Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

The knees. The glossy shins in which, once you were low enough, you could see your own sorrowing reflection. The ankles — oh the ankles, with their little continental tufts of winnowing amber down.

‘I’m sorry,’ burst in the Pakistani playboy Wasim, ‘I don’t know how you can go past the tits.’

‘Depends which end you start from, Was. Some of us haven’t got to the tits yet.’

‘Well when you do you’ll find me there.’ Was was the only one among them who boasted. It was a cultural thing. He couldn’t grasp the comedy of deprivation. He didn’t understand that offering to do without, even when you hadn’t actually done without, was a male-bonding device. ‘In fact I’m there most nights.’

His voice was too deep, too heavy for him to carry. When he spoke he gave the impression of a man falling over himself.

‘Has anyone noticed,’ lamented Nick Heywood, bringing dolour back into the minibus, ‘that they move separately when she walks?’

Everyone had. But everyone took time to review the heart-rending phenomenon again in their minds.

‘I maintain there should be a law,’ said Was, a lawyer himself, ‘against tits moving like that.’

There should be a law against you, everybody thought. Was was social committee, not teaching staff. Strictly speaking he shouldn’t have been in their minibus at all, screwing up their funeral.

What Frank liked best about the Swede was less specifically located. He liked what was between and around her: the space between her legs when she walked, her atmosphere and weather-sytem, her Arctic fuzz. You could say he was returning her to the abstract of beauty which, for three short weeks in August, she made flesh. So how could he ever have expected anything of the fuck? It was so much not the thing she wanted to be doing that she turned her head away and wept all through it.

It wasn’t him. Or it wasn’t only him. She’d wept all through the others as well.

But oh, the tragic adoration she induced. Frank mopped her tears with the corner of his pillow case, wiped her symmetrical nose, and let his eyes wander like hungry lambkins over her grassless slopes. Smooth thighs, flat belly, perfect self-righteous little cunt, labia crossed like a nun’s wrists, thus far and no further, not a hair out of place. Refused the promised land, Moses would have gazed like this from Pisgah. Beautiful, beautiful, but never to be mine.

The knocking on his bedroom door seemed to be an event on another planet. She made the connection before he did. ‘You have visitor,’ she said.

‘What?’ He was still lost; alone on the mountain. ‘What? Who?’

‘Friend maybe,’ she said. She was sitting up now. ‘Shall I leave?’ She couldn’t wait to leave.

‘There’s no way out. Only the window, and we’re three floors up.’

He realised that this was a tactless thing to say. She was a Swede. She could easily decide to jump.

He looked at his watch. A little after one in the morning. No one came calling at that time. But someone was definitely out there.

‘Just cover yourself,’ he said. It must have been the only time in her life she’d heard such a phrase. He threw on a dressing gown, put his ear to the door, then opened it fractionally. It was the Finn. He’d wriggled out of her tonight. Told her he had a headache and when she gave him aspirins told her he was washing his hair.

She’d known something was wrong. Some lousy self-annihilative Finnish impulse drove her to find out who.

‘How’s your head?’ she asked.

‘Better, thank you.’

She looked more than ever unfinished, raw, like an uncooked burger.

‘It doesn’t seem so clean.’

He touched his hair and shrugged at her disconsolately. He wanted her to feel that he respected her too much to lie to her. To lie to her again.

She lit up a cigarette, sat down on the landing outside his door and began to cry.

He wasn’t sure what to do. That was two of them in tears, one inside, one out. He thought how ill the Finn’s tears became her, compared to the Swede’s. Whereas when it came to screaming, the Finn was without equal. He felt suddenly sad for her and for him and for the thing he’d betrayed. You can dishonour a fuck. But if he asked the Finn to come in, and asked the Swede to go home, and fucked the Finn, would he then feel he’d dishonoured the aesthetics of his feelings for the Swede? Not Solomon in all his wisdom could settle the dissension between the dick and heart. Polygamy, that was the only answer Solomon had been able to come up with for himself.

Frank leaned against the door frame, wondering how to act honourably, bearing in mind that he didn’t like to wake up in an empty bed. Now he really did have a headache. He rubbed his temples and put his hands over his eyes. When he removed them he saw the Swede on her knees with her arms round the Finn. She was stroking her hair. The princess and the frog. Who was going to turn into what?

‘Tea,’ the Swede said at last. ‘Can you make tea.’

‘I have wine …’ Wild thoughts of a party crossed his mind.

‘Not wine. Tea.’

It meant going downstairs to the communal kitchen, looking for kettles, gas taps, matches, tea-pots, stuff he didn’t normally bother with in the daylight let alone in the dead of night, but he went anyway. The thing might sort itself out better without him. And it did. When he returned, bearing a tray of tea and chocolate biscuits — it behoved him, he believed, once he was down there, to go to some trouble — they were lying on his narrow bed together, as blameless as Hansel and Gretel; the Finn turned to the wall, the Swede stroking her thin hair and crooning to her in Norse. Frank poured them tea, put a biscuit in their saucers, turned off the light, and went to sleep in an armchair. When he woke in the morning they were both gone.

Neither of them spoke to him again. Worse than that, neither of them fucked him again.

Two days later he stood outside the school, across from the Dewdrop, and watched them climb aboard the bus chartered to take them all to Heathrow. The girls hadn’t become friends, they weren’t talking, they were back in their original parties, Finns here, Swedes there; but they were united in their heedlessness of him.

‘Goodbye the loveliest little arse I’ll ever see,’ Josh Green lamented.

All the tutors were there, the principal, the head of studies, all the social committee, even the staff minibus driver, lined up to wave goodbye. The three weeks of acclimatisation to the idiom of English ways were over. The final morning had been a terrible ordeal. Knowing that they were taking leave of one another on the banks of the River of Eternal Separation, they had indulged one last reckless orgy of oath swearing and heart swapping. Addresses and phone numbers, photographs, rings and necklaces, items of apparel, books that told their story, records that played their music, objects that were themselves love-tokens from others, passed from hand to hand. So extensive and surreptitious had been the passing that sometimes you received your own offering back. But nothing took from the augustness of the ritual. It was like throwing gifts into a grave. Everyone promised never to forget. Some promised to leave their wives and abandon their children. For the space of a morning no earlier allegiance was secure. For the space of a morning at least a dozen innocent English children were fatherless.

They watched the bus pull away, the golden faces recede, then they returned in silence to the staff room. No one spoke for an hour. Just occasionally someone coughed. A fat summer fly buzzed in the pane. You could hear it cleaning its mandibles. Then the throb of a diesel engine and sounds of activity coming from the office told them that the new crop had arrived. They hurried out on to the pavement, swallowing easily again, craning to see into the sun-filled windows of the bus, impatient to get a look at what the next three weeks held in store for them.