Who's Sorry Now?

by Howard Jacobson

  How many houses did Kreitman have? How many love nests? With how many lovers in each? A new woman every night, was that his routine? Two new women? Two together? Should he have asked for two before Kreitman walked into the cyclist? Would Kreitman remember anything of the conversation when he woke? Would he know if Charlie told him that the deal was two – his beloved Chas for any two of Kreitman’s? Or three? Would he remember enough to know that three had never been on the table?

  He was parting company with his reason but there was nothing he could do to reverse the process. He wanted to be parted from his reason. The poison had entered his body. Never mind Kreitman, he was the one they should be jabbing against tetanus.

  Contrary to what moralists tell you, an excessive preoccupation with sex makes you serious. Or perhaps that should go the other way round: only the serious are able to brave wholeheartedly the repercussions of sexual thought. The young are excepted from this. Sex in the young is another matter, unphilosophical, a necessity not a luxury, the fulfilment of an instinct not an illness. Thought to be a jolly person in the past, though tinged of course with that melancholy incident to any man who has looked about him or been sent to public school, Charlie Merriweather was now possessed of so much of the gravitas of unsatisfied desire he barely recognised the weight of his own limbs.

  The other burden he had to carry, of course, was that of treachery, and treachery’s twin brother, loneliness. He didn’t feel he was acting against Chas in his heart, but of course he was. They had done everything together since he was a young man. When he’d been unhappy or uncertain he’d told her and she’d kissed him better. His unhappiness was her unhappiness. They were a couple. They shared. But she couldn’t share this one, could she? He was acting against her, thinking against her, by simple virtue of the fact that what he was thinking he couldn’t tell her. There was the betrayal – not the imaginary other women themselves, but his having to exclude her from all knowledge of them. For the first time since they’d become a pair, he had reverted to being single. And the cruelty of that, for him, was that he had no one to talk to just when he needed someone to talk to most.

  So it wasn’t with any idling lightness that he sat looking at Kreitman’s rescued mobile and thought about the contents of its databank. Pick a number, press a key, and that lurid world of which Charlie Merriweather had for so many years denied the very existence would at once dance into lunatic life. He turned it about in his fingers, picking at the stitches of its leather case (everything Kreitman owned came in a leather case), while he waited for Chas to turn up with the tea and egg baps. Nyman wasn’t watching; fearing he may have killed a man, the cyclist slumped with his head between his cycling shorts, intermittently leaping to his feet to make another desperate representation to the receptionist.

  ‘Nyman, why don’t you go home?’ Charlie said. ‘Nothing’s going to happen.’ But the minute he said it he realised his mistake. By his own confession – ‘I am Nyman,’ was how he had introduced himself while they were watching Kreitman being stretchered into the ambulance, ‘I am no one in particular’ – Nyman had been waiting for such an evening all his life. Nyman the Killer – so that’s who I am!

  ‘I will get some air,’ he said. ‘Please to call me if there are developments.’

  Charlie wasn’t certain he believed the cyclist was Austrian or German, let alone, as Kreitman had insisted, a faggot, however many German faggots on bicycles Kreitman said there were in Soho. He watched Nyman’s back recede, in its pretend athletic vest, then went like a thief into the phone book of Kreitman’s mobile and pressed a key.

  The name Erica appeared on the display. He pressed another key. Bernadette. Then Jane. Then Ooshi. Then Vanessa. Then Dotty. Then Shelley …

  Then who was that? He went back a number. Dotty? Kreitman was in the habit of ringing Dotty?

  He felt the blood run into his neck. Was Kreitman already halfway to enjoying both sisters? The thought sent a sewer of bile into Charlie’s stomach. A man should not fuck sisters, whatever attitude the Old Testament took to Jacob fucking Leah and Rachel. A man should not fuck sisters. In a decent world a man would not even think about fucking sisters. Not Chas and Dotty. Not Dotty and Chas. So where did that leave him? Up in flames, longing for abominations and going madder by the minute.

  Hope and pray it was a different Dotty. Kreitman must have known a thousand Dotties. Charlie did not recognise the number, but then Charlie did not recognise any number. In his house Chas did all the ringing. She had even programmed his mobile for him – just as she still put together his outfits for the day, which socks with which pants – showing him how to operate the phone book, though the only number he could find in it was his own. He checked his watch – fast approaching two in the morning – then pressed the yes key anyway. If this was Dotty’s number and she was asleep she’d either have her phone off or switched over to answering machine, the way Chas did theirs. Anyone else, well, what the hell. His own needs came first. The phone rang four times, then someone picked it up. The voice irascible with broken sleep – ‘Who’s that?’ Dotty! Dotty, for sure. Remembering to pinch her lips together, even though barely awake, lest words made the muscles round her mouth collapse. ‘Wh’s tht?’ Dotty without a doubt. ‘Oh, Lord!’ Charlie said, whereupon Dotty said, ‘Charlie, is that you? What’s the matter? Is everything all right? Has anything happened to Charlie?’ And all Charlie could think of saying in return was, ‘I’m losing my mind.’

  The first thing Chas and Hazel did after Charlie rang them to say he was sitting in St Thomas’s waiting for Marvin to wake up after being run down by a cyclist but not to worry, was to ring each other. If Chas was driving in from Richmond, then Hazel would take a taxi to Wandsworth where the girls had gone to a friend’s house to rave, from which Chas could pick them up without seriously going out of her way and deliver them all to St Thomas’s. Had any man been party to this arrangement he would have pointed out its logical and geographic flaws and come up with an alternative suggestion. Such as, ‘Go separately.’ This was the joy, for Hazel at least, of having no man party any longer to anything.

  In fact, the girls pointed out the chief flaw as they saw it when their mother came to collect them, to whit: if Daddy wasn’t dying, why did they have to see him this very minute when this very minute they were enjoying juggling little, graven love tablets on the tips of their tongues and dancing with bottles of Evian water? Shit, Mummy!

  ‘He is concussed, darlings,’ Hazel said. But could think of nothing further to add when her daughters smiled sweetly back at her and said, ‘But, Mummy, so are we.’

  That being the case, Charlie picked Hazel up from Wandsworth and the two women motored in on their mercy errand without the hindrance of other company.

  ‘Kind of you to do this,’ Hazel said.

  ‘De nada.’

  Chas and Charlie had recently been to Seville for a children’s literature festival, and now Chas was speaking joke Spanish. In the Merriweathers’ world you weren’t expected to be very good at anything, especially languages. A conviction of the propriety of lightness, which Hazel secretly envied. Oh, to be not very good at anything and see it as a virtue!

  ‘The last time I did anything like this,’ Chas said, moving up the gears, ‘was when Timmy’s headmaster rang to say he’d fallen from his dormitory window while trying to launch himself back into it from a drainpipe.’

  ‘What was Timmy’s headmaster doing on a drainpipe?’

  The two women laughed. They felt like the mothers of small children again. Suddenly bruised knees were back in their lives.

  ‘So how come yours didn’t get hurt and mine did?’ Hazel asked.

  ‘Yours will have been doing something wilder.’

  ‘To a pedal bike?’

  ‘Even an argument with a pedal bike’s beyond Charlemagne. He’s too big a baby to get into any real trouble. He walks through danger unaware. He’d have walked through the Russian Revolution without getting a scratch. No one noti
ces he’s there. It’s his height. He seems to be above it. But I bet he’s as jealous of Marvin as anything. He’d love it to be him we were charging in to see with champagne and flowers.’

  ‘You’ve brought champagne and flowers?’

  ‘Well, egg sandwiches anyway.’

  Chas the provider. Because there was never any room in the boot or back seat of Chas’s car, taken up with umbrellas, Wellingtons and anoraks, Hazel had to sit with the Glyndebourne picnic basket between her feet. Hazel knew what would be in it. Not champagne, but rather more than just egg sandwiches. Hand-raised pork pies, which Charlie loved. Cold potato salad with lashings of mayonnaise, which Charlie loved. Taramasalata and thin wheat crackers, which Charlie loved. A bottle of retsina, which Charlie loved. Runny raspberry cheesecake, which Charlie adored. Lemon meringue pie in which Charlie would have bathed, had he been allowed. Why doesn’t she simply fill it with jars of mashed rhubarb and strained peach and have done, Hazel wondered. Chas the mother of Charlemagne the big baby.

  Although she liked and admired Chas in the abstract, positively revered her when she didn’t see her, idealising her capabilities and her appearance, loving her pretend-clumsy handsomeness, the way she seemed to get her face tied up in her spectacles, the way she looked as though she were at any minute going to trip over her own legs, or lose her way in her own kitchen, even while she was single-handedly catering for thirty – although Chas, in absentia, had been her best friend ever since their glory days, when they’d been the girlfriends of that inseparable duo, Charlie Merriweather and Marvin Kreitman – in the flesh Hazel wasn’t sure she liked Chas very much at all. What she forgot, when Chas was not in front of her very eyes to remind her of them, were the notices she hung on all their conversations. ‘Don’t touch my baby.’ ‘Don’t harm my baby.’ ‘Please don’t take my baby away from me.’

  As if, Hazel thought.

  It wasn’t that she hadn’t noticed Charlie’s charms in the time she’d known him. Or that he hadn’t let her know he’d noticed hers. He took you in all right, Charlie Merriweather. He shot you sudden penetrating glances, along the beams of which you had no choice but to send him penetrating glances back. In this regard, if in no other – and in the end what other is there? – he was a man in working order. Big too, unthreateningly strong, and lovable in the bumbling manner of men of that class and generation. A sweet man. But she didn’t know of a single woman, all questions of hurting or not hurting Chas apart, who viewed him as any sort of proposition. A pet was for life and so was Charlie. You couldn’t quickly let him in on the understanding that he’d quickly let himself back out. Which she suspected was exactly the quality women liked in her husband. Marvin Kreitman would cry over you longer than you might find easy, but he’d be gone fairly smartly thereafter. She could vouch for that. It was very nearly a matter of wifely pride. In fact, in Chas’s company, it was a matter of wifely pride. For there was ultimately something unforgivably insulting about the protective playpen Chas constructed around Charlemagne – insulting to the people the playpen was constructed to keep out, never mind to the big baby it was constructed to keep in – as though one had so few consolations of one’s own that one was bound to want to snaffle Chas’s.

  I know what it is she makes me feel, Hazel thought – she makes me feel as though she pities me for having a collapsed womb or lazy ovaries. And she makes me feel as though she fears me for the same reason. Beware! – unnatural, unreproductive woman about.

  For her part, though she never much cared for Hazel in the abstract, positively hating her when she didn’t see her, denigrating her for never having made her own career, running down her second-hand stylishness, her reliance upon outside help – architects, landscape gardeners, designers, personal trainers, party chefs, wine waiters – and satirising her transformation from frightened sylvan creature to huntswoman of the savannah, in the flesh Chas admired her, felt calmed by her compact presence and relieved to be in the company of someone who appeared to be as cynical about the sort of silliness upon which Dotty had embarked as she was. In short, though she had been challenged if not affronted by Hazel’s part in those first overheard acts of sexual mayhem and murder with Kreitman, and then alarmed by the cold marital accommodation she’d subsequently come to with him (which still, somehow, did not take from the idea one had of her as his accomplice), these days she did not feel that Hazel was capable of dropping down on her from the trees and sinking her jaws into her defenceless family. If anything, Hazel had given up and gone middle-aged before the rest of them. Which of course made her excellent company.

  Only one teeny-weeny anxiety remained. That orphaned stuff that Hazel had once gone in for, all that business about how not having a father robbed you of resistant force – Chas had never believed a word of it. She hadn’t seen much of her father herself while she was growing up. Most of the time she’d been as fatherless as Hazel, but that hadn’t made of her a feather to every breeze that blew. Quite the opposite. In Chas’s view, not having a father on whom to practise the arts of pleasing had made her independent and strong-willed. She was father to herself. What had made Hazel weak was not fatherlessness but spinelessness – if spinelessness was the word for always needing a man to lean on and to blame. Not that Hazel was spineless any longer. But you never knew with weaknesses of that sort, whether they were ever completely gone.

  Chas drove as if driving were a romp, like climbing over stiles in a high gale. She wore special glasses for it which she peered over comically, and kept getting her feet, which were far too big for the pedals, in each other’s way. And the more entangled her feet became, the faster she drove.

  ‘Do you want me to take over?’ Hazel asked. ‘It’s tiring driving in the lights with all these late-night lunatics around.’

  ‘What you could do,’ Chas said, ‘is help me off with my jacket, thank you, and pull my skirt up between my legs, it’s so I can find the brakes.’

  As long as Hazel could remember, Chas had dressed in a man’s double-breasted navy jacket, usually buttoned over a top that might have been knitted out of cucumbers, and a long canvas skirt resembling a spinnaker, always (even on the hottest days) worn with thick ribbed tights. It was a blue-stocking get-up – sensible, rural, droll – which was partly forced on Chas, Hazel understood, by the longness of her limbs and the flatness of her chest, but she wore it so unapologetically that Hazel wondered if it wasn’t also provenly a vote winner, that’s to say arousing to someone – some person or persons – other than her husband. Marvin, an individual of such refinement he had pulled his wife weeping (he weeping) from the contamination of smutty jokes, had once offered it as his opinion that Chas was unfuckable to anyone but Charlie, and for all he knew unfuckable to Charlie too, because no man relished the prospect of a mouthful of hot woolly winter hosiery. ‘You fuck with your mouth now, do you, darling?’ Hazel enquired. ‘There was a time when you knew perfectly well how I fucked,’ Kreitman responded. And for the briefest of moments, as they both thought ‘joylessly’, they were more together than they’d been for years.

  And had one asked Chas whether she thought she was fuckable to men other than her husband, whether she wore what she wore because she knew something about what men liked that Hazel in her tailored MaxMara suits did not, and which might or might not have been a mouthful of hot woolly winter hosiery, what then? Would she have turned crimson with anger or embarrassment or both – would she have said she didn’t care whether she was fuckable to other men or not, that she was a woman of the twenty-first century who had better things to think about, and that the question, anyway, if it had to be asked at all, was whether other men were fuckable to her – or would she have lengthened her face and looked over the rim of her comical glasses and very loudly said nothing, like a woman whose soul was her own secret?

  She was a virgin when she met Charlie, which made two of them; and from the solemn hour she had been asked if she took Charlie to be her lawful, and she had replied ‘I do’, she had never o
nce committed, or so much as thought about committing adultery. Are we to take it, therefore, that on the night she drove Hazel Kreitman to the hospital, so recklessly she almost ploughed into a queue of kids waiting to get into a club at Clapham Junction, and then had to suffer the ignominy of a breath test on Albert Embankment, Chas Merriweather was a woman who could put her hand on her heart and swear she had carnally known no man who was not her husband? Yes and no.

  Adultery is violation of the marriage bed, and though she had already met Charlie she had not yet given herself in marriage to him, nor had her professor given himself in marriage to anybody, when midway through discussing her essay on Chekhov (which, incidentally, he thought magical), he had pulled her to him, thrust his little pink tongue into her mouth, suggested his little pink penis into her hand and told her that he loved her. Not an unusual academic event in those days, but unusual for her, unusual for Chas, in that she neither spat out the tongue nor suggested the penis back inside the professor’s pants. Unusual or not, leaving everything where it was hardly constituted adultery, surely to God, regardless of the marital state of either of them. Indeed, in Chas’s view, as it was happening, it didn’t even constitute sex.

  Years afterwards, a president of the United States of America would cause an etymological storm by defining fellatio as a performance of something or other entirely non-sexual, and therefore entirely unblameworthy, in its nature. Did Chas beat the president to it? Was this an earlier (if less controversial) instance of not-sex she was having with a man old enough to be her father, whose brain she revered, and whose translations of the Russian masters she knew by heart? Charlotte Juniper, as she was then, was subtler than the president. She thought kissing and holding on to her professor just the once, and not allowing him to come in her hand – though it alarmed her to remember that he came on her essay – both was not sex and yet was not something she should have been doing either. She felt terrible about it and she didn’t. And the reason she felt terrible about it later was that she hadn’t felt terrible about it at the time.