Shylock Is My Name

FIFTEEN

D’Anton had not at once sent off his letter to the Jew. Nothing was to be achieved by delaying, except the saving of his soul. It was not in his nature, as it had fortunately not been a necessity of his pocket, to go begging to any man, but to go begging to Strulovitch turned his stomach. Perhaps circumstances would change if he held back. Perhaps Barnaby would hit upon another gift for Plurabelle. Or, with a bit of luck, Strulovitch might suddenly put the Solomon Joseph Solomon back on the market. He called himself a collector, but it was said that he sold at times too, when the market was right, and D’Anton had no reason to doubt the veracity of such rumours. If he’d been told that Strulovitch had charts on his walls showing every smallest rise and fall in the value of art in every city in the world, he would not have been surprised.

D’Anton was not a dilatory man, but he didn’t rush into things either. The advantage of having a melancholy nature was that it found a sort of pleasure in the slow passage of time, and since there was no true happiness to be rewarded with at the end of anything one did, there was no rush to do it.

And then Gratan came to him with a strange request— no, that wasn’t fair, it had not yet assumed the shape of a request, it was more a plaint, an outraged perplexity, as though he felt he had been assaulted but had no bruise to show for it. “I’m in a bit of a pickle,” he told him.

D’Anton often wished he’d been a marrying man and had brought up a family. I would have made a good father, he thought, though when he pictured himself playing in the garden with his children they were all boys. This wasn’t sexual. Boys seemed sadder to him than girls, that was all. Boys nursed a secret hurt. He couldn’t have put a name to it. He had never been able to put a name to his own. When he was a child he watched girls reading and painting and playing with their dolls — all right, with their soldiers too — and he saw in them a capacity for engrossment and self-forgetfulness that was beyond him. He was always alert to himself, not just easily wounded but attentive to those wounds, as though his only playthings were the slights he suffered.

Nothing very much changed as he grew older. Mortifications were still his playthings. But he felt them on behalf of other people now — other people of both sexes, but particularly men. The spectacle of their brave vulnerability, the woundedness which dared never speak its name, because men were meant to be strong not weak, consumed his emotional energies. If he could have made the world a better place for every man he saw in pain he would have done so. But you can spread your altruism only so far, so D’Anton made a double-friend of every friend he had, expending more concern on them than most ever thought they stood in need of. Never mind if they took advantage of him. Indeed the ones who took advantage of him the most were the ones he most helped. For they were surely — else they would not have made such exorbitant demands — the ones in greatest psychological want of his assistance.

Between Gratan and Barnaby in this regard — though obligation shaded into love for the one, while love shaded into obligation to the other — there was not much to choose. Barnaby came from the better family and had been given the better education, but he had no gifts beyond the boyish prettiness which, for D’Anton, was the outward form of his inward loveliness of spirit — a loveliness that needed all the help it could get in a world that didn’t scruple to take advantage of innocence. Gratan had been initiated into cruelties that Barnaby could never have borne, had no education and was not by any stretch of the imagination pretty, but he had abundant physical skills and was able to earn an independent living with his body. On the surface he was not the sort of man who called out D’Anton’s sympathies. But scratch a little deeper and the lonely, sorrowing boy could be discerned. Hence those little acts of folly like the Nazi salute which in reality was no such thing. D’Anton recognised a cry for help when he heard one. And when that cry for help was seconded first by one dear friend, and then another, he had no choice but to count Gratan as one of the deserving. He would, as he told Plurabelle — and as he had proved in the matter of finding him a Jew-girl to play with — do anything in the world for him. The phrase was automatic and denoted nothing in particular. But when Gratan drooped his normally manly head and announced he was in a bit of a pickle, D’Anton knew that the hour for another sacrifice — of his time, his energies, his influence, and maybe even his wallet — was at hand.

“Let’s first of all rally your spirits,” he told the footballer. “I’m eating out tonight with Barnaby and a couple of his old school friends who are up to watch some game or other…”

“Unlikely to be Stockport County against Colwyn Bay,” Gratan said disconsolately. Even his career was ash in his mouth.

“No, I think it’s rugby. Anyway, it’s sure to be jolly.”

The word “jolly” was so alien to D’Anton’s vocabulary that even Gratan registered surprise. It was like hearing a man of God speak profanities.

“I’m not sure I’m in the mood for that,” Gratan said.

“Oh come on. Why don’t you join us for supper and you and I can discuss things in private afterwards?”

Gratan hesitated. Tonight of all nights Beatrice would be expecting him to be with her.

“If that’s not convenient…” D’Anton said.

“No, no, I’ll make it convenient.”

But he wasn’t sure how he was going to do that.

—

As it happened, D’Anton had to deal with a second pickle that evening, to which end he’d invited Barnaby — for this second pickle was his — to join him at the restaurant early.

“So tell me,” D’Anton said.

Barnaby pointed to his left hand.

D’Anton shrugged.

“Don’t you see anything missing?” Barnaby asked.

D’Anton counted his fingers. “Well they all seem to be there,” he replied.

“Ring finger,” Barnaby said.

“That’s there, too.”

“Yes, but ring isn’t.”

“Ah. Would that be the ring—?”

“Yes, that Plury bought me.”

“And you’ve lost it?”

Barnaby pulled the face that always broke D’Anton’s heart. The face of a little boy with no one to turn to. “Not exactly lost,” he said.

“Given it to a whore then?”

“Of course not. I haven’t even accidentally left it with a whore.”

D’Anton could tell that Barnaby was looking for a little praise for this show of rectitude.

“Well I don’t suppose it is any business of mine who you’ve given it to…”

“Why do you fear I’ve given it to someone?”

“Fear? Who said anything about fear?”

“Fear on Plury’s behalf, I mean,” Barnaby said, wondering if he’d presumed too far on D’Anton’s jealousy.

D’Anton looked deep into Barnaby’s indolent eyes. “Should I fear for Plury?”

“No you should not. I lost it. That’s all there is to it.”

“Then let’s hope Plury believes you when you tell her that.”

“Why shouldn’t she?”

“Because it sounds like an excuse.”

“I lost it.”

“That’s an excuse for carelessness.”

“Christ, D’Anton, get off my case. You’re as bad as she is.”

A great wave of weariness with men and women and their tawdry ring culture overcame D’Anton. He had swapped rings himself when he was younger (always tentatively, it should be said, always because he thought it was what the other person wanted), and he understood the symbolism of both the giving and the losing, but the overblown poesy of men and women swearing eternal fidelity whenever they slipped a hoop of gold around one another’s fingers, and then the commonplace accusations of betrayal whenever one of them slipped it off, as though the whole ritual had only ever been about trust and fidelity, a test that one or other party to it was bound to fail, a trap in other words, a snare as heartless as a springe, a wire loop attached to a twig to catch a rabbit — all this dismayed, depressed and disappointed him. Here was Plurabelle, an exceptional woman in every way, and yet Barney feared that the minute she discovered he had been careless of her love token—“He loves me, he loves me not”—she would turn into a fishwife.

“So why do you come to me with this, if you want me off your case?” D’Anton asked.

“I’m sorry, D’Anton, I shouldn’t have said that. Forgive me.”

D’Anton felt his friend was practising his apology to Plurabelle. He wasn’t sure if that pleased him or it didn’t. Uncomfortable, but flattered, he edged himself off the end of the imaginary bed. “So what would you have me do?” he asked gently.

“Couldn’t you say you borrowed it?”

“I? Borrowed your ring? To do what with?”

“Oh, I don’t know, to give to a whore?”

There was a moment of silence between them, relieved only by the appearance of the sommelier.

“I’m sorry,” Barnaby said again.

D’Anton let his own silence linger a little longer. “I’ll tell you what,” he suggested at last, “I’ll say I took it off you because I feared a stone was loose.”

“It didn’t have a stone. It was a plain gold band.”

D’Anton remembered: a perfect, unbroken band to symbolise their perfect, unbroken love. Well, it had been his doing. Bringing people together was his speciality. Finding for others a happiness he could not find for himself.

“In that case I’ll I say I took it off you to have it polished. I have my own polisher.”

“Did it need polishing?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Will she be able to see the difference?”

“There won’t be any difference because there won’t be any ring.”

Barnaby looked puzzled.

“You’ve lost it, remember.”

“Ah, of course. So what happens then?”

“I’ll say I lost it on the way to the polisher.”

“That’s a damn good idea. But better to say you lost it on the way back from the polisher.”

“What difference?”

“I want Plury to know I had it polished.”

“As you choose.”

Barnaby took D’Anton’s hands. “I’m forever in your debt.”

D’Anton’s eyes misted over. “Please don’t say that,” he said.

“All right. But can I at least promise that I’ll never ask another favour from you again?”

“I’d rather you didn’t say that either.”

“I understand,” Barnaby said, though he didn’t.

But his spirits had cleared up so markedly that he hardly looked the same person who’d walked into the restaurant with his hair wild fifteen minutes before.

He settled back in his chair and smiled at his benefactor. “Now, how’s that painting going?” he went on.

“Be patient,” D’Anton said.

“Are you telling me you haven’t persuaded the old skinflint to hand it over yet? What’s the delay? Does he want more money?”

“First let me sort the ring.”

Barnaby settled back even further in his chair. Yes, life had problems, but none that others couldn’t solve for him.

“Here we go again,” D’Anton thought when Gratan Howsome eventually joined them, looking as much like a man in a pickle as Barnaby looked like a man who had come out of one.