Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

Who was Mel to demur from that? All she cared to add was that she thought Clarice’s writhings on the covered snooker table — doubling as the Bloom’s lumpy old jingly bed and the Alameda gardens — also played their part in making hers a Molly to remember. As did the baby-dolly night attire Clarice wore, to suggest both the drawers into which the cuckolded Leopold would soon come tonguing and an Algeciras romper suit for kissing in, under the jasmine moon.

Perhaps she’d overdone it, that was Mel’s point. Not an accusation, just a wonder. Perhaps — in the name of dramatic verisimilitude, she didn’t doubt — they’d all seen too far down, then too far up, Clarice’s shorty nightie.

On this, Frank kept his counsel. He’d always seen the point of Clarice. Enjoyed the sight of her flouncing through the village, her horsey face never not decipherably eye-lined and unequivocally lipsticked, her red hair flying, her small breasts pushed out, her jeans cut tight into her cunt which she bore in front of her the way some men carried their dicks, as though it were an encumbrance not of their own making’ or desiring, a gift to others no doubt, but a sore trial for them. When he could remember to be envious, he envied the men who were said to have enjoyed her. But she wasn’t an erotic necessity to him. She was too the thing she was. Although not exactly a beauty herself, like beauties proper she left you nothing to add or subtract. If she’d suddenly gone deaf or developed a squint he might have gone for her. As she was, he didn’t. But the extravagance of her Molly Bloom changed all that. The extravagance of her Molly Bloom was akin to suddenly developing a squint. She’d flung herself full length from pocket to pocket of the snooker table and shown the whole of Little Cleverley — or at least that part of it that had crowded into the village hall — the inside of her thighs, and then she’d hung over the side of the snooker table, and showed them every blue-vein of her pink-tipped conical breasts. This was the flaw that showed him his way. He could, after all, add to her. He could fuck her into better taste.

She’d gone too far, even for coastal Little Cleverley. The Yacht Club with its louche professional membership would have supported her of course, but the Yacht Club was too preoccupied with getting drunk in the evening to think of turning out to applaud James Joyce. All the next day, and all the next, those who had been there described what they had seen to those who hadn’t. And then those who hadn’t seen but at least had heard, described it to those who hadn’t seen or heard. One or two of the older village women hissed when they passed her in the street. Even the rampaging harlots in Mel’s terrace felt it behoved them to be censorious. ‘I can forgive adultery,’ Virna said, in a purple fluster, ‘but I can’t condone exhibitionism.’

‘A flogging, do you think?’ Frank wondered.

Virna thought about it. ‘No, not a flogging,’ she said. ‘It would excite the men too much.’

But the men already were excited. Like Frank, there wasn’t one of them who didn’t see a way of adding to Clarice now. Or subtracting from her.

And Elkin? No one knew what Elkin knew. He had the gift of withdrawing into himself. He could sit smirking into his beard in his corner of The Poldark, sipping his favourite bitter from his special tankard, and not notice that Clarice was sucking off the whole pub. But the morning when Angie, who ran the National Trust Shop, popped her head around the door of the Slate Gallery and called out ‘Slut!’, Elkin did look up quickly from his painting. He looked up, looked around, pulled his right eyelid, greeted Angie — ‘You all right, Angie?’ — then looked down again.

What happened subsequently — subsequently being, by Elkin’s slow-moving clock, some six hours later — Frank heard from Mel who heard it from Clarice. Mel was out on the cliffs with her notebook. She loved the early evenings of late summer, when she felt she was stealing light from the seasons. Just one more long afternoon. Just one more eked out sunset. Little Cleverley was suiting her. She was getting her quiet. Frank had never seen her look better. She clambered among the rocks in her climbing boots and her no-sexual-nonsense dungarees, the bib unfastened, her arms brown but her chest soft in a faded blue singlet. Workman below, goddess above. A sort of centaur: half brute, half angel. Maybe that was what Clarice thought when she saw her, too. Only it would have been the angel half that attracted her. She’d done with brutes.

The surprising thing from Mel’s point of view was not the sight of Clarice sitting on a bench on Deadman’s Point holding a handkerchief to her eye, but the sight of Clarice on the cliffs at all. You never saw Clarice up here. She didn’t dress for cliff walking. Her frocks were too airy to go anywhere near the sea in. One gust of wind and she’d have been over the side. And her jeans were too tight for climbing. You could cut a deck of cards with her cunt, but you couldn’t negotiate a cliff path with it. In fact she was wearing one of her airy frocks today, an ankle-length butterfly print which she’d secured to the bench with a couple of small rocks. Hence Mel’s greeting. ‘You look like a reluctant kite, Clarice. Is anything the matter?’

She’d thought Clarice might have been weeping. But then that could have been wishful thinking. Who doesn’t want to see a slut getting her desserts? Even a pornographer craves justice. But Clarice wasn’t weeping. Her eye was bruised but her soul wasn’t. What she was doing, sitting weighted down on the bench, showing her long horsey nose to the sea, nursing her injury, was laughing. It was too funny, she told Mel. It was too ridiculous. Elkin angry. Elkin inflamed. You should have seen his face. All pinched like a rodent’s arse. No mouth left. Just a scar where a mouth had once been. And his dick so thick. Elkin with his dick out. In the shop.

It was a good job she’d secured herself with rocks, else she’d have laughed herself over the edge.

What had happened was this. Elkin had suddenly and without a word of explanation risen raging from his easel, cleared the shop of stunned emmets — ‘Out! Out!’ he’d yelled, ‘Just fuck off out of here!’ — switched the OPEN sign to CLOSED, emptied the till (’Emptied the till first, note’), bent her over the counter, pulled up her dress, ripped off her pants, entered her rudely, come inside her with more despatch than he’d shown in ten years, turned her around, belted her in the eye, thrown her out of the shop, and bolted it behind her.

If it wasn’t so funny she’d have been annoyed.

‘And this was when?’ Mel wondered.

‘Just now. Half an hour ago. I’m still dripping with him. I’ve not been able to get back into the flat to have a shower. He’s locked that as well.’ Then she removed one of the rocks and lifted up her dress. ‘Look, he didn’t even give me my pants back.’

A high bare thigh, marbelled blue, shaved deep into the trench, then a controlled fringe of sprouting black hair, for Mel to think about.

That’s a lot of Clarice, in the last few days, for Mel to think about.

They began to cackle like witches. The life of a woman, eh. The shit you had to endure. The mucoid indignities you were expected to submit to. Mel too had had her pants snatched off her in her time. Been bent over desks and benches and kitchen tables. Been kicked out of her home by crazily jealous lovers whose features had shrunk to the size of a rodent’s arse. Been punched in the eye. Been forced to wander the streets unshowered while the unwanted sperm ran like treacle down her legs.

‘Frank’s?’

‘No. Frank’s the other kind of bully.’