Howard Jacobson - Shylock Is My Name

He got it. He got it all. But he couldn’t allow it. It was the waste he couldn’t bear. The other kind of waste. The waste of his and Kay’s ambitions for her. The waste of their love. The waste of that excitement he’d felt when he saw her for the very first time. The betrayal of the covenant. The waste of her, not as a pomegranate but a promise.

She was throwing that promise away. On boys who were beneath her. On crazes that demeaned her. On drinks and drugs she didn’t need. On music that didn’t merit a second of her attention. She had grown up in a house that was filled with Mozart and Schubert from morning to night. How could she not tell the difference? The first time he tailed her was to a party in a stinking house in Moss Side where a disc jockey scratched records with his dirty fingernails and shouted “Make some noise!” It was that injunction— make some noise —that brute invitation to the inchoate, that enraged him even more than the sight of her sitting cross-legged on the floor, smoking weed and stroking the matted hair of a half-conscious troglodyte lying with his head in her lap. “Make some noise,” Strulovitch hissed into her ear as he dragged her down the stairs, “have I brought you up to value noise as an entity — just noise for the sake of it, Beatrice — while some chthonic arsehole fondles your breasts!”

She fought him on the stairs and fought him as he dragged her into the Mercedes while the chauffeur looked on, saying nothing. “That’s what this is really about, isn’t it,” she said. “It’s not the music, it’s got nothing to do with music, it’s the fondling. Well no one was fondling me as it so happens. I was fondling him. The only fondling of me that was going on was in your head.”

He slapped her face. You don’t accuse your father of having sexual fantasies about you. She got out of the car. He ran after her. A stranger shouted “Hey!” when he saw them struggling. “Fuck you!” Strulovitch said, “I’m her father.” “Then try behaving like it,” the stranger said. It was a line Beatrice was to borrow. “If you want me to behave like your daughter, try behaving like my father.”

A couple of days later she walked into his study laughing like a witch. “I’ve just remembered your description of the boy fondling me,” she said. “A chthonic arsehole. Congratulations. You make me proud to be your daughter. No other girl has a dad who could come up with a phrase like that.”

Strulovitch felt a twinge of pride. It wasn’t a bad phrase for the spur of the moment. And it had the merit of being deadly accurate. “I’m grateful for your appreciation, Beatrice,” he said. “I’m sorry I hit you.”

“You’re sick,” she said. “ Chthonic arsehole . What you really mean is a goy boy. You wouldn’t have minded if he’d been a Jew.”

“Not true.”

“True!”

“All right, I might have minded less. Not on religious grounds, but because a Jew isn’t interested in the idea of making noise.”

She laughed again. “Shows what you know,” she said.

Was she right? Was chthonic arsehole just a euphemism for a non-Jew?

He didn’t think so. When he saw a Christian he didn’t see a creature of the prehistoric dark. That, surely, was more what Christians saw when they saw him. Why, it was sometimes what he saw when he saw himself.

The fact remained that a Christian husband was not what he wanted for his daughter, any more than his father had wanted a Christian wife for him. Yet it was with him exactly as it had been with his father. They both took non-Jews as they found them, enjoyed cordial relations with them, respected them, loved them — his father’s trustiest pal was a chalk-white Methodist from Todmorden; his partner, a man he cherished like a wife, an ultramontanist from Wells — and they both, father and son, reserved their highest admiration for Gentile geniuses — Mozart and Beethoven, Rembrandt and Goya ( Goy a!), Wordsworth and Shakespeare (whether he was a Shapiro or he wasn’t). With what the Gentiles were in themselves Strulovitch had no quarrel. Only when it came to who his daughter would marry (and maybe sleep with) did he have reservations. Only when he thought of the covenant did a Christian become a troglodyte.

So in the name of that covenant, how many more times did he bundle her into the Mercedes?

He was lucky she never ran away with any of the freaks — he felt he needed another word — who fondled her breasts, even for one night. When he hated her he said that was because she knew which side her bread was buttered, when he loved her he said it was because beneath it all she was a young woman of profound good sense. Either way, he went on tailing her until she grew so accustomed to his presence in the shadows of a car park or at a table in the far corner of a bar wearing dark glasses and reading the Financial Times that she would turn and ask him for a ride home when she felt she’d been out long enough, or a loan when she ran out of cash.

One bank holiday Monday he followed her to the Notting Hill Carnival. She’d said she was going to stay with cousins in Hendon — he’d even put her on the train — but he got wind of her plans. He knew it wasn’t going to be easy finding her in the crowds but went, despite his loathing of street parties, public nudity, jungle music— jungle music ? yes, jungle music — drunkenness, and masquerades, fearing the worst. The worst being? A Rasta junked-up to his eyeballs, swathed in a kafia and making noise on a steel drum. In the event it was Beatrice who found him . His anxiety must have lit him like a beacon. Boldly — and ironically because she knew his fears — she introduced him to a white man in a suit, pretty much his age, who shook his hand and said, “An honour to meet you Mr. Strulovitch.”

“Do you know how old my daughter is?” Strulovitch asked him.

“Twenty-four.”

“Is that a guess?”

“It’s what she told me.”

“You don’t ask people of twenty-four what their age is. You guessed, and you guessed wrong. She’s thirteen.”

“Thirteen and seven eighths,” Beatrice corrected him.

“Out of the mouths of babes,” Strulovitch said.

“Jesus!” the man cried, leaping from Beatrice’s side as though he’d just learnt she had leprosy. Strulovitch was half-inclined to feel sorry for him. He nonetheless said, “If I discover you’re still seeing her I’ll cut your heart out.”

For some reason this threat didn’t upset Beatrice. “Well he was hardly what you’d call chthonic,” she said, when Strulovitch got her home. “He’s the deputy mayor of Kensington and Chelsea.”

“Doesn’t stop him being chthonic,” Strulovitch said. “I can name you a dozen chthonic mayors, never mind deputy mayors.”

But the only reason his threat to eviscerate the bastard hadn’t upset her more was that she didn’t love him. Once the loving kicked off in earnest he knew he’d have his work cut out.

And then it did. He recognised the signs. Loss of appetite, absent-mindedness, teeth marks in her neck. One night he followed her to Levenshulme — a suburb no daughter of his should have been seen dead in — kicked down the door of a council flat and began throttling the first person he encountered inside. He was someone’s grandfather, too old to ravish Strulovitch’s daughter, though he might easily have been acting as a lookout while some younger person did. It took five people — one of them the putative ravisher, too puny, in the event, to have ravished a mouse — to pull him off. You were lucky, Beatrice told him, that you didn’t kill him or that no one called the police. “As far as you’re concerned,” he retorted, “I am the police.”