Howard Jacobson - Pussy

Dr Cobalt put aside her salad. Probrius had gently alluded to the prostitution test she’d set Fracassus some months more – he wasn’t prying: just curious – and the memory of it was still painful to her. Violation Studies had been another of her subjects at university. Probrius could laugh, but violation wasn’t funny. There’d been violation the day she’d listed all the words she knew for prostitute. Of that she had no doubt. The question was: who had violated whom?

‘Whatever the word for it,’ she said,’ the thing he did, the thing he made me do, was damnably clever. And it’s you who’s just said he’s no pushover.’

He stretched out a hand and laid it on hers. ‘No pushover, no. But nor is a wild dog when it’s cornered. As for the thing you said he made you do, I think you’re attributing to him what’s essentially yours. It was you who made you do it. Feeling you’ve been had is your act. The more sophisticated we are, the more we we feel we must grant sophistication to a fool. The besetting sin of our times…’

Hearing himself, he paused. Is this another fine mess my punditry’s getting me into, he asked himself. He wished he had an easier manner. He wished he had fewer degrees. He wished he were more of a wild dog himself. He threw the Doctor an apologetic look. He was sorry for spoiling their little tête-à-tête repast.

But he had forgotten that Dr Cobalt had a number of degrees of her own. And he didn’t yet know that she had a soft spot for pedants. ‘Go on,’ she said, ‘what’s the besetting sin of our times? I’d better know in case I’m inadvertently committing it.’

‘I doubt it, my dear.’ And he was away again. ‘What it comes to, in my estimation, is that we liberals find it so hard to bear the space we see in the minds and hearts of the ignorant that we fill it with our own compunctions. We are only this far’ – he showed her the edge of his knife – ‘from maintaining that the stupid are more intelligent than the clever.’

‘Christianity got there a long time ago,’ Dr Cobalt reminded him.

‘You aren’t going to tell me Fracassus is a holy fool.’

‘He’s a holy little shit. But…’

The Grand Duke invested a day a week into the commercial education of his son. ‘Quality Time’ was the expression some fathers used to describe the intimate hours they devoted to their children; the Grand Duke called his days off with Fracassus ‘Quantity Time’ – a quiet opportunity for them to sit down together and discuss how much they were worth.

As a rule, these days would begin with the Morning Story, a short extract from the Grand Duke’s own favourite business literature, some mornings Adam Smith, others Dale Carnegie, and occasionally a page or two the Grand Duke had written himself. He had talked for years about gathering his thoughts on acquisition and development into a small and beautifully bound volume, but nothing had come of it. Among his hopes for the future was that one day he and the Prince would write it together. In the meantime, he read passages aloud – sometimes the same passages – with which the Prince seemed most in tune. A chapter entitled How To Get Away With Getting Your Own Way was a particular favourite.

It touched the Grand Duke to see his son sitting at his desk and cradling his cheek in his hand while he read to him about the ins and outs of avoiding rent control or removing a troublesome tenant. It would have reminded him of the early days of parenthood when, tucked up in bed, the infant Prince would close his little bullet-hole eyes and ask to hear a story – would have reminded him of such days had they only happened. I haven’t been the best of fathers, the Grand Duke admitted to himself, vowing to do better while knowing he wouldn’t.

No excuses, but he wasn’t in the best of health. Overseeing the building of the Origen ziggurat, golf, and the tragic circumstances surrounding Jago had taken their toll. The Grand Duchess, too, was fragile and, when she wasn’t locked away with her susurrating fairy stories, she needed his attention and devotion. The future held its breath for Fracassus.

This was not a parochial ambition. If the Grand Duke wasn’t in the best of health, neither was the Republic. Neither was the world. When he said the future held its breath for Fracassus he didn’t just mean the future of the House of Origen. He meant the future of the planet.

But he wasn’t going to rush things. He understood his son’s education architecturally, starting from the bottom, a floor at a time. First to the top wasn’t always the winner. Hold the ladder steady; mind the snakes. For the moment at least, the Prime Mover could sleep easy.

Some days, after the Morning Story, the Grand Duke would take the Prince to inspect their properties. On his early visits Fracassus had liked going up and down in the lifts, counting how many floors he owned. Now his pleasures were of a more sophisticated kind. He liked calculating how many people he owned.

On this day, the Grand Duke had planned a visit to the Nowhere Palace of New Transoxiana. It was situated on an artificial beach whose sands were of surpassing softness, sands the colour of his wife’s hair, on an offshore artificial island outside the Walls of the Republic and reachable from it only by a secret underground tunnel. Other titled personnages were allowed to use this tunnel but only the Grand Duke had a key. Fracassus had never visited this isolated section of the Wall before and was surprised to see his father putting his ear to it, as though listening to its heart beat. They had travelled to the Southern Wall without attendants, just the two of them, father and son, and if not exactly in disguise, not exactly in full regalia either. Fracassius watched as his father continued his doctorly exploration of the Wall’s chest, tapping it and listening. Eventually, a tiny aperture appeared and into this the Grand Duke inserted a bronze key. A door opened, just wide enough for one person to enter at a time. It was dark when the door shut behind them. The Grand Duke carried a torch but shone it only when they lost their footing. He wanted the experience to be both a learning adventure and a rebirth for his son. Fracassus didn’t do metaphor and was bored. He reached for his phone. ‘You won’t get a signal down here,’ his father told him. ‘Who were you going to ring, anyway?’ ‘I wasn’t going to ring anyone. I was going to check the weather.’ ‘We’re in a tunnel. There is no weather.’ No weather? Fracassus was frightened. He’d seen a television programme in which a father took his son to the top of a mountain to slit this throat but then God stepped into to stop him. Not a great storyline but he liked it when the father slit a ram’s throat instead. If his father was planning something similar, where was the ram? It frightened him to be without a signal.

‘You still haven’t told me where you’re taking me,’ he said.

‘Off-shore.’

‘I didn’t know we had a shore.’

‘We don’t. We have the idea of a shore and I’m taking you to the idea of off it.’

Ideas frightened Fracassus. ‘Does it have a name?’

The Grand Duke lowered his voice. ‘Avoiding tax. Not to be confused with evading tax. Evasion we’ll discuss next week.’

‘No, I meant does where we’re going have a name.’

‘The Republic Outside the Walls of the Republic.’

‘So is this abroad?’ Fracassus had never been abroad.

‘It’s not abroad when you’re there, but it is when you’re here. It’s what accountants call abroad. Wait till you see it…’

‘Abroad?’

‘No, the Nowhere Palace. A building that is ours when we say it is, and not ours when we say it isn’t. A building whose magnificence adds lustre to the Republic’s reputation but not its treasury. Not everything, my son, can be judged by the financial contribution we make. Sometimes we do what we do for the pure beauty of doing it, even if that means keeping a little something back for ourselves.’