Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

‘They could have made a mistake,’ she said. And she fled from me, unable to bear the sight of disappointment dawning in my eyes.

They hadn’t made a mistake. Not in her sense, anyway.

Later, when I got there and discovered what an exclusively muscular college Golem was, it was brought home to me that I’d been given a place chiefly on the strength of my ping-pong. Golem College boasted more rugby blues than any other college, more cricket blues, more hockey blues, more soccer blues; it fielded the entire Cambridge real and lawn tennis teams; half the Cambridge Hunt; and it had been Head of the River since there was a river. Its only shortcoming was in the sphere of table sports: billiards, bridge, brag, shove halfpenny, ping-pong — anything for which you didn’t need to wear a jock. Hence me.

And I’d thought it was my misogyny that had got me in.

But a place is still a place.

What I’d have done had I not got into Golem College I don’t know. It wasn’t just to get me over ping-pong that I’d fallen back on Cambridge in advance; it was also to get me over Lorna Peachley. I don’t recall taking her attack on me as an absent person too much to heart. I knew things about me that she didn’t know. But I missed her. I missed our practice sessions. I missed looking at her across the net. I hadn’t loved her. I’d messed around with my feelings for her too much to be left with anything as clean as love. I was conscious of a lack, though, and I gave it her name. I kept thinking I saw her in the street. Several times I actually ran after and accosted her, only to find it was someone else. And that’s almost love, isn’t it? The KD could compensate, as far as mere animal company went, but it couldn’t replace her. Whereas Cambridge, I fancied, would give me another crack at her, or at least at someone like her. Someone who had a daily beauty in her life.

In the meantime I had to decide what I was going to do with myself between now and next October, when Cambridge started up for me. I was damned if I was going to stay on at school as a sort of living treasure. Oh yes, Horsey Horsfield was proud of me now — Walzer this and Walzer that — but Horsfield could go to the knacker’s yard as far as I was concerned. Love me, love my bat. Except that I could no longer remember where my bat was. And no longer cared. ‘What you could do,’ my father said, ‘is work with me for the next six or seven months.’ But the gaffs were going down the tubes, as a consequence of the amount of loss-leading we were doing, and I knew my father would have had trouble paying me. There was even a growing feeling that it wouldn’t hurt if I started paying him. So I took a job driving a stop-me-and-buy-one ice-cream van in the hope that there’d be a few shillings left over to help the Walzer family finances after tax and whatever I emptied into the cash registers of the Kardomah.

In the winter? Well there’s the funny thing about ice-cream. People eat more of it when it’s cold and wet than when it’s hot and dry. They did in the part of Manchester I serviced, anyway. It’s a boredom thing. What else are you going to do in Middleton and Radcliffe when it rains? You stay in, watch the telly, scratch your parts and lick a lolly. This is evening psychology I’m describing. I chose the evening shift. That way I could spend all day at the Kardomah. And afterwards nip into Laps’ so that the younger kids could get a gander at me — one-time flicker and chopper extraordinaire, spieler emeritus, now Cambridge double starred misogynist elect.

I wore a yellow nylon coat with deep pockets, played ‘Greensleeves’ on my chimes, and had to hop out to serve from the side of the vehicle every time I had a customer. Van? Vehicle? It was barely a car let alone a van. A cut-down mini with a cool-box at the back. A fridge on wheels. But the exercise kept me trim. And there was more intimacy in the contact than you get in the conventional stand-up soft-serve Monteverdi van. It was good for pulling, that’s what I’m getting at. Women like a nice fresh-faced broad-shouldered young matriculant in a yellow nylon coat, who gives them free ice-creams. They did in the part of Manchester I serviced, anyway.

Make no mistake, those were heady days to be selling icecream. Advances in refrigeration and freezing techniques, to say nothing of innovations in artificial flavouring, meant that there was always some new line to introduce the public to. We would be introduced to them ourselves in the depot every Monday morning, all twenty-four of us, the entire retail sales staff, standing shoulder to shoulder in our deep-pocketed nylon coats, heads down like recaptured truants, waiting for the manager to come out of his office carrying his refrigerated briefcase from which he would draw out, one at a time, one for each of us, the latest wafer, lolly, cornet, ice-pop, tub. Only when we were all provided, and on a signal from the manager, a lordly nod of the head — ‘Now!’ — would we unwrap in unison, and taste. ‘Well, Walzer?’ ‘Extremely good, sir. I especially like the suggestion of caramel, and the contrast between the soft ice-cream and the hard biscuit. It’s like a split with an extra surprise thrown in. I think they’re going to take to it, yes, yes I do. And if I may add one more word — (let Rushdie tell you what he likes: I thought of it first) — ‘naughty, sir, but nice.’ He was an Oxford man himself, our depot manager, but he still admired fluency. ‘Excellent, Walzer. Couldn’t have put it better. The target for this depot is twenty thousand pieces a week. I believe we can beat that. What say you men?’

‘We can beat it easy, sir. We can thrash the living daylights out of it. We can have it for dinner.’

‘Exactly what I think.’ He kept his refrigerated briefcase open on the desk, so that we should have somewhere to deposit the wrappers and the sticks, when there were sticks. The moment we were all finished he’d snap it shut. The briefing was over. ‘Now let’s get out there and move them!’

A lady over here and a lady over there.

I did well. I was salesman of the month three months running.

But then when all is said and done, I’d had the training.

And I liked where the driving took me: the wet melancholy lanes and culs-de-sac, many of them still cobbled, reflecting the bile-yellow end-of-humanity phosphorescence of the streetlamps; the back-to-back and front-to-front workers’ cottages built in the same sickly pink you’d get in our Neapolitan wafers; the swag vases in the windows; the swag ornaments; the swag doorknockers and doormats; and the sallow northern women coming out with the telly still flickering in their eyes and their purses chinking. And I say I liked this? Yes. What I liked was that I was saying goodbye to it; that soon I would never see it again. No more North, no more poverty, no more wet, no more tsatskes — a few more months and then gone for ever!

The best of them, the more presentable of the tsatskes, I took to the Kardomah to be seen with. They scrubbed up well. They could have done with work putting into their pronunciation of the mother tongue, but I was hardly one to talk. I was Boogart’ Awl Cloofin’ it with the best of them now, despite all my efforts to stay clear of the infection, and anyway, as Sheeny said, in an interesting inversion of one of Jesus’s more controversial aphorisms, it wasn’t for what came out of their mouths that we valued them.

Sheeny had changed in the time I’d known him. He rarely head-jockeyed now. Whether this had anything to do with Sabine Weinberger, whether she’d converted him to passivity, I cannot say, but ever since that evening in Benny the Pole’s squeaking pad he had become lazy and quiescent, looking to be done to rather than to do. I’d collect him sometimes, in my father’s van, and drive him to one of the streets on my ice-cream round where a couple of tsatskes would be waiting. He never got out of the van or even made an effort to be introduced; he’d just lie there on the sugar bags like a sheikh, with his flaming putz out, engorged and ticking — for his putz too suffered from the same nervous twitch as the rest of him — waiting to be fellated.