Who's Sorry Now?

by Howard Jacobson

  Who was there for him to stay in and see, come to that? Sleeping without company had never suited him, even for the odd night, but this was the longest unbroken stretch of it he’d suffered since leaving school, and it was beginning to wreak havoc on his body. A man with a wife and five girlfriends showers at least six times a day. A man moping over an inaccessible woman showers less than that. Not a comment on his bachelor facilities: cramped though his Clapham hermitage was, it lacked for none of the eroticising amenities expected of a modern bathroom. Name a refinement of toiletry, Kreitman had it. Name the most powerful shower head, name a douche appliance, name a Roman bath … No, what Kreitman’s unaccompanied life lacked for was inducement. There was no good reason to pamper his body to the degree it had come to expect. Some days he never bothered to dress. Once or twice he never bothered to get out of bed. As a consequence he was beginning to notice upon himself something that looked like mould. The skin of tramps must look like this, he thought. Or the skin of old men. Kreitman’s flesh had always been important to him. Not muscles, not toning, not a tan, simply its integumental texture, its general air of lazy and maybe even absorptive, if not to say magnetic, good health. This flesh is in constant pleasurable employment, that was the notice he hung out upon his body. Now he was rotting.

  Time to get a grip on himself, even if he couldn’t get a grip on Chas. A visit to his doctor, to the chemist, to the herbalist, to his hairdresser and to his outfitters was in order. Clean up the act.

  Which was how he happened to run into Charlie Merriweather on Jermyn Street, loaded down with shirts, looking mighty pleased with the world and his own place in it, a man conscious of not having anything putrid anywhere about his body.

  Chapter Two

  One night Charlie dreamed that Chas turned up and found him in his dressing gown with Hazel. Chas was carrying a teapot and smiling, but when she saw the dressing gown and then saw Hazel she burst into tears. The cruellest sort of tears, not tears that stream but tears that spurt out as though the eyes have sprung a leak. As she cried, she let the tea spill from the teapot on to Hazel’s carpet. ‘What’s she doing here?’ Hazel demanded, and although Charlie knew the answer he didn’t want to say.

  Unable to decide to whom he owed his loyalty, Charlie woke up with a pain in his heart.

  But he would have been better advised not to tell Hazel about his dream.

  ‘If you’re having second thoughts,’ she said, ‘I’d prefer you acted on them now, before I get too used to you.’

  ‘Second thoughts? I’ve never been happier,’ Charlie told her.

  ‘Exactly. Guilt.’

  ‘Why should being happy make me guilty?’

  ‘Don’t be a baby, Charlie. I didn’t have the dream, you did.’

  Sometimes Hazel understood why her husband had been so scathing of the C. C. Merriweather books. Morally, Charlie lived in Tiggy-Winkle Land. He had learned no hard lessons from experience. She could hear Marvin’s explanation: ‘Hazel, he’s had no experience; he’s been happily married for a quarter of a century.’

  But then morally Marvin lived in the lowest circle of Dante’s Inferno. And what sort of a companion did that make him?

  It touched her to be the person who was bringing experience to Charlie, she who had never believed she had anything to bring to anybody, least of all knowledge. Suddenly she realised it was all in the luck of the draw. Some people needed you to be the grown-up one, so you mouthed wisdom; others wanted to reveal life to you, so you hung your bottom lip like a dunce. So far she’d encountered only teachers. Not like that, Hazel, like this. The curse of Kreitman. Even Yossi in the Negev had unpeeled her as though instructing her in how to eat fruit. And she’d extended her hands obediently, limply, like a little girl being helped out of her blazer. Until she stood in the desert without an item of school uniform left on her, waiting to be told what next.

  Now she felt as old as Oedipus, discovering the riddles of the Sphinx to the frightened inhabitants of Tiggy-Winkle Land. She’d had to explain to Charlie why his children were having difficulty with what he’d done: why his daughter had told her mother she’d never speak to her again if she ever spoke to Daddy again; and why his son was rumoured to be clubbing till all hours, stuffing powders up his nose and not answering his father’s phone calls. ‘They must be able to see for themselves that I’m happy,’ Charlie had said. ‘It’s not as though they’re babies, for God’s sake. Kitty-Litter’s a bulldyke and Timmy’s been on Blind Date.’

  ‘Daddies are meant to stay with mummies,’ Hazel reminded him.

  ‘At their age?’

  ‘No, at your age.’

  ‘Chas must have said something to them.’

  ‘That’s very likely.’

  ‘No, I mean she must have turned them against me.’

  ‘Instead of what? Convincing them how sweet you are?’

  ‘Is that beyond the pale?’

  ‘It’s beyond human nature, Charlie.’

  ‘I hope I’d do better.’

  ‘If Chas ran off with someone?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And if I ran off with someone?’

  ‘That’s different.’

  She shook her head over him. ‘What the fuck am I doing with you?’ she said.

  When she wasn’t Oedipus she was Jocasta. Barely a month’s difference in their ages, but she felt she’d carried him in her womb. Not only that, but whenever he wanted to crawl back whence he’d come she had to show him the way. A gazetteer of her own body suddenly, Hazel Kreitman née Nossiter, who until now had been a mystery to herself, an unmapped continent for intrepid mariners to chart. In their early days Marvin had drawn a verbal picture of the parts of her she couldn’t see. Which made her feel as incidental as a feather on a breeze. Was she there only by virtue of Marvin’s descriptive powers? If he lost words would she shed tissue? Not any more. This way, Charlie, throw a right, no a right, and now straight on …

  Same with his body. Hands in the air, feet together, not her coming out of her clothes this time, but him. ‘I have the urge to sew labels into your shorts,’ she told him.

  His eyes brimmed. ‘My father had to do that for me,’ he remembered. ‘And buttons. My mother wouldn’t risk pricking her pretty finger.’

  The sad, motherless boy, unlabelled, unbuttoned and unloved. Once upon a time, Charlie Hyphen Smelly-Botty Farnsbarns found himself all alone in a big wide field with no labels in his shorts. How am I possibly to know who I am, cried Charlie Hyphen Smelly-Botty Farnsbarns, if I don’t have labels in my shorts … ?

  Lost, love-lorn, without the first clue who he belonged to. Now found a home for at last.

  ‘But Chas must have done your sewing …’

  Chas? Oh God, yes. Chas. Yes, of course, Chas had done his sewing, now she came to mention it. But he was emotionally skipping Chas. Chas hadn’t happened. In the context in which he was now living, Chas had no measurable existence. There’d been loneliness and then boom! – in a flash – Hazel.

  When Charlie asked Chas to be happy for him, on account of his enjoying a satisfactory sabbatical from their marriage, he may not have known what he was about but he knew what he meant. I am not a complete fool, he would have told her had she only given him the chance. I know that you cannot really be happy for me. I know that such selflessness as I am asking for does not exist. But I am trying to mark a difference between you, the woman I have always loved, the mother of my children, the companion of my labours, and Hazel, the mother of someone else’s children, the companion of someone else’s labours, a woman I have never loved and, to be frank with you, barely noticed. She is so unlike you, she is circumstanced so dissimilarly, that she is not so much another woman as another species. Therefore I find it impossible to think of her as an infidelity to you. Yes, yes, I grant you, Dotty would have been an infidelity. Dotty I regret. Dotty was wrong. Dotty was a choice against you. But then Dotty was a suicidal act and she didn’t happen anyway. Only Hazel happened, and Hazel isn’t
a betrayal of you because she isn’t an alternative to you. Hazel’s from another planet. So now will you be happy for me?

  What Charlie meant by Hazel being from another planet was that she made him feel he was on another planet. The planet Impurity. The planet Wrongdoing. Some nights the planet Filth. Some mornings the planet Bliss. But never, Chas, absolutely never, the planet Nice.

  He was not, whatever anybody thought, a complete fool. He knew he couldn’t tell Chas he was now domiciled on the planet Sensuality, a place he’d never set foot on with her, not even for the weekend. And what was the planet Sensuality, when all was said and done, if not a satellite of the planet Wrongdoing? Hazel was all wrongdoing. She was his best friend’s wife. She was among his wife’s best friends. She was the mother of children his children had grown up with. She was a middle-aged woman whose appeal he had never much registered, almost a sister to him. And he had won her in a sort of wager. How many wrongs was that?

  He could season most of that wrongdoing, if not with right, at least with a pinch of something morally neutral. For example, Hazel might have been his best friend’s wife but his best friend didn’t deserve her, had spares galore and probably didn’t even notice she was missing. Nor was Hazel really Chas’s friend; the two had only tried to get on for their husbands’ sakes, and left to their own devices would have despised each other, did despise each other most of the time. As for his children, why invoke them? They were behaving strangely – badly, in his view, selfishly – and didn’t have much to do with it one way or another. In the matter of Hazel’s having been a sort of sister to him, sort of is only sort of. And finally, he hadn’t really won her in a wager; rather she had come to him, coincidentally, of her own imperious volition, as a consequence of a train of events which certainly originated in that evening of wild talk in Soho but which no one could have calculated.

  Then why, in that case, did he go on shaking with a sense of wrongdoing whenever he approached her? After the first time Charlie slept with Hazel he never believed there was going to be a second. After the second he never believed there was going to be a third. A hundred and one days of Sodom later, he still submitted to the turning-out of the lights, descended into the mouthing dark, resigned to the likelihood that she would not be there in the morning. He almost did not want to wake, he so dreaded putting out his hand and finding a note on the snow-cold pillow next to him, or seeing her sitting up in one of her round-backed leather boudoir chairs, fully dressed, in the belted-up Alida Valli trenchcoat he’d bought her (war-torn, though a little on the short side), with her bag on her lap, waiting to tell him it had all been a mistake. So that when he did open his eyes to discover her still there, smiling, pleased to see him, leaning on an elbow willing him to wake, her breasts all about her like a tray of canapés, or up and about in the kitchen in high-heeled slippers, making him his bacon and tomato breakfast, he couldn’t believe his good fortune. Another day, then, in which she wasn’t going to give him his marching orders. Another day stolen from propriety and probability. Was it really out of the question for Chas to recognise how little this had to do with her, or with their old life together? It’s the desperation of it, Chas. It’s the head-hurting uncertainty. Not like us, not like you and me in our bedsocks, Missus, Chasser, Mrs C. C. Chassyboots …

  There was another way of putting this. In the only story not for children he had ever dared to write, Charlie Merriweather, then twenty-six, had set about trying to describe, in unflinchingly adult yet tender language, the fondness he and the other Charlie felt for each other. ‘And you tell me this is the first grown-up story you have written?’ Kreitman asked him. Charlie nodded. He was keen to know what Kreitman thought. Not least as the story had grown out of the fears the two Charlies entertained for Kreitman in the light of what seemed to them his sexual cruelty not just to Hazel (that part was obvious) but to himself. In a sense the story was as much about the Kreitmans and damage as it was about the Merriweathers and healing.

  ‘Then my advice to you, for what it’s worth,’ Kreitman said, ‘is not to write another. I doubt you have the gift of addressing the over-twelves. Few do. It’s a calling, Charlie.’

  Ouch! A thousand lances in the beanbag of Charlie’s self-esteem.

  Deflated, he nonetheless knew where the offence actually lay. It lay in his description of the protagonist’s penis. The ‘instrument of friendliness’. He had watched Kreitman come to that passage and seen his jaw drop. The instrument of friendliness would be an obstacle between them for as long they lived. Recalling it over dim sum lunches sometimes, Kreitman would put his finger down his throat and pretend to throw up. Now, years after the writing of the offending tale, Charlie understood why Kreitman had baulked. An instrument of friendliness was not what a woman like Hazel made you feel you possessed. Because she appeared to be shocked by Charlie’s penis whenever and no matter how often she beheld it, Charlie began to feel differently about it himself. A weapon of terror, was that it? A battering-ram of tyranny? Not exactly. He hadn’t been away from home that long. Enough that its distinguishing feature was no longer an innocent amicability. And that was the other way he might have put what was not like his life with Chas about his life with Hazel. These days, if his poor wife could only grasp it, he walked about with something dangerous between his legs.

  For her part, though she was no more hooked on the specifics of a man’s anatomy than any other woman, Hazel Kreitman would not entirely have demurred from this. Against all expectation, Charlie Merriweather was possessed of what she’d heard her mother call a ‘fearfully big thing’, a brute of a penis whose weight had impressed her from the off, and though Charlie had been altogether too embarrassed initially – too embarrassed, too broken and too grateful – to wield it with anything like the expertness it merited, he wielded it with enough for Hazel. Before Kreitman, whose maleness was too mental for you ever to concentrate much on body parts – big brain, that was what Kreitman wanted you to feel inside you, the hard-on of his intelligence – Hazel had encountered two or three fearfully big things. They were always a disappointment in that they were always attached to soppy men. Whether this was an evolutionary imperative, or an unseen consequence of one – the male of the species sad to be reduced to mere functionalism—she didn’t know; but as sure as night followed day a man with a big penis sobbed on your breast after orgasm, idealised you until you wanted to puke and begged you to try to love him for his gentle qualities. Charlie was a sentimentalist right enough, overdid the gratitude and gazed at her as though nothing like her had ever existed in creation, but he didn’t pull back from the obligations of his size. He enjoyed being a big man, enjoyed towering over her when they went out, his hand on her shoulder or even sometimes Latin lover-like on her neck, enjoyed being able to change a light bulb without a chair, understood what she wanted when she asked him to lie on top of her, letting her feel the full length and weight of him, crushing the wind out of her if that was her desire and not too apologetic when he hurt her. She could read that old butterfly shit in his eyes, the same ephemerality crap with which Kreitman had wooed her – ‘When I open my hand, will you be gone, I wonder?’ – but he didn’t want to be gone himself. Unlike Kreitman, he didn’t fuck in order to make himself disappear.

  ‘I like it that you don’t seem to be going anywhere in your head,’ she told him once, reclining like a girl in the strong sour crook of his arm.

  ‘Where would I be going that’s any better than here?’

  ‘I suppose I shouldn’t be telling you this,’ she said, ‘but in my experience men are always on a journey somewhere else. Even in the early days when he was happy just to be with me – unless I got that wrong, too – Marvin used to maraud me, ransack my body as though he’d lost something. Is it here? No. Is it here, then? No. It was like being Treasure Island, like having Long John Silver stomping across you with a spade and bucket. That was before he decided the treasure wasn’t anywhere to be found on me and went looking for it on some other island.’ />
  Charlie listened. ‘And why shouldn’t you be telling me this?’

  ‘In case it puts you off me.’

  ‘Nothing could put me off you.’

  ‘Or gives you ideas.’

  ‘There’s only one idea you give me,’ he said, wanting to break into her sadness, booming his big bedtime laugh and rolling her on to his chest, tapping his broad, straightforward intentions down the taut xylophone that was her spine.

  What would Chas have said? ‘Charlie! Stop it, Charlie, you’ll break the bed.’ With Chas it had been all panto. Dames in bloomers, giant sausages, sticky sweets for the children, oops-a-daisy, he’s behind you! With Chas the sex had been continuous with family, a funny misadventure ending in a picnic and a roll down a grassy bank with his arms round Kitty or Timmy. Whereas with Hazel … with Hazel it ended in itself.

  Undoubtedly, it helped that in Kennington, all five Georgian storeys of it, there was nobody else at home. The Merriweather house had always been in a state of preparation for invited guests or unexpected droppers-in; it was a cooking house, centred on the kitchen, the latest holiday snaps and newsy postcards affixed under magnets to the refrigerator door, the subject of conversation warming in the oven. A child was always on the phone or waiting to be driven somewhere. But Hazel frowned on fridge-magnet culture, ate out more often than she cooked and had never encouraged her daughters to treat home as a club house. Both girls had their own places to live, and though they popped in as a matter of course normally, they weren’t popping in at the moment because they’d fled to Thailand. Fled? In a manner of speaking.

  ‘Not me, is it?’ Charlie asked. ‘Oh Lord!’

  ‘Of course not,’ Hazel reassured him, pinching his cheeks. ‘Why would anyone want to flee from you?’