Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

‘John Major?’ It crosses Frank’s mind that John Major has been buying Stanley Spencers and not paying for them.

‘The recession, matey.’

They are standing in the Sickert room where, not that many minutes before, a deal of some magnitude was struck. You only have to look about you, at the alarm systems if not at the art, to see that there’s no other sort of deal you can strike in this room. Josh Green reads his thoughts. ‘He doesn’t come in every day, you know.’

Frank doesn’t know what to say. ‘Must be handy when he does, though,’ he tries.

‘He pays off what’s owing on my credit card. Do you know what it costs to run this place? Rates, insurance, staff, bank interest …?’

Josh never was one to hold back on embarrassing personal details. But this is quick.

‘… advertising, international fairs …’

‘I can imagine it must cost to corner the market in Camden Town nudes,’ Frank says. Wherever he looks, Camden Town nudes, Sickert’s wonderful sticky suburban trollops wasting the riches of their flesh in dying light.

Josh corrects him. ‘Mornington Crescent, most of them.’

‘Even costlier, then.’

‘You don’t think I own all these.’

‘Josh, I’ve got no idea what you own and what you don’t. But I can’t believe you’re not proud of what you’ve achieved, you two. Together.’

‘Together?’ Josh Green scratches flesh at the corner of his left eye. ‘Who’s together?’

Frank knows not to get too excited too soon. A man can be not together with a Finn but very much together with a Swede. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

‘Not as sorry as I am. We had an apartment in Rome, she’s got that. We had a boat, she’s got that. She’s even got the Ferrari. I’m having to get about in her Fiesta.’

‘Is this recent?’

‘Too recent. We should have done it years ago. The passion goes out of it, matey. And that’s when you should call it a day, when the passion goes out of it.’

‘Josh, we’re middle aged. The passion is meant to go out of it.’

‘You sound like my daughter. Act your age, she tells me. Well I appreciate that, I tell her, coming from someone I’ve always tried to treat like a friend. Precisely my complaint, she tells me; I don’t want a friend, I want a father. Don’t come to me, then, the next time you do want a friend, I tell her.’

‘Do I remember a little girl from Oxford? Jeannie, was it?’

Josh pulls a face. Who cares what she’s called.

‘How’s she doing, anyway? Married? Kids of her own?’

‘Married? Joanne? Course not. She’s gay. Lives with a bird in Lewisham. They run an electrical business together.’

Frank lowers his virginal eyes. A generational thing. ‘Are you all right about that?’ he risks.

‘The electrical business?’

‘No, no, the — ‘ Frank swallows air, like a fish hauled out of water.

‘Just pulling your leg, matey. Yeah. We knew before she did. We were surprised it took her so long to find out. Anna-Liisa spotted it right away. You know how you notice things when it’s not your own child. In a way she was closer to her than either Jill or I were. Perhaps because she couldn’t have any of her own.’

‘Jeannie?’

‘Anna-Liisa.’

So how are we going so far, Frank asks himself. Business — in trouble. Marriage — kaput. Relations with offspring — deeply flawed. Prospects of grandchildren — zilch. Way of life — fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf. If he could bank on every visit to old friends going as well as this one, he’d do it more often.

He doesn’t want to see Josh Green unhappy. He just wants to be certain that fifty’s no good for anyone. Equality in dismay, that’s all he’s after.

‘I can see what you’re thinking,’ Josh says. Some of the merriment that Frank remembers from their language school days has returned to his eyes. ‘You’re thinking I’ve got a bird myself’

‘Whereas you haven’t.’

‘Whereas I have.’

‘And she’s the reason you and Anna-Liisa broke up?’

‘Not the reason. No. She was just someone I leaned on while we were breaking up. Her marriage was in trouble, too. We leaned on each other.’

‘When you say leaned …’

Josh pulls a photograph out of his wallet. ‘Look. What would you do?’

Frank holds his breath as the photograph comes into focus. Softly. Softly. But it’s all right. Not anyone he knows. Not anyone he can’t bear not to know. A squelchy blonde. Squinting in the sun, on the walkway of a marina. Wide apart eyes. Striped nautical jumper over good breasts. Slight blip below, where the belly is wanting to roll. Not so much a boat blonde as a boat blonde’s mother. Navy sail-cloth skirt over deck shoes. Strong legs. Still. It’s the still part that’s upsetting. The defiance. The bravery. Death where is your sting-a-ling? Age where are your ravages? Frank has seen a painting in Josh’s gallery he would buy if only he were a pop star — a Matthew Smith nude rolling in colour, falling through an everywhere of paint, the creamy bedclothes unravelling as she whirls, but bearing her up like a lavishly upholstered magic carpet of clouds, her flesh buoyed, protected from all harm, inexpugnably alive. But Sickert’s truer. Forget space, time’s the issue. It doesn’t matter how voluptuously we turn a woman’s body through its planes, the moment we become conscious of it in time — the moment she becomes conscious of it in time — not all the paint in Camden Town can cushion it against tragedy. But Frank’s a sport. ‘I’d lean on her, too,’ he says, offering to return the photograph.

Josh isn’t ready to take it back. He waits, hungry for more appreciation. ‘So where did you meet her?’ is all Frank can think of asking.

‘Chicago Art Fair.’

‘You do a lot of fairs?’

‘Used to. Couldn’t resist them. You know what they say an art fair is?’

Frank doesn’t.

Josh Green the man is suddenly illuminated by Josh Green the boy. ‘A cunt mine.’

Frank’s too impressionable. He can’t hear of a cunt mine without wanting to go down it. But that’s all right by Josh. He waits, roseate with pride, for Frank, groggy with gas, to come back up.

‘And now that you’ve mined your treasure — ‘Frank starts to say. He means to turn a compliment, but he is anxious that his fidelity to the metaphor shouldn’t lead him back into the cunt of a woman he can hardly be said to know.

But that too is all right by Josh. He’s been waiting for Frank to open his eyes again only so that he can now close his own. Drowning momentarily was something he always did, Frank remembers, as a prelude to paying a sentimental compliment himself. When he surfaces he looks queerly transfigured, as though he’s glimpsed God’s face among the fishes. ‘Oh, matey,’ he says, ‘you should see her from behind. You should see the lovely little bum on her.’ He makes a mould of it with his hands for Frank’s behoof, a pair of trembling palms like scales for a fairy.

‘Josh, how old is she?’

‘Forty-eight, forty-nine. But the bum’s half that age. Peter Blake was going to use a photograph I’d taken of it for his Nine Prettiest Bottoms in the National Gallery …’

‘But?’

‘It isn’t in the National Gallery.’

He goes over to a drawer and begins sorting through some papers. Frank wonders if he’s going to bring out the photograph of the lovely little bum. Men do this. They confer publicly over photographs taken in the strictest and most solemn confidence. Frank has done it himself. Here you are boys, what think you of this? Nice, eh? Mine. Cunt mine. Mein Cunt. But not of Mel. Mel read him too well. Three weeks into their relationship she confiscated his camera. That was after confiscating all the photographs his camera had taken. He’s not sure he’s ever forgiven her. That you should destroy the previous lot in order to supplant them with poses of your own — that’s only just. But to cut off the supply both ends — where’s the fairness in that?