The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  Not in appearance, of course. They weren’t Sowalki drowsy with little fish-ball cheeks. In appearance they resembled the Brontës. They had that distrait look about them, that air of affecting not to hear the agonizing cries, the sound of souls rending, coming from the other room. In the face of the mayhem they tied back their hair and stared sideways. Governesses fallen from high estate — that was who they looked like. Governesses with family secrets, whose voices wobbled and sawed like silk tearing. But in matters of simple social adeptness they reminded me of my aunties. There was that same fear of dogs and shadows. That same alarm when anything moved suddenly. And that same incompetence with respect to brassieres.

  I actually taught one how to dance once. Imagine that. Imagine the measure of the ineptitude that could make me feel relaxed enough to show the way on a dance floor. True, it was only a small dance floor at a small party. And true the dance was only the twist. But even so!

  ‘Now come down,’ I remember saying. ‘That’s it, but keep revolving. Good. Now come up again. Yes, but still revolving.’

  My aunty Dolly would have been proud of me.

  I must have put a hand out to help with the angle of torsion, a light touch of encouragement on the hip, because I remember leaping back from the lumpiness as though I’d hit a tumour. Haberdasher’s swelling. Did they shoplift, these S for spinster, ‘T for totties? Were they thread and tape kleptomaniacs? Was that what my aunties had been up to for all those years, was that why they’d feared shop assistants — because they’d dreaded someone discovering the half mile of elastic they’d stuffed inside their bloomers?

  The twist was the beginning and the end of it, anyway. I kept a shy distance, and the lumpy mattresses of Totty Hall knew not my impression.

  When the touchy silence of existence among the Yorath and Rubella head shrinkers of Golem got too lonely to bear I frequented those back streets of Cambridge to which Yorath had mysteriously alluded in relation to Kafka. I led a secret life. So secret that I kept it from myself. Was that me sitting reading the Daily Mirror over bacon sandwich breakfasts in a transport café off the Newmarket Road? A chip off the old block? Couldn’t have been. Me holding hands behind the laundromat dryers with a woman old enough to be my mother? Impossible. So how come I am able to remember her name? Rose. The laundromat belonged to her. Rose’s Launderette. How come I am able to remember that? I took my shirts there for a service wash, that was all. We fell to talking, that was all. She did my ironing for me and I stroked her ruined hands. And once in a while took her to the pictures. Where we may have kissed. Who can say?

  My Cambridge.

  Brideshead for some. Rose’s Launderette for others.

  Don’t mistake me — I count my blessings; I know I was lucky to have had her.

  And then there was ping-pong. Also something I did furtively.

  I’d said no at first when the invitation from the college team and then from the UCTTC itself appeared in my pigeon hole. Thank you for asking but I no longer play. But I ran into the Master outside the porter’s lodge shortly after that, and I thought I detected a hint of remonstration in the way he feinted his backhand drive at me. ‘Eh, Walzer?’ If Golem had given me a place on the understanding that I’d raise its ping-pong profile, then I was obliged, was I not?

  No doubt there was even something in my contract.

  It goes without saying that nobody at Golem College could touch me, out of practice though I was. Nobody anywhere else in the university either, with one exception. An imperious Sri Lankan. Elongated, fine and prickly like a pandanus palm. Somebody da Silva. I am not being impolite. I have genuinely forgotten. But I admit that had I not genuinely forgotten I would have faked it, because he stole from my glory and got on my nerves.

  As long as he was out of the way, though, playing for his college and not mine, I was able to recapture some of the old satisfactions. It was fun winning again. A blood sport given the calibre of my opponents, but the more fun for that. At the beginning. Do you know, I was able to bamboozle half of them with spin. Not complex spin — just spin. Side. Old-fashioned dining-room table side. They hadn’t come across it before. They stared in astonishment, immobilized, as the ball landed on one spot and then slewed to another. How did I do that?

  One of my opponents, a King’s man, even complained to the referee. ‘He’s spinning the ball,’ he said.

  And the referee had to check the rules to see if spinning the ball was allowed.

  That was the standard we played to.

  So the fun I’m describing had its limits. It was like picking off rabbits with a howitzer. After a while you start to feel ashamed. What would Sheeny have said had he seen me tormenting some nebbish from Queen’s who wasn’t even sure which part of the bat was the handle? How would Phil Radic have greeted the return of my will to win? ‘King of the kids, eh, Ollie. Didn’t I say that all you needed was a rest?’

  So here I was again, entrammelled in humiliations. Mortifying to lose, mortifying to win.

  No wonder I kept it furtive, slipping out of my room with my bat and plimsolls rolled inside my undergraduate gown, and my shorts on under my trousers, hoping that no fellow Yorath and Rubella man would see me go or guess the nature of my errand. I’d raised the question of sport just once in an essay. Vis-à-vis the archery scene in Daniel Deronda. Nothing more than an admiring reference, in passing, to the strength of Gwendolen Harleth’s arm. It drew a gasp and a circle of red ink from Yorath. On the road to womanly wisdom, Walzer, Gwendolen Harleth’s vaingloriousness was the first welcome casualty. Or had I misread?

  A locus classicus for us was the scene in Persuasion where Louisa Musgrove is punished for her vulgar mettlesomeness by being thrown from the Cobb in Lyme Regis. More than a locus classicus, actually a sacred site. Rubella once hired a minibus to take us all down there for the weekend, to see with our own eyes the place where the only athlete in the oeuvre of Austen Jane — for she was to all intents and purposes a gymnast, Louisa Musgrove — symbolically paid for her impetuosity with her life.

  Yorath came to join us later, driving down separately with his family. I’d never before seen him, and never again saw him, in such high spirits. ‘This is where she jumped,’ I heard him pointing out to his little ones. ‘Right here. And over there is where she landed. As though dead. Not because she was lively — you mustn’t make that mistake. Jane Austen never punished vivacity. But because her mind was poor.’

  A shudder ran through us all. A poor mind was a charge we may have laid frequently, but we never laid it lightly.

  One by one we trooped off the Cobb with our heads lowered, knowing what we knew.

  It didn’t take much imagination on my part, therefore, to work out what they’d have thought about someone who put his mind to ping-pong. Better that they never found out. Better that I kept it a secret from them, along with Rose’s Launderette.

  As for my Golem team-mates, none of whom of course was a Yorath and Rubella man, they have melted from my recollection. All I remember is that they easily ran out of breath, wore elasticated shorts and were inordinately impressed by my skills. Shot, Ollie! Beautiful shot, Ollie! Olly, olly, Ollie!

  All hearties are slavish — I learned that on Day One. You can twist a man-mountain head-butter from Bucks around your little finger with the lamest limerick. Make him up a dirty song that rhymes and he’s yours for life. Tongue out, following you down King’s Parade panting, like a poodle. But my ping-pongers team-mates weren’t even the real thing. Podgy would-be hearties from Shropshire and the Borders, they followed behind what was following behind. Poodles’ poodles. And on such I squandered my gifts.

  Playing for the university provided slightly stiffer opposition, and gave me back a bit of pride, but I was still keeping company with minor-counties over-appreciators who wore elasticated shorts. All except Question-Mark da Silva. A class act, da Silva, I’ll give him that. And not just because his shorts were belted and pressed. He was the only non-Bug and Dniester ping-pong player
I’d ever come across who had wit in his game. Maybe not wit as Phil Radic employed it. It was colder than that. Phil Radic’s game was for everybody to enjoy, not least the person on the receiving end of the joke. Da Silva played derision ping-pong and when he was finished with you you were dead. I never faced him competitively. I was careful not to let that happen. But we were the first-string doubles pair against Oxford, in my only representative year, and that was killing enough. He called me away from the table half-way through the second game — we’d fumbled the first — to tell me what I was doing wrong.

  ‘You play your game,’ I said, ‘I’ll play mine.’

  ‘That’s not how you play doubles,’ he said.

  ‘That’s how I play doubles,’ I said.

  He looked down upon me using the full length of his nose.

  He had a very fine nose. ‘Precisely,’ he said. ‘That’s how you play.’

  ‘You play how you play,’ I said. ‘I’ll play how I play.’

  ‘That’s the whole fucking trouble,’ he said. ‘The way you’re playing I can’t play my fucking game.’

  How they swore, those Sri Lankans.

  In Fenners too, with people watching. Dignitaries. For it’s not nothing, a Varsity match.

  No wonder we lost.

  I lost my singles as well. The old trouble. The sick fucks wanted to win too badly. And they’d seen spin before, too, the chazerim.

  Oxford 10, Cambridge 0? Probably not. Da Silva must have won his singles. Oxford 8, Cambridge 2 sounds more like it.

  After which I gave it away. This time there really was no more ping-pong, let the Master think what the Master liked. Disapprobation — that was where I sought superiority henceforth — in prim disapprovals and disavowals. I became a head-shaker. A nay-sayer. World champion in not having any.

  But at least I’d earnt the right to buy a white blazer with light-blue braiding around it. A half-blue — that was all they gave you for ping-pong. For a full blue you had to roll in mud and put your face in another man’s arse. My usual complaint. It’s not sport for the shaygetsim unless there’s toches in it.

  Still, a half-blue is better than no blue. And it cut ice in the Kardomah, that’s for sure.

  A funny thing, though. Years later, coming out of Harry’s Bar, I ran into a person going into the Hotel Monaco and Grand Canal of whom I had no recollection whatsoever, but who was adamant he had played against me, for Oxford, on the night I had fallen out with da Silva. ‘A thrashing,’ he said.

  I hadn’t remembered it as that bad. ‘’Fraid I’ve lost it in the mists of time,’ I said, ‘but didn’t I take you to a final game?’

  ‘Didn’t you take me? Ha! I didn’t get ten points in either game. You destroyed me. The spin you put on!’

  ‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘I never destroyed anyone that night. I lost every match I played.’

  He shook his head. Bought me a Bellini on the strength of it. I’d been unplayable, he reckoned. Tougher even than that Pakistani chappie. Oxford’s worst defeat by Cambridge in a decade.

  ‘You’ve got the wrong year,’ I told him. ‘You’ve got the wrong person. I was on the team that went down to Oxford.’

  But he insisted on his version of events. Maybe he was drunk. I agreed to giving him my address, at any rate, so he could send me the relevant cuttings. We drank another Bellini to that, watched the Canal plash and the scabby gondoliers toss lira for passing boys, and speaking for myself at least, forgot all about it. A couple of weeks later I heard from him. A nice note. On legal practice notepaper. Lovely to see me again, blah blah. After all these years, blah blah. Still spinning, he observed. Ho ho. Together with copies of the match reports from the Cambridge Evening News and the Oxford Mail Confirming his impression of the result in black and white. Cambridge 7, Oxford 3. Ex-Lancashire wiz Walzer and classy Colombo hitter da Silva too much for Oxford. Team of Walzer and da Silva a delight to cognoscenti of the game.

  Explain that.

  Can a person be so wedded to defeat that he remembers it even where it wasn’t?

  And does that mean I can expect somebody to hail me outside Harry’s Bar one of these days and tell me that my life has been one long success story after all?

  Sabine Weinberger came to live with me in my final undergraduate year in Cambridge after I’d met up with her again at a silver wedding. My family, her cake decorations. She had become a silversmith, a fashion jeweller and fabricator of table tsatskes much in demand in north Manchester. Like her father she wore a unicorn micrometer on her forehead which she lowered over her bad eye when she wasn’t working.

  Relations had not been good between us following the night I’d forced my disrespect down her throat at her place. That indecorum belonged to another age, but the hurt was still palpable on the occasions I was back in town and we happened to run into each other. When she saw me at a party she’d hurl herself into the arms of the nearest man, gyrating lewdly if there was music playing, throwing her head back and laughing like a gypsy if there wasn’t. See what you’ve lost, that was what she was saying. Everybody wants, and everybody can have — except you! I opened a cupboard at a Christmas bash once, looking for my coat, and found her with her pants off in the company of two Italian waiters from the Mogambo. I’ve never seen anyone more pleased to be disturbed.

  Just because you can see through a ploy doesn’t mean it isn’t working. If anything, the transparency made it the more transfixing. And I came to be excited by the idea that my very presence assured her unchastity. Yes, it was a sort of jealousy, but a greedily slow and curious jealousy, biding its time, wondering what lasciviousness next. Was there nothing I couldn’t make her do?

  It suited her to be a silversmith. She found herself in her occupation. The micrometer alone was alluring. A marvellous deformity, like a single jewelled eye in the head of a minotaur. All the ornamentation she designed for her own use drew on some monstrous, mythical creature theme or another. I saw her encased from head to toe in a rippling tin foil sheath once, finned like a mermaid. She attached raking witches’ claws to her fingers, ten silver killer-thimbles, and buckled a spiked hell-cat collar around her neck. Long before they became a routine fashion item she was dragging manacles and shackles behind her. But it was Old Testament she did best. Great clanking Bathsheba bangles, gleaming Esther hair-combs, wives of Solomon necklaces coiled as dangerously as snakes, slithering towards her bosom. She clashed like cymbals. I loved that. When she saw me enter a room she fell ringing into the arms of other men.

  Slut Jewess, I guess that was what she was doing. The Slut Jewess. The contents of my old box of family mutilations made flesh. She was plain, she was stubbly, she was local (as good as family, almost); but I didn’t have to cut her up to make her lewd. Lewd she could do herself. The Slut Jewess.

  Funny how the second syllable of that word changes the first. Say Jew and you think of someone bent and bookish; say Jewess and the desert is suddenly alive with swarthy bangled whores writhing around a golden calf with their brazen tits perspiring.

  A silver calf, in this instance.

  It’s the ess that does it. It’s the ess that gives it the juice. Jewess.

  Ess. Ess for Sarah. Ess for Sahara. Ess for So Who Needs a Shikse. Ess for Slut.

  And lonely mid the mirthless and the silent of Golem College, bereft of all totty as I’d been, I finally had no defence against her clanking.

  She had the smell of other men on her when I backed her into a cupboard under the stairs at the Broughton Assembly Rooms, attacked her silver clustered pendants like a bell-ringer, and told her I had ears for no one else.

  ‘You don’t respect me,’ she laughed.

  ‘They don’t respect you,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t respect them.’

  ‘And that’s why you fuck them?’

  ‘Who said I fuck them?’

  ‘I can hear you fucking them.’

  ‘And what does it sound like?’

  ‘Silver bells.’

 
; ‘And that’s why you want to fuck me?’

  ‘Who said I want to fuck you?’

  ‘So what do you want?’

  ‘Your disrespect.’

  ‘In that case you do want to fuck me.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Because that’s how I show my disrespect. I let them fuck me.’

  ‘You must disrespect a lot of men.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And that’s why you want me?’

  ‘That’s why I want you.’

  And a year later, reader, in a little uncivil ceremony on the lawn of Golem College, with our bemused families in attendance, I married her.

  This isn’t a marriage story. Everybody knows what happens in a marriage and it happened in ours.

  She was an act of recidivism on my part, but I have no regrets or complaints. She may not say the same about me, but I charge her with nothing. She kept her part of the bargain. She was as dirty as I wanted her to be, the Slut Jewess of Cambridge, the totty to end totty, and then when she thought that was enough she had the strength of mind to say so. ‘Now we’ll have children,’ were her exact words.

  I cannot even claim that she jeopardized my career as a Collins Classics academic. Rubella liked her, believed he understood her, and even explained her to me sometimes. ‘She’s actually a very shy person,’ he dared to tell me once. What Yorath thought I have no idea. Yorath never talked to actual women. But Yorath Mrs became a friend of Sabine’s through kindergarten, and that was enough. The kinder spoke.

  There were no money worries either. Sabine opened a jewellery studio in Kettle’s Yard where she made enough for me to go on with my research and father a hundred Walzers. And then did the same in Bristol when it was time for my researches to continue there. She was the perfect wife. She travelled well. She fitted in. She earned.