Howard Jacobson - Shylock Is My Name

“Talk of the devil,” he said.

“Thanks, Daddy.”

He hesitated over the introduction, but it had to be done. “My daughter Beatrice, Shylock.”

“Yeah, right,” Strulovitch thought she said, that’s if she said anything. She was a mumbler, otherwise uninquisitive in the not quite impolite style of a preoccupied teenage girl, asking Shylock if he was an old friend of Daddy’s, pretending to listen to the answer, wondering if the men had plans for the day. Globally indifferent.

Did she know who she was talking to?

“We haven’t discussed what we’re going to do,” Shylock said. “Your father might be busy. I’d be quite happy to sit here and read the papers or listen to some music if that wouldn’t inconvenience you. Do you have any Bach, or George Formby?”

Beatrice looked at her father. She didn’t know who George Formby was. Hers was the first generation, Strulovitch thought, that came into the world without memory.

Strulovitch helped her out. “ ‘When I’m Cleaning Windows.’ ”

“That’s not Bach,” Beatrice guessed.

“No he’s funnier than Bach.”

“I am never amused,” Beatrice said, “when I hear facetious music.”

“My own Formby favourite,” Shylock said, “is ‘Happy Go Lucky Me.’ ”

Is he poking fun at himself, Strulovitch wondered. Or is he making fun of her? If so, to what end? Is he flirting with my daughter?

Beatrice seemed neither to notice nor to care. She loosened the towel around her head and shook her hair, sprinkling with the lightest spray Shylock’s fine woollen trousers.

Unless that was her way of flirting back.

“What about Al Jolson?” Shylock asked.

Beatrice shook her head again. The Dark Ages, Strulovitch thought. For all her precocious brilliance, she lives bubbled in an electronic ignorance that makes the seventh century appear a carnival of enlightened knowledge. He was ashamed of her for having heard of so little that happened in the hours before she was born. But he was also worried that this suddenly light-spirited, not to say skittish Shylock might think of helping her out in the matter of Al Jolson’s identity by singing “Mammy” complete with jazz hands. Beatrice knew nothing of what he knew at her age but she knew what was and was not culturally allowable and she knew a white man wasn’t permitted to black up as a minstrel.

“The CDs are on that shelf,” Beatrice said. “Just help yourself. They aren’t mine. And you needn’t worry about disturbing me. I’m off in a few minutes. I have to be at college for a twelve o’clock.” She stuck her chin out at her father — see: contrary to what he supposed, she was taking her coursework seriously.

“What are you studying?” Shylock asked, lowering his voice as though to exclude Strulovitch. The question was almost a caress.

“Oh, it’s a general arts course, pretty basic, but I want to concentrate on performance art,” Beatrice replied. Rather coyly, it struck Strulovitch, as though hearing what she described as “studying” was a novel experience for her.

Strulovitch felt a rush of shame. Performance art! Why didn’t they just call it showing off? He wondered if Shylock had ever encountered the genre or knew it was just another word for shedding your inhibitions in public. Given what he thought of Carnival, he didn’t see Shylock much caring for performance art. (But then you never knew: who would ever have picked him as a fan of George Formby?) Jessica had been trouble enough, but at least she hadn’t told her father she was hoping to explore the empty parameters of audience — performer relations. “Not an occupation for a Jewish girl,” he’d have told her, shutting the windows. That was pretty much Strulovitch’s position too, even though most of the performance artists he’d heard of were Jewish girls.

Were the parameters they were testing those that existed between Jewish girls and their fathers?

Was the ecosexual exhibitionist Annie Sprinkle, born Ellen Steinberg, what came of teaching modesty?

Whatever Shylock understood of this, he inclined his head with Old World politeness. Beatrice might have been telling him she was studying to be a seamstress.

Then suddenly he asked her, “What does that entail?”

He’s doing this to discomfit me, Strulovitch thought. He means to keep Beatrice here all morning, leading her on, catching her out, plucking at my nerves.

Beatrice smiled at him. “Being a performance artist?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll tell you when I have more time,” she said, bewitchingly.

Strulovitch wondered again if she knew whom she was bewitching.

But something inviting in her smile made him apprehensive. Was she thinking about asking Shylock to accompany her to college. He saw her introducing him to her friends. “Hey guys, this is Shylock. Ring a bell? No, me neither. But he’s cool.” And maybe taking him along to one of her performance classes. He saw Shylock engaging in bitter dispute with Beatrice’s teachers, not moderating himself as a modern Jew knew he had to, not knowing what a bear pit the place was. But that fear was quickly overtaken by a further — what if Shylock had designs of some sort on his daughter, not erotic, surely not erotic, but possessive-paternal, and who knew where possessive-paternal stopped and erotic began? Was he looking at her greedily? A performance artist, eh? Strulovitch knew from the inside how a man, without moving a muscle on his face, can comprehensively take in a woman. And why wouldn’t he take in Beatrice who was luscious in the older style of young women, plumper and more contoured than was the fashion, not pared down like a half-gnawed carrot but full and rubicund, a Song of Solomon beauty. Like Leah, perhaps. Another Jessica. Yes, without doubt, Shylock saw and appreciated her. An appreciation that Beatrice noted — how could she not? — and appreciated in return. “And you let this man into your home,” he heard his mother say. “Don’t you have concerns enough with that girl?” All too impossibly Mephistophelean to imagine Shylock on an errand of this sort, Shylock here with the express purpose of replacing Jessica — no, surely not — but it is deranging to lose a daughter as he had lost his and who’s to say what derangement won’t bring about?

An eye for an eye, a daughter for a daughter.

Why should Strulovitch have a daughter and he not!

He felt the ignominy of his suspicions when Beatrice, having dashed down a piece of cold toast, told Shylock it had been a pleasure to meet him, and Shylock, again inclining his head formally, said, without irony or knowingness, “Likewise — good luck with your studies.”

Strulovitch was ashamed of himself. There’s something not right somewhere, he thought, when a father can’t see his daughter in the company of another man without envisioning foul play. Let’s not beat about the bush: there’s something not right with me . Beatrice didn’t need to buy herself a lubricious monkey to suggest a world without moral bearings. The lubricious monkey was him.

Did Shylock see that? Did Shylock mean Strulovitch to see he saw it?

Before she left the room she asked Strulovitch if he’d checked his diary yet.

“I will,” he said. “I promise.”

“You promised last time.”

“This time I really will. I’ll leave a time under your door.”

“Just text it.”

They listened in silence to the girl banging about the house. Their eyes met in a way Strulovitch found intrusive. They shouldn’t have been listening to her together. They were not bonded in his daughter.

The noise she made collecting her things and throwing books around — it sounded like throwing books around, though Strulovitch doubted she had any books — as a rule irritated Strulovitch. It seemed such an unnecessary insistence on her independence. But today he had no choice but to listen with the ears of Shylock. He thought how much he’d miss her if she went.