Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

And how did he come to have her address? Why, she gave it to him.

And the size?

She probably gave him that too. Not out of coquettishness. Out of naivety. She had no defences, Fay. She didn’t know what from what. She was another one a Hottentot could have carried off.

‘How many nights is this?’ my father grumbled, staggering in with a cheese and onion pie wrapped in foil for my mother and finding Fay yet again on the blower, one leg curled under her, one stretched out, legs that joined in swishing silk now, Fay skittish, Fay feminine, Fay fey.

‘Shush!’ my mother said.

A miracle was unfolding. A third spinster was inching towards a husband.

‘What’s he going to send her this time?’ my father said. ‘A frontless brassiere?’

‘Joel!’

The things my father knew! What was a frontless brassiere?

And had they met yet, Aunty Fay and her obscene caller? No. They were taking it cautiously. A step at a time. And was he still asking her about her underwear? In the main he wasn’t. But then he didn’t really have to, did he, since he’d chosen it for her. The perfect riposte, this, to the psychopath who rings you up and badgers you to tell him the colour of your scanties. Get him to go out and buy you your scanties.

So what were they discussing? Culture. He was a cultured man, her heavy breather. He liked reading, listening to music, going to the theatre and walking. That was when he could. For the last few years, while his late wife was dying of a slow wasting disease, he couldn’t. Hence the loneliness, the wretchedness, the desperation, and as night follows day, the filthy phone calls. Now, though, with his new chum Fay Saffron, he could talk H. E. Bates and Terence Rattigan again to his heart’s content.

If you could close your eyes to the manner in which he’d introduced himself, he was quite a catch. He even had a house in Alderley Edge.

‘Alderley Edge!’ my mother repeated. ‘And he condenses books for the Reader’s Digest!’

Yes, the moral infection of swag had taken its toll of us intellectually too. How long was it since any of the women in our house had bought a Collins Classic? Austens, Jane; Brontës, Charlotte; Gaskells, Mrs? — all forgotten. They read magazines now, showbiz gossip, tittle tattle about the Royal Family, and condensed books. And they’d stopped listening to Tchaikovsky. Once upon a time we’d sat in a circle in the dark, oying over the Overture to Romeo and Juliet. It had made us all lovesick together. Not any more. I had my own methods for making myself lovesick now and my aunties were getting off on Sammy Davis Jnr and the Melachrino Strings. We were acculturating to a lower class of English person.

Or they were. By way of compensation I was going far out in the opposite direction. I wanted nothing of anything that anyone I knew liked. It was a good job Twink had vanished from my life, otherwise I would have set about putting him right. Getting him on to Lieder instead of all that Puccini crap. Schubert, Twink, and not Lilac Time either.

Oh no, swag was not going to get me. I would belong to nothing and to no one rather than to swag.

But by God I had to fight against its volubility. The noise our culture made as it ran down! The racket!

We’d been softly spoken when we’d first bundled our belongings over from the Bug. Shush, lie low, keep shtum, and they may not notice we are here. But we’d forgotten our own lessons. Fallen in love with the host culture again, or rather with the lack of it. Even our pronunciation was deteriorating. Boggart Hole Clough, to take an example at random, Boggart Hole Clough where I’d picnicked as a little boy with some of my mother’s friends from the International Brigade, hopping on to a bus at the bottom of Blackley New Road, Boggart Hole Clough which you would have thought was characterful enough already, was now Buggart ‘Awl Cloof. We didn’t hop on to a bus any longer either, we caught t’buzz. Nor did we picnic. We bootered buhns which we shuvelled into our cake’oles in frunt of t’telly. We sooked hoomboohgs. We moonched fuhdge. Soon we’d be throwing stones.

It was no quieter anywhere else in Kamenets Podolski, north Manchester. We were all racketin’ down t’plug’ole together. Next door, where the Markses lived, was even worse. For his seventeenth birthday Selwyn Marks had been given a secondhand Morris Minor. His brother Louis flew back from Israel to teach him to drive it. He’d only been away a year but he was a different colour now — no longer dun from the Dniester but Negev umber — and spoke with a broken accent. He knocked up with me on the table that was still out in their garden, balanced on a couple of dustbins, rotting, bubbling, whitened by the sun and the rain, curled at the corners. ‘I cannot play tsis game any more,’ he told me. ‘I’m musclebound from drrriving jeeps.’ He was in training to lift for Israel at the next Olympic Games. Which meant that while he could raise five grown men above his head he’d rupture himself if he had to bend down for a ping-pong ball. Selwyn had given up ping-pong altogether. Swimming too. Now he was going to be a racing driver. The only sport in which there was no anti-Semitism. ‘How do you figure that, Selwyn?’ I asked him. ‘It’s the helmets,’ he said. ‘They can’t see how big your nose is.’

He should never have been allowed to sit at the controls of a car, with or without Louis next to him. He panicked too easily. Just reversing out of the path was more than he could manage without it erupting into a shouting match with every member of his family.

‘I’ve got my left hand down. I’ve got my left hand down. What do you think I’ve got down.’

‘Selwyn, go slower,’ his mother called.

‘Mother, if I go any slower I’ll be going backwards.’

‘Meshuggener!’ his father shouted. ‘You’re already going backwards!’

‘I’m meant to be going backwards!’

‘So go backwards!’

‘But slower, Selwyn. Go slow. Where are you layfing to?’

‘Now come up grradually off tse clutch,’ you could hear Louis advising, next to him.

‘Tse clutch? What’s tse clutch all of a sudden. My car isn’t fitted with tse clutch.’

‘Selwyn, if you don’t vant my chelp I can go back to Israel.’

‘Vant! Chelp! Why are you talking to me like a fucking German?’

‘Selwyn, wash your mouth out.’

‘Wash my mouth out? What about vash my mouth out! How can I vash my mouth out ven I’m drriving. I’m drriving a fucking car here!’

‘Selwyn, don’t talk to your brother like that. He’s come a hundred thousand miles to teach you.’

‘I’m not talking to my brother.’

‘Then who are you talking to? Your mother? You’re swearing at your mother now!’

‘Let him swear at me, let him swear. Just make him go slow.’

Slow? So far the car hadn’t moved more than six inches. But it always ended the same way, with Selwyn snagging the gears, coming up too quickly off the clutch, burning the brakes, and slamming into the front wall.

‘If you von’t listen to me …’ I heard Louis complaining one afternoon.

It was Friday. The early rush hour where we lived. Shabbes looming. Everywhere people returning home, bearing sweet red wine and milky bread, driving into their paths. Only Selwyn still trying to get out of his.

‘I’m listening, I’m listening!’ he was shouting. He was revving the engine hard. I could smell oil and burning rubber. The same smell that hung over Cheetham Hill for weeks after Copestake’s warehouse had gone up in smoke.

‘Then do vot I’m telling you. Always look in your mirror before rrreversing out.’

‘How can I look in the mirror? I’m concentrating on my driving. If I look in the mirror I crash the car.’