Dan Jacobson

There are people, birds and mice, other cats, cars. There are trees, flowerbeds, the lawn, paths, fences. There are rooms, stairs, radiators.

Dippy-dippy-dation, my operation: How many stitches did you have?

Children’s Counting Song

Six weeks after being taken to hospital during a severe attack of pancreatitis, I returned there to have my gall-bladder removed. This is of course a routine surgical procedure (routine for the surgeons, if not for the patients): indeed, a timely newspaper article had informed me that it was...

The house surgeon was a blonde, tender-skinned young woman, with irises of so pale a blue, set in such wide, weary whites, they looked almost grey. Her hair was drawn back, but wisps of it escaped at her temples and forehead, and formed a kind of soft, irregular frame for her face. It gave a certain pathos to the earnestness of her expression. Fatigue had flattened the skin against her cheek-bones and left bruises under her eyes; her voice sounded effortful and distant. She told me she had been up all night. Now, at 7.30 a.m., there I lay, in a cubicle just off the casualty ward, having been turned out of the ambulance onto a high, hard wheeled stretcher. More work.

The story goes something like this. A ruthless aristocratic seducer of other people’s wives begins an affair with the bride (of a couple of months’ standing) of an acquaintance. The husband, who is 18 years older than the seducer, and no less than thirty years older than his wife, is alternately furious and complaisant, morose and ‘understanding’, vengeful and jocular. Everybody drinks a great deal, and everybody exchanges confidences, or what pass for confidences. A series of taunting, anonymous letters is delivered to the husband. He tells his servants and the police that a housebreaker has stolen a couple of revolvers from him. A few days later he agrees to let his wife go: indeed, at a last dinner together with her and her lover, he raises a formal toast to them and wishes them every happiness and the birth of an heir. In the early hours of the next morning, two miles from the marital home, the lover is found dead in his car. He has been shot through the ear at close range. Later that day the husband lights a bonfire near the house: in this bonfire he tries to burn, among other things, a pair of gym shoes and a blood-stained golf-stocking. He is arrested, charged with murder, and stands trial for his life. An inept prosecution and a brilliant defence result in his being acquitted. Eighteen months after the acquittal, having in the meantime been systematically ostracised by most of those who had previously been his friends, he commits suicide.

If you want to get ahead in the world, you cannot afford to be contemptuous of or ironic about your own fantasies. It is indeed important to be able, as Wordsworth puts it,