Any fool could have given him the answer to that. They were in another county, on another coast, consoling each other for their several cruel rejections, entwined like unhappy children frightened of the dark, engaging in some nice sex of their own.
At least that’s how it felt to Hazel.
For Charlie, on the other hand, it was wildness come at last.
Book II
Chapter One
Carnival in Jermyn Street.
The July sun shining, the cheese shops boisterous, the SALE signs up in every shirtmaker’s window, and on the footpaths trestle tables behind which girls in regatta boaters, blouses striped gayer than a barber’s pole, and skirts red enough to madden half the bulls in Pamplona, pour strawberried champagne for whoever has the time to stop.
Inside, clutching nine SALE shirts to his chest – three for one hundred pounds, nine for two hundred and seventy-five – Charlie Merriweather watches two shirt-sharp black Gatsbys snapping up phosphorescent ties – three for fifty. One of the men gathers the ties he wants in his fist, like flowers. The other drapes them over his arm, periodically pausing to inspect the colours, as though his aim is to complete the prismatic spectrum. Occasionally he shakes his head and puts a tie back on the rack. Charlie smiles at them over his shirts. He is a bit of a black man himself right now. Juiced up. Flamboyant. The lover of a woman who shows her legs, another man’s wife whose nipples jab at her cardigan, an incontestable statement – two incontestable statements – that she is a woman roused.
Are nine shirts enough? More to the point, are they the right shirts? ‘You’ll buy your own,’ she’s told him. ‘I’m not doing any of that mothering nonsense you’ve been used to. You’ll choose your own, just stay away from purple and yellow stripes. You were never a member of the Conservative Cabinet and you’ve never looked after pigs. And see if you can find some ties that don’t have regimental insignia on them.’
He can. Phosphorescent ties. The colour of blood and wine. Three for fifty, nine for one hundred and thirty-five.
They’re dressing each other from scratch. She’s got him out of farm clothes and he’s buying her lingerie. Neither wants the other to own anything from before. It’s like a rebirth for both of them. ‘Take off the lot,’ she told him the first time, in sight of the Porlock sea. ‘And your wristwatch. And your wedding ring.’ He’d never been more naked. He shivered. He wanted to cry, and wondered whether that would make him more naked still. He asked her permission. ‘No, not tears,’ she said. ‘I don’t like tears in men.’ She wanted to cry herself, so long had it been since any man, clothed or naked, had trembled in her presence.
She touched his chest lightly. His skin was so tight she feared she might put a hole in him, pierce him and blow him apart. The poor man! She was careful only to lay the flats of her hands on him. Nothing sharp. Nothing sudden. And he pushed into the flatness of her hands like a dog, showing how trusting he was, and how grateful.
She imagined he would feel guilty when it was all over, reach for his clothes and jam himself back into his wedding ring. ‘Oh, God, Chas!’ she expected him to say. ‘What have I done! My poor wife!’ She had as good as kidnapped him, after all. Found him, after dinner – after a dinner from which Chas had for some reason excluded him, leaving just the two women to slurp soup in company with Nyman – bundled him into her car, not told him where they were going, because she had not known where they were going, just somewhere as far away as possible from a husband who disgusted her and a boy who was playing mind games with her and who disgusted her with herself. God knows, Charlie would have been within his rights to take what she was offering and then go into the usual male revulsion routine. Maybe she even hoped he would. Be guilty and be gone. In and out in the manner favoured by her husband. Not that she could imagine Kreitman ever saying, ‘My poor wife!’ But then come the event, neither did Charlie. Not a word of it. Could such a thing be? The phrase ‘Poor Chas’ hung in the air right enough – whether or not she had got her comeuppance for flirting like a mad thing with Nyman all evening – but strange to say the only person who was thinking it seemed to be Hazel!
Sisters under the skin, suddenly. ‘Poor Chas!’ Hypocritical of me, Hazel thought. But there you go. I have stolen your husband, I have betrayed our friendship, I have ruined your marriage … Whatever! Back to thinking about the man.
So much of what Charlie did and said was unfamiliar to her that she felt she had stumbled upon a hitherto undiscovered gender. He beamed, for one. Did men beam after sex? He glowed. He gave out light. He put his hands on her face and kissed her eyes. He told her she was lovely and that she’d saved his life. That was extreme, wasn’t it? Then he leaned back on the pillows with his hands behind his head, the hairs under his arms soft and gingery – not wiry, not man-hard – and said, ‘I can’t tell you, I just can’t tell you. I feel like a blind man who has had his sight restored.’ Then he kissed her eyes a second time, told her he loved her – which was certainly extreme – and started to shiver and tremble again.
That was when she realised they might be able to do something for each other, beyond this one night.
You fool, Hazel, she thought. But hope swept through her like a fire and she didn’t want to put it out.
When he moved in with her, a few days later, she burned all his clothes except for one outfit in which he could go out and re-wardrobe himself. They had a sacrificial bonfire on the lawn – stoking the flames – with the girls watching from their bedroom windows. Juliet put a finger to her brains and twisted it. Screwy. Cressida put two fingers to her brains and blew them out. But neither of those gestures, of course, was meant to be judgemental.
Charlie wanted to throw a reciprocal bonfire for her clothes, before Hazel explained it wasn’t so simple for a woman. And anyway, some of her clothes were worth keeping. But she allowed him to do the new-underwear thing. That his taste turned out to be identical to her husband’s didn’t come as any shock to her. Underwear sorted the men from the boys, allowing that there were only boys. Charlie may have been of a hitherto undiscovered gender, but all genders have their young and Charlie was still a stripling. She said no to an ankle chain but otherwise went along with his wishes, whistling through her teeth (to keep up her courage) at the sight of herself trussed like a Christmas bird again. Do I look ridiculous? she wondered. Can I trust him to tell me if I look ridiculous? Does it matter?
The girls couldn’t help her in this. The girls belonged to a generation that had skipped lingerie, leaving Hazel with the strange sensation that she had been a tarty piece twice over, and her daughters never at all. Then she remembered – her daughters had irony. You can have lingerie or you can have irony. It is not out of the question to wear lingerie ironically – over your clothes, for example, postmodernly, as a joke against itself—but something told her Charlie wouldn’t have wanted that. Pleasing a man again, was she? Back to floaty? Hair soon to resume the halo of a startled lion’s mane? She shook her head over what she saw in the mirror. The recidivist I am! Hopeless, I am a hopeless case. I have not learned a single lesson. I might as well be seventeen still.
But something was different. She racked her brains to find it. Happy, that was it – she was happy. Which meant that this time she could forgive herself. Leave herself alone. She was who she was. And she hadn’t been who she was for a long time. Maybe she hadn’t been who she really was ever. Careful, Hazel, she told herself. No fool like an old fool. But what could she do? She was happy. She had hope. And if hope makes a fool of us, then let us all be fools.
Deciding that twelve shirts will give him a better percentage chance of getting at least a couple right, Charlie Merriweather goes looking again for his collar size – double cuffs, long sleeves, no purple and yellow stripes – and all but knocks over Marvin Kreitman labouring under a dozen of his own. The two men open their mouths simultaneously, simultaneously flush scarlet and simultaneously turn away. Fuelled by champagne, a hysteria has gripped the shirt-buyers; they are not qui
te pulling garments from one another’s hands, as the hair-netted harridans of popular culture did in the first great January sales of post-rationing Britain, but you don’t dare take too long to make a decision, or you lose out. Who would have thought that men, with their philosophic indifference to goods, would become more obsessive sales addicts, more ferocious squirrellers and snatchers, than women ever were. Nothing to do with saving money, either. The sales just an excuse to acquire. What a gas! If we were still friends, Kreitman thinks, we would pretend to fight each other for our shirts; we would see the funny side of this. Charlie Merriweather thinks the same. But they are fighting each other for their wives, or they have fought each other for their wives, and though in a sense both might be said to have won, or at least to be winning, there is no funny side to it for either of them.
The swap has not worked out the way they wanted it?
Difficult to say, given that they wanted it differently, and that one of them believes he never really wanted it at all. And these are early days yet. They are both nursing tender shoots. They both are tender shoots. But having done the deed, having murdered their marriages where they slept, the two men have no more to say to each other in the aftermath than those who took a dagger to King Duncan.
On top of that, Kreitman is not amused to see Charlie Merriweather shopping where he has always shopped.
Bravado, again, of course. What Kreitman would like to do is put his arms out and wind Charlie into them. But he doesn’t know how to do that.
It is working out easier for Charlie and Hazel than for Marvin and the other Charlie. Perhaps Charlie and Hazel were always the needier, if only in the sense that they’d been growing the crazier – Charlie with sexual curiosity, Hazel with sexual grievance. And because they initiated what happened, taking what happened to date from the hour Hazel kidnapped Charlie from the grounds of the hotel, they are not the ones left looking, ever so slightly, the victims of event.
Over a funereal breakfast at the Baskervilles the morning after, Kreitman had put it to the remaining Charlie that charlies were what they’d been made to look.
She had shown him a steely face. ‘He’s been putting the hard word on my sister,’ she’d said. ‘What is more my children know about it. That’s the unforgivable crime. Where he is now and who he’s charvering is incidental. I don’t care. I never want to speak to him again.’
‘It might not be incidental to me,’ Kreitman informed her. Then, so there should be no mistake, ‘I might care who he’s charvering.’
Charvering? Not a word that came naturally to him. But then what did nature have to do with any of this?
Charlie laughed a bitter laugh. ‘That’ll be the day,’ she said.
Kreitman sought her eyes and swallowed back his answer, as though to let her glimpse a corner of his caringness she knew nothing of. ‘And you too,’ he said, ‘care more than you’re pretending.’
She shook her head. ‘No, I don’t. A little silliness is one thing, asking Dotty for a fuck so publicly the whole of London knows about it, is another. I thought he was happy.’
‘He was happy and he wasn’t. Fidelity does that.’
‘Your company does that.’
Kreitman touched her hand. ‘Don’t lay it on me, Charlie. I wasn’t instrumental in this. It wells up every now and then, that’s all. You can’t stop it. It spills over. It isn’t personal. You of all people should know that.’
‘Me of all people?’
Too soon, Kreitman decided. ‘I mean, you’ve seen it with Dotty. There just comes a time.’
‘Then let him have his time with Hazel… if Hazel’s the best he can do now that Dotty’s knocked him back.’
Kreitman made a halt sign with his hand. Go no further, Chas.
She ignored the warning. ‘This morning of all mornings, Marvin, you can’t expect me to be respectful to that tub of lard you call your wife.’
‘Chas!’
‘Don’t Chas me. A wronged woman has her rights. If Hazel wants him, let Hazel handle the spillage, that’s what I’m saying. But he’s much mistaken if he thinks he can come waddling back to me when his time’s up. I no longer want him. You can tell him that when you next have one of your fourteen-hour lunches.’
How upset was she? How cataclysmically upset? Kreitman couldn’t tell. She was furious – that tub of lard you call your wife was hardly calm or just, God knows. But then who’s ever measured in their views of the trollop humping their husband? And she was fraught, though that could just as well have been the aftermath of the other thing. The thing that had kept him up half the night and her up he didn’t know how much longer. Sex interfered with upset, he knew that. It skewed it temporarily. First, you have to have no sex, then you can think about being upset. First, she had to get the taste of Nyman’s tongue out of her mouth, assuming it had got that far. But when she’d done that, how upset would she be?
‘I don’t believe you really think you can live without Charlie,’ he said.
‘Can’t wait. Just watch me.’
‘That’s braggadocio.’
‘Is it? I don’t think so. He’s been weird for so long it will be a relief. I always thought life without Charlie would be insupportable. But maybe what I was actually thinking was that life without me would be insupportable for him. Well, fuck him! Now I need to think about me. It wells up, Marvin, as you say. It spills over.’
Kreitman considered that. ‘How will you write your books?’ he wondered, after a decent interval of time.
She looked at the chandelier. ‘Balls to our books!’ she said.
Amen to that, Kreitman thought. Let’s drink to that. Balls to all baby books!
‘I think I’ve had it with collaborations, anyway,’ she went on.
‘It’s served you well.’
‘Depends how you measure. I don’t feel well served. Anyway, the money’s not in our sort of books any more. Lower-middle-class magic’s back.’
Kreitman wasn’t thinking about money or magic. ‘Then again,’ he persisted, ‘you could always collaborate with someone else?’
‘Oh, yes … ?’ For a moment she wondered if he was thinking of himself. ‘Who would that be?’
‘The faggot.’
‘What faggot?’
‘Nyman.’
‘Don’t be absurd.’
‘It’s surely not that absurd. You’ve been collaborating with him fine for most of this weekend.’
She decided against putting marmalade on her toast. ‘From you … From you, Marvin Kreitman,’ she said, pointing her knife at him, ‘I’d have expected better!’
‘Better?’
She met his eyes. Hers viridiscent, a little like the burnish on a spring onion, a little the colour of cheese mould, his blacker than squashed berries, and too crooked, you would have thought, to see straight with. They both looked terrible, sleepless and bedraggled. Kreitman unshaven, in a collarless Hindu shirt that didn’t suit him. Chas in something from Kathmandu, tighter than a pea pod, and with too many toggles. And clown’s trousers. And woollen socks.
‘I’d have expected you to be a little more sophisticated in the matter of a man and woman going for a midnight stroll,’ she said.
A midnight stroll, was it? ‘Well, you know what they say – ’ he said, although nobody he knew had ever said it – ‘sophistication nips out the back door once jealousy enters through the front.’
She made a playground face. ‘I’d like to see you jealous, Marvin Kreitman,’ she said. ‘I’d like to see you trying to work out which facial muscles to pull. I bet you wouldn’t even know which colour to turn.’
‘Green.’
‘You’ve mugged up on it.’
‘Not so. It came to me in the night.’
‘While you were sitting up waiting for Hazel to return? Ha! Serves you right. I’d say good for her for getting her own back, if she didn’t happen to be getting it back with my husband.’
‘Nothing to do with Hazel. To do with you. I was at my window,
playing gooseberry …’
She flushed, red on gold like a little fire in the hayrick. ‘Marvin! You had the bad manners to watch?’
His turn now to make a playground face. Naughty Marvin. ‘No choice,’ he said.
‘Of course you had a choice. You could have drawn the curtains.’
‘And missed the moon on the moor?’
Still burning, she laughed. No, she essayed a laugh. ‘You’re a pervert.’
‘I try to be. But it wasn’t pervery. That’s to say it wasn’t primarily pervery.’
‘What primarily was it?
‘What do you think?’
‘Idleness.’
‘Nostalgia.’
She wouldn’t rise to that. She wouldn’t go that far back. One night at a time. ‘It wells up,’ was all she’d say.
‘So how come he isn’t breakfasting?’
Nyman? She shrugged. How should she know? Was she her lover’s keeper? Not that Nyman was by any manner of means her lover. ‘I suspect,’ she said, ‘that he left early. It’s a long way to cycle.’
‘You didn’t spend the night together, then?’ The minute he heard himself put the question, Kreitman realised how infantile the question was. No more baby books, but any amount of baby curiosity.
Charlie pushed her plate aside, put her elbows on the table and clasped her hands. She might have been interviewing him. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I am in some distress. I am not always responsible for what I do when I’m in distress. You of all people’ – she made little quotation marks with her fingers – ‘should know that.’
Kreitman inclined his head, baring his neck.
‘I don’t know why you’re pretending to be jealous,’ she went on, ‘or even interested. You never have been before. But you too, I know, must be in distress. You’ll pretend otherwise, but you must be. If you want to know about Nyman, I’ll tell you. He happened on me at the wrong moment – wrong for me, right for him, you might say. Afterwards he asked if he could come back to my room. I told him I had a husband. He told me he thought I probably didn’t. Then he told me he had no home to go to and asked if I’d put him up in Richmond for a while. I told him no. Then he asked if I would loan him money. I told him no. Then he asked me if I thought Hazel wanted him. I told him I had no idea. Then he asked me if I would mind if he went to Hazel. I told him he should check with Hazel’s husband not with me. He said he thought she probably didn’t have a husband either. I told him I didn’t care what he thought or what he did. He told me he just wanted to be sure he wasn’t hurting my feelings. Jesus, Marvin …’ Here Charlie ran her fingers through her hair, as though all her vexations might be there and she couldn’t wait to comb them out. ‘Jesus Christ – your sex!’
Who's Sorry Now? Page 15