Winner of the Booker Prize
‘The funniest British novelist since Kingsley Amis or Tom Sharpe’ Mail on Sunday
AS SEEN ON BBC IMAGINE
‘Who is this guy, Dad? What is he doing here?’
With an absent wife and a daughter going off the rails, wealthy art collector and philanthropist Simon Strulovitch is in need of someone to talk to. So when he meets Shylock at a cemetery in Cheshire’s Golden Triangle, he invites him back to his house. It’s the beginning of a remarkable friendship.
Elsewhere in the Golden Triangle, the rich, manipulative Plurabelle (aka Anna Livia Plurabelle Cleopatra A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever Christine) is the face of her own TV series, existing in a bubble of plastic surgery and lavish parties. She shares prejudices and a barbed sense of humour with her loyal friend D’Anton, whose attempts to play Cupid involve Strulovitch’s daughter – and put a pound of flesh on the line.
Howard Jacobson’s version of The Merchant of Venice bends time to its own advantage as it asks what it means to be a father, a Jew and a merciful human being in the modern world.
Howard Jacobson has written fourteen novels and five works of non-fiction. He won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse award in 2000 for The Mighty Walzer and then again in 2013 for Zoo Time. In 2010 he won the Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question and was also shortlisted for the prize in 2014 for his most recent novel, J. Howard Jacobson’s first book, Shakespeare’s Magnanimity, written with the scholar Wilbur Sanders, was a study of four Shakespearean heroes. Many books later he has returned to Shakespeare with a contemporary interpretation of The Merchant of Venice – ‘the most troubling of Shakespeare’s plays for anyone, but, for an English novelist who happens to be Jewish, also the most challenging.’
IT IS ONE of those better-to-be-dead-than-alive days you get in the north of England in February, the space between the land and sky a mere letter box of squeezed light, the sky itself unfathomably banal. A stage unsuited to tragedy, even here where the dead lie quietly. There are two men in the cemetery, occupied in duties of the heart. They don’t look up. In these parts you must wage war against the weather if you don’t want farce to claim you.
Signs of just such a struggle are etched on the face of the first of the mourners, a man of middle age and uncertain bearing, who sometimes walks with his head held arrogantly high, and at others stoops as though hoping not to be seen. His mouth, too, is twitchy and misleading, his lips one moment twisted into a sneer, the next fallen softly open, as vulnerable to bruising as summer fruit. He is Simon Strulovitch – a rich, furious, easily hurt philanthropist with on-again off-again enthusiasms, a distinguished collection of twentieth-century Anglo-Jewish art and old Bibles, a passion for Shakespeare (whose genius and swashbuckling Sephardi looks he once thought could only be explained by the playwright’s ancestors having changed their name from Shapiro, but now he isn’t sure), honorary doctorates from universities in London, Manchester and Tel Aviv (the one from Tel Aviv is something else he isn’t sure about) and a daughter going off the rails. He is here to inspect the stone that has recently been erected at the head of his mother’s grave, now that the twelve months of mourning for her has elapsed. He hasn’t mourned her conscientiously during that period – too busy buying and lending art, too busy with his foundations and endowments, or ‘benefacting’, as his mother called it with a mixture of pride and concern (she didn’t want him killing himself giving money away), too busy settling scores in his head, too busy with his daughter – but he intends to make amends. There is always time to be a better son.
Or a better father. Could it be that it’s his daughter he’s really getting ready to mourn? These things run in families. His father had briefly mourned him. ‘You are dead to me!’ And why? Because of his bride’s religion. Yet his father wasn’t in the slightest bit religious.
‘Better you were dead at my feet …’
Would that really have been better?
We can’t get enough of dying, he thinks, shuffling between the unheralded headstones. ‘We’ – an idea of belonging to which he sometimes subscribes and sometimes doesn’t. We arrive, lucky to be alive, carrying our belongings on a stick, and immediately look for somewhere to bury the children who betray us.
Perhaps because of all the anger that precedes all the burying, the place lacks the consolation of beauty. In his student days, when there was no word ‘we’ in his vocabulary, Strulovitch wrote a paper on Stanley Spencer’s The Resurrection, Cookham, admiring the tumult of Spencer’s graves, bulging with eager life, the dead in a hurry for what comes next. But this isn’t a country churchyard in Berkshire; this is a cemetery of the Messiahless in Gatley, South Manchester, where there is no next. It all finishes here.
There is a lingering of snow on the ground, turning a dirty black where it nestles into the granite of the graves. It will be there until early summer, if summer ever comes.
The second person, here long before Strulovitch arrived, tenderly addressing the occupant of a grave whose headstone is worn to nothing, is Shylock, also an infuriated and tempestuous Jew, though his fury tends more to the sardonic than the mercurial, and the tempest subsides when he is able to enjoy the company of his wife Leah, buried deep beneath the snow. He is less divided in himself than Strulovitch but, perhaps for that very reason, more divisive. No two people feel the same about him. Even those who unreservedly despise him, despise him with different degrees of unreservation. He has money worries that Strulovitch doesn’t, collects neither art nor Bibles, and finds it difficult to be charitable where people are not charitable to him, which some would say takes something from the soul of charity. About his daughter, the least said the better.
He is not an occasional mourner like Strulovitch. He cannot leave and think of something else. Because he is not a forgetful or a forgiving man, there never was or will be something else.
Strulovitch, pausing in his reflections, feels Shylock’s presence before he sees him – a blow to the back of the neck, as though someone in the cemetery has been irreverent enough to throw a snowball.
The words ‘My dearest Leah’, dropped like blessings into the icy grave, reach Strulovitch’s ears. There will be many Leahs here. Strulovitch’s mother was a Leah. But this Leah attracts an imperishable piteousness to her name that is unmistakable to Strulovitch, student of husbandly sorrow and fatherly wrath. Leah who bought Shylock a courtship ring. Leah, mother to Jessica who stole that ring to buy a monkey. Jessica the pattern of perfidy. Not for a wilderness of monkeys would Shylock have parted with that ring.
Strulovitch neither.
So ‘we’ does mean something to Strulovitch after all. The faith Jessica violates is his faith.
Such, anyway, are the only clues to recognition Strulovitch needs. He is hard-headed about it. Of course Shylock is here, among the dead. When hasn’t he been?
Eleven years old, precociously moustached, too clever by half, he was shopping with his mother in a department store when she saw Hitler buying aftershave.
‘Quick, Simon!’ she ordered him. ‘Run and get a policeman, I’ll stay here and make sure he doesn’t get away.’
But no policeman would believe that Hitler was in the store and eventually he escaped Strulovitch’s mother’s scrutiny.
Strulovitch hadn’t believed that Hitler was in the store either. Back home he made a joke of it to his father.
‘Don’t cheek your mother,’ his father told him. ‘If she said she saw Hitler, she saw Hitler. Your Aunty Annie ran into Stalin on Stockport market last year, and when I was your age I saw Moses rowing on Heaton Park Lake.’
‘Couldn’t have been,’ Strulovitch said. ‘Moses would just have parted the waters.’
For which smart remark he was sent to his room.
‘Unless it was Noah,’ Strulovitch shouted from the top of the stairs.
‘And for that,’ his father said, ‘you’re not getting anything to eat.’
Later, his mother sneaked a sandwich up to him, as Rebekah would have done for Jacob.
The older Strulovitch understands the Jewish imagination better – why it sets no limits to chronology or topography, why it cannot ever trust the past to the past, and why his mother probably did see Hitler. He is no Talmudist but he occasionally reads a page in a small, private-press anthology of the best bits. The thing about the Talmud is that it allows a bolshie contrarian like him to argue face to face with other bolshie contrarians long dead.
You think what, Rabbah bar Nahmani? Well fuck you!
So is there a hereafter after all? What’s your view, Rabbi?
To Strulovitch, Rabbah bar Nahmani, shaking off his cerements, gives the finger back.
Long ago is now and somewhere else is here.
How it is that Leah should be buried among the dead of Gatley is a question only a fool would risk Shylock’s displeasure by asking. The specifics of interment – the whens, the wheres – are supremely unimportant to him. She is under the ground, that is enough. Alive, she had been everywhere to him. Dead – he long ago determined – she will be the same. Wheeling with the planet. An eternal presence, never far from him, wherever he treads.
Strulovitch, alert and avid, tensed like a minor instrument into affinity with a greater, watches without being seen to watch. He will stand here all day if he has to. From Shylock’s demeanour – the way he inclines his head, nods, looks away, but never looks at anything, sees sideways like a snake – he is able to deduce that the conversation with Leah is engrossing and devoted, oblivious to external event, and no longer painful – a fond but brisk, even matter-of-fact, two-way affair. Shylock listens as much as he speaks, pondering the things she says, though he must have heard her say them many times before. He has a paperback in one hand, rolled up like a legal document or a gangster’s wad of banknotes, and every now and then he opens it brusquely, as though he intends to rip out a page, and reads to her in a low voice, covering his mouth in the way a person who is too private to make a show of mirth will stifle a laugh. If that is laughter, Strulovitch thinks, it’s laughter that has had a long way to travel – brain laughter. A phrase of Kafka’s (what’s one more unhappy son in this battlefield of them?) returns to him: laughter that has no lungs behind it. Like Kafka’s own, maybe. Mine too? – Strulovitch wonders. Laughter that lies too deep for lungs? As for the jokes, if they are jokes, they are strictly private. Just possibly, unseemly.
He is at home here as I am not, Strulovitch thinks. At home among the gravestones. At home in a marriage.
Strulovitch is pierced by the difference between Shylock’s situation and his. His own marital record is poor. He and his first wife made a little hell of their life together. Was that because she’d been a Christian? (‘Gai in drerd!’ his father said when he learnt his son was marrying out. ‘Go to hell!’ Not just any hell but the fieriest circle, where marriers-out go. And on the night before the wedding he left an even less ambiguous phone message: ‘You are dead to me.’) His second marriage, to a daughter of Abraham this time, for which reason his father rescinded his curse and called him Lazarus on the phone, was brought to an abrupt, numbing halt – a suspension of all feeling, akin to waiting for news you hope will never come – when his wife suffered a stroke on their daughter’s fourteenth birthday, losing the better part of language and memory, and when he, as a consequence, shut down the husband part of his heart.
Marriage! You lose your father or you lose your wife.
He is no stranger to self-pity. Leah is more alive to Shylock than poor Kay is to me, he thinks, feeling the cold for the first time that day.
He notes, observing Shylock, that there is a muscular tightness in his back and neck. This calls to mind a character in one of his favourite comics of years ago, a boxer, or was he a wrestler, who was always drawn with wavy lines around him, to suggest a force field. How would I be drawn, Strulovitch wonders. What marks could denote what I’m feeling?
‘Imagine that,’ Shylock says to Leah.
‘Imagine what, my love?’
‘Shylock-envy.’
Such a lovely laugh she has.
Shylock is dressed in a long black coat, the hem of which he appears concerned to keep out of the snow, and sits, inclined forward – but not so far as to crease his coat – on a folding stool of the kind Home Counties opera-lovers take to Glyndebourne. Strulovitch cannot decide what statement his hat is making. Were he to have asked, Shylock would have told him it was to keep his head warm. But it’s a fedora – the mark of a man conscious of his appearance. A dandy’s hat, worn with a hint of frolicsome menace belied by the absence of any mark or memory of frolic on his face.
Strulovitch’s clothes are the more abstemious, his art-collector’s coat flowing like a surplice, the collar of his snowy white shirt buttoned to the throat without a tie in the style of contemporary quattrocento. Shylock, with his air of dangerous inaffability, is less ethereal and could be taken for a banker or a lawyer. Just possibly he could be a Godfather.
Strulovitch is glad he came to pay his respects to his mother’s remains and wonders whether the graveside conversation he is witness to is his reward. Is this what you get for being a good son? He should have tried it sooner in that case. Unless something else explains it. Does one simply see what one is fit to see? In which case there’s no point going looking: you have to let it come to you. He entertains a passing fancy that Shakespeare, whose ancestors just might – to be on the safe side – have changed their name from Shapiro, also allowed Shylock to come to him. Walking home from the theatre, seeing ghosts and writing in his tablets, he looks outside himself just long enough to espy Antonio spitting at that abominated thing, a Jew.
‘How now! A Jew! Is that you cousin?’ Shakespeare asks.
This is Judenfrei Elizabethan England. Hence his surprise.
‘Shush,’ says the Jew.
‘Shylock!’ exclaims Shakespeare, heedlessly. ‘My cousin Shylock or I’m a Christian!’
Shapiro, Shakespeare, Shylock. A family association.
Strulovitch feels sad to be excluded. Only a shame his name doesn’t have a shush in it.
It is evident to Strulovitch, anyway, that receptivity is the thing, and that those who go looking are on a fool’s errand. He knows of a picturesque Jewish cemetery on the Lido di Venezia – once abandoned but latterly restored in line with the new European spirit of reparation – a cypress-guarded place of melancholy gloom and sudden shafts of cruel light, to which a fevered righter of wrongs of his acquaintance has made countless pilgrimages, certain that since Shylock would not have been seen dead among the ice-cream-licking tourists in the Venice ghetto, he must find him here, broken and embittered, gliding between the ruined tombstones, muttering the prayer for his several dead. But no luck. The great German poet Heine – a man every bit as unwilling to use the ‘we’ word as Strulovitch, and the next day every bit as much in love with it – went on an identically sentimental ‘dream-hunt’, again without success.
But the Shylock-hunting – with so much unresolved and still to be redeemed – never stops. Simon Strulovitch’s trembling Jew-mad Christian wife, Ophelia-Jane, pointed him out, hobbling down the Rialto steps, carrying a fake Louis Vuitton bag stuffed with fake Dunhill watches, as they were dining by the Grand Canal. They were on their honeymoon and Ophelia-Jane wanted to do something Jewishly nice for her new husband. (He hadn’t told her that his father had verbally buried him on the eve of their wedding. He would never tell her that.) ‘Look, Si!’ she’d said, tugging his sleeve. A gesture that annoyed him because of the care he lavished on his clothes. Which might have been why he took an eternity following the direction of her finger and when at last he looked saw nothing.
It was in the hope of a second visitation that she took him there on every remaining night of their honeymoon. ‘Oy gevalto, we’re back on the Rialto,’ he complained finally. She put her face in her hands. She thought him ungrateful and unserious. Five days into their marriage she already hated his folksy Yiddishisms. They took from the grandeur she wanted for them both. Venice had been her idea. Reconnect him. She could just as easily have suggested Cordoba. She had married him to get close to the tragic experience of the Hebrews, the tribulations of a noble Ladino race, and all he could do was oy gevalto her back to some malodorous Balto-Slavic shtetl peopled by potato-faced bumpkins who shrugged their shoulders.
She thought her heart would stop. ‘Tell me I haven’t gone and married a footler-schmootler,’ she pleaded as they wandered back to their hotel. He could feel her quivering by his side, like a five-masted sailing ship. ‘Tell me you’re not a funny-man.’
They had reached the Campo Santa Maria Formosa, where he paused and drew her to him. He could have told her that the church was founded in 1492, the year the Jews were expelled from Spain. Kiss me to make up for it, darling, he could have said. Kiss me to show you’re sorry. And she would have done it, imagining him leaving Toledo with his entourage, praying at the Ibn Shoshan Synagogue for the last time, erect in bearing, refusing to compromise his faith. Yes, on the fine, persecuted brow of her black-bearded hidalgo husband she would have planted a lipstick star. ‘Go forth, my lord, be brave, and may the God of Abraham and Moses go with you. I will follow you with the children in due course.’ But he told her no such thing and gave her no such opportunity. Instead, aggressively playing the fool, he breathed herrings, dumplings, borscht, into her anxious little face, the fatalism of villages unvisited by light or learning, the broken-backed superstitions of shmendricks called Moishe and Mendel. ‘Chaim Yankel, ribbon salesman,’ he said, knowing how little such a name would amuse her, ‘complains to the buyer at Harrods that he never orders ribbon from him. “All right, all right,” says the buyer, “send me sufficient ribbon to stretch from the tip of your nose to the tip of your penis.” A fortnight later a thousand boxes of ribbon turn up at Harrods’ receiving centre. “What the hell do you think you’re playing at?” the buyer screams at Chaim Yankel down the phone. “I said enough ribbon to reach from the tip of your nose to the tip of your penis, and you send me a thousand miles of it.” “The tip of my penis,” says Chaim Yankel, “is in Poland.”’
She stared at him in disbelieving horror. She was shorter than he was, finely constructed, exquisite in her almost boyish delicacy. Her eyes, just a little too big for her face, were shadowy pools of hurt perplexity. Anyone would think, he thought, looking deep into them, that I have just told her someone close to us has died.
‘You see,’ he said relenting, ‘you’ve nothing to worry about, I’m not a funny-man.’
‘Enough,’ she pleaded.
‘Enough Poland?’
‘Shut up about Poland!’
‘My people, Ophelia …’
‘Your people are from Manchester. Isn’t that bad enough for you?’
‘The joke wouldn’t work if I resituated the punchline to Manchester.’
‘The joke already doesn’t work. None of your jokes work.’
‘What about the one where the doctor tells Moishe Greenberg to stop masturbating?’
The Campo Santa Maria Formosa must have been witness to many sighs, but few so dolorous as Ophelia-Jane’s. ‘I beg you,’ she said, almost folding herself in half. ‘On my bended knees, I implore you – no more jokes about your thing.’
She shook the word from her as though it were an importunate advance from a foul-smelling stranger.
‘A foolish thing is but a toy,’ was all he could think of saying.
‘Then it’s time you stopped playing with it.’
Strulovitch showed her his hands.
‘Metaphorically, Simon!’
She wanted to cry.
He too.
She traduced him. He, playing? How could she not know by now that he had not an ounce of play in his body?
And his thing … why did she call it that?
And on their honeymoon, to make things worse.
It was a site of sorrows, not a thing. The object of countless comic stories for the reason that it wasn’t comic in the least. He quoted Beaumarchais to her. ‘I hasten to laugh at everything for fear I might be obliged to weep at it.’
‘You? Weep! When did you last weep?’
‘I am weeping now. Jews jest, Ophelia-Jane, because they are not amused.’
‘Then I’d have made a good Jew,’ she said, ‘because neither am I.’
When mothers see what’s been done to their baby boys the milk turns sour in their breasts. The young Strulovitch, slaloming through the world’s religions, was told this at a garden party given by a great-great-grand-nephew of Cardinal Newman in Oxford. His informant was a Baha’i psychiatrist called Eugenia Carloff whose field of specialism was circumcision trauma within the family.
‘All mothers?’ he asked.
A sufficient number of them of your persuasion, she told him, to explain the way they mollycoddle their sons thereafter. They have a double guilt to expiate. Allowing blood to be spilled and withholding milk.
‘Withholding milk? Are you kidding?’
Strulovitch was sure he’d been breastfed. Sometimes he feels as though he’s being breastfed still.
‘All men of your persuasion think they were copiously suckled,’ Eugenia Carloff told him.
‘Are you telling me I wasn’t?’ he said.
She looked him up and down. ‘I can’t say definitively, but my guess is no, actually, you weren’t.’
‘Do I look undernourished?’
‘Hardly.’
‘Deprived then?’
‘Not deprived, denied.’
‘It was my father who did that.’
‘Ah,’ Eugenia Carloff said, tapping her nose, ‘there is no end to what those executioners we call fathers do. First they maim their boy children then they torment them.’
Sounds right, Strulovitch thought. On the other hand, his father liked amusing him with anecdotes and rude jokes. And sometimes ruffled his hair absent-mindedly when they were out walking. He mentioned that to Eugenia Carloff who shook her head. ‘They never love you. Not really. They remain excluded from the eternal nativity play of guilt and recompense which they initiated, forever sidelined and angry, trying to make amends in rough affection and funny stories. This is the bitter nexus that binds them.’
‘That binds the father and the son?’
‘That binds men of your persuasion, the penis and the joke.’
I’m not a man of any persuasion, he wanted to tell Eugenia Carloff. I have yet to be persuaded. Instead he asked her out.
She laughed wildly. ‘Do you think I want to get into all that?’ she said. ‘Do you think I’m mad?’
Poor Ophelia-Jane, who must have been mad, did all in her power in the few years they were together to make their marriage work. But in the end he was too much for her. He agreed with her in his heart. He upset and even frightened people. It was the acrid jeering that did it. The death-revel ironies. Did he or didn’t he belong? Was he or wasn’t he funny? His own mortal indecision for which everyone who knew him – Ophelia-Jane more than any of them – had to pay.
‘You could just have loved me, you know,’ she said sadly on the day they agreed to divorce. ‘I was willing to do anything to make you happy. You could just have enjoyed our life together.’
He enfolded her in his arms one final time and told her he was sorry. ‘It’s just who we are,’ he said.
‘We!’
It was the last word she said before she walked out on him.
There was one small consolation. They had been virtually children when they married and they were still virtually children when they parted.
They could be done with each other and still have plenty of life left with which to start again. And they hadn’t had children of their own – the cause of all human discontent.
But the divorce itself was wormwood to them both. And in the end she couldn’t help herself. Though she believed Jews to have been grievously maligned, when the final papers were delivered to be signed she still stigmatised them, through the person of her husband, in the usual way. ‘Happy now you’ve extracted your pound of flesh?’ she rang him to ask.
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.’
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.
Soon D’Anton became a regular visitor, sometimes staying after the rest of the weekend guests had gone home. They found comfort in each other’s melancholy. ‘You must think it’s ridiculous me living in all this splendour and still being sad,’ she said.
‘Not at all,’ he answered, shaking his head. ‘I import beautiful objects from Japan, Grenada, Malibu, Mauritius and Bali, and have a home in each, and yet I am sad in all of them.’
‘Bali is one place I haven’t yet been to,’ Plurabelle said. ‘What’s it like?’
‘Sad.’