St. Urbain's Horseman (6 page)

Jake began to skip.

Next came some overdue bills. Rose catalogues from the nursery in Sunningdale. Barclay's Bank reminder about his overdraft. Quarterly report from Investor's Growth Fund. Request for money from Anti-Apartheid Movement.
Saturday Night
magazine.
DEBATE:
OUR MONEY … OR UNCLE SAM'S? ALSO FRENCH CANADIAN
ATTITUDES TO SEX
. There was a letter from the secretary of a recently formed minorities' society who wrote to say he had been following Jake's case with keen interest and wished him the best of British luck. He also asked Jake to lend his name to a Sexual Bill of Rights that would be just the job for those who require visual stimulation or who must inflict or receive pain; for necrophiles and for those who enjoy troilism or transvestism. The society's program called for the establishment of clubs which would arrange meetings between so-called deviants with complementary sex needs. Exhibitionists, for instance, would be encouraged to expose themselves before a select audience of
voyeurs
. The society also intended to petition M.P.'s, especially the known deviants among them, for a start on the pornographic social services. Taking the long view, it was hoped to establish mobile brothels to provide for hospitals, institutions, the paralyzed, the crippled, the aged and the inhibited.

There was also the usual quota of obscene letters from strangers who had been following the case in the newspapers, but this morning only one correspondent had enclosed a photograph. It showed a lumpy nude lady, probably in her thirties, kneeling on a mussed-up bed. She smiled grossly at the unseen photographer, her hands cupping her enormous globular breasts, squeezing the nipples.
HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO FUCK ME, PERVERT?
was scrawled over the photograph with lipstick.

Sammy skittered into the room, demanding, “Why aren't you taking me to school this morning?”

“I can't. I've got to be in the West End early again. Granny will take you.”

“Have you got a hangover?”

“Yes.” Jake motioned him closer. Lowering his voice, he asked, “Anything new on Tibbett?”

Tibbett, a schoolmate, was splendid at football.

“You won't tell Molly?”

Jake promised.

“He's being transferred to Leeds. They got twenty-one pounds for him.”

“But he must be worth more than that.”

Mrs. Hersh was calling.

“Will you take me to school tomorrow, then?”

“Tomorrow's Saturday … Oh, Sammy!”

“Yes.”

What do you say to him? I never got to know my father and now it's too late. Or, look here, starting next week I may be a boarder at Dartmoor for a while. Until I get home, walk tall.

“I enjoy you. I like taking you places with me. You've got style. Now hurry or you'll be late.”

Five minutes later the doorbell rang and Jake opened his window and shouted down to Ormsby-Fletcher, “Coming.”

Your lordship, look at it this way. There's a sexual revolution going on outside. All this switched-on lean hungry alienated white Negro cat wanted –

Quite, Mr. Hersh.

Ormsby-Fletcher, disconcertingly cheerful this (and every) morning, continued to chirp, making reassuring noises, as Jake alighted from the black Humber before the Old Bailey.

Cut into stone over the main entrance was the inscription:

And if the Wrong-doer, like Harry, is a child of the Poor? Ormsby-Fletcher gave Jake the thumbs-up sign and Jake responded with a wink. His most ebullient wink.

Jew boys and
WASP
Canadians, Jake knew, had a long and dishonorable association with the Number One Court of the London Assizes. He wasn't the first.

In 1710, when Jonathan Wild, the Prince of Robbers, was the unquestioned
numero uno
of the London underworld, his indispensable aide was a
macher
named Abraham. “This Israelite,” according to the Newgate Calendar, “proved a remarkable, industrious and faithful servant to Jonathan, who entrusted him with matters of the greatest importance.” Traditionally, coiners and highwaymen, footpads, sharpers, and rogues of every description, pleaded – once apprehended – that they had flogged their ill-gotten gains to a Jew boy in Whitechapel. And, speaking of Jews, latter-day Jews, there was also Lord George Gordon, instigator of the riots of June 2, 1780. Lord Gordon's followers set fire to Newgate, laying it in ruins, and plundered the Sessions-house at the Old Bailey. Lord Gordon himself went on to libel Marie-Antoinette and Count d'Amédar, but did not reveal himself as certainly deranged until he “… was discovered, in the habit of a Jew, at Birmingham, with a long beard; and having undergone circumcision … (having) firmly embraced the Jewish faith.” Once Lord, now Reb, Gordon lingered on in Newgate for some years, praying daily, keeping a kosher cell, until he died of jail fever. Once the most popular idol of the mob, he perished, as the Newgate Calendar put it, in the company of the very refuse of society, “… negros, Jews; gypsies, and vagabonds of every description.”

The social tone hadn't much improved by 1880, when the fastidious Montagu Williams, Q.C., complained in his memoirs of the “shabby Jews with anxious faces” who loitered outside the courthouse. Shabby Jews who had knit into defiant gangs, in 1903, and declared their intention to free the accused murderer Lipski, which obliged the warders of Newgate to carry guns for the first time in history on the Polish Jew's hanging day.

Among
WA
SP Canadian precursors, Jake, of necessity, identified most closely with the cross-eyed sex nut, junkie, and McGill alumnus, Thomas Neill Cream, debauched habitué of the fleshpots of South Lambeth about which Hollingshead wrote in
Ragged London:
“The houses present every conceivable aspect of filth and
wretchedness” and “the faces that peer out of the narrow windows are yellow and repulsive: some are the faces of Jews, some of Irishwomen …”

Thomas Neill Cream, begot in Glasgow, in 1850, came to Montreal as a child and, at the age of twenty-two, entered McGill, emerging four years later, another immigrant fulfilled, with his M.D. degree. “An excellent worker, a brilliant boy,” his professor wrote, “but he has some queer ideas: monstrously queer ideas, and I don't know which way they may lead him.”

They led Tommy, for openers, to murder with morphine the Toronto girl an irate father forced him to marry at pistol point. As the girl lay dying in Cream's arms, he sobbed in apparent grief, and then lit out for Illinois, where he did in an elderly rancher with strychnine, the better to savor his rambunctious wife, for which indulgence he endured ten years in the pen, after which he sailed for London. Swinging London (Eng.), where the cross-eyed doctor poisoned at least six
filles de joie
within a year, four of whom died in agony, before he was apprehended and hanged in 1892, falsely claiming on the gallows to be Jack the Ripper.

Yet another Canadian bigmouth trying to make his mark in London.

Possibly, Jake reflected, sitting in the dock, lowering his eyes demurely whenever a juror glanced at him, possibly colonials coming to London have always had a taste for nymphs of the pavements, and he sang to himself,

J
AKE HAD ONLY BEEN GONE AN HOUR WHEN THE PHONE
rang. “Yes,” Mrs. Hersh said, “she's here. Who shall I say is calling, please?” But before the man on the other end of the line could identify himself –

“Is it for me?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Hersh agreed, proffering the phone.

Nancy took it, yielding the baby to her mother-in-law. “Could you take him into the kitchen, please? You can give him some mashed banana, if you like.”

Suddenly, without a struggle, Fort Knox surrenders its gold. Suddenly I'm not too unhygienic to feed my own grandson.

“Yes, certainly,” she heard Nancy say, “as long as I'm back by five. He phones as soon as court adjourns …”

“You're going out?” Mrs. Hersh demanded, appalled.

“So it seems,” Nancy agreed icily.

“What shall I say if the lawyer phones at noon?”

Say I've gone to Forest Mere Hydro for a colonic irrigation. “I must get a breath of air, Mrs. Hersh. I need it.”

Nancy retrieved the baby, nursed him, and sang him to sleep. Mrs. Hersh kept Molly occupied in the kitchen, helping her to make a Lego building, until Nancy reappeared, no longer in slacks, but dressed to kill, wearing her Schmucci-Pucci, if you don't mind, and
smelling like a perfumery. Yankel's Princess. She bestowed a smile on Mrs. Hersh. A small smile. “Now please don't worry about a thing. Molly will play in the garden, like a good girl. Ben's next feeding is at four. I'll be back long before and he should sleep through anyway.”

Alone in the house, Mrs. Hersh did not sift through Nancy's wall-to-wall, cedar-lined cupboard this time, for its extravagant contents, out of Dior and Simonetta, Saint Laurent and Lanvin, had already been revealed to her. Neither did she bother with the umpteen drawers of lingerie, which were no longer a mystery to her either. For Yankel's Princess, silk panties yet. If she ever got a splinter in her ass, that one, only rosewood would do.

Mrs. Hersh hugged Molly, sent her out into the garden with the promise of a present after lunch, and climbed into Jake's attic aerie, where he did not keep a photograph of his mother. His father, the prize idiot, yes. Nancy, naturally. Why, there was even sufficient room on the walls for photographs, plucked from German magazines, of the Von Papen family, Mrs. Goering out shopping, and an S.S. general, as well as an absurd painting of Field Marshal Montgomery. But little me? No.

One cupboard was almost bare. For the riding habit and saddle he usually kept there were both being held at the Old Bailey. Exhibits for the prosecution. But in the other cupboard she was astonished to discover stacks and stacks of tinned food. Shelf upon shelf of cans. A regular supermarket. Soup-size tins, pilchard-type cans, sardine tins. What was so baffling was there was not one tin with a label on it. The labels had been peeled from every single tin. Mrs. Hersh took a can that seemed to be salmon or tuna, either would do, and descended to the kitchen, which she knew from sour experience would be stuffed with
dreck
. In the fridge, bacon and sausages from Harrod's, some smoked eel maybe, and a larder crammed with tins of crab and lobster, mussels, snail shells, pork beans and other
traifes
, but no gefilte fish or kosher salami. Her Highness had forgotten to phone Selfridge's, dialing with a pencil, heaven forbid she should break a
nail, they're a foot long. Anyhow there was bound to be tomato and lettuce, and salmon would be nice. But when Mrs. Hersh opened the unlabeled tin she was amazed to come upon a gooey, stewlike substance with a decidedly nasty smell.

It must be pork, she thought, shoving it aside hastily.

W
HEN NANCY HAD FIRST MET JAKE, AT ONE OF LUKE'S
parties, she had asked him, “Are you a writer?” swallowing the too.

“No,” he had replied, affronted, “I'm the director.”

Which was awfully conceited, yes, but preferable to how he had recently come to identify himself.

“I'm a director. Not the kind you send for – the type you use if he's in town.”

1959 it was, following Luke's Royal Court triumph and while Jake was teetering in limbo, drinking prodigiously as he awaited the opportunity to direct his first film.

On arrival at Luke's party, only a day after she had flown into London, Nancy, thrust into a roomful of jabbering strangers, was instantly aware of a dark, slouching, curly-haired man watching her. Unevenly shaven, his tie loosened, his shirt riding out of his baggy trousers, Jacob Hersh hovered on the edge of whatever group she joined. Scrutinizing the tilt and fullness of her breasts, appraising the curve of her bottom, and searching for a flaw in the turn of her ankle. When she sat on the sofa, crossing her long legs, in animated conversation with an actor, she was not altogether surprised to catch him sinking to the floor opposite, drink in hand, edging lower and lower. Shamelessly seeking out her stocking tops. Infuriated, flushing, Nancy briefly considered hiking her dress, shedding her panties, and
flinging them in his mournful face. Instead she drew her legs closer to her, tugging at her dress. It wasn't, she grasped, so much that he was a dirty little man as that he probably felt she was inaccessible to him and was therefore determined to find fault with her. Being a singularly lovely girl, she was in fact used to the type, having suffered considerably at their hands at university. And Jake, more than anything, reminded her of those insufferably bright boys on campus, self-declared intellectuals, usually Jewish, charged with bombast and abominable poetry in lower-case letters, who were aroused by her presence, and yet were too gauche (and terrified) to speak out and actually ask for a date. Instead they sat at the table next to her in the student union, aggressively calling attention to themselves. Speculating loudly on what they took to be her icy manner. Or they slid belligerently into the seat next to her at lectures, trying to bedazzle with their questions. They also ridiculed her to girls less happily endowed, wreaking vengeance for a rejection they anticipated, but were too cowardly to risk, and bandied suggestions about her secret sexual life sufficiently coarse to make her cry. No matter that she took immense pains not to be provocative, swimming in sloppy joe sweaters, sensible skirts, and flat shoes. Going out of her way to discourage boys the other girls coveted. For this only proved that Nancy Croft was remote; splendidly made, yes, but glacier-like.