Who's Sorry Now?

by Howard Jacobson

  Though of an advanced age, Charlie Merriweather’s mother was so remotely beautiful, so flintily elegant and straight-backed in the abstemious manner of that last generation of the genuinely colonial English, those who still remembered careering about the globe in boats, attending to one international botheration after another (because who else if not them?), and who to this day bathed in great rusting rectilinear tubs, practising the self-denial they preached – what is more she was so attentive to him, as though he were her beau, a shipboard romance on the way to Cape Town or Aden – that Kreitman would have fallen in love with her on the spot had he not, only an hour earlier, fallen in love with the mother of her new daughter-in-law’s bridesmaid. He took it that her beauty was one of the reasons she had mothered so unsympathetically. There never was a beautiful woman yet who didn’t think her life had turned out less sensationally than her beauty merited, or who didn’t blame her children for every ravage. ‘I’m a widow, you know,’ she told Kreitman. ‘You can write to me, if you like.’

  ‘I’ll write to you,’ Kreitman agreed.

  ‘What? Speak into this ear. I’m hard of hearing.’

  ‘I’ll write to you,’ Kreitman repeated.

  ‘Well, that’s what I said.’

  ‘Then I will.’

  ‘But you must promise you won’t write rubbish.’

  ‘I’ll try not to.’

  ‘Charlie used to write me the most stupid letters from school, always complaining about being cold and hungry. As if I wanted to hear any of that. He never had any news. Unless you call an ailment news. Or being bullied. Aren’t you a bit big to be bullied, I wrote back. But he said that was why they bullied him – because he was so big. I told him to put his head down and charge like a rhino, the way I did when girls bullied me at school. But I doubt he took any notice. Bullying one week, cold and starvation the next. Utter rubbish. I used to toss his letters in the bin the minute I’d read them.’

  ‘As long as you didn’t toss them in the bin before you read them,’ Kreitman said.

  She threw him a baffled look. ‘Why would I do that?’

  The other certainty about beautiful women, especially the flinty ones – they didn’t comprehend the rudiments of play. Or at least they didn’t comprehend Kreitman’s.

  ‘I’ll make a point of not writing to you about being cold or being hungry,’ he said.

  ‘Why? Are you cold and hungry?’

  ‘Some of the time,’ Kreitman heard himself saying.

  ‘Then come up to Twyford and see me. I can’t help you if you’re cold, my husband was always cold and I couldn’t help him – I think people just imagine they’re cold most of the time – but I can feed you up. I’ll give you fish pie, Charlie’s favourite. Do you like fish pie? Charlie used to eat so much fish pie when he was small he started to look like a fish. Finnie Haddock, his sisters called him, whenever they wanted to make him cry.’

  ‘What did you call him?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Charlie.’

  ‘The same. Finnie Haddock.’

  ‘And did Charlie’s father also like fish pie?’

  ‘I’m not sure I ever discovered what Charlie’s father liked. He was a headmaster, you know. Only of a miserable little state-maintained grammar school in the wastes of Leicestershire, to which I dutifully followed him and for which I was never thanked, but he loved it. Used to stand on his head outside his office on the first day of term, reciting Lewis Carroll. Then they changed it into a comprehensive overnight. That finished him. Never once stood on his head again. He was a weak person. Like Charlie in many ways. He cried a lot. Wouldn’t go out of the house. Just hid under the table in his raincoat, holding his briefcase, sobbing like a housemaid, the poor man. We sedated him in the end. Filled him full of happy pills. He turned the colour of fruit salad and sat grinning like the Cheshire cat. But at least that stopped the crying.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Kreitman said,

  ‘Why should you be sorry? It wasn’t your fault. I hope you’re not going to write me letters saying you’re sorry all the time.’

  But Kreitman wasn’t able to reassure her because the hour to make the speeches and cut the cake had come.

  ‘Very clear,’ Mrs Merriweather told him when he’d finished his eulogy to the happy couple. ‘I heard every word.’ But throughout Charlie’s speech, she talked in a loud voice to Kreitman. ‘I’m amazed where he’s found the courage,’ she said.

  ‘To get married?’

  ‘Of course not. Doesn’t take courage to do that. Any fool can marry. To stand up and talk, I mean. He wouldn’t say boo to a goose when he was small. Not that he looks particularly confident now. Shaking inside, I suppose, like his father. I hope he doesn’t end up underneath the table.’

  So, no, Kreitman didn’t begrudge his friend a second attempt at filiality. Besides, his own penchant for women his mother’s age hardly put him in a strong position to pass judgement. The two cases weren’t identical. Kreitman didn’t do helpless mutt. Kreitman did saucy whelp. He liked making a gift of his friskiness to women who had forgotten what friskiness looked like, or at least had not expected to have it chewing up their carpets again. Soon enough, to be sure, the eyes drooped and the chops fell and the young pup was moping about the house like an old dog. But dogs do that. They age. And bore easily. Either way, the short of it was that both men landed panting in their loved ones’ laps, but Kreitman moved more.

  Up and down, side to side – not playfully but restively – then off…

  Whereas Charlie stayed … And practised nice sex.

  Pleasing to Kreitman that the match he’d made had worked well, if only in the still-together sense, which, when all is said and done, is probably the only measurement there is. Otherwise, he hadn’t paid much attention to it. A happy marriage in the still-together sense wasn’t a drama that beguiled him. And he didn’t suppose that his fractious marriage to Hazel – though also working well in the still-together sense – was of consuming interest to the Merriweathers. Occasionally his nostrils would fill with the parsnip odour of Charlie Kate’s kitchen-garden disapproval of ‘the way he lived’, but nothing was said. The nearest she came to a declaration wasn’t over women at all, but over Cobbett, the Kreitmans’ cat. Kreitman was at war with Cobbett on account of the way he arched his back against Kreitman’s shin bone the second Kreitman got out of bed. Until Cobbett hit upon this method of ingratiation, Kreitman had not thought of himself as a man with unusually sensitive tibia; but now his shins were like blackboards awaiting the shiny squeak of chalk. That there was an emotional no less than a physical aspect to this shrinking from the feather pressure of his own cat Kreitman didn’t doubt. Cobbett caught him out in an insufficiency: among all the other dishes on his menu of cravings, the cat wanted affection, and Kreitman, knowing his was not a nature that could turn affection on as from a tap, even supposing it had affection to give, felt as though his soul, with all its inadequacies, was being tickled open. So when Cobbett came asking on the stairs, quivering and death-rattling and making a horseshoe of his back, Kreitman did what he was not able to do when any human asked affection of him, and kicked. Hearing about this brutality from Hazel, who made a brave show of seeing the funny side of Cobbett taking the quick way down from the top of the house to the bottom, Charlie Merriweather threatened to turn Kreitman in to the RSPCA unless he either give her his word he would learn indifference, if love was beyond him, or better still give her the cat. Without discussing it with his daughters or his wife, Kreitman gave her the cat. Other than that, he wasn’t sure what Charlie thought of him as a paterfamilias or husband. In so far as the Merriweathers and the Kreitmans argued their couply differences out, they did so as it were by proxy, taking advantage of the mishaps of third parties.

  ‘I can forgive the wilfulness, the selfishness, even the conceit,’ was one of Charlie’s most recent pronouncements on her older sister’s erotic leap, at the age of forty-seven, into the arms of a man half her age, ‘but what
I can’t turn a blind eye to is the silliness.’

  ‘Silliness?’ Kreitman wondered.

  ‘It’s silly of Dotty to go running round one day telling everybody how blissed out she is, and then to go running round the next slagging off Angus for acting unreasonably.’ (Angus being the husband who, partly for that reason, was proving to be every bit as pissed off as Dotty was blissed out.)

  Over the years, Kreitman had met Dotty many times at the Merriweathers’ and had always been a little bit in love with her, firstly on account of her being an assistant to the deputy literary editor of a small-circulation journal – and Kreitman gorged on any company he could find that wasn’t purse- or luggage-yoked – and secondly on account of the heat of imminence she gave off. Anyone with a brain in his head, Kreitman thought, would have noticed that Dotty had so far not leapt for her erotic life only because no man of her acquaintance had so far opened his arms and shouted ‘Jump!’ A pity his own had been so full whenever he met her …

  Among the other things he liked about Dotty was coming upon her in one of the Merriweathers’ bathrooms doing mouth exercises in the mirror. Dotty had read that in order for her jawline not to go wrinkly-custardy she had a) never to smile and b) to put in as many hours in front of mirrors as she could manage, curling her lips inwards like little Swiss rolls and tensing her neck. Since this seemed to Kreitman to be exactly what lizards did and lizards had the most wrinkly jawlines in creation, he wasn’t confident Dotty was following the best advice. He loved catching her doing it, however, and seeing through the mirror if he could get her to forget injunction a). This too – Dotty’s facial exercise regime – Charlie considered silly.

  ‘Silly? I’d say it was desperate.’

  ‘Call it what you like, she’s behaving like Madame Bovary.’

  ‘And you’d like her to behave like who? Old Mother Riley?’

  In fact, if she was behaving like anybody, Kreitman thought it was Anna Karenina. The last time he’d met Dotty was at a grand publishing party to mark the Merriweathers’ twenty-fifth work of collaboration, a sort of silver wedding of true minds. All very well for Kreitman to be ironic, but the truth was he clung to the Merriweathers’ literary and artistic connections like a shipwrecked sailor to a plank from the captain’s table. Being the retail luggage baron of south London had its social compensations, and Kreitman was careful not to go his father’s way and turn his nose up at them: trade fairs in Italy and Germany, the hospitality of wholesalers and importers, visits to manufacturers in Israel, Morocco, India, and sometimes, if he could get in when his staff weren’t looking, just serving in a shop and meeting customers. To this day, against the grain though it was, singing the praises of a purse he’d seen made in Rajasthan and then selling it in Camberwell – count the compartments! look at the stitching! feel how soft! – filled Kreitman with the purest satisfaction he knew, though of course he left it to others to handle the money. But he had loved university, revered people whose professions were their minds, and missed just hanging about, having time, talking over matters that need never be put to any practical or commercial test. Mental irresponsibility – that was what he craved and what the Merriweathers’ social circle gave him. And of course better sex, because as everyone knows, women in ideas deliver more imaginatively than women in business. As witness, maybe, Dotty Karenina.

  Against her sister’s wishes (because there was no way Angus couldn’t be invited), Dotty brought along her beau, a surprisingly sweet-faced boy, considering his reputation for malice, who was famous for the number of books on any subject he was able to review in one week, and for the number of mentions of writers other than the ones reviewed he was able to squeeze into six hundred words. As a person meticulous about shirts, Kreitman disliked Dolly’s boyfriend because he purposely let his frayed cuffs hang out of his jacket sleeves unfastened, and didn’t always wear collars – a look Kreitman took to denote honest and even old-fashioned labour of the mind. Kreitman could easily have been wrong about this, but he believed the person you were meant to be reminded of was George Gissing, slave to Grub Street. ‘In your dreams!’ Kreitman thought. But he should have been more understanding. Although he dressed like Frankie ‘the Hat’ Lampeggiare now, at one time he had aspired to look like Francis Place, the radical. It was at this party, anyway, that Angus finally lost his nerve, abusing his wife in a loud and clanging voice, calling her a cradle-snatching, name-dropping adulteress, attempting to slap her face but missing, and subsequently leaving, slamming doors. A wound in the celebrations which healed no sooner than it was inflicted. Adulteress? Big deal! Except that it was a big deal to Charlie Kate who was looking for less silliness all round. And also a big deal to Kreitman, who could never commit enough adulteries of his own to feel easy with the idea of them going on elsewhere. For him, no less than for Charlie, adultery was a disturbing concept and an adulteress a dangerously inflammatory personage. Why wasn’t she committing adultery with him, being the first of many flaming questions she inspired. Hearing the word, Kreitman immediately sought Dotty’s crinkled eyes. Twist eyebeams with one of the parties to an adultery and it can be almost as good as the real thing. Nothing doing, though, at least not this time round. But an hour later, still observing her from across the room, Kreitman watched as Dotty, in a black linty woollen skirt and matching short-sleeved fluff-fraught top, inadvertently (or not) trailed her forearm through a platter of coleslaw. Was she watching him watching her? Slowly, she raised her arm to her mouth, sent out a tongue whose length and coloration were foreign to Kreitman on account of his only ever having seen her with her jaw set, and licked herself. Three darting probes followed by one wet lingering caress. Then she flushed, threw back her head and laughed like one of those humourless princesses in Ukranian fairy stories, finally tickled into gaiety by the antics of an uncoordinated peasant boy. Was Kreitman that peasant boy? Was the laugh a gift to him? He decided not. Dotty had turned crimson for the room. In that moment at least, she was whore to the universe.

  Of all the things he thought about Dotty in the immediate aftermath of this, it never once occurred to Kreitman to ask how come the whore of the universe could be Mrs Charlie Merriweather’s sister. And you pay for omissions such as those.

  ‘When somebody you’re not sure you know seems to be smiling at you but might not be,’ Charles asked, after the meal, ‘what’s the sophisticated response?’

  ‘Keep your eyes down and your face straight,’ Kreitman answered. ‘Why? Who do you think’s smiling at you?’

  Charlie Merriweather nodded in the direction of a woman whom Kreitman thought he recognised as someone his daughter admired, a sculptor like herself, only of a seriously older generation, say twenty-six, whose pieces were much in demand by public galleries though not, needless to say, by private buyers who couldn’t run the risk of their cleaners doing what Charlie’s mother used to do with Charlie’s anguished letters from his freezing school and throwing them in the bin. ‘I’m not going to fall into the trap of asking by what aesthetic this is art,’ Kreitman had joshed his daughter, ‘but why call it sculpture when she doesn’t sculpt?’ To which her reply was, ‘Oh, Dad, just leave it.’

  ‘Well, if she’s who I think she is,’ Kreitman said to Charlie, ‘she’s one of Ooshi’s.’

  ‘Ooshi’s?’

  ‘A dealer. I’m not sure but I think her name’s Nicolette Halliwell and she does things with trash.’

  ‘What does she do with trash?’

  ‘Conceals speakers in it, I think.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then she arranges it to look like trash again. Talking trash. You have the air of a man who would like her to do something similar with you.’

  ‘I wish,’ Charlie said.

  ‘You don’t,’ Kreitman said. ‘You don’t wish anything. You’re happily monogamous and even if you weren’t, why her?’

  ‘The slut thing.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Charlie! Those are just cold sores.’