Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

I could tell, though, that tonight was not going to be just another tenor night. There was an atmosphere of special occasion about tonight. ‘I want to spend as little time as possible alone with my mother,’ he told me. ‘She’s going to be a bit broyges with me, and a bit upset.’

No wonder. It turned out that Twink was off to Dorset in the morning. He’d known for months and had said nothing to any of us. His mother was aware he was going, but not when. Tonight, with me acting as emotional lightning conductor, he would have to break it to her.

I felt a bit small still to conduct anything as big as a family rupture. ‘Wouldn’t Aishky be better?’ I asked.

Twink patted me on the shoulder. ‘You’ll be all right. You don’t have to do anything. Just be there. I couldn’t ask Aishk. You know his nerves. He’d worry himself too much.’

We went directly to his room where he asked me what I wanted to hear. We both knew it had to be Figaro — Cherubino off to the wars. He put on the Lisa della Casa version, and pulled out the Irmgard Seefried so I could make a comparison, then he went downstairs looking for his mother. She was famously emotional, Mrs Starr, a bruised-petal beauty in her time who had been betrayed by so many men you couldn’t count them and now imagined that the postman and the milkman and the paper boy were trying to rape and rob her. Sometimes she would sit sobbing on the swirly carpet with her skirts pulled up, showing you the tell-tale bruises on her thighs.

‘Why don’t you call the police?’ I once asked her.

She snorted. ‘The police! You know what they’ll do …’

Mr Starr took no notice of any of this. He occupied an upright wooden chair by the fireplace the whole time, whether there was a fire burning or not, dressed as though to receive company, his thin white hair fastidiously combed, his nails the same unimpeachable pink as his scalp, gold studs in his collar, but never moving and never addressing company when it came. He hadn’t left the house or conversed with anyone in it since his brother had embezzled and bankrupted him ten years before. ‘His own flesh and blood!’ Twink told me. ‘My uncle! You couldn’t tell them apart. They were like twins, I’m telling you. They started the business together. They put in exactly the same amount of money and took out exactly the same amount of money — and then that! His own brother! Can you imagine?’

I couldn’t. I only had sisters.

Everyone in Crumpsall and Prestwich and Higher Broughton had a relation who never left the house or lifted a finger as a consequence of some monumental act of treachery suffered by him at the hands of his own flesh and blood. It was a Bug and Dniester thing: all Jews have to have someone they can’t forgive, but Bug and Dniester Jews always have to have someone in the family they can’t forgive. Usually, though, we were voluble on the subject, took strangers through every detail of the original affection, the closeness, such closeness, and then, with precise reference to dates and hours, the how and the where, the when and the why, the perfidy …! On my mother’s soul, may she rest in peace, I only wish him to burn in hell! Right down to the particular corner of hell we wished him in. And the exact degree of burn. Mr Starr was the only person I’d come across who wouldn’t speak about it. I took that to be a measure of how bad the betrayal had been.

The Starr house itself was forever in extremis. An air of desperation clung to every household object. Nothing was confident it was where it should be. Everything was at breaking point. Pictures fell off the walls. Sofas spat their stuffing. Lampshades shattered of their own accord. The china shrieked in the display cabinet. Dresses and blouses and slacks which Mrs Starr took in to re-fashion — for someone had to bring in money — were thrown on every available chair with their seams still unstitched and the pins protruding dangerously, or lay in tangled heaps on the floor like the skins of spent wrestlers from whom the souls had departed. Only Twink’s room was in control of itself, every record in alphabetical order according to composer, then cross-referenced on filing cards according to performer; every record sleeve dead-straight on the shelf and dust-free, a card saying From The Collection Of Theo Starr glued to each one, though not so that it would interfere with any programme notes.

I turned down the volume of Figaro, reckoning that Cherubino was a tasteless choice after all and would only contribute to the emotional scenes to come. After hearing absolutely nothing for about an hour, apart from the spontaneous groaning of boards and the occasional glass exploding in the kitchen, I began to fear heart attacks or a suicide pact. I eased open the door, went out on to the landing, and started to creep down the stairs. I had to be careful: the stair carpet had worked loose from the rods — that’s if there had ever been any rods — and if you lost your footing even slightly it would balloon up from the steps and become a forty-five degree slide. This, I suspected, was how Mrs Starr got the bruises on her thighs.

I was only half-way down when I saw Twink — Theo — standing in the centre of the living room holding his mother. I couldn’t tell if she was crying, but she was very still in his arms, dressed in nothing but a black slip, her hands clasped about his neck like a lover’s, her feet not quite touching the floor. It was almost as if they were smooching.

Mr Starr was erect by the fire, ready to receive guests, squeaky clean, motionless, immovable.

Twink noticed me on the stairs and made a signal with his eyes. ‘Leave us,’ his look said. ‘Everything will be fine. Thanks, Oliver. Leave us now.’

And that was the last I saw of him for forty years.

Whether Aishky fell into bad company as a result of Twink’s call-up I was never able to decide. There’s the further question of whether he knowingly fell into bad company at all; and even the police weren’t able to decide that.

He took Twink’s going hard, there’s no doubt of that. He pretended it was just a team thing — ‘Our mazel, we get to the Second Division for the first time in our history, and now one of our best players decides he wants to become a soldier and defend the country!’; and the truth of it was that without Twink we were indeed seriously weakened and had to resort to fielding both Marks brothers which was never a good idea because they screamed at each other and sometimes resorted to fisticuffs in the middle of a match — but you could see that Aishky was missing Twink’s company as well, the teasing, the chipping, the falling-out over competition balls and wet cloths. He was hurt that Twink had gone without telling him, even though Twink left him a note explaining that he hadn’t wanted to upset his nerves.

‘You see anything of Twink last weekend?’ he would sometimes ask me. ‘I heard he was home on leave for a few days.’

I hadn’t. To my knowledge no one had, except presumably his mother, that’s if he’d been in Manchester on leave at all.

No one on the team heard from him or of him. For all we knew he could have been sent to Cyprus or Kenya or some other hot spot and been taken prisoner, or court-martialled, or shot. But it didn’t feel like that. What it felt like was that he’d closed a chapter. Made a decision that now he was gone he was gone. Why upset everybody’s nerves all over again by re-appearing? Especially with an army haircut. We took partings differently in those days. They were more a matter of course. One day you were there, and then the Cossacks or the SS came through, and that was that.

Not Aishky, though. He took nothing as a matter of course. His game began to deteriorate. His arm stiffened up. He could anticipate the ball all right but it was as if he couldn’t bring himself to hit it. He would just stand there, like a man mesmerized, and watch it go past him. ‘Hit it, Aishk!’ we’d shout out. ‘Your ball, shmeiss the gederrim out of it!’ But he wouldn’t. Couldn’t. ‘My arm just won’t move,’ he said. ‘I’m playing shots in my head but my head isn’t talking to my arm.’