Who's Sorry Now?

by Howard Jacobson

  From the roof terrace in Soho, on which he has no eagerness to encounter other communal souls, the spindle of the London Eye appears to be the spire of the church of St Martin’s-in-the-Field. Kreitman enjoys the prospect, out over the leaded rooftops, past the tiny attic editing suites and the neon cinemas of Leicester Square – the Odeon showing particularly well – to where the wheel turns on a needlepoint consecrated to God. Close an eye, and the golden cross of the church appears to be entangled in the spokes. In the sun, the wheel is an iridescent orb, as persuasive a covenant as a rainbow. As for distance, well, it is not exactly a handshake away, but near enough for civilities. With the use of binoculars, Kreitman can clearly make out the outlines of people in the pods, can count them, and with concentration, he believes, can even decide on the meaning of their physical dispositions, one to another.

  He did not, pursuant to his glittering dinner with his daughters, confront Chas with the evidence of her double-dealing. Although incapable of taking anything lightly, Kreitman was not a man who had to get turmoil immediately off his chest. He could lie peaceably alongside a woman who had wronged him, lie folded in her arms like a vole in the embrace of a cobra, and not raise a murmur of complaint. In general this is a gift – call it a gift for quiescence – which men possess in greater abundance than women. Once wronged, most women find the physical presence of the man who has wronged them abhorrent. Fear may keep them silent, but the abhorrence remains. Perhaps because they aspire to a lesser ideal of perfection, men are better able to swallow their outrage. Kreitman was, anyway. Jealous of the very pillow on which a woman he cared for laid her cheek – a zealot of the minutiae of jealousy – he was yet able to bear it so long as the offending woman engaged him, volubly, in her wrong. Words did not have to be the medium of engagement. A look of connivance could do it. The thrum of silent confession could do it. Gross witness would, of course, do it in spades. It’s a paradox, but then what isn’t – the more access Kreitman was granted to the causes of his agony, which is another way of saying that the acuter his agony became, the easier he bore it.

  It was not deception Kreitman found hard to take, it was exclusion.

  He had not yet attained that peeled-back intimacy with Chas where he could assure her it would never matter what she did that was outside the letter of their law, provided she included him in it. In all probability he never would. She wasn’t pliable enough. She preferred everything to be straight. She had come a considerable distance, for her, simply being with him at all; but he couldn’t see her bending to accompany him into his spider holes and corners. What is more, he did not, in another, better part of his nature, want her to. For himself he did not want her to. Chas was meant to be a clean slate. She had told him she could not bear to be just another woman added to his total, and he had promised her he had stopped counting. He meant it. He had stopped counting off names and he had stopped counting off failures. And what that had to mean was that he had stopped counting off repetitions. Same spot, same sore, same itch. No more. Please no more.

  What it came to was that there was nothing to be gained by accusing her of resuming old relations with Nyman, let alone, for all he knew, of instituting new ones, a) because she would never, in the only way that Kreitman craved, consider taking him into her confidence, and b) because he didn’t want that craving in bed with them. Either she would have to lie, or he would have to leave. If he brought her to the point of having to go on lying, he would be the more inflamed. If he left – but he couldn’t think of leaving with his mind in the state it was and his heart as pulpy as rotten fruit. Exclusion was bound to be the outcome, whatever happened. She couldn’t tell him, he didn’t want to ask her to tell him, but he needed to know.

  Did he need to know?

  He needed to know.

  He was in a torment of needing to know and a torment of neither daring nor wanting to ask.

  So he lay there, with Chas wound around him like a snake, saying nothing.

  She, for her part, felt him drifting away.

  ‘He’s going,’ she told Dotty on the phone.

  ‘Another bulletin? You told me that last time. You make it sound as though he’s dying. Stop listening and get on with it,’ Dotty said.

  ‘I don’t know what to get on with. I think I may have hurt him when I turned him down.’

  ‘What do you mean you turned him down?’

  ‘Don’t scoff, Dotty. He asked me to marry him.’

  ‘Marvin Kreitman asked you to marry him?’

  ‘It’s not what you think. It was a gesture. Nothing but that.’

  ‘And your refusal? Also a gesture?’

  ‘I don’t know what it was. But I meant it. He asked me out of desperation. I think he was frightened he was missing his wife. I think he asked me to marry him to prove he wasn’t. Or maybe he just wanted me to say no so he could start missing me. Something like that. He’s desperate, Dotty, and I have to ask myself what I want with a desperate man.’

  ‘There’s no other kind, darling.’

  Chas thought about that. ‘Then maybe I don’t want to be with a man at all,’ she said.

  But in the meantime she tried to call him back from wherever he’d gone.

  ‘You’ve left me,’ she whispered one night.

  ‘I haven’t,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve stopped looking at me.’

  ‘Have I? I haven’t meant to stop looking at you.’

  ‘You’ve withdrawn everything,’ she said. ‘You’ve stopped looking at me, you’ve stopped speaking to me, you’ve stopped kissing me.’

  That was the moment, wasn’t it, to challenge her with what he’d heard? It would have been a kindness. Spit it out and have done with. I know you’ve been seeing the faggot. Why did you lie? Why do you go on lying? What do you mean by it, and what do you intend to do with him now? Spit it all out – all of it, no matter how petty and inglorious – and give her the chance to clear the air. But Kreitman couldn’t breathe clear air. Like some inverted bat in a bat cave, Kreitman needed the air fetid.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Take no notice. It’s a man thing. Change of life. I’ll be fine soon.’

  Then he turned away from her so that she might hear his body and understand what it was asking for.

  In the end he had to know and hang the decencies. He called Maurice up to talk to him.

  Was Maurice driving Mrs Merriweather anywhere but home?

  He wasn’t. Other than occasionally to the supermarket, where he helped her with her trolley.

  Was Maurice perhaps party to any conversations – in the driveway of Mrs Merriweather’s house, say, or in the aisles of Marks and Spencer, or on Mrs Merriweather’s mobile phone – which were not quite in the spirit of Kreitman’s lending her his driver and his car?

  He wasn’t.

  Would Maurice be offended if Mr Kreitman asked him to keep his wits more than usually about him, and to mention it, should he happen to be in Richmond at an unseasonable hour and see Mrs Merriweather behaving in a way that would cause Mr Kreitman concern?

  Maurice knew not to bind his employer in a man-to-man smile. He inclined his head the way a chauffeur should, even though he only chauffeured a Smart. Mrs Merriweather was a very nice woman. But then Mr Kreitman was a very nice man. And Mr Kreitman paid his wages.

  I am beneath contempt, Kreitman told himself, but he was quickened in every nerve.

  Quickened to no end, for many weeks, to no end at all, unless you count the fraying of the nerves of his relations with Chas, until Maurice, having kept his wits about him, drew Kreitman’s attention to Mrs Merriweather’s having taken a taxi to the London Eye, two afternoons running.

  ‘On her own in the taxi?’ Kreitman enquired.

  ‘On her own, Mr Kreitman. Not counting the driver. I followed her all the way.’

  So that ruled out an excursion with Kitty, followed by an excursion with Timmy. But then you could say it also ruled out an excursion with anyone else, were anyone else staying
over at her place.

  Kreitman listened to the beating of his heart but held himself in suspense. This was the wrong way, but there was no right way. He knew himself. He knew what transfixed him. The next week Maurice reported Mrs Merriweather taking a phone call in the car and being upset by it. And the day after that Chas rang, uncharacteristically for her, to cry off an evening which they’d earmarked as romantic.

  ‘You’re tough to be with at present,’ she’d said. ‘I’m giving myself a little holiday from you. Be kind to yourself’

  ‘Tomorrow, then?’ Kreitman had hoped.

  ‘All being well. Maybe.’

  A little holiday. At least she hadn’t called it a sabbatical.

  But that settled if for Kreitman. He put himself in her position. Where would he go to pursue an amour with a dough-faced cocksucker, a man more rattishly and motivationally, blah-blah, safe from the scrutiny of his children, his friends, his lover, and whoever else he did not wish to shame himself in front of? The Eye, 135 perpendicular metres beyond the reach of discovery. The Eye from which you could see trouble coming, twenty-five miles in all directions. The Eye, that great 2,100-tonne bicycle in the London sky.

  Armed only with binoculars, Kreitman climbed on to the roof of the hotel and, at a cost of £290 a night, excluding breakfast, waited for the giant wheel to run over him.

  Chapter Three

  ‘What do you call those holdall letters that people copy to all their friends?’ Hazel asked Charlie.

  ‘Drivel,’ Charlie said.

  She had brought him tea in his study. He had been sitting at his desk, writing nothing, listening to the leaves drip, watching the garden rot.

  ‘I didn’t ask you for a judgement,’ she said – if I’d wanted a judgement, she thought, I could have stuck with you-know-who – ‘I asked you what they’re called.’

  He shrugged. He had barely looked at her when she brought his tea. Once upon a time he’d have dropped to his knees and buried his nose in her belly and she’d have laughed and warned him not to make her spill the scalding liquid. ‘Charlie, mind!’ That was once upon a time.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘A round-robin letter, maybe.’

  ‘And isn’t that something you send when you want to bring everybody up to date with your fascinating life?’

  ‘I’d have thought so,’ Charlie said, looking at the rain. ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ve just got one in my e-mail – and don’t ask me how he came by my address – from that Nyman person.’

  ‘Who’s that Nyman person?’

  ‘The cyclist who upset my husband.’ She didn’t add, the one whose sexual games precipitated me into your arms.

  ‘Oh, him.’ Charlie seemed in no hurry to remember. ‘And?’

  ‘And it’s uninteresting beyond belief.’

  Charlie put his tea down and looked at her at last. ‘Wasn’t that the point of him? Inverse sophistication. Wasn’t he trying purposely – in a way that drove your husband to distraction – to be as uninteresting as possible?’

  ‘Everything drove my husband to distraction. Pity he isn’t here to read this.’

  And she left the printout on Charlie’s empty desk.

  With the more than averagely inversely sophisticated bits taken out, Nyman’s e-mail read:

  Dearest Friends,

  My twenty-sixth birthday! Another year in which nothing has been happening! How quickly the sands runs through the hourglass of our lifes! My milestones will be few compared to yours, but I tell them because they are my story.

  For sixteen weeks I work behind a counter in shop in Berwick Street, selling porno things. Must I say it was the most educating time of my life? We made competitions, behind the customer’s back, guessing what he was come in to buy. Or she. Oh, yes, don’t be shocked – many shes too come in the porno shop! But whether a he or a she, we never guessed right. She wants whip, he wants frilly pantys. Never judge a book by its contents – that’s my motto now!

  As they say, one thing leads to another, and by a contact I made in this shop I am suddenly out of there and working as courier for an advertising firm. It was a lucky strike to get there. They needed a runner, but I replied only if I could use my trusty bicycle. My fingers nearly wrote ‘rusty’ bicycle! You may have heard I had a ‘spillage’ on my bike, with a captain of industry. Insignificant person, significant person – bang! How do you like that! Now I am close to the family and to friends of the family. Never look where you’re going – that’s my motto now!

  On the future front, a fairground palm-reader has been reading my hand and prognosticating I will be famous and in love. When? Soon. But can’t be certain because the lines on my hand are faint. For another five pounds she will read my personality and tell the future from that. I tell her impossible because I have no personality. Goodbye, fame! Or maybe not. But hello, love, I think.

  ‘Nowhere Man’ is a well-known song by the Beatles. On the occasion of his birthday, this Nowhere Man wishes you health and wealth.

  Your friend,

  Nyman

  ‘Close to the family!’ Hazel thought. ‘The cheek!’ Unless he was close these days to Kreitman. Which could easily mean, for she knew her husband, close to Chas.

  Poor Chas! Hazel hadn’t been surprised when her husband exacted his revenge, as she saw it, and squared their little circle, however an unlikely partner for him Chas was. There was no ‘likely’ where Kreitman was concerned. No likely and no unlikely. The idiot boy Nyman had got under his skin by finding a virtue in being no one, an almost personal affront to a man for whom being someone, for whom being distinct and aloof and outstanding, was a sort of mania. But in the end Kreitman was as much a no one as anyone. There wasn’t a woman he wouldn’t cry over, not a woman that couldn’t disarrange him, therefore – this had to follow, didn’t it? – there was no ‘him’ at home. Between the two – between Kreitman and Nyman – there was nothing to choose. If anything, when it came to self-possession, Nyman just edged it.

  Mulling it over, she wished Kreitman were here to say it to – ‘He just edges you, Marvin – when it comes to self-possession, he just edges you.’

  Hard to believe she had cried over them both. It went to show how low a woman could be brought. Well, she wouldn’t be doing that again. It was only Chas she was sorry for now. Not only on account of the wrong she had done her – though Charlie was a grown man when all was said and done, and desperate, at his wits’ end with being married, a fish that was out of the water gulping air long before she cast her hook – but also because she knew how horrible it would be for Chas – if not today, tomorrow; if not tomorrow, the next day – lying by Kreitman’s side. There was a subtle sisterhood of decency in these matters: you might steal another woman’s husband but that didn’t mean you wished Marvin Kreitman on her.

  Hazel listened to the old anger welling up inside her and knew what was amiss. She was coming apart again. She was being expelled from the mother ship. Any hour now, any minute, she would be left spinning in the silent immensity, on her own.

  I can’t bear it, she said.

  I can’t bear it because I have been there before.

  Better never to have been rescued? Better never to have redo eked? No.

  She urged herself to avoid bitterness and be thankful. Look at it like this, she said – you have had an unlooked-for holiday, a lovely time you never expected to have. Things have been said to you which you won’t forget, which you mustn’t allow yourself to forget. Hoard your memories. Store up treasures.

  But store them up for what? Store them up for when? Her old age? Her lonely old age? Never mind, never mind. She might soon get knocked down by a bus. She might feel a stab in her chest and fold over. You never know what’s waiting for you. All you can do is store. Just store.

  In order to make Charlie feel that he was no fly-by-night, that Kennington was his even though none of his friends ever visited him there, Hazel had changed the message on the answering machine. Not what a modern woman
was supposed to do, but she’d done it. Now it was Charlie who said, ‘Neither Hazel nor Charlie is available to come to the phone at the moment …’ She would leave the message on. Kreitman she had wiped off years ago. Charlie she would leave on for ever. She played it again. ‘Neither Hazel nor Charlie is available to come to the phone at the moment …’ In his booming voice. Falling over his own larynx. Grammatically precise. Jocular. As though the reason neither he nor Hazel was available to come to the phone at the moment was that they were lying laughing in each other’s arms.

  Store it up.

  That’s what I am now, she thought. I am like my mother. A storehouse.

  She went into her office and pulled from her cupboards the plans and the wallcharts and the calendars and the timetables she had put away when Charlie moved in with her, hoping she would never have to consult them again. Then she changed into clothes more suitable for doing business and began ringing her contractors and decorators. It didn’t take long before she was shouting. No need to worry about Charlie. He couldn’t hear. He was sitting in the study she’d built him at the top of the house, unproductive, moving his lips like a man composing a very long letter to himself, barely aware of the rain which fell and fell and fell.

  Standing in the wet didn’t bother Kreitman. Ordinarily it would have maddened him, ordinarily he couldn’t bear being baited by the elements, but standing watching the wheel, he didn’t mind. Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks? Not exactly. He was in no fighting mood. No call to have the cocks drowned or the steeples drenched. Just himself. Dampen me, you elements. Drip, rain, and put me out.