left a message on my answerphone, repeating the invitation. To both of us.
‘Who’s Errol?’ Zoë wanted to know.
‘You know perfectly well who Errol is. We met there.’
‘What do you mean “there”? Is Errol a place? Besides, we met in Oxford Street, waiting for a Chinese to jump off a roof.’
‘We met at a pub next door to Errol’s. You were a kissogram. And he was African.’
‘Errol’s African? Never met him. And I have never been a kissogram. You’ve got the wrong gal, pal.’
‘Palais de drek, Borehamrigid – ring any bells?’
She shook her head. Always pretty when she shook her head. Her nose like a little bell itself.
‘Nope. But are we going?’
‘Nope. You don’t play kalooki.’
‘How do you know I don’t play kalooki? What is it, anyway? A Polynesian stringed instrument?’
‘Well, if it were, you’d play it beautifully. It’s a card game. You don’t play cards.’
‘Only because I was never taught.’
She turned it into a reproach. The things I never taught her! The number of doors these Jews she had the misfortune to get mixed up with slammed upon her genius!
I could have left it at that. She would have forgotten. But something – a little worm of perverse honourableness gnawing at my heart (or was it some other part of me?) – made me tell her what the kalooki evening was in aid of. After which there was no question but that we would go. Wherever she stood at any moment on the Jewish question in general, Zoë was rock solid on the Holocaust. It was Zoë, on our Jew Jew trip to Eastern Europe, who had wept over every killing site, not me. Yes, she had persuaded me to accept the apology of the German people, but she would not have done that had she not believed the German people had something to apologise for. It occurred to me as we filled flasks, packed sandwiches, wrote wills and motored out to Hertfordshire, that the fellowship should go to Zoë. The greatness that had always been in store for her, that special thing she had been appointed to do before she died – was this not it: to strangle with her bare hands every freak found crawling over what was left of Auschwitz with a set square and calculator?
It’s possible the same thought crossed her mind. She was highly excitable when we arrived, murderously elegant in the European introspective mode – Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre – in a black polo-neck sweater and plain long black skirt, neither her wrists nor her ankles showing. Zoë funereal, showing respect to the Six Million Dead.
‘How do you do,’ she said to Errol, extending her goodbye hand as though to insist she had never clapped eyes on him before. ‘What a beautiful house you have.’
I made a face at him not to let on he knew her. He wrinkled his nose at me. The devil knows what little fibbers women are, Maxie.
Then he wrinkled his nose at Zoë.
I hadn’t believed a word of Errol’s story about raising money for a Fellowship in Holocaust Denial Denial, and so was surprised to see the make-up of the gathering.
‘Christ, who are these people?’ Zoë whispered to me. ‘They all look the same.’
‘They are the same,’ I told her. ‘They’re all in charity.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘A cartoonist’s trick. You have to scrutinise their faces very closely. The men all look as though they have something to repent – you can see it in the melancholy brackets round their eyes. And the wives have all got their tits out.’
She corrected me – ‘No, all the wives have all got all their tits out. But why?’
‘It’s an unconscious expression of their givingness. Somebody says charity and they think of giving suck.’
‘And this applies to all charity-givers, does it?’
‘Only Jewish ones. The tit part anyway. Jewish women give more tit than Gentile women. It’s their way of saying sorry to their boy children for subjecting them to circumcision. In fact the whole shebang is about saying sorry. The Jews are a highly apologetic people.’
‘Oh, Jew Jew Jew!’
I shrugged my shoulders. It wasn’t my fault that Errol Tobias had assembled half of fucking philanthropic Elstree.
Put the swearing down to Zoë. But also put it down to half of fucking philanthropic Elstree. If Zoë agitated me into near sociopathic philo-Semitism, fucking philanthropic Elstree agitated me, no less nearly, into its opposite. The stain of Crumpsall on me, was it? Something I believed they saw, whether they did