On this occasion, though, all that bothered him was bound to be disruptive of calm. He had a number of matters to consider but there wasn’t one of them he dared disclose to her, for fear—just in case: for who knew?—she understood. So he sat with her for an hour, holding her hand, wiping her mouth, kissing her cheek, feeling very lonely but trying to imagine how much more lonely she must have been, locked inside wherever it was to which he and fate together had consigned her.
Which left him with a number of matters still to consider, and these he considered in his office, taking time off, occasionally, to look at Solomon Joseph Solomon’s lovely study for Love’s First Lesson.
—
The first and most pressing: whether to let Beatrice go unhindered for the time being, allow her her moment of outrage and then follow her—but follow her where?
The second: whether there was any compromise possible in the matter of circumcision; whether there was such a thing as demi-circumcision, a halfway house acceptable to Jew and Gentile alike.
The third: how brutish was circumcision—no half measures but the whole shebang—anyway? Were Roth and Shylock and the other Jewish sages right, was circumcision an act of the highest human responsibility, a badge not of backwardness but enlightenment?
The fourth: if Shylock was not here to cause him mischief—but had caused it all the same—why was he here?
Unable to decide what to do about Beatrice, since anything further from him would only make things worse, and wanting to clear his head of Shylock, he decided to start with circumcision. Shylock had said it all started with circumcision—“it” being the ancient grudge Jew and Gentile bore each other—but would it all finish with circumcision?
“I can’t promise you,” Strulovitch’s first wife, Ophelia-Jane, had told him early in their courtship, “that if we marry and have a son I will be able to consent to your mutilating him.”
It wasn’t so early in their courtship that Strulovitch couldn’t ask her, in return, “Would you call me mutilated?”
“In appearance, do you mean?”
“I mean however you mean. ‘Mutilated’ is your word. But what other yardstick for mutilation is there?”
“There is the yardstick of psychology.”
“You think I might be psychologically mutilated?”
“Well, scarred at least. I don’t see how it could be otherwise.”
“I have a few things to say to that. The first is that ‘scarred’ is not the same as ‘mutilated.’ Do I take it, therefore, that you withdraw the mutilation charge? The second is that ‘how could it be otherwise’ is not an argument in proof of what you say, it’s just another way of saying it. You think I must be scarred because you abominate the ritual. Could it simply be that because you abominate the ritual you wish me to be scarred?”
She put both hands to her head and pushed her hair back, as though she needed more brain space to deal with his logic chopping.
“Let’s leave it for now,” she said.
But it was always present between them, like the fear of illness or an unresolved infidelity, and a week before they married she brought it up again.
“I really don’t think I can go along with it,” she said.
“The wedding?”
“The mutilation.”
“Then let’s agree to bring forth girl children only.”
“And how do we do that?”
“We can’t. But we can agree to bring forth neither.”
“Is what I’m asking so much?”
Was it? Wasn’t it? Strulovitch wasn’t sure. Had he known how the birth of a child would affect him—how powerfully he would be struck by the concept of covenant, and even then in relation to a girl, where there was no question of ratifying it with circumcision—he might have decided that what Ophelia-Jane was asking was indeed too much. But he was young and ignorant of the sensations that can assail a father. He didn’t fully know his own mind and suspected that if need be he would always be able to change hers. Besides which, his own father had talked of burying him, which made him not well disposed to the faith his father had talked of burying him in. To hell with the whole business. So no, she wasn’t asking too much.
As it turned out, the god of both their non-faiths smiled on them and engineered their separation before they had time to have a child to mutilate.
But even in the absence of an actual boy child the penis, as a site of ritual disfigurement, had come between them.
“That psychological scarring we once discussed,” she began.
“Whose?”
“Yours.”
“What about it?”
“It’s there every time you make one of your footling, thing-centred jokes.”
“How could the trauma of mutilation turn me into a footler? If I’m the trivial man you accuse me of being it must mean I wasn’t mutilated enough.”
“That’s a naive understanding of cause and effect. You footle to disguise the pain. You cannot bear to accept that was what done to you was bestial in the extreme and so you try to joke it away—the proof of that being that your joking is always phallocentric.”
He felt suddenly very weary. Compound words ending in “centric” had that effect on him. “You’re right,” he said. He couldn’t tell her one more time that joking wasn’t in his nature. Nor could he tell her he neither looked nor felt mutilated. That would sound like empty denial or brute insentience, and both only went to show just how badly mutilated he was.
—
A question, then, for Shylock:
How merry was your bond? When you set the forfeit at an equal pound of Antonio’s fair flesh, to be cut off and taken from whatever part of his body it pleased you, what intended you by it? What intended you by it in the spirit of jest—that’s to say how far in earnest were you, and how far playing the devil they expected you to be? And what intended you in the matter of anatomy? Did you mean salaciously, flirtatiously even, to designate Antonio’s penis as the part it pleased you to take? Was that the pound of his fair flesh—weighing hyperbolically—you originally had your sights set on, before all jests went out of the window with your daughter?
They were sitting in Treviso, one of the Golden Triangle’s best restaurants. Two Michelin stars. Italian regional—to make Shylock feel at home—with the longest wine list in the north of England. “I’m half hoping,” Strulovitch had said when they first sat down, pausing only to ask the sommelier for her bloodiest Nebbiolo, “that Beatrice will walk in on her footballer’s arm. Foolish I know. But you will appreciate my folly.”
“So you haven’t gone after her?”
“I don’t want her to feel she’s on the run. If I let her go quietly there is a good chance she will not go far. I’m told he has a house close by. The natural thing is for her to go there, though I imagine it to be full of memorabilia of previous wives, maybe even full of previous wives themselves, and knowing Beatrice, she won’t fancy that. She was disgusted to discover I still possessed photographs of my first wife. Not just disgusted with me but with her mother for allowing me to keep them. So I guess he’s taken her to a hotel, and that it will be somewhere near. I’ve checked the fixture list and I see he has to turn up to play for Stockport County at the weekend, so he won’t be going far. And as for Beatrice, she won’t want to put too great a distance between her and her mother, no matter that she might not care how many miles she puts between her and me. Fast bind, fast find, didn’t work for you. I will let my maxim be, long rope gives hope.”
“Am I to take it from that that you will consent at last to the match?”
“No, I will not consent to the match. It is not a match. I haven’t watched over her all these years for nothing. Besides, it has become a battle of wills and principle now. But I must weigh my options.”
“And they include sparing him the cut?”
“Not necessarily. But the means of effecting it are not immediately to hand.”
He waited to see if Shylock had any suggestions, but
he had none.
Strulovitch poured him more wine.
It was in this convivial if inconclusive spirit, after Shylock paused to send back the linguine with spider crab, or at least the spider crab, declaring the linguine delicious, that the two men fell naturally to discussing Shylock’s own original intentions, vis-à-vis Antonio’s flesh. Had his aim been Antonio’s privy parts, or Antonio’s heart?
“What makes you so sure,” Shylock wondered, “that I knew what I intended?”
“Are you saying you were making it up as you went along?”
“I didn’t have to. It made me up. There is a weight of history when a Jew speaks. I watch the care with which you measure your words. There are impressions you are afraid to give, but you give them anyway. When you walk into a room, Moses walks in behind you.”
“I have a degree from one of the oldest and finest English universities,” Strulovitch reminded him. “When I walk into a room bishops and Lord Chancellors walk in before me.”
“In your head, perhaps. But not in theirs. And you can no more escape what they see than what they anticipate. If a Jew strikes a bargain it is assumed it will be harsh. If a Jew makes a joke it is assumed it will be barbed. So why fight your history when your history is bound to win?”
“In order to confound it.”
“Some other night you can regale me with your victories. In the meantime, since you have raised the matter, you must let me continue with mine. If this is how you see me, I in effect told Antonio, then I won’t disappoint. He came to me loaded down with the weight of his implacable loathing, begging a favour without having the humility to beg it graciously—if anything, I was to understand (and be grateful), that the supplicant was me—in which circumstances how could I resist answering him in his own fashion, embodying his every fear, justifying every overheated rumour, every irrational superstition? If he spoke in metaphor and hearsay, I would speak in metaphor and hearsay in return. But note how little he actually hears of what I say to him. I am so to be disregarded as a man that he doesn’t bother to distinguish what I say in earnest from what I say in jest, cannot tell whether I am obsequious or impertinent, doesn’t even scruple to take umbrage at my salaciousness—for it is salacious to talk of taking flesh from whatever part of him pleases me, as though it is a sexual act and my fleshly pleasure is contingent on it. I am so to be disregarded, in fact—never mind hath not a Jew eyes: is not a Jew there?—that he barely weighs the consequences of what he agrees. In his arrogance as a merchant he believes he has nothing to fear from the transaction, and in his arrogance as a Gentile he negates the Jew he is doing business with. I do not exist, my words do not exist, my threats and my pleasures do not exist—only the loan exists, only what he wants and believes he can get, consequence-free. Why should you be surprised, in that case, that when he forfeits I rest implacably on my bond?”
Strulovitch makes to speak but Shylock puts up a hand to stop him. Even a waiter, about to ask if everything is to the gentlemen’s satisfaction, steps back in fright.
“The question is rhetorical,” Shylock continues. “I don’t expect you to be surprised. No one should be. Antonio forfeits and what ensues must ensue—I must have my bond. Speak not against my bond. I am now become the thing he made me—my bond. I’ll have no speaking. I will have my bond. To my bond you have reduced me, and to my bond, and nothing other than my bond, you must answer. Don’t look for human pity. You never granted me the wherewithal to feel such an emotion before. How dare you expect it now? I am become the embodiment of your contempt. Prepare, then, to face the consequences not of who I am but of who you are. It is as the bond and only the bond that I speak. The villainy you teach me I will execute.”
Strulovitch was of a mind to say that however exhaustive Shylock’s answer, it wasn’t exactly an answer to the question he had asked; in fact to the two questions he had asked: had Antonio’s privy parts been the original site of the compact and, if so, how had Shylock negotiated the actual and moral distance from those to Antonio’s heart.
Shylock registered his companion’s dissatisfaction. “You want an explanation for what cannot be explained,” he said. “Did I know what I wanted in full earnest? Had I formed a definite scheme for what I would do in the event of Antonio defaulting that answered truly to some heartfelt wish—you must ask yourself what would I have wanted with Antonio’s privy parts?—or was I threatening to exact, for the fun of it, or because I had no genetic choice but to exact, the very penalty that superstition expects a Jew to exact? Was I acting out my desires or theirs? When you can answer that about yourself you can come knocking on my door again. This, though, I can tell you—if there was salacious jest in the first proposed requital, there was none in the second. And that was my mistake. I ennobled Antonio by showing I had designs, even momentarily—and even if they weren’t first and foremost my designs—upon his heart. The tragedy he had always sought out for himself I nearly gave him—though he was undeserving of so high an office. Attacking his privy parts would, after all, have kept him in his place—a man of high pretension and small merit. I lifted him out of farce.”
—
Strulovitch thought best to leave it, for the time being, at that. People were watching. Though their table was discreetly positioned, Shylock’s voice was loud and his mode of speaking, for the first time in their brief acquaintance, intemperate. Diners lost their temper at Ristorante Treviso, sometimes even walking out on their dinner companions. But it was rare to hear someone say “The villainy you teach me I will execute.”
Besides, a meal was a meal. And they still had progress to make through the wine list.
The real reason Strulovitch chose not to pursue the subject, however, was that he had grown distracted, afraid he had been wrong, first of all not to prevent his daughter leaving the house, and then not to have gone after her. It seemed right at the time to let her go without a fight, in order to show that he was reasonable, and in the hope that he might thereby win her back more easily later. It didn’t seem right any longer. Where was she now?
He still half expected her to turn up with Howsome, laughing brittly, looking beautiful, a little girl pretending to be a woman. It was while he was raking the darkest corners of the restaurant with his anxious stare that he saw D’Anton in the company of a number of younger men. He looked away. D’Anton was not a person he wanted to see at any time, least of all when he was sick with worry. So what was it that kept drawing his attention back? Partly it was the intensity with which D’Anton was scrutinising him. But also it was something not quite right in the composition of his party. Only as they rose to go—hurriedly, it seemed to Strulovitch, as though he might be the cause of it—did he realise what that something not quite right was. It was the presence of Gratan Howsome.
His first thought was to rise from the table brandishing his fists; his second was to stay right where he was. This was a good sign, wasn’t it? Howsome here on his own? Howsome looking the very opposite to jubilant? Surely this could only mean that they had broken up already. That Beatrice had seen sense, given him his marching orders and returned home. He suppressed a third instinct which was to go over and laugh in the footballer’s face before he could leave the restaurant. Why bother if she had left him already? He imagined her waiting up for him when he got back. Sorry, Daddy.
But she wasn’t.
So where, in God’s name—more to the point, where on God’s earth—was she?
FIFTEEN
D’Anton had not at once sent off his letter to the Jew. Nothing was to be achieved by delaying, except the saving of his soul. It was not in his nature, as it had fortunately not been a necessity of his pocket, to go begging to any man, but to go begging to Strulovitch turned his stomach. Perhaps circumstances would change if he held back. Perhaps Barnaby would hit upon another gift for Plurabelle. Or, with a bit of luck, Strulovitch might suddenly put the Solomon Joseph Solomon back on the market. He called himself a collector, but it was said that he sold at times too, when
the market was right, and D’Anton had no reason to doubt the veracity of such rumours. If he’d been told that Strulovitch had charts on his walls showing every smallest rise and fall in the value of art in every city in the world, he would not have been surprised.
D’Anton was not a dilatory man, but he didn’t rush into things either. The advantage of having a melancholy nature was that it found a sort of pleasure in the slow passage of time, and since there was no true happiness to be rewarded with at the end of anything one did, there was no rush to do it.
And then Gratan came to him with a strange request— no, that wasn’t fair, it had not yet assumed the shape of a request, it was more a plaint, an outraged perplexity, as though he felt he had been assaulted but had no bruise to show for it. “I’m in a bit of a pickle,” he told him.
D’Anton often wished he’d been a marrying man and had brought up a family. I would have made a good father, he thought, though when he pictured himself playing in the garden with his children they were all boys. This wasn’t sexual. Boys seemed sadder to him than girls, that was all. Boys nursed a secret hurt. He couldn’t have put a name to it. He had never been able to put a name to his own. When he was a child he watched girls reading and painting and playing with their dolls—all right, with their soldiers too—and he saw in them a capacity for engrossment and self-forgetfulness that was beyond him. He was always alert to himself, not just easily wounded but attentive to those wounds, as though his only playthings were the slights he suffered.
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