Who's Sorry Now?

by Howard Jacobson

  The moment Charlie cut into the lemon meringue pie his heart crashed through his stomach.

  He had been here before. Once before or a hundred times – it didn’t matter. There was the lawn running down to the river, and there were the children – his darling Kitty-Litter, his laughing boy Timmy Hyphen Smelly-Botty – doing what children do, and there were the de Selincourts and the Gosses sipping Charlie’s Greek wine, and there, viewed through the kitchen window, was Chas in a comically harassed turban rolling pastry or boiling gnocchi or stringing beans – and there in the sky was the sun, and there on the river were the rowers, and there, just there, in the middle of it all, was Charlie himself standing at a trestle table, shouting ‘Yummy!’ and slicing lemon meringue pie for everyone. There’d been a discussion about clothes lines – when wasn’t there, on the Merriweather lawn, a discussion about clothes lines, given Charlemagne’s queer predilection for them? – in the course of which everyone had agreed that the clothes line, however useful, was a social menace and an aesthetic blight, and Charlie in a fit of lugubrious self-denial had made a face and said, ‘Oh, all right then, I’ll wear wet chinos from now on,’ and to everyone’s delight had taken the rusted garden shears and with an exaggerated grunt had snipped the clothes line in the middle, sending a solitary wooden peg flying into the air, where it triple-somersaulted like an acrobat before landing to great applause in Chas’s homemade lemon meringue pie.

  Were the Kreitmans there? Charlie couldn’t see them. Let him close his eyes however many times, he could just about make out Marvin on the lawn, but not Hazel. Had she never been there, or had he never noticed her? Funny, because he had noticed every other woman. His own wife he had not, of course, noticed in that sense. Chas was just Chas, not there to be noticeable in that sense. Even as his heart was crashing through his stomach his memory did not rearrange her to be a visual stimulus to him. What he missed, with an ache like a wound, was the familiarity of her – however unfamiliar that was now, after all the months he hadn’t clapped eyes on her – and that included, as a matter of course, the dissatisfactions which had driven him to look too closely and with too much undisguised desire at every other woman on the lawn. Every other woman excluding Hazel, that is. Without a doubt, she had been there. Coldly, he could enumerate the occasions on which she was bound to have been there. So why couldn’t he see her there? He could come up with only one rational answer to that – he didn’t want to see her there. You don’t wipe a person out of your visual history unless your eyes reject them.

  She had refused pie. She had her figure to think of. Something annoyed Charlie about her employment of that word. Figure. His mother had been fond of the word figure. On his mother’s lips the shape it had made was formal and cold. On Hazel’s it was voluptuous. More voluptuous, all at once, than he cared to make mental room for.

  As an atonement for not being able to find her on his lawn he made himself look at her arranging the flowers he had just bought her. She was still wearing the clothes she had been to visit her mother in, a too short Whistles skirt with a too deep slit, extravagantly decorated with pretend-old buttons and lace, a sexy play on the idea of old-fashionedness, soft on her hips, and a lovely bloody maroon flesh-responsive cardigan he had helped her choose, through which he could watch her nipples breathe. Ten minutes before, the sight of her had filled him with love. Desire, too, yes. Her legs so strong in those high strappy heels. Her prodding chest. Eyes in the wrong place. But first and foremost love. ‘I’ve missed you.’ There was the problem, right there! ‘I’ve missed you.’ He had forgotten what all this was supposed to be about. He hadn’t originally gone to her for love. He hadn’t originally been looking for love. He already had love. Love was what he’d swapped with Kreitman, who had something else. If he’d merely swapped love for love, he had let a few people down, had he not? In the time it took him to revisit his garden, in less time than it took him to finish his pie, he had come down from love to fondness – another commodity he hadn’t been in the market for – from fondness to consideration, and from consideration to pity.

  No sight in creation looks more dolorous to a man than a woman in the fullness of her sensuality and glamour, once you have allowed pity to play a part in your appreciation of her. In restitution for which dishonour – and this explains the terrible spiral of the sexual affections once they start to tumble – you can do nothing except pity her some more.

  This will pass, Charlie told himself. Don’t give in to this. But he was filled with an unassuageable yearning to be back on his lawn in Richmond, bouncing his children who were no longer children on his knee, telling them mad stories, pouring lukewarm retsina, and Chas in her comical turban, up to her elbows in flour.

  ‘One of the nice things about the relations between our familes,’ Charlie had once said to Kreitman, in the days when they lunched together in Soho, ‘is that our children get on so well.’

  ‘You think so,’ Kreitman had replied. He had always hated this kind of talk. ‘Don’t you think that’s just because they’re all drug addicts? In fact, they wouldn’t know whether they were getting on or not. They merely supply one another.’

  ‘Just a stage,’ Charlie said. ‘Like us and rock and roll.’

  ‘Charlie, what are you talking about? You were about as interested in rock and roll as I was in motor racing. Name me a rock band.’

  ‘I mean our generation.’

  ‘I tell you what I don’t get,’ Kreitman said, ‘if you’re going to talk about generations, I don’t get what’s happened to the principle of taking turns. Rock and roll I don’t remember, Charlie, but I do know that we were in awe of seniority when we were young, that however much we rebelled on the surface we deferred in our hearts, so how come, since what goes around is supposed to come around, that this latest batch isn’t in awe of us? Neither on the surface nor under it. I feel cheated, Charlie. I feel cheated of my turn.’

  ‘Try being friends with them instead, Marvin. The wise thing is to take what’s on offer. We gave awe, this generation gives informality.’

  ‘I don’t want to be informal with kids. I want them to keep their distance.’

  ‘Unless they’re girls …’

  Two old friends, one steadfastly in love with the same woman all his married life, one not, meeting regularly to decide who was the unhappier and then losing their nerve.

  But Charlie had been right about what was nice about relations between the two families – the children did get on well together.

  Back from Thailand, Cressida and Juliet Kreitman went clubbing with Kitty and Tim Merriweather even before they had that long-promised dinner with their father.

  ‘So fill us in. Who’s doing what to whom this time?’ Juliet wanted to know.

  ‘Can’t we talk about something else,’ Timmy said. ‘Did you find the beach?’

  They were in a queue on Wardour Street, waiting to pass muster, not more than a few yards, had they but known, from the place where Nyman knocked down Kreitman and did all their brains in.

  ‘The beach is for later,’ Cressida said. ‘I just want to know how we can get your dad out of his shitty old dressing gown.’

  ‘We don’t have a dad,’ Kitty said.

  ‘What I just want to know,’ Timmy added, ‘is how we can get your dad out of our mum.’

  ‘OK,’ Cressida said, ‘so we won’t talk about it.’

  And an hour later they were doing what they’d come for and wiping out every invidious recrimination, and all other invasive passions to boot, to the music of ferroconcrete robots trying to do the same.

  What Nyman was hoping to wipe out in a club whose upper age limit was nineteen on an old night is harder to say. Tim had several times proposed meeting there for a Friday rave, but he hadn’t really expected Nyman to show. People from the box had other people from the box to hang out with. Yet here he was, looming out of the prison-yard lighting like a fugitive, a back-to-front baseball cap on his head, a PVC rucksack on his shoulders, a water bott
le with a pump and a phosphorescent straw in it round his middle, and glitter on his eyelids. ‘Gotcha!’ he said to Tim, catching him round the chest but not breaking the rhythm of his dance.

  Timmy danced like a National Theatre production of Marat/Sade, the inmates of the asylum at Charenton, doubly demented. Nyman did rhapsodic – slow, corkscrew unravellings, as though confined genie-like within a narrow-necked bottle, with a touch of the shaven-headed East. Were the Dalai Lama to have danced, and upon a pinhead, he would have danced like Nyman.

  ‘So who’s your brother’s spiritual friend?’ Cressida screamed into Kitty’s ear.

  And that was how the Kreitman girls got to have their turn with Nyman, as they explained to their more than usually preoccupied father over dinner at a starry restaurant a decent distance from the Ritz.

  ‘You know who this is you’re telling me about?’ Kreitman wanted to be sure.

  ‘Yeah, we know all about the bicycle,’ Juliet said. ‘Alles ist klar.’

  ‘He told you he’s German?’

  ‘I can’t remember if he did or not. But he looks German.’

  ‘He also looks a faggot.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Daddy,’ Juliet said.

  ‘Did he squeak his eye sockets for you?’

  ‘He hasn’t so far.’

  ‘He will. Just stay away from him.’

  The girls laughed. For as long as they could remember, their father had told them to stay away from everyone. It was his idea of setting a good example and ruling with a rod of iron. Once he’d said ‘Stay away’ he felt he had done his duty and could get on with what interested him more.

  ‘So you and Aunty Chas …’ Cressida ventured, when the time seemed right.

  ‘I know what you must be thinking,’ Kreitman said.

  Their conversation was interrupted when a woman Kreitman knew to be celebrated for something or other, just don’t ask him what, begged Juliet and Cressida for their autographs. Not the starry thing to do, but there you had it. Today, even the famous were exercised by fame. She had seen their picture in a colour supplement. Relative Values or Sibling Rivalry – one of those. And she knew Cressida’s work. Cressida’s what? Kreitman thought. He rolled his eyes. He had famous daughters. How could this be? He had fed them warm bottles while Hazel tried to get some sleep, then he had turned away for five minutes and now they were famous. He remembered their inky fingers and their school reports, commenting on their appalling handwriting, a fault inherited from their mother. Now they outdid each other for elegant flourishes and the size of their Mont Blancs.

  ‘We’re not judgemental,’ Juliet said, putting hers away in a handbag, Kreitman noticed, that hadn’t come from the family business. ‘It’s a bit embarrassing for us, that’s all –’

  ‘And a bit naffo – ’ Cressida added.

  ‘But if squeaking your sockets for Aunty Chas is what makes you happy …’

  ‘… who are we to complain?’ Cressida completed.

  If I were in the market for girls today, Kreitman thought, I wouldn’t succeed. They’d eat me alive. I’d have to turn faggot. ‘How would you feel,’ he summoned the courage to ask, ‘if we married?’

  Cressida hung out her tongue. Juliet made pin wheels with her eyes. ‘You and Aunty Chas? Are you serious?’

  ‘I am. I’m not sure about Aunty Chas.’

  ‘Doesn’t marriage still take two, Daddy?’ Cressida wondered. ‘I know we’ve been away for a few months …’

  ‘And aren’t you still married to Mummy?’ Juliet enquired.

  ‘Yes and yes,’ Kreitman said. ‘And for those reasons, or at least for the first of those reasons, it probably won’t happen. I think Chas is worried about how Tim and Kitty will take it.’

  ‘We can tell you,’ Juliet said. ‘Badly.’

  ‘Both?’

  ‘No,’ Cressida said. ‘Kitty badly. Timmy very badly.’

  ‘You’ve had the discussion?’

  ‘We’ve had the “Let’s not even discuss it”, which is more serious.’

  ‘Is it me?’

  Cressida treated her father to one of her most brilliant smiles. ‘Why, is Aunty Chas seeing someone else as well you?’

  Juliet laughed. ‘Well, there’s a thought. Our little Kraut did imply he fancied Aunty Chas was an itsy bit sweet on him.’

  Kreitman stiffened, pushing his plate from him. ‘How did he imply that?’

  Juliet shrugged. ‘How does anyone imply anything? We were talking …’

  ‘Where were you talking?’

  ‘In a bar, after the club. Does it matter?’

  ‘No. It doesn’t matter. Go on.’

  ‘There’s no on to go to, Daddy. We were just chatting, Aunty Chas’s name came up, Nyman said something vague – you know he isn’t a master of language – about how kind she’d been to him …’

  ‘He used the word “kind”?’

  Juliet checked with Cressida. ‘Kind?’

  Cressida feigned boredom. ‘Kind, nice, hot, sexy, giving him the come-on – I wasn’t listening.’

  ‘And he said this,’ Kreitman wanted to know, ‘in front of Kitty and Tim?’

  ‘Yeah, why not? It’s some sort of joke between them.’

  ‘The joke being?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Daddy. Is everything sacred suddenly? Just because our parents have all decided to behave like children, does that mean we aren’t allowed a bit of fun at their expense? Nyman is one of those professionally homeless people, Aunty Chas offers him a bed for a couple of nights, we enjoy jumping to salacious and I have no doubt highly improbable conclusions. Didn’t we learn how to do that from you?’

  Kreitman fell vacant. ‘I don’t know what you learned from me,’ he said. ‘But whatever it was I’d unlearn it.’

  Had you asked him, a second later, what he had just said, he wouldn’t have been able to tell you. There was no room in his head for recollection. Every spare inch was taken up by what had just flown into it. The information, and the interrogations which waited on it as inevitably as night waited on day … What bed, what nights, how recently, how often, to what pleasurable end … ? But he knew to what pleasurable end. He had the picture to go with the question. Dartmoor, Richmond – what difference?

  O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife. That all? Cry baby! Kreitman would have killed for mere scorpions. On his mind fed a whole menagerie of monsters.

  And they weren’t only gathered there to feed, either. In the fouled corners of Kreitman’s mind the world’s bestiary feasted and lied and fornicated and shat.

  Chapter Two

  It sounds sinister. A massive mechanism for spying. The London Eye.

  A giant bicycle wheel, 135 metres in height, 2,100 tonnes in weight, all included, and observable just about everywhere in the city, the London Eye turns at 0.26 metres per second, just fast enough, if you draw a bead on something stationary, to discern with the naked eye. It is a marvel of modern engineering, no doubt about it. And beautiful to behold. Thirty-two luminous capsules, or pods, apparently sea green in colour with the light through them, carry twenty-five passengers apiece. So that’s eight hundred of us up there, in principle, at any one time. On a clear day, we can see for twenty-five miles. Which is how many miles between us?

  No citizen of sound mind dislikes the London Eye. Of those who are able to see it, or enough of it to say they see it, from their bedroom windows or balconies or rooftops, a sizeable proportion claim to have stood and watched it complete its thirty-minute cycle. You find a pod you like and then, without changing your position, you follow its painstaking revolution until it returns to where you first hit on it. You can do this alone or with a lover. With wine or empty-handed. With the radio or headphones on, or silent. Watch for more than thirty minutes and you become woozy, uncertain whether you are watching it or it is watching you. At night you can see the flashes of cameras, little light explosions, as pretty as shooting stars, coming from the highest pods. How many of those taking photographs have pho
tographed you looking?

  For some people a giant bicycle wheel, revolving high over the city, would be a nightmare. People who don’t like bicycles, people who don’t like wheels, people who have suffered traumas as a consequence of either, people such as Marvin Kreitman.

  Yet Kreitman, too, is watching the wheel, fastening upon a pod and following its half-hour revolution. Is that how long you stay on, a half-hour? Can you pay to stay on longer, or is it strictly thirty minutes and then off? If you can stay on longer, do you have to make that decision when you buy your ticket on the ground – assuming that’s what you do – or can you renew as an afterthought, on an impulse, on a lovers’ whim, in the pod itself? Is there a limit to how many times you can go round? Is there an hour when there is so little business that you can have a capsule entirely to yourselves?

  These are the questions which trouble Kreitman as he watches, human-interest questions rather than any that bear upon the weight and size of the structure, the amount of cabling needed to keep it upright, or the problems which the wind must pose.

  For the wheel Kreitman watches is a wheel of fire, imagination’s wheel, and the skills of engineers are irrelevant to a wheel of that sort.

  Kreitman had a sighting of the wheel’s upper rim from his Clapham pencil box, but nothing that could honestly be called a view. It’s even possible that all he had a sighting of were cranes, swaying in the vicinity of Jubilee Gardens, helping to build the new riverside. In order to get a view proper he had to change his address. Nothing permanent. He didn’t want to look at the wheel for ever, or for however long it was provisionally booked to stay up. He just wanted to look at it for a while. How long was a while? He didn’t know. More than an hour, but less than a year. For the best views, in the full-on, reach-out-and-grab-a-capsule sense, there was no beating those characterless flats to which the offices of the once Greater London Council and its neighbours had been reduced. But Kreitman could find nothing rentable there on a short-term basis, nor was he convinced, once he thought about it a second time, that he wanted to be quite so unnervingly close. Seeing the wheel was the object, not the wheel seeing him. In the end he found an apartment hotel in Soho, so new it wasn’t finished yet, and so bijou it made a virtue of that fact, which enjoyed the advantage of a communal roof terrace, commanding panoramic views, and what is more was situated just a collision away from the very restaurant where he and Charlie Merriweather had enjoyed their last ever dinner as good friends, proud husbands and sane men. And Kreitman was not one to look a gift horse in the mouth.