Howard Jacobson: Shylock Is My Name

The accusation hurt him deeply. Though not yet wildly wealthy, he was the one who had brought money to the marriage. And what he didn’t spend on her went, even in these early years, on causes to which she had given her blessing and which would always bear her name. He believed the settlement was more than generous to her. And he knew that in her heart she thought so too. But there it was — the ancient stain. She hadn’t been able to help herself. So the stain was on her as well.

The phone became a viper in his hand. Not in anger but in horror, he let it fall to the floor.

He wrote to her the next day to say that henceforth they were to speak to each other only through their solicitors.

But even after he remarried he carried a torch for her. Despite the pound-of-flesh allusion? He wondered about that. Despite it or because of it?

—

A watched kettle never boils, but Shylock watched by Strulovitch rattles like a seething pot. It’s not noise that distracts him but anxiety, disquiet, neurasthenic perturbation. On this occasion, Strulovitch’s. Conscious of him, Shylock fractionally shifts his position on his Glyndebourne stool and twitches his ears. He could be an Egyptian cat god.

“What’s to be done with us?” he asks Leah.

“Us?”

“Our people. We are beyond help.”

“Nobody’s beyond help. Show compassion.”

“I shouldn’t have to feel it as compassion. I should feel it as loyalty.”

“Then show loyalty.”

“I endeavour to, but they try my patience.”

“My love, you have no patience.”

“Nor do they. Especially for themselves. They have more time for those who hate them.”

“Hush,” she says.

The tragedy is that she can’t stroke his neck and make the wavy lines go away.

—

When Leah was big with child she would call Shylock to her and get him to put his hand on her belly. Feel the kicking. He loved the idea that the little person in there couldn’t wait to join them.

Jessica, my child.

Now it was Leah who made her presence felt. The gentlest of nudges, as though some burrowing creature were at work in the ground beneath him. “Well said, old mole,” he thinks. He knew what she was nudging him about. One of the traits of his character she had always disliked was his social cruelty. He teased people. Riddled them. Kept them waiting. Made them come to him. And he was doing the same with Strulovitch, not letting on he knew he was there, testing his endurance. Hence her prod, reminding him of his obligations.

Only when Shylock turned did Strulovitch see that his cheeks and chin were stubbled — not so much a beard as a gnarling of the flesh. Nothing about his face admitted softness, but the company of his wife had called light into his features and the remains of a querulous amusement lingered in the cruel creases around the eyes he showed to Strulovitch. “Ah!” he said, closing the paperback from which he’d been reading, rolling it up again and putting it with some deliberation in the inside pocket of his coat, “Just the man.”

There lived once in a big old house equidistant from Mottram St. Andrew, Alderley Edge and Wilmslow — at the very heart of what is still known to estate agents as the Golden Triangle — a dope-smoking media don who disapproved of dope and media, heir to a pharmaceutical fortune who favoured the redistribution of all wealth but his own, a utopist who mistrusted the principle of social amelioration, a lover of Gregorian chant who fantasised about being a rock legend, a whimsical conservationist who bought his sons fast cars with which they tore up the very country roads he wanted conserving. If he sounds like many people it’s because many people were wrapped up in him. But he was just one man, a single fretting bundle of idealistic envy. “Sometimes,” he told his students at the business school in Stockport of which he was the dean, “even the fortunate and gifted can feel their lives are mortgaged to a perplexing sadness.”

“You don’t say,” his students said behind his back.

For Peter Shalcross MBE, one day had become the same as every other. A live morning radio interview on any subject, an afternoon lecture to his students on Mercantilism and Alienation — on alternate weeks he changed the title to Money and Estrangement — and then the drive home in the early evening to the heart of the Golden Triangle where a neat Scotch and scarlet smoking jacket awaited him, and where he could fulminate in comfort against the faux manses and manor houses of which the Strulovitches and their kind had taken possession. Every evening at the same time he fulminated, saying the same things and feeling the same burning sensation in his chest. But habit took nothing from the fervour of his animus. Only someone who enjoyed the benefits of great wealth himself could have been made so angry by the great wealth of others — the difference being that he hadn’t had to earn his, the fact of which also made him obscurely angry.

“Can you smell anything?” he would ask visitors, throwing open the doors to his grounds, and when they had exhausted the possibilities — someone burning off leaves in the next county, horse manure, faulty plumbing, dust from the Sahara — he would rub the tips of his fingers together and say, “No none of those, what I smell is more like lucre…The filthy sort.”

Though he was concerned about the effect that the propinquity of lucre might have on the air quality, the hedgerows and his only daughter, Anna Livia Plurabelle Cleopatra A Thing Of Beauty Is A Joy Forever Christine — Christine being the name of the flighty society model he had ill-advisedly married and whose influence on him extended all the way down to his candy-striped socks and fashionably pointed, high crepe-soled shoes — Shalcross was known to boast to his academic colleagues about the millionaire pop stars and footballers who were his neighbours. This was not to be confused with hypocrisy. A man can boast and still deplore.

“If you wanted a pop-idol life, Christine, you should have run off with a pop idol,” he told his wife the night the Cheshire constabulary raided the anything-goes party she’d thrown for Plurabelle’s sixteenth birthday. In fact he was the one who should have run off with a pop idol. Or better still, been a pop idol.

It wasn’t the amyl nitrite that brought the police out, it was the amplified music. And it was a rhythm guitarist, residing half a mile away, who’d alerted them. He couldn’t hear himself practise, he’d complained. Even the noisy were entitled to peace. It was their human right.

After thinking about it for a week, Christine Shalcross did precisely as her husband suggested, though running off in this instance meant no more than moving to the other side of the paddock, where pop idols proliferated like peonies. “For all that I’ll be able to keep a close eye on her from here,” she told her husband, “I’d still prefer you to bring Plurabelle up. A girl needs a father’s example and she loves you more than she loves me. You have that in common with her.”

Estranged from himself, humiliated by his wife, disappointed in his sons who had gone to work for banks which had the indecency to fail, depressed by the cynicism of his students, appalled by the social deterioration of the Golden Triangle and expecting to die early, anyway, as his parents and grandparents had, Shalcross left instructions with his solicitors for the care of Plurabelle. “Taking into account the size of her fortune and the sweetness of her nature, Plury will be at the mercy of every moneybags and bloodsucker that comes along,” he told his lawyers. “Find listed below a number of ordeals of character to which every aspirant to her bed must be submitted. Any who hope to approach her by some other route should know that my family’s reach is long and extends to low places as well as high.”