Who's Sorry Now?

by Howard Jacobson

  For which they applauded her and ordered more champagne.

  Easy to be brave, out with the girls. Easy to believe it might all be a charade and when she got home where there were no girls to cheer her on – no big ones, anyway – all would be well again. ‘Let me be wrong,’ she told herself, she couldn’t bear to remember how many times. ‘Let me have made a mistake.’ But when she got back and saw his face, saw his own disappointment with himself on it – that was the clincher every time: what she couldn’t hide of what he couldn’t hide, his consciousness of his crookedness – she knew there’d been no mistake.

  She cropped her lion’s mane, expelled everything floaty from her wardrobe, bought tailored suits and turned her home into a business. Files, folders, drawers of paper clips and drawing pins, appointment books, wallcharts, timetables. Theatre tickets bought months in advance, another holiday booked before they’d had the last, wallpaper changed annually, ditto carpets, children’s teeth checked every quarter, ironing woman Tuesday, sheet-changer Wednesday, dust-mite inspector Thursday. Kreitman could come home, or not, when he chose, provided he gave Hazel three weeks’ notice of any variation from the usual and pinned details of same on the board in her office. ‘All I ask,’ she said, ‘is the consideration you show those you do business with. You don’t break appointments with your wholesalers or manufacturers, or with your manageresses or window dressers – ha! – you won’t break whatever appointments you have with me. And of course you’ll pay me an annual salary and make adequate provisions for my pension.’

  Her mother all over again, after all.

  Sometimes her heart almost failed her, so close was this to the chill she’d always dreaded. Let me be anything but this. But he had already damaged her heart beyond repair anyway. Her own fault. No resistance. Well, that had changed at least. Now she was all resistance.

  No bad thing, either. She breathed in the thin brave air of independence, filled her lungs with it, strode out into the world in shoes that didn’t kill her, made choices without reference to another person, heard her own voice ring out loud and clear. Was that really her she heard? It was. Hazel Nossiter – forget the Kreitman – speaking for herself. And people listening. Yes, Hazel. No, Hazel. Right away, Hazel. No bad thing? A fucking wonderful thing, that was the truth of it. If only she hadn’t been brought up to believe that being one of two, one half of someone else, and the quiescent half at that, was what life had up its sleeve for her. Strong one minute, she fell back the next, going over it and over it. Not getting over it, but going over it.

  It could have turned out differently, even allowing for the inevitable bitterness of marriage to a man who couldn’t walk straight. Had she pursued her own academic interest, followed up her work on the noble savage with a full-blown study of the unseen Negro – the Negro implicit or concealed, actual or mythic – in English life and letters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, she’d have been where the university was at. The very centre of the turning world. And to hell with Kreitman’s now you see me now you don’t. But she was a mother in the making, and anyway, Kreitman was the academic one. Now it was too late. The university is unforgiving of anyone who leaves it for a while, even though its only subjects are post-colonialism, new historicism and women in distress and she was the perfect post-colonial new-historicist woman in distress. Blink and the professors speak another jargon. Alternatively, she could have demanded that Kreitman take her into his firm, once he too parted company from the university, make her chief marketing director or something like that, and have her accompany him to trade fairs and on buying trips to India and Morocco. But she didn’t want the humiliation of seeing him around women. He was beyond any appeal, beyond all reasoning, beyond help. He had no choice in the matter. It was like an illness. A woman moved into his field of vision and Kreitman went as still as a hare on a wintry common. ‘They’re the only things in life that interest you,’ she’d accused him once. But that was wrong. For Kreitman women existed below the level of interest. It was umbilical. He was joined to them in some unfathomable way. A woman had only to stir the air in Peking for Kreitman to become seismic in Brixton Hill.

  Best to stay away. In the early days when he came home full of shops she thought she might kill him. Did he not grasp how much she would have liked to be a part of that, the fun of starting out and making anxious progress, like Hansel and Gretel before the big bad accountants got them. She couldn’t pretend she saw what he saw in purses, she didn’t share his passion for narrow openings and suede clefts, but novelty was novelty and she liked their original silly idea that she keep an example of every bag they stocked, a little museum of the heart for them to visit when they were old, the story of their joint adventure. First, she seized upon every new exhibit herself, bringing the children to the shop – look! Daddy on his hands and knees, a bigger baby than both of you, now which bag shall Mummy take? – then she left him to it, less and less curious to sample stock, until at last she ceased caring altogether and bought her own fashion bags, as and when she wanted them, from Fenwick’s. As an act of bitter acrimony she keeps the museum illusion up, keeps receiving the latest styles which he religiously presents as though in honour of some saint whose name they have both forgotten, but now she feels she is building a sarcophagus, collecting memoranda of her own death. Week after week, year after year, she opens the door to their museum and shoves another reliquary inside.

  Over it and over it. Only now she is over it.

  So Hazel sits in her office supervising the installation of a new joyless Jacuzzi, the relaying of her lawn, inspecting plans for a loft conversion in which, in time, she will resituate her office. Most of her working day is spent airing grievances on the telephone. Should any of her friends need to know the name of someone to complain to they ring Hazel who might even, if they are lucky, do their complaining for them. She has the number of everyone in charge of every conceivable service operation in London. ‘Good morning, Hazel Kreitman here,’ is all she has to say, and you can feel the phones going cold all over the capital.

  Of her daughters she said, ‘They get their mental restlessness from their father, their political nous from their grandfather the Cabinet minister, and their determination not to be fucked with from me.’ Anyone meeting Hazel for the first time now would readily have believed that. Not-to-be-fucked-with Hazel. Some laugh that was. When never a day went by when she didn’t catch herself mourning for what she’d been – a lustrous, nervous girl, susceptible, trusting, with all her gifts clutched to her chest like a trousseau, the little fool, in waiting for something terrific to happen to her.

  Kreitman, passing her office, catches her in the act of remembering, sees the girlish trousseau she sees, sees her twirling her parasol, sees her at the piano, and apologises. She puts a hand up to stop him.

  ‘I know this isn’t adequate,’ he says.

  ‘It isn’t about you,’ she tells him. ‘Are you ever going to understand that? It’s about me.’

  About me. Hold on to that. About me.

  Over it and over it. Only now she is over it. As her daughters somehow prove.

  Though neither was yet twenty, her daughters were already little corporations, bristling with rumour and negotiation, offers and counter-offers, supporting their own websites and employing their own lawyers and accountants. Cressida, at eighteen, with a whole year of art training under her belt, a skylit studio in Hoxton, a studded dog collar round her neck and a mouthful of steel braces she’d designed herself, looked certain to those in the know to spearhead the next generation of Young British Artists. While Juliet at nineteen and three-quarters, and therefore already a has-been to Cressida and her friends, was taking a year off from Oxford to complete (courtesy of her mother’s old research) a socio-sexual history of the Negro woman in the British Isles, with case studies and a section dealing with the iconography of ‘black’ in popular porno, on the strength of a couple of chapters of which she had secured an advance equal in size to the wage bill of a sm
all hospital, though on the tacit understanding that she’d be willing to raise her skirts for the photographers, with or without an iconographic Negro servant in attendance, on the book’s release.

  ‘Over my dead body!’ Kreitman had protested, but none of the women in his family took the slightest notice of anything he said.

  Hazel liked her daughters and got the point of them. They were her without her mistakes, her as she would have liked to be. When Kreitman saw Cressida’s first show in what looked to him like a whore’s bedroom on Old Street – ‘Well, you’d know,’ Hazel said – his first impression was angry bewilderment and his second impression was the same. ‘What the fuck does a daughter of ours know about hand-me-downs?’ he whispered to Hazel.

  ‘It’s amusing. Just laugh and be proud,’ Hazel told him.

  He was proud but he didn’t get the joke. Or, as he would have preferred to put it, he got the joke but didn’t find it funny. He belonged to another time. He thought art had to be big, grand, declamatory, significant, serious, mined from the soul and loaded with meaning. And that you ought to want to spend a long time looking at it. But how long could you spend in front of Cressida’s rickety coat-stands of reach-me-downs and tattered heirlooms? Or in front of the accompanying chromogenic prints on paper, showing little kids looking lost in big kids’ coats? What was there to penetrate? And again he wanted to know what his pampered daughter had ever experienced of hand-me-downs. Under Hazel’s unvarying regime, all items of suspect clothing went into different-coloured baskets, waiting for the sewing woman who came on Thursdays or the Oxfam and sundry charities woman who came on Fridays. If she wanted to ‘sculpt’ clothes, why didn’t Cressida look into her heart and ‘sculpt’ new ones?

  ‘You’re a fossil,’ Hazel advised him. ‘Go to work.’

  Unlike him, she saw the world the way her daughters saw the world. She liked things now. Pity she hadn’t been born a quarter of a century later herself, and grown to be eighteen in the year 2000. Oh, to be quick and slick, whoever and wherever you wanted to be simply on your own say-so. And to be brittle. And astringent. In her day you melted when a fellow took you in his arms. Now any man chancing his mouth with one of her daughters risked ammonia or metal poisoning. Death by a thousand ironies. No wonder Marvin didn’t get what was going on. What was going on was a consequence of him, a rebuttal to his however many thousand years of supremacist patriarchal certainty. ‘Significance,’ he called it. Ha! Hazel knew the significance of ‘significance’.

  And not a twinge of jealousy that Juliet (named, of course, after her mother’s sad little balcony overlooking the British Museum) was making hay with her research? All right, a twinge. But you can live through your children, and Hazel was squaring her accounts through hers. Good for Juliet if she’d done a deal with a publisher on the strength of someone else’s thoughts and her own good looks. According to Juliet every girl in her college that wasn’t an out-and-out dog had a book deal. Historians with big tits were particularly voguish, but a philologist with a nice arse or even just a pretty face was also in with a shout. ‘Bad luck if you happen to be George Eliot,’ Kreitman had said. ‘But, Daddy, I’m not George Eliot,’ Juliet had reminded him. Hazel had listened to that exchange while sitting airing grievances on her office phone. Inexpressible, the satisfaction it gave her. But, Daddy, I’m not George Eliot. What a long way back that went! What a merciless stripping down of however many thousands of years of male hypocrisy in the matter of beauty and intelligence. Now deal with this – the beauty you commodified we are commodifying back, so what was that about our not being intelligent? Daddy, our beauty is our intelligence. The thing has happened that you always dreaded: we have learned to exploit your weakness for our weakness. Only this time not in a whorehouse. And you can’t be certain whether we are laughing at ourselves or at you.

  How wonderful, Hazel thought, to have put such a creature into the world. Her very own consolatory act of vengeance. And Cressida made two.

  And was anything else making her happy? Some spicy little intrigue independent of her daughters? Some gentleman?

  ‘Oh, please,’ was her automatic answer to any enquiries of that sort. ‘No more butterfly chasers, thank you very much.’

  ‘Go into the bottom drawer of my bureau,’ her mother told her, ‘take out the round Fortnum’s scented violet creams box, untie the ribbons and help yourself to as much cash as you need for a fortnight in the Negev.’

  ‘Mother, he’ll be dead by now. They’ll have shot him. Or he’ll be fat and living in Haifa with a wife in a long dress and ten children.’

  ‘Then you should spend more time standing with me on my balcony. Such distinguished scholars you get to see from here.’

  ‘Not any more you don’t, Mother. They’ve closed the library. Those are tourists, you’re looking at. And most of them are Russian Mafia. Not that that makes any difference to me. I’ve done men. I’ve done being blubbered over.’

  But that was before she met Nyman, an Anglicisation of Niemand, as he made no bones about explaining. Niemand meaning Nobody. Not merely Man with No Qualities but Man with No Prospects of Qualities. The cocksucking cyclist who knocked her husband flat in Old Compton Street. Except that he wasn’t a cocksucker. Unless he was. The point about having no qualities and no prospects being that you don’t know who or what you are. And a little ambiguity, in the meantime, gets you by.

  No wonder Hazel liked him when she talked to him in Emergency, while Kreitman lay comatose in the corridor. He reminded her – startled yet aggressive, at a bit of a loss really, but no pushover – of her old unindividuated self. Charlie Merriweather had rung her, telling her not to worry and not even to come to the hospital if she couldn’t face it. Marvin was out cold, sleeping rather than unconscious, and not seriously injured. A quick tetanus jab when he woke and they’d probably send him right home. In the meantime he’d stay to keep an eye on him, since in a manner of speaking it was his fault. Chas was driving in to keep him company, no doubt preparing a flask of hot tea and wrapping the runny egg baps in silver foil as they spoke. On top of that, the cyclist who’d done the damage was seeing the vigil through as well, feeling pretty bad about it, although the worst you could charge him with was posing while in control of a pedal bike. So Marvin wasn’t exactly short of well-wishers.

  ‘Did you say pedal bike?’

  Charlie was not able to see the importance of the word, but yes, pedal bike.

  Hazel roared with laughter. ‘God, can’t my husband even succeed in getting himself knocked down by something decent? I thought we were talking a Harley-Davidson at least.’

  ‘Does that mean you won’t be coming?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘Lord, no, I’m a wife. It’s a wife’s job to be at her husband’s side whatever he’s knocked flat by.’

  As for where she was when her husband finally came to – she was across the road in Waterloo station, enjoying a hearty English breakfast with the pedal cyclist in question, the Man with No Anything.

  Chapter Four

  No sooner had Charlie Merriweather rung Hazel Kreitman than he regretted it. What if he’d done the wrong thing? What if Kreitman was expected somewhere else in the early hours? What if Hazel was the last person Kreitman wanted to open his eyes and find? Too late now, but if he’d thought of it first he could have gone through the call list on Kreitman’s mobile, which he’d actually caught as it flew from Kreitman’s pocket in the fracas, and checked if it really was Hazel he had rung earlier in the evening to say he’d be late home. Home? Where was home? And how many homes did Kreitman have?

  Sexual curiosity can be a terrible affliction when it gets its teeth into a grown man. Charlie Merriweather believed it was slowly separating him from his reason. No, not slowly – rapidly! How long does it take to go mad? Overnight, if you’ve been putting in the groundwork for thirty years.

  When he was a boy Charlie had wondered along with every other boy how things worked, where things went and when he was going to get his tur
n to find out. They were in it together. It was all part of the fun. He remembered one boy who was more precocious than everyone else, who had a moustache when he was eleven and was locked into a serious relationship with a girl when he was barely thirteen. Simon Lawrence. He wore a locket containing his girlfriend’s picture round his neck and was reputed to have inside knowledge of oral sex. The others envied him crazily, as goes without saying. They stole the locket and put shoe polish on his balls so that his girlfriend wouldn’t like the taste, though there was some controversy in the matter of whether tasting balls formed a part of oral sex. Charlie Merriweather had thought not. Why would any girl want to taste Simon Lawrence’s balls? Simon Lawrence sealed his own fate on that one. ‘Why shouldn’t she?’ he said. So on went the polish. They also wrapped a turd in silver paper and hid it in his schoolbag. With a bit of luck his girlfriend would find it and think it was a gift to her. End of relationship. That much they did know about girls. But their envy was equivocal. Simon Lawrence’s experience put him offside, excluded him from the group. He seemed to spend every break reading letters, biting pencils and then composing answers. It was like extra homework. He looked sad most of the time, frowning, burdened by his dark knowledge. It was better to be with the others and know nothing. Knowing nothing was at least a laugh. But now Charlie felt he was the one cast out, the last one left standing in the playground in the freezing dark, wondering what hilarity drew the others to the pavilion. And kept them there.