Who's Sorry Now?

by Howard Jacobson

  Enough of what Mona had found lovable in Norbert remained for her to want to make it supremely comfortable. A large garden for him. A heated pool for him. An aviary for him, for he had always loved the music small birds made. And to finance all this Mona Bellwood became a sort of bird herself – a vulture, hovering over the remains of the dead. Every community newspaper published in north London was delivered to her door, and no sooner was a family’s sorrow announced than Mona Bellwood struck. Something her job taught her – something her marriage to Kreitman’s father had taught her – people wanted the wardrobes of the deceased emptied quickly, unemotionally, without a word, and whoever came offering, in a van with its engine turning over outside the front door, was as though sent by God, however small the offer. Out of the house and good riddance before the tears dried, the old suits and dresses, the shoes, the handbags, the shirts, the ties, the furs, the whisky decanters and, more often than you would expect, the jewellery – most of it rubbish, but not all, never all. ‘I could claim I perform a service,’ Mona said, ‘but it’s a business. I do it for Norbert. Not that Norbert knows.’

  Kreitman imagined Norbert in a second childhood not unlike Kreitman’s first, excited by the takings, fascinated by the sight of the sand-crab notes creaking eerily apart. ‘Why can’t I count?’ And Mona denying him, showing him how money filthies everything it touches, the palms of your hands, your fingertips. It crossed his mind, sometimes, that she was making not a sou out of raiding the houses of the dead, and was doing it only as a sort of penitence and abasement, seeking out and subjecting herself to the contamination, just so that Norbert shouldn’t have to, even though there was no possibility now of Norbert doing anything. Sacrificing her immortal soul, dirtying it so that he could keep his clean. Just as she had done for Kreitman’s.

  Was he grateful to her for that? Yes and no. She’d been an example to him. Made him not a radical but at least a student of radicalism. Indirectly put him on to Francis Place. But he blamed her for it as well. Nothing had come of him and Francis Place. He had not known how to make anything come of it. Maybe if his mother had let him dirty himself he’d have grown up better equipped to live in a dirty world.

  Her fault.

  It wasn’t all punitive. He wanted her to hear on the phone how bad he felt, but he didn’t begrudge her feeling good on that account when the reason he felt bad was a woman. In that sense he was always going back to her, like a faithless lover returning to a forgiving wife, showing how little the infidelity had ever counted. But whereas the most forgiving wife would always insist on knowing why, if it counted so little, he had bothered in the first place – ‘Then why do it, Marvin, why demean yourself and me?’ – his mother was content just to have him home.

  No one knew better than she did, after all, what refinement of feeling beat in his breast. She had taken him to the specialist when he fainted. She had told all her friends she had a son who was ‘clinically sensitive’, which was the next best thing to having a son who had won the Nobel Prize. And who was to say he wouldn’t do that next? ‘And this year’s prize for Clinical Sensitivity goes to … Marvin Kreitman!’

  Sometimes he felt that she was expecting his call, knew to the hour, maybe to the minute, when he would phone. Had he not inherited his sensitivity from her? When he was a boy she claimed powers of sympathetic prescience, a bodily intuition of his pains that was nothing short of supernatural. At the very moment Marvin took a tumble off his first pair of skates in Regent’s Park, Mona Kreitman’s knees went from under her as she was standing at the kitchen sink. The night he woke with burning tonsils on his honeymoon in Rome, Mona Kreitman fell out of bed clutching her throat. She knew when something was amiss with him, wherever he was. And that included romantic despondency, despair, satiation, boredom, even disgust. So she had a pretty good idea when the phone was going to ring.

  ‘I’m in Dartmoor,’ he told her.

  ‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘Ma, I bet you couldn’t find Dartmoor on a map.’

  ‘You’re right. But what’s that got to do with anything? Unless you want me to come and collect you. Then I’d find it on a map. Is this business, family or pleasure?’

  ‘You are cynical, Mother. It’s family.’

  ‘Then I hope you’re managing to have a good time.’

  ‘I’m having a lousy time.’

  ‘Well, you’ve always known how to have that. But Hazel likes it down there, doesn’t she?’

  Ah, yes. Hazel. Mona Bellwood was too subtle ever to risk an explicit criticism, but there hung over every conversation she had with her son an awareness, as fine as mist, of what might have been called the Hazel problem.

  ‘God knows what Hazel likes,’ Kreitman said. ‘But you’re right, she does enjoy it here. She believes the air agrees with her …’

  An intake of breath and then a moment of silence, during which Mona Bellwood could be heard measuring the qualitative difference between her son’s sensitivity and her daughter-in-law’s. Egregious, the condition of Hazel’s nerves; insufferable, how needy and on edge she was, the little mouse. Dartmoor! Air! What next – the pollen? But not a word, not a word.

  ‘Well, just try to get a rest,’ was all she said. ‘We thought you looked tired when we saw you last.’

  The ‘we’ constituted an unholy little bond between them. ‘We’ meant the women of the house, his mother and Norbert’s nurse. ‘We’ acknowledged that she knew all about his affair with Shelley and, more than that, reminded him that she may have been the one who had promoted it in the first place.

  Your mother, your pimp. Kreitman couldn’t decide what he thought of this, ethically. When he was hers alone, his mother wouldn’t have dreamed of putting him in the way of women. When he was hers alone, she filled his ears with dire warnings of the ruses of the other sex. They would say anything, do anything, to get him. And the first thing they would do was turn him against her, the best if not the only friend he had. ‘If you really love me, you will rip out your mother’s heart and bring it to me in a plastic bag.’ And Kreitman, because he was a man, would do their bidding. ‘No, Ma!’ ‘Yes, Marvin, yes, you will. You’ll see. You’ll see how they’ll make you dance.’ But after Hazel became his wife, the world, or at least that part of it which Mona inhabited, was suddenly filled with interesting, selfless, lovely women to whom she couldn’t wait to introduce him. Sometimes, at a family get-together – a birthday party, a golden wedding, a funeral, it didn’t matter, and it didn’t matter either whether Hazel was in attendance or not – she would actually deliver some girl into his hands, go find her, go fetch her, lead her in by the wrist and hand her over clanking to her son, as though into captivity. Nah, have her, enjoy!

  Should a mother do such things? Kreitman’s ethical considerations were inevitably coloured by his sentimentality, but no, generally speaking a mother should not do such things, though in this instance the mother was mindful of the specifics of her charge – a clinically sensitive boy who had never enjoyed the advantages of a decent father, who worked hard to support his family, who had not quite fulfilled what had been expected of him, who was easily upset and influenced by women, who was married to one with frayed nerves (never mind who’d frayed them), and who was therefore exceptionally in need of recreation. So whatever came to him, as it were, gift-wrapped by his mother – here, have, take, don’t make a fuss – he could hardly throw back in her face.

  But when he was in depressed spirits this was one more thing he could ring her up and blame her for. Another fine mess you’ve got me into, Ma!

  In this instance it pleased him to think of his mother and one of the women he loved discussing his health. If he existed primarily in the solicitudes of women, then he doubly existed when two of them were worrying about him together. And yes, they were right, he was looking tired.

  ‘I’ve got this headache that won’t go away,’ he said, in corroboration.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In my head,
where do you think?’

  ‘Don’t be smart with your mother, Marvin. It matters in which part of your head you have it. Don’t forget I know about headaches. Norbert began with headaches.’

  ‘Well, this one’s in every part of my head. It’s vague. It’s sort of all over. But listen, don’t worry about it. I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s nothing. It’s probably just a spiritual after-effect of the accident.’

  Oops, the accident!

  He had promised himself not to trouble her with that. Once upon a time he’d have rung her from the ambulance, let her hear the sirens at close range. ‘Here, Ma, talk to the paramedic while he’s pressing on my heart. What’s that trickling sound? My blood, Ma, my blood ebbing away, what do you think it is!’ But he was a grown man now, older than she was when he went to university, older than she was when he married Hazel even. And there are some things a grown man spares his mother, such as being knocked down in the middle of Soho by a crazed bicycling faggot-impersonator whom his wife must now reasonably be presumed to be fucking. His mother didn’t need to know any of that, did she? And he didn’t need to tell her. An impressive decision or what? And he’d done well. For eight whole days he hadn’t breathed a word. Until oops, the accident. After which he had absolutely no choice but to spill the beans.

  And with such immoderation of language and vehemence of feeling that anybody listening would have thought it was the poor woman’s doing.

  Which it was, really, for having set him on the road to seriousness.

  Her fault.

  When he next awoke it was dark. He looked at his watch. It was almost one in the morning. And Hazel not back. The light rain was still falling, but that hadn’t deterred some mad fuckers from playing croquet. He heard the chock of the mallet on the ball. That queer colonial sound. Then whispering. Then another hollow chock. Not an urgent game, whoever was playing. Then nothing. He got up and went to the window, much as Hazel had the night before. And saw the watery outline of the moon above the moor, and saw the silhouette of a hermit’s chapel on a tor, and saw Nyman leaning on his mallet with a stange expression on his floury face and his heimat pants down round his ankles. And on her knees, somewhat abstracted, like a washer woman rubbing shirts upon the pebbles in a river, or a half-hearted nun in her devotions, looking somewhere else, not Hazel, definitely not Hazel, unless the darkness were playing tricks on him, but Chas.

  Chas? Chas of Charlie and Chas?

  Chas.

  Whereupon it all came back, an event of no special coloration in the aftermath, though surprising enough at the time, shoved away with other matters of little consequence or sin in the sock drawer of his marital memory. He and Chas of twenty years ago, on that very lawn, drunken, idle, irascible, impatient suddenly of the others, giving them the slip and larking about to the extent of his offering her his tongue, and her taking it. Taking his penis in her hand as well was her idea, her defiance, if you like, of him. Who cares … anything you can do … that sort of thing.

  Had he enjoyed it? Had she? Had it meant anything?

  God knows. Certainly it had never cropped up conversationally between them since. They hadn’t alluded, hadn’t colluded, hadn’t smiled over it, hadn’t fretted over it, hadn’t worried that the other might blab or want more, hadn’t anything. Wonderful, but there it is. In certain circumstances a woman might link her thumb and forefinger and make a hangman’s noose around a perfect stranger’s dick (for he might just as well have been a perfect stranger as far as contact of that kind was concerned) and neither of them think twice about the matter again, thereby reinforcing what Kreitman had always believed: that in itself the flesh of man and woman is entirely neutral, that neither morality nor magic inhere in it, until a decision is made to invest it with one or the other, or with both.

  And since neither he nor she had invested the other’s flesh with anything at all, nothing at all had happened.

  In which case, why did the sight of her playing hangman with Nyman’s penis affect him so powerfully? Sourness flooded into his throat, as though a bag of sherbet lemons had exploded in his stomach. That was how jealousy tasted, but what was he doing being jealous? Of all possible permutations of their little party, this was the very one, perhaps the only one, that should have left him cold. Chas and Nyman – what were Chas and Nyman to him? Come to that, what were Chas and Nyman to each other?

  Here was the question, natural enough in the circumstances, that finally threw a bridge between curiosity and desire. Nyman was nothing to Chas, yet there she was on her knees kneading him. And he, Kreitman, was nothing to Chas, and yet there she’d been, on her knees – the tall woman’s recourse – kneading him. He’d tried it on with her twenty years ago in a spirit of supreme male carelessness, and she’d matched him every inch of the way. You don’t care, I don’t care. Nothing to you, nothing to me. In the mood for disconnected sex? Then let me show you just how disconnected sex can be.

  Was that, then, why it had gone into the sock drawer – not because it hadn’t counted but because he hadn’t counted, and, thank you very much, he didn’t care to recall that? Was Kreitman such a conventional Don Juan that he chose to remember only encounters that flattered him? No, that cannot be right, for Kreitman was a devotee of pain. A sexual insult to Marvin Kreitman was more rousing than any flattering come-on could ever be to men who like their pleasures straight. And Chas had insulted him, he saw that now. He had put it down to inexperience and forgotten about it because he couldn’t afford not to forget about it. He was in love with Hazel. Charlie was his friend. There was nothing to be gained by his dwelling on Chas having out-bravado’d him one scratchy night on a manicured hotel lawn in Dartmoor. Better to call it gaucherie and have done.

  Now, in the light of the queerly conventual scene being played out before him, he could mentally renegotiate what had passed between them. Yes, it hurt watching. Yes, it stung. Yes, he found himself dreading that the kneading would lead to something else, that Chas’s lips would take over from Chas’s tiring hands. Dreading, or hoping? Like rip-raps fizzing about a school playground, the sherbet lemons went on exploding in his gut. But then no one gets to renegotiate the past without paying for it.

  Any third party knowing the players and observing them through a window must have felt some of what he felt. C. C. Merriweather – how could you! For sure, your husband has been out and about propositioning your sister, not to mention, did you but know it, bartering you for another man’s wife, but even so, C. C., how could you touch that! Kreitman, though, was not merely experiencing that universal jealousy which assails sentimental men when they see a virtuous wife and mother throwing away her good name, whatever the provocation, on a wretch. No. Kreitman understood that Chas was playing a deeper game. She was returning feelinglessness for feelinglessness. Nyman in his ignorance may have thought he was picking up a handjob on the cheap; in fact he was having his characterlessness dismanded by an expert.

  Kreitman knew. It had been done to him.

  And now he wanted to see if he could dispossess Chas of her irony and make her love him for himself.

  Nothing cold about that premeditation. Nothing of his daughter’s calculated installations. And nothing of the elegantly symmetric quid pro quo urged by Chas’s demented husband. Heated at the coolest of times, Kreitman’s body exhaled its own silhouette upon the moor-chilled window of the hotel. Suddenly alive to every sexual rebuff Chas had delivered him over half a lifetime, including turning up her nose at purses and threatening him with the RSPCA, Kreitman burned with an old and yet pristine desire for her.

  Nice sex?

  Finally he was convinced. Nice sex? OK, he’d try some.

  Only when he got back into bed and tossed aside the bedclothes did it occur to him to wonder where – since he could definitely locate Chas and Nyman – Charlie Merriweather and Hazel had got to.