Who's Sorry Now?

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘What about Friday?’ Charlie asked.

  Kreitman pretended to rustle his diary. ‘Same again. No can do. I’m just hellishly pushed right now.’

  Well, who wasn’t hellishly pushed right now?

  Not that Charlie honestly believed anyone had pushed him. This time, Charlie in his calmer moments reflected, I’ve gone and jumped. Christ!

  He couldn’t believe the hammering his chest was taking. Was this what not-nice sex did to your ribs and diaphragm? And he was only thinking about it!

  As yet.

  He held on to that. As yet.

  A one-time shooting and fishing hotel, then a murder-mystery weekend hotel, then a white-water rafting hotel – a briefer incarnation, this, on account of the absence within a radius of five thousand miles of anything that could reasonably be called white water – and latterly a string quartet and dance alternating with a book club hotel (in which form it was at last returned to the earlier hush of its shooting and fishing days), the Baskervilles had been a favourite of the Kreitmans and the Merriweathers during that brief opportunity for liberty which comes between courtship and children.

  Kreitman was still the idealistic historian of English radicalism in those days, and not yet the luggage baron of south London, else he would have shown up at the Baskervilles for his first ever walking holiday on Dartmoor – if truth be told, his first ever walking holiday anywhere – accoutred in rucksacks and map holders and water bottles and walking sticks all finished with the softest leathers. As it was, he arrived looking smarter by a country mile than any of them, though he never got to walk a country mile because of the weather. ‘I don’t care what these boots are built to do,’ he told Hazel, ‘they’re brand new and I’m not going out and putting them in puddles.’ So he sat in the lounge and read Country Life and played with the odd jigsaw while the others experienced the exhilaration of rocky landscape and teeming rain. Come night-time he was the only one with energy and didn’t want to hear that they’d seen eagles. ‘Please, I’m exhausted,’ Hazel said, ‘I can’t even bend my knees.’ But no day was a holiday for the young Kreitman that didn’t end in a fuck. Lying in the stag-wallpapered room next door, the two Charlies listened as Kreitman ground his will out pleasurelessly and Hazel uttered not a sound.

  This trip Kreitman wasn’t taking walking boots. By now he knew himself. It was a hot early May, an oasis of hot in a month of showers, too tiring for walking – it was always either too hot or too wet, too misty or too glaring, for walking on Dartmoor – and he had his heart set, since he’d been ordered to turn off that nicely purring engine of his, on sinking into a winged armchair in the mini-palm-court lounge, reading newspapers, smiling at lesbians, consuming pots of tea and anchovy sandwiches, thinking his thoughts and, so long as Hazel kept her distance, ringing up the other women in his life. There was, as Charlie had surmised, though he had overestimated the heat, a fair amount of ringing up and putting right to do. A man actively in love with five women can’t just disappear on holiday when the fancy takes him. Leaving the shops was easier. He had managers and manageresses to tend the shops. But nobody tends your mistresses when you’re not there to see to them yourself. Mistresses? Hardly. That wasn’t the tone of the times. He was more their mistress than they were his. It entailed duties, anyway, whatever it was all called. So he’d said no to the idea of a break at first. ‘I’ve got responsibilities,’ he told his doctor. ‘I’ve got matters I can’t leave,’ he said to Hazel. But two days after his night on the town with Charlie, though his collision with the cyclist had barely left a scratch on him, just a few throbbing aches in the ribs, he fell asleep at his desk in the middle of the afternoon and missed an appointment. He was dead tired, he had to admit that to himself. And among the things he was dead tired of were the women.

  Number itself wasn’t the problem. Of course you had to organise your time intelligently if you weren’t to end up with angry women all over town. But Kreitman employed a driver to help him get around, a discreet semi-liveried Kenyan who laughed at everything and for whom Kreitman had provided a ruby-red Smart, manoeuvring and parking being of the essence. And of course lightness of touch – for what could be lighter than a laughing chauffeur with leather patches on his navy polo neck driving a car the size of a bedbug? Men like Charlie who were driven nuts by the fewness of women in their lives were wont to scrutinise Kreitman’s face for signs that he was on overload. ‘Sheesh, Marvin!’ they would say, shaking their heads, meaning, ‘Can’t you see they’re destroying you, man?’ Wishful thinking. Confining himself (and his driver) to those parts of London where he already had business to attend to, he could have coped with any number. What was tiring in five was what was tiring in two – the pity you expended.

  Actively love two women, attend to them as you are able only when you’re fucking them (fucking with them, Kreitman tried to remember to think, in deference to his own daughters) – though the truth of it was that they were fucking him, using him like some tart they’d picked up on a street corner in Streatham, for that was the way of it between the sexes now – actively love two women, anyway, the sociology of it apart, and you are forever adjudicating between the hands life has dealt them. Lying with Erica, whose skin seemed made of Christmas-cracker crêpe, so quiveringly taut and percussive was it, he would suddenly experience a revulsion on behalf of Vanessa, who each day collected another purply bump on her shins and thighs, not a bruise, though of course a woman of her age walked into more table edges than Erica did, but marks of inner deterioration, signs that veins were popping with overuse and blood forgetting where to flow. Too cruel that such was the reward, in Erica’s case, for lolling on couches half the day, reading Homes and Gardens, while Vanessa’s blue-black bumps were all the thanks she got for having racked her brains in the service of Book at Bedtime before succumbing to the BBC’s unspoken horror of the un-young, collecting her pay dirt, and turning herself into a teacher of the intellectually impaired. Not fair, either, that the lucky one should have rocked him sensuously in the cradle of inconsequence, and given him sweet dreams, while the solemn one left him agitated, tingling to his fingertips with purposiveness, unable to find rest. By sleeping with them both, Kreitman brought them into moral juxtaposition and felt the universal unfairness of things on their behalf.

  Unlikely that these revulsions from beauty and good fortune helped those who had neither, but they deepened the picture. To the simple pleasure which being fucked by women who were beautiful and exuded confidence gave him, he now had to add the complicating fact of his betraying them in his heart. And it was the pressure of this constant ethical refereeing, combined with the conviction that such conscientiousness was enjoined upon him by the amount of fucking he was doing, as though sex were like inherited wealth, entailing greater social responsibilities the more of it you had – it was this that was knocking him out.

  Not a cheerful fucker at the best of times, he was now grown heartsore. He seemed overburdened, a bearer of grievous history, an implanter of sorrows, rather than the fun, gag-a-minute guy – lightsome Kreitman – he would have liked to have been.

  Take what had happened with Bernadette only the night before the drive to Devon. Ten years his senior, Bernadette was an architect with a deep voice, fearsome cheekbones and a strict manner, the kind of woman you saw from a distance and felt immediately reprimanded by, a woman you put up scaffolds to approach and ascended gingerly, in a harness and a hard hat. Circumstances had taken a swing at Bernadette – the lover before Kreitman pinning a letter to her drawing board saying he couldn’t bear seeing her beauty succumb to age and so was running off with her youngest daughter, take it the right way, Geoffrey. Taking it the wrong way, Bernadette had rung Kreitman, who, as the husband of the woman who employed her ex-daughter-in-law to redesign her house, she had once or twice encountered at dinner parties. ‘My daughter’s fucked off with my lover,’ she told him, ‘and since she doesn’t herself have a lover off with whom I can fuck in return, I thought I’d try s
ome other woman’s man. Are you busy?’

  Kreitman loved fucking her because she, even more than all the others, over and above what the times insisted on, fucked him. Ironically and with her steel-grey eyes wide open, waiting for him to make her laugh. That was all she wanted from him, exactly what he’d wanted from his father – jokes, anecdotes, messages from the breathing world, the blacker the better. Any sign of his losing himself on her breast or otherwise thinking about ecstasy and she stopped moving. Sometimes, before visiting her, he’d have to go cap in hand to his own staff, to beg for the latest joke. It was like feeding a monster. Entertain her harshly and she was his. Bore her with sweet talk and she’d be gone. Then, the night before Devon, he lost her in the bed. Simply couldn’t find her. Called her name and she didn’t answer. Nothing on the pillow. Nothing under the duvet. When he pulled all the bedclothes back, there she was at the bottom of the mattress, flattened like her own shadow, extruded as though flayed and thrown away and only the outer skin of her remaining. ‘What are you doing?’ he said. ‘Where’ve you gone?’ She didn’t know what he was talking about. ‘I’m lying here waiting for you to amuse me,’ she said. ‘But you’ve made yourself vanish,’ he said. ‘It’s too upsetting, seeing you do that.’ She sat up with her knees against her chest and lit a cigarette. ‘I think it’s time we took a rain check, Marvin,’ she said. ‘I think you’re getting a trifle tragic for me.’

  He was.

  Looking forward to the rest, he was disappointed, when they checked in to the Baskervilles, to discover that Hazel had planned him a surprise. This weekend the hotel book club was addressing the subject of children’s literature as adult literature, and in attendance to address it with them were the C. C. Merriweathers, Charlie J. and Charlie K. So for the Merriweathers and the Kreitmans (when the Merriweathers weren’t discussing their craft) – this was Hazel’s cute, recuperative idea – it would be a little bit like old times.

  That was the first part of the surprise.

  The second part of the surprise concerned Nyman. Guess what? He was here too.

  ‘So tell me about yourself,’ Kreitman said over dinner. ‘I missed out on the introductions and the breakfasts. What do you do when you’re not biking urgent deliveries around Soho?’

  Sitting on his hands, Charlie Merriweather gave thanks that Kreitman hadn’t asked him what he did when he wasn’t being a faggot.

  What everybody found personable about Nyman was his absence of personality. Nyman too found this personable about himself. ‘There is nothing to tell,’ he said. ‘And I don’t even deliver packages any more. I only pretend to do that.’

  ‘To make yourself interesting?’ Kreitman wondered.

  But killingness was wasted on Nyman who had long ago embarked upon the course of killing himself. Finding if he had a self first, then killing it. ‘Exactly so,’ he said. He had a round blank floury face, the texture of one of Charlie’s baps, but angled to look sad, like a white-faced clown’s. And a small, perfectly circular mouth, shaped as though to receive slender rolled-up magazines, the Spectator or the New Statesman.

  ‘Then tell us all some of the other things you do to make yourself interesting,’ Kreitman persisted.

  ‘Well, for example,’ Nyman said, ‘I can bend my thumbs to meet my wrist.’

  ‘Show us,’ Kreitman said. Then, when Nyman had showed them, ‘And is there anything else?’

  ‘Well, for example,’ Nyman said, ‘I can make my eyes squeak.’

  ‘I don’t think we want to see that,’ Hazel said.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Kreitman corrected her.

  So Nyman put his knuckles in the sockets of his eyes, and ground them until they squeaked.

  Chas and Hazel looked away.

  ‘That it?’ Kreitman enquired.

  ‘Well, for another example,’ Nyman said, ‘I have bicycled down here.’

  Chas gasped. ‘You’ve cycled here from London?’

  Hazel also gasped. ‘Today?’

  ‘No, I left first thing yesterday morning. Last night I slept under a ditch …’

  ‘In a ditch,’ Kreitman corrected him, ‘or under a hedge.’

  Because he had had less opportunity to talk to Nyman than the others, Kreitman continued to work on the assumption that he was German. That was why he took the liberty of correcting his English. Kreitman regularly attended trade fairs in Germany, Germans having an atavistic love of leather – echt leder, how could you put it better? – and he knew that Teutonic longings to overmaster the English persisted, also atavistically, in a dream of mastery of the English language. Help them with idiomatic expression and they would spare your family. But there was every possibility that Nyman wasn’t German at all. Not even foreign.

  Just foreign to the English tongue.

  ‘Yes, under a hedge. Then I began again early, with the birds, and got here as you see me now.’

  ‘You must be whacked,’ Hazel said.

  ‘Well, I am pumped, certainly,’ he said, rolling up a trouser leg and inviting Hazel to inspect his calf muscle.

  Fluttering her hands like a princess about to feel her first frog, Hazel bent and made a stab at Nyman’s muscle. ‘I should say so,’ she laughed, her voice ringing with little girlish bells, as though still not sure whether pond life agreed with her. ‘Pumped’s the word!’

  You can tell, thought Chas, that she has never nursed a boy child.

  Some instinct for propriety had told Nyman not to come to dinner, nor to come near Kreitman at any time, wearing cycling gear. Instead he wore a crushed sandy suit, which went with his colouring, a crushed sandy shirt, a crushed sandy tie and sandy shoes. His general appearance was crushed, of course, as a consequence of being folded in a saddlebag for two whole days and one night under a ditch, but there was no questioning its muscular conformability.

  Why is the little prick wearing camouflage on Dartmoor? Kreitman wondered.

  How variously he dresses, Hazel thought, remembering the elasticated green lunchbox shorts and sleeveless thunder and lightning cycling vest he had on when she first met him. How nice it is to see a man prepared to experiment with his appearance, unlike Marvin with his invariable sharp suits, declaring this is the man I am, this is the man I am, this is the man I am. How pliant and gender-undemonstrative Nyman is, for a man with so hard a body, and how he starts when I look at him.

  How she starts when he looks at her, Chas noticed. Yet how pointedly he averts his eyes from mine. What is it he wants me to see he doesn’t want from me? Alternatively, what doesn’t he want me to see he does want from me?

  Chas was wearing a Butler and Wilson dragonfly on the lapel of her jacket. From time to time she fingered it, changing its position so that it might catch the light and maybe dazzle him. And did he dazzle her? Of course not. No man could be less dazzling than Nyman. He did not emit light, he absorbed it. He was a black hole, and by the magic of physics, all sources of light sought their extinction in him.

  A mystery to Kreitman, this, even as the blackness drew him to it. Kreitman was of the generation that believed you had to be brilliant to win a woman’s attention, that you had to sparkle conversationally, that you had to make wisdom fall from your lips like rubies, while your eyes danced like showers of falling stars. You laboured at your coruscations and the woman was the reward. He could not conceive that a woman might find attractive what she had to labour to win.

  Flash, flash, went Chas’s glittering dragonfly.

  Of the group, only Charlie was incurious about Nyman. But then Charlie had his mind on other things. From where he sat there was a view through the hotel window of one of those warty tors for which Dartmoor is famous. He wasn’t sure whether he could see people on the tor, or merely sheep, but the distant prospect made him melancholy. Distant prospects always did that for Charlie, especially when they were of tors and the tors were pink-tipped by the sun, like the nipples on a flat-chested girl stretched out on a beach or, more melancholy still, asleep in a summer meadow buzzed b
y flies. He gazed out of the window absently, tying his linen napkin into love knots, unaware of Nyman.

  Unaware of Hazel too, it appeared, though it might reasonably be supposed, given the time he’d spent trying to raise and remind Kreitman of this last week, that his absent-minded love knot was for her. But Charlie wasn’t counting his chickens. For the time being it was some lovely glorious nippled nothing he was seeing. Miss Cuntalina Fuckleton.

  ‘But apart from cycling,’ Kreitman persisted with Nyman, ‘what is it you want from life? Presumably there isn’t much of a living in cycling …’

  ‘My husband is always curious to know what there is or there isn’t much of a living in,’ Hazel interrupted.

  ‘I see,’ said Nyman. ‘A businessman.’

  ‘A captain of industry no less,’ Hazel said. ‘The luggage baron of south London.’

  ‘Your husband has a tide?’ Nyman marvelled.

  ‘They say his father was a king,’ Chas threw in.

  Kreitman bridled. No one in Charlotte Juniper’s family had ever worked a market stall. They had survived genteelly, on charity when necessary, for however many hundreds of years, but no stain of any market stall to darken their good name. ‘Who am I dining out with here,’ Kreitman asked, ‘the Tunbridge Wells chapter of the Communist Party? I am making small talk. I am asking Nyman what he wants from life.’

  ‘Marvin’s idea of small talk,’ Chas threw in again – ‘ “And how do you explain creation, young man?”’