Who's Sorry Now?

by Howard Jacobson

  He had been a shy boy. Up to a point they had all been shy boys. Being a boy is a shying business. Over and above that, though, he’d been an unlucky boy. He was the child of odder than usual parents. The son of a more handsome than usual mother. And of a sadder than usual father. Few of his friends went home to happy households at the weekend, but Charlie knew of no one else who went home to find his father quaking under the kitchen table in his raincoat.

  Long before then, when Charlie was little, his father used to embarrass him by turning cartwheels in public places, standing on his head while reciting ‘You are old, Father William’, and otherwise playing the eccentric English schoolmaster. Sometimes, for garden parties or village fêtes, he wore a mortarboard, sometimes plus-fours and a shirt with a frilly front. ‘Mon jabot,’ he called it. ‘Mon jabot du Jabberwock.’ Who was he being? Charlie didn’t know. Just someone from the past. Someone harmless. Someone curiously learned. And ineffective. Charlie’s father had golden hair and a cherub’s face. Even the wrong way up he looked angelic. Outside the family, Charlie noticed, everybody acted as though they adored his father and couldn’t get enough of him upside down reciting nonsense. But a child takes his cue from his mother in matters of embarrassment, and Charlie Merriweather’s mother was abashed, therefore so was Charlie.

  Back home after another spontaneous recitation in the park –

  O My agèd Uncle Arly!

  Sitting on a heap of Barley

  Thro’ the silent hours of night, –

  Close beside a leafy thicket; –

  On his nose there was a Cricket, –

  In his hat a Railway-Ticket; –

  – Edwin (‘Teddy’) Merriweather would submit to his lovely wife’s latest ultimatum. ‘Humiliate me like that again and you’ll be sleeping on a heap of barley,’ she warned him. ‘What you do the rest of the time is your business, but I insist you remember you are a headmaster when you are out with me. Having brought us to this hellhole, I consider it the least you can do.’

  But his shoes were far too tight,

  Teddy Merriweather concluded wistfully, by way of reply.

  ‘Grow up, Daddy,’ his daughters told him.

  Even when he was annoyed with his father for not remembering to act like a headmaster, Charlie loved the precise and yet irresponsible way he spoke, as though nothing was either serious or funny but somehow both. Charlie had heard somebody called the Archbishop of Canterbury speaking on the wireless, and he thought his father’s voice was a cross between the organ pipes of the Archbishop and the burbling whiffles of that Jabberwock whose jabot his father wore.

  In his heart, Charlie felt sorry for his father, going from applause to vilification in the time it took him to cross the threshold of his own house. It would have made sense, he often thought, for his father never to have come home at all. But then who would Charlie have looked to for forbearance? In his hurry to please his mother, before it dawned on him that he would never succeed, not ever, not ever ever, Charlie was constantly being flustered into mixing up his words and saying the opposite to what it was in his mind to say. He said yes when he meant no; he said up when he meant down; when she offered him her glacial cheek at bedtime, barely bothering to look up from her crossword, he would sometimes get so flustered he would call her Dada and wish her many happy returns instead of good night. Once she flew into a rage and boxed his ears, leaving him listening to silence for a morning, because he wouldn’t stop going on about the mats and rice he’d seen scuttling about the garden shed, chewing paper and disappearing into bags of plant feed. ‘What in God’s name are you talking about?’ she railed. ‘How can mats and rice chew paper? Is this some cuteness?’ His father understood. ‘It’s no wonder the boy makes such a hotchpotch of his sentences when you keep flummoxing him,’ Charlie thought he heard him say. ‘Anyway, it’s perfectly clear to me what he means. The Reverend W. A. Spooner would have understood him.’ ‘Then you and the Reverend W. A. Spooner talk to him,’ Mrs Merriweather said. ‘Nonsense is your medium, after all.’

  But being frightened imposes its own obligations, and being understood was no compensation for being shamed. What Charlie gathered from his mother was that his father’s engagingness outside the house degraded all of them. A man in his position had no business turning himself into a jackass for other people’s amusement. If she’d wanted a clown to be the father of her children, she’d have gone looking for a husband in the circus. Listening to her, even with his ears ringing, Charlie was convinced. Somehow his father was wasting something that belonged to them.

  Once, when Charlie was six, his father took him to a stately home in Derbyshire. Just the two of them. They had tea together – triangles of cucumber sandwiches, chocolate cake, slices of lemon on a little plate – then walked by a lake where Charlie’s father taught Charlie the names of different breeds of duck, showed him how to make stones skip across the water and, balancing on one leg with the other leg hidden behind his back, said:

  I’ll tell thee everything I can:

  There’s little to relate.

  I saw an aged, aged man,

  A-sitting on a gate.

  And Charlie thought how wonderful it was to have a funny father who could rhyme and recite to him and who held his hand and didn’t hurry him. But in their leisurely wanderings they hadn’t noticed a sign saying PRIVATE and suddenly there was the aged, aged man, only he wasn’t a-sitting on a gate, he was a-standing behind it, holding back two barking dogs with cheeks as pouched and furious as his were, and he was brandishing a walking stick and shouting, ‘Be off with you, can’t you read?’ and instead of shouting back, ‘I’m a headmaster, of course I can read! I can read a damn sight better than you can!’ or standing on his head, or reciting a funny poem, Charlie’s father flushed scarlet, lowered his eyes, stammered out an apology as flummoxed as any of Charlie’s own, and hurried away, breathing audibly and holding Charlie’s hand so hard he thought it would burn up with the heat. Charlie could not remember ever having felt so sad. It wasn’t just that a perfect day had been ruined; Charlie felt that this incident would stay with him for the rest of his life and that there would never again be a day when he would not feel sad on account of it. Propping up his sadness, like poles supporting a rotting pier, Charlie recognised two distinct sensations. Firstly, he was hurt on his father’s behalf by the telling-off. How much it hurt his father he could tell from how tightly his father held on to his hand. Secondly, he felt let down, that his father hadn’t stuck up for them both and told the aged, aged man what he could do with his stick. A boy doesn’t want to see his father disgraced, whatever the rights or wrongs of the case. Was this what his mother meant when she accused her husband of lowering himself, and of lowering her and her children with him? Well, Charlie could now vouch for that with his own eyes. He had seen his father talked to like a servant. And he had seen his father bow his head and accept the talking-to, as though a servant was all he was.

  Those were the happy carefree years. The blithe times, when Charlie’s father still had his powers of recovery, could take a rebuff one day and could spring back upside down in his knickerbockers the next, before comprehensivisation did what his wife had never quite been able to do, and drove him under the table.

  Charlie was eight or nine, growing taller, growing lonelier, growing shyer, when the table-shrinking started. Although his father was on a pension and there were uncles to help with mortgages and school bills and the like, the change in circumstances moved his mother to the sort of action countenanced by women of her class only during times of national crisis. She went out to work! More exceptionally still, she went out to work as a dental receptionist! It occurred to Charlie that although his mother gave as her only motive money, the real reason she went out to work was so as not to have to look at his father curled up on the floor with his briefcase. An explanation contested by the remains of the person in question who, during one of his periods of lucidity, crawled out from underneath the table to accuse his wife of
taking a job as a dental receptionist only in order to be close to people in pain.

  ‘In which case,’ he shouted after her, ‘you might just as well have stayed home with me.’

  But she was buttoned up in her National Health blue uniform by then, belted and badged as though there were a war on, and already in the street.

  Once a week a lady with a mutating mole on her neck and no flesh on her bones visited the house to do the cleaning. Catherine. ‘Ah, Catherine, Catherine – and would that be Catherine Wheel or Catherine the Great?’ Teddy Merriweather hummed when he was apprised of her appointment. ‘Catherine the Great Unwashed,’ his wife corrected him with a snort. Charlie was frightened of Catherine because of her mole, because poverty had ingrained her skin with soot, because she called him ‘Sonny Jim’, and because she seemed to find the height of him amusing. Once she pushed open the door when he was sitting on the lavatory. Once she found him leaning out of his bedroom window, throwing lead soldiers at the garden shed to see if he could frighten out the mats and rice. Another time she sneaked up on him when he was lying on his bed, talking to Pobble, the bear he’d owned since he was a baby. She moved so silently about the house, on slippers which must have been distributed charitably to the poor, for he had never seen any but poor people wearing them, that he was never given warning she was coming. It seemed to Charlie that she was spying on him, deliberately seeking him out in compromising positions so she could wag her finger at him, call him Sonny Jim and laugh in his face.

  But he had been brought up to be a little gentleman, albeit a little tall gentleman, which meant going to the rescue, sometimes, even of people you didn’t like. So he knew what to do the day he came home from school early on account of a teacher committing suicide and found a man with no clothes on pressing Catherine to the floor, presumably with a view to robbing her or murdering her or both. Entirely against his instinct, which was to leave her there and let the man rob and murder her as often as he had a mind to, Charlie grabbed an umbrella from the umbrella stand and began striking the man’s back with it. Only when the man turned around did Charlie realise it was his father. Charlie recognised the expression on his face. The last time he’d seen his father with a face like that was when the person with the two angry-cheeked dogs had accused him of being unable to read and ordered him off his property.

  Charlie was right. Thanks to his father he was never not going to feel sad again. Never.

  Although he had no words for what had happened, Charlie knew it was wrong in some way that would upset his mother. ‘I won’t tell that you were robbing Catherine,’ he told his father, who was back under the table now, holding on to his briefcase and sobbing like a child.

  But Catherine too must have needed reassuring, because she sat him on the sofa and snuggled up to him not long after and thanked him for saving her and asked him to name his reward. Charlie couldn’t think of anything he wanted. ‘How about an introduction to Miss Cuntalina Fuckleton?’ Catherine asked. When Charlie said he did not know who Miss Cuntalina Fuckleton was, Catherine roared with the sort of laughter Charlie associated with witches and took his hand and introduced him, whereupon it was Charlie’s turn to begin sobbing like a child, though he at least had the excuse of being a child.

  He was an unlucky boy. Unlucky in his parents, unlucky to have been carted off to Leicestershire and then sent back down to Lewes to finish his schooling, unlucky in his encounters with the lower classes and, until he met Charlie and his luck changed, unlucky in love. He couldn’t find anybody. One by one the other boys caught up with Simon Lawrence. Oral sex? Nothing to it. Straight sex? A breeze. Now they were all biting pencils and wearing lockets. All except Charlie. He bought a locket of course, but put his mother’s picture in it. ‘Miss Cuntalina Fuckleton,’ he would have said, had anybody enquired. Some love charm! – the chain gave him a neck rash while the locket itself smacked into his sternum whenever he moved. Small wonder he continued to be lacking in the necessary confidence. They can smell it on me, he thought, I must stink of everything I haven’t done. He did. At school dances girls shied away from him, put off by the avidity with which he stared at them, frightened of his big hungry face, repelled by the odour of his virginity. He believed it was his penis that stank, and washed it in a basin a hundred times a day. He thought he had some disease, he thought his penis was putrefying. He thought his sperm smelt off. But of course it had nothing to do with his penis or his sperm. It was his attitude that stank. Marvin Kreitman pointed that out to him when they met in their first week at university. He emptied a bottle of Givenchy over Charlie, advised him to keep his drawers and cupboards open for a year, recommended he stop wearing vests and change into clean underpants every morning, put it to him that he might consider circumcision, but above all ordered him to stop looking so needy.

  ‘How do I do that?’ Charlie wanted to know.

  ‘You put your tongue back inside your mouth for a start.’

  ‘Do you know what the worst of it is,’ he told Kreitman, ‘legs and nipples.’ He longed for legs and nipples. Ached for them. It was an Indian summer and all the girls had their legs bare and their nipples pushing at their shirts and cardigans, like eyes in the wrong place. ‘Why eyes in the wrong place should get to me the way they do, I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but they do and I’m going mad for a pair.’

  ‘Your nipples are fine,’ Kreitman told him.

  ‘Listen to me, Kreitman,’ Charlie said, ‘if I don’t get to walk out with someone with nipplissimus erectibissimus before this term’s out I’ll shoot myself.’

  Soon after, rather than let that happen, Kreitman introduced him to Charlie.

  And guess what? She had tiny introverted nipples and wore brassières and men’s jackets.

  And long canvas skirts.

  And woolly winter tights.

  But Charlie fell in love with her for all that.

  And should have lived happily ever after, if there were any fairness in the universe. Yet here he was again, at the beginning of another century, wondering to what end those shadows on the walls of the school pavilion leapt and cavorted.

  As a general rule other people did not have as much fun as you feared they were having; he had learnt that as he’d got older. The grass isn’t always greener. Your neighbour is invariably as dissatisfied with his ox as you are with yours. Figuratively speaking, he wasn’t the only one who had worn his mother’s portrait round his neck. Everybody added a little to the truth. ‘No one ever goes to as wild a party as you throw for them in your head, Charlemagne,’ his wife used to tell him when she feared he was growing restless. Some such calculation of human sameness is necessary to keep us all in a passable state of contentment and it had been enough for Charlie for twenty years. Nice sex with Chas twice a month – and Charlie in his peroration to Marvin Kreitman had not exaggerated how nice sex between them was, sex so nice he sometimes wanted to cry while he was having it – nice books to write about children who were only comically not nice, nice sales, nice house on the river at Richmond, nice friends. He even sent off self-effacing articles to fogey journals in praise of his lifestyle, joys of suburbia, charm of the old-fashioned, what you don’t know you don’t miss, better a buffoon than a bounder, as if he’d clean forgotten what it was like to fear you had a putrefying penis. And it was enough. It did. More than that, it was true. The rest was lies. Silliness and lies. Then suddenly it wasn’t. Suddenly the rest was truth and he was lies.

  What had happened? Nothing in his relations with Charlie, he was sure of that. Dear Chas – they still worked as they had always done, on ancient clitter-clatter typewriters at opposite ends of a large pine table with a vase of freshly cut flowers between them, and he still had only to raise his eyes from his machine and see her engrossed in hers, poking her little fingers into the keyboard, as conscientious and unworldly as a head girl at a convent school; still had only to catch her looking quizzically at him over her bifocals, ascertaining whether he was genuinely listening to what she
was reading (‘Charlemagne, attend!’ she would say when she thought his attention was wandering), and his soul would leap as it had always leapt to nuzzle into hers. So, no, nothing to do with Chas. Nothing to do, either, with his son getting his nipple pierced (talking of nipples) and showing up without a word of warning on Blind Date. ‘My name’s Tim Merriweather and I’m from Rich … mond!’ Nor with his daughter getting her nipple pierced and informing them that while she wasn’t once and for all committed and they mustn’t think that that was her settled for the duration and that she wouldn’t be giving them grandchildren eventually, she did fancy having a tentative stab at the other thing. ‘Kitty’s a bulldyke!’ Charlie announced with a wail, during a party for grown-ups on the lawn, and all their friends roared with laughter. Strangers boating on the Thames roared with laughter too. Not at the daughter’s waywardness but at the father’s drollery. Who cared if there was or wasn’t another bulldyke in the world? It was all regulation Richmond. As was, when all was said and done, Dotty with her frayed-sleeved toyboy – yawn, yawn. Respectable Middle England which had never, in truth, been in the slightest bit respectable at all, simply opened its insatiable maw and swallowed the lot. No, none of Charlie’s externals had changed. Something had just switched on in his body. Or in his head. Maybe he’d banged himself. Walked into a wall or ricked his neck rolling off Charlie. Smack, rick, switch – behold, a pervert! No one was ever having as much fun as you feared they were having? The hell they weren’t! Look at Kreitman. Well, don’t look at him just this minute, with blood in his nostrils and tyre marks on his shirt; but in a general way, look at him.