Who's Sorry Now?

by Howard Jacobson

  To her enormous satisfaction, Nyman laughed. A curious ripple that ran up his chest and shook his shoulders, before dying in his face. She wasn’t sure, but wasn’t this, in their company at least, Nyman’s first ever laugh? Discovering that she could coax a sound, or at least a sight, suggestive of mirth out of a person as ruthlessly mysterious, and therefore mirthless, as Nyman heated Chas’s blood. It was a joy comparable to gardening, like watering a parched bed and watching the flowers open. In her excitement, she danced her dragonfly and watched it disappear into the colourless immensity which was Nyman.

  For no reason she could put a name to, Hazel dropped her napkin and while retrieving it accidentally effected a second graze of Nyman’s well-pumped calf.

  The quick look Nyman shot her – two pale points of Arctic light—was perceived by Chas at the very moment it was perceived by Kreitman, who believed he noted a similar roundelay of exchanges beginning with Hazel and ending he wasn’t certain where. Only Charlie remained outside the circle of infatuation.

  ‘Somehow, in all this merriment,’ Kreitman said, ‘my question has been lost. I suspect you’re going to tell me you’re an artist. Everybody seems to be an artist at the moment, all our children, all our wives. The only person I know who isn’t an artist is me, though even I sometimes design a handbag or a suitcase with something approaching artistry, let my daughter insist all she likes that artistry is not to be confused with artisanship. But if you are an artist, please don’t tell me that the art you make is yourself.’

  ‘No,’ said Nyman, ‘the art I make is not myself. I do not have a self.’

  ‘So I understand,’ said Kreitman, ‘though to me you have a very distinct self – I still feel the bruises from it. But you are, then, an artist? Do you blaze a trail or do you leave a path?’

  ‘Jesus, Marvin!’ Hazel said. Then to Nyman she added, ‘You are not obliged to be interrogated, you know.’

  ‘Unless you happen to enjoy it,’ Chas said, putting her face on a slant, as though the world of abstruse enjoyments were her oyster.

  ‘No, it’s all right,’ Nyman said. And that was when Kreitman noticed he was being aped, that Nyman was twirling his wine glass between his fingers exactly as Kreitman twirled his, and that he was making a fist of his other hand, rubbing it absently into the tablecloth, as though kneading dough, as though killing dough, again as Kreitman did. Kreitman’s rigid fist was infamous among his women, each of whom began by hoping she would be the one to get him to open his fingers and release his murderous grip on himself. Now he could see what it looked like and why, as a discrete object, like some tiny meteorite humming with unearthly tension, it upset those who had to eat and drink in its vicinity. But what was Nyman up to? Was he making merry with Kreitman’s mannerisms? Was he learning what Kreitman was with a view to doing him some damage? Or was he just being Kreitman because Kreitman was a good thing to be? Had the little cocksucker chosen to admire him suddenly?

  Whatever the answer to those questions, Kreitman found himself wanting to go on holding Nyman’s attention and winning his approval. If the boy had a yen to be like him he wasn’t going to be dog in the manger about it – he would show the boy how to be like him. The first consequence of which was that he was unable to remember how his own voice worked naturally and started to shout.

  ‘Shush,’ Hazel said. ‘They don’t want to hear you at the far end of the room.’

  ‘You don’t know that. They might very well want to hear me at the far end of the room,’ Kreitman boomed again. And he twinkled at Nyman who, for a black hole, made a pretty good fist, since we are talking fists, of twinkling back.

  Over coffee in the lounge, for the Baskervilles remained one of those hotels that could not bear to serve coffee to its patrons until they were seated too low down to drink it comfortably, Nyman finally told them what he wanted out of life. He wanted to be on television.

  A moment or two of silence greeted this revelation. All of their children wanted to be on television. Sardonic as a matter of generational principle though their children were, and doubly sardonic when it came to television, they had no other medium for appraising worth, and no other measure for knowing whether or not a thing existed. If it didn’t flicker it didn’t count. But until now neither the Kreitmans nor the Merriweathers had quite thought of Nyman as being of their children’s vocational kith and kin.

  Then, ‘You’d be good on television,’ Hazel said.

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Yes, yes I do. I think you’d make people sit up.’

  ‘But then it’s always possible,’ Chas put in, ‘that Nyman doesn’t want to make people sit up. He might want to make people sit down. That’s how we normally watch television.’

  ‘My guess,’ said Kreitman, ‘is that Nyman wants to go on television to do neither. My guess is that Nyman wants to go on television simply to subvert the form. I think when Nyman says he wants to be on television he’s taking the piss. Nicht wahr, Nyman?’

  They waited, husband, wife and someone else’s wife, for the stranger with no character or prospects to tell them who was right. Kreitman saw that Nyman was making a white-knuckled fist with the hand that wasn’t raising the coffee cup, and felt confident. Hazel sank lower in her chair and showed Nyman her neck.

  ‘I think I don’t know yet what I want to do on television,’ Nyman said. ‘I think I just want to be on it.’

  ‘Aha!’ Kreitman said.

  ‘I think I want to show that I am … What is the word?’

  ‘A humorist,’ Kreitman suggested.

  Nyman shook his head. ‘I believe I have no humour.’

  ‘Palpable,’ Chas tried. ‘You want to go on television to materialise yourself. We all do.’

  Nyman looked evenly at her, almost granting her what he had granted Hazel, those two pale points of distant Arctic light. ‘Palpable … That’s not so bad.’

  But Hazel had not yet had her go. ‘A winner,’ she said. ‘I think you want to show that you can win.’

  ‘Win at what?’ Kreitman wanted to know.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Hazel said. ‘Specific achievement is out. You’re so stuck in the past, Marvin, with your winning at what. With television you win simply by being on it. You exceed the common.’

  ‘And how do you do that?’ Kreitman asked. ‘By being even more common than everybody else?’

  ‘It is not a sin,’ Hazel replied with heat, ‘to be unexceptional.’

  ‘Thank you, Hazel,’ Nyman said. ‘You have found my word. I want to go on television to show that I am exceptionally unexceptional.’ He was so pleased he actually clapped his hands together like a seal. ‘It is you, Hazel,’ he continued, letting his blank barm-bun stare, with its distant snowy reflections, last long upon her, ‘who understands me best.’

  At this, Chas did something which no one who was watching had ever seen her, or come to that anyone else, do before. She threw up her canvas skirts. Outside of a Victorian novel, Kreitman thought, I have never heard of a woman throwing up her skirts. He tried to think of Peggotty, but it wasn’t Peggotty Chas reminded him off. It was someone more French.

  Realising how her action could be misconstrued, Chas affected to be worrying about crumbs, and exaggeratedly shook herself out. But a raised skirt is a raised skirt, and her cheeks blazed.

  ‘And now can we play croquet on the lawn?’ Nyman asked.

  ‘Too late,’ Kreitman said. ‘Croquet is a daylight game.’

  ‘Doesn’t have to be,’ said Hazel. ‘There are floodlights.’

  Kreitman closed his face as though closing a door. ‘It’s not a floodlit activity. You can’t measure the distances right. The shadows interfere with your judgement. And with your safety. You’ll end up cracking your shins, or cracking someone else’s, with the mallet. And anyway, the lawn will be starting to get dewy. The balls will skid.’

  ‘How good it is,’ Hazel said, ‘to be married to an authority.’

  But instead of edging her one of his
glances of blank complicity, Nyman suddenly turned to Charlie. ‘Charles,’ he said, ‘I think of you as the authority on all things English – what do you think? Is it your opinion that croquet is out of the question?’

  And had Kreitman been wearing skirts himself, he too might well have flung them over his head.

  ‘So what’s this all about?’ Kreitman asked.

  They were lying on their backs in their separate beds, like a lately deceased Pharaoh and his queen, waiting to be embalmed.

  ‘What’s all what about?’

  ‘Come on, Hazel. It’s called Nyman. What’s it about?’

  ‘You mind your affairs, Marvin, I’ll mind mine.’

  ‘It’s an affair now, is it? You only met him a week ago, isn’t that a bit soon?’

  ‘We don’t discuss these things, Marvin. Your rule.’

  ‘If you don’t want the boy discussed then you shouldn’t have brought him here. Your rule.’

  ‘What is it about him you want to discuss? The way you’ve been trying to woo him all night.’

  ‘Woo Nyman, me? Why would I do that?’

  ‘Because you’re a wooer, Marvin. Because you have no choice. People have to notice you, be fascinated by you, then love you. Women, preferably. But if no new woman happens to be present, you’ll make do with something else. It’s the way you operate.’

  ‘Not with Nyman it’s not,’ Marvin said. ‘You’re lucky I’m civil to him. The faggot put me into hospital, in case you’ve forgotten.’ He was staring at the ceiling from which, if he could trust his memory, a dusty chandelier used to hang. Now it was downlighting. Twenty years ago they made hay in a four-poster. Now mummified in twin beds.

  Hazel got out of hers and went to the window. She was wearing a straight white Victorian shift she had bought in an antique shop. Shapeless and innocent, with lace on the sleeves. Kreitman noticed her feet, like a little girl’s. From his experience it was an unvarying truth about women – even the oldest of them had feet like a little girl’s. It was the one part of them, at least that you could see, that stayed young. No wonder he was upset all the time. The more you had to do with women the more sadness you encountered.

  Once upon a time I could have gone over to her, Kreitman thought, and slid my hands around her through the sleeves of her nightgown, and she would have leaned back into me with all her weight, utterly trusting. He had loved that, the trust, the weight of her, and the way her leaning into him raised her breasts infinitessimally, their undersides softer than peeled fruit. Brand new skin, never before touched, never before seen.

  How long now since he’d touched or seen?

  She stood at the window, looking out in silence. Moonlight on the moor, Kreitman thought. She is probably thinking what I’m thinking. How long it’s been. How much we’ve lost. But what he didn’t know was that she was watching Nyman crouching on the lawn, inspecting the croquet hoops, and the Merriweathers bent over him, presumably explaining the rules.

  ‘You’ll get cold,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not in the slightest bit cold,’ she said.

  Then he noticed she was crying. Dry tears, not sobs, the dry tears every faithless husband fears he is the reason for. I have dried up even her accesses to sorrow, the swine I am.

  ‘Why can’t I ?’ she said. ‘Why can’t I ever?’

  Kreitman’s ears pricked. ‘Why can’t you what?’

  She wasn’t really talking to him. ‘Why can’t I ever have what I want? Always so hard, always so much soul-searching, always such a fuss. This to consider, that to consider. What the girls would think. What you would think, as though I’m obliged to care a tinker’s damn what you would think. Why can’t I be more like you? Want something? Take something. A click of the fingers – Here, you!’

  ‘Here who?’

  ‘Why do you think I can’t do it, Marvin? Why do you think I can’t take him, have him and be done with him, Kreitman-style?’

  If it wasn’t cold, why was he cold? ‘Why can’t you have whom?’

  ‘Whom! Don’t whom me, Marvin. You know perfectly fucking well whom. Why can’t I fuck him without you fucking with my head? Why do you have to have an attitude? Why do you always have to be there? I’ve kept out of your way, why can’t you keep out of mine?’

  ‘Hazel, you brought me here. You organised this.’

  Outside on the lawn, Chas was standing closer to Nyman than the rules of croquet, let alone the etiquette of explaining the rules of croquet, demanded. Hazel turned from the window and showed her husband her distraught face, furrowed with tears which wouldn’t flow. ‘I’m not crying for the reason you think I’m crying,’ she said. ‘I’m crying because it’s so demeaning to be back feeling all this again.’

  ‘It’s so demeaning to be back feeling what?’ (Tell me, tell me.)

  ‘It’s so not what I wanted.’

  ‘Then stop feeling it,’ Kreitman said.

  For a moment he thought she might come over to him and hit him. ‘How dare you say that to me!’ she hissed. ‘How dare you, of all people, make it sound so blithe – you who have never denied yourself a feeling in your life. Except the feeling of loyalty.’

  He withdrew his face, as though frightened for it. But he couldn’t withdraw himself. Too interested. Too interesting, all this. ‘Then if you want to fuck him, fuck him,’ he said.

  My fault, Hazel thought, my own stupid fault for introducing the fuck word. Introduce the fuck word to my husband and he’ll shake its fucking hand off.

  ‘Don’t!’ she said.

  ‘Don’t what?’

  ‘Just don’t! The spectacle of you putting your mind to the rights and wrongs of anything is too horrible to contemplate. I’m ashamed to be married to you. If you want to fuck him, fuck him. Where did you pick up your code of ethics, Marvin – in a cat house?’

  ‘Do you think you might be a little bit in love with him?’

  ‘Stop it, Marvin!’

  He began to cry himself, the full waterworks she remembered so well from the platform at Paddington, and after that every station you could name. She knew what they were worth. She could price the downpour, tear by tear. Nothing was what they were worth. Not a farthing. But she was lonely and horrified by herself, to be feeling what she was feeling, to be at the mercy of all that old pestiferous stuff again – desire of so little consequence it made your stomach turn, but still, somehow, desire. ‘Move over,’ she said, ‘and let me in.’

  He folded her in his arms, surprised, as he had always been, by how small she could make herself. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘It isn’t OK,’ she said.

  He knew what she meant by that. A dread clutched his heart. When women who had loved you lay in your arms and said it wasn’t OK it only ever meant one thing. It meant that they were in the grip of an uncontrollable longing for someone else. A melodramatist of sex, as are all dedicated adulterers and fornicators, Kreitman conceived such longing as a force so irrefutable and destructive that nothing could possibly survive it. Not duty, not home, not decency, not reason, not God, not him. The dread that clutched his heart was a foreboding of his own obliteration. No half measures for Kreitman, when it came to the gains and losses of sex. You won everything, you lost everything. What was marvellous was how alike those two extremes could be. Embracing his obliteration, shutting his ears to every sound except his lurching heartbeat, Kreitman felt desire for his would-be faithless wife race like poison through his body. ‘How bad is it?’ he whispered. ‘How much do you want to fuck him?’ At once, as though she were some washed-up shell creature, poked at by a callous boy, Hazel closed and went rigid in his arms. Kreitman knew what he had to do. He had to shut the fuck up. Not say another single fucking syllable. But he too was at the mercy of an ungovernable longing. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Speak to me. You can imagine I’m him, if it will make you feel better. Call me Nyman. I am your husband’s enemy. Beg me to fuck you …’

  And this time Hazel did hit him.
/>   Chapter Seven

  The following day, Kreitman sat in a metal chair – one of thirty or forty arranged in book-club formation around the Moriarty Room – and listened to the Merriweathers taking questions from their fans. The usual: where do you get your ideas, how do you find a publisher, how are you able to work together, do you try your stories (sorry, did you try your stories) on your own children, what would you like to be if you weren’t writers. Sour for all sorts of reasons, but at his sourest in the presence of book readers and their providers, for he had imagined such a life for himself once, touring the world discussing Francis Place and the glory that was once the English mind, Kreitman allowed his own mind to turn against his friends. What would you like to be if you weren’t writers? Excuse me – what the Merriweathers, Charlie and Charlie, did was not write. Writers wrote for adults, not for children. As for where they got their ideas – ha! The Merriweather books did not contain ideas. Kreitman did not know that for a fact. He hadn’t read, properly read, any of the Merriweather books. But he knew it as an intuition. He didn’t approve of children’s books. He had not read children’s books as a child himself and to the degree that he had been allowed a say in the matter he had not permitted his own children to read them. What was wrong with The Mill on the Floss? What was wrong with Jane Eyre? What was wrong with A Tale of Two Cities? What was wrong with lying listening to Daddy telling you about himself? If John Stuart Mill could be enjoying Herodotus in the original when he was three, Kreitman was not going to give his children Thomas the Fucking Tank Engine. It was sometimes put to him that John Stuart Mill suffered a nervous breakdown in later years, as though that negated the Herodotus, as though readers of Thomas the Fucking Tank Engine didn’t also suffer nervous breakdowns. Nothing makes us sane, Kreitman believed, but some things make us smart. Smart – what a word of now! In his head he took it back. Not smart, intelligent. And that most definitely was not a word of now.

  I am the sole guardian of the culture, Kreitman thought, and I sell purses.