Read Online Shylock Is My Name by Howard Jacobson - Free Book Online Page A

drove them—somewhat surlily, Strulovitch thought—to the Strulovitch home in Mottram St. Andrew, the eastern apex of Cheshire’s Golden Triangle. It had been his parents’ last house, as unlike the houses they’d grown up in in Salford, where their parents had kept chickens in the yards and prayed in Yiddish to the Almighty, as was possible to imagine. All this in one generation—from a stable in a Mancunian shtetl to a baronial hall with a drive big enough to take a dozen Mercedes, a lake for rare fish and a view of Alderley Edge. A piece of purple-hazed, grassy England, holding Stone Age mysteries, theirs to look at and even feel proprietorial about, all thanks to car parts. Strulovitch liked his own house in Hampstead better—he preferred older money to new, even when the new was his own—but there were strong arguments for keeping Mottram St. Andrew. He had professional interests in the north, he had a daughter doing performance studies at the Golden Triangle Academy (latterly the North Cheshire Institute, renamed to remove all associations with poor-schools)—an arts-based independent college for the privileged of all ages, where Strulovitch, as a benefactor, was able to pull strings—and he believed the country air would be good for poor Kay. His mother, too, had wanted to go on living there, and would have been happy, in her own words, “to die in a shed in the garden,” but Strulovitch had insisted on building her an extension big enough to house her carers. “Must I have so many people around me, Simon?” she asked. “You can’t have too many,” he told her. “You might slip in the bath, you might fall coming down the stairs. There’s always an accident waiting to happen when you live on your own.” Ironical that it was to Kay, a woman half her age and with a husband and a daughter in attendance, that the accident waiting to happen happened.
    His mother slipped all right—but quietly, without a sound, slipped out of life under the kind supervision of a host of carers.
    Strulovitch inadequately mourned her. He had loved her but his affections were becalmed. If you can’t love your wife—daren’t love your wife without howling for the loss of her—who can you love?
    Your daughter.
    Somewhere in the house, when she wasn’t gallivanting, Beatrice lived. She was too young, in Strulovitch’s view, to be sharing a place with other students of the performing arts who might be twice her age. Though in her own view she lived at home out of deference to her mother. She was not particularly good with her mother. She was afraid of her illness and impatient with the rituals of communication—who had time to wait for words that might or might not make sense to dribble out of the side of her mouth or appear illegibly on a chalkboard? But she was also ashamed of herself on these very counts and knew it was incumbent on her, at least, never to be too far away. Dreading what would happen to her if she went to college in London, dreading who she’d meet, who she’d fall in love with, and what they’d tell her, dreading her coming home one afternoon with a kafia round her throat, Strulovitch stoked her guilt. Yes—he commended her on her decision—it was a good idea to stay in the north and live at home. He knew her mother would be relieved, whether she’d be able to show it or not. In reality, the geography of Beatrice’s education made no difference; they’d stuff her with the latest foie gras of anti-Jew psychosis and tell her that the sickness was her father’s wherever she went. He wanted not to be too far away from her, though, in case…well, just in case. Which didn’t mean he was tailing her. If she sometimes saw him flitting in or out of one of the art rooms, inspecting students’ work, that was because he had suggestions to make and promises to honour. That was the price a daughter paid for having a father who ran the Strulovitch Foundation. Whichever institution she’d attended would