Howard Jacobson: The Mighty Walzer

I adored them all. Not my sisters. No one adores his sisters. But that still left me with five — a mother, a granny, and three aunties (the Shrinking Violets) — all fine-boned and fluttering. My seraglio.

One by one, and to everybody’s astonishment, the Shrinking Violets found men who wanted to marry them. But that was much later. When I was growing up they each had the letter S for spinster emblazoned on their chests. I’m not being critical of the single state. They could have worn their S with pride. Instead of being mortified when a baby goo-gooed at them on a bus, they could have taken it in their arms and kissed it. ‘Not for me, though I’m sure you’re nice for someone else,’ they could have told it. Instead of turning crimson when a shop-girl offered to assist them they could have said, ‘No thank you, I will do as I mean to go on doing, and assist myself. What, after all, did they fear that babies and shop-girls had over them? Knowledge of the mystic meaning of the letter S, that’s what.

Babies and shop assistants behaved irrationally, made sudden movements towards you, like spiders, and a sudden movement is to an S for spinster what a cross rubbed with garlic is to a vampire.

On Saturdays they used to take me to town, sometimes to buy me a jigsaw, new rubber rings for the hoop-la board, a whole book of crosswords, a new Collins Classic to add to my collection, but in the main to replenish their supplies of S brand haberdashery — yards of spiritless elastic and broken-hearted lace, spinster zips, spinster fasteners, spinster hooks and eyes, all the cheerless wherewithal to repair their lumpy brassieres and granny stockings and God knows what else. That was the fun part. It was the bus journey there and back I dreaded. Did we ever, my three S-emblazoned aunties and I, enjoy a single carefree bus ride? Not that I recall. If there wasn’t a goo-gooing baby to embarrass and frighten us there was a drunk, or a madman, or an invalid we didn’t know how to help, or a jeering gang of prefab boys. Irrational movers, all of them. From whom we had no choice but to leap. As a consequence, we drew notice to ourselves the way black holes suck in the stray matter of the universe. Notice and misadventure. We’d upset the conductor, we’d drop money, we’d lose our tickets, we’d stand on people’s feet, we’d fall into the invalid and spill him off the bus. And the blushing of one of us would set off the blushing of the others. Off we’d go — red, red, red, red — like traffic lights that are running against you. There is no hiding place on a bus. You either jump off or you suffer the exposure. And we were of no assistance to one another. The shy are tyrants. They are consumed by their own appetite for suffering. Nothing else matters. No one else exists. We lowered our eyes and individually burned, leaving the others to die in their own flames.

Back in my parents’ or my grandparents’ house, where nobody was looking, the ordinary affections could be resumed. I could dote on my aunties and, more to the point, they could dote on me.

Did they ‘hold me out’? I must be scrupulous here; I owe that to the love we bore one another. I don’t know whether they held me out. I can’t remember and I am not prepared to say I have suppressed the memory. (Why would I want to add the burden of suppression to everything I already do remember?) But that I was capable of being held out they were, if you can understand me, more conscious than I believe they ought to have been. It’s a matter of degrees of awareness. There was another odious euphemism to which I was subjected as a little boy. In-between. Shaming but true — the thing I had that made me not my sisters, the thing the shaking Mohel had taken a dirty-fingered moon-shaped slice out of and which thereafter and for evermore needed scrupulous bathing and talcuming, the thing I was held out by, did not, in our house, go by any of the usual anatomical or nursery-rhyme names — a penis or the intromittent organ, say; a winkle or John Thomas — no, what I had was an in-between. And everybody knew it.

In the end, the point is not whether my seraglio of women should or should not have enjoyed familiarity with my in-between, understood what it was and where it was — in the end the only point that matters is that with my father away and my grandfather permanently drunk and the Violets shrinking from every approach, mine was the only in-between between them.

Enough said. Whatever harm I did them, the measure of the harm they had done me was the box of family photographs I was now smuggling into the lavatory as many times a day as I could get away with. And if you think a box of family photographs simply means a box of family photographs, you’ve got another think coming.

The box itself nags at my conscience like an undiscovered weapon used to commit an unconfessed crime. Is it still where I left it? Will it ever be found? After all this time, should it ever be found?

It was a chocolate box originally, a de luxe beau monde two-storey coffret, padded, scented, covered in pink velvet and lined with crimson silk. It had once cradled two pounds of the best quality Austro-Hungarian marzipan. An aged and toothless admirer, a fourth or fifth cousin on the non-Walzer side, had embarrassed Fay with it, and she had disembarrassed herself of it on to me. The lid showed a scene from one of Mozart’s operas. I doubt if it was Il Seraglio. Pink ribbons were sewn into the velvet, and with these you secured the lid or released it. When I’d finished what I was doing I’d tie a bow with the pink ribbons, listen to be sure the coast was clear, make a dash across the landing from the lavatory to my bedroom, and stuff the box in a suitcase under my bed.

Now for the contents. I have said that these were family photographs. Naturally I mean that they were photographs of my mother’s side of the family — photographs of my mother herself, my grandmother, and the Shrinking Violets; some of them studio studies, but, in the main, snaps I had taken with my little box camera during one of our peregrinations around Sowalki, or on a blushing trip to Lewis’s at the top of Market Street. Photographs that had men in them were of course no use to me. Nor were group photographs of any sort. One woman at a time was how I liked it. And not necessarily alive. I had a good one of my grandmother’s mother Cheena, for example, looking pensive in a feathered hat. And another of my great-great-aunt Sophia, come to Bialystok in her rustling finery to pose against a painted forest and gain immortality in the putrefying imagination of a twelve-year-old boy still half a century away from being born.

Is it such a sin, jacking off, as the Church of England boys put it, over loved ones? In its own clumsy way, doesn’t beating one’s meat over the female branches of the family tree show a certain groping genealogical respect? If you’re gonna spill, spill over your own.

That would have been my defence, had the marzipan box gone on containing only what I have so far described. But I have, and had, no defence. No defence, no excuse, no rationale, no sanity.

Soon, satiated with the aplasticity of the photographs themselves, I added to my scented coffret of concupiscence the following: a magnifying glass, a pair of kitchen scissors, a tube of glue, and pages of particular appeal torn from Span, a pin-up magazine I had fallen into the habit of buying, the minute I was able to lose the hand of a Violet, from a soft-porno shop on Deansgate, immediately opposite Manchester Cathedral. All porno was soft then. Girls hitching up their skirts, showing a suspender, looking down at their own disarrangement in astonishment, unable to account for how a breast with an unaroused nipple, or a star where the nipple should have been, had slipped its moorings. No split beavers in those days. No beaver of any sort unless you went for Health and Efficiency and then you had to put up with the volleyball and the rest of the family. Otherwise not a hint of a hair, let alone a labium. That was what the magnifying glass was for. To see if I could detect where a hair had once been. And the scissors … and the glue …?