Who's Sorry Now?

by Howard Jacobson

  She climbed up the ladder to him and they kissed. ‘That’s so sweet of you,’ she said. ‘I know how much a clear fridge door matters to you.’

  But in truth clear fridge doors no longer mattered a jot to him. They had gone out the window with the rest of his prejudices. All he wanted now was to exchange nursery-letter messages of love with Chas on every appliance in his kitchen. The moral infection of nice had claimed him.

  ‘Soon,’ Chas said, ‘you’ll be buying me a bear.’

  So he went out and bought her a bear.

  He couldn’t keep it up for ever, of course. One day Chas found I WOULDN’T HALF MIND SLIPPING YOU ONE TONIGHT on the stainless-steel extractor hood. She pretended to shed a furtive tear. ‘I had so hoped it would stay pure between us,’ she lamented. Whereupon Kreitman messed up the letters and wrote WILL YOU MARRY ME.

  Whereupon Chas fell very silent.

  She took him to the ballet.

  ‘Anything,’ he’d said, ‘so long as it’s not Swan Lake.’

  So she took him to see Swan Lake.

  He’d been surprised by her taste. ‘I knew you wouldn’t be modern-modern,’ he told her when she bought the tickets, ‘but I would have expected thirties avant-garde of you.’

  ‘Are you being rude to me, Marvin?’

  ‘Not at all. I’m a thirties avant-garde man myself. In everything but ballet, anyway.’

  ‘And what are you in ballet?’

  ‘Revolted,’ he told her sweetly.

  ‘It’s the men’s lunch packs, is it? Charlie was uncertain about those too.’

  ‘I’m not Charlie. The men are fine. It’s the dirty dresses on the women I have trouble with.’

  ‘Where do you get the idea that the women wear dirty dresses?’

  ‘It’s endemic. It’s what people go to see. Slightly grubby ballerinas in yards of discoloured tulle. Don’t ask me why. You’re the enthusiast. I think it’s some perverted, dirty-washing thing.’

  She narrowed her eyes at him. Perverted was an objection suddenly?

  But what she said was that she’d chosen Swan Lake as the easiest place to start. ‘At least with classical ballet if you can’t stomach the perversion you can enjoy the music’

  ‘Tchaikovsky!’

  In the event, he did even better than that. He enjoyed everything. The athleticism. The body as lyrical instrument, for God’s sake. The poignancy. Even the dirty washing. ‘But don’t forget,’ he said, kissing her during the interval, ‘that it’s because I love being with you and being seen with you.’

  He meant what he said. Being with and being seen with. She attracted attention in evening dress. It suited her to be sheathed in plain black, lightly jewelled, hoisted up on imperious heels, her cornfield arms and neck out, her hair down, another of her fault lines showing – a tomboy in a glamour frock, country mouse in the arms of town mouse, and vice versa. Sometimes photographers got excited when they saw her getting out of a taxi. ‘They think I’m Camilla Parker Bowles’ younger sister,’ she whispered to Kreitman, flushing, fearing that who they actually took her for was Camilla Parker Bowles.

  ‘Gets something,’ Kreitman said proudly. ‘Mistress of a prince.’

  But he knew why they were taking her photograph. It was because she gave consciousness of rude.

  She felt more herself, however much he liked her glittering (and therefore half somebody else), in her spinnakers and flatties. Walking clothes. She introduced him to where he lived. ‘Road,’ she said. ‘Pavement, strolling area, little park, Common, woods.’

  ‘Woods my foot,’ he told her. ‘That’s faggot jungle.’

  ‘Grow up, Marvin,’ she said. ‘You’d cottage if men and women could do it standing up.’

  He dared her. But she knew his game. As long as he was daring her he didn’t have to walk. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘You have one of the loveliest commons in London on your doorstep. Look how flat it is.’

  And away they went, hand in hand, arm in arm – he liked linking her, the way he’d seen old European men, perhaps even his father, linking women, hanging on to them, almost hanging off them – until she explained that it was better exercise to swing your arms. Hazel used to tell him that as well; but on Hazel’s lips it had seemed a reproach – get your filthy unfaithful hands off me, Marvin Kreitman – whereas from Chas, from Chas he could take anything. Explain that.

  She got him into an anorak. Took him to one of those adventure streets in Covent Garden and had him fitted up for toggles. He screamed at first, brushing something off himself with such violence that she thought a tarantula must have sidled out of one the pockets. Even the shop assistant grew alarmed. ‘Is everything all right, sir?’

  ‘Words,’ he shouted. ‘I’ve got words on me!’

  And he had. NORTH FACE, POLARGUY. SCARP.

  There were no anoraks without words. Elsewhere, words were vanishing. Soon there would be no words. Now he knew where they were going. On to anoraks.

  ‘I’ll unpick them,’ Charlie promised.

  But of course he got used to the words and in the end rather liked having SHOREWALKER written across his back.

  He saw the future, saw his life extending into old age, serene and comfortable, his arm in Chas’s, the Common an explosion of butterflies, he and she white-haired and zipped into matching all-weather parkas, still handsome, still smiling when they caught each other’s glance.

  Then, one achingly sweet penitential Sunday – the first and last warm Sunday of the year – he saw Hazel and Charlie also walking arm in arm across Clapham Common. Happy they looked, no get your filthy unfaithful hands off me, Charlie Merriweather, no, none of that, just happily talking, laughing, absorbed entirely in each other, not looking at the world. Funny – Hazel on the Common in dancing shoes, Chas in hiking boots; Hazel dressed for cocktails, Chas for pitching tents. He thought he caught the sound of Hazel’s laughter, tinkling and seductive, like a glass chandelier with breezes blowing through it. Today, for reasons of her own – perhaps a consequence of the melancholy leafiness of the afternoon – Chas was ruminative. Briefly, Kreitman felt a pang for something that had never been: not quite the past, and not quite what he had ever wanted the past to be. But it was a pang of retrospection of some sorts. We are with the wrong women, he thought. We are with the wrong women. Then he quickly took the thought back.

  He wasn’t sure whether Chas had seen them. He didn’t want Chas to have seen them. It would be worse for her, he believed. Pretending to be interested in whatever was happening on the bandstand, just kids doing wheelies on their bicycles, he steered her in that direction.

  But he couldn’t so easily steer his conscience away from what he’d thought. I owe her, he told himself. For that fleeting involuntary infidelity, I owe it to her to love her twice as hard and twice as long. But how long was twice as long when he’d already been contemplating eternity? He felt the tears squeezing into his eyes. He knew what he would be thinking next – he would be thinking that if anything happened to Chas he would not be able to survive. There was the grave, there was the coffin, and there was he, Marvin Kreitman, throwing himself down upon it.

  She felt him giving way to pathos. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I’m just thinking that I couldn’t live without you.’

  She threw him a half-grateful, half-beseeching look. ‘Isn’t it a bit soon, Marvin, to be thinking that?’

  He simultaneously nodded and shook his head. Yes and no. But in the end it was all about this, wasn’t it? You made the leap, or you didn’t. Love was the decision to make the leap.

  She put her arm round his shoulder. He liked that. He liked her having the confidence to encircle him, to take him away from where he’d been. Surreptitiously, she upped the pace; then she said, ‘Right, swing your arms,’ and soon she had him striding across the grass, invigorated, without a morbid thought in the world.

  And had Hazel or Charlie seen them? Unlikely. Charlie rarely noticed anything when
he was out walking and Hazel was enjoying herself too much to raise her eyes to other people. As a rule Charlie gave her good Sundays, unlike Kreitman who made a purgatory of the day of rest, whatever the weather. She could never get any nature with Kreitman, that had been her main complaint. He wouldn’t allow her to forget the human world. Charlie, on the other hand, almost reminded her of a tree, so green and frondescent-smelling was he, so abundant and protective. Today he’d been making up stories for her as they walked. Nature stories, full of sap. Stories she could squeeze and which left the juice of berries on her fingers. Which Charlie could lick clean.

  Once upon a time, Hazel-Mouse Hyphen Hazel-Worm was walking in the woods with Charlie Hyphen Smelly-Botty Farnsbarns when they came upon the good witch Cantilever Hyphen Thumbelina Fucklebum stirring juices in an iron pot. ‘What are those juices you are stirring, Cantilever Whatever Your Name Is?’ Hazel-Mouse enquired. ‘Why my dear,’ replied the good witch, ‘these are the juices of unhappiness. Sourness, jealousy, maliciousness, regret, and not remembering to be kind to Charlie Hyphen Smelly-Botty. If I can boil all these juices away I will have made Felicity Soup. Have you ever tasted Felicity Soup, my little one?’ Hazel-Mouse shook her head. ‘Then you just sit here and put your arms round Charlie Hyphen Smelly-Botty and give him lots of kisses while I go on stirring, and if the angels are with us you’ll get to taste Felicity Soup tonight.’

  Hazel snuggled into him, for protection and shade. Who cared who else was crossing the Common that day?

  Chapter Six

  So everyone on planet Nice is happy, then?

  And the children?

  And Nyman, without whom, in all fairness, so much happiness might never have been spread abroad?

  In the days before he was caught up quite so intimately in their fate, Kreitman had not been above firing the occasional cheap shot at the Merriweathers’ example of parenting – semi-pseudonymous writers of (at one time) highly successful self-improvement novels for children age category 11-14, parents of actual children who were going to the dogs.

  Like yours, Kreitman?

  He wouldn’t have denied it. Just like mine. Only I’m in purses, not in children’s books. I expect children to go to the dogs.

  In fact – had Kreitman been talking facts – the C. C. Merriweather books were not quite as anodyne as he imagined them. True, the Flying Away series of which Kreitman disapproved, all questions of content aside, purely on gerundival grounds, suffered from being too obviously post Peter Pan. It was Charlemagne who had planted the seed, telling Mrs C. C. Chassyboots during the interval of a performance of the play that he too, as a boy, had tried jumping off the wardrobe.

  ‘To see if you could fly, Charlie?’

  ‘To see if I could commit suicide.’

  Not long after that, they together hit upon the idea of talking the world’s children down from their wardrobes by reminding them that there were other ways of flying. Becoming a pilot, for example. Or an air hostess. Or an astronaut. Or a balloonist. Or First Girl on the Moon – the fastest seller of the lot.

  ‘What about bungee jumping next?’ their editor wondered. After thinking about it, they arrived at a mutual decision that bungee jumping was more about not hitting the ground than taking to the air, wasn’t strictly speaking a profession, and wasn’t really something they felt they ought to be encouraging their young readers to try.

  In this, Flying Away was not typical of the C. C. Merriweather books. Normally they took greater risks. Slightly greater risks. While other children’s writers were banging out their myths and fantasies, their legends of Ungala, their spook stories and sagas in the manner of The Hobbit, the Charlies stuck to their guns and wrote about what they called real kids living now. They tackled race, venereal disease, depression, drunkenness, drugs, Aids, illegal immigrants and even, latterly, affairs between schoolchildren and their teachers. They weren’t comfortable writing about poor kids – never having met any – and they knew there was only a limited fantasy market for books about rich kids, so they pitched it somewhere in between, inventing little classless striplings who never smoked or swore but knew where smoking and swearing were to be found, and little sexless hoydens who were never once penetrated no matter how far they allowed relations with the head of geography to go. ‘Goodbye,’ the relevant member of staff always lamented on the last page, ‘I will never forget you or what you have taught me.’ Moral? Goodness is its own lesson. And you don’t have to give away everything to make a lasting impression.

  There was the problem: the C. C. Merriweathers weren’t excessive enough for the children for whom they thought they wrote. Some critics believed they’d been losing their touch and their audience for years. Others admired them for not taking the easy route of witchcraft and horror. But all of that went for nothing anyway when, out of nowhere, old-fashioned owl-eyed boys with secret powers flew back with a vengeance on a magic broomstick.

  What price depression in a suburban comprehensive now?

  As for the Charlies’ own real-life children, they were no more going to the dogs than anybody else’s. So Tim had been on Blind Date and now fantasised about getting on Big Brother? From whom, under the age of twenty-five, did that significantly mark him out? And with regard to Kitty the bulldyke – a) she was no such thing, the bull part being a fiction entirely of her father’s making, the extravagance of the word and the activities it denoted having caught his fancy; and b) a little light dykery was de rigueur, if not by now all but passé, among girls of her class and generation. Kreitman wouldn’t have known because he never went to such places, but girls experimentally making out with girls was a commonplace in every clubbing venue in the country. His own daughters could have told him that.

  But how far they were or were not burnt-out cases by their late teens, and how far that made them any different from their peers, is not the question. What we want to know – of the Kreitman girls as well – is how much their routine descent into young persons’ hell was quickened by the recent cataclysmic events in their families. How did the sight of their several parents behaving like kids themselves, tying one another up into a cat’s cradle of sexual irregularity – an all too regular irregularity – and then falling mooningly in love with the new arrangements – how did that gross spectacle strike them?

  The fingers which Juliet and Cressida put to their brains on the occasion of Mummy’s making a festive bonfire of Uncle Charlie’s wardrobe on the lawn almost gets it. Fingers down their throats would have been better.

  They were universally disgusted.

  ‘I am too old myself to take account of the distaste of young people,’ Kreitman told Chas when the subject finally climbed into bed with them.

  ‘Where does that leave you with Hamlet?’ Chas wondered.

  ‘Wishing he were older.’

  ‘It’s all right for you,’ she reminded him. ‘Yours are in Thailand, no doubt having a ball and never giving you a thought. I have two going dippy on the spot.’

  Not much given at the best of times to considering the feelings of people not within his immediate field of vision, Kreitman had forgotten all about Tim and Kitty on principle, neither enquiring after them nor accepting any of Chas’s invitations at least to meet them for tea – though not at Kreitman’s place, not under the bed – so they could judge (‘Judge what, Mummy?’) with their own eyes. He was determined, on grounds of fastidiousness not far removed from theirs, never to acknowledge Chas’s domestic existence, the fish-pie and fridge-magnet Chas he’d known under the previous dispensation, and that meant never visiting her at home in Richmond, which anyway, by all accounts – that’s to say by Chas’s account – her little ones had turned into a madhouse.

  ‘I don’t know whether I can face this,’ she would say some mornings, as Kreitman was handing her over to Maurice to Smart back to Richmond. ‘Timmy lying in a pool of vomit with half his nose missing, and Kitty weeping in every room.’

  ‘Stay with me,’ Kreitman said.

  ‘
And do what with the house?’

  ‘Torch it.’

  ‘And the children?’ She knew the answer.

  ‘Torch them.’

  There were times when she was tempted. They were over-egging the pudding, her children.

  Yes, of course Kitty had felt betrayed by her father, betrayed on her mother’s behalf and – you didn’t have to be much of a psychologist to work this out – betrayed on her own. If Daddy was going to run away with anyone, blah-blah … Doubly betrayed both ends, remembering that Aunty Hazel was shock number two, shock number one having been Daddy’s assault on the good name of Aunty Dotty. What was it with Daddy and aunties? Good question, Chas thought. ‘I can’t bear to look at him,’ Kitty said, in the immediate aftermath of shock number one. Which turned into ‘I won’t forgive you if you ever see him or speak to him again,’ after shock number two. ‘That’s a little extreme, darling,’ Chas had replied, but since she was feeling pretty extreme herself, she understood. ‘And I don’t want him ever coming to this house, or trying to contact me, or speaking to any of my friends,’ Kitty had gone on, stumbling over her tongue stud. If it’s causing her so much discomfort, Chas thought, why doesn’t she have the bloody thing out? But your daughter’s your daughter. ‘I’m sure he will be too ashamed to try,’ she’d said. ‘Too ashamed of me or too ashamed of himself?’ ‘Why would he be ashamed of you, Kitty?’ ‘Why does he call me a bulldyke? Why did he used to call me Kitty-Litter?’ You know your father and his jokes, Chas half wanted to say. But the words choked in her throat. ‘Your father is a sexually very disturbed person,’ was what she chose to say instead.

  All that was fine. Not fine, terrible, but as you would have expected it to be. Charlie had acted despicably and his daughter despised him. What Chas couldn’t fathom was why Kitty was now feeling the same way about her. In the time she was alone, mourning Charlie and their collaboration, Chas had bowed to Kitty’s taunting. ‘You have been such a doormat, Mummy. You invited him to wipe his feet on you. You allowed him to believe he could get away with anything. He treated you with such contempt!’ This didn’t seem a fair description of either of them, but Chas accepted it. She too had failed Kitty in some way and this was her punishment. But oughtn’t it to have followed, now that she had shaken Charlie out of her hair, now that she was mistress of her own affairs, no longer a doormat, no longer a shame to her daughter – oughtn’t it to have followed that Kitty would be applauding her every inch of the way? ‘Go for it, Mummy! Whoo!’ – shouldn’t Kitty have been shouting that?