Howard Jacobson - Pussy

He had discussed the Prince’ progress with Professor Probrius and Dr Cobalt, both of whom felt the character of the Prince was coming into clearer focus.

‘He is certainly who he is,’ Professor Probrius declared.

‘And you can certainly see who he’s going to be,’ Dr Cobalt added.

‘And words?’

‘Yes,’ said the Professor, ‘there are more than there were.’

‘More, without doubt,’ Dr Cobalt agreed.

‘And more appropriate?’

There was a pause. ‘We are working on that.’

‘I have myself,’ the Grand Duke pronounced, ‘added to his stock of commercial and political terms. I wouldn’t say he was fluent in them, but nor would I say he is tongue-tied. I wonder if we might agree that he has enough to be going on with and concentrate on other skills. I think his knowledge of geography is shaky. He has told me several times that he has a yen to travel to Ancient Rome but thinks it’s in Los Angeles. This is a slip occasioned by confusing television epics, I imagine.’

‘And while we are on that subject, Your Highness, he does also suffer chronology amnesia in relation to ancient worlds in general. He isn’t entirely clear we aren’t still living in them. He talks a lot about Cafe Nero. I have a suspicion he thinks the Emperor owns the chain and might actually be working in one of them. So perhaps we should look at his history, too.’

‘Excellent idea. Let’s get him modernized. I propose to get him tweeting.’

For someone as beguiled by screens as Fracassus, he was slow to embrace interactivity. How to explain this the Grand Duke didn’t know. Perhaps the Prince had been alone with his own thoughts too long to be curious about anyone else’s. He didn’t miss conversation because he’d never had it, and he didn’t crave the to and fro of social media because fro wasn’t a preposition that called to him. What the Grand Duke had to get him to see was that Twitter didn’t entail any of the tedious conversational niceties he feared. Twitter was an assertion of the tweeter’s will, full stop. It imposed no obligation to listen or respond. ‘You can be as deaf as a post and as blind as a bat,’ he told his son, ‘and still tweet with the best of them.’

Had he had the time, the Grand Duke would personally have led his son into the arts of social media self-assertion, but there were pressing commercial matters to attend to, and there was no point asking the help of the Duchess who lacked the requisite genius for compression. She refused to understand it. ‘I fail to see,’ she said, when the Grand Duke explained the nuts and bolts of the system to her, ‘how Fracassus is ever going to attain 140 characters. He doesn’t have enough words.’

‘140 characters is the maximum, my dear,’ he told her.

‘And what’s the minimum?’

‘Demanska, I have no idea. How is that relevant?’

‘I would like Fracassus to keep his messages as brief as possible. I don’t want him making himself ill thinking of something to say. You know how finding just one word can defeat him.’

‘Le mot juste , my dear. One word can sometimes be enough.’

‘In Fracassus’s case it will have to be.’

They exchanged anxious glances. They both feared what that mot juste could turn out to be.

Left to his own devices, would Fracassus tweet exclusively about pussy?

To allay his wife’s concerns – and not only incidentally his own – the Grand Duke appointed a Twitter adjutant to assist the Prince in mastering the necessary arts.

The person he chose was Caleb Hopsack, leader of OPP, the Ordinary Peoples’ Party, and twice voted Commoner of the Year. Though not a member of the Grand Duke’s inner circle – as how could he be, given his loud championing of all things unquiet and unrefined? – the two had nonetheless built up a friendship over the years based on Caleb Hopsack’s knowledge of the turf and the Grand Duke’s longing for some of it to rub off on him. The Grand Duke was under no financial necessity to gamble but felt ancient twinges of kinship with bookies and touts, with tipsters, with stables, with the smell of straw. Perhaps his grandfather… Whatever his motivation, he liked the occasional visit to the racecourse, particularly – whenever possible – in the company of Caleb Hopsack, who seemed to know everybody in the racing fraternity from owners to jockeys to punters and even to the horses. Though he had no reason to envy anybody, the Grand Duke envied Caleb Hopsack. What was his secret? How had he succeeded in making ordinary people feel he was one of them when he had amassed considerable personal wealth, belonged to the most exclusive clubs, hobnobbed with Grand Dukes, and dressed like a stockbroker’s idea of a gentleman farmer who enjoyed a tipple? Certainly the Grand Duke knew no one else of his eminence who could, with such an instinctive flair for looking wrong, wear a racing trilby and window-pane check coats and yellow waxed cotton trousers, and look right in them.

‘I don’t know where you find these things,’ The Grand Duke once remarked, looking him up and down with undisguised admiration and perplexity. He felt uncomfortable calling them ‘things’ but wasn’t sure what other word to use.

‘The question isn’t where but why,’ Hopsack replied.

The Grand Duke waited. ‘Why?’ he asked when it became clear that Hopsack wasn’t going to tell him otherwise.

‘It goes without saying,’ Hopsack explained, going into that third person solipsistic mode that ordinary people found transfixing, ‘that as Leader of the Little People’s Party Caleb Hopsack must speak exclusively to and for the concerns of little people. To do that successfully he must look like them.’

‘I thought you were Leader of the Ordinary People’s Party…’

‘Ordinary/Little, Little/Ordinary – same difference.’

‘But you don’t look anything like Ordinary or Little people. I have met them. I employ several hundred thousand of them. None of them would know how to begin dressing like you.’

‘You entirely miss the point,’ Hopsack said. ‘I am the idealized, never-never rural version of what they secretly would like to look like. It doesn’t matter that the clothes I wear are not ones they would know how to access or could afford to buy even if they did. Sartorially, Caleb Hopsack is their shadow self. Sure it’s a joke. But it’s a joke they get. I bare my cigarette stained teeth at them and remind them of a horse. They come muttering to my meetings and remind me of bags of hay. We despise one another. This is the age of the ironising of the archetype. I have a beer pot with my name on it in every public house in the Duchy but the Plebs know I prefer Scotch. They need Caleb Hopsack to be ordinary and a toff at the same time.’

‘So which are you?’

‘What sort of question is that? Have I not said that this is the age of the ironizing of the archetype. Maybe I am the one, maybe I’m the other, maybe I’m both.’

He was just the person, the Grand Duke thought – maybe just the three people – to oversee his son’s Twitter page.

With the Grand Duke’s permission, Caleb Hopsack would begin by building up interest in Fracassus on his own Twitter page. It would help gain momentum, he said, if Caleb Hopsack were to be filmed chatting to the Prince on the inside of the golden gates. Perhaps the Prince would be so good as to put his arm around Hopsack’s shoulder, shake hands with him, kiss him on both cheeks, and then, to the camera, give the double thumb of Internet approval. Whereupon Hopsack would open wide his famous reticulated mouth and gulp down the admiration of his followers like a shark swallowing down scampi. This would go directly on to YouTube, innumerable links to which Caleb Hopsack would tweet around the world.