Howard Jacobson - J

‘The opportunity?’

‘That’s what it was.’

‘And she was how old?’

‘The girl? I’ve told you. She’d be about your age now, so then she would have been nine or ten.’

‘You went with a girl of nine?’

He had the shakes again, she noticed. ‘No, I didn’t “go” with her. She was the daughter.’

‘Whose daughter?’

‘The daughter of the woman I was “going” with. It was the mother who attracted me.’

This was getting worse by the second, Rhoda thought. At sixteen, if the words you like to use don’t express contempt, they express disgust. Rhoda allowed her teacher to see her rehearsing all of them in her head.

‘Wait a minute. Just listen. Let me tell you how it was before you judge me. The mother went for me, not the other way round. I met her at a print shop where I’d gone to get an invitation printed. She was doing the same, only she was arguing over the invitations they’d done for her. They were for the private view of a painter at a gallery I assumed was hers. She wanted me to agree that they’d botched the job. “Look at the colours!” she said. “Did you ever see a woman’s breasts that colour?” They looked all right to me, but I agreed because I thought she was genuinely upset—’

‘And because you hoped you’d get a look at the colour of hers.’

‘No, yes, maybe. That’s cheeky of you, but I deserve it. But that’s not the point. I was being supportive, that’s all. I didn’t know then that dissatisfaction was her hallmark, that arguing with tradespeople was just something she did. Like throwing parties. There was a gallery opening or an engagement party or a ruby wedding every week in her world and she paid for most of them. All lavish affairs. Champagne and lobster canapés. She had money to burn. She had everything to burn. She would have burned me had I let her. So it was poetic justice in the end. If you think I lost my mind you’d be right. I lost my mind from the moment I saw her shouting about her invitations. I’d never been with anybody like her. She was older and knew more of the world than I did. A woman with her own art gallery. She was my opposite in every way — unreserved, voluptuous, selfish, faithless, as wild as a cat. She laughed more than anybody I’d ever met, too, but when she wasn’t laughing her face would become a mask of tragedy. She had these great, dark, over-painted, sorrowful eyes, as though they told the whole mournful history of her people. That was her explanation, anyway. “We have experienced too much,” she would tell me, holding me to her breast, and ten minutes later she was doing a seating plan. “Does nothing mean anything to you for long?” I’d ask her, and she’d say, “Yes, you,” or “Yes, my daughter,” and once she even said, “Yes, God.” She told me she prayed but when I asked her what she prayed for it was always something material — good weather for the opening, the continued absence of her husband (“So that I can have my way with you all weekend” — as though God would help with that), a lightning bolt to destroy the boycotters who milled outside her gallery, chanting against the country whose best painters she represented — though in their presence she merely guffawed her contempt and called them sanctimonious ghouls. “They’ll go when they find some other no-hope cause,” she told me in front of their faces. There was no guilt or conscience in her. No beauty or inspiration. Don’t get me wrong, she was beautiful to look at herself. Dark and soft. Bewitching. Sometimes when I held her I thought she had no bones, her body was so yielding. Though she was obstinate in all our conversations and fought me over everything, in bed she would be anything I wanted her to be. But there was no spiritual beauty. She gave money to charity but the impulse never seemed charitable to me. It was too easy, too automatic. Before my parents ever gave money they would sit around and discuss it for weeks. Should we make a donation here or would it be better spent there? She just wrote a cheque and never thought about it again. She would go to concerts and openings of shows at other art galleries but I never saw her moved. My music she hated. “Caterwauling about fishermen and bumpkins,” she called it. I doubt she’d ever eaten a fish. I doubt she’d ever seen the sea, come to that. Or been out into the country. She looked down on people, imitated the accents of the poor, jeered at me even, sometimes, for not having her advantages. And that included a dinner jacket. “You can’t come to one of my family events looking like that,” she said the first time she saw me in my corduroy suit.

‘I wished I didn’t have to go to her “family events” or meet her “people” — I never felt at home with them. Was that because they looked down on me? I didn’t know. But I always felt they tolerated me, that was all. And if I dared to say a word against them she’d fly at me in a rage. Once she broke two of my teeth. Yet for all the specialness of her “people”, for all the superiority of their suffering over anyone else’s, she would still affect the airs and graces of a woman who had just taken tea with royalty. These attempts to hide who she was and where she’d come from — her family had sold hats on a street market! — shocked me. And she did it so badly. People laughed at her behind their hands and she didn’t notice. No doubt they were laughing at me too. I know what you must be thinking — why did I stay? I was obsessed by her, that’s why. The more I hated her the more fascinated I became. I can’t explain that. Was she my cruel mistress or my lapdog? I tell you, though you are too young to understand obsession, I was obsessed by the oily sallowness of her skin, her heavy breasts, her swampy lips, the little panting cries she made when I entered her — forgive me — the extravagant way she moved her hands, making up stories, telling lies, transparent fantasies, trying to impress whoever she needed to impress — a room of thirty people or just me, it didn’t matter — but it sickened me too.’

He paused as though remembering his manners. Was there perhaps something she wanted to say at this point?

There wasn’t. Rhoda thought he was probably right — she didn’t have quite the years yet for this.

He took that to be permission to go on.

‘There was something ancient about her. I don’t mean in appearance. I mean in what she represented. She went too far back. History should have finished with the likes of her by now. Sometimes when I was making love to her — forgive me, please forgive me, but I have to explain — I felt I was in a sarcophagus making love to a mummy. I thought she would come apart in my hands, under my kisses and caresses, like parchment. Can you be oily and dry? Can you be soft and brittle? Well she could. That was her power over me. And then she would stir, sit up like someone risen from the dead — Cleopatra herself — and shake her jewellery in my face. That jewellery! She would put those hands up to my cheeks and look at me with longing — or was it loathing? — and I’d hear the jewellery clinking and I wanted to tear it off her. Christ, how badly I wanted to do that! Rip it from her throat and drag it out of her ears. All that false beauty, the impossible way she spoke, her contempt for her marriage, her raving about her precious daughters, her people’s tragic past, her pseudo-religiousness, the art she didn’t care about — it’s a miracle I never did strangle her.’

Rhoda finally found some words. ‘So you got someone else to strangle her for you?’

He took a moment to reply. Measuring the silence. ‘I let the gallery be burned.’

‘With her in it?’

‘With the child in it. There were living quarters there. She liked staying there sometimes. It was a treat for her. She could play at shop. Her mother even let her talk to clients sometimes, about the art. She thought it was a great joke. “Out of the mouths of babes,” she’d say.’