Zoo Time (47 page)

Too much self-knowledge and intent spoiled it for those who made a hobby of being cultured, who trotted from Tate Modern to the National Theatre and then on to one of the three or four reading groups to which they belonged, and who in their hearts believed they too had a story to tell and would have told it if only they had had the time (which they might easily have had had they only stayed away from galleries and theatres more), if only they had not had families to bring up, if only things had worked out differently for them, if only they had had the advantages or the education, if only the monkey in them had struck the right keys and come up with the right letters.

I was under no more illusion about my esteemed readers’ affection for me than I was about my affection for myself, and I didn’t like myself at all. They read the pap I put out not because they loved me, but because they hated Proust at his most dilatory and Henry James at his most sublimely impenetrable and Lawrence at his most finical-erotical-prophetical and Céline at his most odious. In my new incarnation as a writer of what was ‘readable’ I was the antidote to art.

Poppy died before
The Good Woman
was published. Francis had, in the end, cared for her and was now wasted himself. ‘They should bury me with her,’ he said. ‘Or at least they should bury my heart.’

Other than ‘Oh, Francis’, I had no reply. In my own heart I thought it would be right if they buried his. I envied him. Not his few short years with Poppy but the inordinacy of his grief. It denoted a steadfastness I feared I didn’t possess, and of course a goodness I knew I didn’t.

Vanessa flew back for the funeral and shook like a leaf through every minute of it. She looked very fine, golden from the Western Australian sun, though less queenly than I remembered her at Merton’s funeral. She had marks on her face I hadn’t seen before, deeper, I thought, than could be explained by this new sorrow. It was as though writing had turned her serious, but in the process taken away her vivacity. Not writing had suited her. In her rage and frustration she had bloomed. In her not writing she had been a prodigy of non-fulfilment. Now she was just another practitioner. One of thousands, millions even. Hush, and you can hear them; listen, on a quiet night anywhere on the planet, and you can hear the scratch of their pens or the dead click of their keyboards, as innumerable as the sand which is by the seashore.

But I could not tell her that. Let her find out for herself.

We embraced, like old friends who had fallen out, without passion.

‘Are you all right, essentially?’ she asked me.

‘I am,’ I said. ‘I can see that you are – essentially.’

She nodded. ‘It’s good to be busy.’

‘Yes,’ I said. I wanted to ask if she was enjoying the frontier life she had surprised me in Broome with the news that she had always craved. But she would think I was being ironic.

Similarly, I thought, she refrained from asking whether I was still writing about myself and wondering why no one read me. ‘Working on something?’ she asked instead.

‘Yes. You?’

‘Yes.’

There is nothing to say once you have decided to call an end; the argument has no spritz in it any longer. And you can’t remember why it ever spat and fizzed the way it did.

I wished she would tell me to stop stealing her airwaves, to get the fuck out of the cemetery so that she could think her thoughts. It would have pleased me to see her vertiginous with frustration again. Not because I wanted to see her unhappy but because I wanted to see her grand.

We avoided all talk of Poppy until we were about to part.

‘I know it must have been hard for you sometimes,’ she said, ‘having both of us to cart around. I want to thank you for doing it with such good grace.’

‘It wasn’t hard,’ I said.

And then it was my turn to shake like a leaf.

44

Spelt From Sibyl’s Leaves

My follow-up novel to
The Good Woman
was
The Good Daughter
. There was no stopping me now. I had
The Good Mother
ready to go. And even before I began on that I was mulling over
The Good Son-in-Law
. Though how I was going to keep sex out of that one, I didn’t know.

It was as I walking home from the launch party for
The Good Daughter
that I saw the tramp Vanessa had called Ernest Hemingway keel over, like a shot bear, in the middle of the road. I couldn’t tell if he’d been hit by a vehicle or had just lost his footing. At this time of the night in Soho there was no saying what had caused what. Minicabs and limousines and rickshaws were double-parked, picking up and spilling out. Hen nights, stag nights, monkey nights. People lay in pools of their own vomit, waiting for the paramedics. You couldn’t tell, from looking at what anyone was wearing, what the season was. In Soho it had become a perpetual late summer, shirts open to the navel, legs bare to the femur, no matter what the temperature. The restaurants were all full, booked out, though no one was eating in the restaurant that they really wanted to eat in.

(That
he
really wanted to eat in? Forget it.)

Smokers lounged outside, laughing and coughing, inspecting their mobile phones with that air of urgent wonder that would have made a Martian suppose they had never seen such things until tonight. Everyone had a message waiting, and whoever didn’t, sent himself one. In restaurant queues the latest of Sandy Ferber’s two-minute Unbooks helped while away the waiting.

No one noticed anything any more, there were no witnesses to any crime, because people did not raise their faces from their screens. How they any longer fell in love was a mystery to me. Eyes used to have to meet in long lingering amazement. But who had time to raise their eyes or be amazed? Perhaps they fell in love, at a remove, through their electronic devices. IthinkIloveyou.com. I felt self-conscious carrying an actual book. It was a first edition of
The Good Daughter
, still hot from the printer’s, signed by everyone at my publishers, even Flora, though I might not have mentioned that I never did leave S&C – couldn’t do it, couldn’t do it to the memory of Merton, couldn’t do it to Margaret Travers, his no less faithful secretary, who I felt needed me to stay for continuity’s sake, and into the dark interior of whose crackling unbelted raincoat I couldn’t bear no longer to slip my arms, and anyway, with books as verdant and unapocalyptic as I was writing, there was nowhere else to go. Slumdog Press? I was too popular.

Verdant or otherwise, was I the only person in Soho, I wondered, carrying a book qua book? Ought I to have hidden it inside my jacket? I was the only person in Soho wearing a jacket, too. Or down my trousers?

It was as I was thinking about where or whether to conceal it that I saw Ernest Hemingway go over. It must have been a heavy fall, however it happened, because his notebook had come apart and leaves from it were being scattered by the careless feet of pedestrians. It was only paper. The streets of Soho were full of paper.

People are good, whether they are readers who respect the page or they are not. My new humanitarian philosophy: keep people away from art and judgement, where they are as lost souls, and they are, behaviourally speaking, wonderfully good. Was that another title for me?
People Are Good
– and no sooner did the tramp fall than passers-by rushed to see how he was and to assist him to his feet. ‘I’m trained in first aid,’ I heard one woman say, ‘tell me where it hurts.’ Shame she didn’t ask me. But on Hemingway it was a wasted, thankless piece of kindness; he did not raise his sightless eyes to her or to anyone else, and would not, frankly, have been very pleasant to make physical contact with.

We are all good in our own way. Some looked after the man, I went after his papers. Assuming this was the same book he’d been working on since Vanessa and I first encountered him, and possibly for years before that, it was a magnum opus, the labour of many hundreds of weeks. In which case every page was precious. And who else but I gave a damn about them? I chased down as many as I could, standing on them before bending to pick them up, the way I imagined the acolytes of the Sibylline oracle would have run after the leaves of her prophecy when they blew from the mouth of her cave. The Cumaean Sibyl had ‘sung the fates’ on the leaves of oak trees and when they scattered they scattered. What she had prophesied was lost. What did she care?

Ernest Hemingway, too, seemed not to care. Let his leaves blow where they chose.

But
I
cared.

It was my intention to return the pages I had retrieved, whether he wanted them or not, but I was word-deranged – a man who could not walk by a discarded cigarette packet without pausing to read it – and I could not resist stealing a look at what he had been writing all these years. Not a vulgar, competitor’s curiosity, I hope, not a thief ’s or a scoffer’s, but the respectful wondering of a fellow worker with words. How good was he? What did he know that the rest of us, who lived lives so much more compromised and comfortable, who preferred not to let our testicles hang out of the holes in our trousers, who lacked his austere, friendless dedication – what did he understand that we did not?

I quickly saw that for all their density not one of the scattered leaves of his notebook was different from any other. What he had to say, he went on saying, for page after page. And what he had to say was forceful, incontestable, not to say beautiful, in its clairvoyance:

O

OOOOO

OOOO

OOO

OO

O

O

OO

OOO

OOOO

OOOOO

O

A Note on the Author

An award-winning writer and broadcaster, Howard Jacobson was born in Manchester, brought up in Prestwich and educated at
Stand Grammar School in Whitefield, and
Downing College, Cambridge, where he
studied under F. R. Leavis. He lectured for three years at the University of Sydney before returning to teach at Selwyn College,
Cambridge. His novels include
The Mighty Walzer
(winner of the Bollinger Everyman
Wodehouse Prize),
Kalooki Nights
(longlisted for the Man Booker Prize), the highly
acclaimed
The Act of Love
and, most recently, the Man Booker Prize-winning
The Finkler Question
. Howard Jacobson lives in London.

By the Same Author

Fiction

Coming From Behind

Peeping Tom

Redback

The Very Model of a Man

No More Mister Nice Guy

The Mighty Walzer

Who’s Sorry Now?

The Making of Henry

Kalooki Nights

The Act of Love

The Finkler Question

Non-fiction

Shakespeare’s Magnanimity
(with Wilbur Sanders)

In the Land of Oz

Roots Schmoots: Journeys Among Jews

Seriously Funny: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime

Whatever It Is, I Don’t Like It

Also available by Howard Jacobson

In the Land of Oz