Howard Jacobson: The Mighty Walzer

Aishky jumped. ‘What was that?’

‘Last orders, Aishky.’

He looked bemused. Last orders?

Is that not wonderful — that you can get to sixty and not know that there is such a thing as last orders? Sixty and never once have been in a public house late enough to hear the bell? I leaned across and kissed the top of his pate, tasting the old ginger stubble which was softer than maybe it should have been and miraculously smelt of newness, like a baby’s.

‘Does that mean we have to leave now?’ he asked.

‘It means we have to drink up. We’ve just got time to get a couple more songs in,’ I reckoned. ‘One or two from the old Brindisi collection.’

So that was what we did, even managing to persuade Twink to join us in the odd chorus, though he had always been more the collector than the performer — yes, before they could turn us out on to the blank songless streets of Manchester, a million miles from Mandalay, we bel canto’d one last time with feeling whatever we could remember of our favourite drinking-up songs, the ‘Libiamo’ from La Traviata, the knock-it-back-quick from Cavalleria Rusticana, Lucrezia Borgia’s ‘The Secret of Bliss is Perfection’, and Mario Lanza seizing the day as the carefree student in Heidelberg, destined one day to be a king and never to carouse again.

Ein, zwei, drei, vier … Libiamo ne’lieti calici, for life is but a tsatske and tomorrow we may die.

And that ought to have been that. Enough. Enough, even for a glutton for punishment like me. The next morning should have seen me back on Alitalia, scampering for the clear uncluttered blue of my little pigeon loft on the Via Dolorosa, coffined gondolas or no coffined gondolas, as quick as my Walzer shanks would carry me. Enough already.

But you don’t always have the final say in matters of the heart. You can’t float into your old home town, sleep in your old room among your old shmondries, shove your nose into your daughter’s wedding, pootle along to the Ninth World Veterans’ Table Tennis Championships and not expect some of the shit to stick.

You can’t monkey around with your feelings and with ping-pong.

I actually had my ticket in my pocket when I turned up at G-MEX for the finals. My flight was at 5.30 so there was a fair chance I wouldn’t get to see all of the later matches. But I’d take whatever was on offer. It was going to have to last me a long time.

During the mid-morning break between the two men’s doubles semi-finals and the two women’s, I ran into Phil Radic. I recognized him immediately. Another one who hadn’t changed. We hadn’t met since I’d served off the table to Royboy Roylance in a pet, and we hadn’t spoken since I’d said ‘I don’t think there’s anything to discuss, Phil,’ also in a pet, but I knew he wouldn’t be harbouring a grudge. I’d written glowingly of him in my manual, recommending his game as a model to anyone wanting to play ping-pong the way it was originally meant to be played, with mercurial wit, and although no one ever bought or read that publication, apart from my father who made it to the bottom of the acknowledgements page, I was aware that books had a marvellous way of always landing on the desk of whoever they happened to mention.

We shook hands. He had his old Irgun tan and looked mighty handsome, shone up like a conker, in a black and grey loose weave jacket and a tie I recognized as Ferragamo from a shop on the Via Veneto. There was a lady on his arm. Not quite his style, I thought. Anderer, for a start. (Phil had refused to play for England on a Shabbes, remember.) And although my age, I guessed, and therefore younger than him, somehow too old for him at the same time. Grey haired, full figured, an eensy bit florid. Someone who had crossed over, in the Italian style herself, from being decorative to being functional. Done lovely, now doing motherly. An admirable portioning out of seasons, it always seemed to me; something Italians did well. A problem for the men, but then what isn’t? She was not someone I could imagine Phil Radic showing off around the pool in the King Solomon’s Palace Hotel, Eilat, that’s all I’m saying. Not any more, anyway.

‘Oliver, I don’t know if you ever met my wife,’ he said. ‘Oliver, Lorna.’

We bowed.

It did for one mad moment pass through my mind to say, ‘Your wife’s maiden name wouldn’t happen to be Peachley would it?’ But the question was redundant. I had not the slightest doubt it was her.

Changed beyond recognition, but her. Her. Oh yes, her.

I surely don’t need to explain how I knew. Magnetism, that’s how. The same way a bird born on the Manchester Ship Canal knows, come September, the quickest route to the Zambezi.

For a millionth of a second I ceased to be a living person. For a millionth of a second I was medically dead. No human frame could have turned-that cold and gone on harbouring life. But let no one tell you differently — worse by far than the moment of death is the moment of resurrection. A terrible nausea seized me, as though nothing I had ever done or felt had the slightest meaning. I am still not sure how I managed to stay upright.

And her? From her not a flicker. Had a fly been resting upon her eyelid it would not have registered the slightest encouragement to be gone.

And had the fly been resting on her heart?

Ditto.

‘Well, good to see you, Phil,’ I said.

‘You too, Oliver.’ Then he laughed. ‘Maybe in another forty years.’

And I laughed. ‘Maybe.’

Then I bowed to Lorna.

And Lorna bowed to me.

Later in the day I was sitting thinking about my plane, looking at my watch and waiting for the men’s singles final to start, doubting whether I’d get to see it all, wondering if I cared, when I became conscious that Mr and Mrs Radic were taking up seats in the row behind me. I didn’t turn about to look. But I sensed them through my back, climbing over knees, fussing. Then I felt a hand — a woman’s hand, full of rings — quickly tousling my hair. No lingering. No pressure. Just the gentlest of ruffles. Such as you might give, without thinking, to a favourite child.

Denoting, in my view, what?

That she loved me after all?

Of course not.

That she forgave me?

Not that either.

Just that she remembered who I was.

Which is all any of us Walzers has ever asked.

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