Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

And still another: is she in any sense that matters doing it with him?

‘I want you inside,’ he says.

She doesn’t demur. He twists the brush out of her and leads her in by the neck.

‘Kneel,’ he says.

She kneels.

He pulls off his belt and ties her hands behind. He puts the handle of the brush in her mouth. ‘Taste yourself,’ he says.

He undresses and sits in the little pink velvet bedroom chair. A nice thought of the management’s, a honeymoon touch. Like the pretty matching valance round the bed. Like the vase waiting for the single rose they would inevitably buy. Romantic. Strange they don’t provide the brush that goes up the cunt as well.

‘Come over here,’ he says. ‘On your knees, stay on your knees.’

She does as he tells her.

In reality, in fairness, he has been doing what she tells him. She was the one who lifted up her skirt. She was the one who said use something. For his part he would have been happy to go on floating on their magnetic field, cutting into gateau. But he’s a grown man, a free agent — it’s a free country, Frank — and he’s not obliged to do anything he doesn’t in his heart want to do. One day, when I’m old, he tells himself, I will look back on tonight and I will not forgive myself. But old is still a long way down the track. ‘Now suck me,’ he says.

She seems surprised that this is all he has in store for her. Her eyes quickly register the abstemiousness of his expectations. Suck him? She’s come all the way to Paris with her husband’s best friend and a bag full of spiky brushes just to suck him!

He grabs her hair as her mouth is about to descend on him. ‘I think you should beg to suck me,’ he says.

She begs. ‘I beg you,’ she says.

‘Use my name.’

‘I beg you, Frank.’

Frank!

He comes copiously. In silence. Fingers through her hair. Fingers round her neck. Holding her head still. So that she can swallow everything.

‘Now I would like you to talk to me,’ he says, ‘about the taste of my sperm.’

And she does. At length. Omitting not a single detail, no matter how seemingly trivial. It isn’t difficult to ascertain from her, at the last, that she would rather swallow him than anyone.

Than anyone, Liz?

Than anyone.

Kurt!

Frank!

What are the chances? Arms opening to him, pulling him in, closing around him, boys, boys with greying temples, boys looking at early retirement packages, boys who haven’t spoken or heard from or alluded for a quarter of a century — what did you do? what did I? — what are the chances of a warm welcome?

Mel has never met Kurt. He was gone, stone cold out of the life, well before Mel got her turn. But she knows the story. Frank’s version of the story. And she recognises the symptoms of the herzschmertz that seasonally seizes him, usually at the beginning of spring, which is also when the dreams start, as a consequence of his cleaning out drawers and coming upon old photographs, or worse still, old letters. These days she doesn’t bother to wait for the wistful expressions of regret — ‘Funny how after a certain age you don’t make real friends again. It’s true what they say: no pals like old pals. Et cetera.’ ‘It’s just a tic,’ she tells him, refusing to look at the photographs. ‘If you’d wanted old pals you’d have worked harder at keeping them. You’d have respected the rules of palship more.’ But the fever has to run its course. Mamet plays. Buddy movies. Hands of poker, just the two of them. The sound of him on the phone to directory enquiries — ‘No, I don’t have their address, but there can’t be that many Brylls in Cheltenham.’ Before the business of life carries him on to some new repining.

What are the chances of a warm welcome? ‘I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole,’ Mel warns. Ezekiel.

And she doesn’t even know the whole story. She doesn’t know that drunkenly one night after a GCE examiners’ meeting — he must have been drunk, mustn’t he? — Frank spills the beans to a fellow examiner, a Cheltenham colleague of Kurt’s, and a fellow admirer of Kurt’s wife’s green eyes. Maybe it’s the warmth of that particular admiration that sets him off. He hasn’t seen Liz for months. And no longer collects letters from her from Trafalgar Square. What is there to write about now she has told him — willingly or under duress, he will never know; but it was duress of her own designing, he knows that much — that she prefers the taste of his sperm to that of any man living? You can pack too much into a single night. You can cover too much ground. The new admirer — Billy Yuill (and the name doesn’t help his cause with Frank) — has the look of a man just starting out on the journey. But under serious misapprehensions as to the nature of the terrain. Like someone in flannels and a boater turning up at the foot of Kilimanjaro. ‘You’re dressed wrong for where you’re going,’ Frank wants to tell him. ‘Get out of those picnic clothes. And wipe that starry expression off your face.’ It’s the mother in Liz that Billy is soft on. He likes to see her with her kids. He’s been accompanying her to children’s playgrounds. He’s helped her put a sandpit in the back garden. You’re a vicarious pervert, chum, Frank wants to tell him. You’re a proxy paedophile. He’s not only worried for the children, he is affronted on Kurt’s behalf Men who are smitten by a woman’s wifely little ways, Billy Yuill, should leave her to perform her wifely little functions for her husband. And then there’s the insult to Liz herself to consider. We’re talking person here, Billy. Not mother, not shopper, not angel in the house. We’re talking woman. We’re talking laughter that tears you to tatters. We’re talking fibrous magnetic fields. We’re talking cunt that cuts like a gateau. We’re talking hair brushes. We’re talking cock-sucker.

So let’s talk it.

Billy Yuill has a big meandering mouth. It goes all the way round his face. George Formby, Frank thinks. A mouth for standing hoping by a lamppost with. How he holds it together, while Frank talks to him about the view from Montmartre, the city spread out like a woman’s body, the darkling fuzz of the Bois du Boulogne, the creamy domes of Sacré-Coeur, Frank doesn’t know. But when Frank rings Kurt a week or two later and Kurt tells him never to phone or call or write or otherwise make contact again, not with him, not with Liz, not with their children, not with their children’s children, not now, not ever, he has to face the fact that Billy Yuill’s control over his meandering mouth was only temporary.

So now what are the chances?

There’s champagne tasting at the Burford fine-food shop. It may be barely eleven in the morning and he may only just have polished off his bacon and eggs, packed his bags and paid his bill, but a wedge of pork pie and a gargle of bubbly are just the ticket for Frank. No one brings you Cotswold crusty pie, strong English mustard and French bubbly for elevenses when you’re living at home cowering from the buzzards and nursing your machines.

Already in their shorts, the crap-watchers from Sutton Coldfield congregate outside the shop wondering whether the sign saying free champagne tasting can possibly apply to them. Through the window Frank shakes his head at them. They back away. Not knowing what to do next on their holiday, some of them think about lying down in the road.

You can lead a horse to the water, Frank thinks …

Fortified, he swings the car back on to the A40 and points it in the direction of Cheltenham. His roof is down. Woman’s Hour is on the radio. Someone talking about the new strong eroticism of women’s fiction. Mel’s work is being discussed. Forgetting, not a little proud, turning to share the transport, Frank reaches for his phone to tell her to listen, then remembers that they no longer mingle vicissitudes. His morning courage begins to leak away. He thinks of going back to Burford for another thimbleful of bubbly. This time, the speaker explains to Jenni Murray, it’s ourselves we’re pleasing. Unlike when, Frank wonders, hitting the accelerator.