Howard Jacobson: No More Mr. Nice Guy

He’d have understood it better had it been him under the springs. He and his old pal ignominy. They had grown up together. Together, their sperm had failed to pass muster in a public gardens in Harrogate. Together, they’d come home from a shtuppenhaus in Wythenshawe and found a pair of fat girl’s knickers in their pocket. Under the springs was just the place for them. He was a man. Ignominy was his middle name. But in Mel it was shocking. Blinding. It was as though she was his idol, and had fallen.

In the end, of course, she threw the spell off. Enough. Enough. And this time she meant it.

But how were they, Clarice and Frank, mere babes in the woods of Mel’s measured degradation, how were they to know that this time she really really really meant it? They climbed back on to the spring mattress and began bouncing. Come on, Mel, get under!

Enough, she said.

Clarice went over to her and held her chin. Any more trouble and she would slap her face. Under the mattress, Mel.

Enough, Mel said.

Lick my cunt, Clarice told her. You and Frank. Together. Now!

Ten minutes later Mel was dressed, waiting for a taxi to take her to the railway station. Four hours after that she was back in London.

That was how Frank and Clarice got to spend one conventional night together, fucking like ordinary sublunary lovers, without having to worry about Mel’s special needs. But the following morning, early, Frank too was in a taxi. And that, effectively, was the finish of Mel’s bolt hole, the place she’d bought to enjoy peace and quiet in, her last throw of the man-free romance-of-nature dice. An estate agent’s sign went up soon afterwards.

Poor Mel. No wonder she’d demanded silence. It wasn’t only him she needed to shut up. It was herself. Enough now. Enough with all the noisy importunings of desire.

You can’t go on listening, that was her point. You can’t afford to go on listening.

But there’s no getting rid of the noise in his brain tonight. Poor Mel twice over. An idol doubly fallen. Fancy her having returned on her knees to Little Cleverley. Fancy her having come all this way to get another lick of Clarice. And never telling him. That’s if she had. But what if Clarice was lying? What if Mel had never come back that second time? What if they’d cooked this up in bed all those years ago, calculated that he’d come back one day, wouldn’t be able not to come back, and when he did, what fun for Clarice to concoct some cock and bull story about Mel having been back before him? He didn’t know what Mel was capable of, that was what it amounted to. D the fat comedian had seasoned his imagination with jealousies of the conventional sort. Another man … men … Mel sprouting hair again. Now Clarice was dropping still deeper deviancies into the boiling pot of his uncertainty. There was pain in it for him whatever the truth was. Mel actually coming back to Clarice, or Mel fainting in Clarice’s arms, plotting the deception. Disgusting, either way.

Just how disgusting are you, Mel? Tell me, tell me.

‘Keep out of my head,’ she had warned him back in London, when he’d tried to get her to whisper to him in the night, tried to incorporate her shame into his. For a fallen idol is a mightily voluptuous concept.

The conventional lovers’ night he’d passed with Clarice was a wasted opportunity. It hadn’t answered to any of the needs released by the preceding three days. Sure, sure, she was nice to fuck. But what’s one more fuck in a long life of fucking? The needs he hadn’t honoured, and should have honoured, were essentially conjugal in nature. They were to do with Mel. You could say he wanted to be Mel now. It worked like this: considering that Mel had submitted to the erotic will of Clarice, willingly made herself her vassal, and considering that Frank had always accepted the primacy of Mel’s will in most things, didn’t it then follow that Frank was a beggar’s beggar, a bottom’s bottom, and considering that, didn’t it also follow that he was doubly in thrall to Clarice? That Clarice herself would not have been able to follow him through all his upside down reasoning only added to the perverse excitement. If a subtle man desires the thrill of throwing himself away, who but a shallow woman should he throw himself away on? That, anyway, was how he ought to have presented himself to Clarice on that last night — as a supplicant’s supplicant, the lowest of the low.

But he knew less then, didn’t he? He wasn’t fifty then. And no one had yet painted his portrait in cappuccino froth.

Tonight, though, he knows everything. Tonight, with only the moon as his witness, he will get Clarice to treat him like the filth he is.

For Mel’s sake.

‘HAPPY THE PERSON,’ wrote the fifth-century monk Evagrios — Evagrios the Solitary, to his friends, except that he had no friends — ‘Happy the person who thinks himself no better than dirt.’

So Frank must be delirious, must he not? The nonpareil, the shape and form, the very looking-glass of happiness?

He is a monk himself now. In a manner of speaking. By a man’s company ye shall know him, and Frank is keeping company with monks. He sleeps in a bare but comfortable cell in a new wing of the Abbey, sharing facilities with fifteen other retreatants from the howling world of fleshly sin. He eats his meals, in silence, with the monks. Crap still — there is to be no escape from crap, on the box or in the belly: for a man must toil and a man must eat — but at least sanctified crap. A plain sufficiency. Sprouts, sausages, black pudding, blackened potatoes, gravy, rhubarb and redcurrant compote. He gives thanks for it in Latin before, and after folds his napkin and leaves the refectory with his eyes lowered.

On some mornings he rises with the monks for vigils and lauds. An electric buzzer goes off in the corridor beside his room, telling him it is 3.30 a.m., but it’s up to him whether he rises or not. Free choice. He has not taken orders. He has seriously considered it, but the monks have made it plain they would not seriously consider him. He is too old. Too set in his ways. Pope Gregory, whom we have to thank for what we know of St Benedict, the founder of Frank’s adopted order, set great store by men of Frank’s years. ‘Temptations of the flesh are violent during youth,’ he wrote, ‘whereas after the age of fifty concupiscence dies down.’ Frank can vouch for that. Were it not for habit, inadequate preparation for old age, and an incapacity to think of anything else to do with himself once he reached it, Frank would have willingly kissed goodbye to concupiscence the moment it kissed goodbye to him. Well, the old horse is dead now, right enough. Not all the whippings in selfchastising Christendom can ever bring that beast back to life. So why don’t the monks consider him good monastic material? There’s a flaw in the order. It isn’t enough that a man has a broken back; they want to be the ones that do the breaking. Benedict himself broke his own, won a victory over temptation by rolling naked in sharp thorns and stinging nettles, tore his own poor sinful flesh to shreds. But that was before there was a Benedictine order to do it for him.

Frank finds vigils and lauds harder to get up for the further the year advances. It can get cold in the North-East of Scotland at three-thirty in the morning in November. Yes, he’s seen the last of the summer off up here, and most of autumn, and now means to do the same to winter. And maybe, after that, to spring. And then, who knows? He’s taking it a season at a time.

The monkish life is growing on him. He rises, or doesn’t, to the pre-dawn torture buzzer. He prepares himself a simple breakfast in the retreatants’ kitchen, white toast, Summer County margarine, and orange marmalade made by the monks. Sometimes he greets his fellow fugitives, like Gordon who has been here even longer than he has, and who acknowledges Frank’s greeting with sad heroic eyes, as though unable to decide whether he’s pleased or not to have made it through one more night. ‘Yes indeed,’ he says, when Frank comments on the beauty of the day. Yes indeed. It’s that or burst into tears. Otherwise it’s brave good mornings, and little else, all round. But that’s fine and dandy by Frank. He doesn’t want conversation. He’s said all he needs to say for one lifetime. And heard all he needs to hear. By the beauty of the day he means the imminent withdrawal of all signs of life. The earth is already half dead up here. The begrudging light is slow to show itself and quick to go. Dawn will soon be ten a.m. and twilight fifteen minutes later. Get into the pine forest that rises up behind the Abbey, protecting its rear, and you can forget you ever knew what light looked like. That too suits Frank. He wants the day over and done with. He may be skipping vigils regularly now, but he never misses compline, the peace before sleep, the calm that ushers in the Greater Silence.