Who's Sorry Now?

by Howard Jacobson

  In another corner of her mind, however, for even a good wife keeps corners which her husband never gets to visit, Chas was exhilarated. She had been mistress of events. When she encountered the professor coming in and out of lectures she perched her sunflower head even prouder on its stalk than usual and smiled an adventuress’s smile, while he slunk past, hidden in the folds of his gown, not knowing whether she thought him a lecher, not knowing whether she thought him a fool, not knowing whether she was going to tell on him to the authorities or to other students. It was a time for women to prove they could be as insouciant as men, and Chas believed she had passed the test. Sex wasn’t supposed to matter to men, and now she had shown it needn’t matter to her. Except, of course, that it wasn’t sex.

  So what was it?

  She had a feeling it ran in the family. She didn’t mean Dotty. In Dotty’s case it ran away from the family. But discounting Dotty, who was the anomaly, there was, she fancied, a proneness to minor quasi-sexual mishap (if that wasn’t putting it too strongly) extending matrilineally she did not know how far back. Her mother and her grandmother were countrywomen of unassailable propriety, the wives of successful public men – the first a surveyor, the second a doctor – but eminent in their own right as well, both serving officers of their respective parish councils, both voluntary educationalists, conservationists, preservationists, indefatigible charity egg-beaters and National Trusters against whom not a breath of malicious rumour was ever raised. Let a working man tip his hat to Charlie’s grandmother too familiarly and he ran the risk of being elbowed on to the road. Charlie’s mother, too, bore herself sternly, wearing corsets as impregnable as armour long after such protection had gone out of fashion, even in Shepton Mallet. And yet to Charlie’s eye they both appeared vulnerable to solicitation of an absurd or accidental nature. There was something of the pantomime dame about them both, now starched and forbidding, now capable of ending up on the straw with their skirts raised. It was almost as though, in proportion as they armed themselves against direct assault, they courted compromising surprise. Not because they hankered for adventure, quite the opposite – because being compromised proved how gauche and therefore how unfitted for adventure they were. Like her? Well, she wasn’t sure about that. But an entry in her grandmother’s diary, bequeathed to her on that formidable lady’s death, only months after her own inconsequent interlude with her professor, certainly rang bells.

  ‘Sunday evening, rained all day,’ the diary read, ‘drenched to the bone and glad to be home. Spent an unlooked-for hour sheltering under a tree with Mr Leonard Woolf, whose gardens I had gone to inspect. The poor man wretched on account of the recent suicide of his wife by drowning. The sight of all that falling water would not have helped much, I imagine. Whether I should have acceded to his requests in other circumstances I very much doubt. But there was a charitable side to it. And it was only a small favour he asked. Besides, my own curiosity as to the matter of his Jewishness – never having encountered the phenomenon before – spurred me on a little. For myself, cannot say it was a pleasure, cannot say it was not. For him – definitely not.’

  Like her? The same droll obligingness, not devoid of a sense of duty? The same passive recipience of what was and yet was not erotic liberty? Maybe the same. Or, if not the same, similar.

  As for Charlie’s mother, Dotty on the telephone to Charlie in London swore blind that she had seen the coalman position himself a hot breath behind her at the Shepton Mallet street party for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and manoeuvre her hand into his flies.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Charlie said. Though she could quite picture the pantomime. Lawk-a-mercy, Mr Brotherton!

  ‘Then don’t believe me. But if you’d seen him bulging in his best suit you’d have wished it was your hand.’

  ‘Dotty! What did Daddy say?’

  ‘Daddy? Daddy was away surveying, as usual.’

  ‘So what did Mummy do?’

  ‘She kept it there, silly.’

  Well, I suppose it was a party, Charlie told herself. And in a small, cold community you don’t hurt the feelings of the coalman.

  She pursed her lips for the traffic cop in Vauxhall, thought about a joke since Hazel was with her, then thought better of it and blew into the bag.

  And despite the family susceptivity she truly only opened her mouth for her professor, and never moved away her hand, on that one occasion?

  Truly.

  And never ever, post Charlie, with anybody else?

  Never ever?

  Well … just the teensiest time. But that wasn’t anything of vital importance either.

  ‘Shhh!’ she ordered him, smoothing his hair.

  Kreitman loved nothing more than having a woman’s hand in or near his hair. Had someone told him that God was a woman and would stroke his brow and run her fingers through his hair on his arrival in Her presence, he would gladly have gone to Her at once, and to hell with all the others.

  Now more than ever. A woman to blow cool air across his brain, that’s what he needed. A woman to blow women out of his brain.

  The cruel paradox of Kreitman’s life, as he saw it: he was ill with women, but only a woman could make him better.

  He felt a little less ill, opening his eyes this time, than when he’d first come out of his faint on the Soho streets. For Kreitman, fainting was the proof that he would the badly, and that life was an accident, without meaning or purpose. He had been a congenital fainter as a boy. The sight of blood did it. Horror stories did it. Hot food did it. His father did it. Being struck did it. Seeing a hand raised in anger, even if not to him, did it. Nietzsche went mad on the streets of Trieste, seeing a man beating a horse. Marginally less unstable than the philosopher, Marvin Kreitman fainted at the zoo, seeing a parrot, crazed with being caged, denuding itself of its feathers. Kreitman knew how the parrot felt. Not the being caged, but the futility. Sometimes he plucked at himself, ripping out his fingernails and toenails, tearing the skin from his knuckles, pulling out individual hairs from his scalp. And fainting. Told by the doctor that this was merely a phase Marvin was going through, his mother took him to be examined by a specialist. Several thousand pounds of tests later, Marvin was diagnosed ‘sensitive’. Money well spent. ‘My son is clinically sensitive,’ she informed friends. ‘I could have told you that and saved us a fortune,’ his father croaked. Whereupon Marvin fainted again.

  The fainting itself he could live with. Sometimes it was even pleasurable just to vanish from the scene. What he could not bear was the coming-to. When Kreitman came to after fainting it was as though he were being reassembled. So why wasn’t there satisfaction in that? Reunification is meant to be a happy event. Things coming together which have been apart – friends, lovers, nations, ligaments – are deemed to be fortunate. Occasions for a party. Fireworks. Not in Kreitman’s case. When Kreitman came to after fainting, he felt he was being reassembled out of parts that were not his and did not fit. There was physical pain in it, the agony of bones going into sockets that would not take them; but the mental anguish was the hardest to support, the nauseating certainty that the mind you’d been given back was not your mind, that it was of another colour and configuration from your mind, that the patterns you saw were not the patterns you were accustomed to seeing, that there was a music to the objects you woke to which bore no resemblance to any music you knew, or to any rhythmic pattern or system of notation you recognised or liked. He had been reassembled randomly, thrown together, a stranger to himself, without consideration of suitability or match, and that proved there was no meaning or purpose out there. Kabbalists argued that the Godhead who had once presided over a unified and harmonious universe had become alienated from himself, and as a consequence we were all so many scattered sparks, shaken as through from a falling torch. Fine by Kreitman. There had been meaning once, but there wasn’t any now. Unfortunately, he was living now.

  Among the scattered sparks that comprised this latest disgusting composition of what wasn
’t himself was a fiery recollection of loose talk with Charlie Merriweather. What he thought he could remember couldn’t possibly be the actual event. Another person’s conversation had been confused with his. As for how he’d spent his own evening, some poor insensible bastard elsewhere on the planet was waking with a dream of that.

  But he was still alarmed to find Charlie Merriweather’s wife, standing like Florence Nightingale in a spinnaker, by his bed.

  ‘Where are the others?’ he asked her. ‘Or are you here on your own?’

  Because Kreitman noticed such things, he noticed that she didn’t say, ‘Why, would you like me to be here on my own?’ But he also noticed that she also didn’t say, ‘And what, Marvin, would I be doing here on my own?’

  ‘Charlemagne’s asleep on a bench in the waiting room,’ was what she did say, ‘and Hazel’s having breakfast with Nyman.’

  Here we go again, Kreitman thought. Wrong parts. ‘Nyman?’

  ‘The cyclist.’

  ‘Which cyclist? Not the faggot who ran me down?’

  Charlie shrugged and shook her head, as though Kreitman’s bad language were a poisonous insect that had flown into her hair and she wanted to be rid of it.

  ‘And he’s called Nyman, you say?’

  ‘Yes. An Anglicisation of Niemand.’

  ‘How the fuck do you know that?’

  ‘He tells you.’

  ‘A German?’

  ‘I don’t know. An Austrian, I think.’

  ‘There are no such things as Austrians. All Austrians are Germans.’

  ‘Hush, Marvin.’

  ‘I don’t have to hush. Germans I can say what I like about. That’s their function for the next thousand years – to be the butt of everyone who isn’t German. Especially when they’re faggots who run me down in the street. And Hazel’s having breakfast with him, did I hear you say?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Loyal of her. And would you have any idea how Hazel happened to run into this Nyman?’

  ‘He was here. He’s been here all night with Charlie.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ Kreitman said, ‘why don’t you join them for breakfast and leave me to have another little faint. Maybe when I next surface the world will make more sense. It’s kind of you to have come, Charlie.’

  ‘De nada,’ Chas said.

  Chapter Five

  Neither quite awake, nor quite unconscious, impressionable Kreitman drifts through Spain.

  Schlock Spain, but then what other kind is there? Castanets, garlic, warm nights, a dusty bar in a dusty calle, beaded curtains rattling like snakes, and a pregnant whore, older than his mother, fingers hotter than hell, thrumming out a malagueña on his thighs.

  (Surprising, really, that Kreitman never recounted this experience to his young daughters, lying stiff as lozenges in their beds. For it contained everything he liked in a story – expectation, sensuality, disappointment, failure.)

  ‘Todos los otros son fríos,’ the pregnant whore sings – not to him, to the other whores, but it is music to his ears.

  All of the others. All cold. All except him cold.

  And not just cold as in the opposite to hot. But friós. Which sounds icy to his Spanish. Arctic. Freezing in the blood. Frigid and frigidaired with fear.

  But not him.

  ‘Gracias,’ he says.

  She smiles at him. ‘De nada.’

  He is thirteen, on a school trip to Barcelona. ‘Don’t go off the beaten track,’ the teacher tells them, so they do. Old Knotty with his twisted teeth. ‘Careful, boys.’ So they’re not. But it’s only beer the five under-age boys are after, cerveza in a shady bar where they can practise their Spanish and get a taste of what it will be like to be men in a foreign country. Sooner than they think.

  ‘Aqui!’ the barman orders them. He is wonderfully blind in one eye and lame in one leg. Everyone in Spain is either half blind or half lame. The legacy of the Civil War, according to Knotty. So there’s the smell of killing in the calle, too. You don’t argue with killers. The barman rattles open bead curtains – ‘Aqui, aqui!’ – to a bare anteroom with a single bullfight poster on the wall. Here, confessions will have been beaten out of traitors. Kreitman has seen the films. Cruel hands shaving the heads of young girls who consorted with the enemy. A scrubbed table awaits them. A jug of beer is slid in. And some colourless liquor in an unlabelled bottle. Did they ask for that? ‘Clip joint,’ they all think, their five little hearts beating as one. But they don’t know what a clip joint is yet.

  After the beer, the whores. One after another they enter, like aunties bearing birthday gifts. A fat one, a thin one, an old one, a young one, and his, the pregnant one, not too far gone, only a blip where her belly is and eyes that dance at him. Older than his mother, but otherwise could be his mother. The fat one sits on Gerald Barnish’s lap. The thin one inclines her head on Hugo Feaver’s shoulder. The old one and the young one carve up the Dorment twins. And Kreitman’s drums her fingers on his thighs. Call it the beginning of his life, call it the end. Everything is decided for him at this moment. Whatever it is I’m feeling now, he tells himself, is what I was put on earth to feel. Blood runs like honey through his veins. His bones fold. Tremors skate across his skin as though on a field of melted butter. Now he knows.

  And the others? Frightened and wanting to go home. Fríos.

  He is so whatever the opposite to frío is himself, the bottom of his mouth has welded itself to the top. ‘Cuànto?’ he manages to ask.

  ‘Diecinueve.’ Her voice is harsh and alcoholic. A bicycle chain lubricated with aniseed.

  ‘Pesetas?’

  Could it be pesetas? For that many pesetas he could have her a hundred times that night and still leave with money in his pocket.

  She laughs a gypsy laugh, her drumming fingers scaling heights he did not know were there. ‘Años,’ she says.

  He knows she isn’t nineteen years. But if lying is to be part of it, he’s up for that as well. For lies, too, taste sweet.

  ‘Muy hermosa,’ he says.

  ‘Quien?’

  ‘Usted.’

  She laughs at him, the little red-faced fiery formal boy. ‘Gracias, señor,’ she says.

  ‘De nada.’

  But he never does find out how many pesetas. Suddenly, Knotty with his twisted teeth is asking for them at the bar. Five boys, in blazers, seen disappearing into a disreputable bodega much like this. Yes, those five. And now, out!

  Must he? He feels the tears rise. Will he never see her again? Never, never, never, never?

  Relieved to be rescued, even by Old Knotty, the other boys file out. But not Kreitman. Kreitman feels his life is over. The whores shrug lazily. Kreitman shows his tear-torn face to his. She smiles and raps one final melody on his leg. ‘Adiós,’ she says. ‘Adiós, mi héroe.’ And then in gargled English, ‘Till the next time.’

  And now the next time is all he can think about. Confined to his hotel the following day. Out of town on a bus trip the day after. Musical theatre the evening after that. Something about bells in a village in the Pays Basque. Ding-dong, ding-dong. The clanging of his heart. For he is in love as well as on heat. On his last night, clutching all the pesetas he owns, he gives his frigid school friends the slip and goes looking for her. Down this calle and up that. But how to tell one disreputable bodega from another? He has no luck. Every barman has one eye. Every bar a beaded curtain to a naked anteroom. And because he doesn’t know her name he cannot ask for her, even were desperation to give him the courage to shape the sentence. Towards the end of the night, sad and footsore, he thinks he sees her ahead of him. He runs to show her his pesetas. It will be like showing her his heart, for he is not at all dismayed by the element of transaction in this, his first passion, whatever his mother would have said. Not at all. The pesetas define his excitement. In some important way, they are the excitement. It was exciting just counting them out. But the woman he overtakes is only a ghastly simulacrum of his woman, respectable and half her age
.

  In bars he cannot find, women sing with the voices of men. The smell of melancholy, now and for ever, is garlic prawn. Hot nights in cobbled alleys will always remind him of desire gone begging.

  He never does find her. Never, never, never, never. But for a whole year he thinks about her all the time, and for the rest of his life he thinks about her some of the time. Todos los otros son fríos …

  It helps to have that said in your hearing. It explains your difference from other men.

  And now he knows that he never is and never will be happy unless he is suffering the pain of hope gone begging, of thwarted desire and of unbearable loss.

  Chapter Six

  Ordered to get some rest, Kreitman agreed to let Hazel drive him down slowly to a hotel they both liked, though Kreitman less than Hazel, on one of the softer edges of Dartmoor.

  It wasn’t just being knocked down he needed rest from. He needed rest from Charlie. All week, as though ducking flying bullets, Kreitman had been dodging his friend’s calls. You know when someone’s desperate to reach you. You hear it in the way the phone rings. And every time Kreitman’s phone rang he knew it was Charlie, demented, ill with fidelity, pushing for the swap.

  You also know when someone’s avoiding you. Conversing with his women, Charlie thought. Making assignations even while his bones ache. Talking dirty. Three on a phone. The couple of times he did get through, Kreitman cut him short. ‘Up to my ears, Charlie. Let’s have another day in Soho again soon. Yes, exactly – on the principle that a man who crashes his car should start driving it again without delay. This Thursday? Love to, but let me see, let me see – no, can’t.’

  Wouldn’t, more like. He’d been trying not to think about Charlie, but when he did, he understood that the best reason for denying him – sanity and decency aside – was that he didn’t want him in so close, didn’t want to forgo the experience of having him out there as a dumbstruck spectator of his irregularities. Everything else was pointing to the conventionality of Kreitman’s routines. Twenty years ago he’d been a wild man, the Casanova of University College, now what he did his own daughters considered too naff even to tackle him about. Yuk, Daddy, adultery? Get a life! But Charlie at least was still bulging his eyes. Shame to lose that. And lose it he would once he and Charlie became, so to speak, brothers in arms.