Howard Jacobson: No More Mr. Nice Guy

He hasn’t left all his machines behind. He has his portable computer with him, and his Hitachi laptop television (having still a column to write), and his mobile phone. He thinks about ringing Mel and telling her about the pound coin. Confessing. Even when they’re fighting they have a tradition of his confessing. ‘I feel such a shit,’ he says. ‘You are such a shit,’ she tells him. It’s the only thing they agree on. But they are past fighting now. They have fought. Full stop. He keeps his fingers off the winking phone. He’s going to have to get used to confessing to himself.

In sight of Oxford, he luxuriates in the thought of a night at the Randolph. A third-floor corner room, if he can get one, with views of the Martyrs’ Memorial and the walls of Balliol and the Apollonian urns on the roof of the Ashmolean. Up among the heavenly choir. The Randolph’s not what it was — let’s face it, Oxford’s not what it was — now that Inspector Morse has passed over and through it, like the angel of popular rigor mortis; but that’s the business he’s in himself: killing by commonness. England your England as seen on the telly. ‘Welcome to Jane Austen country’, a sign on the A3 promises as you cross into Hampshire. How many people have read Jane Austen since she died in 1817? But the sign didn’t appear until they put her on the box. Soon the Department of Transport will cede its obligation to erect road signs to the Radio Times. Wildfell Hall, straight ahead. Vet’s Dales, filter left. Throw a right for Brookside Close. There the Hovis Street. Here Frank’s Column.

Did the Elizabethans do that? Guided tours round Falstaff’s Eastcheap. Weekend for two, with dinner, in Dunsinane.

His ire is academic. The Randolph’s full. So much the better. Who wants to be where everyone wants to be, anyway? Popular religion knows you can’t have everybody crammed into one heaven; there has to be an elect. Popular culture has yet to sort that out. In the meantime its purveyors leave the mob to its milling and head for the Tuscan hills.

It’s for the guest houses and bed and breakfasts of north Oxford that he’s heading. Up the Banbury Road, with mounting misgivings, but no will to resist. He knows what’s coming. At the Marston Ferry lights the retrospection gang jumps him, the heartbreak memory boys who have been waiting at this very intersection for his return, their fists in their mouths, for twenty years or more. Drive, they say. Stop, they say. Here, they say. No prizes for guessing where here is. The Dewdrop Inn in Summertown where, ante Mel, ante the melancholy and the maelstrom, he taught the girls from Wittenberg to drink deep.

He does as he’s told and pulls into the kerb. Summertime in Summertown. The very time of the year and the very hour of the evening. If he sits here long enough he will see himself come and go, shoulders rolling, fag burning his fingers love-bite yellow, cord jacket pinched in at the waist, black leather tie, scrotum as tight as a bag of pennies. A sprig in the pink of post-graduation. A feather in any foreign student’s cap. Which one will he have on his arm tonight? The Venetian on whose underclothes you could smell the lagoon? The Spaniard who would touch a man anywhere but only through the embroidered scented handkerchief she kept tucked in her conventual sleeve? Hard to be certain after all this time, but isn’t it the Finnish screamer? Yes, yes, that is who it is, it’s the Shrieker from Hameenlinna.

She fucked them all, the most famous of the language-school Finns, she fucked the principal, she fucked the social secretary, she fucked the head of studies, she fucked the tutors, she even fucked the school minibus driver — smoking throughout and screaming the whole of Oxford awake whenever she came and whoever she came with — but she fucked Frank better and longer than she fucked anybody. And once, sliding to the edge of a crowded bar stool, hooking her ankles under his knees, spurring him like horse, and with nobody able to believe that they were seeing what they were seeing, she fucked him in the Dewdrop.

He prided himself on how squeamish he wasn’t. They passed her along, the way you could in the early seventies, with accompanying warnings about her cigarette habit, the foulness of her breath and the racket she made. He was the last to have her, being busy at the other end of the chain, preparing and passing on Greeks. Her mouth wasn’t the problem to him it had been to the others. He stuffed whatever he could get of himself into it, and later kissed her deep and long.

She lit up and marvelled at him. ‘Nobody before kiss me like that,’ she said.

‘Maybe you didn’t give them time.’

‘Hold my cigarette.’

He liked it that she screamed so loud. ‘What you’ve all failed to see,’ he told the others, talking their nights over in the minibus that drove them down the Banbury Road from where they slept to where they taught, ‘is that it’s a joke. She’s taking the piss.’

‘Finns don’t make jokes.’

‘Where you’re wrong. It’s you who don’t get their jokes.’

‘So who’s she taking the piss out of?’

‘Well, us for a start. But I reckon mainly herself. She thinks she’s crazy wanting to fuck so much.’

‘She is.’

‘We fuck as much as she does. And she’s got the excuse of being on a sort of holiday. We’re supposed to be working.’

‘Fucking is working.’

‘Speak for yourself’

‘And at least we don’t scream.’

‘Speak for yourself.’

He’d started to scream with her. They egged each other on, like two cats. Coming and laughing and howling all at once. It beat gazing fondly. She didn’t have the looks, or the shape, or the aura, to inspire adoration. She was built on classically Ugro-Finnic lines — thick neck, sparse hair, short legs, sandpaper skin, flat nose. ‘Like fucking a platypus,’ Josh Green reckoned, the morning after he’d taken his turn. He was the only qualified language teacher among them. Not that anyone cared about qualifications in this school. ‘Like licking an aardvark.’

Nicholas Heywood, who affected fastidiousness and had no qualifications at all, was appalled. ‘You mean you licked her?’

‘’Course I licked her. She’s a visitor to this country. I’m paid to make her feel welcome.’

Frank licked her too. Fucked her, kissed her, licked her, screamed when she did. A platypus? So what, if that was how a platypus went about it. Why be anthropocentric? If anything, he rather liked her rough condition, the way her cunt spread all over the place, the way her mouth jerked about, the sudden appearance of one of her scaly legs under your arm or around your neck, no part of her ever where you expected it to be, nothing in repose. Being ill-favoured and disconnected enabled her to let herself go and take the piss. Beauties can’t do that. Furthermore, it enabled him to feel he was making a contribution to her self-esteem. You can’t do that with a beauty either. Beauties come to you as finished products. You may admire, but you are not expected to add or to subtract. Which is why no man likes fucking them, whatever they say to the contrary.

Or do to the contrary. The Swede, whose attention he first caught, as chance would have it, while the Finn was digging her heels into his femurs from the bar stool of the Dewdrop, was the age’s abstract of the beautiful. Tall, but not too. Slender, but not too. Eyes the colour of a Hockney pool; hair that aureoled about her head in gold leaf, like the halo of a Byzantine saint. Beauty in a woman either has to have some boy in it or some baby. The Swede’s beauty had both. She held herself like a cupbearer, straightbacked, waiting on men in order that she might soon take their place among them. But her mouth smelt of milk and her teeth looked brand new, as though they’d turned up in her mouth that very day. And of course heartbreak entered into it as well. ‘The arse,’ Josh Green moaned in the minibus, ‘the arse on her!’ He might have been delivering an elegy. Everyone felt the same, as though they were in mourning; and each of them mourned for his favourite part.