Howard Jacobson: Shylock Is My Name

Having deposited these detailed stipulations, he went into the garden of the Old Belfry — his belfry, of course, was genuinely old — laid himself out beneath the second most ancient oak tree in Cheshire, stuffed tissues up his nostrils against the stench of filthy lucre, took an overdose of the pills for which his family had been overcharging grossly for half a century, and expired.

Richly left and richly independent, Plurabelle shed copious tears — for she had inherited the sadness gene from her father — and allowed a decent interval of time to elapse before summoning the courage to read her father’s test, presented to her in a long Manila envelope, like a Last Will and Testament, by his solicitors. A gap year, she called this decent interval of time. A period in which to travel, meditate, meet interesting people, have a breast enlargement and work done on her face.

At the fulfilment of which, looking simultaneously younger and older than her years and ever so slightly Asiatic, she sliced into the envelope with a letter opener made of the horn of one of the rhinos she intermittently marched through the centre of Manchester to preserve. Unable to see how being able to identify the three biggest lies of the twentieth century, or to name the fifty richest “foreign” families in the United Kingdom, or to suggest a viable scheme for assassinating Tony Blair, would yield her the ideal partner, she put her father’s test in the bin and devised trials more likely to yield the sort of man she thought she wanted. On her twenty-first birthday she attended a swinger’s party in Alderley Edge, having taken the sensible precaution of ascertaining first that her mother would not be there. She went wearing a Formula One driver’s suit and goggles and jiggling the keys to each of her cars — a Volkswagen Beetle, a BMW Alpina, and a Porsche Carrera. These, once she had secured the attention of the majority of the guests, she threw into an ice bucket and went outside to wait in the Beetle. That fights broke out over the BMW and the Porsche but no one followed her to the Volkswagen didn’t entirely surprise her, given that this was Cheshire, but she felt she’d learned an invaluable lesson. Deceived by ornament and the glitter of appearance, men were incapable of seeing substance let alone valuing it. She became a lesbian for a year, received instruction in holy orders from a nun who had once done secretarial work for her father, tried her hand at modelling, journalism, photography and kinetic sculpture, had her breasts reduced, and settled finally for running a restaurant — though she had no cookery skills — in what had been the stables of the Old Belfry.

She called the restaurant Utopia and envisaged it as the centrepiece of that experiment in idealistic living her father had often talked to her about but never got round to putting into practice. Guests would be invited to stay the night, or even the weekend, go on treasure hunts, play croquet, fall in and out of love, treat one another beautifully, avail themselves of therapies of various kinds from Ayurvedic massage to marriage guidance — Plurabelle herself excelled at mediating between stressed partners, having practised for many years on her parents — inveigh against wealth, though only the wealthy could afford to attend, and of course enjoy food that bespoke honest endeavour combined with profligacy. Cottage pie washed down with Krug Clos d’Ambonnay. Or white Alba truffle with tap water. Eventually, she told a reporter from Cheshire Life , she would put her own ornamental virginity on the menu but as yet had not devised a method for distinguishing the right buyer from the wrong.

Though highly photogenic in the gamin style, with a retroussé nose, a Daisy Duck mouth, golden tresses, a throaty voice that brought to mind a bee buzzing in a windowpane in late summer, and a Scandinavian weather girl’s figure, Plurabelle Shalcross had her father’s fascinated mistrust of the media. No, she wouldn’t make a television programme about her Utopia weekends, but then again, if it were to be a series, maybe she would. To the idea of bartering her virginity on screen she brought the same complex of scruple and consent, with both finally winning out. Better, surely, from the point of view of audience interest, to keep the question of her finding the right man forever in suspense. Week in, week out, she could set new challenges and, week in, week out, suitors would fail them. Thus she laughed, cried, frolicked, cooked badly and, as episode followed episode, adjudicated — not just between lovers prepared to joust to win her, but between the affairs of others among her guests. Soon, imperceptibly, her programmes came to be about judgement as much as food and love. A new series entitled The Kitchen Counsellor became an overnight success. Couples, friends, even lifelong enemies, would bring their disputes to Plurabelle’s table where, as she served them delectable dishes prepared behind the scenes by someone else, she would deliver verdicts held to be binding at least in the sense that all parties had agreed to abide by them in their release forms.

Not only was this a cheaper option than going to law or even arbitration, it gave combatants a taste of passing fame and, still more alluringly, Plurabelle’s incomparable sagacity. Who cared, after that, whether they had won their argument or lost it!

For those for whom fame was less important than vindication, Plurabelle, flushed with success, initiated a live interactive Webchat facility called Bicker. Here, the contentious would submit their grievances to the arbitration of the British public. “I can’t be the one who decides everything,” Plurabelle told her friends. But the British public turned out to be too vitriolic an arbitrator even for its own taste, the site consumed itself in rage, and Plurabelle was once again the person who — in the humane spirit of it not mattering whether anything was decided or not — decided everything.

Life was a game and Anna Livia Plurabelle Cleopatra A Thing Of Beauty Is A Joy Forever Wiser Than Solomon Christine its master of ceremonies.

—

Oh, but sadness is a curse.

Plurabelle’s mother told her it was natural in a girl who had recently lost a father. But Plurabelle sought a deeper cause. Or maybe a more superficial cause. A different cause, anyway.

Her mother couldn’t help her with that. “Philosophy exceeds my maternal brief,” she said. “Why don’t you go to sadness classes in Wilmslow?”

“Because I don’t need to be taught it. I need to get rid of it.”

“That’s what they do there,” her mother said. “I put it wrong. It’s like Alcoholics Anonymous only for sad rich people.”

“Will I have to stand up and say, ‘Hello, my name is Anna Livia Plurabelle Cleopatra A Thing Of Beauty Is A Joy Forever Christine, I have a personal fortune in excess of twenty million pounds and I am a saddist’? Because if I do I’m not going.”

Her mother shrugged. In her view what her daughter needed was a lover. When you have a lover there’s no time to be sad.

Plurabelle went anyway, despite her initial reluctance. It’s possible that she too secretly hoped to find a lover there. Though God knows she didn’t need any more sadness around her. In order not to be recognised she wore a headscarf that made her look as though she had toothache. Most of the others were in disguise too. We are sad because we’re famous, Plurabelle thought. But the convenor told the gathering not to look for reasons right away, not to attribute it to ambition or stress or the spirit of competition and envy prevailing in the Golden Triangle. They were sad because they were sad. The only important thing was not to be in denial.

Over coffee, after the first session, she discussed this idea of not looking for a reason for their sadness with an older, elegant man whom she’d noticed at the meeting, sitting somewhat apart and staring ahead of him as though the sorrows of ordinary mortals were not to be compared to his. He introduced himself, in a manner that was part apologetic and part disdainful, as D’Anton, and close up seemed to her to be sad because he was homosexual (or at least not definitively heterosexual), for which, as she understood it, they were also not to look for reasons. They talked at length in a serious vein, after which she asked him to one of her Utopia house parties. It was up to him whether he wanted to be filmed or not. Bring someone, if you like, she told him. But he arrived alone, bearing an enormous glass paperweight in the centre of which was a teardrop. “That’s beautiful,” she said, “but you shouldn’t have.” He made light of the gift. Among the objets d’art he made a living from importing, he explained, were glass paperweights. This one came from a small village in Japan where they’d been blowing glass since the fourteenth century and no one knew how to do anything else. She wondered if the teardrop was human or animal. They say it’s the teardrop of whoever beholds it, he told her. Whereupon they both cried a little and held on to each other as though they meant never to let go.