Howard Jacobson - Shylock Is My Name

“What’s that got to do with the price of eggs? You end up in a court of law and no one cares what academy rules you did or didn’t break, whose pleasure you procured the girl for, or how conspicuous she was.”

“Procured!”

“Wake up, D’Anton! That’s how it will look. Mud sticks. And the more salacious the accusation, the more people will want to believe it. You might think you are above this, but I don’t think I am. What happens to my reputation, what happens to my show, what happens to the Belfry if I’m accused of running a bawdy house for paedophiles?”

“Oh, come on!”

“And what happens to your good name if you’re accused of assisting me? They’ll call us pimps, D’Anton. The country is in the mood for witch-hunts. The press tell them there’s a pervert under every stone. They’ll say we groomed underage girls here. Gratan will be finished. You’ll be a hate figure on social media. And Barney will probably leave me.”

“So what do you propose?”

“That we tell Gratan he must come back. He listens to you. Order him to return.”

“And do what?”

“Man up.”

“And what if what he has to man up to is three years in Strangeways? Why would anyone come back for that?”

“To help us, for one thing. To repay my kindness and whatever it is he owes you. Because he’s the one who got us into this. And if he does return, then maybe the monster won’t prosecute.”

“You think he’ll forgive and forget? He’s not a forgiving and forgetting man, Plury.”

Plury thought about it. She had been looking wild-eyed throughout this conversation, her eyes and lips more swollen than ever; now she resembled a figure from ancient tragedy and comedy combined, distraught and disfigured. She took D’Anton by his sleeve. “If Gratan gives him what he wants and agrees to his demands, he might.”

“What are you saying?”

She made a distracted scissor movement with the index and middle fingers of both hands. Had she seen Shylock doing the same thing she couldn’t have copied it any better. “Snip, snip!” she said.

Gratan’s response to D’Anton’s text telling him to come home and face the music was immediate and terse. “No fucking chance,” he wrote.

D’Anton texted back to say that was no way to talk to a man who’d always had his best interests at heart.

Gratan responded by saying that a friendship could only be tested so far.

D’Anton texted again to ask what Beatrice thought about returning.

Gratan responded in a similar vein to his earlier message. “Haven’t fucking asked her.”

D’Anton texted to ask why not.

“Sick to death of her,” was Gratan’s reply.

“Any particular reason?” D’Anton wondered.

“She keeps talking to me in some foreign language.”

“What foreign language?”

“How would I know? It’s foreign. Jew, I think.”

“Then couldn’t you at least see your way clear to sending her home?”

“No wucking fay,” Gratan replied. “The sex is too good. It’s the only time she shuts the fuck up.”

D’Anton took that as a no, then, to any possibility that Gratan would countenance circumcision into the Jewish faith.

—

“Now what?” Plury wanted to know.

She was out with D’Anton and Barney at a bar in Manchester. They didn’t want to be heard discussing any of this in the Golden Triangle. Where they were drinking nobody would understand the word “circumcision.”

“We dare the Jew to do his worst,” D’Anton said.

“I don’t think that’s going to work,” Barnaby put in — an intervention that surprised him as well as his companions. Normally when there were councils of war he left Plury and D’Anton to do the talking. His role, at such times, was to make them feel better simply by virtue of his pleasing presence. But on this occasion his good name was at stake as well as theirs. If the Belfry was a brothel, what was he? The idea of Gratan getting away with something, no matter that he only dimly grasped the full extent of the offence, didn’t please him much either. Gratan does something wrong and gets to stay in Venice for his pains, and he, Barnaby, does nothing wrong and has to put up with all this tetchiness and tension in Cheshire.

He was feeling badly let down by D’Anton in other ways too.

“So when’s this ring I gave you coming back?” Plury had asked the moment they sat down to their drinks. “You swore to me you’d wear it till the hour of your death, and it’s been off your finger for a week.”

Barnaby had stared penetratingly at D’Anton. They’d rehearsed this, hadn’t they? D’Anton was meant to look at his own left hand where, after getting the ring polished by “his man,” he’d worn it for safety, only to discover with magnificently feigned horror that it had gone, goodness knows how, fallen off and rolled into a gutter or under the wheels of a bus, he could only suppose because his fingers were narrower than Barney’s. “I would rather cut my left hand off than be responsible for this,” he was to say, whereupon, amid promises of restitution, profuse apologies, tears from Barnaby and the like, Plury would embrace them both and tell them that flesh-and-blood love such as they enjoyed, and she hoped always would enjoy, far surpassed a trinket. But D’Anton, in his Gratan-centred distraction, forgot his lines, gazed into space, and with utterly uncharacteristic impatience snapped at Barney for consuming his time and glared at Plury for making a fuss.

“I will deal with you,” Plury said to Barney, “later.”

(More than ever he needed that picture.)

D’Anton she glared at in return.

Are we in competition over this ring, she asked herself, and didn’t much like the answer that came back.

Thus their exquisite world of mutuality and consideration, so often troubled but then redeemed by sadness, had begun to buckle under the pressure of short temper. Hence Barnaby — by any interpretation of events their only innocent victim — speaking what was on his mind.

“As I see it,” he went on, “the Jew will not back down. I’ve never heard of a Jew who will. They believe they lose face if they relent. It’s against their religion. My father who met many Jews told me the same thing. They have hearts of stone. Try standing on a beach and ordering the tide to go back — that’s what it’s like persuading a Jew to change his mind. So if Gratan himself won’t return to face the music we have no choice but to find a proxy Gratan to satisfy the Jew’s bloodlust.”

Surprised by how much Barney knew about Jews and their beliefs, Plury was nonetheless perplexed by his reasoning. “A poxy Gratan I can understand, Barney,” she said, “but what’s a proxy Gratan when he’s at home?”

I’m getting pretty tired of both these men, she thought. In fact she thought she was getting pretty tired of men altogether. Maybe she should have been the one who ran away with Beatrice.

“A substitute of some sort,” Barney said.

“A substitute for what?” D’Anton asked.

“For Gratan. A substitute for Gratan in the eyes of the Jew.”

“You’ll have to explain that,” Plury said. “Take it more slowly.”

Barnaby didn’t see how he could go any slower or be any clearer. “Someone who will stand in for Gratan. A scapegoat, is that the word? An understudy. Someone the Jew can do the equivalent to.”

“Someone else he can circumcise, do you mean?” D’Anton wasn’t sure whether it was he or Plury who asked that. Neither was Plury, so synchronised were they in consternation.

“Yes,” said Barnaby. “That’s what he wants isn’t it.”

“Darling,” said Plury, “he isn’t looking for any old person to circumcise for the fun of it. The point of circumcising Gratan is to get a Jewish husband for Beatrice.”