Who's Sorry Now?

by Howard Jacobson

  And it wasn’t him. It was her. Her and him. Them. Hazel knew her daughters. Had Kreitman brought a woman into the house they’d have hit the roof. But for Mummy to be shacked up with a new bloke was cool, even if the new bloke was only soppy Uncle Charles. So disgust wasn’t what motivated them to go to travelling. Not moral disgust, anyway. Aesthetic disgust was nearer the mark. They were not keen on how their mother was dressing for Charlie, and vice versa. Too short, the skirts. Too whispering, the dresses. Too pink and white, Uncle Charles’s chest, scarcely covered by his blue candlewick dressing gown, and too white and blue his unshod feet. Kreitman had been a model father as far as the decorum of the domestic wardrobe went: he wore leather slippers with a crest on them, silk pyjamas and a sort of pasha’s robe that tied around him twice. Sometimes he wore a smoking jacket. And on rare occasions a braided fez. Whatever was uncomfortable. As far as his daughters were concerned this made him a prize old fart, but a prize old fart was how your dad was meant to look. Uncle Charles on the other hand was getting about like a disreputable lodger their mother was knocking off on the side. That dressing gown! The one item in his wardrobe he had not let Hazel burn. At any moment, the girls feared, this appalling ancient garment was going to fall off his shoulders, unravel or undo, or he would simply omit, one fine morning, to wear it at all. And they were sufficiently Kreitman’s daughters not to want to be there when that happened. Gross – that was their verdict on the new situation. Gross and sad. But as they didn’t want to upset their mother by telling her that, they upped and left. Fingers crossed that by the time they returned Uncle Charles would have gone home to Aunty Chas and Mummy would be back wearing trousers.

  This couldn’t have suited Charlie better. With the girls gone, it was as if they had never been. No trace of them. How did some families do that? To remove the atmosphere of offspring from his house – his old house – you would have had to flood, earthquake and firebomb it. Twice. And even then a little dolly with a missing arm would surely have survived the flames.

  Wonderful, no matter how the effect had been achieved, to move about a space free of consequences. Free of memories as well, for there was no sign that Kreitman had once been here either. Every impression of him upholstered over. So non-repercussive did the place feel, so without recall or aftermath, it could just as well have been a brothel – not that Charlie had ever been inside a brothel – as a home. What was the opposite to nice sex? Nasty sex? No. Just sex from which nothing flowed or issued except more of itself. As long as Hazel wasn’t planning to flick it all away from him, Charlie believed he could at last count himself a happy and disreputable man.

  Whereas Hazel – what Hazel loved about Charlie was the aura he gave off of being domiciled. Had anyone charged her with upholstering away all memory of Kreitman she’d have flown into a rage. ‘Excuse me – he upholstered away all memory of himself. He was like a ghost, my husband. When he rose from a chair he left not a dent behind. When he looked in a mirror there was no reflection. He wasn’t here. He never lived here. Tell me I dreamed him and I’ll believe you. The only person you’ll find to vouch for Marvin Kreitman’s existence is his mother, and she’s a ghoul.’

  Charlie, on the other hand, left his imprint on everything and smelt of every chair he’d ever sat in. Kreitman had scoffed at Charlie for living bodilessly, for being embarrassed by his own skin. But Kreitman’s judgements were all erotic, and since the erotic life for Kreitman was situated between his ears, he was the last one to talk of incorporeality. Kreitman didn’t need a body; he propelled his penis with his mind. Poor Charlie may have been a bit behind the door sexually, but there was a body there to call on right enough.

  ‘I’m a fatherless girl,’ she told him. ‘I find it marvellous that when I wake up you’re still there.’

  So they both felt it. Wonder of wonders, they each disappeared dreading into the dark, and each woke grateful and relieved that the other had not gone.

  ‘Do that thing with your eyes,’ Charlie said.

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘That thing when you sneak a look across at me with everything upturned. That sly, peeping thing. Ascertaining that I haven’t crept away, but not wanting me to see that you’re checking. Like a child on Christmas Eve, keeping a lookout for her presents.’

  ‘Do I do that?’

  ‘Often.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘You do. I promise.’

  ‘That’s because I had no dad. No one to dress as Father Christmas. I always knew it was my mother creeping in.’

  ‘I’ll be your dad.’

  She looked alarmed. Like a child waiting for her presents to be taken away from her. ‘Don’t say that, Charlie.’

  He put his arms round her, folding her inside him. ‘I only mean that it touches me, the thing you do with your eyes.’

  ‘It doesn’t frighten you off?’

  ‘God, no. I love it. I love the way your eyes hold the light when you do it. I love the way they seem to steal all the light that’s in the room.’

  ‘They are lit with the light of you,’ she told him.

  Whereupon he kissed them, making them better.

  Wonder of wonders.

  Then, out of the blue, ‘Hey, why don’t we’ – Chas ringing Kreitman to suggest – ‘meet up at my health club?’

  Kreitman’s first instinct – to smell a rat. ‘I thought health clubs were single-sex institutions,’ he said.

  ‘Those are health farms. I’m talking about my gym.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had a gym.’

  ‘I have now.’

  ‘Why do you want me to meet you at a gym? Do they serve food there?’

  ‘I wonder why you associate seeing me with eating, Marvin.’

  ‘I associate seeing anybody with eating.’

  ‘I’m just “anybody”, then?’

  ‘If you were just anybody, Chas, I wouldn’t be in the state I’m in.’

  ‘What state are you in? Have you gone to pieces over me?’

  She’s hysterical, Kreitman thought. ‘I’m a wreck,’ he said.

  ‘That’s exciting. Tell me more.’

  More than hysterical. Hyperphasic.

  ‘About as exciting as an unweeded garden,’ he said. But he decided against mentioning the mould.

  ‘Then it sounds to me that a gym is just what you need.’

  ‘What will I have to do there?’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’ve never been to a gym.’

  ‘Not since school. Gym then was something everybody dreaded. It astounds me that these days people pay to go somewhere they once avoided like the plague. Will I be required to do handstands against wallbars?’

  ‘You can if you want, Charlie.’

  Charlie!

  ‘Marvin,’ he corrected her.

  She laughed her mistake away with a carillon of little bells, making nothing and everything of it. ‘Come tomorrow at ten,’ she said. ‘It’s quiet then. Do you have things?’

  ‘Things?’ Did she mean condoms?

  ‘Shorts, trainers …’

  ‘Those I’ll buy,’ Kreitman said. He had already mentally picked the bag he was going to carry his things in – South American leather, very soft, lots of zip pockets, with a tartan lining, on sale in his own shop right below him, a snip at three hundred and fifty smackers, but then it came to him at half that.

  She gave him the address. ‘Ten o’clock, then.’

  ‘Ten o’clock then. Oh, and Charlie, how will I recognise you?’

  ‘Has it been so long?’

  ‘An eternity.’

  She laughed, but didn’t hesitate. ‘I’ll be wearing a scarlet leotard.’

  As I dreaded, Kreitman thought.

  He slept badly. No man sleeps well before a prizegiving. Now that she was almost within his grasp – he didn’t mean that in any predatory sense, but her confusing her husband’s name with his did seem to signal some significant mental changing of the guard on her part – it was natural that
he should consult with himself on the question of whether or not he really prized or wanted her. What if he didn’t? If he didn’t, there was no explaining why he’d been moping about without the consolation of company all these weeks – but what if he didn’t? She seemed a responsibility, suddenly. A burden. You don’t take on lightly a woman whose husband has left her, a woman whose husband has left her for your wife and whose voice has risen to perilous heights. Chas normally had a loamy, vegetable contralto – soothing rather than thrilling, like being tucked up in a warm bed. Now her voice was skidding about the upper register, as though it were on ice skates. She sounded like a woman in need of support. Remembering his cat Cobbett, Kreitman wondered whether support was something he had it in him to provide.

  He was at the gym shortly before ten, his driver unable to resist a joke about the location. ‘You decided to take up bodybuilding, Mr Kreitman?’

  ‘Time to get a bit of fat off, Maurice,’ Kreitman said. He thought he caught Maurice grinning Africanly at his new overnighter.

  Chas wasn’t waiting for him in reception. They told him at the desk that she was already upstairs in the gym, but it wasn’t going to be as easy as nipping up to find her and having a quick run-around. First he had to enrol as a temporary member, choosing a full-peak, off-peak or semi-off-peak tariff, then he had to fill out a questionnaire about his health, then he had to have his photograph taken, then he had to swap a credit card for a key to the locker room and a towel, and even then they wouldn’t let him up in case he intended getting on to one of the machines prior to medical assessment and without supervision. An insurance thing. ‘I’ve got plenty of insurance of my own,’ Kreitman said. ‘But anyway, I promise I won’t go on anything. I still have a note in my pocket from my mother, forbidding me to climb on to anything mechanical. It’s held good for over thirty years. Trust me, I just want to talk to Mrs Charlie Merriweather. So far you’ve relieved me of the best part of three hundred pounds – that must buy me ten minutes of conversation. Please let me go up.’

  The unilluminated women at the desk – he would not have employed them, not even for West Norwood – took pity on themselves, rather than on him, for gyms are wordless places and Kreitman had already spoken more sentences in a minute than they heard here in a month. ‘That way’ – pointing him in the direction of the locker rooms. Not like school showers, no echoing tiles, no rotting timber draining boards for feet, none of that hot badger’s-lair smell of what, before the advent of trainers, they used to call pumps; but still the old discomfort around undressing in the company of people of the same sex. The woman didn’t exist before whom Kreitman wouldn’t, in the blinking of an eye, display his genitals. How many had seen them? How many hundreds? How many thousands, even? In Ispagna … mille e tre. But men, no. To men he remained a secret. Nor did he want to see theirs. Nor their buttocks, though that was the way men generally made it easy on one another, effecting a three-quarter turn so that any genitalia you got, you got in profile; otherwise innocuous rump. Except it never was. Very shocking to Kreitman, the plump wire-haired backside of a man. Naked with one another, men were too naked. Kreitman found them frightening. What they found him was another matter. A man who did not use his mouth like other men? Automatically, he undressed as he’d last undressed as a schoolboy, keeping his shirt on till last, then sliding his shorts on under that.

  Chas laughed when she saw him. Pressed polo sweatshirt, socks with a horizontal blue stripe in them pulled halfway to his knees, clumping snow-white trainers the size of moon boots. And still carrying his leather overnighter.

  ‘You look ready for anything …’ she noted, ‘… except exercise.’

  ‘I haven’t come here for exercise,’ he reminded her, going over to where she was langlaufing like a mad woman, beating eggs with both hands.

  She pushed buttons on her machine and slowed down. A bank of numbers appeared on the dial, followed by a heart, lit up and pounding. She had high colour in her cheeks, no doubt from the exertion. But also, Kreitman thought, from hypermania. He was surprised to recall that he hadn’t seen her since she’d driven him home from Dartmoor in a knitted hat (her in a knitted hat), with so much left unsaid between them. So how was she looking after all this time, other than perfervid? Was he still in love with her, after weeks and weeks of imagining, now that she was flesh again?

  The other and perhaps more important question to ask – was she at all (never mind still) in love with him?

  One phrase will suffice for both: Who knows.

  What counted was that from this moment they felt locked into it: they had talked of meeting, they had toyed with meeting and now they had actually met – to go backwards from that would have been more tiresome than to go on.

  ‘I’m sorry about the way I look,’ Kreitman said, offering to read her mind.

  ‘Is that another way of saying you’re sorry about the way I look?’ Chas said, reading his.

  He took her in. Hair pulled up in a fairground-coloured alligator clip, cheeks on fire, chest flat under a taut white body garment whose manufacturer’s label was out and which must have stud-fastened under the crotch, given how lumpy the crotch appeared to be, legs spidery, with too much space between them, and that superabundance of gusset and seam that makes you avert your face when you see it on little girls kitted out for the ballet. How did she look? Shit was how she looked. But who was he to talk? They both looked shit, just like the last time they’d met. Was that their fate, always to look shit for each other?

  But if he’d wanted smart he could have stuck with Erica, couldn’t he. Not a fold or seam awry anywhere on Erica. Not a label showing. Ditto Hazel, who went to the gym once in a blue moon, carrying a little too much weight certainly, grown top-heavy over the years (though definitely no tub of lard), but always nicely coordinated and zesty, still capable of turning heads. And Ooshi in running shorts – taking it as read that unshaven legs kindled wild desire in other men as well – was a sight to make an atheist believe in divine purpose. But Kreitman wanted none of those. Kreitman wanted Chas.

  ‘You look the way I hoped you’d look,’ he lied, and when she peered down her nose at him quizzically, as though over spectacles, though she wore no spectacles for the gym, then extended her long milkmaid’s arms (at the end of which her little afterthought hands, denuded, he noticed, of all rings) – a handshake was what she gave him, not a kiss, her pumping cheesemaker’s handshake – he realised he wasn’t lying at all. He did like the way she looked – she, Chas, as opposed to what she had capitulated to, her unspeakable end-of-civilisation aerobic-wear – liked her because she was contradictory, droll and solemn, stern and wicked, capable of everything that was opposite to her nature. The old fault line.

  And she?

  Terrified.

  Terrified of what she was doing. Terrified of herself, of her own temerity. Terrified of him.

  Hard to credit, watching him on the treadmill while she flailed for another fifteen minutes across Norway, a man so unrhythmic, so unaccustomed to any bodily exertion except the little of it imposed by lovemaking, that the slightest unevenness in the revolutions of the rubber tread he toiled along, like Mother Courage, made his head spin and his balance precarious – hard to credit that such a man could inspire terror in anyone. But yes, she was afraid of him. It was possible she had chosen to meet him in the gym precisely so she could put him at a disadvantage and see him at his least fearsome. If so, it didn’t help. His reputation came before him. He was unreliable. He was a man who let you down, whatever he looked like on a treadmill. He made promises he couldn’t keep. ‘It’s not as though I don’t know what I’ll be letting myself in for,’ she e-mailed Dotty, only the day before she asked Kreitman out, supposing you could call this ‘out’. ‘And I am not so naive as to suppose I can be the one to change him.’

  ‘Which doesn’t stop you from supposing you just might be,’ Dotty e-mailed back.

  ‘Are you laughing at me?’ Chas typed.

  ‘No. I think
you should have a good time and hang the consequences,’ Dotty promptly replied.

  ‘Which are bound to be dreadful?’

  ‘Dire, darling. Have fun.’

  So fun was what Chas had logged off and decided to have.

  Chapter Three

  He took her to a trade fair.

  Fun? He’d show her fun.

  ‘We can drive or we can fly or we can get the train,’ he told her.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Harrogate.’

  ‘Then let’s turn it into an adventure. Let’s go by train.’

  ‘What you have to understand,’ he explained, over a Great North Eastern breakfast, ‘is that there are trade fairs and trade fairs. Some I go to are dedicated leather goods and luggage shows – the hard-core, big-name stuff, Globetrotter and Constellation cases down one row, Longchamps, Picard, shocking-pink Pollini clutch bags made out of ostrich up another. Some are fashion events which also do accessories – good for off-the-wall items, copper-mesh evening bags, chain-mail belts, silk purses made out of sows’ ears. Where we’re going is more of a gift fair, which encompasses just about everything, even arts and crafts.’

  ‘Are those sops to my rural origins?’ Chas asked.

  ‘Not at all. They are calculated insults to the memory of my cosmopolitan father. He made it a point of honour never to have anything handmade on his stall – “You call it handmade, I call it drek,” was how he charmingly put it. So I make it a counter-point of honour to dabble in a little tooled leather when I can. It sells sometimes, as well, amazingly enough. Even in Wimbledon you get the occasional backwoodswoman. And now, of course, there’s line dancing.’

  ‘It astonishes me just to hear you say the word craft,’ she said, ‘let alone to discover you actually stock it. I thought it was a point of honour with you that everything you sold had to have the stitching inside?’

  ‘And cost a million pounds?’

  ‘At least.’

  He smiled sourly at her. She thought him slick. Glitzy. A pedlar of overwrought merchandise for Saudi Arabians or women of the Cosa Nostra. It was an underlying grievance in his relations with the Charlies that they had always backed away from the facts of how he earned his living, much as if he’d been a shyster lawyer or a moneylender. Every marketing detail of every book they’d ever written he’d lived through with them – titles, covers, reviews, awards. ‘Look, what do you think?’ Charlie used to come charging down the stairs to cry, holding aloft the latest volume, before the Kreitmans had even got their coats off. ‘New illustrator. Yes or no?’ But if Kreitman so much as mentioned briefcases the Merriweathers would suddenly smell something burning in the kitchen, or remember a stranded child they had to pick up. Don’t get him wrong – he didn’t want to talk shop, he wanted to talk Kultur – that was the whole point of dining at the Merriweathers once a fortnight – but a little quid pro quo wouldn’t have gone amiss. Once in a while they might have expressed concern that a consignment of hand-painted lipstick cases from Gujarat had gone missing in the earthquake, or bothered to remember that Kreitman had launched a new line of mobile-phone cases in the finest kidskin, designed exclusively for his shops by him – ‘So how are they going, Marvin?’ they hadn’t asked. He wasn’t looking for a major conversation, just the small change of amicable enquiry. Nor was he looking, quite, for social acceptance – unless he was.