Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

And by we he meant me. Him and me. All very well getting the girls and the infirm to help with the teddies, appropriate even, given how infirm and girlish teddies themselves were. But there was nothing fluffy about a coffee table — coffee tables were carpentry, and carpentry was what men did. Measuring, sawing, screwing, gluing. (How much did he know about me and glue?)

There was a further aspect of coffee tabling he needed me for. Artwork. I was the grammar school boy. I knew something about pictures, didn’t I? Paintings. All that malarkey. The coffee tables my father had watched the pitchers clearing out on Garston market — ‘Not five pounds, not four pounds, not even three pounds, here, look, I’ll tell you what I’ll do …’ — were illustrated, showing scenes from Swan Lake and The Nutcracker under their glass tops. My father didn’t know what the ballets were called, or even that they were ballets. They were pictures, that was all, and someone had to choose them. Me. The one with all the green books.

Leaving aside the crazed salacious collages I made in the privacy of the lavatory, what did I know about art? Well, I knew that my grandmother’s reverend head on a naughty schoolgirl’s torso wouldn’t be a seller in Catholic Liverpool. I knew that there were no famous paintings of ping-pong players in action. And I knew I could do better than Swan Lake. I had the regulation art tastes of a shell-shrinker my age. I revered a couple of Rembrandt self-portraits, as well as The Nightwatch and the person in the gold helmet; I owned a jigsaw puzzle of Brueghel’s Tower of Babel; and I was stirred at some deep and upsetting level by Bosch’s nightmare demons with flowers in their bums. Enough there to be going along with, wouldn’t you have said, for a coffee table company limited in its production capacity by the space available after supper on the living-room floor.

We soon got to the bottom of the omnipresence of The Nutcracker and Swan Lake. They were the only prints of a suitable size you could pick up. No printer cheap enough to keep our tables competitive had Brueghel’s Tower of Babel in stock. Nor The Nightwatch. We enjoyed some good fortune with the Bosch, though. One small firm in Eccles was so taken with the flowers in the bum they were prepared to have one of their artists copy it. But we had to order five hundred. ‘Done,’ my father said. We still have them. Somewhere under the stairs of my mother’s house is a soggy cobwebbed oblong carton containing four hundred and ninety-nine barely-look-alike Bosch posters printed in the primary colours. We never sold a single one. The public knows what it likes and it knew it didn’t like a coffee table showing Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, chiefly anal, under glass. What it liked was Swan Lake. Also anal, but melodic. The only Bosch table in existence is owned by me. ‘Keep that one for yourself,’ my father said ironically as we dismantled the three dozen we had made, substituting the art people wanted for the art they didn’t. ‘Consider it an early wedding present.’

A better early wedding present would have been to leave me alone.

To get on with what?

To get on with ping-pong for a start.

I’d been wrong to think there was nothing left to live for after losing in the fog in Dukinfield. There was getting even left to live for. There was passing on the pain and beating someone else left to live for. In short, there was next week.

Thus the beauty of playing in a league was quickly made manifest to me. In a league there is never a last chance. Never a final, once and for all deciding match. Play in a league and you do not have to come face to face with your maker. Next week you might thrash your maker.

The week after Dukinfield was a home match. Against the Post Office. I was told we played better at home. I could have figured that out for myself. We would have played better on an ice floe in the Arctic Circle so long as we hadn’t had to spend an hour in Aishky’s Austin beforehand.

As though it took a special interest in our progress and had committed our fixture list to memory, the fog which had lifted immediately after Dukinfield began to fall again. ‘You’re not going out in that on your own,’ my mother said. ‘Your father will drive you.’

‘What in?’ my father asked.

Losing a bus is like losing a limb: it takes a while to remember you no longer have it. More than once I’d seen my father pat his face clean, throw on a tie and go whistling out of the house only to return disconsolately half a minute later.

‘Then your sisters will take you.’

‘No!’ I said.

‘Ah, Ma, no!’ they said together.

They no more wanted to be seen with me in my tracksuit than I wanted to be seen with them in their ballooning net petticoats and ankle socks and Olive Oyle high heels.

So there was nothing else for it. My mother and the Violets accompanied me on the train from Bowker Vale and waited for me in the card room at the Akiva. It’s an ill wind. There was a dance on in the card room that night and it was here that my aunty Dolly, the oldest of the Violets — though she had come out in nothing more alluring under her maroon overcoat than a yellow cardigan with a button missing, and the S for Spinster throbbing on her chest — met the man who would one day take her out of herself, make her heart dance, and then break it. Gershom Finkel.

I went all phlegmy seeing Twink and Aishky again. I coughed, blaming the fog, but it was puppy love that was guggling up at the back of my throat. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed them. They hadn’t turned up for practice after the jam and marmalade fiasco. Aishky had had to lie down all week, and Twink had blown his life savings on a trip to London to hear Giuseppe di Stefano sing Rudolfo at Covent Garden. Di Stefano was his favourite living lyric tenor. Aishky thought Mario Lanza but Twink laughed in his face. That shreier! Not counting those who had long jossed it like Caruso, and those who had recently jossed it like Gigli (though he’d always been too much of a crooner for Twink’s taste), it went di Stefano one, Björling two, Ferruccio Tagliavini three …

Over Del Monaco?

… Tagliavini three, Mario Del Monaco four, Richard Tucker five …

And then Mario Lanza?

Twink snorted. Mario Lanza, Aishk, didn’t make it into the top twenty.

Sheeny Waxman wanted to put in a vote for Bill Haley.

‘Do me a favour,’ Twink said.

I tried a joke myself. ‘Where would you rate Victor Barna?’

Twink looked nonplussed. ‘As a table tennis player …? You’re moodying me.’ Then he got it. ‘Dependable, but not up there with the very best of them. He can be a bit flat for me. But definitely above Lanza.’

He was in high spirits, limber, laundered, up there with the best of them himself, ready to take on anybody. Opera lifted him, warmed him through, cleared his asthma, put arias in his hair. He’d unearthed some rare and precious 78s of John McCormack while he was in the Smoke, including Act I of Boito’s Mefistofele and the exquisite and almost impossible to find ‘Pur Dicesti’ by Antonio Lotti, both in mint condition. It was Twink’s ambition to own the biggest collection of recordings of lyric tenors in the country. Already it was second to none in Prestwich. ‘I’ve got stuff even the BBC don’t know where to lay their hands on,’ he told me. ‘They ring me. How do you like that?’ So he was well on his way.

I noticed that his bat looked as laundered as he did. The pimples sat up unusually flexuous and nipply. ‘Have you shampooed your bat?’ I asked.

‘Listen to the kid! Have I shampooed my bat? Shmerel! I bought new rubbers from Lillywhites. Fatter pimples. I decided to change my game while I was away.’