Howard Jacobson - Shylock Is My Name

Shylock eyed Strulovitch stealthily, as a snake might. I have shocked him, Strulovitch thought. Good. I have shocked myself.

He asked Brendan to open the car windows briefly. He wanted to feel an invigorating air blow in off the fields, even if it was only Cheshire out there. It is civilised to accept the violence of our natures, he thought. It is justice that makes us human, not forgiveness. We are things of blood, not things of milk.

Then he asked for the windows to be closed again.

“I am complimented to be thought too harsh by you,” he said.

“You shouldn’t be,” Shylock said. “It does no good to confirm Christians in their suspicions that we are lost to loving-kindness.”

Strulovitch took the liberty of tapping Shylock’s knee. He nodded in the direction of the chauffeur. Was Shylock up to date enough to know that a black man could be a Christian? Strulovitch hoped his expression told the story and served to warn him. In front of a Christian of whatever colour we should not talk slightingly of Christians.

Shylock apologised. “I am not accustomed,” he said under his breath, “to minding my ps and qs. I am used to abusing in the spirit I’m abused. The times have grown nice.”

“Appearances,” Strulovitch said in a whisper, “can be deceptive.”

The chauffeur drove them — somewhat surlily, Strulovitch thought — to the Strulovitch home in Mottram St. Andrew, the eastern apex of Cheshire’s Golden Triangle. It had been his parents’ last house, as unlike the houses they’d grown up in in Salford, where their parents had kept chickens in the yards and prayed in Yiddish to the Almighty, as was possible to imagine. All this in one generation — from a stable in a Mancunian shtetl to a baronial hall with a drive big enough to take a dozen Mercedes, a lake for rare fish and a view of Alderley Edge. A piece of purple-hazed, grassy England, holding Stone Age mysteries, theirs to look at and even feel proprietorial about, all thanks to car parts. Strulovitch liked his own house in Hampstead better — he preferred older money to new, even when the new was his own — but there were strong arguments for keeping Mottram St. Andrew. He had professional interests in the north, he had a daughter doing performance studies at the Golden Triangle Academy (latterly the North Cheshire Institute, renamed to remove all associations with poor-schools) — an arts-based independent college for the privileged of all ages, where Strulovitch, as a benefactor, was able to pull strings — and he believed the country air would be good for poor Kay. His mother, too, had wanted to go on living there, and would have been happy, in her own words, “to die in a shed in the garden,” but Strulovitch had insisted on building her an extension big enough to house her carers. “Must I have so many people around me, Simon?” she asked. “You can’t have too many,” he told her. “You might slip in the bath, you might fall coming down the stairs. There’s always an accident waiting to happen when you live on your own.” Ironical that it was to Kay, a woman half her age and with a husband and a daughter in attendance, that the accident waiting to happen happened.

His mother slipped all right — but quietly, without a sound, slipped out of life under the kind supervision of a host of carers.

Strulovitch inadequately mourned her. He had loved her but his affections were becalmed. If you can’t love your wife — daren’t love your wife without howling for the loss of her — who can you love?

Your daughter.

Somewhere in the house, when she wasn’t gallivanting, Beatrice lived. She was too young, in Strulovitch’s view, to be sharing a place with other students of the performing arts who might be twice her age. Though in her own view she lived at home out of deference to her mother. She was not particularly good with her mother. She was afraid of her illness and impatient with the rituals of communication — who had time to wait for words that might or might not make sense to dribble out of the side of her mouth or appear illegibly on a chalkboard? But she was also ashamed of herself on these very counts and knew it was incumbent on her, at least, never to be too far away. Dreading what would happen to her if she went to college in London, dreading who she’d meet, who she’d fall in love with, and what they’d tell her, dreading her coming home one afternoon with a kafia round her throat, Strulovitch stoked her guilt. Yes — he commended her on her decision — it was a good idea to stay in the north and live at home. He knew her mother would be relieved, whether she’d be able to show it or not. In reality, the geography of Beatrice’s education made no difference; they’d stuff her with the latest foie gras of anti-Jew psychosis and tell her that the sickness was her father’s wherever she went. He wanted not to be too far away from her, though, in case…well, just in case. Which didn’t mean he was tailing her. If she sometimes saw him flitting in or out of one of the art rooms, inspecting students’ work, that was because he had suggestions to make and promises to honour. That was the price a daughter paid for having a father who ran the Strulovitch Foundation. Whichever institution she’d attended would have wanted something he had, the offices of a philanthropist, of no matter what religion, being always in demand.

“Don’t use yourself up,” his mother used to warn him. “There’s only one of you.”

It was only as he was getting out of the car — again conscious of something not quite right in Brendan’s demeanour, not quite what one expected of a chauffeur — that he realised he had again not attended her grave.

The day had held too much excitement. And as his mother said, there was only one of him.

But there was always an excuse.

So what was Brendan’s? He hadn’t been behaving rudely exactly. He hadn’t driven too fast, or cornered aggressively. He hadn’t been slow or resentful in opening the doors for his passengers. But he seemed ruffled. So who or what had ruffled him? The presence of Shylock, was it? The Christian-baiting? The Jew-talk?

Strulovitch wondered how his dogs would react. But they took no notice when he let himself and his guest in. They didn’t even look up.

—

He suggested a drink and maybe something light to eat before bed. But he didn’t want it to sound as though he couldn’t bear to be left alone. Needy was he? He had just come, in a manner of speaking, from burying his mother. He had no wife he could talk to. He had no daughter he could trust. He had scores to settle — some social, some religious, some metaphysical — never mind what scores, just scores. Of course he was needy.

Shylock declined food, but found the idea of a drink agreeable. Strulovitch offered him grappa. He shook his head. Kümmel, perhaps. Strulovitch didn’t have kümmel. Slivovitz, then? Strulovitch didn’t have slivovitz. Shylock shrugged. Amaretto? Strulovitch thought he had amaretto somewhere. Shylock didn’t want to put him to trouble. I’ll have water, he said. Or cognac. Strulovitch had cognac. Shylock was in no hurry to retire. He didn’t sleep much, hadn’t slept much for a long time. And he seemed to be stimulated by Strulovitch’s furniture — the leather and steel armchairs, the art deco rugs, the prints of resurrections on the walls, the uncannily lifelike clay sculpture of a half-naked couple wrapped around each other in a death embrace.

“Is it permissible to sit in this room?” he asked. “Or should I be standing to inspect its contents?”

“Sit, sit,” Strulovitch said, ushering his guest into a chair. Had Shylock been in such a house before, he wondered. It must have been this thought that led him to say something stupid about the changes he must have seen.