Shylock Is My Name

TWENTY-ONE

Gratan’s response to D’Anton’s text telling him to come home and face the music was immediate and terse. “No fucking chance,” he wrote.

D’Anton texted back to say that was no way to talk to a man who’d always had his best interests at heart.

Gratan responded by saying that a friendship could only be tested so far.

D’Anton texted again to ask what Beatrice thought about returning.

Gratan responded in a similar vein to his earlier message. “Haven’t fucking asked her.”

D’Anton texted to ask why not.

“Sick to death of her,” was Gratan’s reply.

“Any particular reason?” D’Anton wondered.

“She keeps talking to me in some foreign language.”

“What foreign language?”

“How would I know? It’s foreign. Jew, I think.”

“Then couldn’t you at least see your way clear to sending her home?”

“No wucking fay,” Gratan replied. “The sex is too good. It’s the only time she shuts the fuck up.”

D’Anton took that as a no, then, to any possibility that Gratan would countenance circumcision into the Jewish faith.

—

“Now what?” Plury wanted to know.

She was out with D’Anton and Barney at a bar in Manchester. They didn’t want to be heard discussing any of this in the Golden Triangle. Where they were drinking nobody would understand the word “circumcision.”

“We dare the Jew to do his worst,” D’Anton said.

“I don’t think that’s going to work,” Barnaby put in — an intervention that surprised him as well as his companions. Normally when there were councils of war he left Plury and D’Anton to do the talking. His role, at such times, was to make them feel better simply by virtue of his pleasing presence. But on this occasion his good name was at stake as well as theirs. If the Belfry was a brothel, what was he? The idea of Gratan getting away with something, no matter that he only dimly grasped the full extent of the offence, didn’t please him much either. Gratan does something wrong and gets to stay in Venice for his pains, and he, Barnaby, does nothing wrong and has to put up with all this tetchiness and tension in Cheshire.

He was feeling badly let down by D’Anton in other ways too.

“So when’s this ring I gave you coming back?” Plury had asked the moment they sat down to their drinks. “You swore to me you’d wear it till the hour of your death, and it’s been off your finger for a week.”

Barnaby had stared penetratingly at D’Anton. They’d rehearsed this, hadn’t they? D’Anton was meant to look at his own left hand where, after getting the ring polished by “his man,” he’d worn it for safety, only to discover with magnificently feigned horror that it had gone, goodness knows how, fallen off and rolled into a gutter or under the wheels of a bus, he could only suppose because his fingers were narrower than Barney’s. “I would rather cut my left hand off than be responsible for this,” he was to say, whereupon, amid promises of restitution, profuse apologies, tears from Barnaby and the like, Plury would embrace them both and tell them that flesh-and-blood love such as they enjoyed, and she hoped always would enjoy, far surpassed a trinket. But D’Anton, in his Gratan-centred distraction, forgot his lines, gazed into space, and with utterly uncharacteristic impatience snapped at Barney for consuming his time and glared at Plury for making a fuss.

“I will deal with you,” Plury said to Barney, “later.”

(More than ever he needed that picture.)

D’Anton she glared at in return.

Are we in competition over this ring, she asked herself, and didn’t much like the answer that came back.

Thus their exquisite world of mutuality and consideration, so often troubled but then redeemed by sadness, had begun to buckle under the pressure of short temper. Hence Barnaby — by any interpretation of events their only innocent victim — speaking what was on his mind.

“As I see it,” he went on, “the Jew will not back down. I’ve never heard of a Jew who will. They believe they lose face if they relent. It’s against their religion. My father who met many Jews told me the same thing. They have hearts of stone. Try standing on a beach and ordering the tide to go back — that’s what it’s like persuading a Jew to change his mind. So if Gratan himself won’t return to face the music we have no choice but to find a proxy Gratan to satisfy the Jew’s bloodlust.”

Surprised by how much Barney knew about Jews and their beliefs, Plury was nonetheless perplexed by his reasoning. “A poxy Gratan I can understand, Barney,” she said, “but what’s a proxy Gratan when he’s at home?”

I’m getting pretty tired of both these men, she thought. In fact she thought she was getting pretty tired of men altogether. Maybe she should have been the one who ran away with Beatrice.

“A substitute of some sort,” Barney said.

“A substitute for what?” D’Anton asked.

“For Gratan. A substitute for Gratan in the eyes of the Jew.”

“You’ll have to explain that,” Plury said. “Take it more slowly.”

Barnaby didn’t see how he could go any slower or be any clearer. “Someone who will stand in for Gratan. A scapegoat, is that the word? An understudy. Someone the Jew can do the equivalent to.”

“Someone else he can circumcise, do you mean?” D’Anton wasn’t sure whether it was he or Plury who asked that. Neither was Plury, so synchronised were they in consternation.

“Yes,” said Barnaby. “That’s what he wants isn’t it.”

“Darling,” said Plury, “he isn’t looking for any old person to circumcise for the fun of it. The point of circumcising Gratan is to get a Jewish husband for Beatrice.”

“Or to scare him off altogether,” D’Anton put in.

“I know that. I’m not the fool you take me for. But now, whatever Beatrice decides to do, it’s a question of honour, isn’t it? It isn’t the flesh he wants — who’d want that, especially from Gratan? — it’s the principle. He won’t care how he gets it or who he gets it from. Jews aren’t particular who pays what they believe they’re owed. Give him what he wants and I’d like to bet we won’t hear any more from him. And since we can’t give him Gratan…we have to give him someone else.”

A quiet descended on the party. Even the bar seemed to fall silent.

“But there’s no point my offering, though I would do anything for you,” Barnaby went on. “I faint at the very thought of blood.”

“And since I am disqualified by gender…” Plury began.

“That leaves just me,” D’Anton said.

—

You should sit in the dark more, D’Anton would tell the students who came to hear him think aloud. Not quite lectures, they were not quite classes either. He wanted more distance between him and his students than the word “class” implied. It isn’t good for you, he would go on, to live in so over-illuminated a world. If I say you spend too many hours looking into screens I don’t want you to mistake me for a moralist or a Luddite. My only concern is for your aesthetic welfare. Light is to be cherished, in the way great painters like Leonardo and Caravaggio cherished it, as an illumination of meaning, as a way of distinguishing between the mundane darkness of things and the glow that can come with understanding and discrimination. You lose a sense of beauty and volume if everything is light.

Did any of them listen?

Well one student, he remembered, did. “In your discussion of chiaroscuro you haven’t mentioned Rembrandt,” she put up her hand to say. “Wouldn’t you agree that for Rembrandt, perhaps more than for any painter, light was a form of psychological insight?”

That student was Beatrice. He saw her clearly now, in shadowy retrospect, her golden bangles dancing about her wrists as though she’d raised an arm to shake a tambourine, her own innate darkness illuminated as though by the psychological insight — call it the operation of conscience — he was bringing to bear upon himself. Was that the moment when he lit upon her as a plaything for Gratan? Was she Susanna in Rembrandt’s great painting, and he the more forward of the Elders? Such a scene answered to no prurience he recognised in himself, but he must have gone so far as to imagine how she might stimulate prurience in another man — otherwise why did he choose her? So didn’t that make him a partner or co-conspirator — a pimp, Plury had called him — in titillation?

How many times was that in recent days that he’d sunk a line into his soul and drawn up the word “procurer”?

He sat in the dark — the dark he emitted as a man of sorrows, and the more mundane dark he controlled with the flick of a switch — and pondered.

He would have liked his eyelids to have been of thicker, more opaque tissue. He had read that only the prepuce and the labia minora were thinner-skinned than eyelids, but as light didn’t come to him through those he found no consolation in the knowledge.

The light that did come to him, no matter what he did to shut it out, was violet, the colour of amethyst. This was the reason he rarely bought a paperweight or miniature that had amethyst in it: he found the stone too rich and the light it gave off too searing. Amethyst was the colour of his neurasthenia, the colour of what offended his taste, the colour of his antipathies. Strulovitch was one of those antipathies, though he’d have been hard-pressed to say whether, in this instance, the antipathy or the amethyst came first. Was Strulovitch amethystine in person? Was there something of the mineral’s violet hardness in the sheen of his skin? Was it his voice that shattered with too much light D’Anton’s attenuated nerves? He could more easily have explained why he hated Strulovitch morally. He hated the fact that Strulovitch bought and sold art, no matter that he bought and sold art himself. His own buying and selling had love at their centre; he traded because he loved the thing he traded in. Whereas Strulovitch, by his estimation, loved art incidentally, that’s if he loved it at all, the ecstasy of it, for him, residing in the final balance sheet of beauty. This D’Anton knew, not from anything Strulovitch said, and not from anything he observed or heard about his practices as a connoisseur and buyer. He knew it because Strulovitch was not refined as he, D’Anton, was refined. To be alive didn’t pain him as it pained D’Anton. He lacked excruciation. Beauty didn’t run through him. If beauty perished from the world, would Strulovitch act any differently? D’Anton could not conceive existence other than as an exquisite torment of the feelings. If there were suddenly to be no beauty in the world he would feel it into being. But Strulovitch? No, Strulovitch wouldn’t notice. He was too consumed by the materiality of things. And what was material was, to D’Anton, the colour of amethyst.

Beatrice too. A magenta spray of hair, her glance a gleam of mulberries, words like plums in syrup.

Was this what Gratan loved — the rich, pulsing presentness of the girl. Her insolent palpability?

Must have been.

So how did he know so well what Gratan loved?

D’Anton was a connoisseur of small things — miniature portraits, teardrop paperweights, pricks of conscience. Though abstemious by temperament he was acquisitive, as only the vain can be acquisitive, of elegant self-torment. He punished himself mentally for having too much money; for being well educated; for having exquisite taste; for being multifariously gifted. People came to him for assistance and he didn’t always give all they looked to him to give. Alternatively, he gave too much. In the amethyst dark of his fractious egotism he counted off his failings, of which one was perhaps the mirror image of all the others — too great a collusion in the afflictions of those he loved. Was Gratan’s weakness for Jewesses an affliction? Well he’d fed it, however it was to be described. Fanned it. Stoked it. But what if he’d been fanning some comparable affliction in himself? Did he too, behind the purple veins of his eyelids, nurse a weakness for the colouration of Jews? Was Strulovitch not so much an antipathy as a corrupt esteem?

“Desire” was a word he wouldn’t use. So far and no further. And “esteem” was far enough. But if there were some lurking, unholy, unacknowledged esteem, then he had done poor Gratan a great disservice, led him on to go where D’Anton himself wanted but did not have the courage to go. I owe the boy some recompense, he thought, with a shudder of that excruciation of which he believed Strulovitch to be incapable.

He had loved reading the lives of the Christian martyrs at school and tore out many illustrations to pin on his bedroom walls. One of his favourites was St. Lawrence who was roasted on a gridiron. D’Anton could, without difficulty, conjure up Tintoretto’s famous painting of Lawrence’s martyrdom, the light illuminating his suffering as cruel figures poked at him, prodding at his agony, from the darkness. There was a legend that St. Lawrence had ordered his tormentors, if they were going to cook him, at least to cook him properly. “Turn me over,” he told them. “I’m well enough done on this side.”

D’Anton had a taste for torment. Did that mean he also had a taste for his tormentors?

“Turn me over,” he imagined begging Strulovitch.

—

“Are you really prepared to do this for us?” Plurabelle asked.

D’Anton closed his eyes. Sometimes there was no need for words.

“You are a saint,” Plurabelle told him.

He shook his head, still without opening his eyes.

Sitting together in the little parlour that bore more the impress of his taste than hers — she had none, was his private view — they found a form of words they hoped would pacify the fiend who threatened the continuance of their idyll.

Plurabelle wondered whether these words should be witnessed by a Justice of the Peace. D’Anton thought not. A note on his paper would, he believed, suffice. Strulovitch, of all people, would surely know him as a man whose stern probity was beyond question.

“I hereby pledge requital for your grievance,” he wrote. “Let my person stand as surety for Gratan’s return within a fortnight.” (Plury had wanted a week, D’Anton a month. A fortnight was their compromise.) “If he is not back to face his punishment by then, take from me what you would take from him. I ask for no alleviation of his offence save this, and trust it will be the end of the matter.”

And he signed it with that flourish of which Strulovitch had already seen an example.

He wished he could have included Love First’s Lesson in the deal—I ask for no alleviation but would appreciate your throwing in Mr. Solomon—but it was important Plury remained in ignorance of any of that.

D’Anton sighed. How weary he had grown of these entanglements in the love affairs of others. How he wished he had never introduced anyone to anyone. How high the price of friendship had become.

“You really are a saint,” Plury repeated when he showed her what he’d written. “Though no saint I was ever told about at school had your gift for language.”

Some mole of probity in his nature — or maybe it was simply impatience — compelled him to shake off her praise. “If you knew more,” he said, “you wouldn’t say that of me.”

Plury looked intrigued. “Tell me,” she said.

He looked deep into her troubled eyes. “Can I count on your absolute confidence?” he asked.

“I swear,” she said, “upon our friendship. I swear on the sacred melancholy that binds us.”

“Not a word to another soul, your promise. Not even to Barney.”

“Not a syllable even to him.”

Whereupon he drew her to him, much as a lover might, and whispered words of wildness in her ear.

Anyone close to Plury would have marvelled at what she did then. She threw back her head and roared with laughter. It could have been enough to cure her of her sadness for ever.

“I can’t wait,” she said, between gasps of unaccustomed merriment, “to see the bloodsucker’s face.”

“The Jew’s you mean?”

“The Hebrew’s, yes,”

“You must be referring to the Israelite.”

“The Christ-Killer, yes. The crooked-nose…”

“Plury, stop that!” D’Anton laughed.

There had not been so much mirth heard in Plury’s Utopia for many a month.

—

Because she wanted to be certain the pledge would be received, because she knew herself to be no less culpable than D’Anton, because she wanted to see the devil with her own eyes, and because she was devising a little something extra of her own, Plurabelle delivered D’Anton’s note in person, driving the short distance to Strulovitch’s house — she was surprised to discover they were such near neighbours — in her housekeeper’s Vauxhall. She couldn’t have explained to herself her decision not to take the Porsche or even the Volkswagen Beetle, but she was miffed to discover a Mercedes in the drive.

She shuddered when Strulovitch himself opened the door to her. The hand with which he took what she handed him all but froze hers. This was a further surprise. She had come prepared to face the fires of hell. In her mind’s eye Strulovitch was a man with the complexion of a devil and a scaly hand. What she hadn’t expected was this icy blast. No wonder poor Beatrice had fled. I was right to have taken her in and warmed her through, she thought, and I am right to assist her now. God help us all.

But she was wrong about one thing. The person to whom she handed D’Anton’s sainted offer was not Strulovitch.

It was Shylock.