Who's Sorry Now?

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘My sex? Nyman isn’t my sex.’

  She waved away his blustering. ‘I’ll tell you something, Marvin, he’s more of what I understand by a man, more rattishly and motivationally a man, more stripped down to the bare bones of a man, than you and Charlie rolled together. Don’t be insulted by that. It isn’t so terrific to be a man.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ Kreitman wondered about that. Wasn’t it? Maybe it wasn’t. Then, not quite sequentially, he said, ‘I thought he was a faggot.’

  She shook her head, this time meaning to cause pain. ‘He’s not a faggot,’ she said. ‘Let me assure you, the one thing our friend Nyman is not, is a faggot.’

  To the universally jealous Kreitman, the only person on the planet to have gone without contact with the opposite sex the night before, not counting his conversation with his mother, it was as though she had thrust her fingers in his eyes. He could see only blood, falling like rain blown against a window.

  Charlie discovered the true depth of her upset when her husband turned up in Richmond after three days of being denuded of his wedding ring in Somerset and asked her to be happy for him retrospectively.

  She was sitting at her old manual typewriter, at their table, pecking at the keys. She did not look up.

  ‘Why should I be happy for you, Charlemagne? For shitting on our marriage?’

  He was astonished she saw it like that. ‘I haven’t been shitting on our marriage,’ he told her. ‘I haven’t been doing anything to our marriage. I’ve just been away from it for a while.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  What had he been doing? ‘Having a sabbatical,’ he said.

  ‘You never wanted a sabbatical before.’

  ‘I never needed a sabbatical before.’

  ‘I see – we’re talking needs, are we? Do you really think I’m the person you should be telling this to?’

  ‘Who else? You’re my best friend.’

  ‘I’m not your best friend. I’m your wife.’

  ‘It’s possible to be both, Chas.’

  ‘Is it? I doubt that. I think it’s possible to be neither, but I doubt it’s possible to be both. Not in the sense of being a wife and a best friend who is happy for you when you sleep with other women. I think you might do better with Dotty. She’d make a good best friend. Try talking to her about your needs – oh, sorry, you already have.’

  Ah, Dotty. Charlie Merriweather had forgotten about Dotty.

  ‘I was dying, Chas,’ he told her. ‘I was this close to being a dead man.’

  Still refusing to look up, she missed seeing him measure with his fingers how far he’d been from being a dead man. But then nobody knew better than she did how close to being a dead man he remained.

  This close.

  She was curious about one thing, though. ‘Tell me what you thought you were dying of, Charlie.’

  He racked his brains. It wasn’t that he didn’t know. More that he didn’t know how best to put it. For two pins, had circumstances been different, he’d have rung up Kreitman. Help me with this one, Marvin. You know women.

  In the end, his belief that honesty was always the best policy prevailed. ‘Nice sex,’ he told her.

  And that was when she began to cry, great wailing cries which he had no idea she had it in her to make, cries which were more like an animal’s than a woman’s, howls beyond the hurt or bafflement of the conscious mind, gasps and eructations of brute bodily pain, as though sealers who had already claimed her young ones were now unleashing their fury upon her with wooden clubs.

  Had he done that? Just by taking his clothes off, staying away for a few days and giving himself a little leeway, had he caused that?

  It was when she began banging her head on their table, on their old sacred space, dashing her own brains out now, hammering herself free of him, hammering him out of her skull, that he started to howl himself. Nothing compared to hers, even he could hear the difference. Mere schoolyard blubberings – cold, lonely, hungry, bullied, far from home. Help-me-mummy cries, uttered without the slightest expectation of success, because his mother had never helped anyone. But at least they quietened Chas. She caught her breath several times, made a fist and banged her chest, pushed her hands up under her chin, behind her ears, pressing into her head. That was where the pain was. There.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked her through his tears. ‘Are you going to be all right?’

  ‘Get out!’ she shouted. ‘I’ve wasted my life on you. You’re a moron – get out!’

  An hour later he brought her tea. She hadn’t moved. ‘I thought I’d told you,’ she said.

  An hour after that he brought her a brandy. She still hadn’t moved. ‘Do I have to plead with you?’ she said. ‘Give me back my life. Get out of the house.’

  ‘Chassyboots,’ he said, putting out his hand to touch her hair.

  ‘Don’t make me wish you were dead,’ she said. ‘Don’t drive me to want to kill you.’

  And that was when he moved in with Hazel.

  Nothing comparably upsetting happened in Kennington. Far more civilised, the Kreitmans. Get the betrayals over early in a marriage and you spare yourself the seal-clubbing. Kreitman was out of his house, in all the essentials at least, before Hazel was back from her extra-marital escapade in the West Country. What more was there to discuss? Their marriage came to an end, what was left of it, on the night he vampired in on her distress and tried to sucker her into tell-me sex. ‘Fuck me, Nyman’ – that stuff either lands you the big prize or lands you in big trouble. No mistaking where it landed Kreitman. Never mind the punch on the nose; the coldness of Hazel’s turned back was the coldness of finality. Kreitman was attuned to finality. He knew it from his mother’s dismissal of his father, despatching all memory of him, along with his cut-glass decanters, in a matter of weeks.

  He had never thought he would leave Hazel. The French windows open, butterflies on the lawn and Hazel at her piano – that had been how he’d seen his life, extending like a sunlit country road for miles and miles and miles, before vanishing off the edge of the world. Yet he had also known he would leave Hazel, because he foretold just as vividly the turning of her back. No scenes, no sad goodbyes – if there had to be goodbyes he’d never go – just a leaving of the house as on any other day, except that this time he would never return to it. Not his doing, her doing. Not what he wanted, what she wanted. He granted women this – the primacy of their desires. He just did what he was told.

  But in truth he’d closed his own doors. Had he been able to summon a single rousing image of Hazel in the arms of Charlie he might have tried to salvage something. Not a nice way of gauging how much you did or didn’t love somebody, but that was Kreitman. He was an incorrigible sentimentalist of anguish. Where there was jealousy there was life. And there was none. He couldn’t put his imagination to work. He could see no picture. He could hear no talk, not even talk derogatory of him. This was partly because he could not take Charlie seriously as a rival. Charlie of the putrid penis? Impossible. For all it excited or upset him, Hazel might as well have been sleeping with Donald Duck. Nyman on the other hand, Nyman of the putrid disposition, Nyman who was everywhere and nowhere, who was everything and nothing, Nyman had piqued him. Nyman he could think of as the enemy of his soul. How much that was to do with the faggot himself and how much to do with Hazel wanting a piece and Chas taking it was the big question. Whatever the answer, it was Chas who was on his mind now. Exclusively on his mind. For the first time since he could remember, for the first time since he was Cophetua to his mother’s beggar-maid, he was down imaginatively to only one woman. And that meant being returned to the torments of only one woman, because he wasn’t at all sure that Chas was feeling the same way about him.

  He moved into the least formal of his convenience love nests, a narrow high-ceilinged would-be warehouse, the shape of an up-ended matchbox, above his shop on Clapham High Street, opposite a nightclub. The flats attached to his other shops were all copies of the Philippe Star
ck hotel rooms he’d stayed in on his buying trips around the world, places to fuck quickly and cleanly in; but this one, though hardly a home, at least reflected his unsatisfied temper, housed his books, his personal papers, the things that had no place in his marriage. It had been Hazel’s suggestion, originally, that as he spent so much time away, physically and mentally somewhere else, he could do worse than fix himself up an office space to store the possessions it always made him melancholy to look at, the memoranda of the intellectual life he’d abandoned, the junk of the bachelor existence he’d sacrificed (the dartboards and snooker cues and flamenco records dating back to his first holiday in Spain), all of which was just cluttering up space she could put to better use. ‘Think of it as a den,’ she said. ‘All men like a den, don’t they?’

  ‘Yes, but usually at the bottom of the garden. Not at the other end of London.’

  She threw him a look, the look, meaning men who want to make sentimental noises about the bottoms of their gardens would do well to know where the bottoms of their gardens are.

  And she reminded him that Clapham and Kennington were not exactly at opposite ends of London.

  By the time he had stuffed it with what mattered to him – shelves of the writings of the English radicals going up into the girders and reachable only by ladders, box files containing his old lectures and lecture notes, an old sea chest holding letters from his mother, an antique shove-halfpenny board on mahogany legs, a wind-up record player for his 78s, all his curry spices and a collection of Jack Nicholson movies on video – there was scarcely room for a bed. He was pleased that he had put the bed last. It refuted something about him. In the end he had a mezzanine floor built which he festooned with rugs. That was the bed. Opulent but hard to get to. The ladders for his books were at least made of steel. The ladder to his bed was made of rope. And how did the varicosed mothers of the women he loved negotiate that? They didn’t. Without knowing it while it was happening, he now realised he had been saving Clapham High Street. For whom? For Chas, of course.

  In time she would climb up to his bed and he would hack off the rungs of the ladder behind her. And that would be that.

  He had made no fuss about moving out. He had peered into Hazel’s bedroom and cried. Then he had opened the lid of Hazel’s piano stool – Chopin and Debussy, unplayed for however many years – and cried. Then he had taken a last look at Hazel’s bag museum, everything strewn around malevolently, like some holy place that had been sacked by infidels, and this time cried long and seriously. Then he did whatever else he had to do. He left a note for Hazel telling her that she’d been right all along, that a den was the very thing he needed, and cheerio. She knew how to reach him. She wasn’t in immediate need of anything. She had her own chequebook and credit cards. Her own car. Her own interests. And now her own lover. For his daughters too he left a note, saying he’d take them out to dinner as soon as he’d got his head straight. They’d understand that.

  It didn’t enter Kreitman’s calculations that Charlie would actually interpret the terms of the swap (some swap!) quite so literally: take up residence in Kreitman’s house, put his shirts in Kreitman’s wardrobe, sleep in Kreitman’s bed. When he thought about Hazel he thought of her as he’d known her, living the same life only with him not there. Not that different from before. He had no intention of padding pyjamaed up the Merriweather staircase himself, so Charlie’s whereabouts vis-à-vis Chas was equally immaterial. He was somewhere. Who cared where. Kreitman was not going to buy into the domestic farce of dodging and being dodged. The situation was already indecorous enough by virtue of its symmetry. Some men are natural born swappers, some aren’t. Kreitman wasn’t. He lacked the mirth.

  The same squeamishness told him to keep his distance from Chas in the first days after their grin-and-bear-it breakfast on Dartmoor. She had driven him back to London in her mobile picnic basket, neither of them speaking much, silenced by the amount of Charlie the vehicle contained – Wellingtons, anoraks, walking sticks, Glyndebourne umbrellas, all the tramping-in-mud and sitting-on-damp-grass gear that had been the glue of the Merriweather marriage. But this would have been a time for quiet anyway. Kreitman had said what he’d needed to say. Shown Chas that she was able to hurt him. And she had shown him that hurting was something she might come to enjoy. Eventually. Anything further, for the time being, would have been unsubtle.

  He rang her only twice in the first week, alluding to as little as possible, not even telling her that he had moved out of his house. The first call was no more than a polite thank-you for the lift and a discreet enquiry as to her spirits. Nothing knowing. Just was she all right.

  Her voice was like a tall building in a high gale. She was fine. Why shouldn’t she be?

  ‘No reason,’ Kreitman said.

  ‘No reason other than that my husband has just come home asking me to be happy for him.’

  Kreitman said nothing. Not even, ‘And are you?’

  ‘He tells me he’s been on sabbatical. I don’t suppose you’ve ever thought of Hazel as a sabbatical yourself.’

  ‘No,’ Kreitman said.

  ‘No,’ she jeered, extending the vowel so that it took in all the women Kreitman had thought of as a sabbatical.

  Don’t rise, Kreitman cautioned himself. Don’t go near it. He wondered what else Charlie had told his wife. That he had swapped her for Hazel? That she was now obliged, by the terms of the deal, to do something nice for Marvin. Surely even Charlie knew the difference between a venial sin and a capital offence. ‘You’ll work it out,’ was what he said.

  ‘We have worked it out,’ she told him. ‘We’ve worked him out. He’s gone.’

  ‘What do you mean, he’s gone?’

  ‘Gone. Gone gone. I ordered the prick off the premises and he obligingly packed his bags and skedaddled.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Kreitman said. But he was thinking how unconvincingly she swore. Had she ever called anyone a prick before? Skedaddling was pure Chas, her hand not quite in the glove of the vernacular, and ordering people off premises had something of her soul in it too, but prick … ?

  They were both listening hard. ‘You’re sorry?’ Was she wondering if he’d ever used that word before?

  ‘I truly am, Charlie.’

  ‘Are you?’ she said. She was weeping now, walled about in tears. ‘I wonder if you are …’

  And Kreitman, alert and lonely in his bachelor pad, heard something in that that gave him hope.

  When he rang again it was to ask her out. For lunch, not dinner. Somewhere casual, not somewhere significant. To dry her tears, was the implication. To offer his shoulder, in the event of Charlie still being gone, or his counsel in the event of Charlie’s having returned. She said no, of course. No to Charlie’s having returned, no to her ever wanting him to return, and no to lunch. But she didn’t say he had a fucking nerve.

  ‘Call me if you change your mind,’ he said.

  ‘We’ll see,’ she’d said. But weepily.

  The next day she did call, but only to tell him how hurt she was that he had let her rave on about her husband but hadn’t informed her that he wasn’t just knocking off Hazel but had actually moved in with her.

  ‘Charlie’s moved in with Hazel?’

  ‘Come off it, Marvin.’

  ‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it, I swear to you.’

  She didn’t believe him. ‘Marvin, your house isn’t that big.’

  ‘I’m not in the house …’

  He waited for her to digest that information, measure its import for herself, but she said nothing.

  ‘I haven’t been in the house since I got back from Dartmoor,’ he continued.

  ‘Aha,’ she said. Pull the other one.

  ‘Think about it, Chas. What would I be doing there? Tucking them in and taking them Ovaltine?’

  ‘I wouldn’t put that past you.’

  ‘You think I’m a pander as well as a sabbaticalist?’

  ‘I think you’re capable of anything, Marv
in.’

  ‘Maybe, but not that. I’ve told you, I’m motivated by nostalgia, not pervery.’

  ‘I’m surprised you call it pervery.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning you might think of it as companionable – your wife, your best friend … and you.’

  ‘Forget it, Charlie. That’s not my scene.’

  ‘Not your scene?’ She let out a mock gasp. ‘I don’t suppose you remember the violence, Marvin, with which you once publicly dumped on me for using that expression.’

  ‘I don’t. But I apologise.’

  ‘For dumping on me?’

  ‘For that too. But it shows how agitated talking to you makes me. What I should have said was, “Threesomes? My thoughts do not that way tend.”’

  ‘Which is why you left the house?’

  ‘I’ve told you, I’d left the house already.’

  ‘To live alone or with some girl?’

  Was she jealous?

  ‘I don’t do girls. But yes, to live alone.’

  ‘I can’t see your thoughts tending to loneliness for long, Marvin.’

  She was. She was jealous.

  ‘You know damn well where my thoughts are tending, Charlie,’ he told her.

  She paused, listening, listening. ‘Well, we’ll see,’ she said again. But still she made no reference to lunch.