Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

Only to their wives and girlfriends.

Sitting in a cab in a traffic jam in Battersea he watched a group of the spunk-filled body-built labouring young patch a six-inch hole in the road, one on a drill, another on a shovel, another in the cab of a heavy roller. They jerked and twitched and whistled and grinned and bawled and rattled and drove and shovelled and shook and larked and slipped and yanked and box-kicked and cuffed and goosed and nutted and scratched and yawned and farted and jerked and twitched … Sport with them? Might just as well, Frank thought, go skylarking with a colony of mud crabs.

Barely a woman went by whom he did not consider from some angle or imagine in some contortion. Neither decrepitude nor derangement stood in the way of his passing fancy. If she were old he re-conceived her young; if she were disordered he reassembled her. But for the male animal — whatever the age, whatever the colour, whatever the condition — he had no possessive or regenerative instinct. As they were they were. They were no business of his.

And neither, clearly, were his dreams. He read some Edmund White, just to be on the safe side. But the high falutin’ squiffiness, all the talk of the beautiful and the brave, and then straight into the old brown crack, only confirmed what he suspected. He wasn’t gay. He didn’t have what it took.

And now?

Say ah! and he’d still turn the litmus paper blue, he’s sure of that. But he has to concede that there’s a pattern to his socio-sexual preferences that isn’t all it should be. He’s too deferential. There’s too much docility in him. When he kisses the likes of Josh Green, he lets them make the running. They envelop him. When he smooches with D she hoists him up to her level. He allows whores to take liberties with him. He adopts the submissive posture. His recollections of Mel’s scarlet prose disturb him. It’s all very well laughing at Lorenzo; the truth is he, Frank, wouldn’t say no if some Sabina with a throbbing cunt offered to chain his dick to the mouse of her computer. Not say no! He’d kill for the chance. Better still, be killed for the chance. Watching a late-night telly programme sympathetic to perverts, he has learnt that sado-masochists divide themselves into tops and bottoms. He’s a bottom. That’s what the gay vegetarians had intended by their mooning cappuccino — not that the bottom was his tendency, but that the bottom was him. He’d misread the nature of their gift. They’d presented him with his portrait — that was all.

Now see the advantage of age. Discover a submissive tendency in yourself when you’re seventeen and you have plenty to worry about. How will you describe yourself to your future wife? How will you be able to beat your children without wishing it were the other way round? Which clubs will you join? But when you’re one-twentieth as old as the millennium you don’t have any such anxieties. So you prefer the lower bunk. Who cares? What bearing can that have on the little that’s left of your life? Lie where you like! If Frank feared there was any real danger that he’d sink into senility — senility proper — in black stockings and a pinny, doing the dishes for a touch-me-not whore in a brushed nylon housecoat, that’d be another matter; but it would be with the housework as it had been with the ogling of male bodies in Covent Garden — he wouldn’t know where to start.

So nothing’s wrong, that’s where, on the fringes of sleep, on his last night in the next room to the fat comedian, he is content to leave it. He is not in any danger. All’s well. Nothing’s up. It can’t possibly do him anything but good, though, to be reminded of a time when he cracked the whip, when he was indubitably the top, and had the sovereignty not just of one bottom but of two, to prove it.

Little Cleverley it is, then.

‘ ’LO, FRANK. YOU all right?’

He has no sooner parked his Saab in the old familiar ferry car-park, locked, stretched, and once breathed the fishy air, than he is greeted by the owner of The Poldark Inn parking her car. When was he last here? Seven years ago? Eight? Yet she hails him as though she’d pulled him a pint only the night before.

Time moves differently down here.

‘You got a room for tonight, Vera?’

She’ll check for him. It’s a busy weekend coming. The last before the kids go back to school. The last weekend of emmet hell before the better class, freer-spending, childless mob descend.

It all comes flooding back to him, not only how differently time moved down here, but how it was mapped by the temperaments of the tourists. Invasion was always the name of the game, rape and pillage however you cut the deck; but at least when the marauding underclass had gone, in a last explosion of flying pasties and jemmied tills and howling snot-strewn babies, you could lie back and let the middle classes walk all over you in soft-soled cabin-creepers.

Is that why he’d enjoyed it down here — because it was a submissive, masochistic place?

Hang on, though. He hadn’t enjoyed it down here. It was Mel who had enjoyed it down here.

Mel who’d found it. Mel who’d wanted it. Mel who’d allowed him to join her only on the understanding that he’d go quietly.

The only part he’d unambiguously enjoyed was Clarice.

But then Mel had found her as well.

It didn’t answer to the truth of things, though, to separate Clarice, however she came about, from the place she came about in. Wasn’t there a sense in which Clarice was Little Cleverley? L’état, c’est moi; Nellie, I am Heathcliffe — that sort of sense. And yet Clarice wasn’t in the tiniest bit submissive or masochistic. She had a genius for acquiescence, which is quite different.

It’s her acquiescent nature that leads Frank to believe she will still be here. Elkin the slate painter will never leave Little Cleverley, never has left Little Cleverley, not even for a long weekend. He made it to the outskirts of Plymouth once and immediately turned back. Couldn’t hack the crowds. Clarice has been acquiescing to Elkin, on a personal as well as on a business level, for too long to think of leaving him now. Only if Elkin’s dead is there any chance Clarice won’t be here. And even if Elkin’s dead she will still go on running the Slate Gallery, because that’s what Elkin will have wanted her to do. She will never run out of original Elkins to sell; when Frank was last here it was Elkin’s boast that he had two hundred thousand slates painted, in reserve stock, as a safeguard against a sudden loss of limb or inspiration. He was getting on, moving into stroke territory, the country of the blind, arthritisville. He could wake up one morning and just not want to do it any more. Enough with the badgers and the blue tits. Enough with the fucking sailing ships. So while he could, while he still had the stomach for it, he was knocking off one hundred and fifty slates a day, which was a third more than he needed to keep up with what the shop could shift even at the height of the season. In the event of his death, all Clarice would have to do was drill the holes, thread the cords, and hang the art. She was looked after beyond the grave. All this for the small price of acquiescing to a tedious old fart who sat humming in shorts and a smock the whole day, with his brushes pushed into his beard, breaking slates into unusual shapes and colouring them with sufficient skill for the form of a seal or a puffin to disclose itself to the astigmatic crap-watching clamjamphrie from Wolverhampton who trooped through their gallery with neither hope nor purpose for seven months of the wheeling year.

Yes, it is Clarice’s fate to be here forever. Like the rocks beneath, the poor bitch.