“On what compulsion must I?” he asked.
Whereupon Shylock said what he too had to say. “The quality of mercy is not strained, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven…”
—
Strulovitch owned an etching by an unknown nineteenth-century artist that showed Ulysses lashed to the mast of his ship to protect him from the treacherous mellifluence of the sirens. The sirens themselves were a touch too Rubensesque for Strulovitch’s taste but he liked the way their songs were drawn as musical notations that flew towards Ulysses like birds, assailing all his senses. Struggling against his bonds, his eyes popping out of his head, Ulysses clearly regretted his decision to be restrained. But what about the sailors whose ears were stopped with wax? Did a single flying melody get through to them as they laboured at their oars? Or was there just a wall of yammering and the mermaids miming?
Having no wax to din out Shylock, Strulovitch deafened himself, instead, by act of will, stringing a procession of black thoughts, like funeral bunting if such a thing existed, from ear to ear. Everything he could recall that had ever made him angry, every slight, every exclusion, every bad thing done to him and every bad thing he had done. It was more than a match, in its malignancy, for Shylock’s honeyed peroration.
This, had he listened—but had he listened he would only have heard what he knew he was going to hear—was what Shylock said:
“The quality of mercy is not strained…You ask on what compulsion you should be merciful, you who have received no mercy yourself from him I ask you to show mercy to—you ask why you should requite what you have not received—and I say to you: Be an exemplary of mercy; give not in expectation of receiving mercy back—for mercy is not a transaction—but give it for what it constitutes in itself. Show pity for pity’s sake and not the profit of your soul. Eyes without pity will become blind, but it is not only in order that you may see that you should practise it. Pity is not compromised by profit or deserts, it does not minister to self-love, it is not a substitute for forgiveness, but builds its modest house wherever there is need of it. And what need is there of it here, you ask, where justice alone cries out for what is owing to it. The need is this: God asks it. What pertains to him, must pertain to you, otherwise you cannot claim that you are acting justly in His name. And will God love the sinner more than the sinned against? No, he will love you equally. No man can love as God loves, and it is profane of any man to try. But you can act in the spirit of God’s love, show charity, give though it is gall and wormwood to you to give, spare the undeserving, love those that do not love you—for where is the virtue merely in returning love?—give to those who would take from you and, where they have taken, do not recompense them in kind, for the greater the offence the greater the merit in refusing to be offended. Who shows rachmones does not diminish justice. Who shows rachmones acknowledges the just but exacting law under which we were created. And so worships God.”
Though he wouldn’t attend, Strulovitch waited. Manners too are a species of that compassion Jews call rachmones.
“You are finished?” he asked at last.
Shylock signalled to those who had applauded him that such an ovation was unnecessary. “Yes I am finished,” he said.
“Then I and my co-signatory will proceed to the clinic as agreed,” Strulovitch said.
Shylock bowed to him. He seemed to expect nothing else.
But Strulovitch wanted a quiet word before leaving. “Was it for this, then, that you came?” he asked in his lowest voice. What business remained between them was theirs alone.
“I’d prefer to think,” Shylock replied in kind, “that this was why you found me.”
Strulovitch swam in the unexpected blue of Shylock’s eyes. When had they changed colour?
“Who did the finding and who the being found is not a matter that will easily be settled between us.”
“No.”
“I too admired your performance.”
“You weren’t listening.”
“I got the gist of it.”
Shylock lowered his head. His hair was thinner than Strulovitch had noticed before, but then he had not seen him without his hat. A sentimentalist when it came to men—especially to fathers—he was half-inclined to kiss Shylock where the hair was thinnest.
Shylock read his mind. “I am not in search of a son,” he said.
“And I have had my fill of fathers,” Strulovitch said. “I hope I can admire your theatricality for itself. But you couldn’t really have believed that it would sway me.”
Shylock laughed. A shy catch of the breath. When had he started to laugh? “Not for a moment,” he said. “Affecting your resolution was the last thing on my mind. Not everything is about you.”
—
When Strulovitch swept out of Plurabelle’s drive with D’Anton at his shoulder, Plurabelle did not even see them go. She had eyes only for Shylock. God, I love this man, she thought. I fucking love him.
She was glad Barney was not here. It had been inspired of her to get rid of him though she hadn’t really known why she’d done it at the time. Now she could only hope he’d lost his way and would never come back. Let him stay in Chester Zoo.
She approached the new man in her life and laid a hand on his arm, surprised by how hard it felt. “That was awe-inspiring,” she said.
Shylock’s eyes had reverted to their gunmetal grey. “But it didn’t work,” he said. “Mercy has not been shown.”
“Oh, that needn’t matter.”
“Needn’t it?”
“How do we ever measure what works anyway,” she said, looking up at him with her swollen lips. “I can only tell you that it worked for me.”
“I’m pleased to hear that. To whom are you showing mercy?”
“I will show it you if you wish me to.”
“I am not in need of it.”
“What are you in need of ?”
He paused, as though expecting something else. “And?” he said.
She was disconcerted. “I don’t understand.”
“I am waiting for what follows. Don’t you usually have a riddle for those you think want something from you?”
She shook her hair as though wishing to rid her head of what he’d just said. “I have no riddle for you,” she said. “With you, I feel at last that I can be direct. I know there is nothing you want. But is there anything I can give you?”
He wondered if she was about to offer to make him famous. I am too old for this, he thought. “Peace and quiet,” he said. “Peace and quiet are all I am in need of.”
She took that to be further encouragement. Peace and quiet she could give him. “You are not what I thought you were,” she persisted.
“And what did you think I was?”
“I don’t know, but I would never have imagined…” Whatever it was she would never have imagined she couldn’t for the moment find the words for it.
Shylock helped her out. “That a Jew could be so Christian?”
She felt that he almost spat the words at her.
“No, no, that wasn’t what I intended to say. What I mean is that you looked so forbidding when you opened the door to me at Simon Strulovitch’s I didn’t dream you could be capable of such humanity.”
“That’s just another way of saying the same thing. You saw a Jew and expected nothing of him but cruelty.”
“I didn’t see a Jew. I don’t go around seeing Jews.”
“All right—you saw cruelty and gave it a Jewish face.”
“I’m only saying you are not what you seem. I am not a Christian. I haven’t been to church since I was a little girl. But I know what Christian sentiments are. Is it so wrong to be surprised by the eloquent expression of sentiments one normally hears from the pulpit by a man who scowls?”
“You mean a Jew who scowls.”
“I mean what I say I mean.”
“Then I will answer you in that spirit. Yes, it is wrong to be surprised. It is wrong not to know where you got your sweet
Christian sentiments from. It is morally and historically wrong not to know that Jesus was a Jewish thinker and that when you quote him against us you are talking vicious nonsense. Charity is a Jewish concept. So is mercy. You took them from us, that is all. You appropriated them. They were given freely, but still you had to steal them.”
“I?”
“It shocks you to exemplify? It must. It shocked me. I was made to crawl for what I exemplified. So yes, you. You say my humanity surprises you. What was it you expected? And whose humanity is it that you think you see in me now? Your own! How dare you think you can teach me what I already know, or set me the example I long ago set you? It is a breathtaking insolence, an immemorial act of theft from which nothing but sorrow has ever flowed. There is blood on your insolence.”
Plurabelle looked as though she were about to cry. She put a hand on her chest. “I feel you’ve laid a curse on me,” she said.
“Well now you know the sensation from the other end,” Shylock said.
And this time Plurabelle could have sworn he did spit on her.
—
“That’s what you call telling them,” Leah said.
Shylock pulled his coat around him. “It was not without a long premeditation,” he admitted.
“It was none the worse for that,” she said.
“A long premeditation invites anticlimax,” he said. “One can think too long. What I said was musty. It could have been better.”
“It was good enough.”
“Is that all?”
“Good enough is good enough. You don’t, I hope, think you are going to change history.”
“I can hope.”
“You’d be unwise to do so.”
“You wish then that I’d stayed silent?”
“I haven’t said that. Though I wish you’d shown a little of your rachmones to that poor girl.”
“Ach, I wouldn’t worry for her. She fucking loves me.”
“Then maybe I should worry for you.”
“I think you’re safe. She’s the wrong persuasion.”
—
He didn’t go immediately, but stood in the snow enjoying her proximity.
Some days were harder than others. Today he would have liked to feel her arms around him. There was quiet between them, as though each were waiting for some word from the other. At last it was she who spoke.
“Caring about the right or wrong persuasion has not done us any good,” she said.
“It’s not only our doing,” he reminded her.
“No, it’s not. But it’s us I’m talking about. You and me and Jessica.”
“Oh, Jessica will be fine.”
But he read from the long echoing silence that ensued, that she knew, after all, that Jessica was not and never would be fine.
So had Leah all this time been concealing what she knew from him, just as he had all this time been concealing what he knew from her? Did she know what he’d have given the world for her never to find out, that their daughter had betrayed them, betrayed the love they’d borne each other, betrayed her upbringing and betrayed her own honour, for someone, for something—describe it how one would—of no worth?
It had been worse, then, for Leah than for him. Down there, in the cold of her interment, Leah lay day after day, without the consolation of confession or conversation, with her arms wound tight around their disgrace.
He thought his heart would break.
—
By the time Strulovitch returned to the Old Belfry to await public word of D’Anton’s operation Shylock was gone and of the friends of Plurabelle still dancing attendance on her none appeared to be of a mind to talk to him.
The little afternoon light there’d been was fading quickly. That suited Strulovitch. There was nothing he wanted to see. He dusted snow from a filigree bench far from the marquee and sat indifferent to the damp. He’d dropped D’Anton off at the clinic without looking at him or speaking to him. D’Anton had clearly wanted quiet himself after his altercation with Shylock. He shook a little, Strulovitch thought—though that might have been in fear of what awaited him. He recovered his spirits enough to say, “So this is it, then, over the top we go,” as he left the limousine, but Strulovitch had met that with silence. Why the victim should have been in a lighter mood than the executioner Strulovitch didn’t bother to enquire. Bluster, presumably. As it was bluster on his own part to say he hoped his adversary would die screaming under the knife. In fact he no longer cared what happened either way. Let D’Anton live, let D’Anton die—the outcome was immaterial to him. What would it change? It wouldn’t bring Beatrice back. It wouldn’t bring his wife back. It wouldn’t cook Gratan’s goose. And D’Anton would still be D’Anton when he was discharged. In all probability, and with some justice, more the Jew-hater than before.
He wondered if Shylock were feeling much what he felt right now. Knowing his words had all been for nothing. It wasn’t just that there was no victory to be had; it was that there was no victory worth having. Victory and defeat were alike absurd.
On it stretched, backwards and forwards, the line of risible time—all the way from the conversion of the Christians to the conversion of the Jews. And would the world be a better place if the one hadn’t happened and the other suddenly did? Beatrice with or without Gratan—what difference? The gallery he had failed to open in his parents’ name—so what? His ruined wife—did it matter to her what sort of world she lived in? Action had stopped arbitrarily for Shylock, but time hadn’t. Time had embalmed him. Would he have been better off had time ended for him when action did? Would he have effected anything less or anything more? The greatest illusion of all—that time would labour and bring forth beneficent change.
He didn’t know how long he sat there, but the chill had barely begun to spread through him when Plurabelle called out that she had news. Her voice had an unaccustomed crack in it, like a choirboy’s on the point of breaking. She looked shrunken and feverish. Knowing nothing of what had transpired between her and Shylock, Strulovitch took this to be the natural consequence of her fears for D’Anton. Good. If nothing else he had sown disquiet. And for a moment he hoped again his adversary had died screaming under the knife. But there was something not quite right about Plurabelle’s agitation. She had news, she said tragically. If the news was that D’Anton had died screaming under the knife, why was she taking so long to deliver it? Why the music-hall posturing—the badly executed stagger, the laboured breathing, the pale hand to the brow?
She’s hamming this, Strulovitch thought. She doesn’t want it to end. He could understand her looking forward to all being well again in her brittle little world, and Strulovitch with his threats and menaces being gone from it. But that didn’t explain the histrionics.
A small number of people were gathered in the marquee, hugging the heaters. “I have here a letter from the surgeon, dated, you might be surprised to learn, five days ago,” Plurabelle finally announced. Her voice was suddenly strong and vindictive and, as she read, her sorrowing eyes of moments before became points of unabated fire.
To whom it may concern,
I have today had the pleasure of examining this delightful patient (name supplied) with a view to judging his fitness to undergo circumcision by the “Forceps Guided Method” and am pleased to report that examination proved such a method, or indeed any method, supererogatory as the patient is already circumcised. The operation, as far as I can deduce and he recall, was performed when he was an infant, such procedures being common among families living in hot countries.
Needless to say one cannot circumcise a person twice.
Yours very sincerely,
Pandhari Malik
—
Was there laughter? Was there applause?
For the second time that afternoon, Strulovitch stopped his ears. If there is such a thing as hysterical deafness there is such a thing as rational deafness too. Why listen to what neither educates nor honours you? Why be demeaned by the unfolding of absurd pr
edictability?
He didn’t have the patience—with events or with himself—to track back over the subterfuge that had made a fool of him. No one had acted with principle. He had lost, that was all that differentiated him from D’Anton. Winning—the prize a bloodied D’Anton—would not have made him the better man.
Surprised only by how little he was surprised, he slipped away before Plurabelle could confront him with his defeat. Let her exult without him. He had no further business at the Old Belfry and nothing to complain of. He was glad of it. To the modern mind there is a dignity in being tricked. It confirms the preposterousness of existence.
I am content, he thought. Obsolete, but content.
He did not immediately return home. He asked Brendan, whom he found in earnest conversation with other chauffeurs, to drive him round. Anywhere. On ungritted lanes, preferably. A whited landscape. High hedgerows and the quiet crunch of tyres on snow. Stay away until nightfall. And not long to wait for that. Here, night fell in the middle of the afternoon.
Before getting out and opening the door for Strulovitch, Brendan turned around and handed him a letter. “It’s my notice,” he said.
“I’ve been expecting it,” Strulovitch said. “I hope I haven’t been a trial to work for.”
“Sometimes one needs a change, sir,” Brendan said. “That is all.”
“You must do what your conscience determines, Brendan,” Strulovitch told him.
It gave him no pleasure to reflect that in the absence of fiends and devils to blame, Brendan’s conscience would be his scourge.
—
When he did finally get back he went straight to his desk where he scribbled a note to D’Anton. “To the victor the spoils,” he wrote. “As a mark of my good grace I will arrange for the Solomon Joseph Solomon to be delivered to your home. I trust the pleasure it gives the person for whom you say it is intended will be returned tenfold to you. You have a parched and withered look. May the sap of gratitude and reciprocated friendship rise in you. We were not put on earth to be forever sad.”
Before retiring, he called in on Kay and found Beatrice sitting with her. Neither woman made any demonstration of affection.
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