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Chapters (27)
  1. Contents
  2. About the Book
  3. About the Author
  4. Also by Howard Jacobson
  5. Dedication
  6. Title Page
  7. Prologue
  8. Part One
  9. Chapter I
  10. Chapter II
  11. Chapter III
  12. Chapter IV
  13. Chapter V
  14. Chapter VI
  15. Chapter VII
  16. Part Two
  17. Chapter I
  18. Chapter II
  19. Chapter III
  20. Chapter IV
  21. Chapter V
  22. Chapter VI
  23. Chapter VII
  24. Chapter VIII
  25. Chapter IX
  26. Chapter X
  27. Copyright

That is not, of course, and I am the first to admit it, any kind of adequate explanation of how I came to have wound up here, washed up like that bit of exotic wreckage that was found on the rocks this morning – a splinter of a roulette table, the fishermen reckoned, from some capsized pleasure boat. And if I am ever to get away with a clear conscience and a clearer head – yes, that is my intention, despite the liquid looks I am getting from the local bean-eaters and other assorted fantasists I meet in the pubs and who want to tell me that they can see I have fallen fatally for the place as they have done – if I am going to escape, then I must follow Camilla’s old advice to me and come clean. I don’t expect it to be easy. It is not in the grain of my nature to be candid and confessional. ‘I’m an embroiderer,’ I told Camilla, I don’t know how many times. ‘I’m interested in the filigree around the edges of the truth.’ ‘You mean you haven’t got a straight bone in your body,’ she used to reply.

Ours was, as I think I have already made plain, a very verbal, argumentative connection.

Well, I can’t argue with you now, Camilla. But wherever you are, prepare to admit that you were wrong. Turn your fine stern eyes in this direction. Look at me. See how straight I’m growing. Watch how clean I’m coming.

Cleanish, anyway.

Part One

PART ONE

Chapter I

CHAPTER I

[1]

I’D BE PREPARED to say that it was my own fault for tampering with the secret arts, except that that confers too much dignity on all parties. This isn’t a Faustian story.

All I had done was act on some passing marital impulse, to please and pacify a wife and, while I was at it, confound a cheap and easy charlatan. And even though things had got a bit beyond me I would still have been all right – I had already convinced Sharon that continued conjugal harmony depended on her willingness to stop saying, ‘But that’s amazing!’ – if only the local necromantic press, namely The Finchley Zoist and Astral Traveller, had not got hold of my story, or if only I had not got hold of it. I can still hear the noise it made – I’m referring to the actual noise of the actual paper, not publicity – as it came crashing, unsolicited – it goes without saying that I was not a regular subscriber – through my letter box. Rolled up so that it resembled the sort of weapon with which peasants revolt and delivered with enormous violence, it got three-quarters of the way into our hall and might have even made it up the stairs had it not collided with the telephone table and knocked the receiver off its cradle.