Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

He drops down into Porlock for afternoon tea and finds a film crew painting the town into period picturesqueness. The all-singing, all-dancing late eighteenth century. Maybe they are doing Biographia Literaria for telly.

‘It is not every man that is likely to be improved by a country life,’ declaims Colin Firth Coleridge in a white knotted muffler, while the children whip their hoops along the cobbles and the costermongers bawl their wares. ‘Education, or original sensibility, or both, must pre-exist, if the changes, forms, and incidents of nature are to prove a sufficient stimulant. And where these are not sufficient, the mind contracts and hardens by want of stimulants: and the man becomes selfish, sensual, gross, and hard-hearted –

Cut to opium den.

The BAFTA, Frank warrants, is already in the bag.

Meanwhile, although there is nothing to look at except a few men in overalls painting the doors of houses, the ill-educated and the insensible cluster in their gross contracted summer shorts and wait for the stars to arrive. Who will be Dorothy? Who will be Hazlitt?

‘I think I’ll wait to see it on the box,’ Frank tells an insufficiently stimulated family from Wolverhampton who think that the whole thing is going to start and finish the minute the paint dries.

‘Isn’t eet loive?’ the head of the family asks.

Out of instinctual politeness, Frank offers to think about it. ‘Unlikely,’ he says. ‘But you could ask one of the cameramen when he arrives.’

‘When will that boi?’

‘In about a fortnight,’ Frank guesses.

He gets back into his Saab and climbs and then drops into the twin towns on the Lyn. Welcome to Yuill country.

This time he doesn’t go looking for the best hotel. Anything will do. Anything will have to do given that he’s running out of readies and the Lyns are running out of rooms. He takes an attic with a gable window that gives him the sea. Then goes in search of the tea he didn’t get in Porlock.

A sign outside the only cafe that isn’t full entices him in with its promise of a VERY SPECIAL TEA CAKE OFFER.

‘What is that?’ he asks the waitress.

‘I’ll just ask,’ she says, disappearing into the kitchen. Half a minute later she is back. ‘It’s a tea cake,’ she says.

‘And the very special part?’

She hesitates, as though it might come to her if she can temporarily quieten everything else that is happening in her brain. There is something airy and ballooning about her. Unlocated. She wears a little frilly maid-of-all-work apron over black jeans and running shoes. It’s not her fault, Frank thinks. She is unimproved by country life.

‘I’ll just ask,’ she says. Half a minute later she is back. ‘It comes with tea,’ she says.

‘I’ll have it,’ Frank says.

He pulls a face to himself, meaning all I want is a quiet life. But all he really wants is crap.

And he gets it.

How can you crappify a tea cake?

You can, that’s all. A rural thing. After which, he has a further sensual errand to attend to. One of his machines needs to be replaced. His hair drier. Along with much else he finds it hard to be without, the old one blew up in Cheltenham. Ever since Mel got him out of his Palermo suits and taught him how to imprison his hair in a pony tail, and then, when times changed and men were expected to look more like minstrels than their mothers, to free it from a pony tail and coif it down over his eyes and ears in dreadlock-like corkscrews, he has gone nowhere without a drier. The moment he takes his drier out of his luggage, Mel is with him. Now, like the golden bowl of virtue, it’s broken.

As is the heart of the woman who runs the only electrical shop he can find. She sits behind the counter in her coat, with her head down, staring at the linoleum floor, unmoved by the appearance of a customer. There is no light on in the shop. But then there is nothing in the shop you’d want to see. In a matter of seconds Frank is able to do a complete stock check. One iron, one kettle, two toasters, one set of curling tongs, a box of fuse wire, a dozen lightbulbs in dented cartons, three jars of locally made runner-bean chutney, and a hair drier. Since a hair drier is all he wants, enough is a feast. He hands the woman a twenty pound note. She gasps, thinks about holding the note to the light, remembers that she doesn’t know what to look for and that she doesn’t care anyway, and then gasps again when she sees she has no change. Her fingers hover like little starving birds over the empty chambers of the till. ‘Oh,’ she says. Frank finds her the right money. ‘Oh,’ she says again. She doesn’t once raise her eyes to Frank. She is his age. And once would have been pretty, in the crushed-petal-under-the-heel-of-an-infantry-officer style. Being cast away in a dead shop, Frank thinks, is the same as being marooned in a body you don’t want to employ for fucking any more. Neither of us has anything to sell. Neither of us wants customers. Re-training — that’s all we require.

As he’s closing the door behind him, he hears the woman say, ‘Oh, I must — ‘ But she doesn’t bother to finish.

After dumping his new drier back at the hotel and pausing to watch Oprah talking to grannies in filmy frocks who mean to fuck till they drop, he takes the cliff railway down to Lynmouth — that’s assuming he’s been in Lynton — where there’s a sea wall with lines of grannies on it, puffing hard, showing their bloomers and eating pasties in the heat. He takes the cliff railway back up again and wonders whether to risk the Valley of the Rocks where, according to Hazlitt, Coleridge ran out bareheaded in a thunderstorm ‘to enjoy the commotion of the elements’.

Does Frank need any more commotion just this minute? The sea roars and froths at the edges, otherwise it’s a millpond; there is not a cloud in the sky, not a whiffle of wind; if you jumped from the cliff you could determine the precise parabola of your descent, and not make a mark on the imperturbable surface of the water. No thunderstorm looks likely on this benign Gulf-stream-touched day. So Frank decides to give it a go. What he hasn’t calculated is the effect the benches are going to have on him. The North Walk is not a demanding ascent, but this is retirement country and retirees like to know there’s going to be a bench to sit on every couple of yards. He’s not averse to a comfortable sea-view bench himself. But on the third or fourth he tries he notices a brass plaque. These are memorial benches. To the memory of George and Mabel Wonnacott. To Ron Creacombe from his sister Alice. In loving memory of Lucy Pomeroy (1948–1983) who loved the sea, from her darling husband Frank.

He has nothing but respect for the memory of Mr and Mrs Wonnacott, and for Ron Creacombe come to that, but it’s Lucy Pomeroy who finds him. She died when she was only thirty-five. A child. She was born the same year Mel was born. She loved the sea, Mel loves the sea. She had a darling husband Frank, Mel has — But what does Mel have?

He sits on Lucy Pomeroy’s bench and grieves for them both, Mel and Lucy. What a touching thing it is, to name a bench after someone you love, to heave it up on to the cliffs, and to leave it there forever. Does he come here, then, Frank Pomeroy? Does he put on his suit and buy a bunch of flowers and come to visit her? Does he stretch himself out upon her and sob his heart out? Or is it comfort enough to know that she is always here, where she loved to be, bareheaded in the commotion of the elements?

And another question. Has Frank Pomeroy got over it? Do you ever?

He’s been having disaster dreams. Every time his head hits the pillow he imagines Mel on fire or being swallowed up by her own garden. ‘O mercy!’ to myself I cried, ‘If Lucy should be dead!’ He knows what Mel would say. If only Lucy would be dead! — that’s the way to understand the emotional grammar of that poem. It’s written in the wishful subjunctive, just as your dreams are. You’re only imagining me consumed by the elements because that’s what you secretly want to happen. Nothing’s changed. You’ve been murdering me in your head ever since you met me.