Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

The twist was the beginning and the end of it, anyway. I kept a shy distance, and the lumpy mattresses of Totty Hall knew not my impression.

When the touchy silence of existence among the Yorath and Rubella head shrinkers of Golem got too lonely to bear I frequented those back streets of Cambridge to which Yorath had mysteriously alluded in relation to Kafka. I led a secret life. So secret that I kept it from myself. Was that me sitting reading the Daily Mirror over bacon sandwich breakfasts in a transport café off the Newmarket Road? A chip off the old block? Couldn’t have been. Me holding hands behind the laundromat dryers with a woman old enough to be my mother? Impossible. So how come I am able to remember her name? Rose. The laundromat belonged to her. Rose’s Launderette . How come I am able to remember that? I took my shirts there for a service wash, that was all. We fell to talking, that was all. She did my ironing for me and I stroked her ruined hands. And once in a while took her to the pictures. Where we may have kissed. Who can say?

My Cambridge.

Brideshead for some. Rose’s Launderette for others.

Don’t mistake me — I count my blessings; I know I was lucky to have had her.

And then there was ping-pong. Also something I did furtively.

I’d said no at first when the invitation from the college team and then from the UCTTC itself appeared in my pigeon hole. Thank you for asking but I no longer play. But I ran into the Master outside the porter’s lodge shortly after that, and I thought I detected a hint of remonstration in the way he feinted his backhand drive at me. ‘Eh, Walzer?’ If Golem had given me a place on the understanding that I’d raise its ping-pong profile, then I was obliged, was I not?

No doubt there was even something in my contract.

It goes without saying that nobody at Golem College could touch me, out of practice though I was. Nobody anywhere else in the university either, with one exception. An imperious Sri Lankan. Elongated, fine and prickly like a pandanus palm. Somebody da Silva. I am not being impolite. I have genuinely forgotten. But I admit that had I not genuinely forgotten I would have faked it, because he stole from my glory and got on my nerves.

As long as he was out of the way, though, playing for his college and not mine, I was able to recapture some of the old satisfactions. It was fun winning again. A blood sport given the calibre of my opponents, but the more fun for that. At the beginning. Do you know, I was able to bamboozle half of them with spin. Not complex spin — just spin. Side. Old-fashioned dining-room table side. They hadn’t come across it before. They stared in astonishment, immobilized, as the ball landed on one spot and then slewed to another. How did I do that?

One of my opponents, a King’s man, even complained to the referee. ‘He’s spinning the ball,’ he said.

And the referee had to check the rules to see if spinning the ball was allowed.

That was the standard we played to.

So the fun I’m describing had its limits. It was like picking off rabbits with a howitzer. After a while you start to feel ashamed. What would Sheeny have said had he seen me tormenting some nebbish from Queen’s who wasn’t even sure which part of the bat was the handle? How would Phil Radic have greeted the return of my will to win? ‘King of the kids, eh, Ollie. Didn’t I say that all you needed was a rest?’

So here I was again, entrammelled in humiliations. Mortifying to lose, mortifying to win.

No wonder I kept it furtive, slipping out of my room with my bat and plimsolls rolled inside my undergraduate gown, and my shorts on under my trousers, hoping that no fellow Yorath and Rubella man would see me go or guess the nature of my errand. I’d raised the question of sport just once in an essay. Vis-à-vis the archery scene in Daniel Deronda . Nothing more than an admiring reference, in passing, to the strength of Gwendolen Harleth’s arm. It drew a gasp and a circle of red ink from Yorath. On the road to womanly wisdom, Walzer, Gwendolen Harleth’s vaingloriousness was the first welcome casualty. Or had I misread?

A locus classicus for us was the scene in Persuasion where Louisa Musgrove is punished for her vulgar mettlesomeness by being thrown from the Cobb in Lyme Regis. More than a locus classicus , actually a sacred site. Rubella once hired a minibus to take us all down there for the weekend, to see with our own eyes the place where the only athlete in the oeuvre of Austen Jane — for she was to all intents and purposes a gymnast, Louisa Musgrove — symbolically paid for her impetuosity with her life.

Yorath came to join us later, driving down separately with his family. I’d never before seen him, and never again saw him, in such high spirits. ‘This is where she jumped,’ I heard him pointing out to his little ones. ‘Right here. And over there is where she landed. As though dead. Not because she was lively — you mustn’t make that mistake. Jane Austen never punished vivacity. But because her mind was poor.’

A shudder ran through us all. A poor mind was a charge we may have laid frequently, but we never laid it lightly.

One by one we trooped off the Cobb with our heads lowered, knowing what we knew.

It didn’t take much imagination on my part, therefore, to work out what they’d have thought about someone who put his mind to ping-pong . Better that they never found out. Better that I kept it a secret from them, along with Rose’s Launderette.

As for my Golem team-mates, none of whom of course was a Yorath and Rubella man, they have melted from my recollection. All I remember is that they easily ran out of breath, wore elasticated shorts and were inordinately impressed by my skills. Shot, Ollie! Beautiful shot, Ollie! Olly, olly, Ollie!

All hearties are slavish — I learned that on Day One. You can twist a man-mountain head-butter from Bucks around your little finger with the lamest limerick. Make him up a dirty song that rhymes and he’s yours for life. Tongue out, following you down King’s Parade panting, like a poodle. But my ping-pongers team-mates weren’t even the real thing. Podgy would-be hearties from Shropshire and the Borders, they followed behind what was following behind. Poodles’ poodles. And on such I squandered my gifts.

Playing for the university provided slightly stiffer opposition, and gave me back a bit of pride, but I was still keeping company with minor-counties over-appreciators who wore elasticated shorts. All except Question-Mark da Silva. A class act, da Silva, I’ll give him that. And not just because his shorts were belted and pressed. He was the only non-Bug and Dniester ping-pong player I’d ever come across who had wit in his game. Maybe not wit as Phil Radic employed it. It was colder than that. Phil Radic’s game was for everybody to enjoy, not least the person on the receiving end of the joke. Da Silva played derision ping-pong and when he was finished with you you were dead. I never faced him competitively. I was careful not to let that happen. But we were the first-string doubles pair against Oxford, in my only representative year, and that was killing enough. He called me away from the table half-way through the second game — we’d fumbled the first — to tell me what I was doing wrong.

‘You play your game,’ I said, ‘I’ll play mine.’

‘That’s not how you play doubles,’ he said.

‘That’s how I play doubles,’ I said.

He looked down upon me using the full length of his nose.

He had a very fine nose. ‘Precisely,’ he said. ‘That’s how you play.’

‘You play how you play,’ I said. ‘I’ll play how I play.’