Howard Jacobson - Shylock Is My Name

Then he remembered that several years before he had stood in the way of Strulovitch’s opening a gallery of Anglo-Jewish art in memory of his parents. What if he were to say he would stand in the way of it no more? What if he were to go still further and offer to use his not inconsiderable influence to facilitate it?

I’ll do that for you, Mr. Strulovitch, and all I want in return is — what? He did his sums again and came up with two things he wanted from Strulovitch. The Solomon Joseph Solomon and Gratan’s release from the threat of dismemberment. What if Strulovitch would do a deal on one and not the other? What if it fell to him, D’Anton, to prioritise? Gratan’s plight was clearly far more serious than Barnaby’s, but if truth be told D’Anton preferred Barnaby to Gratan and felt more sympathetic to his suit. Gratan had got himself into this mess, blindly following that part of himself which, quite frankly, deserved to suffer retribution. Whereas Barnaby was just trying to please a lovely if whimsical lady. There, too, lay the other basis for his preference: he would rather be the indirect cause of Plury’s felicity than Beatrice’s, Beatrice Strulovitch being…well, a Strulovitch.

Solomon himself — the other Solomon — D’Anton thought, would have trouble sorting this one out. The irony was that Plurabelle’s own television show, The Kitchen Counsellor, was the perfect place to adjudicate between these claims on D’Anton’s givingness, but the Solomon Joseph Solomon was to be a surprise to her and a discussion of the rights and wrongs of circumcision would surely have a deleterious effect on ratings. Which left him back where he began, wanting to be even-handed but not knowing how.

He was being premature in his calculations, anyway, he reminded himself, in assuming that Strulovitch would play ball with him at all. He didn’t doubt that his own loathing — no, he didn’t loathe Strulovitch, did he? His natural aversion then, his discomfort, his reluctance to like — was reciprocated. What if Strulovitch would rather keep the Solomon Joseph Solomon and risk losing his daughter than accept D’Anton’s condescension — as he would no doubt view it — in a matter that had once raised so much bitterness between them? Had there ever been a Jew yet — just a question — that was not inflexible and vengeful?

Thinking it over, D’Anton was pleased he had not yet sent Strulovitch the letter. Better not to show his hand yet. Better not to let Strulovitch know what he wanted. Did this not prove, once more, that time taken to plan a move was never time wasted? He went to look again at the letter, with a view to toning down any note of imploration, only to discover that it was no longer on his desk. There was only one explanation for this. His assistant, desirous as always to please a man so busily engaged in pleasing others, had hand-delivered it to the address on the envelope.

D’Anton bent over his desk as if in pain. He felt it was he who had been hand-delivered to Strulovitch. In his mind’s eye he saw his mortal enemy, hunched as though over a money bag, fingering his words with diabolic satisfaction.

D’Anton shuddered. It wasn’t just Gratan Howsome who had something to fear from the Jew’s malevolence.

Timing, thought Strulovitch, is everything.

If he’d received D’Anton’s letter before seeing him at Ristorante Treviso hugger-mugger with Gratan Howsome he might have looked kindly on the request. Well, “kindly” would have been to overstate it, but with an irony-drenched beneficence at least. How amusing that such a man should come cap in hand to him. And how amusing it would be to do such a man a kindness in return: sell him the Solomon Joseph Solomon for exactly what it had cost him, thereby depriving D’Anton of the pleasure of calling him a usurer and rogue. He liked the study for its pictorial flair and anatomical attention, but not as much as he’d have liked the sumptuous work it originally became. No one would have got that from him for any price. But the first attempt — yes, lovely as it was, he could bear to let it go, especially when the reward was so sweet. Here, D’Anton, my dear fellow, you must have known you had only to ask. I cannot tell you how delighted I am to learn you are a convert to Jew art at last.

Why, he might even have made him a gift of it.

But Strulovitch now knew him to be a friend and possibly a co-conspirator of Howsome’s. Difficult to see what the men could possibly have in common, but that wasn’t his affair. Companions in nefariousness they clearly were. Who was to say D’Anton hadn’t played a part in Howsome’s making off with his daughter? They’d been together, looking shifty, on the evening of the day Beatrice had decamped, which strange occurrence suggested D’Anton might have given the lovers shelter that very night. Who was to say that they weren’t there still, enjoying D’Anton’s florid hospitality — Strulovitch guessed it would be florid; florid and abstemious all at once — drinking sake from fine Japanese porcelain and toasting Strulovitch’s displeasure in Bellinis?

Strulovitch read D’Anton’s words again. Had he missed the tone of them? What at first had looked like a begging letter now looked like a vicious leg-pull. He’d been planning the most deliciously ironic response, but what if the irony was all in D’Anton’s court and he, Strulovitch, was its object?

That unnamed man, the “young and impressionable friend” who wanted the picture as a token of his devotion to a woman — there could be no doubt about his identity now. He was unmistakably Howsome.

Which meant that the woman to whom he was devoted— devoted ! — was unmistakably Beatrice.

Which left only the title of the painting itself to consider. Love’s First Lesson ! The lubricious innuendo was unmissable. The young woman — Howsome’s pupil in the erotic arts — would cherish the picture every bit as much as he, Strulovitch, would want her to, D’Anton had written. Meaning what? Either those words were rank sarcasm or they gestured at some lubricity locked away in Strulovitch’s fatherly concern.

The joke’s on me, Strulovitch realised.

He paced his drawing room, waving the letter in front of his face as though fanning himself with it.

Well we shall see about that, he said aloud.

—

Out in the garden Shylock was talking to his wife.

“I’ve been thinking,” he was saying, “how our refined morality has left us incapable of enjoying that spontaneity of action other men enjoy.”

“How so, my love?”

“Well take this man Strulovitch. What am I to him? I catch him staring at me sometimes when he thinks I’m not aware of him. A stare that seems to start from the deepest recesses of his mind and finishes I have no idea where. It disturbs me. Not even by you, my dearest, was I ever looked at with this intensity. I do not call it love. It isn’t admiration either. It’s an intensity of curiosity such as a parent might feel for a child, or a child for a parent, a sort of baffled pride as though anything I do, or have done, reflects genetically on him. I either bear him up or I let him down. He is not capable of indifference towards me. I am all lesson. I am all example. I need you to tell me I was never a trial of this sort to you, Leah. Or to Jessica.”

It was always hard for him to mention Jessica by name. So much to hide, so much not to say, so much grief. Did Leah hear that? In her infinite tact did she detect how much this withholding of her name cost him? And was it costly for her as well?

“Anyway,” he ruminated after a period of quiet, “it puts me in a false position to be an exemplar — not a role I’d ever have chosen for myself — the foundation of whose exemplariness has always to be kicked from under him. These Jews, Leah, these Jews! They don’t know whether to cry for me, disown me or explain me. Just as they don’t know whether to explain or disown themselves. They wait for a sign that they are not as cringingly passive as they have been described, and when it comes they tear their hair in shame. ‘We are a people on the verge of annihilation,’ Strulovitch is fond of telling me, when he remembers. ‘We cannot look to anyone to help us but ourselves.’ Yet the moment a Jew raises a hand to do just that his courage fails him. Better we be killed than kill, I see him thinking. Look at him now, pacing his floor, plotting a revenge he won’t in the end have the courage to carry out. The man lacks resolution, Leah. Tell me what I should do — spur him on or let him be?”