Her showers followed a precise routine: allover rinsing, hair shampooed twice, conditioned once, allover body soaping, a slight crouch to rub her crotch, pushing the foam in ovals round her breasts, stretching away and down to clean between her buttocks, then another rinse, then exfoliation with skyblue Body Shop wiry mittens, then allover rinse of the hair and body. She kept a Toulouse-Lautrec postcard by her bed because it looked like her and Moshe, two tucked up ten-year-olds. She used to scrunch up her eyes and he’d worry and pester her to wear her glasses and she’d say that she was fine. If she was sad she’d mooch and wear the Russian shapka that she discovered left behind in the cloakroom at Freedom on Wardour Street.
Sometimes Moshe wished he was a virgin, he felt so burdened with accumulated facts. But no, he had to admit it — virgins had facts too. He wished he was a baby. He wished he was a speechless baby.
Moshe listed his favourite fantasies. He lay there and wondered if a fantasy was a habit. Then he wondered why it mattered, decided that it didn’t. He only ever imagined
Nana and Moshe in sunlight, in rooms with crumply beds and softest sunlight dimpled with reflections, on impossible holidays, drinking Voss water culled from an artesian well in bottles designed by Neil Kraft.
He tried to imagine himself without her and didn’t want to.
He remembered going down on her with Duke Ellington bobbing in the other room. It was a syncopated sex scene. A big-band sex scene.
They talked together about sex. They worried about sex. They worried every evening about sex. Moshe told her just to think about what she found sexy. That was his exasperated advice. He said, ‘What do you think about when you wank? Whaddayawankabout?’ Nana looked sheepish. She couldn’t say. She said, ‘You.’
Sadly, this was true.
Whereas Moshe’s fantasies came quickly. He had to slow them down. There was Nana in her schoolgirl pose, telling him, in gingham, all about her antics at gymkhanas. She described the feel of the pommel. She mentioned the word ‘stirrups’. And Moshe imagined saying, ‘Use me like a horse.’ Or he would ponder on making her pregnant. It made him come more quickly. Often he had to make his dreams about Nana more abstract. He shied away from detail. Too much detail made him too excitable. Though there was the recurring vision of Nana in a bath, tightfit- ting her body, and in the clear water goldfish dotted round, swimming over her skin. And Nana would sprinkle fish food in her soft pubic hair, and let them gulp while Moshe studied her, his chin on the bath’s cold rim.
If Nana had got up early to go to lectures, and Moshe was left alone, he would find the copy of a Louise Bagshawe novel that Anjali had got free with Company and left behind in his flat. Moshe would locate the sex scenes. The book began to fall open at the sex scenes. He would pad across to the toilet to get the toilet roll. Then, having arranged the four pillows in suitably supportive positions on the bed, he would recline and masturbate. His favourite passage was a description of a girl, who wanted to make it in the music business, being fucked quickly against a rough brick wall. The description was brief but evocative. He liked Louise Bagshawe’s style. Moshe would come and then let the semen cool on his stomach until it ran thinly and unpleasantly down his sides. And Moshe would forget to put away the loo roll. When Nana came home she teased him.
Often people seem to be shocked by the idea of a boy masturbating, if he is in a relationship. But it is true. Masturbation is all too common. Moshe was a flagrant example. It was not that you would always find him backed against the headboard. But occasionally that was his pose.
Moshe remembered how Nana stood over the loo, a boyish girl, and trimmed her pubic hair with her curved cuticle scissors from a Boots manicure set that Papa had bought for her one Christmas. Or how he would wear her knickers all day, enjoying the tight light lace.
Moshe had once made up a fantasy of Nana licking Anjali from behind but now that felt weird. It felt a little loaded.
He listed her favourite foods. She loved purple sprouting broccoli. She loved pink sashimi salmon, which she ate jerkily, her head bobbing at the chopsticks. He marvelled at her calm in restaurants. Her calm was sexy. It had glamour. She called him from The Ivy, nonchalant, unfussed, because Papa had cancelled so maybe Moshe?
And Moshe, who possessed no ironing board, could then be found crawling on the tiled bathroom floor, ironing his only shirt, swearing, and jabbing, and swearing at the indents of the grouting.
He adored her. He adored everything about her. He even loved their weekends at Papa’s house.
He would sit in the conservatory and pick up an old copy of, oh maybe Risk Professional. There was a pile of magazines in a magazine rack. The rack was twists and curls of glazed mahogany. It was like a pretzel. Moshe ruffled Risk Professional. He opened it at a two-page advert for Zurich Financial Services. ‘Building relationships, solution by solution.’ That was the motto of Zurich Financial Services. Then there was a quote in italics from William Hazlitt. ‘You know more of a road by having travelled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.’ Underneath the quote, there was a small photo of distressed-leather suitcases. The opposite page was a glossy of a dusty track. It was sunset. The light had gone misty with the melancholy of passing time. ‘Drawing on years of experience to help you cover new ground.’ That was the businesslike caption.
It was the last utopia on earth, thought Moshe, happy, looking round him at the photos on the upright piano — a smudged view of Lake Leman, Nana intent on a butterfly.
Moshe read a mauve leaflet enclosed in Risk Professional, advertising a Breakfast Briefing at the British Bankers Association. Extremists — working towards a safer environment.
With the advent of globalisation, grows the voice of anticapitalism, and it is becoming more sophisticated.
Dealing with terrorists and extremist mentality takes strategic planning, forethought and the complete implementation of a culture against this type of attack. Without preparation of this type, counter measures are hard to execute with any degree of success.
Moshe adored all this. He adored her.
He wondered what it felt like loving him. It was unimaginable.
He would lie there. He thought about threesomes. But there were no threesomes. He could not really think of any famous threesomes. They were oddly unusual. He thought about Jules et Jim. This thought did not last long because Moshe had never seen Jules et Jim.
9
But let us think about Jules et Jim. It is a film by Francois Truffaut. Of all the characters in this novel, apart from me, and I am not a character, only Papa has seen this film. The origin of Francois Truffaut’s film Jules et Jim was Henri- Pierre Roche’s novel Jules et Jim. Papa, an admirer of the film, somehow acquired a translation of this novel — ‘The Classic French Love Story’ — free with the compliments of Options magazine and Pavanne, in September 1983.
Francois Truffaut said that when he read this novel, he realised he had chanced on something new for the cinema. He had found a plot that was radically different from any other plot in a film. Up till then, a film’s plot had good characters, whom the audience loved, and bad characters, whom the audience disliked. Everything was unambiguous.
Whereas in this special case, in Jules et Jim, the audience would be unable to choose between the main characters, because the audience is forced to love all of them equally. All three central characters are a little bit good and a little bit bad. It was that element, which he called ‘anti-selectivity’, said Truffaut, that struck him most forcibly in the plot of Jules et Jim.