Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

‘It’s only a matter of time,’ Mel told Frank. ‘All she needs is a cottage.’

Then, quite out of the blue, the cottage next door came up, Mel mentioned it to Virna, Virna moved in her things, and overnight became coastal.

She raised the heels of her shoes but remained in every other aspect of her appearance, including the crumpled face, a shirt-washing, church-going Cornishwoman. The heels were all it took. The heels and a certain way of swinging her abdomen when she walked through the village. Within a week of her moving in, there was not a man in Little Cleverley that wasn’t hers for the asking. The illusion was too fascinating. The contrast between what they saw and what they got — like cracking open a crab and finding the flesh of pawpaw — drove them all to madness.

‘I suppose you want some now, as well,’ Mel said to Frank.

‘Virna! Do me a favour.’ But he was only human. When a plain woman well past her prime starts swinging her abdomen, of course you want some.

That it’s a sort of death dance only intensifies your interest. You want some quick. This was what lay behind Frank’s surprise to find her here. Could she still be going? Was she still managing to hang out against age, against the suck of respectability, against re-retirement in Bodmin? Can she still swing that abdomen?

All that’s visible of her from her doll’s house window is her purple crumpled face.

‘You here for long, Frank?’

‘I don’t know, Virna. A day or two.’

‘Be in The Poldark tonight?’

Virna’s first lover was a part-time barman at The Poldark. In the daytime an electrician. They’d opened their account in his van on the way back from a darts match in St Austell. ‘I could die for you, maid,’ he’d told her, as she gave herself to him on a bed of cables in the the back of the van, threw wide her legs at last and to hell with what they did to adulterers. ‘And I could die for you, Vernon,’ she told him. So determined were they to die for each other that they fell asleep with Vernon’s stubby dick still inside her, careless of who might find them, in a lay-by on the A390, right by the Little Cleverley turn-off. ‘But you know, Mel,’ she declared later, ‘in the morning you want to live again!’

Will he be in The Poldark tonight? He’ll be staying there, but will he be in the bar, that’s what Virna means. Will he be joining in the singing? ‘Going Up Camborne Hill Coming Down’? ‘Why, why, why, Delilah’? He can’t say. That will depend on Clarice.

By the time Mel had finished helping inland women from as far away as Liskeard and Redruth to ditch their no-good husbands and de factos by finding them a coastal cottage close to hers, the entire terrace had become a sanctuary for absconding beldams. Seven fishermen’s cottages, all but one of them occupied by rusting matrons looking for their last good time. Or more often, their first good time. The odd one out being Mel herself, who, having got rid of Frank by proxy, as it were, still hadn’t got rid of him in the flesh.

‘Ironic,’ he observed, ‘that I should be the only man in residence.’

‘Don’t count your chickens,’ she warned him.

The terrace became a haunted little place. Not only the souls of the originally rejected husbands, but those of subsequently rejected lovers, flitted here, tapped on the window panes, pleaded to be let back in. They would come wandering late at night, in the heart-ache hours, as silent as wraiths. Sometimes, as Mel and Frank were sitting reading by the fire, they would see a face appear at the window, look in distractedly, fragment with pain, and then vanish. Sometimes, the light-sleeping Mel would jump up suddenly in bed, disturbed by the sounds of low male weeping in the street below.

Magic was afoot. One woman going to the bad attracts its own sort of curiosity among the men of a village. But a row of them raised a peculiar ire in the breasts of the jilted. What had happened wasn’t private, wasn’t individually about them. Someone was casting spells. The finger pointed to the outsider, Melissa Paul. The witch. And the village knew what to do to witches. Rubbish suddenly began to appear in her garden. Suggestive, systematic rubbish. Mel would come out in the early morning to stroke the worms and there it would be — the masticated carcass of a chicken, bones, gristle, parson’s nose, the liver and the kidneys still in their plastic bag; a party-pack not unlike the one Frank’s girlfriend number one had posted off to Frank’s girlfriend number two, only without the registered envelope. Then her cat disappeared. For a while she was frightened to be out late on her own. The village lights went off at twelve. Then the glorious silent starry blackness that stirred her soul became her enemy. A car drove her into a hedge. A can of beer was thrown at her from an unknown window. She was threatened. She was mugged. Once, outside the cottage, a holiday maker walking her dog was punched to the ground and damn-near raped. In the dark the woman resembled her. A day later a card was posted through her letter box — NEXT TIME IT WON’T BE AN EMMET.

‘Look on the bright side,’ Frank said, forgetting to go quietly. ‘They’ve accepted you.’

There was no point calling the police. The husband she had encouraged Virna to leave behind in Bodmin was a sergeant in the force.

Clarice was not among those Mel enticed to the terrace. Clarice was well established as a woman going to the bad on her own terms long before Mel turned up. And those terms did not include dumping your previous life and running for it. Why so emotional? Why be so either-orish about it? Clarice had no ambition to expire in the back of someone’s van in a lay-by on the A390. She wanted to laugh, not die. But then she had Elkin, and as long as Elkin had a pot of paint to piss in, his own tankard waiting for him at The Poldark, and Clarice to stick the price stickers on the slates and man the till, he left her alone. Elkin was the means to her freedom, not an obstacle to it.

The one time Elkin did play up, he delivered Clarice clean into their hands. Mel’s and Frank’s hands, that is. Hers and his. His and hers. In truth no one knew, the time Elkin did play up and subjected Clarice to either-orishness, whose hands were whose. And no one cared.

Did Elkin blow because he had reached the point where he could take no more, or was it a discrete one-off explosion, caused by the gossip that followed Clarice’s interpretation of Molly Bloom at the annual Little Cleverley Dramatic Society summer gala night? Impossible to say. What’s jealousy, anyway, if it isn’t overheated love? The pan might boil over occasionally, but you can’t blame the flame for the soup.

Elkin didn’t see Clarice’s Molly Bloom with his own eyes. It was his domino night at The Poldark. And he probably wouldn’t have gone to see her had he been free. He never particularly liked going anywhere that he had to wash the paint out of his beard for, or change out of his shorts and smock for; but he especially never liked trudging up the hill to the village hall, where he had to sit on uncomfortable seats and listen to something arty. He made his own art. Out of soot, urine and slate. And when you’ve made art all day you want a break from it at night. For Frank, who watched crap all day, it was of course different. As it was for Mel, who wrote crap all day. For them the trudge up the hill was nothing but pleasure and relief. As was Clarice’s Molly Bloom, whether or not she put in twice as many yes’s as James Joyce had already given her.

Discussing the performance afterwards, Frank reckoned it was Clarice’s Cornishness that made her Molly Bloom unlike any he had seen before. The Cornish talk as though they have shingle in their mouths. You hear the tide pulling at the beach. You hear the whole gravelly content of the ocean bottom stir and shift. In Clarice’s Cornish mouth the familiar hopeful lyricism of Molly Bloom’s ribaldry was ground into the cold knowingness of the mermaids, more a dare than an affirmation, the shipwreck taunts of the rock-bound sirens, whose yes I said yes I will Yes is a diabolic act of ventriloquism, your words not theirs, yes to their porphyritic breasts, yes to their perpetual seaweed-embrace, yes to death by drowning Yes.