Who's Sorry Now?

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘I am ill with grief over my husband,’ she told Dotty, ‘and this guy keeps ringing me up and asking me out. But I’m well aware you’re not the person to be saying this to.’

  They had been to The Mikado – ‘Just take me to see anything, just get me away from the house,’ Chas had begged her sister – and now they were sitting in the American Bar at the Savoy, drinking burgundy, picking at olives and looking striking. The Juniper girls up from the country, smelling of hay, but with the sun in their hair.

  ‘And who’s the guy?’ Dotty asked.

  ‘There you are! That’s not the question you’re meant to ask, Dotty. You’re so sideways. A sister shouldn’t be sideways.’

  ‘How should a sister be?’

  ‘Straight.’

  Dotty crossed her legs, rattling her sequins, and sat back in her chair, her chest out. (Incapable of not flirting, Chas thought, even with me.) ‘This straight enough for you? Now what’s the question I’m meant to ask?’

  ‘Why am I ill with grief for my husband.’

  ‘And why are you?’

  ‘Oh, Dotty, what a question. Twenty-three years!’

  Dotty opened her eyes very wide, not because she was surprised by the amount of time her sister and her brother-in-law had been together but because she had read that opening her eyes wide for long periods prevented crow’s feet. ‘All the more reason for accepting it’s over,’ she said. ‘A hundred years ago you’d have been dead already. Victorian expectations of one marriage to one man no longer apply. It’s mortality that decides morality. Always has been. A woman of the twenty-first century can expect to live until she’s eighty-five at least. With your constitution you’ll probably make it to a hundred and five. That means you’ll need a minimum – a minimum, Charlie! – of three husbands. Let this one go. Divorce him and marry this other guy. Who is he?’

  ‘You forget that we were more than husband and wife. More than friends even. We collaborated. Twenty-seven books! It wasn’t me who used to say we were a marriage of true minds, it was Charlemagne.’

  Dotty uncrossed her legs, winnowing with light the sequins on her antique dress. One of their grandmother’s. Chas noticed that Dotty had taken to wearing these more and more often lately, as though needing to clothe her forward behaviour in the garments of a more withdrawn time. A proof, Chas believed – and this was a belief she held dearly to – that modern women like her sister only affected abandon, while in their hearts they remained as self-restrained as their grandmothers. This affectation was what Chas meant by silliness. On the other hand she could see that Dotty was looking very beautiful tonight, that she was enjoying showing the room (and the waiters) her sequins (and her legs), that the burgundy which she’d been drinking to excess had made her voice deep and that taken all round her silliness became her.

  But it wasn’t only to draw attention to herself that Dotty went on changing her position; she was also looking for a posture suggestive of confidentiality. ‘Listen to me, darling,’ she said. ‘The marriage of true minds you speak of was also going down the plughole. It’s not for me to pry but I bet your sales have been plummeting. What do you expect? You’ve been stuck in the eighties for years. Your other half was bom stuck in the eighties – the eighteen eighties. He was making you stale, Charlie. He was holding you back.’

  ‘Everybody’s sales are plummeting,’ Charlie said.

  ‘Not true. I can name some whose sales are soaring.’

  ‘Please don’t,’ Charlie said.

  ‘I wouldn’t be so crude.’

  ‘I mean, please don’t go on with this subject.’ She was annoyed. Suddenly she could detect the agitating influence of the malicious boy-of-letters with the frayed cuffs, the true face of Dotty’s silliness. She could hear the Publishers Weekly pillow talk – ‘That sister of yours is on a bit of a loser with that husband, wouldn’t you say? Have you seen their sales figures recently? Not that they ever were much cop as a writing team, but at least they had the ear of the market once, when every child was a Little Lord Fauntleroy. How come no one’s told them the Fauntleroys have died out? No wonder the big clown is after a piece of you. You’re his last chance to enter the modern world. That’s if he has anything left to enter you with …’

  Following her thoughts, part of the way at least, Dotty uncrossed her legs, her sequins hissing like a snake, and put her arms round her sister. ‘Face facts, darling,’ she said. ‘All good collaborations come to an end. Think of… I don’t know … help me … Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.’

  ‘I’m surprised you go so far back culturally any more,’ Chas said. ‘I’d have imagined, given the circles you move in now, that Wham! would have been the first example that sprung to mind.’

  Dotty looked at the ceiling and comically pretended to tap her brow. Actually tapping her brow would have broken the skin. ‘Who’s Wham!?’ she said. Then she signalled the wine waiter for more burgundy. ‘Oh, Charlie,’ she said, ‘you don’t think Whami’s of now, do you?’

  Charlie shrugged. ‘I’m not the one who’s desperate to keep up,’ she said.

  ‘And I can’t help it if I attract young men,’ Dotty retorted. ‘It runs in the family.’

  ‘Dotty, it does not!’

  ‘Oh, doesn’t it! And Mummy?’

  ‘What about Mummy? You’re not going to give me that coalman routine again.’

  ‘Never mind the coalman, what about Tony Almond?’

  ‘I’ve never heard of Tony Almond. You’ve made him up. Mummy would never have gone near a man called Tony Almond. It’s a hairdresser’s name.’

  ‘Not quite. He was a wine merchant. Half Mummy’s age. He had that shop in the high street with all the vintage whiskies in the window. Almond’s. He used to help Mummy choose her Christmas wine.’

  ‘Took her down to his wine cellars, I suppose?’

  ‘That’s exactly what he did. Every Christmas until she was too old to negotiate the stairs. Then he just closed the shop for the afternoon.’

  ‘Dotty, how come you know all these things and I don’t?’

  ‘Mummy confided in me. She wouldn’t tell you because she thought you were a prude. “Charlie would just say I was being silly,” she said. But I can see you don’t want to believe me. Suit yourself. I find it helps, knowing I’m following in Mummy’s footsteps. Keeping up the grand Juniper tradition. I wish you’d do the same.’

  ‘Mummy was a Dunmore, not a Juniper.’

  Dotty inverted her lips. ‘You’ll go to the grave a pedant, Charlie.’

  Charlie crossed her arms on the little table and slumped her head on them. Could Dotty be telling the truth? Was any of it the truth? Had her mother really gone down into his cellar with the wine merchant? Even just the once? Even just for fun? And did it matter one iota if she had?

  Grandma too, whose coruscations Dotty did not scruple to borrow – what about Grandma and Leonard Woolf?

  Not to mention herself; only think what she was capable of, simply out of incompetent politeness, or raging grief.

  When she looked up she was surprised to find that her own thoughts had taken an inconsequent turn. ‘Would you forgive him?’ she asked.

  ‘Tony Almond?’

  ‘Don’t be an ass, Dotty. My husband.’

  ‘What do you want me to say, Charlie?’

  ‘I don’t want you to say anything. Would you forgive him?’

  Dotty opened her eyes wide, made a letter box of her mouth, looked at her reflection in the wine that had just arrived, shook out her sequins and sighed. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. And not because he’s fucking that slack cow, but because he demeaned you by wandering around looking desperate. I’m surprised it took him so long to come on to me. Charlie, he was making a fool of you. His tongue was hanging out. He slobbered over everything that moved. Who wants to be with a man who can’t get himself laid?’

  Charlie would have liked to be able to open her own eyes wide, and make a letter box of her mouth, but her eyes were small and wet with tears, a
nd her mouth was shut fast with unhappiness. ‘Was it really as bad as that?’ she asked.

  ‘Worse. I’m sorry, darling – and don’t forget I was very fond of Charlemagne myself – but it was ghastly. You’d have been better off with a fucker.’

  ‘Like Marvin Kreitman?’

  The sisters exchanged a long look. ‘Out of the frying pan into the fire,’ Dotty said.

  ‘Come on. You said I’d have been better off with a fucker. Have the courage of your convictions. Would I have been happier with Marvin Kreitman?’

  ‘I didn’t say you’d have been happier with a fucker, I said better off, less demeaned.’

  ‘So would I have been less demeaned with Kreitman?’

  Dotty thought about it. ‘He’s a bit of a throwback.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘He’s a sort we thought we were rid of. I feel a certain nostalgia for the type myself, but I can see that his was a virus we needed to knock out. Are you telling me there’s about to be another outbreak of him?’

  ‘Dotty, will you be straight! Would I have been less demeaned married to a man like Kreitman, whether or not he was fucking every woman in sight, than I was – than you say I was – married to a man who was visibly dying of not fucking anybody?’

  Dotty thought about it some more. She held an olive out before her lips for so long that Chas thought she was going to scream. ‘Jesus, Dotty!’ she cried. ‘Is this another of your facial exercises?’

  ‘I will conscientiously answer your question,’ Dotty said.

  ‘When? Next week? Next year?’

  ‘Now.’

  ‘And … ?’

  Dotty swallowed her olive and looked long into her sister’s eyes. ‘God help any woman who has to make that choice,’ she said.

  Waiting for her to call, Kreitman put on flamenco music – Lorca’s sore-throat cante jondo was what he loved, not the heel-clicking tourist rubbish – and lay on his bed listening to it all the day and half the night, drowning out the club opposite, the rasping melancholy of unrequitedness. How good sex was when you couldn’t get it! Why, on the night of their soul-searching, had he not frogmarched Charlie Merriweather out of the restaurant and over to Virgin Records on Oxford Street, bought him every piece of gypsy music in the store, and ordered him to go home and enjoy cultivating the exquisite art of doing without, instead of indulging his unseemly wondering and allowing it to bring them both to this pass?

  When he wanted a break from flamenco he played shove-halfpenny with himself, hours at a time. Exhausted by that, he challenged his computer to chess. Pissed off with losing, he dusted down some of his old college books and grew maudlin. Beginning his early married life in the most straitened circumstances, Francis Place had cautioned against cramped living quarters. ‘Nothing conduces so much to the degradation of a man and a woman …’ Well, there was no woman living in these cramped quarters, and in Kreitman’s view nothing conduced so much to a man’s degradation as that.

  Looking at himself in his bathroom mirror, he saw a lonely man. Was this the loneliest he’d ever been? Was he lonelier now than on that last lost night in Barcelona, heartbreak paella perfuming the cobbled streets and his hot fist stuffed with pesetas? Much lonelier. Then he could only guess what he was missing. Now he was in a position to count losses until his hair turned grey.

  There is some mischief in numbers. Waiting for you in the midst of plenty, zilch. The more Kreitman counted the less he had. So was that all he’d been amassing over so many years – nothing?

  Other than Charlie, who was not available to him at the moment, he had no male friends. It’s a choice you make: either you go chasing women or you have friends. There isn’t room for both. Kreitman’s women were his friends, which worked well, kept him in company, conversation and games of chess, so long as they remained his women. But he had no appetite for any of his women now, not since he’d watched Chas on her knees on the croquet lawn, in a black-mass mockery of prayer to a man for whom she had no regard. Some sights blind you to all others. Fix your gaze on Sodom and Gomorrah going up in sulphur on the Plain of Mamre and you turn to stone. Kreitman had disobeyed the injunctions of decency and wisdom and kept his curtains open. Only he hadn’t turned to stone; he’d turned to jelly.

  If he were tucking his grown-up daughters into bed and telling them what life had thrown at Marvin Kreitman next, they wouldn’t have been much impressed with the adult content of his story. ‘Now, when it’s too late, you’re telling us fairy stories. In the catalogue of contemporary carnalities, Daddy, touching someone’s dick is not that mega.’

  Where had he been, their old man? What would he say if they told him about a triple anal?

  It was true. He knew it. He had stood at the window, aghast, watching not that much happening. But how much had to happen? For Marvin Kreitman, sitting in a cinema and waiting for the twelve-foot kiss – just that, just two lips brushing – was a shattering experience. No matter how trashy the plot, no matter how cheesy the actors, he hung on the coming kiss in palpitating suspense – was it soon … was it near … was it now! And when at last it did come, it was as though he’d never seen one before: it dried up his mouth, soaked the collar of his shirt, bound steel hoops around his chest. Try breathing now, Kreitman!

  No small thing, a kiss, whatever happened next. And as for reaching out for body parts …

  In the end it’s all about susceptibility to shock. If it feels rude, it is rude. Call it wonderment. The wonderment of rude. Some of us never have it, some of us don’t know how to keep it. Chas had it and so far Chas had kept it. That was enough for Kreitman. He had looked out on to the moor, seen consciousness of rude and gone up in flames.

  Who among those he’d been fucking for dear life only a month before – he’d show them triple anal! – could lodge anything in his head to rival Chas giving wonder? Ooshi in her rubber corset, playing the dominatrix with one eye on the clock? ‘Beg, Kreitman!’ Erica wetting his ear with what she’d done with other women? ‘Then I … then she … then I … after which we …’ Forget it. Yes, he’d begged abjectly enough in his time – ‘Please, Ooshi, oh God no, oh God yes, not that, yes that!’ Sure, he’d urged Erica on in her flagging fantasies – ‘You didn’t, you couldn’t, you never!’ But their day was over. They were bored with him and he was bored with them. Who started it didn’t matter. They’d lost the trick of rude. They were too overt, too seamlessly the thing they were. They weren’t respectable and lewd. They weren’t confident and gauche. They didn’t have fault lines running through them, on one side of which they kicked husbands off the premises, like queens of infinite space, and on the other pronounced prick as though it were the brand name of a tuck-shop lolly. No fault line, no desire; and if he no longer desired them (or, indeed, they him) there was no point seeing them. Here was the catch in his erotic reasoning. His social life waited on his dick. His dick waited on his imagination. So if his imagination was not stirred, he ate alone.

  He rang his mother just once, then put the phone down. How was that for restraint! If ever there were a blame and kiss-it-better time, this was it, Kreitman up to his ears in his own bhuna chicken juices and reduced to playing chess with a computer. All your doing, Ma. Behold the glory and the ruination of your works! But Chas was the only person it excited him to blame for his decline and fall now. She was the woman in his life – let her fix it!

  He had to force himself to leave the flat. One morning he found himself being tailed by a ruby-red Smart driven by an African chauffeur. It took him ten minutes of quickening then reducing his pace, and a further ten trying to work out who would be putting a detective on him – Hazel, obviously, but why? – before he remembered that the car and its chauffeur were his.

  ‘Maurice, I’d forgotten I had you,’ he said, when the driver wound down his window.

  ‘You should get out more, Mr Kreitman,’ the driver laughed.

  He got Maurice to take him the rounds of his furthest flung shops, Lewisham, Crystal Palace, Penge,
swinging back towards Putney via Thornton Heath and Wimbledon. Was this his life? He totted up what he amounted to – so many hundreds of Ander suitcases, so many thousands of Manchester United schoolbags, so many hundreds of thousands of coin-tray purses, still selling though you would have thought the penny-pinching bachelor gent who shuffled his coins on to the tray to inspect them, exactly as an ailing German will inspect his stools, was a thing of the past. Was it time for him, Kreitman, to have a coin-tray purse of his own? She loves me – shuffle, shuffle – she loves me not. She loves me …

  Because it gave him something to take his mind off himself he was pleased to walk into a staff problem at his West Norwood branch. An assistant not in the first flush of youth, nor in any sort of flush of presentableness, come to that – only West Norwood, you see – was taking a bag down from a shelf. The bag, unlike the assistant, was hard-edged, highly polished, brittle as a diamond, not cheap. ‘A good choice, madam,’ he overheard the assistant saying, ‘I’ve been thinking of buying that one for myself for weeks.’ He took her aside, though not aside enough, once the sale had fallen through. ‘Peggy,’ he said, ‘I mean this in the nicest way, but ask yourself why it would be a recommendation to a woman let’s say half your age and let’s guess twice your height, a woman with an air (I say no more than that) of having a degree from Oxford and from Cambridge and a house in every road in Dulwich, that the handbag on which her attention happens to have alighted is the very handbag chosen above all others for its fashionableness and elegance by you?’

  It came out ruder than he meant it to, but what help was there? The shop fell quiet. The grey-haired assistant blinked three times, lowered her head and disappeared into the stockroom. Kreitman followed, inhaling leather. He loved a stockroom. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I could have put that better.’

  ‘You could have put it to me in private, Mr Kreitman,’ she corrected him, sniffing.

  Kreitman took her point and apologised again. He had broken one of Francis Place’s three golden recollections to himself, and played the tyrant. And for no reason other than that he was love-sick and idle. In the days when he counted off his women he was considerate to his staff. Was being in love with one woman making a pig of him? He wondered if Peggy was going to hand in her notice and then sue him for unfair dismissal. Staff were no picnic any more. Hire a person to stuff travel bags with newspapers and you have taken on a responsibility as onerous as marriage. More. Easier to shed a wife than a sales assistant.