Zoo Time (41 page)

‘You’ve told me that. You told me that the time you told me you had a tumour.’

‘Well, I’m telling you again. You like writing about wild guys? Well, who’s wilder than a Jew?’

I gave him a long look. Not much wild about the baby ringlets and the fringes. Who’s wilder than a Jew? Who
isn’t
wilder than a Jew? But I could have been wrong. I’d been wrong about everything else. I’d assumed that Jeffrey had squeezed himself into Yafet in order to damp himself down, quieten the tumult in his head. But what if Jeffrey the impious disturbance was not only still in there but more impious than ever? Not a fraud or an impostor, I wouldn’t have accused him of that, but still going both ways. The religious could do that: they could jeer at belief, rail at God Himself, from the very centre of their faith. In this, they were unlike your regular conscientious humanist, who was stuck with his one-track, literal-minded rationality. No, he said. And that was that. Jeffrey-Yafet, on the other hand, grinning with his wet red mouth, could just as easily have been mocking himself as mocking me. Belief contained its own parody; disbelief did not. As a matter of principle, disbelief closed down uncertainty and ambivalence. Whereas belief, particularly Jewish belief, from what I knew of it in the novels of the wild American Jews I admired, played more games with itself than any other sort. Even the most solemn Jewish holy man was a trickster at heart.

I didn’t know I thought any of this until I thought it then. So thank you, Yafet.

Did that then mean that he was right? That I’d missed a trick?

Well, I’d missed everything else.

‘So how does your new belief system square with the wrongs you’ve done me?’ I asked him.

‘Not new. Recovered. Always in there, Gershom, always in there. In you, too.’ He leaned across to touch my heart this time. But otherwise he pretended not to know what I was talking about.
Wrongs?
What wrongs?

‘My wife? Her mother?’

‘Oh, not that again. I’ve told you – I was winding you up.’

Did I imagine it, or was he beginning to turn a w into a v.
I vas vinding you up
.

‘And how does
bull-chava
–’

‘
Bal-chuva
.’

I couldn’t be bothered. ‘How does that square with winding me up – your own brother?’

‘I was ill. And yes, all right, the night of your wedding with your mother-in-law. A little bit. A nibble. Love was in the air, Gershom.’

‘You were the best man.’

‘Best man, mother-in-law – it was a wedding.’ (
A vedding
.)

‘And what you said about Vanessa?’

‘Well, the family has never liked Vanessa. But I do. I’ve never said a word against her.’

‘But you have. You said a word against her to me.’

He straightened his skullcap. ‘You told the
Wilmslow Reporter
you liked wild guys.’

‘So I should like you?’

‘No, you should like her. She’s the real wild guy in the marriage.’

‘You’ve told me that, too.’

‘But you took no notice.’

‘How do you know what I took?’

‘I talk to Vanessa sometimes. She rings me. She rang me when she heard about my tumour.’

‘And she told you I wasn’t doing my best by her wild side? How do you treat a wild guy you’re married to?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never been married.’

‘So what did she complain about?’

‘She didn’t complain. I could just hear it in her voice.’

‘Hear what? Unexpressed wildness? Did she tell you I was stopping her from being Jewish?’

‘You can tell when someone’s not happy, Gershom.’

‘Fuck off with the Gershom. And anyway – who’s happy?’

Dumb question. ‘I am,’ he said, grinning at me with his wet mouth.

That was as far as we got. My mother called us from the bedroom. She embraced Yafet, straightening his skullcap and pinching his cheek. ‘A good boy,’ she said, looking at me but meaning him.

Me she shook hands with. The writer. The disappointment of the family.

My father was sitting up in bed without his tubes, scraping out a grapefruit. He didn’t know who anybody was but appeared cheerful enough. I thought I saw him eyeing off my mother’s sparrow legs.

‘Look at him,’ my mother said, with a hitherto concealed tenderness, pushing what was left of his hair back from his vacant face. ‘
Kayn ahora
.’

40

Whoremaster

So had I missed a trick?

Would I have done better as Gershom?
The Anne Frank I Never Knew
by Gershom Ablestein.
Mishnah Grunewald’s Choice
by Gershom Ablewurt.
The Boy in the Striped Dolce and Gabbana Pyjamas
by Gershom Ablekunst?

Had I missed out on my wildness by missing out on being Jewish?

Almost as soon as I got back to London Francis rang. Or rather Poppy rang. ‘Is that Guy Ableman? I have Mr Fowles on the phone for you.’

‘Come off it, Poppy,’ I said.

But the next minute Francis was on the line.

‘Dear boy! I hear you’ve been under the weather.’

‘Under the cosh, Francis, not the weather.’

‘Sorry to hear it. You all right now? Lunch? There’s a new brasserie opened near me.’

‘There’s a new brasserie opened near everyone,’ I said.

‘So what do you fancy instead?’

I suggested the matchbox restaurant where I’d seen Merton for the last time.

‘Oh God, Guy, you can’t move there and it’s full of publishers.’

‘That’s what I fancy,’ I said.

I knew why. Only a month after Merton’s suicide the buyer for books for thirteen- to fifteen-year-olds for one of the lesser-known supermarkets had keeled over here halfway through her dessert. There’d been a much publicised brawl in the toilets, too, between the husband of a foreign rights assistant and an Italian novelist widely supposed to be her lover. And a veteran book rep, describing what he’d seen to a table of colleagues, dislocated his shoulder imitating the husband throwing punches. The word was out in the trade that there was a curse on the place. Though all that did was increase the business. The appeal of it wasn’t lost on me. We all wanted to see the industry implode before our eyes.

The other, if you like unconscious, reason I’d chosen to eat here was brought home to me when I saw Francis trying to squeeze his bulk between a table made from an old Singer sewing machine and a banquette fashioned from a pew riddled with woodworm. It pleased me no end to see him so uncomfortable.

‘You look the way I feel,’ I said, not waiting for the menus before starting in on him.

I noticed that he’d cleaned his appearance up considerably – no slim-fit striped shirt hanging out over his trousers. And a tie. The tie, particularly, pained me. It looked like a gift.

‘Oh Lord,’ he said, pretending to shield his face. ‘We’re not going to have a set-to as well, are we?’

‘That’s up to you,’ I said.

‘Well, first of all I never thought you’d mind.’

‘I knew you were going to say that. Which offence are we discussing?’

‘Are there two?’

‘For all I know there might be more.’

‘Vanessa begged me to read her novel. She said at your suggestion. I read it and I liked it.’

‘Francis, there are people up and down the country waiting years to get a verdict from you on their manuscripts. Many of them will die before they hear from you. And many more will die when they do. How come Vanessa was able to jump the queue?’

‘She’s your wife, Guy. I was doing you a favour. What would you have said had I refused her?’

‘Thank you.’

‘You don’t mean that.’

‘No, I don’t mean that.’

‘It’s a good novel.’

‘I believe you.’

‘You haven’t read it?’

‘No. Not allowed to until it’s published. And Poppy?’

‘Poppy is not allowed to either. Not ever.’

‘That wasn’t what I was asking, Francis.
And Poppy
meaning what do you have to say about Poppy?’

‘That I love her.’

‘You love her! She’s a woman of sixty-six. How old are you? Fifty-two? Plus she’s the mother of one of your clients and the mother-in-law of another. Plus,
plus
I told you
I
loved her.’

‘No, you didn’t. You told me you wanted to get into her pants and write a novel about it. I warned you strenuously against it.’

‘You warned me strenuously against the novel. You encouraged me strenuously to get into her pants.’

Our conversation, speaking of strenuous, was being followed strenuously by the other diners. People urged me on silently when I caught their eye. Hit him. Go on, knock him down the stairs. No doubt they were urging on Francis likewise. They didn’t care who did what to whom. They just wanted to see blood spilt. Publisher and author, foreign rights assistant’s husband and lover, agent and client – it all gave spice to the dying days of a finished profession. I should have brought Vanessa here. Wife novelist versus husband novelist – that would have been a beauty.

‘You misled me,’ Francis said, our altercation having been interrupted by the arrival of charred octopus. I hated charred octopus but ordered it from every restaurant in London. It was like sea bream. Something just made one say the words – I took the compulsion to be general, given the amount of it I heard people ordering – when what I really wanted, what we all really wanted, was shank of something.

I was distracted. ‘Say that again, Francis,’ I said. ‘Did I hear the words “misled you”?’

‘Yes, that was exactly what you heard and exactly what you did. You misled me.’

‘Into believing what?’

‘Into believing you were having an affair. And you weren’t. You never were.’

‘Poppy denied me, did she? At the crowing of the cock, was it? Don’t be so fucking melodramatic. I never claimed we were having an affair. I said I was thinking of it.’

He banged the table. ‘But she wasn’t, Guy. Get that into your head. She wasn’t.’

Was this worth pursuing? What had happened was so old a story it embarrassed me to be a part of it. Francis throws himself at her – a man without a wife and only a handful of years, all right two handfuls of years, younger than her, a man with whom she could look forward to some future as she most certainly could not with me (in truth what could she look forward to with me, her daughter’s husband, except the occasional company of someone who would kill spiders for her?) – whereupon, unable to believe her good fortune, she cleans out all the cupboards of her past so as not to spoil his idealisation of her.
Guy! Did Guy say that, the cheeky monkey? Don’t make me laugh.
And now I’m the bad one for speaking retrospectively ill of the woman he loves.
Get out of having thought about getting into her pants, Guy
. No matter that he had once egged me into them out of his own vicarious lubricity.

‘OK,’ I said, ‘she wasn’t. I hope you’ll be very happy.’

‘There’s no need to be sarcastic.’

‘I’m not. I think she’ll make you an excellent receptionist. Unless she’s progressed to reading manuscripts for you by now.’

‘Well, that’s something else I wanted to tell you.’

‘You’re handing me over to Poppy? Do you know her taste in literature?’

‘No, I’m not handing you over to Poppy – though I don’t doubt you’d like it if I did. Poppy will be leaving. As will I. I’ve had it. I’m getting too old for this. It’s not what it was. The fun’s gone. The soul’s gone. The words have gone.’

‘What about Billy Funhouser?’

‘I’m Funhousered out, Guy.’

I didn’t believe his motives. He was saying half this for me. But I didn’t doubt his resolution. I saw what was waiting for him. Cutting mint for Poppy in Whichever-over-Shitheap for the rest of his days. Lucky devil.

‘Love in a cottage, is it?’ I enquired. I didn’t say I knew the very cottage. I didn’t say the last time I’d visited my mother-in-law there she’d kissed me full on the mouth.
Full on the mouth, Francis
.

Why spoil things for him, just because he’d spoiled things for me?

Besides, I had other things to worry about. I was agentless.

‘You make it sound confined,’ he said, ‘but I’ll count myself a king of infinite space there after bloody London.’ He made as though to move his arms, to cut his octopus. Impossible. All he could do was flap his elbows.