Who's Sorry Now?

by Howard Jacobson

  Since they had become they, Chas and Marvin, Nyman had not cropped up much in their conversation. He was gone from her house, gone from her life, gone from her thoughts, and Kreitman had his own reasons for not reminding her of him. Once, on their first night in Harrogate, he had loomed and then been beaten down, and once again, weeks and weeks later, he had put in a guest appearance, Kreitman having succumbed to twinges in that part of his back which had come into contact with Nyman’s bicycle. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t kick shit out of the little arselicker when I had the chance,’ Kreitman cursed, rolling on to the grass and trying to remember the muscle-stretching exercises the physio had taught him.

  They’d been sitting on a bench in Regent’s Park, holding hands, watching the ducks. One of the few dry days of late summer. The lake was scuffed with the scurrying of birds. A swan rose on the water and arched its neck. A home-loving heron they had spotted on previous walks – a pathologically uxorious heron with whom Kreitman had indentified – was playing pick-up-sticks to furnish an empty nest. All things that loved the sun were out of doors, even the women of the jaballah and the veil, their eyes dancing in the letter-box slots of their wintry yashmaks. From what place in himself, on such a benign afternoon, Chas wondered, had Marvin called up such violence?

  She fancied she had dispelled all unseasonable ill-temperedness from his nature. She felt it was a mark against her, somehow, that it had resurfaced. What wasn’t she giving him? It was in the face of this disappointment with herself that she let down her guard. ‘What is it about that boy that galls you so much?’ she asked.

  Kreitman straightened himself up, stood on one foot, much like the heron, grabbed the other foot by the toe which the heron did not do, repeated the exercise, this time changing feet, shook the grass from his suit, for Kreitman would not go into so public a park as this in his cagoule, then rejoined her on the bench. ‘He rode into me, deliberately. Twice in one evening. What other explanation do you need?’

  ‘Your anger always seems over and above that, Marvin.’

  ‘Over and above being knocked down?’ He laughed. ‘Measure me, then, the anger appropriate to being run over twice.’

  ‘You know perfect well what I’m saying,’ she insisted. Miffed, she jutted her jaw. ‘You go looking for anger where he is concerned. You hear his name and beckon rage into your heart. I used to think it was a joke. The boy hardly merits so much passion, after all. Now I think he’s a pretext.’

  He stood up again, linked his hands in a double fist behind his back and breathed in. A relaxation exercise. He caught her eye and held it longer than was comfortable for either of them. ‘Indeed the boy hardly merits so much passion,’ his face said – ‘from either of us.’ But his actual words were less challenging: ‘A pretext for what, Chas?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m asking you. Violence? Unhappiness? Dissatisfaction with me?’

  He went on fisting his shoulder blades. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘The boy, as you call him, puts himself about as a faggot, and you assure me he isn’t. Will that do?’

  She opened her hands, as though to accept responsibility for the unpleasant topic, and in the hope that it would fly away, now she had released it. ‘It will do me if it will do you,’ she said. But it didn’t look as though it did her.

  Or him, come to that. ‘If you want to know,’ he relented, ‘I fear him. I fear his nothingness.’

  She was surprised by the confession. Relieved, too. She would have liked to hear him deny the charge of dissatisfaction with her, but failing that, leaving her out of it altogether was second-best. ‘That surely is to accept him at his own valuation,’ she said.

  ‘I fear that as well. To a person as fixed as I am, even playing with looseness is unnerving. Anyone whose motives or movements I can’t count on, I fear. I fear him as I fear clowns or madmen. They negate everything. They negate me, anyway.’

  ‘But that’s exactly what he wants to do.’

  ‘I know that. It makes no difference. Faggot jokes are the same. Let’s elevate trash and see if we can make seriousness lose its nerve. Nothing could be more transparent. But it works. I lose my nerve. When everything else has been destroyed, two things will be left in control of the planet – cockroaches and camp.’

  ‘Marvin, he isn’t camp,’ she wanted to say. But wasn’t that where they came in? Here was the perfect opportunity to tell him about Norman. Your indestructible vermin, Marvin, is actually a Norman.

  But she backed off. She didn’t have the words, and she couldn’t claim to understand the psychology; but she had the feeling, lying listening to Kreitman’s body think, that even as it thought about her it sometimes thought, and sometimes thought too long, about Nyman as well. And she didn’t want to be a party to any of that stuff, whatever it was.

  Chapter Eight

  At what point Charlie Merriweather realised he hadn’t changed his life at all – not radically changed it – and was back to having nice sex, only with someone not his wife, it is hard to say. A realisation of this magnitude does not come upon you suddenly. It creeps into your bed.

  The wet weather was disagreeing with Charlie. The more it rained, the fewer the opportunities to go shopping with Hazel, and the fewer opportunities to go shopping, the fewer opportunities to go taking back. It mattered to him, this aspect of their life together, because it was one of the few opportunities the pair of them had to go public, to make any kind of show of the love they bore each other. Day after day it rained, and nobody visited. Night after night they stayed in, and no one visited. He read to her, novel after novel. ‘Very soon now,’ he joked, ‘there won’t be any novels left to read.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to write some, Charlie,’ she joked. But his words struck fear into her. Were they running out of a resource already? Was running out of novels just another way of saying that he was running out of something else?

  They discussed inviting some of his friends round. What about Basil Vavasor, great-nephew of Aubrey de Selincourt? What about Giles Akersham, great-great-grandson and biographer of Edmund Gosse? What about Clarence Odger? Charlie thought about each one in turn, then shook his head. They belonged as much to Chas as to him. They belonged to the family. In the earlier days, before the Merriweathers were launched, they had financed the family. Sent Timmy to school. Paid for Kitty’s piano lessons. Built the extension. They would be embarrassed meeting him in another context. And maybe saddened. They hadn’t financed him into another context. And he too would be embarrassed. And maybe saddened.

  ‘You aren’t ashamed of me?’ Hazel asked.

  Ashamed of her? Ashamed of Hazel? What a thing to ask. He’d never been prouder of any woman, and never prouder of himself as any woman’s man. But it’s a queer thing about that question – once it’s asked, once it’s seriously posed, it raises doubts and changes, ever so subtly, the balance of power. If Hazel truly feared he could be ashamed of her, what did that say about her sexual self-confidence – so important to him as a man who had travelled at twice the speed of sound from the planet Nice to the planet Wrongdoing – and furthermore, what did it say about his need to make that journey in the first place? Never mind had he overestimated Hazel, had he underestimated himself?

  The rains fell and Charlie burned off the pages.

  ‘ “But, in spite of these deficiencies, the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony, were fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union …”’

  Next –

  ‘ “But I know that my dearest little pets are very pretty, and that my darling is very beautiful, and that my husband is very handsome, and that my guardian has the brightest and most benevolent face that ever was seen …”’

  Next –

  ‘ “L—d! said my mother, what is all this story about? –

  ‘ “A Cock and a Bull, said Yorick – And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard.”’

  ‘Not quite to my taste, that one,’
Hazel said.

  ‘Too ludic, for you?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘Too what?’

  ‘Ludic. One of your husband’s words. Playful without being funny. This was where he laid the blame for all the facetiousness of twentieth-century literature.’

  ‘Then read it to me again slowly, my love,’ Hazel, falling back on her pillows, implored sweetly.

  The rains fell and Hazel grew anxious. She could count the changes. Charlie no longer marvelled over her soaps and towels. He no longer trembled when she took him in her arms. He no longer asked her to ‘do that thing’ with her eyes, that ‘sly peeping thing’, ascertaining that he hadn’t crept away and left her fatherless again. He was still attentive to her, still loved getting her to put on heels and little else, and he was still generous with his weight, climbing on top of her on the sofa or the floor, letting her feel the full length of him, the moment she requested it. But attentiveness and responsiveness were small potatoes compared to that feast of demandingness and initiation, of watching and waiting, of desperation and gratitude, which in their early days he was up and about preparing, before she had even opened her sly peeping eyes. Funny: there was a time – long, long ago it seemed – when she saw Charlie as the very antithesis to her husband – a man to be avoided at all costs because it would be impossible to be rid of him. A puppy-dog man – shoo! Charlie, shoo! – whose rump sank lower and lower in puppy-dog gratitude the more you kicked it. Now, suddenly, she caught herself wondering what she would have to do to stop him from leaving. She had no instinct for any of this. There was demeaning oneself and there was demeaning oneself. To a fault she had been a pleaser, brought up to go along with whatever a man wanted, but trying to work out what a man wanted, giving your every waking hour to anticipating his desires, to pre-empting or quickening his appetite, to creating novelties for him every time he walked into the house, no, no, that was too low even for her. She remembered her girlfriends at university publicising their stratagems for keeping men simultaneously satisfied and hungry – never wearing pants, dyeing your pubic hair, always being certain to be caught sitting on the edge of the bed playing with yourself when he arrived back from work or from being with his wife. But as Hazel was keeping company with Kreitman for most of her university career, she was never reduced to the vulgarities of second-guessing: Kreitman commanded her not to wear pants. All that had changed since, of course. Now if her daughters second-guessed a man it was in order not to give him what he wanted. Allowing that Charlie was of an older time, Hazel wondered if she shouldn’t be lending an ear to some of the older teaching. It was hard to imagine what, of the basics, they were missing. The pants thing she already did, even though what she wore was so scant Charlie generally preferred her with them on. He had her nipples jutting night and day. He had her teetering on stilts. He had her painting her nails purple. As for playing with herself on the edge of the bed while waiting for Charlie to get back, that was not going to work for the reason that Charlie never went out.

  She supposed she could always try incorporating it into their readings. ‘ “… for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs …”’ Oh, Charlie, Charlie, oh, oh, Charlie, ohhh …

  And throw in the odd ‘sweet Jesus!’ Wasn’t that what women at their most irreligious, were meant to cry? Oh, sweet Jesus!

  Can’t see it, Hazel thought. Can’t see Charlie appreciating my vying with him for climaxes, however low on tides we’re running.

  Bizarre, but the person she might most have benefited from a word with was her husband. What would keep you here, Kreitman, if you were him? But where that was bound to lead she definitely could see. First, whisper in my ear, Hazel, everything you have been doing for him so far. Be conscientious. Don’t leave out any detail, no matter how apparently significant. I’ll decide what’s important and what isn’t. My ear is open. Start.

  So prolix, her husband, even in his curiosity. Such a dirty-minded prolix bastard. The dirty-mindedness she could almost forgive. But the prolixity!

  As for her daughters, who would no doubt have advice of their own to offer – along the lines of ‘Don’t wait for him to go, you be sure to give him the shove first, Mummy’ – they were back, but keeping their distance. They had brought Charlie a beautiful tie-dyed kaftan back from Thailand. And matching slippers so that he should get the message it was for wearing around the house. It did no good. He tried it on once to great applause, decided it was too lovely to wear except on important occasions, and reverted to his blue candlewick dressing gown, bare feet and general air of obscene imminence.

  ‘What if I asked Uncle Charlie to lend me his dressing gown for one of my sculptures?’ Cressida proposed to her mother.

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ Hazel warned her.

  ‘Even if I could promise him it would eventually hang in the Tate?’

  ‘Leave Charlie alone,’ Hazel said. ‘He makes an old lady very happy.’

  ‘What about you, Mummy?’

  At which Hazel laughed, until her laughter turned to tears.

  Shocked to see her cry, for Hazel had always been a dry-eyed woman, especially with her children, Cressida put her arms around her. ‘Is something wrong, Mummy?’ she asked softly, for all the world a mummy herself. Ironic about everything else, they were infinitely patient with grief, artists of Cressida’s generation. In their line of work they had to handle lots of upset.

  Hazel let herself go limp in her daughter’s arms. It was the nearest she had got in years, she thought, to knowing who Cressida was. So she was capable of doing this! Wasn’t that extraordinary! She had a daughter who could give comfort. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Juliet too was capable of taking her in her arms and making her feel well.

  All at once her spirits roused. She was the mother of a line. A matriarch. In her veins the future throbbed. Of what earthly significance, compared to that great fact, was Charlie Merriweather’s cooling ardour?

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Someone must have walked across my grave.’

  But in the night, sleepless, watching Charlie labouring at his dreams, she succumbed again to sorrow. Was his ardour really cooling?

  And this time she walked across her own grave.

  Not on the same night, for that would be altogether too neat, even for an entanglement made of neatness, but on nights not far apart in time, Charlie and Kreitman dreamed a similar dream. Charlie’s dream concerned Chas, though by implication it also concerned Hazel. Kreitman’s dream was the purer in that it concerned only him.

  In Charlie’s dream, Chas came out of the pumping darkness, not looking or behaving much like herself, and straddled his chest. Her hair was long and in his face, but she did not smell of anything. She put her hand behind her back to find his penis which she tried in vain to force inside her. In vain because the position was altogether wrong. Oh, brave new Charlie’s penis, but it wasn’t so brave or so new that it could stretch that far, even in a dream and no matter who was pulling it. But also vain in that his penis was limp. Chas recognised her mistake and shifted her body so that it was better positioned to take his. Again she reached for his penis, but it remained resolutely limp. In her desperation to force him inside her, Chas began to perspire and then to cry softly. How am I going to tell her? Charlie thought. How am I going to break it to her? But when he awoke, in great distress, he wasn’t sure what news he had to break, or who the person was he had to break it to.

  In Kreitman’s dream the person lying on the breast was him. The person weeping was him too. He was trying to say the words, ‘It’s a mistake,’ but his weeping wouldn’t let him. The arms around his neck were very soft. Not clinging, protective rather. Arms of understanding. Except that he was sure she didn’t understand or, if you like, that she misunderstood, that she mistook him, which was why it was a matter of such great urgency to him to say
the words, ‘It’s a mistake.’ ‘Hush,’ she said. ‘It’s all right. Hush.’ Then he realised the weeping he had been listening to was not his but hers. That was the mistake. The cause of this great convulsion of sadness was her not him. And then her weeping grew so inconsolable he knew his heart would break if he didn’t force himself to wake.

  So who was she? Kreitman didn’t know. Or if he knew, he wasn’t letting on. This is the sense in which the dream concerned only him: it was a dream of grief but the only party to the grief he recognised was himself, Marvin Kreitman. Was the weeping woman in whose arms he nearly died simply every woman he had ever slept with? Was she the continuum that stretched the whole way back to his mother, the first cause of all love and discontentment in him? She wasn’t Chas, he was sure of that. She wasn’t either of his daughters. She wasn’t Erica or Bernadette or Shelley or Vanessa. Nor was she Hazel, though it took him a little longer to rule her out. No, she wasn’t Hazel. She wasn’t. Hazel didn’t weep like that. But she coincided with a sudden burst of longing for his wife, an ache for her physical presence, which he thought would shatter the insides of his brain.

  ‘He’s missing her,’ Chas phoned her sister to say.

  ‘Missing the tub of lard? You’re joking. He never took the slightest interest in her. Are you sure it’s not me he’s missing? Are you sure he’s not missing a broken toenail?’

  ‘No, he’s missing her. I can hear it.’

  ‘Oh, darling, you aren’t still listening to his body? This is Marvin Kreitman we’re talking about. His body is certain to be lying. If it says he’s missing her I shouldn’t worry – it means he isn’t.’

  ‘I appreciate your words of comfort, Dolly, but I know what I’m talking about. I am beginning to understand him. He’s all about loss. I don’t mean the usual sexual thing about only wanting what you can’t have. To my surprise, he isn’t like that. He isn’t losing interest in me because I’m available. Quite the opposite. On that score I have no complaints to make …’