Shylock Is My Name

TWENTY

“Oy gevalto, we’re on the Rialto,” Beatrice said.

Gratan looked at her in bafflement. The air was full of confused sounds — gondoliers singing, waiters shouting, canals rising, church bells ringing, umbrellas going up. “I didn’t catch that,” he said.

“Oy gevalto, we’re on the Rialto.”

He was none the wiser.

“It doesn’t matter,” Beatrice said.

She wasn’t exactly disappointed. How many times had she said that to herself in Gratan’s company? But if she wasn’t exactly disappointed, what exactly had she been expecting? Nothing — was that it? In which case what was she doing here?

How many times had she asked herself that in Gratan’s company?

She’d been to Venice before, accompanying her father to the Biennale, going from pavilion to pavilion listening to him inveighing against installations, videos, whitened canvasses or blackened rooms in which faceless women screamed in agony or orgasm — all the stuff she liked. So she knew what it was to be in Venice with an ill-tempered man, but she also knew what it was to be in Venice when the sun shone and the ill-tempered man was ill-tempered on aesthetic principle, rather than…Well, why was Gratan ill-tempered? Had she become a wife to him already? She sat under the dripping awning, watched water falling into water, and sighed deeply. Venice could do better than this, that was her point. And she’d spent enough time with Gratan to know that outside the environs of sex he couldn’t do better than this. As for it being more fun to be with a Jewish man who got her jokes — she wasn’t going to give her father the satisfaction of knowing she’d even entertained such a thought. But her expression would have given her away had he seen it.

“Anyone else won’t know what you’re talking about,” he’d been warning her for years. “They won’t get the cultural allusions. Just remember — your intelligence is five thousand years old, they were born yesterday. They can only think one thing at a time; you can think a dozen.”

“I only want to fuck them,” she’d answered back once.

He’d slapped her face.

So much for being truthful.

She’d wondered many times since why she hadn’t called a policeman or taken him to the Court of Human Rights. You can’t just hit your children because they use bad language.

Or had he hit her only because she wanted to fuck Christians?

Well, the lunatic had got his comeuppance now. The thing he’d most dreaded had come about. She was on the run, to all intents and purposes married (or would have been had he not been married already) to a Gentile who couldn’t even think one thing at a time. And it had come about because he — her lunatic all-fearing father — made it come about.

If I could be sure this is where I want to be right now, and that I’m with a man I want to be with, I’d thank him, Beatrice thought. But she wasn’t. Unhappiness didn’t describe her state exactly. It was three days since Plury and D’Anton had bundled them on to a plane, and in that time Gratan had finally grasped that she didn’t want him nipping off the minute they found themselves alone together. So she had his company, at least in the sense that shomerim, the Jewish sentinels of the dead, have the company of a corpse. And the rain was not without its consolations. It was almost fun — for her, at any rate — negotiating St. Mark’s Square over duckboards and sitting in cafés catching rain in coffee cups. If this were any old break from the kind of man her father didn’t want her to be with she’d have considered it only a moderate fiasco, and she’d had enough of those in her young life. But it wasn’t any old break. They waited nervously for news. They kept their eyes open for police. Her father might have alerted Interpol. Gratan feared he might have breached his contract with Stockport County who, in his view, were looking for any excuse to terminate it. Already he was talking wildly about learning Italian (that was a joke: he had still to master the rudiments of English) and signing on for Venezia reserves. And there had been a disagreeable atmosphere at the airport where Plury and D’Anton had made it clear they were displeased — a change from Plury’s initial excitement for them — and Gratan had told D’Anton he was not prepared, at his age, to be treated like a child, which D’Anton had answered by saying, “Then stop acting like one.” So the risks had to be worth it — for both of them — didn’t they? She had to conceal the fact that she’d been born five thousand years ago and he had to be the man she wanted to spend the next five thousand years with. He had to amuse and scintillate her. He had to take an interest in performance art and get her jokes. He had to make her knees shake when she looked at him. He had to make her feel proud of him when he opened his mouth. He had to look more of a mensch. And—?

And he didn’t.

“Oy vey, why have I run away?” Beatrice wondered.

—

D’Anton rarely answers his own front door. It takes him too long to rearrange his face into something resembling civility. Nothing can be done in a hurry if you are a man of sorrows. Besides which, D’Anton doesn’t welcome surprise. For this reason he has an assistant to answer the door for him, when necessary. In the Golden Triangle it is rare for people to call on one another without prior arrangement. It is unlikely that the person you want to see will be in, for one thing; and front doors are generally a long gravelly walk from where you will have parked the car. So it’s easier all round to make phone calls and meet out. This is one reason why D’Anton has never installed an intercom system. It will almost never be used. The other reason he hasn’t installed such a thing is that it’s ugly. There is a plaited bell pull which, after much haggling, he’d been able to persuade the janitor of a monastery in Burma to sell him. But none of the infrequent visitors ever pull hard enough, and D’Anton is not going to put up a hideous notice telling them to do so.

Today, his assistant is off, nursing a sick relative in the country. They don’t, in the Golden Triangle, call where they live the country, any more than they call it town. So when the mellifluous Burmese bell that never rings unexpectedly does so, D’Anton jumps with surprise and annoyance. He has to make the long trek down from his study in person, just as the monks had to come down from the mountain for afternoon prayers. It rings three more times before he has made it all the way. This person is impatient, D’Anton recognises. And rough-mannered. So not Barnaby or a Jehovah’s Witness. Whoever it is that’s pulling, pulls so hard that D’Anton fears the bell will be yanked from the wall. “Yes, yes,” he shouts. “I am coming as fast as I can.”

As fast he can, that is, in his Nepalese slippers with their Ali Baba points.

And when he unbolts and opens the door he finds Strulovitch.

—

The two men, who would rather not, in any circumstances, wish to be exchanging glances, direct their gazes over each other’s shoulder. If D’Anton were a pirate with a parrot, Strulovitch would be addressing that. D’Anton himself is looking even further to the rear of his guest, as though at Strulovitch’s grandparents in their headscarves and skullcaps, falling under the hooves of Cossacks’ horses, muttering to their mouldy god while their hovels go up in flames…But enough of that, D’Anton tells himself.

Strulovitch, who is holding a sheet of headed paper which D’Anton at once recognises as his, is the first to speak.

“We can do it here or inside,” he says.

“It?”

“Well if I tell you that, we are already doing it. You’d prefer it here then?”

“I am not frightened of you,” D’Anton says.

Strulovitch smoothes the soft tips of his shirt collar. “I wouldn’t expect you to be. We are both priestly men.”

“A more priestly man would have made contact with me some other way before coming hammering at my door.”

Strulovitch laughs. “Hammering? Is a bell pull not for pulling? I could not have announced myself more peaceably. I twitched the rope as though plucking a loose thread from a tapestry.”

“And so vandalising it…I see you have read my letter.”

“What else would bring me here? You were hoping for a response. Well here I am.”

“But you aren’t carrying the picture.”

“And you aren’t handing me what I want in return for it.”

“I can write you a cheque for it now.”

“I don’t want a cheque.”

“So what do you want?”

“Not what, whom.”

“I don’t have your daughter, if she’s what this is all about.”

“You admit you know about my daughter. That saves us both time.”

“I have met your daughter, yes. An unhappy girl.”

“Is that for you to judge?”

“When she speaks to me of her unhappiness, I think it is.”

“Why would she speak to you of her unhappiness? Who are you to her?”

“A friend of a friend. But you know that. You have seen us together.”

“I saw you together on the night Beatrice ran away. Odd he should have been with you and not her that night. What is he to you, anyway?”

Strulovitch is pleased with himself for not answering his own question with the words “Rough trade?”

But D’Anton guesses what he’s not saying. “I am not obliged to discuss the nature of my friendships with you,” he says.

“And I am not obliged to let you have the picture you have asked for.”

The last thing D’Anton wants is to have Strulovitch in his house, assessing him, looking over his treasures, picturing how he lives, but in his mind’s eye he sees the unhappy Barnaby, already showing signs of petulant jealousy that D’Anton has spirited Gratan away to Venice with his floozie but has so far done nothing for him, not even in the matter of the lost ring that Plury is sure to be enquiring about any day now. In a tableau of the heart, D’Anton paints himself creeping up on Barnaby, lightly clapping his hands over his eyes, and leading him to a wall on which Love’s First Lesson is hanging. For you. For you to give to Plury, because I want you to be happy together. But of course the subtext of this gift is that it is from me to you.

D’Anton loves being in receipt of gratitude, whatever its source. But gratitude from Barnaby is special.

“Come in then if you must,” he tells Strulovitch.

There is no hall. They are already in a morning room every wall of which is hung from eye level to ceiling with miniature portraits. Watercolours on ivory, vellum and porcelain, oils on enamel or copper, snuffbox covers in filigree gold frames. I don’t see any Kitaj or Kossoff, Strulovitch thinks, though his glance is of the briefest.

D’Anton doesn’t offer Strulovitch a seat. “I am not able,” he says, “to do business with you on the basis you suggest. I am not in a position to barter your daughter.”

“Are you saying she is not here?”

“I wasn’t saying that. But no she isn’t. She never was here. I don’t think she’d like it.”

Strulovitch knows that D’Anton means to impugn his daughter’s taste, but looking quickly around he knows he’s right. “No,” he says. “She wouldn’t like it at all. But if she isn’t here, where is she?”

“If I did know where she was why would I tell you?”

Strulovitch taps the letter which he still carries like a summons.

“You think I want the picture that badly?”

“Well someone does. Unless you were merely making merry with me.”

“Yes, you are right — someone does.”

“Gratan Howsome presumably. As a love token for my daughter. You can hardly expect me to hand it over lightly in those circumstances.”

“If I tell you you are wrong, that it is for someone else entirely, will you name your price?”

Is this the moment, D’Anton wonders, to bring up my willingness to rethink my position on his gallery? He thinks it probably isn’t.

“My price is still my daughter.”

“Then it is too high. I cannot betray one friend to please another.”

“You should not look on it as betraying a friend. You’d be assisting a father.”

“A father can be as much a rogue as any man. Your daughter was made unhappy until she met Gratan. It would be wrong of me to intervene in this, even supposing I had the influence effectively to do so. And I would hardly be likely to encourage him to return to face your savage proposal.”

“To ‘return,’ you say. So they have gone away.”

“Your daughter is of an age morally to make her own decisions.”

“Now she is,” Strulovitch says.

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that she wasn’t when your friend began with her.”

“I don’t know what ‘began with her’ is supposed to mean.”

“Then let me enlighten you. I have evidence that Gratan Howsome was sleeping with my daughter when she was fifteen. That this is a criminal offence I don’t have to tell you. That others who knowingly connived in the offence could be prosecuted as accessories is something you might not have thought about, but I suggest you think about it now. One way or another, I want my daughter returned and your friend with her. How I proceed from there depends largely on your co-operation.”

It is a matter of immense satisfaction to Strulovitch that D’Anton has to find himself a chair, though none looks suitable for sitting in.

—

“My guess,” Plurabelle opined, “is that he’s bluffing.”

“It shouldn’t be difficult to find out how old Beatrice was when Gratan…” D’Anton declined to finish. Some things, even when they concerned people he cared about, he preferred not to put his mind to.

“I don’t mean bluffing about her age,” Plury said impatiently. “I mean bluffing about what he’s going to do.”

“To Gratan?”

“To all of us.”

“We can’t be held responsible for what went on between them. How were we to know how old Beatrice was and what Gratan was getting up to with her?”

“I knew.”

“You knew her age?”

“I never questioned her about her age. And probably wouldn’t have done anything had I known. I had my first affair with a married man when I was twelve.”

“Well then…”

“But I knew they were sleeping together. I gave them a room.”

“That’s not a crime.”

“It is if I knew.”

“You just said you didn’t know.”

“But what if I have to prove that? I don’t want the police here, D’Anton. For any number of reasons. And neither, I would imagine, do you.”

“Plury, I have nothing to hide.”

“It was you, D’Anton, who brought her here. A Jewess to feed Gratan’s appetite for Jewesses. You found the idea amusing. As did I.”

“Amusing, but no more than that. I didn’t imagine there was going to be a grand affair…”

“Just a squalid one — is that your point? I don’t think that will help you. Especially when it’s discovered that you found the girl at the academy where you lecture.”

D’Anton winced at the word “lecture.” “I have broken no academy rules. I didn’t find her for my pleasure. I didn’t ‘find’ her full stop. She was there. Hardly inconspicuous is she?”

“What’s that got to do with the price of eggs? You end up in a court of law and no one cares what academy rules you did or didn’t break, whose pleasure you procured the girl for, or how conspicuous she was.”

“Procured!”

“Wake up, D’Anton! That’s how it will look. Mud sticks. And the more salacious the accusation, the more people will want to believe it. You might think you are above this, but I don’t think I am. What happens to my reputation, what happens to my show, what happens to the Belfry if I’m accused of running a bawdy house for paedophiles?”

“Oh, come on!”

“And what happens to your good name if you’re accused of assisting me? They’ll call us pimps, D’Anton. The country is in the mood for witch-hunts. The press tell them there’s a pervert under every stone. They’ll say we groomed underage girls here. Gratan will be finished. You’ll be a hate figure on social media. And Barney will probably leave me.”

“So what do you propose?”

“That we tell Gratan he must come back. He listens to you. Order him to return.”

“And do what?”

“Man up.”

“And what if what he has to man up to is three years in Strangeways? Why would anyone come back for that?”

“To help us, for one thing. To repay my kindness and whatever it is he owes you. Because he’s the one who got us into this. And if he does return, then maybe the monster won’t prosecute.”

“You think he’ll forgive and forget? He’s not a forgiving and forgetting man, Plury.”

Plury thought about it. She had been looking wild-eyed throughout this conversation, her eyes and lips more swollen than ever; now she resembled a figure from ancient tragedy and comedy combined, distraught and disfigured. She took D’Anton by his sleeve. “If Gratan gives him what he wants and agrees to his demands, he might.”

“What are you saying?”

She made a distracted scissor movement with the index and middle fingers of both hands. Had she seen Shylock doing the same thing she couldn’t have copied it any better. “Snip, snip!” she said.