Who's Sorry Now?

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘As you were,’ he saluted to the shop in general, as he left. But none of the remaining staff looked up from what they were doing or otherwise showed they thought his joke particularly funny.

  ‘Right, Maurice,’ he said, folding himself back into the Smart, ‘let’s see what trouble I can cause in Mitcham.’

  He was better off indoors with his unrequited gypsy music and his shove-halfpenny board. Waiting for the call from Chas.

  He couldn’t stop thinking about her. She had turned golden in his imagination, come in out of the sun-bled fields and taken possession of the great glittering indoors, made lustrous by artificial light. Once upon a time he had not liked the sameness of her palette, her corn-stook hair, yellow to her shoulders, framing dully her corn-stook complexion; now the homogeneity of her colouring seemed to him the very model of beauty, her yellow become bronze, its evenness of shading stirringly at odds with the unruliness of her character. When he heard her voice he tried to picture what she was wearing, even though he couldn’t stomach a single item in her wardrobe. When his phone rang he hoped to God it was her and was unable to prevent his own voice dropping when it turned out to be someone else. ‘Come on, come on, get off the line,’ he muttered into his teeth, rocking on the balls of his feet, aflame with impatience, even though the caller had once whispered up all the devils of hell for his entertainment. But there you are, they were the wrong devils, not a one of them Chas in her knitted cucumber top and spinnaker skirt, down on her lavender-gathering knees on a croquet lawn, confusing the categories, mixing up his head.

  He jumped when he heard his mail delivered, or the bell ring, or the door rattle. When he looked out of his window he thought he saw her in the street, reading the shop numbers, looking up for a sight of him, smiling one of those blind person’s smiles of hers – fantastical because she didn’t have an inkling where his flat was, but that didn’t stop him imagining her coming up the stairs, knocking on his door, seeing how he was living and feeling sorry for him.

  ‘You’ve reduced yourself to this for me?’

  ‘For you, Charlie.’

  And then one of them running into the other’s arms.

  No, not one of them, him. Running into hers.

  Jelly. He’d turned to jelly, grown passive, become the victim of events. He never thought of going to her, always of her coming to him. Never of his kissing her, always of her kissing him. He imagined being touched by her – her hands on him, not his on her – cudgelling his brains to recall how his skin felt the one time she had touched him. But too much had happened since then, four children had been born, innumerable other touchings had taken place, and he’d been too drunk, and she’d been too drunk, and there’d been more bravado than skin in it, anyway, and more tease than touch. And more irony than he’d had the wit to register.

  Ironic women had always been his weakness. He had fallen for Hazel because she’d been sardonic about herself. Of his current crop of lapsed lovers, Bernadette had been his favourite because she put up ironic buildings – libraries too dark to read a book in, old people’s homes which were death traps even for the young and virile – and because she looked to him to confirm her bleak view of existence. Chas’s irony, though, was different. Something to do with protectiveness. She’d mocked Charlie protectively for however many years. Become a sort of mother to him and assumed a sort of care. Ironically sort of. My baby, my poor weak baby. With hindsight, Kreitman now believed there might all along have been a touch of that in her tone to him too. Was it something to do with her brand of sex? The satiric half-accidental handjob, after which she was liberated to show pity? Had she been mothering him ironically for twenty years without his ever noticing? And did she therefore feel motherly to that nonentity Nyman as well? Was she nursing Nyman in a leaded-windowed bedroom with a view of the Thames in Richmond right this minute, fumbling in his pants and rocking him in her arms, even as Kreitman uncorked his third bottle of Shiraz and ripped open his second packet of malted-milk biscuits for the night?

  Do I know anything, Kreitman wondered, of what has or hasn’t happened?

  After all, he needed to talk to his mother.

  She had moved north, when she became Mrs Bellwood, to the quiet of Rickmansworth, then further north again, nudging at the Chilterns, after Norbert had his stroke. She greeted Kreitman in her garden, a cigarette in her hand. He loved it that his mother smoked. It made her raffish in his eyes.

  ‘I’m dead-heading the roses,’ she said.

  ‘With a cigarette?’

  She showed him the secateurs sticking out of her apron pocket. Secateurs he cared for less than cigarettes, then remembered he’d seen Chas wielding them in Richmond and wondered if maybe they could be rendered raffish, by association, too.

  ‘I knew you were coming,’ she said.

  Kreitman, standing ill at ease on the lawn with his arms folded, laughed. ‘No you didn’t.’

  She tapped the side of her face, just below her eye, the nerve centre of her sympathetic prescience. ‘I told Norbert you’d be here, just half an hour ago.’

  He met her gaze. Don’t say anything, her eyes warned him. Make no comment about the fact that when you’re not here I’m talking to someone who cannot talk back to me and who most of the time doesn’t understand a word I say.

  She walked him round the garden, showing him flowers. A new side to his mother. There’d been no flowers in the days of his father. But then Bruno the Broygis would probably have kicked their heads off on his way in.

  Kreitman didn’t ask how Norbert was. He knew the routine. No mention. What there was to be told, he would be told. Sometimes his mother would take him up to see Norbert, sometimes he would be wheeled out. But if he wasn’t, he wasn’t. And Kreitman knew not to wander round the house. A man who has had a stroke as serious as Norbert’s leaves a swinging thurible of baby smell, damp and dead, in every room he’s been in. Mona Bellwood showed no sign that that distressed or shamed her. If she was careful who she allowed to go where, that was to spare them.

  Too cruel. Too unthinkably cruel that his mother’s second crack at romance should have ended so abruptly in this. One bastard, one vegetable – where was the fairness in that?

  ‘So,’ she said. ‘Love-troubles. Have you come to see Shelley?’

  ‘Ma, I’ve come to see you.’

  ‘I know, but have you also come to see Shelley?’

  ‘No, not today.’

  ‘Then definitely love-troubles.’

  He sat on a step while she continued savaging the roses. ‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ he said, ‘I’ve left Hazel.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, not bothering to look up.

  ‘Ma, do me a favour – enough with the psychic powers.’

  ‘Who’s talking about psychic powers? She rang me.’

  ‘Hazel rang you!’

  ‘I’m her mother-in-law, why are you surprised?’

  ‘What did she ring you to say?’

  ‘What do you think? “Congratulations. You have your wish. Better late than never.”’

  ‘She said that?’

  ‘Yes. Brave of her, I thought. First brave thing I’ve ever heard her say.’

  ‘And no doubt you told her that?’

  ‘No. I said I was sorry if either of you was unhappy. Are you?’

  ‘What did she say to that?’

  ‘I’m asking you that. Are you unhappy?’

  Kreitman took off his jacket and folded it on his lap. Linen. He didn’t want it creased. ‘What I am,’ he said, ‘is bewildered. I can’t work out why I like what I like in women.’

  ‘Simple,’ his mother told him. ‘Trouble. You like trouble.’

  ‘Yes, but that doesn’t help. What I want to know is why do I like trouble.’

  She dropped the secateurs on the lawn and came to join him on the steps. Creakily. He hadn’t noticed that in her before. He thought of her as about his age. But up close she wasn’t the beggar-maid any more. You can’t push your husban
d around in his wheelchair, smelling infancy and death on him every day, and stay a beggar-maid. ‘What exactly is it you want to hear from me?’ she asked. ‘That I did something to you when you were small? That I gave you a taste for trouble?’

  ‘Ma, you know I’m not asking you that.’

  She shrugged. ‘I may have,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t your Freud say all mothers do that. Why should I be any different? I tried to make you believe in yourself, and who can say whether that’s a good thing. Maybe I made you arrogant. Maybe you thought I was the only one who could appreciate you. And since you couldn’t have me – bingo! – trouble.’

  ‘Freud in a nutshell, Ma. I can’t think why you’ve always been so against him. But I’m not blaming you for anything. I just want to know whether I was always … what I am. When you took me to all those specialists because I kept fainting, did any of them say anything?’

  ‘Like your boy seems to want trouble from his women? Marvin, you were eight at the time. We weren’t looking for woman-associated symptoms.’

  ‘But I was morbid, wasn’t I? That’s why you took me.’

  ‘No one said anything about morbid. The doctors called you sensitive.’

  ‘But what does sensitive mean?’

  ‘Sensitive means sensitive. You’re still sensitive. Look at the fists you’re making.’

  She put her hands on his, unlacing his fingers. What he couldn’t decide was whether their eyes had met, whether she had mutely said, ‘You like that, don’t you, Marvin? You like me to unfist you.’

  ‘Do you remember,’ she suddenly said, ‘telling me about the woman you met in Selfridges?’

  He tossed his hair. Jest and no jest. ‘Ma, I’ve met so many women in Selfridges.’

  This time their eyes did meet. Hers were black and Caspian still, but the blaze wasn’t what it once had been. He thought they looked sorrowfully into his – not sorry for herself, sorry for him. She squeezed his hands. ‘You told me you met this one in the bag department. You told me you stopped her buying something. You were excited, you said, because she was as old as I was. A funny thing, Marvin, to tell your mother.’

  A phrase he would rather not have remembered came back to him. ‘You don’t use your mouth like other men.’

  That first. How interesting. First the phrase, then the woman.

  It was just before he went to university. Out on the prowl, anywhere, it didn’t matter, Tottenham Court Road, Piccadilly Circus, Carnaby Street, Regent Street. A late Saturday afternoon, the shops not yet closed, his eyes darting in every direction, then bullseye! he found one – tall, fleshy, sarcastic-looking, self-contained in the manner of a married woman not needing to be on the prowl herself – where else but in Selfridges’ handbag department. ‘Don’t buy that one,’ he’d said. ‘Rubbish leather. The patent will come off in the rain. Clasp will rust and the strap’s old-fashioned. This one suits you better.’

  His reward a knee-trembler after lasagne and Valpolicella, up against a wall in St Christopher’s Place, close to where once stood a urinal in which the downwardly mobile Victorian painter Simeon Solomon – no long-windedly self-righteous Moral Chartist, that one, but a hero of Kreitman’s nonetheless – did feloniously attempt the abominable crime of buggery (so Kreitman could like a faggot when it suited him) upon one George Roberts, or vice versa. Though no blue plaque marks the spot.

  No blue plaque for Marvin Kreitman either, but then no blue plaque was necessary – it was scarred on his brain tissue, the place where he learned he did not use his mouth like other men.

  So how did other men use their mouths?

  She didn’t know how to put it. She’d only come out to buy a handbag when all was said and done. And she wasn’t in the habit of doing this. But since he asked – well, more assertively, more animalistically, or something.

  Kreitman bit her lip.

  She pushed him from her. ‘There’s something wrong with you,’ she said, before she walked away. ‘You just leave your mouth there, like a baby bird’s, waiting for something to be put into it. It’s horrible. Then you bite me.’

  What sort of mouth did a baby bird have? Soft, red, passive, blindly hungry. Not a flattering comparison, was it? Thereafter he was careful to present a powerful set of mandibles to every woman he kissed. Lock into Marvin Kreitman’s jaws and you knew how a mouse felt when an eagle swooped. But the imputation stuck – there was some masculine forcefulness that wasn’t his by nature.

  And he’d told this to his mother?

  Marvellous that she remembered. How many years ago was it? Twenty-five? Thirty? But more marvellous still that he’d told her.

  Why would he have told her?

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘something is vaguely coming back to me.’

  ‘It worried you at the time, I remember.’

  ‘It still worries me.’

  She shook her head and took his hands, both remade into fists, one in each of hers. ‘You’ve got your health,’ she said. ‘You have two wonderful daughters. You have never been short of girlfriends. You make a good living. What do you have to worry about?’

  It always saddened and bemused him, how little his mother expected of him now. Health, for God’s sake. Daughters, girlfriends, a living … Where had the other stuff gone? His destiny, his moral spotlessness, his genius? Couldn’t she at least be a little bit disappointed for him?

  Or was that just the mouth issue all over again? Was that why he’d told her – so that she could pity and reprimand him, in equal measure? Did he seek his mother’s disappointment?

  Christ!

  Before he left, his mother took him to see Norbert in the lovely high-ceilinged sunlit room she’d built for him, quiet as his old library, every sound dying in deep lilac carpet, his books and papers, unread, all around him. How old was Norbert? Kreitman wondered. He looked ageless – a thousand years, a thousand days, impossible to tell – a creature washed of all his sins, only his tongue a problem to him, everything else apparently sorted, his eyes off on some unknown journey of their own.

  ‘Marvin’s here to see you,’ his mother said.

  ‘Hi, Norbert,’ Kreitman said.

  Not a flicker.

  Because Kreitman didn’t know what else to do, he waved.

  Mona Bellwood went over to her husband’s chair and rearranged him, lifting him under his arms, as she must once have lifted Marvin, pulling the hair back from his unlined brow, tidying him around the ears, this never unkempt man. She raised her face and saw her son looking at her. She smiled a tired smile. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said. ‘But he’s in here. He hasn’t gone. I know that when I touch him I’m reaching him.’

  And you, Mother, Kreitman wasn’t able to ask, who’s reaching you?

  ‘You’re a believer in the soul, then?’ he said.

  ‘I always knew where you were when you were out,’ she reminded him, continuing to clean up her husband’s face, smoothing away the hairs, absently stroking his cheeks, rearranging his cravat. ‘I could always tell if something bad was happening to you. I don’t know whether you call that believing in the soul.’

  ‘So you know where Norbert is?’

  ‘I do, yes, definitely.’

  ‘And is something bad happening to him?’

  She started to answer, but then couldn’t. Cracks suddenly appeared across her face, like the shattering of glass. She put up her hands to hide her grief, though whether from him or from Norbert he couldn’t say. Somehow, with a movement of her shoulders, she was able to signal him to leave. ‘How could you be so cruel, Marvin?’ she collected herself sufficiently to ask. But by that time he was out of the door.

  It wasn’t safe for him to go out. When he made a call to one of his shops he upset the staff, and when he went to visit his own mother he upset her and himself. Death in the house and his mother ageing, and there was he, who should have been a comfort, absorbed in the trivia of self-damage, wondering what it meant that he wanted his mother to know he didn’t kiss like other
men, and by natural extension – for all roads lead to the same place when you’re in the state Marvin Kreitman was in – wondering what sort of kisser Nyman was. That the reason Chas hadn’t taken him up on his offer – too busy kissing the faggot? A man more rattishly and motivationally stripped down to the bare bones blah-blah than he and Charlie rolled together – Chas’s own words. Meaning exactly what? That as men, as sexual men, as users of the mouth, he and Charlie didn’t add up to a hill of beans in Chas’s estimation?

  It had come to something that he was bracketing himself with Charlie these days. Charlie and Marvin, two absolute no-hopers with women. Except that that description didn’t apply to Charlie any more, did it?

  He had run into Shelley, when leaving his mother’s. On her way in to take up her nursing duties, so not starched yet, still in her civvies, if you could call them that. Thirty years old and wearing a tiny ruffle of a skirt, black convent tights and dinky bower boots, like a fairy who had come down off a Christmas tree, looking for a punch-up. Kreitman sighed. Those were the days.

  He had forgotten what women were like. Was this what they did? When Shelley spoke to him she pushed her face forward, as though she wanted him to pat her head, like a cat. Little pink tongue. Little green eyes narrowed. Little cough, due to little fur ball in little throat. Lovely, Kreitman thought. So lovely he couldn’t think how he had forgotten. But no fault line. That’s why he had forgotten. No wonderment of rude.

  So there he was, back to square one.

  Not safe for him to go out, so he stayed in. Three calls from Chas in as many weeks, two anguished, one aerobatically cheerful, but still no lunch date. As for his wonderful daughters, they had put their various contractual obligations on hold, postponed the explanatory dinner he’d promised them – no hurry, Daddy – and gone hitchhiking around Thailand, looking for some beach. So who was there for him to go out and see?