Shylock Is My Name

NINETEEN

Timing, thought Strulovitch, is everything.

If he’d received D’Anton’s letter before seeing him at Ristorante Treviso hugger-mugger with Gratan Howsome he might have looked kindly on the request. Well, “kindly” would have been to overstate it, but with an irony-drenched beneficence at least. How amusing that such a man should come cap in hand to him. And how amusing it would be to do such a man a kindness in return: sell him the Solomon Joseph Solomon for exactly what it had cost him, thereby depriving D’Anton of the pleasure of calling him a usurer and rogue. He liked the study for its pictorial flair and anatomical attention, but not as much as he’d have liked the sumptuous work it originally became. No one would have got that from him for any price. But the first attempt — yes, lovely as it was, he could bear to let it go, especially when the reward was so sweet. Here, D’Anton, my dear fellow, you must have known you had only to ask. I cannot tell you how delighted I am to learn you are a convert to Jew art at last.

Why, he might even have made him a gift of it.

But Strulovitch now knew him to be a friend and possibly a co-conspirator of Howsome’s. Difficult to see what the men could possibly have in common, but that wasn’t his affair. Companions in nefariousness they clearly were. Who was to say D’Anton hadn’t played a part in Howsome’s making off with his daughter? They’d been together, looking shifty, on the evening of the day Beatrice had decamped, which strange occurrence suggested D’Anton might have given the lovers shelter that very night. Who was to say that they weren’t there still, enjoying D’Anton’s florid hospitality — Strulovitch guessed it would be florid; florid and abstemious all at once — drinking sake from fine Japanese porcelain and toasting Strulovitch’s displeasure in Bellinis?

Strulovitch read D’Anton’s words again. Had he missed the tone of them? What at first had looked like a begging letter now looked like a vicious leg-pull. He’d been planning the most deliciously ironic response, but what if the irony was all in D’Anton’s court and he, Strulovitch, was its object?

That unnamed man, the “young and impressionable friend” who wanted the picture as a token of his devotion to a woman — there could be no doubt about his identity now. He was unmistakably Howsome.

Which meant that the woman to whom he was devoted—devoted! — was unmistakably Beatrice.

Which left only the title of the painting itself to consider. Love’s First Lesson! The lubricious innuendo was unmissable. The young woman — Howsome’s pupil in the erotic arts — would cherish the picture every bit as much as he, Strulovitch, would want her to, D’Anton had written. Meaning what? Either those words were rank sarcasm or they gestured at some lubricity locked away in Strulovitch’s fatherly concern.

The joke’s on me, Strulovitch realised.

He paced his drawing room, waving the letter in front of his face as though fanning himself with it.

Well we shall see about that, he said aloud.

—

Out in the garden Shylock was talking to his wife.

“I’ve been thinking,” he was saying, “how our refined morality has left us incapable of enjoying that spontaneity of action other men enjoy.”

“How so, my love?”

“Well take this man Strulovitch. What am I to him? I catch him staring at me sometimes when he thinks I’m not aware of him. A stare that seems to start from the deepest recesses of his mind and finishes I have no idea where. It disturbs me. Not even by you, my dearest, was I ever looked at with this intensity. I do not call it love. It isn’t admiration either. It’s an intensity of curiosity such as a parent might feel for a child, or a child for a parent, a sort of baffled pride as though anything I do, or have done, reflects genetically on him. I either bear him up or I let him down. He is not capable of indifference towards me. I am all lesson. I am all example. I need you to tell me I was never a trial of this sort to you, Leah. Or to Jessica.”

It was always hard for him to mention Jessica by name. So much to hide, so much not to say, so much grief. Did Leah hear that? In her infinite tact did she detect how much this withholding of her name cost him? And was it costly for her as well?

“Anyway,” he ruminated after a period of quiet, “it puts me in a false position to be an exemplar — not a role I’d ever have chosen for myself — the foundation of whose exemplariness has always to be kicked from under him. These Jews, Leah, these Jews! They don’t know whether to cry for me, disown me or explain me. Just as they don’t know whether to explain or disown themselves. They wait for a sign that they are not as cringingly passive as they have been described, and when it comes they tear their hair in shame. ‘We are a people on the verge of annihilation,’ Strulovitch is fond of telling me, when he remembers. ‘We cannot look to anyone to help us but ourselves.’ Yet the moment a Jew raises a hand to do just that his courage fails him. Better we be killed than kill, I see him thinking. Look at him now, pacing his floor, plotting a revenge he won’t in the end have the courage to carry out. The man lacks resolution, Leah. Tell me what I should do — spur him on or let him be?”

He waited for her to tell him what she thought. They spoke so often for so long when she was alive. They spoke and spoke. When she was no longer there to speak to him it was as though a cord connecting him to life was severed. He would go to the synagogue to speak to other men but their company could not replace hers. Theirs had not been a synagogue marriage. They spoke ideas, not faith. Leah had never been circumscribed by convention or tradition. She was like a fountain of clear, fresh thought. So when she went, his throat dried and his mind atrophied. He didn’t want to see anything, because where was the value of sight if what he saw he could not share with her? He closed his ears to music. He stopped reading until he began to read to her again at her graveside. He saw no point in activity, and would sit for hours, thinking nothing, in a vacancy that was nearer to non-existence than sorrow. What had his life been to him before Leah? He couldn’t remember. There was no before Leah. That his house became a hell for his daughter who couldn’t rouse him or interest him in her life he accepted. Leah’s death made him a bad father. Or, if he’d been a bad father before — a man who lived only for the love he bore his wife — the death of that too-loved wife made him a worse one. Poor, poor Jessica then, doubly deprived. No wonder. No excuse, but no wonder. And when he did rediscover some of his old energy it hadn’t been out of any renewed concern for her well-being. He wished he could have lied to himself. And to her. I lived again for you, Jessica, I remembered what I owed you. But the truth of it was different. It had been the Gentiles who had pricked him back into animation. In their contempt he found the twisted stimulus to live again.

It is rage not love that propels a man to action.

When he looked up he saw Strulovitch occupying his own patch of garden, walking to and fro, a man without a wife to talk to, lost in reflection, moving his lips soundlessly.

He had no trouble reading what Strulovitch was saying. “I will do such things…”

He was sympathetic to the frustration. He too would once have done such things.

What they are, yet I know not…

But at least Strulovitch had what was still to come to look forward to. What things they were, yet he knew not. Whereas Shylock was busted. What he’d done he’d done, and what he had yet to do, he never would do now.

I miss the future, Shylock thought.

“So tell me,” he again asked Leah. “Do I restrain him or whip him up into the vengeful rage he’s been longing for all his life?”

The cold earth in which Leah was rolled around gave its deepest moan.

“Very well then,” Shylock said. “In this, as in everything else, I will be guided by you.”

—

“What do we do about it? What we do about it,” Plurabelle said, “is this.”

She made a sign with her thumb, meaning get them the hell out of here, on a train, a ship, a plane, anything. Just get them away.

D’Anton wasn’t sure. “Do we want to rile a man as vile as this?” he wondered.

“The Jew?”

“The wealthy Jew, yes.”

“The Hebrew?”

“E’en him. The moneybags, who else?”

They laughed. It was fun, even in worrying times, to play Jewepithets.

“Now I’ve lost my thread. Would you be so good as to repeat your question,” Plurabelle begged.

“I asked how good an idea it was to rile the Jew.”

“You mean the inexecrable dog—”

“Stop it, Plury!”

“Must I?”

“You must. I ask again: how good an idea is it to rile him?”

“Do you care about our friends?”

“I care about Gratan. Forgive me if the Jew’s daughter means a little less to me.”

“Well she means a great deal to me. I won’t have her judged by that pig she calls a father.”

“Pig refuser, surely.”

“A pig can refuse a pig. But take my point. She is not him, any more than I was mine.”

“Yours, I imagine, was another order of father,” D’Anton said.

“Well he wasn’t an Israelite, a werewolf, a castrator and a bloodsucker, if that’s what you mean.”

“I mean something along those lines, yes.”

“But I love her despite her father the thick-lips — I assume he has thick lips, I haven’t seen him.”

“Thick and wet.” He was careful not to look at her lips.

“As I suspected. Whereas hers are full and voluptuous.”

“Like yours.”

“Thank you. But stay focussed. Gratan loves her. And I demand that you love her.”

“So why can’t they stay here until the storm blows over.”

“Because the storm might not blow over, and I don’t want that hook-nose — I assume he has a hook nose: don’t answer — banging on my doors. You know the press — they will love this. Besides, the lovers need some time on their own. Beatrice is looking a little flaky to me. She and Gratan have been fighting already. She could easily decide she’s made a big mistake. And you know what Gratan’s like. Two minutes of not getting all he wants and he’ll be off looking for another wife.”

“But how can they go away anyway? He’s got a team to play for. He can’t come running back every weekend.”

“Isn’t he suspended for that salute thing?”

“That was a year ago or more.”

“Couldn’t we get him suspended again? Get him to use the ‘n’ word? Or punch someone?”

“Only too easily But he wouldn’t thank us for that. Another suspension could be the end of his career.”

“Then let’s get him compassionate leave. I know all the managers. There isn’t one of them that doesn’t want to be on my show.” She tossed her hair, knowing how silly she could be about herself—“Or in my bed. Trust me, I already have him in my pocket. What’s his name?”

“I just don’t know about this,” D’Anton said. Things were getting complicated. He could no longer work out how any course of action impacted on any other. Where did this leave Barnaby’s hopes? What would squirrelling the pair out of the country do to D’Anton’s own plan of wrong-footing Strulovitch by promising to support his application for a gallery in return for the Solomon Joseph Solomon? Suddenly, everyone was looking the loser.

He wasn’t sure either what removing the lovers from all society but their own would do to their feelings for one another. Plury was right: Gratan bored easily. And Beatrice, with no intrigue to distract her, and no father to fight, might discover that Gratan wasn’t all that interesting a conversationalist. She might even tire of him erotico-aesthetically and decide that circumcision had much to recommend it after all. Leave aside the religious aspect, and D’Anton — a lover of beauty in all its forms — preferred the look of the foreskin gone to the look of foreskin intact. How it was that the Jews — a people with no instinct for beauty whatsoever — should have reached that conclusion all on their own, D’Anton couldn’t understand. If anything he’d have expected them to go the other way — append a foreskin where nature had not intended one to be. Make ugly what had originally been lovely. He could only assume that somewhere in the course of their rejection of the ancient world they’d encountered a few pagan connoisseurs of male pulchritude. Whatever the explanation, it wouldn’t surprise him if Beatrice before too long came around to his way of seeing. And then what?

One possibility was that Gratan would be persuaded by her pleas, Beatrice would be reconciled to her father, whereupon, all honour satisfied, a grand Jewish wedding would be held in Haddon Hall or Thornton Manor or even, given Strulovitch’s labyrinthine contacts, Chatsworth.

For reasons he could not have put into words, such a prospect plunged D’Anton into the deepest gloom.

“I just don’t know,” he repeated.

—

At breakfast Shylock said, “I can’t help noticing that you appear dishevelled and perturbed. I take it you have had no sleep and that your emotions are in disarray.”

“You could just say I look like shit.”

“I have seen you looking better. Can I be of assistance?”

“I am on a sea of indecision,” Strulovitch said.

“Whether to return to port or steam ahead…”

“That’s what a sea of indecision means.”

“Which course would you prefer to take?”

“If I knew that I wouldn’t be on a sea of indecision.”

“Not necessarily. Your indecision might be to do with practicalities rather than preferences.”

When are you leaving, Strulovitch wondered. Why did you come and when will you be going?

He didn’t mean it. He remained awed by Shylock in his soul, and still sought his friendship as an idea, but in a day-to-day way, and especially given what was happening with Beatrice, he could find his linguistic exactingness, or was it his moral exactingness, or should he just call it his all-round Jewish exactingness, exacting…

“My indecision,” he answered with a sigh, “is neither about preferences nor practicalities.” He took a long time bringing out those words, as though their length were a severe trial to him. “It’s about morality. My rights and entitlements as a Jewish father versus my daughter’s rights and entitlements as — well, I don’t know what as. Do I have a right to pursue Beatrice and drag her home? Does she have a right to go off where and with whom she chooses? Am I entitled to insist she has a Jewish husband, or at least the nearest to a Jewish husband I can manufacture for her? Would she be within her rights to get me certified? Are her new friends entitled to laugh at me? Would I be justified in paying their laughter back with interest, tenfold or a hundredfold, by fair means or foul? That too is a component of my indecision — what weapons to employ to make them suffer.”

“The latter can’t be called an issue of morality,” Shylock said.

“You are being,” Strulovitch answered, “peculiarly pedantic this morning. Have I offended you as well?”

“Not in the slightest. I just want to be certain we are talking about the same thing before I offer an intervention.”

“If you are going to add to my indecision I ask you not to. My head aches.”

“My intervention won’t add to your indecision. On the contrary, I don’t see how it can do anything but make you resolute.”

“Resolute for what?”

“Recompense.”

“On what grounds?”

Shylock hesitated only fractionally. “Violation. Gratan Howsome took advantage of your daughter when she was underage.”

“My daughter is sixteen.”

“She was fifteen when Howsome first slept with her. I believe that’s against the law in your country.”

Strulovitch suddenly found swallowing difficult. He spread his hands on the table as though to show there was nothing between his fingers. He seemed to want Shylock to do the same. “How do you know this?” he asked.

“I know what I know. It’s late in the day for you to be questioning my modus operandi.”

“It’s not your modus operandi I question. It’s your sources. You’ve just made a serious allegation. I have to know whether or not I can trust it. How do you come by your information?”

“That’s not a question it profits you in any way to ask. Better you simply confirm what I have told you. Take a look on her computer. Check out her correspondence.”

“You’ve been reading her emails?”

“I only suggest that you do. It might go against your morality but you have told me you have sneaked half a look already. Try sneaking a whole look.”

“It goes against my morality.”

“And what about your daughter being abroad with a man twice her age who slept with her when she was fifteen? How do you square that with your morality?”

Thou torturest me, Tubal.

—

What if Tubal lied?

Had Shylock ever considered that?

Your daughter spent in Genoa, as I heard, in one night fourscore ducats…

You “heard,” Tubal? You fucking heard!

On the strength of Tubal’s “hearing”—mere hearsay — Shylock built a case against his daughter, and by extension every goy in Venice, that was bound to topple over into catastrophe. Even Othello took longer to be convinced.

Thou stick’st a dagger in me.

Was that Tubal’s intention? To inflame his friend to the point of madness? It isn’t necessary to find a motive. The inflaming of a friend is a motive in itself. The bigger question is why Shylock presented his chest with such alacrity to that dagger — with just so much alacrity as Antonio was to present his to Shylock’s knife. When it came to a hunger to be gored, they were mirror images of each other — the merchant and the Jew.

As for whether Tubal spoke the truth — matters were too advanced for that ever to be tested.

But still Strulovitch, discomfited by Shylock’s revelations, had to discomfit in return. A cruel vengefulness rose in his chest like bile.

“Did you ever consider that Tubal might have lied to you?”

Shylock was not slow to follow the logic of Strulovitch’s challenge. “You think I might be guilty of reporting falsely to you? Haven’t I said: go to her computer and corroborate what I tell you.”

“Does that mean you wished you’d corroborated Tubal’s reports?”

Shylock placed his elbows on the kitchen table and rested his chin on his fists. It looked painful, what he was doing, grinding his knuckles into his jaw. Or that might be what I want to think, Strulovitch thought. But he was not going to rush Shylock into speaking. His own silence was enough. Did you or didn’t you?

“At the moment of his telling me, no,” Shylock said, when at last it suited him to say something. His fists still supported his jaw, stopping him from speaking fluently. He seemed to want to find enunciation difficult. “Tubal told me what I dreaded, and what we dread we half want to come to pass. But on reflection, yes. On reflection I sometimes ask if Tubal could have been party to the general mischief and if I lost my daughter by attending to him. I still hold myself potentially accountable for that. I exist in an equipoise of grief and guilt. But to what end should I have doubted him? My Jessica was gone. I didn’t require a Tubal to tell me that. She had stolen what she alone knew where to find. So had I shaken Tubal to within an inch of his life what might I have rattled out of him that was more to my liking? That she’d gone through threescore ducats instead of four? Twoscore? Ten?”

“Such details matter. Was my daughter fifteen when Howsome slept with her or was she sixteen? Much hangs on the answer.”

“Then go to her computer. I am just the messenger.”

“Tubal would have said the same. But there are occasions when the messenger is no less odious than the message. Being ‘just the messenger’ doesn’t make a man unimpeachable. What if Tubal was morally in connivance with the thing he was relaying?”

“And you would like me to have cut his heart out? Who’s to say you aren’t right. Perhaps I should have taken my knife to his chest instead of Antonio’s. But messengers tell you how your repute stands, if nothing else. So they are always to be trusted in part. Jessica ran off. Where to and how much she spent when she was there is immaterial.”

“And the monkey?”

“What about the monkey?”

“What if Tubal lied about that? What if he conjured the monkey out of his own Jewish terrors?”

“There was a monkey.”

“What if he wished you harm?”

“Why would he do that?”

“Because Jews are kinds of devils, even to one another.”

“There was a monkey.”

—

An hour later Strulovitch was back at the breakfast table, his face flushed, his voice harsh. He looked as though he’d been drinking. But he’d only been at his daughter’s computer.

“I’ll kill him,” he said.

Good, Shylock thought. Let’s see if you have the courage. But what he said was, “First you have to find him.”