Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

In fact what Josh removes from the drawer is a cutting from a not very recent Tatler showing his new love at an old ball, on a boat, shaking a leg with Onassis, circa 1970, about the time Frank was moving his own limbs preternaturally slowly to ‘Je t’aime’. Sad. Frank isn’t the only one stuck in the past.

‘Tatler voted her one of the ten most beautiful women in England,’ Josh says.

‘I can see why.’

‘What would you do if you were me?’

‘I’ve told you. I’d enjoy myself’

‘What would you do if you couldn’t enjoy yourself?’

‘What do you mean?’

Josh hesitates. Even for him there are words you can’t use without putting spaces round them. ‘If you had trouble getting it up?’

‘You can’t get it up?’

Josh pulls back from the finality of that. ‘Don’t know about can’t. Haven’t so far. I think it was the fight with Anna-Liisa. You know what it’s like: things get said. You lose your respect for yourself as a man.’

Know what it’s like? Yeah, Frank knows what it’s like, but he takes a moment to think about it, so that he can add to his list. Where was he? Marriage — kaput. Relations with offspring — deeply flawed. Dick — inoperative. Self regard — down the drain. ‘Isn’t it a question in the end,’ he says, ‘for … what is her name?’

‘Sara.’

Sara with an ah. Not Sarah with an air.

‘Isn’t it a question in the end for Sara? What does she think you should do about it?’

‘She doesn’t know. It’s never happened to her before. When you’ve been voted one of the ten most beautiful women in the country you’re used to men being able to fuck you. The first time it happened she sat on my face and cried and cried.’

‘And the second time?’

Josh tries to remember the second time. ‘I think she struck me.’

‘And even that didn’t work?’

‘Joke all you like, matey. It’s hurtful to a beautiful woman. And she’s just coming out of a painful marriage herself. On top of that she’s got to go into hospital for an operation. Only minor, we think, but there’ll be a scar. She’s frightened that’ll make it even harder for me.’

‘And will it?’

Josh shrugs.

They fall silent. An operation has entered the room. You never know with operations. Sensible, maybe, to concentrate on the scar. Never mind whether my lifeblood is draining out through a plug in the theatre floor; what if my lover will be put off by a two and a half inch suture above my bikini line? This is a gallery. And Josh is a connoisseur. Aesthetics matter. Perfection is everything.

‘Do you see a future with this woman?’ Frank asks, once it is clear he must ask something.

‘An erotic future?’

‘I just meant a future. But I suppose eroticism enters into it.’

‘I want five more years of erotic life. With Sara. I’d settle for that.’

Five years, Frank thinks, of Sara sitting on his face and crying. He could have got that with the Swede ages ago. Or with Mel, come to that, speaking figuratively.

Five years. We’re into that phase. Just give us five more years. That was what his father reckoned he would have settled for at the end — just five more years. And he was seventy.

Frank wants to know something. Will there ever be a time when you are happy for it to be over? Not five more years or five more weeks or even five more minutes. Stop now! Case closed.

Silly question.

They walk to a Chinese restaurant, where Josh has a regular table. His own wine. His own won ton bowl. His own chopsticks. Frank imagines them being locked away in his absence like private snooker cues on a rack in a snooker club. They used to play together in Oxford when they weren’t fucking. Now he has an image of Josh at full stretch over the table, trying to pot the pink with a ten-inch stick of ivory. ‘Can you get extensions for those?’ he asks.

Josh takes this to be an allusion to their earlier conversation. His chin recedes. ‘You think an extension might be the answer?’

Their eyes meet in a sort of silent toast to old mirth. Unspoken between them is the realisation that if they let the same amount of time elapse before they meet again they will be seriously old men when they do. Older than Frank’s father was when he died, wanting just five more years.

Josh orders them crispy Woodstock duck, over which he remembers to ask Frank what he’s up to. But he starts to go sleepy, slide down in his seat, drown, as soon as Frank starts to tell him. Frank’s own fault. He won’t return the compliment. Won’t open his heart. Won’t say how much he earns. Won’t say who he loves. Won’t make a little floating picture of Mel’s bum with his hands. Though Christ knows there’s a good enough reason for that — Mel no longer has a bum.

They go back to the gallery for decanted port. Raise glasses. Exchange cards. Before Frank realises that there’s not much point handing over a card with your address on when you don’t have an address. ‘Let me give you my mobile number instead,’ he says. ‘More reliable.’

He needs a new card, with only his mobile and his car registration numbers on it. Frank Ritz, gipsy.

Oh, and of course his e-mail. But for the bad dreams, Hamlet could have boarded happily in a nutshell. Why shouldn’t Frank be bounded in a laptop and count himself a king of infinite space?

Before he goes he asks to have a last look at the Matthew Smiths. Take a bit of fleshly hope away with him. While he’s looking and wishing, it occurs to him that the only paintings on the walls of Josh’s gallery that don’t show a nude on a bed show nudes in a bath.

‘Josh,’ he says, ‘where are the landscapes?’

Josh smiles. A long melancholy smile that seems to go all the way back to the intense seriousness of boyhood. ‘These are the landscapes, matey,’ he says.

SO WHO’S IT to be next?

If this is what reunions with old friends are always like, he’s ready for more. Wheel them on.

He’s stayed away from old friends as a matter of principle since he became old enough to have old friends. As a matter of Mel’s principle, that is. Other than when it comes to crap-watching, Frank has no principles. Principles are Mel’s territory. Don’t look backwards, she is always telling him. Was always telling him. It unsettles you. And you do it out of the worst of motives. There are only two reasons why you ever want to see an old friend: you either want to suffer or you want to crow.

Living with Mel has been like living with an Old Testament prophet. She denies him every pleasure.

And foresees only disasters.

Well, Mel too is now the past, an old friend as of five days ago. He has got through a working week. Had his laundry attended to in a farmhouse bed and breakfast on a stubbly field just outside Shipton-under-Wychwood, and faxed in his weekly column via laptop and modem from a country house hotel in Burford. So far, touch wood, he has eaten well, not got too drunk, and kept his dick in his pants. Not that, touch wood, anyone has invited him to take it out.

Touch wood.

He left Oxford after two nights in Summertown. Sleeping badly. The retrospection gang keeping him awake. Since then he has been trying to get into the Cotswolds proper but has been restricted to the margins by holiday crowds. On a rough calculation, he hasn’t ventured more than five miles from the A40 since he was booted out of his home. Not his fault. Twice he has tried to find a hotel room in Bourton-on-the-Water, but everything is taken. August, the girls at the desk tell him, shaking their heads. He knows it’s August, but what he doesn’t know is why August should affect Bourton-on-the-Water. The Venice of the Cotswolds they call it, on the strength of a couple of man-made streams and a bridge. A sign points to a bird-park in Bourton-on-the-Water and another sign points to a place where you pay to see a model of the village you’re already in, otherwise it’s heritage and has-been shops. Has there been a sitcom set in Bourton-on-the-Water? Unable to park his Saab, unable to find anywhere to sit for lunch, unable to get a room, Frank stands in the middle of Bourton-on-the-Water and scratches his head. He is the only person not wearing shorts. Is there something wrong with him? Wherever there is a blade of grass someone wearing shorts is lying on it. The village is so crowded there are people wearing shorts lying on the road. What happened to the idea — prevalent when Frank was young — that you went to a beach if you wanted to lie down in the sun? What happened to driving to the coast, parking by the sea, eating sandwiches in your car and staring at your death in long trousers, as a way of spending August?