Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

‘It’s natural,’ she said.

Nothing was less likely to reconcile me to nature than the word natural on the lips of one of my aunties.

‘I can’t,’ I said.

She should have had fellow-feeling for my discomfiture, but have I not said that the shy are tyrants of self-engrossment, that they burn alone, leaving their fellow sufferers to be consumed in their own flames? And the ex-shy are more callous still.

‘Just find it in yourself,’ she said, steering me into the middle of the room. ‘One, two, three, and … one, two, three …’

No use. The only thing in nature One, two, three reminded me of was bumping the Copestakes’ van out on to London Road in Liverpool.

‘I don’t understand it,’ Dolly said, ‘you must have rhythm for table tennis.’

‘He hasn’t,’ Gershom Finkel answered for me.

She had more success with Dora.

But then so did Gershom.

Cutting up my aunties was an act of love. When I want to bring them back to the front of my memory today, it’s to my box of mutilated photographs I go first. My memory of my box of mutilated photographs. (The box itself I no longer have. I took it to Cambridge with me, years later, and threw it in a bin behind the cricket pavilion on Parker’s Piece, where I calculated that anyone finding it would not know what it was, or at least who they were.) In the box I was able to distinguish them more keenly. I paid them greater attention. The reason I am able to recall now that Dora only ever turned her eyes towards you in order to let you know that you were wrong, and that she had a slyer way of smiling than Dolly, as though there was an understanding as to truth which she’d reached only with herself, and that she was more coquettish than Dolly in the quiet as a nun style, and had a slighter and less lumpy bust — not unlumpy just less lumpy — is that I had to make allowances for these things when choosing which prefab kid’s mother’s body to attach her to. Art — art gets you there every time.

Whether Gershom made similar observations in the course of taking both sisters out dancing I have never been able to decide. It may be that Dora’s sly interior smile bears on Gershom’s preference only in that it helps explain how come she went along with it, or worse still, encouraged it. ‘If you have a choice of two, always go for the quieter one,’ Sheeny Waxman once advised me. Among those of us who frequented Laps’ it was common knowledge — even I knew it and I knew nothing — that the quiet ones were the best ones, that they asked the least, gave the most, and screamed the loudest. But Sheeny’s point was subtler than that. If you have a choice, go for the quieter — the quieter. In other words, where there is competition between two — and when isn’t there competition between two? — the less socially confident will be the one to deliver because she is the one who has a score to settle. The mistress is almost always more timid than the wife, but where the mistress is the wife’s best friend (let alone her sister) there is no almost about it, she is invariably the more timid. Invariably.

Boo to the goose.

Boo.

Boo.

Boo.

Poor Dolly, having to lose to the only person less confident than her on the planet.

Poor Dora, having to destroy her own sister in order to find some self-worth.

Poor Gershom — No. We could have been wrong, my mother, my father, my sisters, Fay, me, but our sympathies didn’t extend that far. Gershom’s heart was not engaged. Not in either direction. If his heart had ever been engaged to Dolly, however fleetingly, he would not have been able to drop her off in Lower Broughton after a Wednesday night swirling at the Ritz, mention it to her, as a sort of afterthought, while she was getting out of the car, that he believed Dora made a better partner for him — nothing personal, just a compatibility thing — and then drive away. And if his heart had been engaged to Dora he would not have encouraged her, or allowed her to encourage him to encourage her, to make a stranger of her sister. No. There was no reason to poor-Gershom Gershom. He had nothing much to do with his life, that was all. I knew why but couldn’t say, for fear I’d be castigated for not saying earlier. He had nothing much to do with his life because he’d bet against his own gifts when he was young. Plock plock, I lose. He’d fouled his own nest. Serve him right.

But what about when it came to fouling ours? My father was afraid that now he’d got a taste for it he wouldn’t stop. Next it would be my mother he’d try. Then Fay. Then my sisters. Because wherever he looked in my family there were sisters, and he specialized in sisters.

My mother made a sound like a death-rattle. ‘I think you’ll find,’ she said, ‘that he’ll have the brains to stay away from here in the future.’

‘What, and miss the bagels?’

It was a black joke. What wasn’t black at the moment? The last thing we really expected on the very first Sunday after Black Wednesday was a visit from Gershom Finkel. Dolly had been put to bed in our house. She was given my sisters’ room, my sisters moved in with my mother, and my father moved in with me. We crept about, not speaking. Neuralgia had spun its web among us, a black spider that hung where we could see it, but which we didn’t dare disturb for fear of its venom. All our heads ached. Nothing and no one was in the right place; every pattern was dislocated, as they are when you take in the dying. Dora remained at home, in an excitable and heightened state, according to Fay, who ferried herself and my grandmother between the two. Fay feared as much for Dora’s health as for Dolly’s. There was a strange light around her. And she had started to make small talk with my grandfather, which no one had done for years. ‘Seeing the man’s point of view suddenly,’ was my mother’s reading of that. My father had a more practical interpretation. ‘She’s just softening him up,’ he reckoned. ‘Trying to get him on side for when Gershom moves in.’ Fay pulled a face. ‘In that event we’ll all have to come here,’ she said. It was naturally assumed that ‘here’ would be safe, and that Gershom would move the centre of his operations to Lower Broughton, however poky it was. So, no, we most definitely did not expect him to turn up for bagels as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

But turn up he did!

He did. He did. And what is more he came early!

It was my mother who opened the door to him. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Dolly is here.’

‘Oh, is she?’ He didn’t give the slightest sign that seeing her would at all inconvenience him. He made as if to come into the house.

(‘He was looking over my shoulder,’ my mother told us afterwards. ‘He was actually trying to look past me to see whether the bagels had come.’)

‘No,’ she said again, ‘you can’t come in.’

(‘I actually had to bar his way,’ she told us. ‘I thought he was going to walk over me.’)

He started to laugh. The same broken, rat-a-tat-tat laugh he used when he was pretending to admire my medals and cups, turning them upside down and examining them for price stickers. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You’ve taken sides. Fair enough. I thought as Dora’s sister that you’d have stuck by her. But fair enough.’

(‘I could have hit him,’ she told us. ‘I don’t know what stopped me.’)

He turned and walked back down the path, airless and loping as when he circumnavigated the ping-pong table at the Akiva, a man not among friends.

My father called him before he got to the gate. ‘Gershom, I’d like a word.’

‘No, Joel,’ I heard my mother say.

‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to touch him. I just want a word.’ He had his coat on. And was jiggling his van keys. ‘Let’s go for a spin, Gershom,’ he said.