Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

Now it was his turn to look bashful.

I was in his way.

Let’s be even-handed about it — we were in each other’s way.

So when he came to hear that Sheeny Waxman had fallen out with Sam Sam the Bedding Man and was looking for a job he jumped at him. Sheeny was reckoned to be one of the best pitchers in the country. The sizes of the edges he pulled were legendary. London Boys were known to come up just to watch Sheeny work, and to go back whistling through their teeth. His trick was to start sedately, ringing a little dinner bell and engaging individual punters in a confusion of free gifts and part-exchanges, and then turn progressively more demented. In this his natural tics and twitches were of inestimable help to him. As was his fastidious taste in sharp suits, white shirts with detachable collars, and matching ties and handkerchiefs. Short as he was, you could see and hear him from everywhere; whatever else you were doing you dropped, wherever else you were going was suddenly of no account, such an irresistible spectacle was he, frothing and jerking in his downy mohair whistle, one parrot-eye closed, hoarse and golden like an aristocratic dwarf, a scion of some Nordic royal family, gone mad and reduced to knocking out swag on English markets because of centuries of syphilis and in-breeding.

Of course there was no point hiring someone with Sheeny Waxman’s reputation to work the floor, assuming he’d ever have consented to play second fiddle to another pitcher anyway, but my father made it clear he didn’t in the least mind stepping down in order, in his own words, ‘to defer to a master’.

‘ I’m not ongeblozzen with pride,’ he told me, pointedly. ‘I don’t think I know everything. I don’t think I’m too good for everybody. I don’t think there’s nobody I can learn from.’

The principle of becoming better and stronger is very simple. If you improve, you become strong. How to make improvement is very, very difficult, however.

Zoltan Berczic (one-time national coach of the

Hungarian Table Tennis team)

MY FATHER’S POINTEDNESS apart, it gave me a queer satisfaction to have Sheeny Waxman working for us. It altered the relations between this and that. It put my separate worlds in harmony and in some way that I couldn’t properly explain made me feel more important and grown up.

Maybe there was nothing to explain; maybe having Sheeny on the family payroll simply flattered me with the illusion that I’d bought a share in his haunts, that I’d put my name down, so to speak, for the Ritz and the Plaza and the Kardomah, especially the Kardomah where hoarse-voiced men in camel coats croaked lewd propositions to women young enough to be their granddaughters.

The Kardomah had its own unofficial prep school. Laps’. Only after you’d submitted yourself to an undefined period of continuous assessment at Laps’ — social audacity alone was the criterion: volubility, brazenness, wideness as we called it — were you considered up to doing the Kardomah. And even then you may have shot your bolt too soon, in which event it was back to Laps’ for another indeterminate stint. No one I knew could remember when there hadn’t been a chip shop called Lapidus’s on Bury Old Road. It was institutional. Tell your parents you’d been at Laps’ when they caught you creeping up the stairs after midnight and all your sins were remitted. Yes, you could get yourself into deep waters at Laps’, but at least you were swimming between the flags. At Laps’ one of our own, one of unserer, was always there to save us.

Not infrequently, successful graduates of Laps’ — Sheeny Waxman, for one — would drop in to see how we were getting on, leaving the roofs of their cars down and their engines running, acknowledging greetings from juvenile versions of themselves, dispensing advice, alluding briefly to their own apprenticeships, in the manner of great men returning to their old schools on speech days. The closer you were to graduating yourself, the more you recognized these sentimental homecomings for what they were — acts of late-night desperation, the final foray before the lights went out in Manchester and all that remained was the ignominy of an empty bed. Laps’ gave you one more go, there lay the beguilement of the place even for those who thought they had put it behind them; at Laps’ there was always just the possibility of cashing in on someone else’s mishap, or of simply doing a deal. On Saturday nights, especially, the atmosphere of bazaar and barter on the pavement outside Laps’ was so fervid that motorists strange to the area would stop to consult their maps, imagining that they’d taken a wrong turning and driven into the Lebanon. It’s a measure of how miffed Sheeny must have been by Cynthia Cartwright’s refusal to accommodate him on my debut night that he dumped her in the middle of Miles Platting instead of bringing her back to Bury Old Road and exchanging her for someone more amenable at Laps’. Not that there had to be a swap. Sometimes you would simply drop off a non-performer altruistically, as a kindness to a fellow head jockey. Because it was understood that women were a perverse species, who would with some and wouldn’t with others.

So on top of everything else it was, Lapidus’s chip shop was a hotbed of early feminism, too? You could say that. Certainly anyone listening to Selwyn Marks on the injustices suffered by Ruth Aarons would have been impressed by the humanity and understanding a boy his age was able to show towards a woman he had never met.

We were sitting in the back room of Laps’, sharing a big plate of pickle meat, sweet and sour cucumbers, mustard and chips. Funnily enough, Sheeny Waxman happened to pop his head into the room as we were talking. With Sheeny you always saw his stiff snow-white cuffs, and then his gold shield links engraved with his initials, before you saw him. It was a Kardomah thing; at the Kardomah you led with your cuffs, filled your mouth with phlegm, tugged at the lapels of the coat which you wore loose and empty-sleeved around your shoulders, then made your pitch.

‘So who’s this Ruth Aarons?’ Sheeny wanted to know.

‘No one you’ve shtupped,’ Selwyn said.

Sheeny twitched. Maybe he hadn’t. He’d be surprised, but maybe he hadn’t.

‘Anything here?’ He didn’t expect an answer. What would kids like us know, anyway? After checking the room out for himself, he ratcheted his neck up out of his collar, jerked a handful of our chips into his mouth, and left.

‘Big shot,’ Selwyn said.

‘I like him,’ I said. I didn’t go on to say, ‘And my father slips him his pay-packet.’

So who was this Ruth Aarons?

‘Who won the Women’s World Table Tennis Championships in 1935/6?’ Selwyn asked me.

‘Ruth Aarons?’ I hazarded.

‘Correct. And in 1936/7?’

I hesitated. I could feel a trick question coming on. ‘Not Ruth Aarons?’

‘Ha!’ Selwyn banged the table, causing Lotte to look up from behind the fryer. Any trouble in the back room at Laps’ and Lotte had you out. Selwyn, who was already flushed with indignation on behalf of Ruth Aarons, flushed further under Lotte’s stare. ‘Not Ruth Aarons is a very good answer,’ he said. ‘Not Ruth Aarons. Not nobody.’

‘How come?’ I asked. ‘Were there no women players that year?’

‘If there were no women players that year, explain to me how Votrubcova was able to win the mixed doubles with Vana, and Depetrisova was able to win the women’s doubles with Votrubcova.’

I couldn’t.

‘The best women players in the world were there. All of them. Including Ruth Aarons who’d won it the year before and was playing better than ever. But do you know what it says in the record books under Women’s Singles 1936/7?’