Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

So does this mean Josh Green hasn’t, after all, married the Swede? And since it must do, why isn’t Frank feeling any better? Why is he still pacing his room?

It’s that name, Anna-Liisa. He knows he knows it. Anna-Liisa. Anna-Liisa. He rubs the back of his neck. A shaft of iron has entered his spine. Anna-Liisa. Anna-Liisa. Through the open window comes the sound of screams. Girls at play. Leaving the Dewdrop and getting into cars. Jesus Christ, don’t tell me … It is, it is, that’s who it is, it’s the Finn! Josh Green didn’t do the blindingly obvious thing and sneak to Sweden to marry the snivelling Swede, he snuck to Finland and married the fucking Finn!

If Frank goes on walking the carpet much longer he will walk through it. He thinks about another shower but knows he will come out of it stickier than when he went in. He is unaccountably upset. Forget disconcerted; he is discomforted, discomfited — spell it how you like. He is discommoded.

Viewed from the point of view of envy, it makes no sense. Frida was the prize. Frida was the beauty. But what if it’s been the most terrific fun with Anna-Liisa? A half a lifetime chasing her fidgety cunt all over her body. ‘Tis here, ‘tis here, ‘tis gone! A scream for them both. A co-operative of talents. Runs the gallery with the assistance of his wife Anna-Liisa blah blah blah. What if Josh Green, connoisseur of the lovely arse — which Anna-Liisa’s definitely was not — made a supremely intelligent choice, abjured the aesthetics of the heart in favour of the dick and has been rewarded with a happy and successful life?

As opposed to, ‘I mind that we don’t play together any more — ’

He climbs back into bed. If I’m going to make a go of this, he tells himself, I’m going to have to avoid comparisons. We can only live our own life. The trouble is, by imagining Josh Green first with the Swede and then with the Finn, he’s given him two lives. And Frank can’t decide which of them he must avoid comparing his own with.

He puts out the light. There’ll be no sleep until he has mentally trampled on his day. The last-straw brawl, the greasy chips, the boy with the loose eye he’s probably criminalised, the pathetic fan, the inane record … Serge somebody and Jane somebody, Jane with a Lawrentian surname, Chatterley, Brangwen, Birkin, Jane Birkin, that was it. Went to Paris and lived with a frog. What a waste of brain cells. Not living with a frog, remembering Jane Birkin. He drifts off, women of all nations coming and coming and coming in his head in pidgin French.

YOU CAN’T JUST breeze into the Josh Green Gallery. It isn’t a shop. You have to ring a bell, wait, and then suffer the scrutiny of a sort of chamberlain, a melancholy gentleman of a gravity beyond his years dressed in an undertaker’s suit. Where there’s art there has to be death.

Frank is asked whether he is looking for anything in particular. He is quick to realise you don’t say you’d just like to have a little browse around if that’s all right. On the offchance that a Holman Hunt might take your fancy.

‘Mr Green is who I’m looking for. Though I have no appointment. I’m an old friend of his. Frank Ritz.’

Now that he’s here, Frank hopes that Josh isn’t. The reunions he always plans entail old friends marvelling at how well he’s done. He might be Broadcasting Critic of the Year, but that’s not a hell of a lot to crow about to someone who owns the National Gallery. Least of all when you’ve just been booted out of your home — your only home — and are feeling a lot less optimistic about that than you were the day before. And it shows in ink and charcoal circles around your eyes.

Josh is bound to be away. It is August after all. Why would you bother hanging around Woodstock in August when you’ve got a boat off Barbados and an apartment in Rome to choose from?

But he can’t be away, else Frank wouldn’t be invited to wait in the front gallery while the undertaker announces his presence in an anterior room. Unless it’s Mrs Green who hasn’t gone away.

The Alma-Tadema Roman bath-house is on the wall. Alongside a Lord Leighton Grecian spring. And an Etty steamroom. So this is a themed gallery. Bathing and showering. Women bathing and showering. In rivers. Streams. Lakes. Ponds. Bagnios. Turkish baths. Russian baths. Finnish baths.

The women bathe and shower with their bodies on a twist, an aerobically difficult three-quarters turn that enables the sun to dry their breasts and their buttocks simultaneously. Josh Green always was an arse man. Frank wonders whether this is a sign that art and experience have mellowed him into a tit man to boot.

A door opens to an adjoining room. The Sickert Room, where Frank espies him closing a deal — a disconcertingly strange yet familiar figure, like the father of an old friend. He has a pop star with him, whom Frank vaguely recognises but refuses to fish for a name for, and with the pop star is an equally renowned black model who stands discounted to one side, restless but faithful, like a borzoi. Frank assumes that the pop star is buying a painting, but the scene is equally suggestive of his selling the model. Or putting up one in part-exchange for the other.

The undertaker interposes his body between Frank and the objects of his curiosity. ‘I have told Mr Green you are here, sir.’ In the meantime, he gestures, if you would care to look about you in this room, observing the feeling for fleshtone which the great academicians brought to the painting of ladies’ posteriors, you will be using your time wisely for once and, who knows, you may learn something.

However, he’s too late. Josh has seen him and recognised him and waved. This is the advantage, or not, of having your photograph above your column. Your appearance comes as no surprise to anyone. He waves back; a self-deprecatory dumb-show — don’t mind me, go on with what you’re doing, business is business, a couple of million smackers don’t come your way every day, whereas a friend –

Dumb all right. What if a couple of million smackers do come his way every day? His and Anna-Liisa’s?

Once he’s free — the short all-over-white pop star and his tall mahogany companion having made a sudden dash for it, darting out of a side entrance so as not to be spotted, and diving into the inconspicuousness of a thirty-foot limo — Josh proves to have changed little, on the exterior anyway, from the flushed owl-eyed familiar of those filthy minibus rides up and down the Banbury road. He is wearing a camel cardigan, not unlike the ones he used to teach in. And he is still estuarine in intonation. ‘Hello matey,’ he says. There are pink spots in his cheeks. ‘Long time no see.’

They embrace in the new manner of men. Arms around each other, lips to throat. Frank is glad he has lived until the age he has for this, if for no other reason — he has lived to kiss and be kissed by men. After centuries of shaking hands like butlers, heads bowed, stomachs tucked in, groins well back, men have started to nuzzle one another like bears. Frank is surprised how readily he’s taken to it; but now that nobody minds he’s not fucking them, the musky entanglement of moustaches, the abrasion of rough cheeks, are just about all he’s getting in the way of bodily love.

‘Well?’

They offer to admire each other, look each other up and down.

‘Well?’

Frank opens his arms wide, another of his dumb-shows meant to take in the enormity of Josh’s universe, his walls of showering nymphs, his chamberlain, his clinking troglodyte clientele, his chunk of Woodstock. ‘Terrific,’ he says. ‘This is terrific.’

Josh can’t get rid of the pink in his cheeks. ‘Was terrific,’ he says. ‘Until John Major.’