Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

He turned up — some bodily form of him turned up — just as I was completing victory number one. He ducked in, between points, like a bailiff, stood at the far end of the room where I couldn’t fail to see him, and clapped ironically, dead knuckles on a dead palm, when the match was over. You can always tell when someone from your own side would much rather you had lost. Though it might be stretching language a bit to say that Gershom Finkel was on our side. He wandered off again for Twink’s and Aishky’s second matches. Went dancing, presumably. Put his dead hand between my poor aunty Dolly’s quaking shoulder-blades. How did he know when to come back? Who told him that I was about to go on again?

‘I’ll umpire this one if you like,’ he said, testing the net for height, and twanging it for tautness, before sitting down.

No one likes umpiring. No one undertakes the job willingly. Least of all, my team-mates told me later, Gershom Finkel. ‘The mamzer’s never umpired a game in his life,’ Sheeny reckoned.

‘Once,’ Louis Marks corrected him. ‘Three years ago, when Johnny Leach came to play an exhibition match in the club. He called him for foul-serving as well.’

As well. The phrase tells its own story. ‘When you’re ready, gentlemen … Away call. No, it’s tails. Walzer to serve. Love all. Foul serve, love — one.’ That was about the way it went. I exaggerate only slightly. To be fair to Gershom — though I can’t think of any good reason to be fair to Gershom — he cautioned me about my serve before calling it. Cautioned me once, called me twice, and then, to rub salt in, rose from his chair, stood behind me, breathed into my neck, and showed me what I was doing wrong. My serving palm was not flat, there was the problem. ‘In the delivery of the service,’ the rules stated, ‘the free hand of any two-handed player shall be open and flat, with the fingers straight and together, thumb free and the ball resting on the palm without being cupped or pinched in any way by the fingers.’

Make a rule and you’ll always find a life-hating pedant who will interpret it ungenerously. Later emendations of the rules — having just such an umpire as Gershom Finkel in mind — removed the emphasis from ‘the precise degree of flatness of the server’s free hand’. What’s so special about flatness, when all is said and done? Illegal spin, that was what the no cupped-palm rule existed to prevent. Sol Schiff’s legacy. Diabolically concealed finger-spin. The thing that had once dashed Gershom’s own hopes. But just because the four fingers of my free hand were not lying dead straight and together, like the corpses of four little Victorian pauper babies, it didn’t mean I was doing a Sol Schiff.

This could have been the end of me. Mortification in front of friends; mortification in front of strangers; my confidence shot down just as it was taking flight; and a palpable ineptitude demonstrated in the area where I was most sensitive — in the matter of what I did with my free hand. I thought I would burn up. There is nowhere to hide on a ping-pong table. I have said that about a bus, but compared to a ping-pong table a bus is a haven of hideaways. I lost control of my mouth which began to skid horribly across my face. I was within a whisker of throwing my bat down, covering my shame, and running out of the Akiva for ever. So what stopped me? Not my own presence of mind, that’s for sure. I was a shell-skulker, a lavatory-stewer, a secret cutter-up of aunties and grandmas — I had no presence of mind. What saved me was the generosity of my opponent. Dave. They were all Dave or Derek, the Post Office team. Derek Lockwood, Dave Clayton, Derek Hargreaves. This one was Dave Hancocks. I was lucky in him. He let Gershom’s first decision go. Took the point. Not gladly. But took it. You don’t look a gift-horse. But after the second call he deliberately hit his next return off the table and subsequently dribbled his own service into the net. Thereafter, whenever Gershom fouled me, Dave Hancocks threw away the next point.

But where did this leave me? Ought I to be deliberately netting my returns to thank him for netting his? Where did reciprocity end in a situation like this? I looked to Aishky. ‘Dave Hancocks is one of ping-pong’s gentlemen,’ he whispered to me. ‘He isn’t looking for any favours. Just play your game.’

Twink too had some advice for me. ‘Don’t insult the guy by holding back,’ he said.

Easier said than done. I was falling in love with the man. He had saved me from humiliation. He had stuck it to Gershom in the most demonstrative way possible, short of smacking him in the face. And he praised me, once I had recovered sufficiently to be able to play some shots, in a manner that sent little warm shivers — love-warm, not shame-warm — down my legs. ‘Shot, kid,’ he said, and I tingled. ‘Unlucky,’ he said, shaking his head and smiling, and I fear that I tingled even more.

There was something of the foot soldier about Dave Hancocks. Strong stocky legs, a low centre of gravity, resolution, dependability. You could imagine him walking across the Alps with Hannibal, carrying the General’s sandwiches. He had a Roman profile too. And a head perhaps a little too large for his body. Anyone wanting to be picky about Dave Hancocks’s appearance might have wondered whether he wasn’t too much like a dwarf — not exactly a dwarf but too much like one — to be considered handsome. For my part I can only state that I have always admired the Roman-dwarf look on a man. I suppose I was responsive to the shape because it was a refined and more mobile version of my father’s side. I had been brought up to believe that a big head on a square squat body was a mark of manliness.

Under other circumstances, later in my career, and without Gershom around to vex the chemistry, I would gladly have lost to Dave Hancocks. ‘Unlucky,’ he would have said, ‘unlucky, kid,’ and I would have gone soft inside his strong consolatory handshake. Of course I didn’t know at the time that I wanted to yield to him. What I am describing comes to a man only after many years of reflection; and I refer to it for no other reason than that it is interesting to me to realize that the corrupt germ of voluptuous defeatism was lodged in my system so early.

As it was, I had to make do with the lesser voluptuousness of beating him. It was plenty to be going on with. ‘Very well played,’ he said, looking up at me, shaking my hand and bowing. He was wonderfully courteous. A postal clerk by day, a little dark top-heavy troubadour of ping-pong by night.

‘Yes, very well played,’ Aishky and Twink chorused.

We all knew what we knew. That I’d beaten Gershom Finkel as well as Dave Hancocks.

When he’d finished filling out the scorecard, Gershom Finkel came over to where I was sitting with my towel on my head. I felt it go dark around me. ‘I don’t mind spending a bit of time helping you to get that serve right,’ he said.

I didn’t come out of my towel. I felt very calm in there. Very calm for me. It was as if I’d been born with ringing ears and suddenly they’d stopped. I could hear the world clearly at last. I heard Aishky taking the net down. I heard Twink zipping up the legs of his tracksuit and humming ‘Che gelida manina’ to himself. Then, ‘Fuck off, Gershom,’ I heard myself say.

It’s a wonderful moment in the life of a shy young person when he swears at a fully grown adult for the first time. It’s like a miracle cure. It’s like waking up with strong legs on your second morning in Lourdes. Speaking for myself it was as though I had all at once become a man.

So I stayed under the towel a little longer, just in case it wasn’t true.

I had a lot to trawl through before I could get to sleep that night. The perfect loveliness of winning. The confirmation of that old Walzer conviction — that I was destined for great things. My storm-resistant forehand chop, which I actually replayed as I lay on my bed, chopping at shadows. The kindness of my friends. My acceptance, signalled by the consideration shown to me by the Roman dwarf, into the affections of men. But most of all I kept saying over and over again, because they were sweeter than any words I had ever previously heard myself utter, Fuck off, Gershom … Fuck off, Gershom … Fuck off, Gershom …’