Howard Jacobson - Shylock Is My Name

When Beatrice and Gratan arrived they found the pillows in what they were now to think of as their boudoir freshly fluffed, bridal flowers in a vase, a bottle of Perrier-Jouët Belle Epoque on one bedside table and a box of Ladurée macarons on the other. They would also have found, had they gone looking, D’Anton in demi-residence, rehanging paintings in Plury’s parlour — Plury loved to come home to D’Anton’s reconfigurations — though he was too preoccupied to see the lovers arrive. Gratan was glad of that. He wanted to break the news in stages to D’Anton, whom he looked on as a sort of guardian, and from whom he expected sympathy but not necessarily encouragement. It had been D’Anton who had originally introduced Beatrice to their little world, and it was possible he would not look kindly on Gratan’s appropriation of her. He could hear what D’Anton would say before he said it. “I didn’t bring the girl here for you to make off with, Gratan. Not everything exists for your pleasure.” A reprimand made out of affection, but a reprimand nonetheless. “Just don’t do that again,” D’Anton had warned after Gratan’s Nazi salute. He had pointed to Gratan’s head. “Use that in future.”

His manager at Stockport County had often said the same.

Of course D’Anton might have guessed what was afoot — he was a man lost in gloomy self-abstraction, but there had been enough whispering in corridors and clumsy disappearances for even him to notice. Failing that, Plury might, in her vicarious erotic excitement, already have told him. But if he still didn’t know, Gratan figured it would be best to keep him in ignorance for as long as possible, not to say what he had done exactly, and in particular not to give the person he had done it with a name. It would be more prudent to talk in generalities — she, he, the father, circumcision, stuff like that. D’Anton was a man of the world and would be able to tell him whether, in an abstract way, circumcision was something all Jewish fathers demanded of Gentiles who wanted to marry their daughters; whether they were within their legal and moral rights to do so; whether there were officers of the law who could enforce it; and whether it was likely to be painful.

Having carried Beatrice over the threshold, he had deposited her on the bed with less ceremony than she felt the occasion warranted, hurriedly explaining that he needed to nip downstairs a second.

“Where are you going?” Beatrice shouted after him, but he was already gone. “Just make sure you nip back up again,” she added to herself.

D’Anton was up a library ladder when Gratan found him. “Does that look straight to you?” he called down without looking round.

Gratan was too caught up in his own troubles to know whether a picture was straight or not but he chose the easy option and said yes.

“So,” D’Anton began when he was off the ladder. He could tell from Gratan’s flushed appearance that he had something urgent to say. It was then that Gratan had poured out the edited contents of his heart, in response to which D’Anton had invited him to the restaurant…

To go forward a bit:

“I don’t know,” Gratan said to himself as he ran back up the stairs, “whether I’m coming or going.” To Beatrice, who was standing at the window, as though awaiting his return by that route, he said, “Sorry, but I just have to slip out for a short while.”

Beatrice stared at him in disbelief.

“First you have to nip down and now you have to slip out. Anybody would think you don’t want to be with me.”

She was not remotely sentimental. She hadn’t supposed this was to be their honeymoon night. They had slept together many times already, and the evening wasn’t otherwise to be sanctified by what had gone before. It was a night to get through, that was all. But for him to be nipping down and slipping out before she’d even had time to unpack her case was not how she, or indeed how any woman, would have expected things to go.

“Of course I want to be with you,” Gratan said. He appeared hurt that she should doubt it.

“Gratan!”

“What?”

“We’ve only just got here!”

“I’m not going to be long.”

“Where have you been?”

“I can’t say.”

“Where are you going?”

“I can’t say.”

“This isn’t a good start, Gratan. Not after the day I’ve had.”

He led her to the bed and embraced her in a manner that made it possible for him to keep an eye on the time. “It hasn’t been easy for me either,” he reminded her.

“No but you’re bigger and more experienced than I am. And he isn’t your father. Please don’t go out tonight. Not tonight.”

But Gratan had his appointment with D’Anton at Ristorante Treviso to keep. He needed D’Anton’s advice — not later, not tomorrow, but now, in advance of his first night with Beatrice as runaways. It had dawned on him, in the course of the brief but fraught drive from Beatrice’s house to Plury’s, that however enraged and determined Beatrice was today, she might well feel differently about things — including him — in the morning. A father was still a father, no matter that he was a monster. And a Jewish father, from all he’d heard, even more so. He couldn’t take anything for granted. What Beatrice said was not necessarily what Beatrice thought. He was pleased with himself for these insights into a woman’s psychology. On Beatrice’s behalf, as well as his own, it was important he talk to D’Anton. Otherwise he could easily make a false move. Say something he’d regret. Do something he shouldn’t.

“Don’t ask me to tell you where I’ve been or where I’m going,” he pleaded. “Just trust me. When you know, you’ll agree I was right to go there. It’s for us.”

“It sounds as though you’re going to fetch a priest. Don’t.”

“I swear I’m not,” Gratan said, putting his hand to his heart in a gesture that reminded Beatrice ever so slightly of his notorious Nazi salute.

“You haven’t got another woman already?”

“Another woman! We’ve only been here an hour.”

How long did it take, Beatrice wondered. “And you’ll be back soon?”

“I promise,” he promised, raising his arm to his chest again.

“You needn’t do that,” Beatrice said. “Just come back sober.”

“As a lord.”

“It’s as drunk as a lord. A judge is what you mean. Never mind. Just assure me you are coming back. You haven’t brought me here to leave me here?”

“Why would I do that?”

He kissed her with fierce passion. The first time he clapped eyes on her she’d been dressed as an urchin. Plury’s doing. “My little Jewboy,” Plury had called her. She looked a little like that again — more petulant than angry, more of a girl than a woman, more oriental than western, cross-bred, out of place, neither one thing nor another, a confusion to him. Was there nothing he wouldn’t do for her?

“I won’t be long,” he said.

To go back a bit:

So Beatrice, on such a night, was left alone to reflect on what she’d done.

Was it any surprise she shed a tear?

She wiped her eye and wondered if Gratan had slipped out to kill her father. Would she have minded?

And what if, in the ensuing fight, her father were to kill Gratan? Would she have minded that?

Questions, questions…

She opened the champagne, though she didn’t much like champagne, starting when it popped. Was that Gratan’s gun going off? Or her father’s? Her house was only a mile and a half away. On such nights, in the quiet of the Golden Triangle, sound travelled.

By the time I’ve finished this bottle, she thought, I will have forgotten who Gratan Howsome is. But I will not have forgotten my father.