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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

Chapter V

CHAPTER V

[1]

I EXPECTED IT to take a lot longer myself, given everything that’s happened, but it really does look as though I’m on the mend. Today, for example, I have not only been through two whole drawers of Camilla’s private papers plus a shoebox of letters without shedding more than a thimbleful of tears, I have also ventured at last into that tea chest marked ‘Matrimonial’ which I have for so long sedulously avoided. In fact, thanks to Camilla’s comprehensive candour about her past, I didn’t discover anything I didn’t know already; but knowing that Camilla had once been married to a Polish seaman who looked like her brother, a septuagenarian opium pusher with dead book-keeper’s eyes, just like her father’s, as well as Jaimie the tractor driver and an Irish pedlar called Dinny (yes, she had been Camilla O’Meara for a whole fortnight) and a convicted multiple arsonist of whom the Kray twins were said to be in awe, was not the same as seeing photographs of them in their suits with carnations in their buttonholes. I breathed heavily, I can tell you, when I came to the set taken outside Parkhurst, which showed Camilla looking radiant in her white straw hat (she always married in the same hat, for luck) alongside her fire-crazed groom, a couple of smiling watchful warders, and, if I’m not mistaken, one or other of the twins evincing the sort of entrepreneurial concern that goes with being best man.

I breathed heavily but I didn’t break up. I flicked through all the old marriage certificates. I held up to the light the assorted unreturned rings – wedding and engagement and eternity – which Camilla had tied together with a piece of pink ribbon, the romantic. And I respected the instinct that had led her to assemble a little album of tangible memories – a sprig of Irish heather, some dried pressed blackthorn, the wrapper from a stick of Polish sausage, a letter of rejection from the parole board, and an envelope of dope. I didn’t harm anything, is what I’m saying, least of all myself. Which can only mean that I am much more robust than I was. A month ago I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself flinging the photograph of the arsonist into the fire.

And since I am feeling better, I am going to chance tackling a subject long owing to me as a special treat and one without reference to which no explanation of what kept and still keeps me in Castle Boterel can be complete.

I am referring, of course, to Camilla as a banquet.

Here’s hoping that I have not been premature and that my health is indeed up to it.