“Repugnancy?”
I am not you, Strulovitch thought. I don’t arouse such aversion. I am someone else living in another time.
But he almost regretted it were so.
“If the word offends you,” Shylock said, “find another. But they won’t ever forgive you in their hearts. You might as well whet your knife on the sole of your shoe.”
“Is that your advice to me?”
Shylock said nothing.
“Nonetheless,” Strulovitch continued, “you did on occasions eat with them.”
“Yes, and I live to regret having done so. But it wasn’t in order to win their affection that I went. It was to provoke them. I went to make their food taste like ratsbane in their gullets. There has to be some pleasure in life. It can’t all be work and prayer.”
Ah, Strulovitch thought, there’s a provocation I do understand.
—
Silence between them.
Shylock eating dry toast.
Strulovitch wondering if it was true he had a kosher mind.
Beatrice…
Where was Beatrice?
Strulovitch wondered if she could have overheard this conversation. And if so, what would she be thinking—a modern girl who did what she wanted, kissed whom she wanted, ate what she wanted?
“Who is this guy, Dad? What’s he doing here? Is he trying to convert you?”
And what would Shylock’s reaction be when he met her? Would the sight of a living daughter, still at home, break his heart?
“So, your daughter…” Shylock mused into his coffee, his punctuation implying he had been keeping pace with Strulovitch’s thoughts, “is she in residence?”
NINE
Among D’Anton’s more lovable qualities, in Plurabelle’s view—and he was a man made of lovable qualities—was his capacity to listen. Especially to listen to her. She had only to say she wanted a thing—for herself or for a friend—for D’Anton to seek ways to get it.
And so it was with a Jewess for the footballer Gratan Howsome. The minute she learned he had a thing for Jewish women, Plurabelle decreed that they should find him one. And Plurabelle had only to decree—especially in a matter that bore on Gratan’s felicity—for D’Anton to act.
Even as they were speaking he remembered being struck by the appearance of a student he had encountered at the Golden Triangle Academy, an institution on which, in his most princely manner, he bestowed time, delivering occasional public musings on beauty and renunciation. Her looks weren’t pleasing to him personally but, with his gift for altruistically entering into a foreign aesthetic, even a limited foreign aesthetic, he was able see how they could be pleasing to someone else—like Thai scorpion soaked in whisky or black bed linen. Something about her, perhaps even something about her family name, to which he wouldn’t have paid much attention, lodged in his memory. He smiled at Plurabelle’s good-hearted suggestion and tapped his nose. “Leave it with me,” he said, more spiritedly than Plurabelle could remember him having said anything.
—
Plurabelle liked her from the beginning, immediately forgetting she’d been procured for the footballer. “You remind me of me when I was your age,” she told the girl, in all likelihood remembering the time before she’d had work done on her face.
She loved the idea that the girl was studying with a view eventually to being a performance artist and expressed the hope that she would one day perform at one of her weekends. “We could put a stage up for you,” she said.
Modestly, the girl explained that a performance artist didn’t employ a stage. Hers was, or would be, a different sort of performance, subverting expectations of what performance space was, even violating what people normally thought of as their space. Art should go where it was not normally welcomed, she said.
Plurabelle listened to her in wonderment. So precocious. So lustrous and bejewelled, though the bejewelled part was an effect of her natural beauty only. “Well your art will always be welcome here,” she said. “My house is yours, violate it as much as you like. I will invite some important people to be violated by you.”
“I’m a long way from being ready for that, Plurabelle,” the girl had replied with a becoming blush.
“Call me Plury,” Plury said.
The girl thought the sky above her head would burst, it had so many stars in it.
It was Plurabelle’s suggestion, one evening, that they dress for dinner as boys. The girl was uncomfortable. She wasn’t sure how she’d look. But she went along with it. Plurabelle had wardrobes of dressing-up clothes.
“Suits you,” Plurabelle said scandalously, knotting a scarf around her neck and putting a cap on her head. “I feel we’re brothers.”
Gratan Howsome, who of course was at the table, was smitten at once.
Thereafter, they did this often. It always ended the same way, with Plurabelle smothering the beautiful girl with Levantine lips in rapturous kisses, laughing wildly, and calling her “My little Jewboy.”
And with Gratan burning into her with his eyes.
—
This was how, unknown to Simon Strulovitch, his daughter Beatrice became an intimate of Anna Livia Plurabelle Cleopatra A Thing Of Beauty Is A Joy Forever Christine.
TEN
“She’s in residence in a manner of speaking,” Strulovitch said. “Certainly she officially resides here. But where she’s living in her head or in her heart…Look, to be brief with you, I’d say we’re heading for a showdown.”
“Your doing,” Shylock wanted to know, “or hers?”
“I’m not sure we’re separate enough for me to be able to answer that. We seem to want to bring things to a head, and then step back again, at exactly the same time. It’s what’s kept her here so far…it’s what’s kept us together.”
“Your simultaneity of rage?”
“I couldn’t have put it better. But it’s an equally simultaneous fear of that rage too. We both, I think, dread the final collision. Somewhere I believe she is sorry for me.”
“Sorry for you?”
“Yes, since Kay took ill at least. Before that she thought I was out of my mind. Now she thinks I’m still out of my mind but doing my best for a father without aptitude or assistance.”
Shylock appeared on the point of saying something, but before their conversation could proceed further, Beatrice herself appeared, a little the worse for wear, in an indigo Stella McCartney robe which Strulovitch had bought her for her last birthday, and a towel around her head. A couple of strands of wet hair fell about her face giving her, to Strulovitch, for all the indolent, burnt butteriness of her skin and the laconic way she moved her limbs, a bewitching mermaid look. She could have come in straight from swimming with the ornamental fish. It pained him, how lovely to his eyes she was.
“Talk of the devil,” he said.
“Thanks, Daddy.”
He hesitated over the introduction, but it had to be done. “My daughter Beatrice, Shylock.”
“Yeah, right,” Strulovitch thought she said, that’s if she said anything. She was a mumbler, otherwise uninquisitive in the not quite impolite style of a preoccupied teenage girl, asking Shylock if he was an old friend of Daddy’s, pretending to listen to the answer, wondering if the men had plans for the day. Globally indifferent.
Did she know who she was talking to?
“We haven’t discussed what we’re going to do,” Shylock said. “Your father might be busy. I’d be quite happy to sit here and read the papers or listen to some music if that wouldn’t inconvenience you. Do you have any Bach, or George Formby?”
Beatrice looked at her father. She didn’t know who George Formby was. Hers was the first generation, Strulovitch thought, that came into the world without memory.
Strulovitch helped her out. “ ‘When I’m Cleaning Windows.’ ”
“That’s not Bach,” Beatrice guessed.
“No he’s funnier than Bach.”
“I am never amused,” Beatrice said, “when I hear fac
etious music.”
“My own Formby favourite,” Shylock said, “is ‘Happy Go Lucky Me.’ ”
Is he poking fun at himself, Strulovitch wondered. Or is he making fun of her? If so, to what end? Is he flirting with my daughter?
Beatrice seemed neither to notice nor to care. She loosened the towel around her head and shook her hair, sprinkling with the lightest spray Shylock’s fine woollen trousers.
Unless that was her way of flirting back.
“What about Al Jolson?” Shylock asked.
Beatrice shook her head again. The Dark Ages, Strulovitch thought. For all her precocious brilliance, she lives bubbled in an electronic ignorance that makes the seventh century appear a carnival of enlightened knowledge. He was ashamed of her for having heard of so little that happened in the hours before she was born. But he was also worried that this suddenly light-spirited, not to say skittish Shylock might think of helping her out in the matter of Al Jolson’s identity by singing “Mammy” complete with jazz hands. Beatrice knew nothing of what he knew at her age but she knew what was and was not culturally allowable and she knew a white man wasn’t permitted to black up as a minstrel.
“The CDs are on that shelf,” Beatrice said. “Just help yourself. They aren’t mine. And you needn’t worry about disturbing me. I’m off in a few minutes. I have to be at college for a twelve o’clock.” She stuck her chin out at her father—see: contrary to what he supposed, she was taking her coursework seriously.
“What are you studying?” Shylock asked, lowering his voice as though to exclude Strulovitch. The question was almost a caress.
“Oh, it’s a general arts course, pretty basic, but I want to concentrate on performance art,” Beatrice replied. Rather coyly, it struck Strulovitch, as though hearing what she described as “studying” was a novel experience for her.
Strulovitch felt a rush of shame. Performance art! Why didn’t they just call it showing off? He wondered if Shylock had ever encountered the genre or knew it was just another word for shedding your inhibitions in public. Given what he thought of Carnival, he didn’t see Shylock much caring for performance art. (But then you never knew: who would ever have picked him as a fan of George Formby?) Jessica had been trouble enough, but at least she hadn’t told her father she was hoping to explore the empty parameters of audience–performer relations. “Not an occupation for a Jewish girl,” he’d have told her, shutting the windows. That was pretty much Strulovitch’s position too, even though most of the performance artists he’d heard of were Jewish girls.
Were the parameters they were testing those that existed between Jewish girls and their fathers?
Was the ecosexual exhibitionist Annie Sprinkle, born Ellen Steinberg, what came of teaching modesty?
Whatever Shylock understood of this, he inclined his head with Old World politeness. Beatrice might have been telling him she was studying to be a seamstress.
Then suddenly he asked her, “What does that entail?”
He’s doing this to discomfit me, Strulovitch thought. He means to keep Beatrice here all morning, leading her on, catching her out, plucking at my nerves.
Beatrice smiled at him. “Being a performance artist?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll tell you when I have more time,” she said, bewitchingly.
Strulovitch wondered again if she knew whom she was bewitching.
But something inviting in her smile made him apprehensive. Was she thinking about asking Shylock to accompany her to college. He saw her introducing him to her friends. “Hey guys, this is Shylock. Ring a bell? No, me neither. But he’s cool.” And maybe taking him along to one of her performance classes. He saw Shylock engaging in bitter dispute with Beatrice’s teachers, not moderating himself as a modern Jew knew he had to, not knowing what a bear pit the place was. But that fear was quickly overtaken by a further—what if Shylock had designs of some sort on his daughter, not erotic, surely not erotic, but possessive-paternal, and who knew where possessive-paternal stopped and erotic began? Was he looking at her greedily? A performance artist, eh? Strulovitch knew from the inside how a man, without moving a muscle on his face, can comprehensively take in a woman. And why wouldn’t he take in Beatrice who was luscious in the older style of young women, plumper and more contoured than was the fashion, not pared down like a half-gnawed carrot but full and rubicund, a Song of Solomon beauty. Like Leah, perhaps. Another Jessica. Yes, without doubt, Shylock saw and appreciated her. An appreciation that Beatrice noted—how could she not?—and appreciated in return. “And you let this man into your home,” he heard his mother say. “Don’t you have concerns enough with that girl?” All too impossibly Mephistophelean to imagine Shylock on an errand of this sort, Shylock here with the express purpose of replacing Jessica—no, surely not—but it is deranging to lose a daughter as he had lost his and who’s to say what derangement won’t bring about?
An eye for an eye, a daughter for a daughter.
Why should Strulovitch have a daughter and he not!
He felt the ignominy of his suspicions when Beatrice, having dashed down a piece of cold toast, told Shylock it had been a pleasure to meet him, and Shylock, again inclining his head formally, said, without irony or knowingness, “Likewise—good luck with your studies.”
Strulovitch was ashamed of himself. There’s something not right somewhere, he thought, when a father can’t see his daughter in the company of another man without envisioning foul play. Let’s not beat about the bush: there’s something not right with me. Beatrice didn’t need to buy herself a lubricious monkey to suggest a world without moral bearings. The lubricious monkey was him.
Did Shylock see that? Did Shylock mean Strulovitch to see he saw it?
Before she left the room she asked Strulovitch if he’d checked his diary yet.
“I will,” he said. “I promise.”
“You promised last time.”
“This time I really will. I’ll leave a time under your door.”
“Just text it.”
They listened in silence to the girl banging about the house. Their eyes met in a way Strulovitch found intrusive. They shouldn’t have been listening to her together. They were not bonded in his daughter.
The noise she made collecting her things and throwing books around—it sounded like throwing books around, though Strulovitch doubted she had any books—as a rule irritated Strulovitch. It seemed such an unnecessary insistence on her independence. But today he had no choice but to listen with the ears of Shylock. He thought how much he’d miss her if she went.
When she went.
The silence roared in his ears.
—
“She’s a beautiful girl,” Shylock said after they heard the front door slam. “Lovely.”
“Beautiful, yes,” Strulovitch said. He was still angry with his guest. Still felt intruded on. And Shylock seemed to know and enjoy it. “Lovely I’m not so sure about.”
“I can only speak for her appearance. For the impression she gives.”
“Yes. And what’s not lovely about her is what’s not lovely about all of them. She has natural discernment but it’s not strong enough to overcome the culture she’s been born into.”
“You are in danger of sounding like an old man.”
“Weren’t you? Isn’t a father by definition an old man? You locked your doors on yours.”
“I had to. I’d lost one woman. I didn’t want to lose a second.”
“That’s called being an old man.”
“I knew the danger she was in.”
“From shallow foppery and drumbeats? How great a danger was that, really? Don’t we create the thing we fear by hyperbolising it? You kept a sober house, but a sober house is no place for a young girl.”
“And are you telling me you let yours run wild?”
“I can’t stop her.”
“But you try.”
“I try. I have a sacred obligation to try.”
“That was all I was doing.�
�
“And we both failed,”
“You haven’t failed yet.”
Strulovitch looked long into his guest’s fierce, melancholy eyes. His own were undistinguished, a pearly, uncertain grey, the colour of the North Sea on a blustery day. Shylock’s were deep ponds of pitted umber, like old oil paint that had somehow—not by restoration, more by inadvertent rubbing—regained its sheen. They were dark with that Rembrandtian darkness that holds light. Ironic that when Strulovitch looked into them he felt as though he were in the crypt of a church. We are not the slightest bit alike, he thought, except in what we feel for our daughters. So what was it Gentiles saw that told them they were both Jews?
Shylock knew, from the intensity of Strulovitch’s scrutiny, what he was thinking. “No we aren’t remotely alike,” he said. “Not in appearance nor in the manner we have lived our lives. You don’t keep a kosher house, you don’t attend synagogue and I’m prepared to wager you don’t speak a word of Hebrew. So what does it mean to say we are both Jewish?”
“I’m more interested in what it means to them. What do they see that unites us?”
“Something older than themselves,” he said.
“In you, maybe…I don’t intend that unkindly.”
“I know how you intend it. But in you too. It isn’t wear and tear. It’s an inability to be indifferent. You might think you don’t believe but you’re still listening to ancient injunction.”
“That makes me no different from a Muslim or a Christian.”
“Yes it does. Christians are so anxious to accommodate to the modern they have stopped listening. They sing carols and call it faith. Before long there will be none of them left, the long interregnum will have come to an end and we’ll be back with just pagans and Jews.”
“And Muslims.”
“Yes, and Muslims, but they are out on their own, in an argument with everybody but themselves. Look at you—you are riven. Islam does not encourage the schizophrenia you live by. When a Muslim listens to ancient injunction he attends with the whole of himself and finds a sort of peace in it.”
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