Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

Kreitman threw his head back and laughed. A waitress in a short black leather apron, whose pants you could see when she cleared a table, whose pants she was no doubt contracted to let you see when she cleared a table, came to check how they were for wine. ‘Gendemen?’

‘We’re all right,’ Kreitman said. ‘But my friend’s in love with you.’

‘I’m not,’ Charlie said, ‘I love my wife. I only take advantage of other women. And we’ll have two brandies. Any. The best.’ Then to Kreitman he said, ‘So?’

‘So what, Charlie?’

‘So which are you going to sacrifice?’

‘You’re drunk, Charlie.’

‘Maybe, but I’m clear. If it’s the women who are stopping us from doing what we’d like to — in my case from fucking someone else; in your case from finding out what it’s like to be fucking only one — then we change the women. Exchange the women. What’s wrong with that? You have Charlie, I have whichever one you’re prepared to part with.’

‘I have Charlie! ’

‘You don’t want Charlie?’

‘What do my wants have to do with anything? Do you honestly envisage Charlie leaping into bed with me? Have you forgotten that she nearly had me arrested by the RSPCA? She blackmailed me out of my own cat. She thinks I’m a brute.’

‘You are a brute, Marvin. But I’m not offering you the cat …’

‘No, that’s right, you’re offering me Charlie. Who is of course renowned for her easygoingness in matters sexual. Look how she’s taking Dotty’s indiscretions. If she finds those silly, how’s she’s going to react to this? Sillier still, Charlie. A lot sillier still.’

‘Why don’t you just leave Chas to me. I have a feeling you’ll be surprised by her. Now who do I get? I’d be happy with Hazel but if you’re not fucking her and she’s not expecting you to, there might not be any point. I want whichever one will best reflect back to me the image of myself as bastard.’

‘Oh well, in that case, any one of them would do,’ Kreitman said. ‘They all know about bastards. Why don’t you take the lot?’

For the first time since the quick consumption of his elicoidali , the ever hungry prep-school boy with a gob full of lollies appeared in Charlie Merriweather’s place. But only fleetingly. ‘No,’ he said, after giving Kreitman’s offer a decent period of consideration, ‘I think it’s important you should choose. Make it equally costly. Who’s it going to be, Marvin?’

‘Charlie, enough.’

‘Come on, play the game. Which one …?’

And so out at last, brandied, into the roaring Soho night, remorseless with clubbers, boys bald as missiles, girls gashed red across the face as though with razors, and Kreitman exclaiming, ‘Christ, these kids!’ and Charlie swaying off the pavement, agreeing, ‘Yes, beautiful, aren’t they, so much more sure of themselves than I ever was, splendid really, so come on, Marvin, who’s it going to be?’ and then the cyclist — that cyclist! — with his hands off the bars, pink and purple luminous under the street lights, crying, ‘Honk, honk, urgent delivery,’ and Kreitman’s chance, come sooner than expected, to unseat the cocksucker before he mowed down his jabbering friend, and the next thing flat out under the vomiting moon with tyre marks across his chest.

Not liking anything about the world when he came to in it, with a fright more nauseating than birth, back as though from hell with all its devils, only to find more of them waiting to pitchfork his soul, and Charlie not sobered, still with his big white jaw hanging open, wanting an answer to his crazy question — ‘Which one, Marvin? Who are you going to give me?’ — Kreitman went to sleep again on the street.

When he came to a second time it was already another day and he was lying on a castored metal trolley in a corridor off Emergency.

‘Is this where they are laid who tangle with a faggot?’ he enquired.

Whereupon someone smoothed his hair and said ‘Shhh!’ And strike him dead — strike him dead again — if that someone wasn’t Charlie, not Charlie his old chum but Charlie his old chum’s wife. Charlie otherwise known as Chas.

That Charlie!

So where was Hazel?

More to the point, who was Hazel?

‘I might not be anybody,’ she warned Kreitman on their first date. ‘I have never had a father. And girls who have never had a father never really learn how to turn themselves into a resistant force.’

‘Then don’t resist me,’ Kreitman said. Though even he knew she wasn’t talking about that.

They were sitting in a curry restaurant near his digs in Camden. They had noticed each other in lectures for months but their paths hadn’t otherwise crossed until they’d met in a picture queue for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest . Neither was alone, but neither exactly looked tied up either. Kreitman decided to ignore the feelings of their respective dates and gave her his card. No other student at the university had his own card. Hazel laughed when she read it –

Marvin Kreitman

B.A. Pending

— and the squishy-hearted Kreitman immediately fell in love with her because her laughter had such sadness in it. ‘Ring me,’ he said in a dark voice, and she did. That was partly what she meant by having no resistant force. When somebody asked her to do something she did it. And now here she was letting him choose what she ate, how many poppadoms, which sorts of pickle, not because she couldn’t resist, but because she couldn’t see any logical reason why she should resist.

She tried. For weeks after this first date she refused to see Kreitman, actually washing her hair every night for a month and once even sleeping with another man she hardly knew in order that she shouldn’t have to lie to Kreitman when she made the usual excuses and said she was seriously seeing someone else. She was terrified of her own quiescent nature. The year before, holidaying in Israel at a friend’s suggestion, she had let a soldier take her off the bus and strip-search her in the Negev. Yossi. She even told her mother about him. ‘Handsome devil,’ her mother said, ‘I can see why.’

She lacked moral guidance. Her mother had worked in the House of Commons library in the fifties (the last good-naturedly fancy-free decade of the English twentieth century), where she dressed in pencil skirts which showed off her calf muscles and satin blouses which made her breasts float like pillows, and where she became intimate with any number of Cabinet ministers, all of them Tories (the only ones she liked: a social confidence, sense of humour thing), one of whom — though if anybody knew which, nobody was saying — had fathered Hazel. Given Hazel’s mother’s predilection for men who looked like Hazel’s Israeli soldier — tiers of teeth, no-smoke-without-fire eyes, shoulders bristling with wool, moustaches like a sea lion’s and a bazooka in his belt — it oughtn’t to have been too difficult to whittle down the number of Tory ministers in contention; but Hazel never felt she’d got close (Harold Macmillan, no; Selwyn Lloyd, no; Anthony Eden, hardly) and maybe her mother was never dead sure herself. Whoever he was — or at least whoever he was told he was, and that did not preclude his being a cartel comprising every suspect on the list — he left the women well provided for, with a flat giving out on to a Juliet balcony overlooking the British Museum, a blue-grey Austin A40, an inexhaustibly stocked drinks cabinet and a sufficient allowance to make Hazel’s mother think twice before selling her story or asking for more. Which outcome, viewed all round, hardly disposed her to bring her daughter up a bundle of maidenly compunctions. She put Hazel on the pill at thirteen and advised her to let impulse be her judge. The only trouble with that being that Hazel could never decide which her impulse was or what it was telling her.