Narrative. There is no narrative in Jomier’s life. A life like a story has a beginning, a middle and an end, and Jomier has now reached those last chapters that drive biographers to their wits’ end. Nothing happens. There is nothing to say. The last lap between retirement and death can last a year, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years – the elastic of life stretched by new drugs, medical techniques, robotics, diagnostic machines.
There had been a story. Jacques Jomier, a French Protestant, had moved to London in the seventeenth century after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. He was a bookbinder. He set up shop in Soho. He had a wife who was also a Protestant and also French. With her he begat a Jomier who begat another Jomier who begat another Jomier. These later Jomiers married women from the indigenous population and with each begetting the Frenchness was thinned by British blood, and the Calvinism by easier-going Anglicanism, until there was nothing French about the Jomiers but their name, and nothing Calvinist but the occasional feeling that Jomier has upon waking in the morning that the whole human race is damned.
As a child Jomier had been in two minds about his ancestry. It made him different – even special – but meant that he was called a Frog at school where the pupils were addressed by their family names. A public school. It was common for public-school boys to pick on anything distinctive as a pretext for teasing and bullying. Red hair. A big nose. A spotty complexion. A French name. The teachers in loco parentis looked on and approved. Ragging, like beating, bullying and brutal sports, formed character. It was part of the ‘ethos’ of the public school. It transformed cringing wimps into leaders of men.
Jomier’s mother and father had made ‘sacrifices’ so that their only child should receive a private education. Jomier père had been a civil servant. A high-flyer in the Home Office who in the event did not fly quite as high as had been expected. They lived in Sussex. He would take the train each day from Haywards Heath to Victoria and return in the evening. At the weekend he would play golf. Jomier’s mother did not work. She was pre-Betty Friedan. Pre-Germaine Greer. There was some ‘family money’ which for a time filled the gap between income and expenditure. Jomier père only looked cursorily at his bank statements or letters from his broker. He assumed that providence would provide the means for him to lead the life that his father had led before him. He made some economies after the war: he sacked the cook and in the evening ate what his wife had gleaned from Mrs Beeton. But other expenses were non-negotiable. Membership of the Garrick. Glyndebourne. A Humber. School fees. They were covered by his salary from the Home Office and, after his retirement, his inflation-proof Civil Service pension. When he died, Jomier’s mother moved into a flat in Holland Park to be near to her son. Then to an old people’s home. Then to a hospital. Then to a coffin. Then to a grave.
Had they been worth it? The school fees? Would Jomier have won a place at Oxford if he had not been taught by good teachers in small classes? Would he have made the right kind of friends? Would he have got a place in chambers in the Inns of Court? Would he have met Tilly? Would he have fallen in love with Tilly? Would Tilly have fallen in love with him? No. If Jomier’s education had been paid for by the state rather than by his father, he would be a different person. He knows this. His father and mother had known it. In England a private education is the peg hammered into the rock face that prevents a free fall into the abyss of social indistinction. It is what differentiates hoi aristoi from hoi polloi; the patrician from the plebeian; les gens biens from the canaille; the gentleman from the common man.
Jomier marvels at the ability of the English to say one thing and do another; to talk of equality of opportunity while preserving a system under which, generation after generation, the dregs stay at the bottom and froth rises to the top. The English. Jomier is as English as most of the English but from his Huguenot gene comes a certain detachment. From time to time the Frog jumps on to the leaf of a water lily to study its habitat – the pond. How open English society seems to be. How welcoming to people throughout the world. Most of the billionaires in Britain are foreigners – Indians, Arabs, Russians, Iraqi Jews. Elegant squares in Belgravia remain empty and silent because the non-domiciled millionaires are elsewhere. Deep pits are dug into the ground in Knightsbridge and Chelsea, and cranes reach to the sky, as blocks of sumptuous apartments are built by sovereign funds for sheikhs and oligarchs. Feudal titles are bestowed upon immigrants – Sir Joshua and Lady Zion, Lord and Lady Japati, Baroness El-Aksa, Nazir Bookerbanana, OM.
Does Jomier resent this? Yes and no. At times he feels aggrieved that the English have been expelled from those elegant Georgian and Regency streets and squares where Sir Pitt Crawley once walked with Becky Sharp; that the only English to remain are the collaborators with the colonists, the acolytes of Mammon, leeches fat with money-blood that they have sucked from the system in the City; that the auction houses and shops and department stores patronised by his parents and grandparents – Christie’s, Sotheby’s, Harrods, Harvey Nichols, Fortnum & Mason, Paxton & Whitfield, Berry Brothers, Lobbs – now charge prices that only the bankers and hedge-funders and sheikhs and oligarchs can afford – the tradesmen meeting an enquiry from an indigenous Englishman with the mix of a smirk and apologetic smile: ‘If you ask the price you cannot afford it’ and ‘What do you expect?’; Go to Tesco, Primark, Sainsbury’s, Marks & Spencer. Like a Navajo Indian, Jomier has been ejected from his ancestral lands in St James’s to live in a reservation under the flight path of jumbos, Airbuses and Boeings bringing the oligarchs from Moscow, the sheikhs from the Gulf, the oil barons from Caracas, the bankers from Zurich and New York.
Outside London and Islamic city states such as Bradford and Leicester, there is still an England familiar to the English – pubs, parish churches, village greens. In hamlets in Hampshire Jane Austen’s England thrives. There may be more squires than yokels, more manor houses than peasants’ cottages; and what cottages there are belong to weekending stockbrokers and advertising copywriters – the descendants of the peasants now packed into little Persimmon homes, each with a Georgian portico; but here all can pretend that they live in a country with an English culture and an English history, not a polyglot global growth vortex that sucks in immigrants to build larger airports with more runways to receive more immigrants to work in supermarkets and schools and hospitals to cater for immigrants or the children of immigrants. Only 20 per cent of children attending primary schools in London are born in Britain. When Jomier keeps his hospital appointments surly West Indian women at the reception desk tell him to wait with the Ethiopian, Iranian, Malaysian patients to be seen by an Iraqi or Indian or Sri Lankan or Nigerian doctor. The only specialist Jomier has come across with a white skin was Czech. Her assistant was also white: a German. The male nurse was Albanian.
Is Jomier a racist? He reads the newspapers. He watches television. He knows that there is a thought police out there looking for racists among white middle-class Englishmen like Jomier. It is the first of the Seven Sins of the Secular State. These are:
Racism
Misogyny
Homophobia
Elitism
Smoking
Obesity
Religious belief
Jomier is innocent of faith and fatness, and he no longer smokes. But the others? Can one be a racist without knowing it, like the carrier of a disease? What is a racist? How is racism to be defined? Is it a mere awareness of the race or nationality of others? A preference for one race or nationality over another? Jomier likes the courteous Indians or Pakistanis who sit behind the counter in the newsagents and sub-post offices across London and dislikes the West Indian youths who saunter around in flash trainers and baggy trousers and drop chocolate wrappers and pizza boxes in the street. But Jomier’s prejudices have nothing to do with the hue of human skin. He dislikes the blarney-bullshitting Irish and, most of all, the sullen, sarcastic, shaven-headed, white-van-driving Sun-reading indigenous Estuary English.
Jomier’s prejudices, he decides, are not based on race but on characteristics that transcend race. Jomier likes people who are intelligent, articulate, curious, amusing, cultivated, considerate, kind. He likes people who share his sense of humour and catch his ironies; people who are oblique, unassertive, cynical, disillusioned. ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity . . .’
‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity . . .’ The words of Qoheleth, son of David, King of Jerusalem, three hundred years before Christ. Jomier is familiar with the Bible: he reads the copy he won as a prize when a child to cull absurdities, monstrosities, contradictions to use in arguments with his Christian friend Theodor Tate. Qoheleth alias King Solomon asked God for wisdom rather than riches and so was given not just wisdom but also riches and a thousand wives. ‘Much wisdom, much grief,’ wrote Qoheleth. ‘The more knowledge, the more sorrow.’ And the wives? Qoheleth says nothing about love though he, King Solomon, was himself a child of love – the offspring of his father King David’s adulterous passion for Bathsheba. ‘It happened towards the evening when David had risen from his couch and was strolling on the palace roof, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; the woman was very beautiful.’ David made enquiries about this woman and was told, ‘Why, that is Bathsheba, Eliam’s daughter, the wife of Uriah the Hittite.’ Uriah the Hittite. Jomier the Huguenot. It happened towards the evening that Max was sipping ouzo at a beach bar in Crete when he saw Tilly hitch up her bikini top that had slipped while swimming in the sea. Max has no need to make enquiries about the woman with beautiful breasts. He knows that she is Tilly, daughter of Roddy Gardner, wife of Jomier the Huguenot, his friend. ‘Then David sent messengers and had her brought. She came to him, and he slept with her.’ Then Max made a telephone call and she came to him, and he slept with her.
Uriah the Hittite was sent to war with a message to Joab, David’s general: ‘Station Uriah in the thick of the fight and then fall back so that he may be struck down and die.’ And Joab did as he was told. Joab, then besieging the town, put Uriah on the front line. The men of the town sallied out; the army suffered casualties, and Uriah the Hittite was killed. And when Bathsheba heard that Uriah her husband was dead, she mourned for her husband. And when the mourning was past, David sent for her and fetched her to his house and she became his wife.
Jomier the Huguenot was not a soldier. He could not be sent to war. He was not killed. He was merely deceived. Cocu. Life left in his body. Death to his self-esteem. Better to have died a hero like Uriah.
‘But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.’ Jomier often wished that he could believe that Max would get his comeuppance in the world to come. ‘Vengeance is mine, says the Lord. I will repay.’ But Jomier does not believe. He notes, too, that it was David who displeased the Lord, not Bathsheba. Even God is duped by women. Bathsheba surely knew that David could see her naked in her bath. Why else would she take it on the roof in full view of the palace? So too the hitching up of Tilly’s bikini top was for the benefit of the hairy alpha-male Max – the connoisseur of cantaloupe melons. Uriah the Hittite – Uriah the poor provider – versus David the Lord’s Anointed, legendary slayer of Goliath – cool, courageous, rich. Nolo contendere.
Jomier keeps his thoughts about Bathsheba to himself. He expresses them in his journal which is now password-protected, though he knows that it would be easily bypassed were his computer ever to be seized by the thought police. Failing to find paedophile downloads, they would extract evidence of misogyny, that second of the Seven Deadly Sins.
Is Jomier a misogynist? Or a gynophile – a lover of women? Both. Both to extremes. Jomier’s earliest memories are of a preoccupation with the female of his species: an emotional preoccupation – a tenderness for Belinda, a girl with a squint at his nursery school; and a physical preoccupation. An early memory – being surprised by his mother as he examined the private parts of Sally, the girl next door. In the garden. A summer’s day. Rebuke. A smack. He did not understand what he had done wrong. Was it not natural to be curious about the physical differences between the sexes, shrouded by navy-blue knickers, hidden between closed legs? His mother had been evasive. One opening, perhaps, but not the other. She did not specify which was permitted, which forbidden. Nor had Jomier had time to establish that there were two. He was to learn about that later in life – from books and further research.
Sally had been quite happy to be the object of Jomier’s researches. So had other Sallys since. Such as Tilly. Tilly 1. In thinking about Tilly, Jomier distinguishes between Tilly 1 and Tilly 2 – Tilly 1 being the Tilly he loved and courted and married and who was happy, like Sally, to be the object of his attentions; and Tilly 2, the sly Tilly who never rejected or deflected his attentions but had her mind on other things – on Max and when she would next see him and how much she would rather she was having sex with him. Most of Jomier’s current thoughts are about Tilly 2 and they are ugly – prima facie evidence of misogyny. But there are times when they give way to memories of Tilly 1 – a different person, a girl young and fresh and loving whose face lit up when she saw him and laughed at the silliest of his jokes. They had met at a party and started talking and became so engrossed in their conversation that others in the circle had drifted away. What was the topic? Forgotten. The first kiss? On the Thames Embankment after a concert at the Festival Hall. He had issued the invitation. She had accepted. Both keen to be thought cultured. Later revelations: they both preferred movies. Hollywood pap at the Kensington Odeon: the smell of popcorn as they came in from the autumn urban mist. Or French mysteries at the Gate cinema in Notting Hill. Or any old film at that old music hall, the Coronet – with supper afterwards at the Ark or Costa’s Grill.
Jomier feels sad when he thinks of Tilly 1. He mourns. He grieves. He thinks back to the first time they made love and remembers only that he remembered nothing: there was no ‘other’ to observe. ‘This at last is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh!’ Adam’s cry when he was presented with Eve. Jomier’s inward exclamation when he had first made love with Tilly. Tilly 1.
Jomier is not a Jew but he sees elemental truths in Jewish myth. God creates Adam but decides ‘that it is not good that man should be alone’ and so creates Eve as a helpmate and companion. Adam is delighted. But Eve is discontented: from the start, woman runs true to form. She likes the look of the one thing they may not eat in the Garden of Eden. The Forbidden Fruit. Fuck that! She plucks it, takes a bite, then inveigles Adam to do the same. The result? The end of innocence. ‘They saw that they were naked.’ He looks with revulsion at her pubic hair and slimy vulva; she, with the same disgust, at his dangling penis and swaying scrotum. Yuk. They cover up with loincloths made from fig leaves. The birth of shame. God notices this screening of their private parts. ‘Who told you were naked? Have you been eating of the tree I forbade you to eat?’ Now comes the blame game. ‘It was the woman you put with me,’ says Adam. ‘She gave me the fruit, and I ate it.’ And Eve: ‘The serpent tempted me and I ate.’ The serpent!
Their excuses do not wash. God kicks Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, but before they go, he ‘makes clothes out of skins for the man and his wife’. The start of the rag trade. The birth of fashion. Now, a million years later, the skins are silk and satin. Diaphanous lingerie with lace edging to at once entice and veil the shame. Bras, corsets, stockings, garters, camiknickers. Jomier knows them all only too well. He has unveiled and unbuttoned and unhooked and pulled down to uncover the soft and the spongy, the puckered and the hirsute, the slippery and the engorged. Jomier has observed and mentally dissected but never again has he known the primordial innocence of those early years with Tilly 1 – when they did not know that they were naked and remembered nothing of their acts of love.