Zoo Time by Howard Jacobson Read Free Book Online

mellow yellow,’ I sang.
    ‘No, they don’t,’ Vanessa said.
     
    On the emptied street, Vanessa paused to give a pound coin to a tramp. Not any old beggar or derelict, not a drugged-up Soho layabout or a Big Issue seller, but a tramp of the old school, wind-burnt face, long white beard, trousers ripped all the way to his groin (so better dressed than most of my profession), a who-gives-a-monkey’s indifference to whether anyone noticed him or not. He was sitting on a wooden bench outside a pub, writing in a reporter’s notebook.
    ‘He looks just like Ernest Hemingway,’ Vanessa whispered admiringly, reaching into her bag.
    ‘He seems to be writing longer sentences than Ernest Hemingway’s,’ I whispered back.
    I wanted to see what he was writing but couldn’t, with decency, get close enough. I felt slightly shamed by him, such profound concentration, such fluency of the hand, no need of a computer. Was he the last of the pen-holding, plein-air novelists?
    In so far as she was capable of doing anything discreetly, Vanessa discreetly plonked her coin in front of him. He didn’t look up or otherwise acknowledge her. I knew how he felt. There was a sentence he had to get right, and nothing else existed.
    Vanessa took my arm. She was trembling. All acts of generosity on her own part moved her deeply. I even wondered if she was going to shed a tear. ( Were going to shed a tear? Was going to shed a tear.)
    As we walked on, the sound of a coin hitting the pavement and then rolling into the road followed us.
    Vanessa jumped. Anyone would have thought she’d heard a gun go off. I jumped with her. We were all keyed up. A car’s exhaust backfired and we feared another publisher had taken his life.
    ‘If you’re thinking of going back and picking it up for him, I wouldn’t,’ I said. ‘That didn’t sound like a fall to me. It was too violent. I’d say he threw it.’
    ‘At me?’
    I shrugged. ‘You. Us. Humanity.’
    I was secretly impressed. Not just the last of the plein-air novelists, but the last of the idealists for whom only art mattered.
     
    A question that was sometimes asked: What had a woman as beautiful and confident as Vanessa, who could have married a rock star or a banker or a presenter on breakfast television – who could, for God’s sake, have been a presenter on breakfast television – seen in me?
    The answer I invariably gave: ‘Words.’
    In the century of the dying of the word there were still women who lusted after men to whom words came easily. And vice versa, of course, though the men who didn’t have words themselves were less likely to value them, and were certainly far more frightened of them, than the women. Give a man a word or two more than the common and he’ll always find a woman to revere him. Fill a woman’s mouth with words and she’ll scare the living daylights out of the other sex. Nothing but bags of nerves, the other sex. Every man I knew, a quivering wreck the moment a woman spoke.
    Something else that was dying – men.
    As both a reverer of words in men and a woman whose own words put men off – I’m talking about the words that flowed from her, not the novels she was never going to assemble from them – Vanessa considered herself lucky to have found me. She never said as much to my face, but I understood that to be the reason she had married me in the first place, the reason she had stayed with me and the reason she once flattened a young reviewer whose name was all initials and who had spoken ill of my prose style.
    There’s loyalty for you. But when I thanked her for it afterwards she denied it had anything to do with me. ‘You qua you deserve all you get,’ she said. ‘It was your gift I was defending.’
    ‘I am my gift,’ I told her.
    She coughed and quoted Frieda Lawrence at me. ‘Never trust the teller,’ she said, ‘trust the tale.’
    ‘That’s D. H. Lawrence,’ I corrected her.
    ‘Oh yeah!’ She laughed wildly.
    But her point remained the