Howard Jacobson: No More Mr. Nice Guy

The lawyer Wasim was the last to arrive on the scene. His booby-trapped voice rolled rudely into the road like the Indus flooding another insignificant village. ‘OK, so what’s worth fucking this time?’ he wanted to know.

He wasn’t to be trusted around anything solemn.

Has he made up his mind yet, after all this time, sitting shaking his head at the wheel of his Saab, whether it really is the Finn he’d like to see walking out of the Dewdrop again, or whether he’d prefer the Swede? Has he reached any adjudication as to the competing claims of the dick and the heart?

Some question. He’s fifty years of age. When he talks of his heart today it’s to a doctor. His heart is the thing that will eventually kill him. What lies heavy on his heart right now is not beauty, but cheese. As for the dick, he doesn’t mind being the first to admit it — there are mornings when you’re fifty when you cannot be certain you have a dick. ‘What’s that?’ Mel used to complain. Panic in her voice. ‘What’s that poking me in the back?’ It was her contention that he deliberately woke her up with it. That the tyrannical reign of the dick had begun before she was even conscious. Had she not made it sound so punitive he’d have agreed with her. He wasn’t awake himself yet. Having a dick was like having a dog that needed to be walked early. You got no peace with it. It wanted a walk, then it wanted a pat, then it wanted a game. Then. That was then. Now if he wants to get a look at his dick before breakfast he has to stand on a mirror.

But Nature must intend something by this, must She not? If he is free at last of the importunings of his dick, he must be free for some purpose. It’s just a question of discovering what that purpose is.

The language school is gone. The times are against it. Once you take the fucking out of teaching, a school like the one to which Frank was devoted loses its rationale. That students learn less as a consequence — learn less of consequence — he is convinced. That teachers too were once happier when fucking their students was an allowable perk — in most cases their only perk — he doesn’t doubt either. Show him a happy teacher today!

He knows better than to raise this matter in the company of any of the little Heloises of yesteryear who have columns on his paper. The times are the times. He isn’t distressed by hypocrisy. It’s important to own to a code of beliefs, whether you live by it or not. He just wishes more people would stand up for fucking as a teaching tool.

Where the language school was, there is now a guest house. Frank has no choice in the matter. This is where he will spend the night. Who knows, this may be where he will spend the rest of his life.

Nothing remains of the old interior. The builders have been through. It was deceptively formal before, hinting at monasticism and scholarship; now it’s snug and homey. For couples. Love in a cottage. Ceilings lowered. Creaking boards installed. Panelling ripped out for flowery wallpaper. And nautical junk everywhere. Why is the theme of every guest house, no matter where it’s situated, the sea? Prints of wrecks. A polished diver’s helmet on a little table. An onyx lighthouse on the reception desk. The breakfast room is where the common room used to be. It was here, in the first years of the school, before the social committee grew ambitious, that they held the discos. They played only one record. Heavy breathing, somebody whispering Je t’aime, somebody coming in a French accent. Round and round it went. The school anthem. It suited everyone’s tastes. The Finn darted her sour tongue in and out of his mouth in time to it. Empurpled in the crossfire of the disco lights, the Swede dropped her beautiful cupbearer’s head on to his shoulder and wept to it. Had anyone tried to put something else on the turntable there’d have been a riot.

Frank hasn’t heard it, hasn’t been anywhere he could have heard it for an eternity, but now he can’t get it out of his head. He is relieved they give him a room in the new extension — no associational problems here at least. He hangs up his clothes and lays out his machines, remembering to put his batteries on charge. He would like to lay himself out for an hour or two, but he can’t silence the Je t’aiming, not even in the shower. Out is the only place to be. But not out to the Dewdrop. He wonders whether to take his phone, decides against, and walks into town.

A reader of his column recognises him in the Broad and asks for his autograph. The usual: female, not in the first flush, hair going crazy, goldfish bowl spectacles, children grown up and gone away. Nothing much to do with herself now except go touring and recognising people with televisual connections. Her husband hangs back. Asking for an autograph, in Frank’s book, is the same as asking for sex. He reaches for his fountain pen. ‘What have you got for me to sign?’

The woman reddens, pats her person as though a couple of pale green leaves from an autograph album might flutter out of her, dithers, then remembers that she is carrying a bag, with three novels in it, from Blackwells.

‘A book?’

Frank knows it can’t be one of his. All his crap-watching collections are out of print. And the new one, with Broadcasting Critic of the Year on the cover and an old photo on the back, isn’t published yet. ‘I’m not sure I can sign a book I haven’t written,’ he says. He wonders if one of them might be by Mel. And what he would do then.

‘Why not? Go on.’ She risks boldness. ‘You choose.’ Behind her glasses her eyes flinch from her own temerity. In broad daylight, in a public place, she is opening a bag for a man she’s never met before to look in.

The husband hangs back even further. Frank wonders why he doesn’t quit the scene altogether. But that’s naive. A man has to be unusually lacking in masochistic curiosity not to want to grab a glimpse of a stranger fucking his wife in the middle of Oxford in broad daylight.

Frank inspects the contents of the bag. All telly books. Uppity telly books. An Inspector Morse mystery. A Commander Dalgliesh thriller. And Middlemarch. He chooses Middlemarch. Winner in category best provincial novel by woman over thirty not a lesbian. Had she been alive now, they say, George Eliot would undoubtedly have been writing for television. Oh yeah — just as Marquez and Llosa are, Roth, Kundera, Bellow, Grass, Gordimer, Updike. Can’t keep any of’ em off the box. Frank knows he’s in the wrong profession. He likes sentences more than he likes action. Thoughts more than he likes pictures. Nothing he can do about it, it’s his age — he’s a moral insight man. As for example, since Middlemarch is in question, that shrewd and poignant encapsulation of the motive force of men’s long-suffering fidelity to their wives and mistresses — He dreaded a future without affection. He being Tertius Lydgate. But what’s in a name? Tom, Dick, Tertius, Frank.

He inscribes it on the tide page. And signs it as though it’s his own.

She bows, drops a bead of perspiration on to his wrist, then stands beside him in a peculiarly artificial manner. It takes Frank much longer than it should to realise that her cuckold of a husband has his camera out and is snapping them. The pervert, Frank thinks. The weirdo. But in one corner of himself he is envious. With Mel, all deviant snapping had to stop.

Twenty minutes later Frank catches sight of the smutty pair walking slowly, shoulder to shoulder, down St Aldates, trying to figure out the meaning of his inscription. One of them looking for the compliment. The other looking for the pain.

Otherwise, Oxford isn’t giving him whatever it is he’s come for. The stones still exude the sickly mildew odour of collegiate privilege, enticing the morbid to imagine what they can never have. Even his own not so very old college with its kitsch bridge and far-from-secret gardens has sealed over in his absence and once again become a mystery he cannot hope to penetrate. Like the Swede’s cunt. But the town, the town has become a mug and T-shirt bazaar run by bouncers. Heavies in black trousers and summer anoraks, striking aggressive attitudes and communicating through walkie-talkies outside genteel tea rooms and public houses, places of entertainment to which, in his day, you wouldn’t have scrupled to take your mother and father … people the age he is now.