Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

She took even greater risks with the local boys, who knew to ring her doorbell between six and seven in the evening, at the time Elkin could be relied upon to be beard down in his supper. Three long rings, followed by one short. Then eyes to her letterbox. Clarice would be standing in the hallway with her skirt ready. The moment the flap trembled, she raised her skirt. Sometimes she would press her body to the hole in the door and give them a close-up. If she was really in the mood she would let them touch her, blow on her, smell her, finger her, make her come.

‘What I especially like,’ she told Mel, ‘is never being certain whose fingers they are. That’s what makes me come. Does that shock you?’

No one in Little Cleverley knew how Melissa Paul earned her living. Mel, that was the only name they knew her by. Some sort of a journalist. ‘No,’ she said, laughing, ‘of course it doesn’t shock me. I’ve always thought sex is best with people you don’t know. Sex with people you can’t see either, sounds better still.’

But she was making mental notes. Lady Serenissima Montefiore, heroine of Yes, My Lady, who invites the kitchen hands at Montefiore House to poke their penises through the letterbox of the oak door to the great hall, on the other side of which she waits on her knees with her mouth open, finishing Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus interfellatio — something to chew on between violations — originated in this conversation.

It wasn’t just sex with people you didn’t know and couldn’t see that Clarice liked. It was coming in places you didn’t normally associate with coming. She’d got sick of coming only in bed. The hallway, on the coconut mat, with Elkin obliviously tucking into his supper above, beat bed all ends up.

Mel knew exactly what she meant. Fucking beds. She’d fought this one out with Frank, who thought coming was not only a bed event but a morning event. Preferably prone. Preferably not fully awake.

Oh, yes yes. Men prone in the mornings. Their dicks their only waking part. The sheer uninventive mechanicalness of them. They cackled on. Witches sistered in the conventional domestic come.

Mel called for another bottle of champagne. ‘So what it amounts to,’ she said, raising her glass, ‘is that every boy in the village has seen your cunt.’

Clarice raised hers. ‘And every man.’

A pause. Was there a pause? ‘Including Frank?’

‘Excluding Frank.’

‘Poor Frank. What’s he done wrong?’

‘You’re my friend.’

Aha. Mel knew all about friends. ‘How can you be sure he hasn’t seen your cunt through the letterbox?’

‘I’d have recognised his eyes.’

‘You know Frank’s eyes that well?’

‘They’re distinct.’

‘So Frank misses out…’

Another pause. Was that another pause? Hard to tell when you’re into champagne bottle number two. ‘I could always show it to him,’ Clarice offered, ‘while you’re there.’

Mel thought about that. ‘He might not want to see it while I’m there.’

Now there was a pause. Before Clarice found just the right words. ‘Who cares what he wants!’

They laughed. Their eyes met through their winking champagne flutes. Danced. Acidified.

Suddenly they were in competition. Who would blink first?

It was at that moment that Frank turned up.

‘Go on then,’ Mel said. ‘Show him.’

And Clarice did.

CONSIDERING HOW LITTLE he has ever liked pubs, Frank has to concede that they have been good to him over the years.

He checks with Vera that his room is ready for him at The Poldark, collects his stuff from the car, plugs in his batteries, freshens up in the sink — the bathroom is down a flight of stairs and he is all at once too impatient for that kind of palaver — and strides over to the Slate Gallery.

The rain has stopped, but the shop is full anyway. Midspiel, Elkin nods his beard at him. Then turns away to expel someone licking an ice-cream. There are more no-eating signs in Elkin’s slate shop than there are slates. But the signs never stop them. For signs to work people must have been taught to read.

Clarice is standing behind the till with her arms folded on her chest. Bored. Not impossibly selecting a flash victim. She has not perceptibly aged. The mouth is a little more fixed, otherwise she is as cascading as she was. Her eyes splinter like a shattered windshield when she catches sight of Frank. ‘You!’ She points at him, as though to inform him who he is. She bursts into laughter, still pointing. ‘What are you doing here?’

She is the first person he has met today for whom a year is not a minute, who doesn’t think she last spoke to him the day before. Good. Someone has noticed he has been gone.

‘Just passing through.’

He knows not to hurry to kiss her. They work to a different social clock down here. He can’t do any of that grab and shoulder-swivel stuff he does when he meets a woman he knows in Soho. Nor can he fall into her arms the way he does when he meets a man. Any hairy abrasions will have to come later. There’s no middle ground of companionable touching in Little Cleverley. In Little Cleverley you go from icy detachment to clawing each other to death in a single movement.

She comes across the shop floor to him and surreptitiously runs a long bloody finger down his shirtfront. ‘Mel with you?’

He shakes his head. Coming from Clarice, the question doesn’t carry what it might coming from someone else. His answer, too, is free of the usual opportunistic algebra — Mel no equals dick yes. That’s not how things compute with Clarice. Really, Mel ought to be here. Really, he ought to ring Mel on his mobile and put Clarice on. But he’s not sure he even remembers the number.

‘Is she well?’ Meaning, he detects, has she forgiven me.

Something else Frank has forgotten. There was no fond leave-taking between the women. They went from clawing each other to death to icy detachment in a single movement. That’s if you can call three days and three nights a single movement.

‘Mel? Well? No, not well.’

Clarice scrutinises his face to be sure what sort of not well he is reporting. Then, having cleared it for serious ailments of the body, she says, ‘She always took things hard.’

Which is a bit soon for Frank.

He leaps to correct a false impression, to restore Mel to vigorous good health in the eyes of Clarice. ‘Mel takes things the way Mel takes things,’ he says. ‘When I say she’s not well I should add that she’s well enough to have booted me out of the house.’

But there’s no shaking Clarice’s complicity. ‘I bet you deserved to be booted out,’ she laughs. ‘Knowing you.’

Meaning, you bugger! Not meaning, poor Mel.

But what does he want? He’s turned up out of the blue on Clarice’s shop floor, Mel-less, you could say flaunting his Mel-lessness, with a face full of bad intentions — has he any right to expect Clarice, for whom this is a busy emmetwatching day, to launch immediately into an itemisation of Mel’s virtues? And what impossible standard of probity is he demanding of himself? Is he Mel’s little soldier suddenly, sent out into the world, fully-armed, to fight for her good name?

Funnily enough, as his nostrils progressively fill with Clarice, that’s exactly how he does see himself. Mel’s little warrior.

Clarice has to leave him for a minute. Elkin is beckoning. An emmet family needs help deciding between a medium seal on a rock and a large field mouse in a field. They prefer the medium seal qua seal, but aesthetically favour the colour of the cord from which the large field mouse hangs. Easy. Clarice changes the cord for them while they watch in a stupefied hush. Unties the knots, re-threads the cord. Look, ma, a woman re-threading a cord! Frank sees how showing customers her cunt was the logical next step for Clarice.