in dumbshow or any other way—what had befallen her. She lived in bed now—her own bed—needed to be helped to bathe and eat, and couldn’t always make herself intelligible—beyond that, the pretence went, things were as they’d always been. About Beatrice he was careful to say little, and about his fears for her he said nothing at all. He was reluctant to put any pressures on her. Let Kay decide what subjects she wanted to approach by whatever means were available to her. Beatrice’s presence cheered her, but she seemed to wish to see her only on her own, as though they were separate families, individual spokes of a wheel that had fallen off.
Strulovitch looked past her when he was in her presence. Beyond her, as in a broken mirror, he sometimes saw the wife he’d known but it felt like an infidelity to smile across the room at her. Better, in the presence of a ruined memory to remember nothing oneself. So they sat silently together, he in a chair by her bed, holding her hand, she looking into nothing, the two of them possessed of no before, and certainly no after, in a perfect harmony of unbeing. So unalive to sensation they could have been the first man and woman, waiting to be breathed into, poised for creation to begin.
Strulovitch had never been more thankful for the fortune built on car-parts he had inherited. His relations with his father were repaired. The burial had been only temporary: with his divorce from Ophelia-Jane Smythson came reconciliation, and with his marriage to Kay Kominsky came an inundation of fatherly love strong enough to knock him off his feet. A marriage in instead of a marriage out: it seemed that that was all his father—a man in every other way a heathen—had ever lived for. Keep it in the family. Just that. Fine by Strulovitch. He was re-inherited. And now that Kay was ill he understood how important it was to have money. You needed to be rich. Assuredly he appeared richer than one needed to be—which was why he gave so much away, endowing lectureships, providing music rooms and extending libraries, helping to buy works of art that would otherwise leave the country—yet you needed to be nearly as rich as he was just to live. By which he meant to reside in a house big enough to show art and shelve books, to travel in comfort, to have suits made by Italian tailors, to have a chauffeur, to send one’s daughter to be schooled, and to afford round-the-clock care for one’s wife. He had his own working definition of poverty as well as wealth. Whoever couldn’t afford to make provision for carers and nurses, whether they were necessary now or would be necessary in the future, was dirt poor. To avoid falling into the hands of the state was reason in itself for making money. One worked and earned in order not to die disgracefully. You take my life when you do take the means whereby I live…and the means whereby I hope to die as well.
And then, of course—talking of dying—there was the money needed to escape in a hurry when the hour came, scooping what was left of his family into his arms and never stopping to look back. Even the Jewishly on-again off-again Strulovitch was never Jewishly off-again when it came to believing this: safety was not to be taken for granted, the danger hour always came around.
In the meantime, knowing each morning that his wife would be washed, that his daughter would be educated, and that his money would be there when he needed it for bribing officials at borders, or just for carers of his own, left him free to pursue his interests. And pursuing his interests kept him from bewailing the ruins of his wife. There was a great deal to be said, Strulovitch believed, for keeping busy, the other word for which—as Beatrice’s teachers were surely telling her with relish—was capitalism.
But he didn’t revel in wealth. He revelled—in so far as he could be called a reveller at all—in the world he could see. I already am spiritual, he would have said to anyone who tried to remind him of all that wasn’t worldly—I am spiritual to the degree that I think the material world is infused with the divine.
And love?
He didn’t understand how anyone could love what wasn’t visible.
This didn’t mean he didn’t love his daughter when he didn’t see her. But then when didn’t he see her? Worry is a way of keeping an image close and safe, and from the moment of his wife’s stroke—no, further back than that—he had worried about his daughter constantly.
They had waited a long time for their only child—a wait more agonising for Kay, who spoke conventionally of hearing her clock ticking and dreaded running out of time altogether. He hadn’t especially wanted children and suspected other men of exaggerating when they said their hearts burst at the sight of their first child, but his own heart did exactly that. Partly this was on behalf of Kay. A vicarious joy compounded by relief and terror—for to want something as much as she had was surely an invitation to disappointment or worse. Doubly fragile and precious is that child whose conception relies on miracle. And there was the usual selfishness, too. When he looked at the baby Beatrice he saw himself projected into the future. But he gave in momentarily to the “clouds of glory” experience as well, imagining her as an emissary from God, fancying that her eyes were still closed against the brightness of the effulgence she had witnessed before coming here. And that in its turn raised the question of which God that was, and what message Beatrice was bringing from Him. Was this a religious moment for Strulovitch? He didn’t think so. He didn’t do religion. He didn’t pray. He didn’t bind his arm or cover his head. Devotionally he did so little he might as well have been a pagan. And the moment itself, however one described it, didn’t last long enough to effect a transformation. But he would have admitted, if pressed, that the God whose glory he imagined his baby daughter squinting against was the Jewish God not the Christian, a being too serious and majestic ever to have taken human form. Nothing more. The beginning and the end of Strulovitch’s seeing into the heart of things, but it was enough to determine the course of his preferences for Beatrice once and for all. She should have a Jewish husband, not because he looked down on non-Jews, or wanted his Jewish line to continue, but because her life had started seriously, in a sort of pain of remembered solemnity and anticipated grief that could not be thrown away on merely arbitrary affection and wilfulness—on whim or spite or capricious apostasy, or even haphazard love, however deeply felt—but owed, and was owed in return, an obligation of honour and loyalty, no matter that he was damned if he knew loyalty to what. Something that wasn’t just hers to determine—was that it? A covenant. Something that would have found tangible expression in circumcision had she been a boy. Something in the nature of an oath of allegiance, never mind that she was not in any position, as someone born only an hour before, to swear it on her own behalf. And wasn’t that the reason why he, as her father, was obliged by all he understood as holy, to swear it for her?
“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.
FOUR
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 su
bject 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?
Shylock Is My Name Page 4