Who's Sorry Now?

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘Don’t boast, darling.’

  ‘I am allowed to boast, Dolly. I only wish I could boast that he thinks only of me. But he doesn’t. He’ll think only of me when he’s on to the next one. First he has to lose me, then he’ll love me.’

  ‘Well, for your sake I hope that isn’t soon,’ Dotty said.

  ‘Hope it isn’t soon he loves me?’

  ‘Hope it isn’t soon he loses you.’

  ‘Same thing,’ Chas told her.

  ‘Well, you know what I think,’ Hazel’s mother told her.

  ‘Mother, if the Palestinians haven’t shot him or he isn’t in prison for selling secrets to the Iranians he’ll be wearing ringlets down to his knees.’

  ‘Hazel, you are always at least twenty-five years and a dozen sentences behind me,’ Hetta Nossiter said, adjusting the dimmer slightly on the lamp beside her.

  Although her mother had all her faculties about her, Hazel noted she had been growing tetchy recently with the light. Either there was too little of it coming in from Great Russell Street, dying in the courtyard and finally smothered by the classical façade of the British Museum, or there was too much coming through the worn parchment lampshades. Was this what became of you when you lived alone? Was nothing ever exactly the way you wanted it?

  ‘Are your eyes all right, Mother?’ Hazel asked.

  ‘Ha! You should have eyesight as good as mine. Between the two of us, my dear, there is only one set of eyes, and they belong to me.’

  ‘It belongs to you.’

  ‘Don’t cheek your mother. My grammar was never any disappointment to Cabinet ministers. It’s you who’s the disappointment, not me.’

  Hazel shrank from these words as though they were missiles. ‘Mother!’ she cried.

  ‘Well, I’m sorry, but I have to be cruel to be kind with you. You’re so prickly. How many times have I had to tell you – you don’t keep a man by making his life a hair shirt. When you find a man, Hazel, you feather-bed him.’

  ‘The way you encouraged me to feather-bed Marvin?’

  Hetta Nossiter turned up the dimmer on her lamp. ‘Ach, Marvin.’

  My own fault, Hazel thought, looking out at the touristic dismalness of Bloomsbury, busier than when she’d grown up in it, but more aimless, no longer a place for people on some errand of the mind – my own fault for coming here.

  Her mother had met Charlie Merriweather once, quite recently, in this very room, and liked him. Hazel had brought him on a hunch – correctly guessing that Charlie would be amused by her mother on account of her faded fifties associations (Charlie loved faded), and that she would be taken by him partly because his own deportment had something of the fifties about it, partly because he was tall, but mainly because he wasn’t Marvin. ‘An agreeable change to see you with someone whose father didn’t sell purses on a market,’ she whispered to Hazel, while Charlie was looking round the little flat. ‘A nice build on him too. He’d look good in uniform. Is he too young to have done national service?’

  ‘Wonderful woman,’ Charlie had said after meeting her. ‘I love the smell of gin around women of that era.’

  This was news to Hazel. ‘Does my mother smell of gin?’

  ‘Not so much her as the apartment block,’ Charlie said quickly. ‘A lot of secret tippling goes on in Bloomsbury. Always has. It’s either that or they blow their brains out. It’s my favourite stratum of English society, what’s left of it, ex-civil servants and fallen gentry, antiquarians and owners of military bookshops, all coming apart at the seams but still managing to keep going on boiled cabbage and iced gin and bleary recollections of buggery …’

  ‘Buggery, Charlie? My mother!’

  ‘The men, Hazel. The men.’

  ‘And the women?’

  He thought about it. What recollections were the women living on? All the women Charlie knew were living on recollections of being in love with V. S. Pritchett and Geoffrey Grigson. Broken hearts of another age. Was that the universal fate of women? Was it caused by men like him? ‘I like your mother very much,’ was all he’d say. ‘She’s a dear.’

  So it seemed to Hazel that with so much instantaneous affection between them they amounted to a sort of alliance or network – could she actually mean a bulwark? – which she could count on in her heart. No reason, now he liked her mother, not to take Charlie round to meet her again. And no reason, now her mother liked Charlie, not to tell her that she sometimes feared her life with Charlie was built on sand.

  ‘But I don’t think,’ she said, ‘that I could make things any more comfortable for him than I already do.’

  ‘Do you cook exotically for him? Do you serve him sweetbreads? Men love entrails, you know.’

  ‘I cook as exotically as is consistent with the tastes of a man who puts tomato ketchup on his kedgeree and whose idea of a treat is a fruit scone.’

  ‘Do you remember to put cream on his scone?’

  ‘Double cream. And jam.’

  ‘Marmalade’s better.’

  ‘Charlie’s a jam man.’

  ‘What about your clothes?’ Without appearing to, she surveyed her daughter, not disapprovingly. She was less tailored than she had been. A good sign. ‘Are your clothes feminine enough for him?’

  ‘Mother, look at me. If I went any more feminine I wouldn’t be able to stand up.’

  ‘There you are,’ her mother said. ‘What are you doing wanting to stand up with a man?’

  Hazel looked around the room, decorated in pink and gold, with portraits of statesmen (one of them her father) on the walls and figurines of shepherdesses (one of them her mother) on the mantelpiece. She shook her head. She had been born here. Grown up here. Educated into womanhood here. ‘You know, sometimes,’ she said, ‘I think it’s a miracle I’ve achieved even the little I have. A husband, for a time. A lover, for a time. Two daughters, I hope, for ever. How, given the example you have shown me, have I managed that?’

  ‘Well, you haven’t managed a sense of humour,’ Hetta Nossiter replied.

  ‘No,’ Hazel said. ‘No one can accuse me of managing one of those.’

  And not for the first time she trudged out of Bloomsbury like a heroine in one of those great novels of humourlessness Charlie had been reading aloud to her – that’s when they weren’t great novels of facetiousness – footsore and weary, determined to put the shames of her past life behind her, but uncertain where her future was to be found.

  Kreitman knew the longing he was feeling couldn’t be for Hazel. It made no sense. He had longed for Hazel, first when he was very young and she had gone off to see a school friend for the weekend, leaving him weeping like a baby at the railway station, wondering if he would ever see her again, praying no accident would befall her, longing for her, actually longing for her presence, within minutes of her being gone; and then, an older man, when she had had enough of his delusive tears and turned her back on him, denying him anything that would remind him of their earlier days, no reminiscent smile, no recapitulations in the voice or retrospection in the body, nothing, stone dead nothing – then he would go out walking on his own, and long for her, quite simply and disconnectedly yearn, as for a person who was no more, with that same chasm in the heart the bereaved know, long, long to have the space left by that one shape filled by that one shape – until maybe he would meet some girl and postpone the longing for another time. Yes, yes, he knew how that was judged. Some man of feeling you are, Kreitman, to be deflected from your feelings by any trull that passes! Well, first of all hold with the trull. You haven’t met her. And don’t suppose that a capacity for deflection only ever denotes callousness or coldness. We are many-chambered creatures; the squishy-hearted, the inconsolable weepers at railway stations, having maybe a chamber or two more than most men. And full of longing though we are in one chamber, we are fitted with the means to be full of something else in another. Yeah, full of shit, Kreitman! Suit yourself. But the truth’s the truth: they did not console him, the other women, whether they were wom
en for five minutes or a fortnight or for life, they did not console or compensate or distract him, they simply existed concurrently. They also were.

  Shouldn’t it then follow that Kreitman’s longing for Hazel had never gone away but also was, perhaps for all time, in the chamber where his longings were stored? Asked that question a week before, Kreitman would have pooh-poohed it. Longing for Hazel had died. She’d killed it. He’d killed it. Vicissitude had killed it. Sadness was another thing. He would always be sad about Hazel, sad for Hazel, sad from Hazel. But longing was of another order. Longing was as tangible as touching. What you longed for you as good as held, except that you didn’t, which was why your heart broke. And he didn’t feel that way about Hazel. Hazel he did not want to hold. But here was the mystery – if he didn’t want to hold her, why was he imagining her in his hands, and if he wasn’t longing for her, why did his heart break when he realised his hands were empty?

  The afternoons were worse. At the best of times Kreitman was not good at afternoons. Work helped as a rule. A shop to go to helped. But the habits of non-attendance which Kreitman had acquired in the weeks waiting for Chas to make her mind up and materialise had stayed with him even now that they were palpably a pair. Most mornings, Chas left him in bed and went to Richmond where there was room at least to swing a cat and write children’s stories. Since Kreitman wouldn’t hear of it that she went home by any method but the Smart, he was Smartless for several hours himself. By the time the Smart was back, Kreitman had lost the will to do anything with his day but wait for it to return to Richmond and collect Chas. ‘I should just give you Maurice,’ he said. ‘That way you’ll end up resenting me for ruining your business,’ she said. ‘Do I have a business?’ he asked her. ‘It was your business that made me fall for you, remember,’ she reminded him. ‘It was your business that showed me you didn’t have a heart of steel.’

  So between kissing Chas goodbye and waiting for her return, on those days when she did return, Kreitman idled through his afternoons. The rain hammered on his roof. There was nothing to see from his windows but the tops of umbrellas and the amphibian feet of uncomplaining Londoners. Bizarre to him, the patience of these people. Did nothing stir them to revolt? By three o’clock, flamenco was on his record player and the smell of Moorish dust was in his nostrils. Whereupon the longing started.

  Ridiculous, but there was nothing he could do. Anyone seeing me, he thought, would say I have finally got my comeuppance. But then if that’s what I have got, that’s what I have got. It’s not within my power to do anything but suffer it. You can’t get up, pull yourself together and walk away from your comeuppance.

  Tears poured down his face. He would walk around the flat to keep his circulation moving, smiting his chest an inch or two above his heart, great thumps with a clenched fist, as though he meant to knock himself off his feet. Maybe a bottle of red wine, maybe not. Occasionally a cigar. He did not want to become a creature of habit. By four he was too upset to trust himself to his feet and had collapsed on his desk, his forehead on his gouging knuckles, the longing banging in his ears.

  But tell him this: if the longing was for Hazel, how come it was sparked off by flamenco – music for which Hazel had never expressed the slightest enthusiasm nor shown the remotest aptitude. Had Hazel been a flamenco dancer – no mystery. Had she loved the guitar even – no mystery. But the brutal truth was that Hazel hated flamenco with a passion and, in the days before Kreitman moved his enthusiasms to his den on Clapham High Street, had never missed an opportunity to deride his devotion to it. ‘Finding the gypsy in your soul, Marvin?’ she would call when she caught him with his ears to his speakers, crouched like a beast in pain. In more playful moods she would imitate the castanets, making sluttish expressions with her mouth, as though to imply this was music for the sort of tramps in whose name he had trashed their marriage. On the blackest days she would simply yell, ‘For Christ’s sake, Marvin, will you turn that crap down!’

  You see his quandary. How could flamenco move him to yearnings for a woman to whom flamenco was crap?

  What he decided was that he was in mourning for companionship, for the companionship of just one woman, and was yearning to be happy. Flamenco reminded him of all the ways a man could be unhappy. Stop playing it. Chas was all set to be the companion of his heart, but she was out of his sight too often. Stop letting her go.

  Of course, the way things stood, she had to go. There was no room for her here. To get into bed she had to perform a manoeuvre of which an SAS man would have been proud. To get out of it, especially in the middle of the night, was more perilous still. There was nowhere for her to write. And she had a pair of children growing loopier by the hour to keep an eye on. There was only one resolution to this. He would buy a house for them both. In Richmond if that was what she wanted, though not on the same side of the street as the house she already had. He would get down on one knee, ask her to marry him and buy them a house.

  What was wrong with that for a plan? He was obviously in love with Chas – there could be no other explanation for his missing Hazel, assuming for the moment that it was Hazel he’d been missing. He knew himself. In the process of his affections passing from one woman to another, he suffered. Something in the brain: the migrating affections, crushing over the pons Varolii, pressed upon a cranial nerve. That was how he knew, definitively, he was in love with woman Y – the agonies he suffered remembering woman X.

  Not that he lacked the proof he needed in his feelings for Chas herself. The old fault-line appeal hadn’t led him astray. He continued to marvel at how unlike herself she could be. He loved the surprisingness of being with her. He believed she loved the surprisingness of being with him. The sex, to isolate a single component at random, was extraordinary, by virtue of how her skin felt under his fingers – neither flaking nor about to spill – and by her virtue of how his felt under hers – her hand the collar, her arm the chain. That would change, of course, he knew that. One day his fingers would not feel what they felt now and one day the collar at the end of her chain would loosen. Infinitessimally on both counts, but that’s all it takes. No matter. They would have the continuing unexpectedness of each other. You and me, us; who would ever have thought that when you stole my cat Cobbett from me?

  And who would ever have thought this – you and me, us – when you picked me up at a party all those years ago, taught me the Bump, and then handed me over to Charlie?

  Nice, wasn’t it, when life turned out so differently from the way you expected it?

  Very nice.

  And very nice back at the Kreitman residence where Charlie was waiting for Hazel, out visiting her mother, with a big bunch of red roses, a lemon meringue pie in a pretty cardboard box tied with violet ribbon and what looked suspiciously like a complete set of the novels of P. G. Wodehouse.

  He leapt at her like a labrador when she came in. ‘I’ve missed you,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve missed you,’ she told him.

  Then he bent to her and they kissed, balancing to perfection, you would have thought, sensuality and affection.

  Maybe, thought Hazel, I don’t have anything to worry about after all.

  Book III

  Chapter One

  If a person is happy for the first sixty-nine years of his life and unhappy for the last one, does he die an unhappy man?

  When is it reasonable to call ‘Time’ on happiness? Think no man happy until he’s dead and you save yourself a lot of bother. But that’s routine pessimism, and routine pessimism is merely a sort of showing off. It also dodges the question. As a young man Kreitman liked saying that you should call no man dead until he was happy – but that too was only swagger.

  The trouble is that happiness, as a summation of an observable condition of life, is arbitrary. It all depends where you decide to stop. Cut the deck here and you draw happy, cut it there and you draw sad.

  This might be why we like to have a painting above our mantelpiece. A painting freezes time, offering
the illusion that a loveliness of nature, or an expression of human contentment, can last for ever. In the best paintings you can feel Change breathing just beyond the canvas, panting to be let off the lead. But look again the next day and he is still where he was, still eager, still chomping, but still restrained.

  Someone should have painted Hazel and Charlie just before Charlie cut into the lemon meringue pie.

  Or Kreitman on his knees to Chas.

  ‘I wish I had a camera,’ Chas laughed, flushing, flustered even, ‘but haven’t you forgotten something?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That you are already married.’

  ‘Oh, Hazel will be glad to be rid of me,’ Kreitman said.

  ‘Is that a recommendation?’

  ‘Do I need a recommendation?’

  Chas thought about it. ‘And the other thing you’ve forgotten,’ she said, ‘is that I too am already married.’

  ‘To which I cannot, with any gallantry, reply that Charlie will be glad to be rid of you.’

  ‘No,’ Chas laughed, ‘you can’t.’

  It made her sad, suddenly, to hear the words that Kreitman couldn’t say.

  ‘Leave it,’ she said, helping Kreitman to his feet. ‘This is very sweet of you and entirely unexpected, but let’s leave things as they are for the moment, eh?’

  She was surprised how disconsolate he looked. ‘Come on,’ she said, taking him by the shoulders and straightening his back. It was like cheering up a child. She felt she had to put the briskness of hope back into him. ‘Come on,’ she said again, kissing him. ‘We’re all right as we are, aren’t we, eh? Eh, eh?’

  It had been her great thing as a wife and mother, instilling briskness. Let’s go for a walk, let’s buy an ice cream, let’s bake a cake. She had excelled at it. But she had never been a wife or mother to Kreitman, from whose eyes the tears rolled inconsolably, like a baby’s.