Shylock Is My Name

FOUR

D’Anton performed a secondary function for Plurabelle in that he was well and variously connected and could extend her circle to people she would not in the normal course of things encounter, no matter that many were her neighbours. The models and actresses, bankers, rappers, star footballers and breakfast TV astrologers — the obvious ones — she could find herself. And when she didn’t, they found her. But cricketers and rugby players, accountants, architects, designers, life coaches and even the odd free-talking bishop (for D’Anton’s family had Church connections that went far back) — such B-listers, who were not entirely without glamour, she was soon relying on D’Anton to provide. He knew people of this sort because they paid him to fill their houses with beauty and sometimes even hunt out specific paintings for them. “Anything you can get me from the Sistine Chapel,” was one request. “A painting of gay men screaming at one another in the lavatory by that guy they say wrote Shakespeare,” was another. Plurabelle marvelled at the breadth and variety of his connections.

Sometimes he rolled his eyes in her direction when he brought them to her parties, as though to say they were unaccountable for by him, not of his doing or acquaintance, and she would do well to have security staff keep watch on them.

Once he introduced her to Mehdi Mehdi, a French Algerian ventriloquist who was in hiding from the French and Algerian police on account of the Nazi ideology his dummy espoused, though he persuasively argued, in D’Anton’s view, that as a ventriloquist he had neither person nor ideology of his own and employed his dummy to comment critically (though it wasn’t strictly speaking his business to be a critic either) on the ideology in question. When quizzed by journalists as to the fondness he appeared to feel for his dummy, and indeed the fondness it inspired, he offered no reply in his own voice but left it to the doll to say that if the unintended consequence of his fame was that half the youth in France was giving Nazi salutes that was better than their making the Star of David.

Plurabelle was astonished to learn that half the youth of France had been making the Star of David.

D’Anton waved away her concern. “He’s amusing,” he said, “in a vindictive and perhaps even mendacious way, but he’s essentially sound and good value to have at a party.”

Plurabelle understood the distinction and told D’Anton to bring him and his dummy along. She was pleased to discover they were both good dancers. But for his being wanted by the police she would have had him, or at least his puppet, on The Kitchen Counsellor in argument with a rabbi.

A rabbi, ideally, who was also a ventriloquist, so that their dolls could have gone at it hammer and tongs.

What it was about him that appealed particularly to sportsmen neither she nor D’Anton could have said, but his puppet’s hallmark Nazi salute was soon being copied in France by footballers who had been to see his act in underground cabarets in Marseilles, and in Cheshire by footballers who thought it chic to do what the French did, though of these Gratan Howsome — the latest of D’Anton’s invitees — was the only professional so far actually to perform it on the field of play.

“He’s the godson of a very dear friend of mine, now deceased,” D’Anton explained, when Plurabelle expressed surprise at the affection there seemed to be between the two men. She had a fondness for tattoos and piercings herself, and liked men who padded around you like a dog and turned up with a different haircut every time you met them, but she wouldn’t have imagined any of this would appeal to D’Anton. It seemed, however, that their goodwill — and something even stronger than that — was of long duration. “It’s complicated,” D’Anton told her, “as explanations of deep but apparently incongruous affections often are. I inherited an obligation I would go so far as to call sacred from a friend who had inherited it from a friend of his. If I say that poor Gratan is something of a football in all this I don’t want you to think I’m being flippant. He is, in all but name, an orphan. In a manner of speaking I stand in watch and ward over him.”

“He would seem to me to have more people watching over his welfare than most orphans,” Plurabelle said with an irritation that surprised herself.

Could she have been jealous of Gratan for enjoying a protection she had come to see as hers alone?

“Then I have not explained myself well enough. His mother left him. His father maltreated him. He was abused by an uncle. But for the intervention of Federico and then Slavco there’s no knowing what would have become of him. I must continue where they left off.”

“You make it sound like a chore.”

“Not a bit of it. The obligation I’ve inherited I undertake willingly. What else are we for if we do not answer when the helpless call? Especially if, by so doing, we go on remembering friends who have been taken from us. In Gratan I see something of the gentle temperament of those who cared for him, no matter that he might sometimes strike some people as a bit of a brute. In fact, he has a physical vulnerability rare in a footballer. And a sweet nature for all his reputation as a womaniser.”

“And his reputation as a Nazi?”

D’Anton laughed and shook his head. “Oh, that’s only recent,” he said. “Since his coming here and meeting Mehdi Mehdi, in fact. He has a twitchy arm, that’s all. I think the world of him.”

According to Gratan himself, the salute was a misunderstanding. Given that other players (no names) were performing it surreptitiously, pretending they were scratching their ear or taunting the opposition with rabbit signs, there was, in his view, a necessity to bring it out into the open. He wasn’t a racist in general — when had he been booked for taunting a black or Asian player? — and he could prove categorically that he wasn’t an anti-Semite. Name a single occasion on which he’d been booked for fouling a Jewish player. And at least one of his wives — he wasn’t sure offhand which — had been a bit Jewish.

“He has a thing for Jewish women,” D’Anton told Plurabelle. “He thinks they’re hot. There’s no accounting for taste.”

“Does he have one at the moment?”

D’Anton thought about it. “Not that I know of.”

“Then we should try to find him one. We owe that to your friends.”

—

Some time after D’Anton’s installation — say eighteen months — Plurabelle fell in love. Not with D’Anton and certainly not with Gratan or the wanted Algerian ventriloquist or his dummy, but with a person she saw first — feet first, as it happened — underneath the chassis of her Volkswagen Beetle. Her Porsche Carrera had needed servicing, but the mechanic who’d been sent (the garage went to her, she didn’t go to it) decided he would much rather recline a while under the Beetle, a car that was rarely seen in the Golden Triangle whereas Porsche Carreras were ten a penny.

Informed by her house manager that the gentleman, who in plain truth didn’t much look like a mechanic to him, hadn’t given the Porsche a second look but had made a beeline for the Beetle, Plurabelle squealed with the consciousness of her good fortune. Found him — found him at last! — a man not to be deceived by ornament. If he were to turn out to be even marginally well favoured when he rolled himself out from underneath the meanest of her cars, she would give herself to him on the spot. No matter that the spot was a gravel drive.

She ran inside to wash off her make-up. Fifteen minutes later, wearing her oldest clothes, she returned to the gravel drive. “Let me see you,” she called out, clapping her hands. A woman used to being obeyed. But who also wanted someone to obey.

And when he did, inch by inch appear, smudged with engine oil and more than a little bashful to be seen not in overalls but in his shirtsleeves — Plurabelle noted that he hadn’t even rolled them up — he presented as pretty a picture of innocent manliness as ever delighted a maiden’s eyes…

—

To the mind of a cynic the word “opportunistic” might have occurred sooner than “innocent.” He who would win the heart of an heiress known to be wary of flattery from men with a marked taste for the meretricious must surely, if he has a brain in his head, choose to please her by preferring what is plain over what is gaudy. Those chumps who fell at the first hurdle, blinded by sparkle, deserved to be sent packing. Wherein did they suppose lay the test of their mettle if all that was required of them was to be predictably loquacious on the subject of glitter? And why hadn’t a woman who could be won by such banalities been won a hundred times already?

Some such calculation would have saved many a suitor expense and bother.

Against the charge of opportunism, however, must be laid the intriguing fact that this heiress wasn’t at home when the gentleman slid underneath her Volkswagen, wasn’t at home and wasn’t expected to be home any time soon, leaving open the question of how he knew she would find him there unless he intended never to move until she appeared. A calculation, or absence of calculation — they can amount to the same thing — which while it might not save him from the charge of contrivance does bespeak wholeheartedness. So either way he had qualities to recommend him to Plurabelle.

That it was his friend D’Anton (his dear, dear friend D’Anton) who tipped him the wink — a couple of winks, to be precise — a) to the fact that Plurabelle’s heart was unoccupied, and b) as to the means to occupy it — did him no disservice, either, once it was discovered, for to be a dear, dear friend of D’Anton was an endorsement of his character in itself. Though when Plurabelle was apprised of all there was to be apprised of she wondered less that D’Anton was so sad. For who, once they had seen him, could not love Barnaby?

Or Barney as she called him in her heart at once, and then later in the company of everybody but the servants.

Had she been more certain of the codes that governed the pastoral ideal she meant to live by, she would have considered clasping both D’Anton and Barney to her bosom and seeing what transpired. Sleeping with two or more men was not unheard of in the Golden Triangle, and she had more than once slept with two women in the aftermath of her first disillusionment with the other sex. But while she had no fear of losing Barney to D’Anton, who didn’t own a Volkswagen Beetle for him to tinker under, she did worry how the former would view such unconventionality on her part. Just because he didn’t idealise wealth, or see purity in gold, didn’t mean he didn’t idealise and see purity in her.

D’Anton the same, if from a different perspective.

One night, at a local restaurant, she asked the two men how they met. They gave conflicting answers. Barney said he didn’t remember. D’Anton said he would never forget. They met, D’Anton recounted, by the pig roast at an agricultural fair in Alsager. D’Anton was not a big pig-eater himself but he was escorting a visiting Japanese glass-blower, whose favourite dish happened to be pork. This was the third festive event in Cheshire he’d taken Takumo to and his guest had made straight for the pig roast at every one of them. Barnaby seemed just to be sauntering, neither curious nor incurious, neither hungry nor not. The day was warm, he was idle, and agriculture was in his veins. He was wearing an oatmeal coloured suit, loose-fitting like a hay bag, his hair the colour and texture of the straw D’Anton imagined spilling from it. Cloud-filtered light cast the glow of late summer on Barnaby’s face, making him resemble the Hireling Shepherd in William Holman Hunt’s painting of that name. Plurabelle knew the painting, she was quick to say — it hung in the Manchester Art Gallery. Often she had stood before it in a sort of rapture, imagining herself to be the shepherdess. Her interruption appeared to distress D’Anton, perhaps for the reason, Plurabelle reasoned, that in his picture there was no shepherdess.

Barney laughed a shepherd’s laugh. “I don’t recall any such fair and I have never owned such a suit,” he said.

“You wore an off-white linen shirt under it,” D’Anton went on. “It had a button missing.”

“Never owned one of those either.”

“And you were carrying a straw panama.”

“Not me guv’nor.”

“So what’s your version?” Plurabelle asked him, aroused by the mention of the missing button.

He shook his head. “D’Anton was just somehow always there or thereabouts,” he said. “You might as well ask me when I first saw the sky.”

D’Anton’s expression brought to Plurabelle’s mind another painting by William Holman Hunt. The Light of the World. Jesus with the moon behind him like a halo, knocking on a door with no expectation of its being opened, his lips pursed almost pettishly, his eyes downcast, a lonely, self-pitying man—“Behold I stand at the door and knock; if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me”—all the while knowing that the door will remain unanswered.

There seems to be something about all this being rejected that D’Anton quite likes, Plurabelle thought. Could it be that he hopes Barney won’t give him whatever it is he wants?

Or was it she who was hoping Barney wouldn’t give him whatever it was he wanted?