Shylock Is My Name

Act Five

It is one of those better-to-be-dead-than-alive mornings you get in the north of England in winter, though the absence of light is more markedly felt in the Golden Triangle of Wilmslow, Mottram St. Andrew and Alderley Edge on account of the sadness that prevails there in all weathers.

Sadness is among the tools which those who would live nobly employ to distance themselves from the farcicality of existence engulfing everyone else. The unfairness, the banality, the repetition of cruelty. That some are delivered to far grander sorrows than these is proved by their sadness.

As it happens, it is also one of those mornings when a person neither sad nor hopeful might feel that the sun could yet show itself. Not this day, and not even the next, but in the weeks or months to come.

Plurabelle wished they’d waited. Her gardens would not look their best until spring arrived. But she was at the mercy of Strulovitch’s impatience. And D’Anton’s, come to that. And for herself, too, she knew that the sooner this was settled the better.

“Up,” she said to Barnaby who believed that Sundays were for lying in bed. Indeed, as a man who’d only ever had to look presentable for a living, Barnaby believed that most mornings were for lying in bed, and since his curly head looked so pretty on her pillow Plurabelle was usually content to indulge him. But today was different. “There is something in particular I’m going to want from you,” she told him. “Can you guess what it is?”

Barnaby felt tested to within an inch of his life. He doubted he had an answer to any question left in him, or that he could find within himself a single further proof of his devotion. D’Anton had still not succeeded in getting him the Solomon J. Solomon sketch that would show Plury how much and how unconventionally he valued her, but at least he’d found Barnaby a ring much like the one Barnaby had lost. So it couldn’t be that that she wanted from him. And they’d made love sweetly the night before, so it couldn’t be that either.

“A clue wouldn’t go amiss,” Barnaby said, knowing that theirs was a multiple-choice relationship and that, as always, she would give him three.

“It’s about today,” Plury helped him. “A very important day, as you know.”

Barnaby sat up on one elbow and turned his profile to her. That usually helped him out of trouble. “You either want me to welcome guests at the gate,” he guessed, “go around with the raffle tickets, or dress D’Anton’s wounds and I’m not going to do that.”

Plury shook her head. “You can make yourself scarce for the day,” she told him, “or you can make yourself scarce for the day, or you can make yourself scarce for the day.”

Barnaby, being boyish, wondered if there was a fourth option.

“You can make yourself scarce for the day,” Plury said, kissing him.

“Is this because you fear I will faint at the sight of blood?”

“No, it is because I fear my women friends will faint at the sight of you.”

“I know,” said Barnaby, “that that isn’t the real reason you want me out of the way.”

“And you are right. The real reason I want you out of the way is that your very presence is suggestive of sexual pleasure. You are so young and so beautiful and so indolent that no one will believe we devote ourselves to anything here but indulgence of the flesh. That is not the impression I want to give, today of all days. I was sad before I met you and it will better serve our cause — yours, mine and D’Anton’s — for me to look sad again.”

“Very well,” said Barnaby, pleased she hadn’t mentioned Gratan, “I will drive to Chester Zoo.”

Plurabelle could tell he was hurt. But this was a day for sacrifices.

—

Strulovitch and Shylock had also risen early.

Strulovitch tried on a number of suits, all of them black, and spent much of the morning at the mirror. How do you dress for such an occasion?

At last he sought Shylock’s advice.

“Taking one thing with another,” he asked, “which of these three ties strikes you as the most appropriate?”

He was reminded of his marriage mornings. The same intestinal tumult. The same wondering if he was looking forward to the day’s events or dreading them.

“As a rule you don’t wear a tie,” Shylock said.

“No, but I think today calls for one.”

“Then any but the red,” Shylock said.

“I am assuming,” Strulovitch mused aloud, “that you will not be making any changes to your wardrobe yourself.”

Nothing moved on Shylock’s face. “There is, though,” he replied, “the question of the hat.”

“I was guessing you would wear it.”

“The point is not what you were guessing but whether I ought to wear it.”

“You are more threatening in it.”

“Meaning I shouldn’t wear it?”

“No, meaning you should.”

Shylock looked at himself in the mirror. He too was nervous and reminded of an earlier time.

—

The final plans, hammered out by persons better suited than the principals to putting their minds to such things, were these:

The two men would be driven by Strulovitch’s chauffeur Brendan to the Old Belfry where there would be a small champagne reception at which, if Gratan and Beatrice had not returned to face the music — Plurabelle had booked a string quartet just in case — Strulovitch and D’Anton would have a final conversation, confirm terms in front of witnesses chosen for their discretion, and then be transported in a limousine belonging to neither party to a private walk-in circumcision clinic in Stockport for surgery — a preliminary check of D’Anton’s physical and psychological fitness for such an operation, minor as it was, having taken place at the clinic several days before. Strulovitch would see D’Anton across the threshold (and hang about a while outside to be certain he didn’t make a run for it) and then return to the party. In due course — the procedure itself, barring complications, not being lengthy — news of its verified completion would be relayed to the Old Belfry, Strulovitch would sign papers to the effect that no further action would be taken against Gratan, no further restraints placed on Beatrice, and no further word spoken against the good names of Plurabelle and D’Anton. The latter would remain in the clinic for as long as necessary, receiving the best care that Stockport had to offer, and Strulovitch would take his leave satisfied. How much champagne he drank would of course be up to him. Ditto the making of a speech.

—

“As best man you might want to say a few words yourself,” Strulovitch said to Shylock.

“I am not your best man.”

“I am joking,” Strulovitch said.

“Your joke is not welcome.”

“It was kindly meant.”

“I thought we had agreed that no joke is kindly meant.”

Fifteen minutes of tense silence between them in the course of which first one, and then another, repaired to a bathroom to inspect his appearance in a mirror.

It was Strulovitch who spoke first. “I am wondering,” he said, “if we ought to make sure that all is well at the clinic.”

“Why shouldn’t it be?”

“Ideological misgivings.”

“It’s a circumcision clinic.”

“You can never rule out second thoughts.”

“Second thoughts on the part of whom?”

“The surgeon.”

“He does this operation all the time. It’s a routine procedure for him. It’s how he makes his living. If I were you I’d be more concerned about D’Anton turning up.”

“D’Anton! Of D’Anton I have not the slightest doubt. I have sounded his nature to its dregs — not much of an achievement I grant you, given how little of his nature is anything else. But I know him, I have him, he is mine. He will need, more than anything, to demonstrate his bravery and in the process show us to be inhuman wretches. He might even be hoping we will kill him. I am only sorry we can’t oblige.”

“We?”

Strulovitch stopped what he was doing and looked across at Shylock who was not looking across at him. “Don’t tell me it’s your constancy I should be worrying about.”

“Do I owe you constancy? I am not aware I owe anyone anything. I certainly don’t owe this D’Anton harm.”

“No, you don’t owe me or D’Anton a thing. But our actions have consequences.”

“You will have to explain that.”

“There are consequences to setting an example.”

“I set an example! I?”

Shylock would have liked at that moment to be in Strulovitch’s garden, expressing incredulity to his wife. “My host seems to see me,” he would tell her, “as a role model. Would you believe that?”

“I shouldn’t let this go to your head, my dear,” he knew Leah would reply, “but you were always a hero to me too.”

“Then you are both fools.”

—

D’Anton, though eager until the last moment to know if there’d been news from the Rialto, was perhaps the least anxious of the actors. Let the axe fall. What would be, would be. The readiness is all.

Considering his initial reluctance to Plurabelle’s plans, he was in remarkably good spirits. But then she had worked on him and got him to understand how much hung on his co-operation. He too, she hoped she didn’t need to remind him, could only gain from this in the end.

But she was impressed nonetheless by how calm he seemed on the day. “I am armed by the knowledge of our rectitude,” he said, taking her hand and putting it to his cheek.

“And I by the quietness of your spirit,” she said.

They both laughed.

—

When Strulovitch and Shylock arrived a small party was gathered in a snowy white tent, warmed by banks of the most efficient patio heaters money could buy.

It fell to Shylock, who was not wearing his hat, to effect the introductions.

“It seems odd,” Plurabelle said, shaking Strulovitch’s hand, “that we have not met until now.”

“Since we don’t move in the same circles, except those my daughter runs around me, and you around her, I don’t find that odd at all,” Strulovitch replied. What did, however, strike him as odd was the look of hurt surprise — like a person drowning where there is no water — which the thousand cuts of surgery had lent Plurabelle’s every feature. May the knife do as ill with D’Anton, he wished.

He is as horrible as I imagined, Plurabelle thought, feeling a renewed surge of pity for Beatrice. No wonder her own father had hated Jews. For the first time she understood the tests he’d devised for her prospective lovers. They were calculated to protect her from the depredations of such monsters. Of the two examples here, she much preferred Shylock, a preference she emphasised by taking him by the arm and walking him into the marquee, scattering him like gold dust among her friends.

“Who are these people?” Strulovitch enquired, following her.

“They are well-wishers of D’Anton and friends of mine,” she told him. “You were invited to bring an equal number of supporters.”

“I have no need of supporters.”

“I promise you they are not here to sway opinion, one way or another.”

“There is no opinion to be swayed. I and your co-conspirator in the abduction of my daughter are agreed as to what will happen should Gratan not return Beatrice by noon, and I see we are only a few minutes away from that. It doesn’t look as though they are coming.”

At noon exactly, D’Anton emerged from the house and, with eyes becomingly lowered, his back bent slightly as though feigning weariness, he walked to meet Strulovitch. Strulovitch noted that under his coat and jacket he wore a shirt as snowy as the earth, the top three buttons of it open like a crooner’s. Has he forgotten what we’re here for, Strulovitch wondered. Does he think I have designs on his heart?

Neither man made an attempt to shake the hand of the other.

“The matter is settled then,” Strulovitch said, looking at his watch. “You will submit to my wishes in place of your crony, Gratan—”

“He is not my crony.”

“As you wish. You will submit in his place, and once the thing is done—”

“The slate between us will be clean. You will have no further call on any of us, including your daughter.”

“My daughter will remain my daughter, I will not consent to thinking of her as ‘one of you,’ but yes, whatever she wants I will consent to so long as I have written assurance that you have left the clinic other than as you entered it.”

“That exceeds our agreement, I think. Will it not give you room from now until evermore to complain that I am still, in some respect or other, the man I was before?”

“How you remain, ‘in some respect or other,’ is none of my affair. The state of your mind, your character, your affections and temperament, your prejudices, are yours to do with as you please. They are such as the Devil himself could not change and I don’t flatter myself that I could. You know what I ask. It is a strictly circumscribed demand.”

“That I return, God willing, fit to be your son-in-law…”

“That you will never be.”

“Nor will I ever want to be. I mean in your ‘strictly circumscribed’ sense only. Fit in your God’s eyes to be a Jewish husband were I ever to desire to be one. Ha!”

Strulovitch wondered what it was about that phrase “your God’s eyes” that made him want to put out D’Anton’s. He had been hoping, even after the clocks struck, that Beatrice would turn up, with or without Gratan. Now he prayed she wouldn’t.

He nodded his assent.

“Then do your worst,” D’Anton said.

He looked around, hoping to see Barnaby. It was only a shame that it wasn’t his but Gratan’s debt he was paying. There was poetry in his heart for Barney. “Give me your hand, Barnaby,” he could have said. “Bid your wife judge whether Barnaby had not once a love…” D’Anton was a man for a dying fall. “Bid your wife judge whether Gratan had not once a love” had a very different ring to it.

He was about to ask Plurabelle to commend him to Barnaby’s favour, but Plurabelle had business of her own to attend to. “May I make a final plea,” she said, addressing Strulovitch, “before this business is concluded. I understand a father’s pain. My father died dreading what might befall his daughter. I won’t say he did too much to protect me, but his precautions didn’t exactly smooth my way. Sometimes a father must chance his child to the world—”

“I have chanced my child to the world,” Strulovitch said, “and the world has undone her. I have struck a bargain which won’t bring her back, but a bargain is a bargain. This gentleman is by repute — certainly by his own repute — a man of honour. By that honour he owes me the little I have left to ask.”

“It is not a little to him,” Plurabelle said.

Strulovitch coughed, looking to Shylock for corroboration of the infelicity, before remembering that Shylock wasn’t a corroborating man. Without his hat he looked a more genial figure. Unamused but lenitive. The headmaster of a progressive, but not too progressive, secondary school.

“This is an operation,” Plurabelle continued, “that can go terribly wrong. You mean it as a humiliation, and a humiliation it most certainly is. Do you also mean it as a fatal injury? You think I exaggerate but I have details here”—she brought from her pocket a computer printout bearing, Strulovitch noticed, the Wikipedia logo—“of accidents and, yes, fatalities that must surely make you think again. I am your daughter’s friend. I believed myself to be her protector. As such I plead with you, by your own faith and hers, to spare a man who would not intentionally have hurt a hair on her head.”

She seemed to be speaking by rote, not even looking into the eyes of the person she was trying to persuade.

“It’s too late for any of this,” Strulovitch said. “We have struck our deal. Let’s get it over with. So that we can be done with one another for all time. The car, I believe, is waiting.”

He made a courtly motion with his hand to D’Anton. After you.

The men made to go but were again halted.

“Tarry a moment. A word before you leave.”

Strulovitch turned in surprise. The speaker this time was Shylock who, until that moment, had been holding himself theatrically aloof, a man worthy of notice for his lack of interest in the day’s events or any of the parties to them. Shylock bored. Shylock somewhere else. But that was then. Now, as though snapped into action by some external agency, he was another man. Shylock urgent. Shylock here. Conciliatory in tone, gently spoken, hatless, avuncular, but insistent on being heard.

“What’s this?” Strulovitch said.

“A moment of your time,” Shylock said. “No more.”

“It’s all been said.”

“Not all.”

“Have I forgotten something?” Strulovitch asked. “Or have you?”

“Forgotten something? I, no.” Shylock paused as though the matter of their being different men with different memories merited careful thought. “But you, yes, you have forgotten something.”

The banal sky felt thundery all of a sudden. Shylock could do that; he could affect the atmospheric pressure, perturb the weather with whatever was perturbing him. Strulovitch looked up, saw the future and the past. The weariness of the prophets descended on him.

“I have no time for this triteness,” he said. “I am not in need of a lesson. The matter is agreed.” Here he inclined his head to D’Anton who was resigned to his fate, whatever the meaning of Shylock’s intervention.

But Shylock hadn’t finished yet. “You accept the terms?” he asked, looking into D’Anton’s face for the first time.

D’Anton’s eyelids dropped like heavy curtains. “Fully,” he said.

“You allow them to be just?”

“Just? Does justice enter into this?”

“If you think it does not, then you cannot accept the terms.”

“I accept the terms because I have to.”

“By what reasoning?”

“I have no option.”

“You could refuse.”

“If I refuse, those I love will suffer consequences.”

“And you? Will you suffer consequences?”

“I don’t count what happens to myself.”

“You are a willing sacrifice?”

“I am.”

“Therefore by this action both sides will achieve the thing they seek. I call that just.”

D’Anton nodded his head.

“So I ask again: You allow these terms to be just?”

“Cruel, but just.”

“But just?” It is like extracting teeth, Shylock thought.

“Yes,” D’Anton conceded. “Just.” He smiled faintly at his own joke. “Just just.”

Shylock, unamused, nodded and turned his face back to Strulovitch’s. “Then,” he said, “must the Jew be merciful…”

Strulovitch knew exactly what he had to say in return. You don’t always have a choice.

“On what compulsion must I?” he asked.

Whereupon Shylock said what he too had to say. “The quality of mercy is not strained, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven…”

—

Strulovitch owned an etching by an unknown nineteenth-century artist that showed Ulysses lashed to the mast of his ship to protect him from the treacherous mellifluence of the sirens. The sirens themselves were a touch too Rubensesque for Strulovitch’s taste but he liked the way their songs were drawn as musical notations that flew towards Ulysses like birds, assailing all his senses. Struggling against his bonds, his eyes popping out of his head, Ulysses clearly regretted his decision to be restrained. But what about the sailors whose ears were stopped with wax? Did a single flying melody get through to them as they laboured at their oars? Or was there just a wall of yammering and the mermaids miming?

Having no wax to din out Shylock, Strulovitch deafened himself, instead, by act of will, stringing a procession of black thoughts, like funeral bunting if such a thing existed, from ear to ear. Everything he could recall that had ever made him angry, every slight, every exclusion, every bad thing done to him and every bad thing he had done. It was more than a match, in its malignancy, for Shylock’s honeyed peroration.

This, had he listened — but had he listened he would only have heard what he knew he was going to hear — was what Shylock said:

“The quality of mercy is not strained…You ask on what compulsion you should be merciful, you who have received no mercy yourself from him I ask you to show mercy to — you ask why you should requite what you have not received — and I say to you: Be an exemplary of mercy; give not in expectation of receiving mercy back — for mercy is not a transaction — but give it for what it constitutes in itself. Show pity for pity’s sake and not the profit of your soul. Eyes without pity will become blind, but it is not only in order that you may see that you should practise it. Pity is not compromised by profit or deserts, it does not minister to self-love, it is not a substitute for forgiveness, but builds its modest house wherever there is need of it. And what need is there of it here, you ask, where justice alone cries out for what is owing to it. The need is this: God asks it. What pertains to him, must pertain to you, otherwise you cannot claim that you are acting justly in His name. And will God love the sinner more than the sinned against? No, he will love you equally. No man can love as God loves, and it is profane of any man to try. But you can act in the spirit of God’s love, show charity, give though it is gall and wormwood to you to give, spare the undeserving, love those that do not love you — for where is the virtue merely in returning love? — give to those who would take from you and, where they have taken, do not recompense them in kind, for the greater the offence the greater the merit in refusing to be offended. Who shows rachmones does not diminish justice. Who shows rachmones acknowledges the just but exacting law under which we were created. And so worships God.”

Though he wouldn’t attend, Strulovitch waited. Manners too are a species of that compassion Jews call rachmones.

“You are finished?” he asked at last.

Shylock signalled to those who had applauded him that such an ovation was unnecessary. “Yes I am finished,” he said.

“Then I and my co-signatory will proceed to the clinic as agreed,” Strulovitch said.

Shylock bowed to him. He seemed to expect nothing else.

But Strulovitch wanted a quiet word before leaving. “Was it for this, then, that you came?” he asked in his lowest voice. What business remained between them was theirs alone.

“I’d prefer to think,” Shylock replied in kind, “that this was why you found me.”

Strulovitch swam in the unexpected blue of Shylock’s eyes. When had they changed colour?

“Who did the finding and who the being found is not a matter that will easily be settled between us.”

“No.”

“I too admired your performance.”

“You weren’t listening.”

“I got the gist of it.”

Shylock lowered his head. His hair was thinner than Strulovitch had noticed before, but then he had not seen him without his hat. A sentimentalist when it came to men — especially to fathers — he was half-inclined to kiss Shylock where the hair was thinnest.

Shylock read his mind. “I am not in search of a son,” he said.

“And I have had my fill of fathers,” Strulovitch said. “I hope I can admire your theatricality for itself. But you couldn’t really have believed that it would sway me.”

Shylock laughed. A shy catch of the breath. When had he started to laugh? “Not for a moment,” he said. “Affecting your resolution was the last thing on my mind. Not everything is about you.”

—

When Strulovitch swept out of Plurabelle’s drive with D’Anton at his shoulder, Plurabelle did not even see them go. She had eyes only for Shylock. God, I love this man, she thought. I fucking love him.

She was glad Barney was not here. It had been inspired of her to get rid of him though she hadn’t really known why she’d done it at the time. Now she could only hope he’d lost his way and would never come back. Let him stay in Chester Zoo.

She approached the new man in her life and laid a hand on his arm, surprised by how hard it felt. “That was awe-inspiring,” she said.

Shylock’s eyes had reverted to their gunmetal grey. “But it didn’t work,” he said. “Mercy has not been shown.”

“Oh, that needn’t matter.”

“Needn’t it?”

“How do we ever measure what works anyway,” she said, looking up at him with her swollen lips. “I can only tell you that it worked for me.”

“I’m pleased to hear that. To whom are you showing mercy?”

“I will show it you if you wish me to.”

“I am not in need of it.”

“What are you in need of?”

He paused, as though expecting something else. “And?” he said.

She was disconcerted. “I don’t understand.”

“I am waiting for what follows. Don’t you usually have a riddle for those you think want something from you?”

She shook her hair as though wishing to rid her head of what he’d just said. “I have no riddle for you,” she said. “With you, I feel at last that I can be direct. I know there is nothing you want. But is there anything I can give you?”

He wondered if she was about to offer to make him famous. I am too old for this, he thought. “Peace and quiet,” he said. “Peace and quiet are all I am in need of.”

She took that to be further encouragement. Peace and quiet she could give him. “You are not what I thought you were,” she persisted.

“And what did you think I was?”

“I don’t know, but I would never have imagined…” Whatever it was she would never have imagined she couldn’t for the moment find the words for it.

Shylock helped her out. “That a Jew could be so Christian?”

She felt that he almost spat the words at her.

“No, no, that wasn’t what I intended to say. What I mean is that you looked so forbidding when you opened the door to me at Simon Strulovitch’s I didn’t dream you could be capable of such humanity.”

“That’s just another way of saying the same thing. You saw a Jew and expected nothing of him but cruelty.”

“I didn’t see a Jew. I don’t go around seeing Jews.”

“All right — you saw cruelty and gave it a Jewish face.”

“I’m only saying you are not what you seem. I am not a Christian. I haven’t been to church since I was a little girl. But I know what Christian sentiments are. Is it so wrong to be surprised by the eloquent expression of sentiments one normally hears from the pulpit by a man who scowls?”

“You mean a Jew who scowls.”

“I mean what I say I mean.”

“Then I will answer you in that spirit. Yes, it is wrong to be surprised. It is wrong not to know where you got your sweet Christian sentiments from. It is morally and historically wrong not to know that Jesus was a Jewish thinker and that when you quote him against us you are talking vicious nonsense. Charity is a Jewish concept. So is mercy. You took them from us, that is all. You appropriated them. They were given freely, but still you had to steal them.”

“I?”

“It shocks you to exemplify? It must. It shocked me. I was made to crawl for what I exemplified. So yes, you. You say my humanity surprises you. What was it you expected? And whose humanity is it that you think you see in me now? Your own! How dare you think you can teach me what I already know, or set me the example I long ago set you? It is a breathtaking insolence, an immemorial act of theft from which nothing but sorrow has ever flowed. There is blood on your insolence.”

Plurabelle looked as though she were about to cry. She put a hand on her chest. “I feel you’ve laid a curse on me,” she said.

“Well now you know the sensation from the other end,” Shylock said.

And this time Plurabelle could have sworn he did spit on her.

—

“That’s what you call telling them,” Leah said.

Shylock pulled his coat around him. “It was not without a long premeditation,” he admitted.

“It was none the worse for that,” she said.

“A long premeditation invites anticlimax,” he said. “One can think too long. What I said was musty. It could have been better.”

“It was good enough.”

“Is that all?”

“Good enough is good enough. You don’t, I hope, think you are going to change history.”

“I can hope.”

“You’d be unwise to do so.”

“You wish then that I’d stayed silent?”

“I haven’t said that. Though I wish you’d shown a little of your rachmones to that poor girl.”

“Ach, I wouldn’t worry for her. She fucking loves me.”

“Then maybe I should worry for you.”

“I think you’re safe. She’s the wrong persuasion.”

—

He didn’t go immediately, but stood in the snow enjoying her proximity.

Some days were harder than others. Today he would have liked to feel her arms around him. There was quiet between them, as though each were waiting for some word from the other. At last it was she who spoke.

“Caring about the right or wrong persuasion has not done us any good,” she said.

“It’s not only our doing,” he reminded her.

“No, it’s not. But it’s us I’m talking about. You and me and Jessica.”

“Oh, Jessica will be fine.”

But he read from the long echoing silence that ensued, that she knew, after all, that Jessica was not and never would be fine.

So had Leah all this time been concealing what she knew from him, just as he had all this time been concealing what he knew from her? Did she know what he’d have given the world for her never to find out, that their daughter had betrayed them, betrayed the love they’d borne each other, betrayed her upbringing and betrayed her own honour, for someone, for something — describe it how one would — of no worth?

It had been worse, then, for Leah than for him. Down there, in the cold of her interment, Leah lay day after day, without the consolation of confession or conversation, with her arms wound tight around their disgrace.

He thought his heart would break.

—

By the time Strulovitch returned to the Old Belfry to await public word of D’Anton’s operation Shylock was gone and of the friends of Plurabelle still dancing attendance on her none appeared to be of a mind to talk to him.

The little afternoon light there’d been was fading quickly. That suited Strulovitch. There was nothing he wanted to see. He dusted snow from a filigree bench far from the marquee and sat indifferent to the damp. He’d dropped D’Anton off at the clinic without looking at him or speaking to him. D’Anton had clearly wanted quiet himself after his altercation with Shylock. He shook a little, Strulovitch thought — though that might have been in fear of what awaited him. He recovered his spirits enough to say, “So this is it, then, over the top we go,” as he left the limousine, but Strulovitch had met that with silence. Why the victim should have been in a lighter mood than the executioner Strulovitch didn’t bother to enquire. Bluster, presumably. As it was bluster on his own part to say he hoped his adversary would die screaming under the knife. In fact he no longer cared what happened either way. Let D’Anton live, let D’Anton die — the outcome was immaterial to him. What would it change? It wouldn’t bring Beatrice back. It wouldn’t bring his wife back. It wouldn’t cook Gratan’s goose. And D’Anton would still be D’Anton when he was discharged. In all probability, and with some justice, more the Jew-hater than before.

He wondered if Shylock were feeling much what he felt right now. Knowing his words had all been for nothing. It wasn’t just that there was no victory to be had; it was that there was no victory worth having. Victory and defeat were alike absurd.

On it stretched, backwards and forwards, the line of risible time — all the way from the conversion of the Christians to the conversion of the Jews. And would the world be a better place if the one hadn’t happened and the other suddenly did? Beatrice with or without Gratan — what difference? The gallery he had failed to open in his parents’ name — so what? His ruined wife — did it matter to her what sort of world she lived in? Action had stopped arbitrarily for Shylock, but time hadn’t. Time had embalmed him. Would he have been better off had time ended for him when action did? Would he have effected anything less or anything more? The greatest illusion of all — that time would labour and bring forth beneficent change.

He didn’t know how long he sat there, but the chill had barely begun to spread through him when Plurabelle called out that she had news. Her voice had an unaccustomed crack in it, like a choirboy’s on the point of breaking. She looked shrunken and feverish. Knowing nothing of what had transpired between her and Shylock, Strulovitch took this to be the natural consequence of her fears for D’Anton. Good. If nothing else he had sown disquiet. And for a moment he hoped again his adversary had died screaming under the knife. But there was something not quite right about Plurabelle’s agitation. She had news, she said tragically. If the news was that D’Anton had died screaming under the knife, why was she taking so long to deliver it? Why the music-hall posturing — the badly executed stagger, the laboured breathing, the pale hand to the brow?

She’s hamming this, Strulovitch thought. She doesn’t want it to end. He could understand her looking forward to all being well again in her brittle little world, and Strulovitch with his threats and menaces being gone from it. But that didn’t explain the histrionics.

A small number of people were gathered in the marquee, hugging the heaters. “I have here a letter from the surgeon, dated, you might be surprised to learn, five days ago,” Plurabelle finally announced. Her voice was suddenly strong and vindictive and, as she read, her sorrowing eyes of moments before became points of unabated fire.

To whom it may concern,

I have today had the pleasure of examining this delightful patient (name supplied) with a view to judging his fitness to undergo circumcision by the “Forceps Guided Method” and am pleased to report that examination proved such a method, or indeed any method, supererogatory as the patient is already circumcised. The operation, as far as I can deduce and he recall, was performed when he was an infant, such procedures being common among families living in hot countries.

Needless to say one cannot circumcise a person twice.

Yours very sincerely,

Pandhari Malik

—

Was there laughter? Was there applause?

For the second time that afternoon, Strulovitch stopped his ears. If there is such a thing as hysterical deafness there is such a thing as rational deafness too. Why listen to what neither educates nor honours you? Why be demeaned by the unfolding of absurd predictability?

He didn’t have the patience — with events or with himself — to track back over the subterfuge that had made a fool of him. No one had acted with principle. He had lost, that was all that differentiated him from D’Anton. Winning — the prize a bloodied D’Anton — would not have made him the better man.

Surprised only by how little he was surprised, he slipped away before Plurabelle could confront him with his defeat. Let her exult without him. He had no further business at the Old Belfry and nothing to complain of. He was glad of it. To the modern mind there is a dignity in being tricked. It confirms the preposterousness of existence.

I am content, he thought. Obsolete, but content.

He did not immediately return home. He asked Brendan, whom he found in earnest conversation with other chauffeurs, to drive him round. Anywhere. On ungritted lanes, preferably. A whited landscape. High hedgerows and the quiet crunch of tyres on snow. Stay away until nightfall. And not long to wait for that. Here, night fell in the middle of the afternoon.

Before getting out and opening the door for Strulovitch, Brendan turned around and handed him a letter. “It’s my notice,” he said.

“I’ve been expecting it,” Strulovitch said. “I hope I haven’t been a trial to work for.”

“Sometimes one needs a change, sir,” Brendan said. “That is all.”

“You must do what your conscience determines, Brendan,” Strulovitch told him.

It gave him no pleasure to reflect that in the absence of fiends and devils to blame, Brendan’s conscience would be his scourge.

—

When he did finally get back he went straight to his desk where he scribbled a note to D’Anton. “To the victor the spoils,” he wrote. “As a mark of my good grace I will arrange for the Solomon Joseph Solomon to be delivered to your home. I trust the pleasure it gives the person for whom you say it is intended will be returned tenfold to you. You have a parched and withered look. May the sap of gratitude and reciprocated friendship rise in you. We were not put on earth to be forever sad.”

Before retiring, he called in on Kay and found Beatrice sitting with her. Neither woman made any demonstration of affection.

“When did you get back?” he asked Beatrice.

“Not long ago.”

“Are you well?”

She looked at her mother as though for confirmation. Was there a nod, a smile?

This is hard on her, Strulovitch thought — meaning everything. This is too cruel. She’s a child. “You look well,” he lied.

“I doubt that,” she said. “But thanks, anyway. I’m unharmed, if that’s what you mean. And unbetrothed, if that’s what you really want to know.”

“It’s enough you’re here.”

“It’s enough for me too.”

It was enough she was here. It was everything she was here. But some unquiet, unappeasable sprite of fatherly fault-finding nudged aside the joy he wanted to express. “If you’d told me you were coming home today,” he said, “you’d have saved everybody a lot of trouble.”

“Maybe I didn’t want to save everybody a lot of trouble.”

In her stony unforgivingness she resembles Shylock, Strulovitch thought. Were he to ask her what she was thinking he had little doubt how she would answer.

I will be revenged on the whole pack of you.