Who's Sorry Now?

by Howard Jacobson

  An attentive observer will have noted some ambiguity in Kreitman’s feelings about his friends the Merriweathers. As a professional couple at the soft end of the writing profession, and he a mere bagman, they kept open a number of doors to his idealised past which would otherwise have creaked closed. But Kreitman was a puritan who loved art for its strenuousness and history for the stories it told of struggle. Whatever came easy was of no value to Kreitman. And that that included fucking we already know. The problem with the Merriweathers, viewed solely as a couple now, considered only as a literary entity, was that they had neither struggled to find their métier, nor struggled with it once found. A niche opened for them and they fell into it. The same of course could be said for him, but in his case the casket of riches that fell open was not prized by the Kultur. The more money Kreitman made, the further into the background of the nation he felt himself recede. Money ruled, without doubt. The catch for Kreitman, though, was that the way you made it also ruled, and except in so far as it showed him in a picturesque costermonger light, the way he made his (dirty fingers, Kreitman) did him no favours precisely where a favour would have been appreciated. ‘Ah, purses!’ an academic philosopher with a boy’s brow and a soldier’s back had once repeated, meeting Kreitman on the Merriweather lawn, and the Thames flowing sweetly, and the blackbirds melodic, and the shadows lengthening. ‘Ah, handbags and the like!’ And he had remained with his pale hand to his cheek and his Mekon head thrown back in contemplation for so long, that Kreitman wondered whether his profession had turned the thinker to stone. His own fault for caring? Decidedly. No one knew that better than he did. But what could he do? He’d gone out and got Kultur, and for Kultur when it infects the un-kultured there is no known cure. With the Merriweathers, though, it all went, as it had always gone, swimmingly. He had not been able to imagine how the Charlies were going to survive leaving university. He remembered waving goodbye to them when they drove off on their honeymoon, immediately after graduating. To this day he could see their big unsheltered eyes receding, seeming to plead with him to call them back. It was like watching Adam and Eve leaving the Garden. It all but broke his squishy heart. But he had got it completely wrong. They weren’t leaving the Garden at all, they were entering it. The one excluded from the Garden was him, Marvin Kreitman. Thereafter, there always seemed to be someone giving one or other of the Charlies something. This one bought them a house. That one bought them furniture. Another paid their first child’s school fees. Not relatives, either. Not even friends, as far as Kreitman could make out. Just people. Folk. Personages of the Kultur. Until the Merriweathers in turn became personages of the Kultur themselves, ready to assist whoever came passing the hat round in the Garden next.

  Some friend, that Kreitman! But what choice did he have? There was never an orphan yet who did not envy a big family. And the truth is, he would have bought them a house if no one else had. And furnished it for them. And paid for Timmy the Pierced, latterly of Blind Date, to go to Bedales. It was possible to feel concern for those you loved and to feel resentful of them at the same time. Possible? In Kreitman’s estimation it was a universal law.

  He slipped away from the book readers as soon as it was respectable to do so and took a stroll around the gardens. Sitting on a sun-bleached bench, she in linens, which he’d watched her steaming with her travel-steamer after silent breakfast, he in heimat urchin mountain pants cut off halfway down his legs, she animated, he not, she the watering can, he the flower, were Hazel and Nyman. Kreitman turned and walked the other way. Finding a bench of his own, he took out his mobile phone, scrolled through the names in his phone book, paused at one he fancied and punched OK. There was a time when Saturday imposed the most arduous obligations. On sofas and daybeds all over London, Kreitman’s lovers pining for their prince. And he, with his pockets full of change (what would his mother have said!), darting into every phone box he could find. Oh, for a mobile phone in those days. Now he had the technology, the occasion for it was gone. Wasn’t that always the way. Five numbers, and not a one of them was answering. Five women, and not a one of them was home.

  No one on the planet more lonely than me, Kreitman thought. It wasn’t self-pity, it was self-punishment. For Kreitman understood loneliness as a species of failure. It disgusted him to be alone. It showed him to be incompetent in the art of not being alone. It shamed him. It angered him. And he turned the anger on himself.

  Crossing the lawn, oblivious of him, careless of the sun except as it illuminated each for the other, a young couple entwined, he in a loose short-sleeved shirt with his arm around her shoulder, she in a clinging strawberry-patterned summer frock, as undulant as the sea, with her arm around his waist. Be happy for them, Kreitman thought. Be happy for humanity, of which you are no less a part than they. Share with them. Share in them.

  Fat chance of that. The fact was, other people’s erotic happiness took from his. Their absorption in themselves excluded him. Which of course was exactly what it was meant to do. But that was no consolation. It was beyond reason and beyond cure, but he could not stroll through a garden, he could not cross the street, he could not enter one of his own shops, he could not wait at a carousel for his luggage or at a counter for a sandwich and see a woman with her hands on a man without the sight diminishing him. Talk was even worse. Conceal Kreitman where he might overhear dalliance or description, a woman declaring her love, a woman confiding her love, a woman no more than wondering if she might be in love, and let the lover not be him, not be Marvin Kreitman, and he would suffer convulsions of jealousy. What did that man have that Kreitman did not? What business had those women, anyway, falling in love with another man, any other man, before they had met him? He was in sexual competition with everybody, not only those he knew and had already challenged, but with men he had never seen and never would see, men already dead and men still waiting to be born, men who had no shape or appearance in his eyes, men whose age he could not guess and whose intentions he could not fathom, but who were vividly alive to him by virtue of nothing but their being the object of a girl’s devotion.

  All biological, no doubt. Kreitman’s genes seeking their perpetuation to the exclusion of all others. But what did knowing that solve?

  Mid-afternoon, a light rain falling, Charlie came looking for him. The two men met between pots of foliage, on the steps to the lounge. Afternoon teatime. ‘Join me,’ Kreitman said. Devonshire tea – jam, clotted cream, the works. Charlie bit the air, which Kreitman took to signal assent.

  He had seen Charlie crossing the lawn to him and was struck by how deranged he looked, his mouth open and closing, yammering wordlessly like a madman. He was dressed peculiarly, too, in a heavy jacket with green and yellow squares, a ribbed cricket sweater and a scarf thrown around his neck. Winter towpath clothes, for Dartmoor in May.

  ‘I see that something is the matter,’ Kreitman said, pouring.

  ‘I’ve beheaded the monster,’ Charlie said.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I’ve beheaded the monster guarding the labyrinth where my other selves are hidden. I’m free. The swap’s ready.’ Kreitman could hear his breathing.

  ‘I thought we’d agreed to say no more about all that,’ Kreitman said.

  ‘Did we? I don’t remember any agreement of the kind. I haven’t agreed to stop anything.’ His jaw was trembling. ‘Are you chickening out on me now?’

  ‘Charlie, there’s nothing to chicken out on. We were pissed.’

  ‘Oh yes there is. You get Chas, I get Hazel. You get to taste fidelity, I get to taste the opposite. That’s what we agreed.’

  ‘It’s not my recollection that you were to get Hazel, Charlie. I thought we hadn’t decided who you were getting.’

  ‘Ah! So you do remember!’

  Kreitman thought of Chas throwing up her skirts for Nyman. ‘I remember that we behaved like clowns,’ he said. ‘But how come you’ve decided on Hazel suddenly? Because she’s been slobbering up to Nyman
?’

  Charlie thought of Hazel, rooting under the table to steal a second marvel over Nyman’s pumped-up calves. ‘Everyone’s been slobbering up to Nyman. You’ve been slobbering up to Nyman.’

  ‘He seems to make one do that,’ Kreitman agreed.

  ‘Not me.’

  ‘No, not you. But then your mind has been on other things.’

  ‘And not yours? I’ve watched you, Marvin. I’ve watched you eyeing Chas. Well, now’s your chance. She’s ready.’

  Kreitman laughed. ‘You’ve prepared her for me, have you?’

  ‘She’s prepared herself. She’d do anything to pay me back.’

  ‘For what, Charlie? For staying out late on a Friday night with me?’

  ‘Nothing to do with you. To do with me. To do with me and women.’

  Kreitman laughed at the incongruity of the phrase ‘me and women’ on Charlie’s lips. Charlie as bastard. ‘You’re not telling me you’ve fucked Hazel already?’

  Charlie’s mouth started to move silently again. A diadem of sweat appeared from nowhere on his brow. ‘Not Hazel,’ he said. He wasn’t eating anything, Kreitman noticed. Not rubbing his hands over the fruit scones. A bad sign. ‘No. Not Hazel.’

  Kreitman sat up in his chair and wiped all trace of Devonshire tea from his face. For what he was about to hear he wanted to look dignified. ‘Then who, Charlie?’

  ‘It’s not who I’ve fucked, it’s who I’ve propositioned for a fuck.’

  Kreitman appeared to mull that over. ‘Go on,’ he said.

  Charlie took a deep breath. ‘I’ve been seeing Dotty,’ he said.

  ‘Dotty!’ Now it was Kreitman’s turn to yammer like a madman. ‘Dotty! What do you mean you’ve been seeing Dotty? You didn’t tell me you were seeing Dotty when we last talked.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me you were seeing her when we last talked.’

  ‘I wasn’t. I’ve taken her out to lunch once, for God’s sake. That’s it.’

  ‘Me too. I took her out to lunch once – only that wasn’t it.’

  ‘Taking your wife’s sister out to lunch isn’t seeing her.’

  ‘Maybe not. Why are we arguing over the meaning of seeing? Seeing her or not, I took her out to lunch and asked her to sleep with me. Do you want to correct me over the meaning of sleep?’

  ‘You took your wife’s sister out and asked her to sleep with you? I hope this was a very long time ago.’

  ‘What difference when it was? But it was last week, if you want to know.’

  ‘And she said no?’

  ‘Of course she said no.’

  ‘Then everything’s all right,’ he very nearly said. Good job Hazel wasn’t there to hear him very nearly say that. The spectacle of you putting your mind to the rights and the wrongs of anything, Marvin, is too horrible to contemplate. He tried to do better. Everything wasn’t all right. Not intelligent to proposition your wife’s sister, and not nice, either. Not something you should do and not something you would want your wife to get to hear about. But then why should she get to hear about it? Good job Hazel wasn’t there to hear him very nearly think that. Cat-house morality. But it was a conviction written into the lining of Kreitman’s soul – a lie was always better for everyone than a confession. Better in the sense of more humane. Suddenly he remembered what Charlie had told him of his fear of guilt, lying like a garrulous third person in his marriage bed. ‘Oh, Charlie,’ he said, ‘you haven’t been owning up?’

  Charlie shook his head. ‘Hardly had the chance,’ he said resentfully, a man for whom never being given the chance was the story of his life.

  ‘Dotty told?’

  ‘Not in so many words.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Dotty didn’t tell Chas. She told her under-age boyfriend.’

  ‘And he told?’

  Charlie nodded.

  ‘The little shit. Never trust a reviewer, eh?’ Both men pondered that truth, then Kreitman said, ‘But hang on a minute. If Chas knows that you’ve been propositioning her sister, how come she’s been behaving so calmly down here?’ (Leaving aside the throwing up of her skirts.)

  ‘She’s only just found out.’

  ‘The little shit rang her here to tell her?’

  ‘Not exactly. The little shit sent a fax.’

  ‘To the hotel?’

  ‘No, to home.’

  ‘But you’re not at home.’

  ‘No. But Kitty and Tim are.’

  Kreitman covered his face. Through his fingers, he said. ‘Oh, Charlie, no! Please don’t tell me Tim and Kitty found it.’

  Charlie nodded. Timmy Hyphen Smelly-Botty and Kitty-Litter Farnsbarns found it. The end of innocence. He kept nodding. The biggest, saddest nods Kreitman had ever seen. Kreitman rose from the table and put his arms round his friend’s shoulders, squeezing them, then lowered his lips to Charlie’s head. The hair was wet, smelling of trampled leaves and panic. How heavy his head is, Kreitman thought. How hard it must be, sometimes, for him to carry it.

  ‘And Tim and Kitty,’ he deduced, ‘rang Chas? That was sweet of them. I wonder if mine would have acted with the same consideration.’

  ‘They didn’t actually. They rang me. But they must have rung while I was talking to the book club. They left a message warning me. Threatening me, too, I suppose. Warning me off. But giving me a chance. The trouble is … Chas always goes through my messages for me.’

  Kreitman returned to his seat and made fists of his hands. ‘Ah, the beauty,’ he said, ‘of a trusting marriage.’

  Charlie looked at him. ‘Not any more.’

  The silence of the grave between them. Had the earth opened there and then, sucking down the table and all its tea things, neither would have been much surprised. Ruination comes quietly, picking off the china, emptying the mantelpiece first. Kreitman heard a clock ticking, which ten minutes before he would not have been able to tell you was in the room. He felt that universal sadness of the sentimental man, slightly bleary as though alcohol had played a part in it, but long anticipated and familiar, as though it were the fulfilment of the very fear with which one comes into the world. Here it is then, the distinguished thing. Or rather – for he had refamiliarised himself with the forestaste every time he waved goodbye to a woman he loved – here it is again. Was this all his fault? Had the example of his looseness, his loose tongue, destabilised Charlie? He felt guilty, too, that even as Charlie’s children were leaving their fatal message on his phone, he, Kreitman, had been begrudging Charlie his life-pass to the Garden of Eden. Choke on your own bile, Kreitman, Kreitman thought.

  ‘So, the coast is clear,’ Charlie suddenly said.

  Kreitman had forgotten that this was where they’d begun. Sex and death. Contemplating the destruction of his marriage, Charlie sought redemption through sperm. What a wonderful thing life is!

  ‘Wait a bit,’ Kreitman said.

  ‘What for? Seize the hour, Marvin. I’ve beheaded the monster, I claim the maiden.’

  Not a time for Kreitman to be saying he didn’t care to be Chas’s revenge on her husband, or that he did not desire her whatever the conditions. ‘She’ll come round,’ he said. But he didn’t believe it; some crimes against the marriage vows are capital.

  ‘If you think that,’ Charlie said, employing the logic of the insane, ‘then just do the swap while I’m waiting. Just lend me Hazel.’

  To tide you over, Kreitman thought. Among the other things he could not say was, Hazel isn’t mine to lend, not mine in that she was never mine to lend, for God’s sake, Charlie, not mine to give or lend, but also, simply, just not mine. Not now. Not any more.

  ‘The bugger!’ was what he said instead.

  ‘The bugger what?’

  ‘The bugger Nyman has got there before you, Charlie.’

  Kreitman did not go down to dinner. He left the room when Hazel came in to change – left quickly and silently, before she could order him out – and returned once he was confident she had gone. Whatever was happe
ning out there would not make for the sort of dinner party he enjoyed. He couldn’t imagine the Merriweathers making a joint showing. Chas may well have driven home by now. Charlie may well have been lying at the bottom of a trout stream. At least he was dressed for it. Or, energised by death, propositioning one of the waitresses. Which left Nyman for Hazel to enjoy unhampered.

  He lay on the bed and rang room service. Red wine was what he wanted, red wine as bloody as it came and a thick rare steak, also bleeding. The remote was broken so he had to get up to turn on the television. Shit on every channel. He watched a desolating programme about people who wanted to sing like other people, obscure people who imitated famous people, though he didn’t know who the famous people were either. His daughters would have known. And Nyman of course. For wasn’t that what Nyman was doing, first on his bike and now down here – impersonating some other person in the hope of been recognised for someone he wasn’t? Stars In His Eyes. Dreaming of being famous for reminding people of someone else. Maybe right this minute Nyman was on a high being him, being Kreitman. Big mistake if he hoped thereby to make a favourable impression on Hazel.

  But that wasn’t his business.

  He fell asleep watching shit and woke up only when his steak arrived. Not bloody enough. But then when ever was it? He ate it sitting up in bed anyway and polished off the wine. Then he got out of bed and turned off the television. Then he got back into bed and rang his mother.

  Whenever he was at his lowest, Kreitman rang his mother. He had been doing that since he was small, ringing her from school, ringing her from camp, ringing her from Barcelona, ringing her from his honeymoon hotel, so that she should hear the melancholy in his voice. The blotting-paper effect, partly. You’re my mother, suck up my sorrows. But more than that, Kreitman rang his mother when he was low in order to blame her. Your fault! Nothing specific – she had done him no wrong, other than being his mother. But that seemed to be sufficient reason.

  Your fault!

  Kreitman admired his mother. He admired the way she kept herself youthful – black-haired and jingling like a gypsy still – and he admired the way she rose above her circumstances. Barely one year into her second marriage she found herself having to support an invalid. There was money over from husband number one, the bitter little key-fob thief who had been Kreitman’s father, but she wasn’t sure how much of that Kreitman was going to need (for he was still bound for Downing Street in those days), and it was important to her that what was left of husband number two should be cared for decently. Young Kreitman didn’t believe it behoved him to look too closely into his mother’s personal life, but he was of the opinion that she had fallen in love in a big way the second time around, even though the object of her devotion was a mouse-man called Norbert who found his fulfilment stamping books and refolding newspapers in a small public library in north London. A person of such quiet deliberation that you could hear the sound his pink-whorled fingers made when they touched a page – a soft, hypnotising, papery phttt which acted voluptuously on Mona Kreitman’s nervous system – Norbert Bellwood was nature’s refutation of Kreitman’s father, the least dyspeptic, most unaggravated man on the planet. Where Kreitman Senior used to dash his food down as though he were getting rid of the remains of someone he’d murdered, the police hammering on his door, Norbert Bellwood ruminated on every morsel until it liquidised into his stomach without his even so much as swallowing. ‘It’s uncanny,’ Mona Kreitman told her friends. ‘No Rennies, no Gaviscon, and not a rumble in the night. He is the answer to my prayers. And you should hear him clean his teeth! Except you can’t. He’s like a ghost with an imaginary brush.’ No need for anyone to call Quiet! in Norbert Bellwood’s library. The unruliest children, the noisiest readers, felt Norbert’s presence and fell silent. The only disturbance, the inking of his rubber stamp and his long gingery eyelashes fanning the air as he read. Even the stroke which made him an invalid and broke Mona Kreitman’s – now Mona Bellwood’s – heart came quietly. One minute he was at his desk calculating a fine, the next he was out on his back on the library carpet, looking up unseeing at a grubby bust of an old philanthropist of the borough. And nobody had heard him moan.