Who's Sorry Now?

by Howard Jacobson

  Charlie mentally prepared himself for visitors, but no visitors ever came. As for inviting his own people, he remained squeamish about that on account of Chas. A tact thing. But perhaps he was nervous on his own account as well, not knowing what they would make of him looking so well.

  He kept contact with those of the Richmond Kultur to whom he’d been closest. Phone calls mainly; inconsequential conversations which skidded away from anything dangerous; chit-chat of a literary complaining sort, stuff in the papers, gossip about what was happening in the television soaps, which Charlie and his set watched religiously, as an affront to those who inhabited a sniffier Kultur than they did. He did a pub lunch once with Clarence Odger, the friend who carried five hundred thousand words of manuscript with him everywhere in two plastic Waitrose bags, but that didn’t work out too well. In the first place the friend couldn’t concentrate on anything Charlie was saying to him because he couldn’t take his eyes off his plastic bags, and in the second, when he did remember his manners long enough to ask Charlie how his new life was going, there seemed to be some gleam in his eye which, in Charlie’s view, denoted salacious knowledge. Was that how his friends thought about him now – salaciously? Was that in some way how he thought about himself?

  Thereafter he made no further arrangements to see anybody.

  ‘So, apart from me, did Marvin have no friends?’ he asked Hazel one evening.

  Hazel opened her eyes wide at him. ‘You know what Marvin had.’

  ‘And when you were together … ?’

  ‘Which wasn’t often.’

  ‘No, but when … what did you do ?’

  Hazel shrugged. What did they do? Had she forgotten already? Had nothing happened?

  ‘Meals,’ she said. ‘I recall a lot of meals.’

  ‘In or out?’

  ‘Oh, out. My husband loved being out.’

  ‘So what did you do when you were in?’

  Knowing Charlie liked looking at the arch of her throat, Hazel threw back her head. ‘In?’ she repeated ‘Now there I think you’ve finally got me.’

  ‘You didn’t read to each other?’

  Hazel laughed a bitter laugh. ‘Marvin spat chips, Charlie. You were his friend, you know that. He spat chips in front of the television, he spat chips when we went to see a film or a play, and he spat chips when he opened a book. Where would have been the fun of reading together? I needed to hear him spit even more chips? I once suggested he pick up his old academic ambitions and write a book of his own. Call it Spitting Chips. But you can imagine his reaction to that. He spat chips. Nothing he hated more than gerundival tides.’

  ‘Don’t I remember it,’ Charlie said. ‘Don’t I remember the scorn he poured on our Flying Away series.’

  ‘He would have,’ Hazel said, blinking. She was inclined to forget that Charlie had once been a writer of fictional self-improvement books for young adults. Flying Away must have driven her husband bananas. ‘Ing me no ings, he used to say. It should go on his tombstone. Ing me no ings. Cute fucker!’

  So Charlie read to Hazel.

  ‘I can’t tell you where I am,’ Chas said, returning Dotty’s far too early Sunday phone call, ‘because I don’t know where I am. But I’ll give you a clue – I got here by rope ladder.’

  ‘Christ, Charlie, are you abroad?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking. Though in fact I’m on Clapham High Street … I think.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Well, I’m brought here, like some empress on a palanquin, only it’s not a palanquin it’s a Smart.’

  ‘It sounds as though you’ve been kidnapped.’

  ‘It feels a little as though I’ve been kidnapped.’

  ‘Sounds like you’re having fun, though.’

  She thought about it. Was she having fun? ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m having fun.’

  ‘And you’ll remember to be careful?’

  ‘On the ladder?’

  ‘No, not on the ladder. On the you-know-what.’

  Chas laughed. ‘I’m damned if I know what the you-know-what is,’ she said, ‘unless you’re meaning to be crudely graphic. But no, as a matter of fact I have no intention of remembering to be careful.’

  Then, because Kreitman was shinning up with a pot of coffee, she rang off.

  He liked seeing her up there, high among his books, angular like the girders, a great creature, the biggest of the non-flying birds, nesting in his aviary. With her mobile phone to her ear.

  ‘There’s no good reason, is there,’ he said, blowing hard, ‘so long as you’ve got your phone to keep you nominally connected to the world, there’s no good reason why you shouldn’t stay up here for ever.’

  ‘Until you get bored.’

  ‘I won’t get bored.’

  ‘Until my children need me.’

  ‘Have them round.’

  ‘Oh yes. I can see that. They didn’t like you very much, Marvin, when you weren’t charvering their mummy.’

  Kreitman shrugged. He was only trying to meet her objections. ‘Then don’t have them round. Just phone them occasionally and visit them a lot.’

  ‘And my work?’

  ‘You can dictate. I’ll be your stenographer. You might find the child in me.’

  ‘Marvin, I think it’s the man in you we need to locate.’

  That’s how far advanced they were. They could insult each other and not expect to be misunderstood. Half the art of falling in love – attaining the foolish intimacy of schoolchildren.

  Then her phone rang again. And then it rang three or four times after that. Dotty for a second time, warning against silliness. She knew her sister would like that. The other calls were from those of Chas’s friends who were also members of her profession. ‘Sunday morning,’ she told Kreitman between conversations, pulling a contrite face, ‘the Sunday-morning ringaround. You’ll have to learn to live with this if you want me never to leave your bed. On Sunday morning I catch up with the general rejoicing.’

  To Kreitman’s sensitised ears – greedy for tidings from the Kultur – rejoicing wasn’t quite the word for it. ‘You’re joking!’ he heard Chas say. ‘You’re kidding me! She didn’t! The Smarties? I’d have given her more chance of winning the Peace Prize …’

  Sometimes she set her mouth, compressing her lips to a bloodless scar, zipped tight across her face. Sometimes she tapped irritably at her temples, as though to loosen congealed matter. Sometimes, in a bound, she went from hilarity to despair.

  ‘What is it?’ Kreitman asked when she was done. ‘What have you heard?’

  She sat with her knees up on his bed of rugs and tapped the space next to her. Lie here, my love.

  She was confident of him. Confidently possessive of him, even on his territory. Lie here, my love – and he did.

  Then she told him the terrible truth, that even writers of children’s stories felt bad about one another’s success, begrudged each other every penny, resented every word of praise bestowed on someone else.

  ‘I’d never have guessed it,’ Kreitman said.

  She made as if to push him from the bed. ‘You needn’t be sarcastic. I’m just trying to be frank with you. I know how much you idealise my profession. So I think it’s time you heard it from my lips. I am not pleased for X. I cannot ever be pleased for X. I count every tick on her page a cross on mine.’

  Tell me about it, Kreitman thought. Tell me something I don’t already know. As with letters, so with love. Every tick on his page, a cross on mine.

  He smiled up at her and stroked her arm. Lolloping arms, he had once thought them. Mere farmyard implements. Now, transfigured by desire, they were a warrior maiden’s arms, long and tapering and strong, beautiful, victorious, the arms of Boadicea.

  ‘It’s because we die,’ he said. ‘If we didn’t the we could afford to be more magnanimous. But we only get one shot. We can’t forgive the person who shoots further.’

  She patted him like a child. ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘We cannot forgive o
r bear it. So what we do in our profession is make sure that no one else can forgive or bear it either. When you hear a rumour of someone else’s good fortune, you pass it on. Passing the Pain, Charlie used to call it. A parlour game for two or more writers.’

  ‘Except,’ said Kreitman, ‘that you don’t have to be writers.’

  ‘You pass the pain in purses, Marvin?’

  He winced. She could still do that to him. ‘I pass the pain in love, Chas,’ was his reply.

  ‘“I shall still lose my temper with Ivan the coachman, I shall still embark on useless discussions and express my opinions inopportunely,”’ Charlie read, ‘“there will still be the same wall between the sanctuary of my inmost soul and other people, even my wife … but my life now, my whole life …”’

  ‘Lovely,’ Hazel said. ‘I’d forgotten how positive a book could be.’

  Charlie closed the novel and kissed her. They were sitting up in bed, supported by banks of pillows, his reading light on, hers not, so that shadows kept half of her obscure from him, still so much of her he could only guess at. ‘Tomorrow night we’ll start Barchester Towers,’ he said.

  She clapped her hands. ‘Goody, goody,’ she said.

  When they put out the light and finally turned aside from each other, Hazel found herself cursing her husband. What did it take to make her happy? Had it really been beyond him to read her a story once in a blue moon? Would it not have made him happy too – or at least been balm to his troubled soul, if happiness was too much too expect of him, the gloomy fucker – would it not have been preferable to all that frantic running around in erotic misery, just to have stayed in with her, fluffed up their pillows and read a book together?

  This was the one canker eating away at her contentment – the sweeter it was with Charlie, the less she could forgive Kreitman for having made it so sour. What Charlie did – effortlessly most of the time – Kreitman, too, could have done.

  So one doesn’t escape, Hazel realised. Happiness now doesn’t erase misery then. What perverseness, to be punishing now with then, almost out of jealousy of oneself, as though, once miserable, one never has the right to happiness again.

  Thank you, Marvin.

  And was Charlie thinking along similar lines?

  Similar, but not the same. Charlie, before he disappeared into fevered dreamland, was thinking how like his new life was, sometimes, to his old.

  Some of us wake well, some of us wake badly. Chas Merriweather woke in pieces. Nothing worked. Nothing was attached. Half her hair seemed to have fallen out and all colour had been bled from her in the night. ‘Don’t look at me,’ she told Kreitman. Her face was corrugated but queerly virginal, like the soles of her feet. She woke blotched, fraught, exhausted, as though the single purpose of the day would be to get her back to the condition in which she’d gone to sleep.

  But Kreitman looked at her. What is more he enjoyed looking at her.

  ‘Why are you laughing at me?’ she cried, hiding herself under the sheets.

  Was he laughing? He thought he was smiling. Pleased to see her. Pleased to see her there, with him. Pleased to witness the morning miracle of Chas putting herself back together.

  I am maturing, Kreitman thought. I am not waking desperate to be gone. I like it that she comes to looking like the Battersea Dogs’ Home. I am becoming fond.

  From either side of her fault line he was putting things back together himself, but not too tidily if he could help it. He was fonder than he had been, and also more roused than he had been: those two states could not be unconnected, of course they couldn’t, but he was not going to swap perverseness for harmony quite yet. What roused him, surely, was the novelty of the fondness, and of course the novelty of its object. Sensual, overwhelming all his senses, a woman who refused sensuality, who thought it was silly, and who woke the colour of her feet – explain that!

  In the matter of his touching her, what Kreitman couldn’t figure out was how, even in the darkness, his fingers were able to measure a quality he had no adequate words for but which, roughly, he thought of as the underlay of her skin. He loved the deep give in her, what he would have called her substance were it not for that word’s associations of stoutness and amplitude, neither of which Chas possessed in the slightest. How best to put it? A woman like Shelley had skin so fine you feared it might flake off under your caresses. A woman like Bernadette, on the other hand, seemed to be stitched into a hide. You didn’t stroke Bernadette, you polished her. And then again there was Hazel, whose whole vascular system seemed to be in motion when she rolled her hips, or swung her heavy breasts above his face, first one and then another, just beyond his reach, making him search for them blindly, with frantic lips – a thing she hadn’t done for twenty years or more, not with him anyway. But Chas’s flesh structure was not like any of these. She didn’t leave him desolate, that was the best explanation he could give. She didn’t spill out from between his fingers like mercury, or crumble under them like rose petals. She wasn’t too much or too little. She was just the right amount.

  In the matter of her touching him, there were fewer mystifications. She touched him, full stop. Or rather she held him, full stop. She took hold. It was the taking he loved, the way her little hand claimed possession of him – his penis, he specifically meant, but the moment she took hold he was all penis – encircling him with the most deceptive lightness, as though she were leading him into painless but permanent captivity, her hand the collar and her arm the chain.

  Where had she learned to do that?

  He knew the answer. She had learned it from him. She had listened to the silent desires of his body and discovered what to do. But then of course she had listened to her own silent desires as well.

  Accord was what you called this. Though whether it comes only when you are in love, or is itself the reason you get to be in love, no one will ever know.

  And she? Well, she wouldn’t have taken such complete possession of Kreitman if she hadn’t wanted to, would she?

  ‘I’ve never spent so long in bed in daylight hours,’ she told her sister.

  ‘I’m glad,’ Dotty said, ‘that you’ve finally released the pagan in yourself.’

  Chas thought about that. ‘I’m not entirely sure it’s pagan,’ she said. ‘It’s very intense.’

  ‘Oh, Charlie, you aren’t going to go religious on me.’

  ‘No, I mean intense in another way. It’s almost as though I’ve taken up with a nervous system wrapped in tissue paper.’

  ‘You are having sex?’

  ‘God, yes, oodles of it. But he’s a strange man. Not at all like Charlie. Being with Charlemagne was like being with a bear. He rolled all over me. He made me feel I was covered in honey. This one goes very still, as if he’s listening for something. His body seems to think, Dotty.’

  ‘That comes as no news to me, darling. Haven’t we all always known what Kreitman’s dick was thinking? Just as long as you don’t make the mistake of believing you can make it think something else.’

  ‘Dotty, you are terminally trivial. I am trying to talk metaphysics to you. You used the word pagan – I simply wish you to know that we’re not just thrashing about up here.’

  ‘I understand, darling. Your bodies are thinking together. Thoughts, I am sure, far too deep for me. But that doesn’t have to preclude all fun, does it? Tell me at least that you are having fun.’

  ‘I’m having fun.’

  ‘And you promise me you are not falling in love with him … or his thoughts.’

  ‘We all have fun in our own way,’ Chas said, making no promises.

  Chapter Five

  Marvin Kreitman’s idea of fun was different from Chas’s. Marvin Kreitman’s idea of fun was not to go anywhere. Climb up the magic rope ladder, pull up the sheets and snip off the rope. Chas set about changing that. Slowly at first, starting with the kitchen. She taught him to cook, showing him how to stew apples and to crumble butter and flour. She taught him how to make jam, which fruit to use, how
not to be frightened of sugar, how to stop before it got to the condition known as sticky. (The way you do with me, he laughed.) She even showed him – taking no notice of any of that – how to make that miracle of eggs, lemon meringue pie, Charlie’s favourite.

  He’d baulked at that. ‘You have thought this through?’ he checked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You do know you’re turning me into Charlie.’

  ‘No danger of that,’ she said. ‘You don’t call me Mrs Chassyboots and rub your stomach and beg for seconds.’

  So Kreitman called her Mrs Chassyboots and rubbed his stomach and begged for seconds.

  Then they looked at each other and agreed not to try that again.

  ‘No fridge magnets, either,’ Kreitman warned her.

  But how, once he’d said it, could she resist? One morning, after she’d left to go back to Richmond – work, children, all that – Kreitman climbed down his ladder and found I ADORE YOU in little red and yellow letters on his Lamborghini toaster. He thought his legs would go from under him. When Chas turned up again the next evening she found BUT NOTHING LIKE AS MUCH AS I ADORE YOU in letters twice the size running diagonally across the fridge door.