Who's Sorry Now?

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘Not for me to say. I can only tell you what I tell you.’

  ‘Will it do you any good for me to believe that?’

  He thought about it. Make a woman believe you and you’re in trouble if you’re lying. Trouble with yourself. He knew that. Every man knows that. The hard bit is to know whether you’re lying or not. All he could think was that he’d come through a sort of purgatory getting to this point with her. She had been touchy at dinner with his business friends, noisy men who sold sunglasses and weren’t at all, to her sense, those easygoing profiteers he’d promised her. ‘I don’t know where you’re going, Kreitman,’ one of them had challenged him, over the third or fourth bottle of champagne, ‘but I’m going this way’ – pointing upwards and meaning, if Chas understood him correctly, to the topmost rung of the ladder of success. Before Kreitman had found something witty to say in reply, a second sunglasses man had roared with laughter, offering it as his opinion that ‘that way’ – meaning up the stairs of the hotel – was exactly where Kreitman was going too. Just the coarse surmisings Chas had been dreading. God knows, in Kreitman’s reading of the situation, she had fought hard to dispel any doubts that she was his tart for the night, by coming down to dinner in an appallingly ill-fitting trouser suit made of green sacking, the jacket loose on her chest, revealing altogether too much of a white armoured brassiere, and too scant behind, showing the label of her trousers, or something even worse; the trousers themselves too floppy and too long, a clown’s trousers, through which, whether or not that was the label he could see when she rose to leave the room, was too visible the outline of her underwear. For desire to have got past such an outfit, what was over and what was under, some other element must have come into play. That other element could only have been love.

  He buried his face in her neck and breathed in her odours. Hay and plum wine. Upsetting. God knows why. Something autumnal. She was passing and it was his job to hold her back.

  ‘If you want to know what will do me good,’ he said sadly, as though speaking of impossibilities, ‘it’s you learning to believe what I say to you.’

  This time she did break from him, and sat up, pulling the sheets to her neck. She didn’t like her white freckled chest, with its striations of middle age, nor did Kreitman; she didn’t like her undermined breasts with their flat nipples, unpalatable even to her babies, as indeed they were to Kreitman – didn’t that prove it was love?

  ‘What would you think of me if I took at face value everything you’re telling me,’ she almost pleaded, ‘and pretended to ignore that you’ve said it to a hundred other women?’

  He sat up himself and reached for the unfinished wine by his bedside, by her bedside rather, for he had come to her room, not taken her to his, knocking gently, softly softly, no brusque alarms, even while she was still trying to decide whether she was a blackguard or not. The wine had been waiting, a queer-shaped bottle on a stainless-steel tray, with a card telling you the price around its neck. All part of the twenty-first-century makeover of grand hotels from chintz to stainless steel, the beds twice the size that had sufficed last century’s travellers, and no more pretence that fucking wasn’t the reason you were here. Gone, the old awkwardness around the signing-in – Mr … and Miss … oops!; gone the shifty expression on the porter’s face and the coughing in the lift; gone the morning flurry to remake the bed so the chambermaid should never guess your secret – all gone, anachronisms, just like Kreitman, the last soldier of illicit sex. Now you fouled the sheets before you left the room, so no one should think you’d had a quiet night.

  He sipped wine and listened to the silence of the room. Then he said, ‘I am not irresponsible. I don’t have a cruel streak.’

  ‘I believe you.’

  ‘I’m a softer-hearted man than you think.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m afraid of. Over the years I’ve heard Hazel say that it wasn’t you following your prick she feared most, it was you following your tears.’

  Prick – that word again. She made him light-headed. It was like talking dirty with a Mother Superior. But all he said was, ‘Ah yes, Hazel.’

  ‘Ah yes, Hazel!’

  To change the subject, he said, ‘And what should I fear most, Chas?’

  ‘From me?’ She laughed a bitter laugh. ‘My cowardice,’ she said. ‘And maybe my inexperience. You have a one-man woman in your bed, remember.’

  ‘It’s your bed, Chas.’

  ‘All the more shocking. I may wake up in the morning and regret this.’

  ‘I won’t let you.’

  ‘You won’t be here.’

  ‘Won’t I? Do you mean to expel me?’

  ‘Well, I could go to your bed and leave you here if that would make you feel better. But I cannot wake with you. Not so soon. I might roll over and call you Charlie.’

  ‘You have already called me Charlie.’

  ‘Have I?’

  ‘On the phone.’

  ‘That’s different. I haven’t yet rolled over and thought you were Charlie.’

  ‘I could handle that.’

  ‘There you are, you see, I couldn’t. We are incompatible when it comes to accustomedness. I’m still all shocks, Marvin.’

  But the amazing thing – wonder of wonders – was that so was he.

  Chapter Four

  Charlie, on a strange lavatory, hears Hazel asking for his alibi.

  ‘Alibi? What alibi?’

  ‘What’s your alibi? Do you have an alibi ready?’

  A hand rattles the doorknob.

  ‘I’m in here,’ Charlie says. ‘It’s me in here.’

  The door is locked, but that doesn’t stop her. And Charlie cannot put his weight against the door because the strange lavatory is long and narrow, almost a passageway, the rattling door at one end, he sitting, without an alibi, at the other.

  One more turn of the knob and she is inside. Not Hazel – he had that wrong – but Chas, his wife Chas.

  She is wearing a towel piled high around her head, a snow-white turban, as though she has just stepped from the bath. Her face is raw from bathing, too. Chas – fancy Chas being here! His instinct is to get up and greet her – Hello, Chassyboots! – but in the circumstances, lavatory and all that, he cannot. As she advances towards him, she grows. By the time she is upon him she is twice her normal height. He looks up and notices her fingernails. They are splayed, like scissor-hands, longer and redder than Chas ever allowed her nails to grow, not fingernails at all, when you really look, but proper nails, nails for hammering, each one silver, not red, and sharpened to a point. ‘Your alibi,’ she demands again. But before he can think of one, her nailed hands are in his eyes …

  Until recently, Charlie was never that much of a dreamer. But he is dreaming a lot now. For him.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Charlie,’ Hazel said, ‘you cannot still be raving over the contents of my cupboards.’

  What this time?

  Towels.

  Lying back in her bubble bath, Hazel marvelled at the pertinacity of her lover’s enthusiasms. Why had no one ever told her a man could be so easy to amaze? First it had been her perfumes, then her oils, then her moisturisers, then her soaps, then her rollers, if you could believe that – her piccaninny Molton Browners which would have thrown Kreitman, had he seen them, into a blue fit – after which her sheets, her pillowcases, her duvet covers, her throwaway slippers and this week, though he’d been drying her with them for months, her towels with the satin borders.

  ‘Charlie, I’ve been to your home. You wife buys the same towels I do.’

  Charlie shook his head. He was too big, really, for a bathroom. He didn’t know where to put himself. But as long as she allowed him into the mysteries of her toilet, let him talk to her while she gently poached her flesh in hand-hot water, how could he take himself off somewhere else.

  ‘Charlie never bought towels as large and soft as these,’ he said. ‘Charlie bought towels that scratched. I now wonder whether it was deliberate. On the
hair-shirt principle – to make me bleed.’

  Well, be thankful, Hazel thought. She considered telling him that it was more likely to have been a soap-powder problem in Richmond, but that was hardly her business, was it? And if Charlie believed her towels were softer and caused less pain, who was she to complain?

  She called him to hose off her bubbles, then climbed out of the bath, pinker than a porcelain doll, into the marvellous towel he held open for her. If she went limp in his arms, he would enfold her in them and dry her with the heat of his body. If she stiffened, he withdrew. It was like having a dog who could read every nuance of her moods.

  She was beginning to tire of him, then? Not at all. She could not now imagine her life without him, or remember what it had been like to have no one there to welcome her out of her bath. But yes, she was taking him just the teensiest bit for granted. His own doing, he was so docile.

  Nice sex, was that what Charlie was importing chez Kreitman? I should worry, Hazel thought. And nice sex, anyway, was sex enough for her. But it did sometimes occur to her to be concerned that Charlie was domesticating their bed to an extent that he would ultimately regret, even if she wouldn’t.

  Being married for so long to Kreitman had taught her something – that men create the circumstances of their own dissatisfaction.

  Their trouble was – and it may have been overstating things to call it a trouble – they didn’t have enough to do. Charlie wasn’t writing. She had set up a study for him at the top of the house, overlooking the garden so he could have green thoughts while he worked, but the loneliness had got to him. He was used to working in tandem with his wife. The pair of them at either end of their old pine table. She pounding at her typewriter, looking under or over her spectacles at him whenever she believed she had written a good sentence, he scratching behind his ear, coughing, getting up to make tea for them both, going for a wander down to the river, where he knew he would find someone with whom to exchange pleasantries, the time of day, anything, anything that employed the real warm words of life. When he told Hazel that the study she had put together for him was too quiet, or at least that his view was too unpeopled, she tried to make sure she was always in the garden while he was at his desk, so that she could animate his landscape, wave at him when he looked out, point to flowers that had recently bloomed, or just nod enthusiastically in response to his hand signals, which invariably illustrated some aspect of the making and drinking of tea. But that tied her to his working patterns rather, or at least would have tied her to his working patterns had he had any. He still couldn’t get going. When she was there he played with her, when she was out he repined. He didn’t know what to write. He wondered if there was any way he and Charlie could resume their collaboration by post, by e-mail, by text messaging even, without alluding to what had passed between them. But who was going to go first? He hadn’t spoken to her since she’d sent him packing. All communications, including her demand that the C. C. Merriweather brand name revert forthwith to her, had been made through their accountants – now her accountants – which he took to be significant in that she hadn’t yet resorted to a solicitor. Could they perhaps go on writing together through their accountants? It was when he reached that point in his creative deliberations that he got up, clattered down the stairs and ran a bath for Hazel.

  As for Hazel, she didn’t have enough to do either. Overseeing conversions and complaining to tradespeople had seemed a full-time occupation before. Now that she had Charlie at home with her she was less willing to have her house redesigned, let alone to open it to builders. ‘Apart from anything else there’s your concentration to think about,’ she told him, as an explanation for why the Jacuzzi hadn’t gone in.

  ‘Yes, there’s my concentration to think about,’ Charlie agreed. ‘Though we could go away for a week while they do it.’

  For similar reasons – a relief, this, to service industries throughout the capital – her telephone complaints routine had stalled. She had other things to do with her mornings now. Nor did she dress any longer in the sort of clothes that had once made complaining easy. In a tailored suit she was not a person to be trifled with, even on the telephone; but wearing the sorts of frills and spikes Charlie liked to see her in, trifle was her middle name. The best explanation of why Hazel’s phones slumbered quietly on their cradles, however, lay in the change that had come over her temper: she wasn’t complaining because she had nothing to complain about. She was happy.

  Of her old discontented habits only one remained – testing the returns policy of every shop in London. She had not been born a taker-back of clothes. Like kleptomania, of which it is a near relative, the taking-back of clothes is a function of despair, and despair had entered Hazel’s life only when she discovered that her husband’s tears were universal. He substituted one woman for another, shedding tears along the way, and she did the same with clothes. It was an addiction she could not shrug off, even though she had shrugged off Kreitman. The clothes she bought continued to look wrong the minute she got them home, didn’t fit although she’d tried them on in the shop, looked different in different light, looked wrong, looked stupid, made her angry. But these days, instead of seething up and down the West End in the rain, her hands full of creaking carrier bags, she ambled in and out of her favourite New Bond Street stores with a carefree smile on her face, and Charlie on her arm.

  It suited him. If he was taking back with Hazel he couldn’t suffer those bouts of unproductive loneliness in his study. And if he was taking back with Hazel he could get to see her nipping out from behind curtains in her underwear. Here was another example of how his life had changed. With Chas, shopping for clothes had been one humiliation piled upon another, a saga of fluster and concealment, annoyance, embarrassment, misjudgement, despair – and that was just him. Off they’d go to get her out of her spinnaker, and back they’d come after a thousand disappointments and alarms with a spinnaker no different from all the others. ‘Nothing else fits me, Charlemagne. This is all there is. Don’t say anything!’ For Chas, a changing room was a torment somewhere higher up the scale of mortifications than the ducking-stool, whereas for Hazel – well, for Hazel, a changing room was almost like a public stage. Back the curtains went and there she was, half naked, entirely unabashed, careless who saw her – ‘Have you got this in a fourteen?’– waiting only for Charlie to leap from his upholstered sugar-daddy’s chair and cry Bravo!

  What a gift it is, Charlie thought, what a gift some women have for sensuality, for making life easy, for filling it with enchantment. And how lucky that makes me!

  A gift for making life easy! – Hazel the difficult, Hazel who was courted in her early years by men leaving nuts outside her door, to see if they could tempt her out, so wild and easily frightened a creature did she seem – a gift for filling life with enchantment, Hazel the terminally disillusioned!

  My lottery theory confirmed, she thought, noticing how she’d changed. You are who you fall in love with. And I wouldn’t have understood that had I not fallen in love with who I’ve fallen in love with.

  And if she hadn’t? She didn’t want to think about it. If she was now a lovely person only because she had stumbled upon Charlie, what would have happened to her had she stumbled upon the Yorkshire Ripper? Idle question. She had stumbled upon Marvin Kreitman and look at the sort of person that had made her. Please God don’t send me back there again, Hazel pleaded. Please God let me stay happy and lovely and with Charlie.

  Happy in the bath and lovely in Fenwick’s changing rooms and Charlie never out of her sight.

  But when they weren’t bathing or taking back, they were light on what Hazel, with some recapitulated disgust, called a ‘social life’. Kreitman’s phrase for the foremost of a man’s entitlements, and hence Hazel’s bitter euphemism for the same. As a consequence of the indignities to which marriage to Marvin Kreitman had reduced her, Hazel had more or less finished with a social life. Other than the Merriweathers – and they were now off the list – she s
aw none of her old university chums. She had a few similarly placed women friends she met in the restaurants of art galleries and with whom she abstractly discussed castration and lesbianism and the like – the ones who’d cheered her on when she’d cropped her hair, accused Kreitman of fucking her brain and kicked him out of her bed – but they would not have approved of the comprehensiveness with which, to please panting Charlie Merriweather, she’d reverted to the bad taste of a passive wardrobe. Which left only her daughters, expected back from Thailand any day, much missed by her, but in fairness no more a diversion for Charlie than he was a diversion for them.

  The staidness of Hazel’s life when she wasn’t in New Bond Street, the monastic quietness of her house, astounded and dismayed Charlie, who had always considered himself a social orphan but in truth lived in the centre of that maelstrom Kreitman was quick to call the Kultur. Publishers of presses which had been failing since the forties, biographers of Surtees and Trollope, literary down-and-outs who carried their manuscripts with them everywhere in plastic bags, men who bore the names and obscurely benefited from the estates of Gosse and de Selincourt and Quiller Couch, faded beauties who had once given their hearts to Desmond MacCarthy, rock climbers, swimmers, explorers, cads and fogeys of every description, and of course writers of children’s books by the magic busload – all these were regular visitors of the Merriweathers. If they weren’t all there together on the lawn at weekends, waiting for Charlie to pour them Greek wine and Chas to rustly them up fish pie while pretending she couldn’t find the fish, they turned up unannounced, in dribs and drabs, on weekdays. Frequently one would come to complain about the other, though not infrequently the other would already be there, complaining about the one. Sometimes the older among them would be found exhausted on the Merriweather doorstep after getting lost in Safeway’s or being savaged by rutting deer in Richmond Park – actually bearing wounds, some of them, actually pitting the steps with blood the colour of pink gin – or just as likely having blundered out of their own quarters on a quite different errand the reason for which had subsequently escaped them. Not so much the nerve centre of the Kultur, then, as a hospice for it? Same difference, in Kreitman’s view. The Kultur as shaped by the British loved a hospice as it loved itself, revered infirmity and thrived in sick rooms. Old men on drips pulled the levers, while young men old before their time, like Dotty’s beau, padded in and out of the wards, took down their memoirs and did their bidding. But that, of course, was only Kreitman’s view. And who was he to be an arbiter of rude health? Call these gatherings what you will, the consequence was that time never hung heavy at the Merriweathers’. Whereas at the Kreitmans’, once lovemaking and towelling were finished for the day, you could hear the movement of the second finger as it dragged itself across the face of Hazel’s bedside clock.