High life
Old Joe
Taki
Like Max Kelada, Joseph Desiree Dwek is an Englishman who was born under a bluer sky than is generally seen in England. Joe resembles Mr Know-All in more ways than one. He is extremely short, but makes up for it by wearing lifts in his patent leather shoes. He also has dark skin, a hook nose, large brown expressive eyes, and a body that betrays the soft Levantine way of life. His gestures are exuberant, especially when money is discussed, which it would be safe to say is almost all the time.
Like the narrator in Somerset Maugham's story, I was prepared to dislike Dwek before I knew him. In fact I took a great loathing to him as soon as I set eyes on him. It was in 1960, and I had gone to a friend's house to play poker. Joe walked in and my friend took him around the room introducing him as 'my gentleman friend from England'. Needless to say, among the largely 'Wasp' group, passing Joe off as an Englishman was as easy as converting a tiger to vegetarianism. Joe made it worse by continuing to 'work' the room the way only American stockbrokers and politicians do.
On one occasion, I ran into Joe as I was about to enter passport control in London. Well, not exactly. Joe went through another channel, and I went through where the foreigners go. Joe had kindly pointed out the fact that I was a foreigner. Once through, I looked around and saw an enormous line forming behind Joe at the British subjects' desk. I could see Joe gesticulating, threatening, finally cajoling and begging. Eventually the officer let him through. I never found out what the problem was but I can imagine. Joe, a Jew who was born in Cairo, educated in Lebanon, and domiciled in America, was a natural target for the suspicious passport officer. I decided right then and there that anyone so versatile couldn't be all bad. We started seeing each other socially and, more important, began to gamble against each other. Once, during a backgammon trip to New York, Joe and I were caught gambling in an after hours club and taken up in front of a judge who looked to me like a hanging one. When the judge asked Joe if this was the first time he was up before him, he answered. 'I don't know your honour, what time did you get up this morning?' The judge thought the answer extremely funny. He let us both go. After that, needless to say, we became good friends.
Joe was, and I believe still is, the best backgammon player in England. He is certainly the hungriest. He is now divorced and remarried. His first wife obtained the divorce due to a rather strange slip of the tongue from one of his numerous employees. She, the wife, told her maid that she was suspicious of Joe's relationship with his secretary. And the maid answered: 'Oh madam, you're just saying that to make me jealous'.
The reason I am telling the gentle readers of the Spectator about a rogue like Dwek is because he's fallen out with that other cad, Charles Benson. It seems the latter has of late become an intimate of the royal family. And has begun to treat us, his old friends, with the kind of benign neglect that, say, Ivan the Terrible showed for some of his more recalcitrant subjects. Personally, I don't mind. I know that sooner or later Benson will try and hit a royal for a tenner and that will be the end of a recent but beautiful friendship.
Dwek is not as philosophical as I am, nor as secure. After all, Cairo, Beirut and Golders Green do leave some scars. He is furious that Benson now speaks in the first person plural. Last week Joe reverted to type. When Benson's name came up in conversation he evoked an old Arab curse: 'May the fleas of a thousand camels infest his armpits,' he screamed, which proved to me that despite the handicap of an English passport Joseph Desiree Dwek remains a son of the desert.
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