Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

He never did find the one he was looking for, the one who had started him off. Whoever she was, she had vanished like a mermaid into the deep proletarian sea. It pleased Frank to think that maybe she had just nipped out of her house on a whim that night, fed up with the housework, short of a few bob and who knows, in the mood for a gam and a gobble herself. What if he were her first and only client? And if so, what contribution had he made to her understanding of society? Did she now suppose that no Oxford-educated gentleman would dream of popping his dick into a lady’s mouth until she’d taken out her teeth?

Back in Oxford he was carless and therefore, as far as the street went, whoreless; but he sometimes cycled late into the underworld of Cowley, just to keep his eye in.

Looking, anyway, was always mainly what it was about. There and back and round and round they drove, these Flying Dutchmen of the cobbled stews, often with no intention of ever stopping. You stopped when you were finally persuaded you wanted sex. But sex wasn’t the compulsion that united Frank and his fellow obsessionals — members of the skilled or spiritual professions, most of them, thinkers, carers, healers, teachers — as they swung and circled, stalled, juddered, peered, hovered, maybe even haggled, then swung again. Close shaves, that’s what they were after. Nearly-sex.

And nearly-seen. Eyes you think you know through whoremonger-misted windscreens thinking they know you. That your doctor? That your patient? That your wife’s father wondering that my daughter’s husband? Nearly-seen and nearly-caught. So who needs the sex?

They were in it for the money. Even more than the whores were in it for the money, the punters were in it for the money. Up until he’d been gammed for five shillings in the playground of his old primary school, Frank had toed the line in the matter of paying for sex. Who me? That’ll be the day! When I have to pay for sex I’ll be too old to want sex. But once hand over the cash and you know you’ll never want it free again. What pay for sex, me? Maybe not, since sex, strictly, is not the commodity you’re paying for. Shame, that’s what you get for your pair of tusheroons. Yourself disprized. Which is where the driving round and round and never stopping comes in. Four hours up and down the same unlit street then home with nothing but an empty petrol tank to show enables a man to disprize himself without going seriously into overdraft.

All the same, Frank was grateful for his bike. No whore was going to gam him on the sprung seat of his bicycle. Whereas, if he took a car to Cowley he knew he’d blow his whole student grant there in a single term. Not because the whores of Cowley looked particularly good. But because they didn’t.

English whores have always understood the subtle seductiveness of dressing down. Where the whores of Italy get themselves up in promises of grotesquery beyond the invention of Boccaccio or Fellini, and the whores of France put on pearls and court shoes so that Frenchmen might realise their fantasy of sleeping with their uncles’ wives, or their brother’s daughters, the whores of England reach for the first items in their wardrobes, confident that as long as they are turned out more frumpishly than the women their punters live with they won’t go home empty handed. A shrewd comprehension of the nexus of sex, money and necessary dissatisfaction is at work here. And the whores of the West Midlands, taking that to be the carpet slipper of country bounded by the the M5, the M4 and the A40, comprehend it better than any. Let loose in Cowley, Frank would have pauperised himself in a matter of weeks, trying to figure out why he wanted to finger the fur of women who reminded him of dinner ladies.

Late as it is by the time he has his car back, the motor of insurgency that is now driving him decides not even to try trolloping it in Cheltenham but to rev straight for Gloucester.

It’s ten miles to Gloucester and he isn’t sober. But Frank can’t be sure he’d have got it right in Cheltenham. He’s out of practice. No whores since Mel’s been in his life. Honour, partly. Love, partly. But mainly no need of them. Why go to whores to have himself disprized when he’s got Mel?

It’s also more difficult now than it was in his heyday to be certain that the nodding dolly propping up a lamppost with a fag between her fingers is in fact on the job. There’s every chance that she’s a company director just slipped out of a strictly non-smoking office to have a puff. Go anywhere you like in the West End during business hours and you see them, loitering on street corners and in doorways, one leg up behind, sucking hard on a Marlboro, and nodding with the stress of the job — whores for all the world. As always, it’s morality that makes for harlotry. True, there’s little likelihood of his hitting on a company director out smoking in a doorway in Cheltenham at one in the morning, but better to be safe than sorry. Gloucester has a meaner reputation. You can’t come to grief in Gloucester. That’s to say you can come to grief in Gloucester.

Besides, there’s a cathedral there.

‘Gloucester, Gloucester, Gloucester.’ It took an Italian prince, as imagined by an American novelist, to grasp the sissing loucheness of English cathedral cities. Until he read The Golden Bowl, Frank thought he was alone in associating infidelity with cloisters and tombs and towers. It was a joke at the Oxford language school that as soon as Frank fell for one of his charges he whisked her away for the weekend to Wells or Winchester. Before she threw in her lot with the Finn, the Swede had been earmarked for Salisbury. Before he met the Swede, he had the Finn’s name down for Lichfield. But these were just a young man’s trial runs. The simple sex that is a prelude to the more serious business of betrayal. Later, when the golden bowl is cracked, you get the point of cathedral cities. Wives and lovers, other men’s wives and lovers, those are the ones with whom you do the gargoyles; best friends, best friends of your lovers, those are the ones you take to evensong. Had Liz not wanted Paris, she’d have got Gloucester. ‘Gloucester, Gloucester, Gloucester’ — like an old song, the prince’s unholy mistress marvels. In Gloucester he lost her. Except, in the case of the prince, he didn’t. In Gloucester he tossed her. It was only later that he lost her. But let’s not spoil the story.

Frank knows he shouldn’t be drinking and driving. But the part of him that cares what he should and shouldn’t be doing has been inoperative most of the evening. Even Mel’s talking spleen, still in the Saab’s glove compartment, gets short shrift. Fuck off, Mel. A man’s dick’s his own. And anyway, isn’t driving good for drunks? He has his roof down. The night fans him. The moon sucks the poisons from his system. The convention of having to stay roughly on his side of the road — to say nothing of having to stay on the road at all — keeps his eyes open. If he’s not careful, by the time he gets to Gloucester he’ll be stone cold sober.

Although his nose tells him that he should skirt the city and make for the Bristol end, a sign for the cathedral lures him into the centre. He doesn’t get out of the car. Under the moon, spotlit and scaffolded, the cathedral nods at him like a giant whore. He looks her up and down, decides against, and drives off. A one-way system carries him in a direction he doesn’t want to go, then dumps him at the gates of Her Majesty’s Prison. He stops the car. He’s been outside this penitentiary before. How many years ago was that? Crazy Jane, his first girlfriend with a mind, brought him here, stoned, on a train from Oxford. She wanted to stand outside the prison all night. A vigil. At first she told him it was for her brother, who was languishing in a cell on a trumped-up embezzlement charge. Hugo, the darling of the family. Hugo the golden boy, who’d fenced for England in the Olympics until he lost an eye in a shooting accident on their uncle’s estate. He’d gone to the bad after that, accumulating gambling debts, losing the hand of the second daughter of the present Duke of Gloucester and shortly after that losing his membership at White’s. There wasn’t much he hadn’t lost in his short life, young Hugo. But he hadn’t so far lost his head as to diddle Rothschild’s out of a million. No, he would never have done that. Not Hugo. She’d cried, cataloguing her favourite brother’s misfortunes, and Frank had put his arm around her as they circled the prison, trying to see over the wall, trying to guess which window might have been his. But at about three in the morning she confessed she had no brother Hugo and that the person she was invigilating was in fact an old school friend called Franklin.