Coming From Behind by Howard Jacobson

Author:Howard Jacobson [Howard Jacobson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

8

SEFTON READ KEVIN Dainty’s novel a couple more times on the way back to his room. It struck him as being rather light on construction, not so much wrought as slicked and smarmed together with some kind of moral pomade or brilliantine. Even the fouling and the fucking were oleaginous. And Sefton soon realised why. Kevin Dainty was a Londoner. He might have been playing his football in Wrottesley but he had been born within the requisite distance of all the bells and clocks and towers, all the streets and pubs and markets, all the docks and marshes and cemeteries, all the sights and sounds and fishy smells, about which it is the mark of the true Londoner to be tedious. And he wasn’t just born close – he was born in the living centre of the throbbing heart. And therefore he was as bright as morning on Hackney Downs, as breezy as a coach trip down to Brighton, and as full of blubber as a plate of jellied eels. Why was it that no one dripped like a Londoner? Sefton wasn’t certain but in his heart he thought it was probably all the fault of Dickens. Ever since he had invented them, Londoners had been unable to see themselves as anything but sentimental warmints, coves and dodgers, as energetic as a tugboat and as home loving as Toodle, fly and artful, but not nat’rally wicious. So once Sefton ascertained where Kevin Dainty came from it wasn’t really necessary for him to flick a fourth time: there was only one novel a Londoner could write.

In the event there were a couple of small surprises. Instead of being the expected aphoristic Jewish market-stall holder (life is one big gaff) from Shore-ditch, the hero’s best and oldest friend – who was devoted to the hero ever since they’d come up the hard way together but who wasn’t going to stand idly by and see what fame was doing to the hero’s life and what the hero’s tireless womanizing (what’s wrong with the one you’ve got, you shmuck?) was doing to the one he’d got, the shmuck (a real little lady with a warm heart and a nice bum and more love in her little finger than he had power in his right boot, the shmuck) – was in fact an aphoristic West Indian cab-driver (you see the world in your cab, mon) from Leyton. And, perhaps as a consequence of this first departure from convention, the hero’s wife Elaine – the one with the warm fingers and the nice heart and all the love in her bum, whom the hero had sobbingly to confess (even while he was slipping it to the bunny from Bromley) that he loved and didn’t deserve even more than he loved and didn’t deserve his old mum who had had nothing all her life and the baby Trevor for whom he wanted something better and the as yet unborn (but you could hear her kicking, like her

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