Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

‘Don’t tell me this isn’t the real thing,’ she told her mother, ‘because it’s the nearest I’m ever going to get.’

‘Not true, darling,’ her mother said. ‘Remember the Negev.’

‘Oh, Mother, that was just the hots,’ Hazel said.

‘Exactly!’ her mother told her.

And she did have the hots for Kreitman, or at least would have had the hots for Kreitman had her hots not called out his hots — oh, God, those , his dreaded inflexible stage-managing, his iron-grip ritualising, this way not that way, say this but not that, beg for me, deny me, open yourself, close yourself, cheap whore it, expensive mistress it, hurt me, hurt me more, ensnaring her in coarseness, defiling her with smut, before away they went again, labouring and moaning, spinning centrifugally, lost in their separate immensities. After which, as predictable as dance steps, her dark forebodings — ‘He’s wanking into me,’ she thought, ‘he’s doing something on his own, I might as well be a bucket’ — followed by his breezy day-to-day devotion, prodigality with his company, anguish at the merest mention of an absence, followed by her line-of-least-resistance conviction that if that wasn’t proof of love then nothing was.

She liked him, liked the idea of herself with him, high-principled woman on the arm of high-principled young man, loved it when he called her ‘his girl’, his romping girl, came alive in the role of a companion-wife if not in the role of a harlot-wife, came to think that she was cut out, after all, to do socialising and give dinners — though not in the presence of her mother-in-law — to remember birthdays and have babies, but still she should have fucked him off when she had the chance. Now, a score or more years on, she could not remember when she first discovered that his desolation on the platform of every railway station in London did not stop him sleeping with another woman as soon as he could find one, ‘as soon as’ meaning within the hour sometimes, within the half, should another train luckily disgorge someone of the same mind. He was as broken-hearted as a man could be for fifteen minutes, then he wasn’t. It was as subtle, morally, as that. As subtle as one dog sniffing after another. Was he looking for succour, for consolation, a replacement only while she was away, because she was away? Frankly, she didn’t give a damn. He had tried to flatter her with that one, when first caught out: No, no, no , not what it looked, nothing like what it looked, in truth he was merely dipping into the general pool of her sex made fragrant by her dear self, and therefore — didn’t she see? — only gazing after temporary reflections of her. Loving her made him alive to all women. The only men who didn’t love all women were those who were not lucky enough to love one. She flooded him with vitality, energised him, replenished what she took, made him feel as powerful as a god. Should it be any surprise, then, that he acted like a god? Looked down out of his lordly superfluity and plucked whatever took his fancy? As for what it meant: nothing. Passing fancy, that was all. There was only her … she must believe him, her alone, and her reflections …

‘Whatever,’ she said, instituting separate beds.

‘Whatever’ — was she the first person, she wondered now, to have coined the new nihilistic usage of that word? Watching daytime television, sick to her soul, watching the victims of failed love affairs and marriages, the betrayers and the betrayed, the liars and the lied-to, agree for the sake of ten minutes of telly notoriety to turn their unhappiness into a free-for-all freak show of the emotions, Hazel noted the increasing frequency, month by month, year by year, of ‘Whatever’. Tired of listening, tired of reasoning, tired of lies, that’s all there was to say — ‘Whatever.’ The rest was silence. ‘You murdered my feelings, you stole from me and cheated me, you trashed my home, you corrupted my children, you turned my friends against me, you made me loathe myself…’

‘Whatever.’

But she’d said it first and, she believed, she still said it best.

She blamed herself at the time. No will power. Of course he took advantage. Anyone would take advantage. She’d have taken advantage of herself if she’d known how. No point then, in her middle twenties, with one child had and one child coming, making empty gestures. She didn’t want the gift-wrapped life her poor mother lived, unaccompanied in a silent flat overlooking the British Museum, waiting to be strip-searched by the Israeli army. And she wasn’t up for starting the whole shebang again: ‘Hello, I might not be anybody’, followed by another seeming-softie weeping buckets on the platform at Paddington. And at least now she could be free of Kreitman fucking with her head. Drop the ‘with’ — actually fucking her head was what he’d done. ‘My lower parts were never the problem,’ she told her friends, ‘though of course he talked cunt until the cows came home. But it was head he really wanted. And I don’t mean what you think I mean. What my husband liked to do with head was fuck it. Show me what’s in yours and I’ll pretend to show you what’s in mine. He fucked my brain, girls, but now at last, I am pleased to tell you, I am able to think for myself again.’

For which they applauded her and ordered more champagne.

Easy to be brave, out with the girls. Easy to believe it might all be a charade and when she got home where there were no girls to cheer her on — no big ones, anyway — all would be well again. ‘Let me be wrong,’ she told herself, she couldn’t bear to remember how many times. ‘Let me have made a mistake.’ But when she got back and saw his face, saw his own disappointment with himself on it — that was the clincher every time: what she couldn’t hide of what he couldn’t hide, his consciousness of his crookedness — she knew there’d been no mistake.

She cropped her lion’s mane, expelled everything floaty from her wardrobe, bought tailored suits and turned her home into a business. Files, folders, drawers of paper clips and drawing pins, appointment books, wallcharts, timetables. Theatre tickets bought months in advance, another holiday booked before they’d had the last, wallpaper changed annually, ditto carpets, children’s teeth checked every quarter, ironing woman Tuesday, sheet-changer Wednesday, dust-mite inspector Thursday. Kreitman could come home, or not, when he chose, provided he gave Hazel three weeks’ notice of any variation from the usual and pinned details of same on the board in her office. ‘All I ask,’ she said, ‘is the consideration you show those you do business with. You don’t break appointments with your wholesalers or manufacturers, or with your manageresses or window dressers — ha! — you won’t break whatever appointments you have with me. And of course you’ll pay me an annual salary and make adequate provisions for my pension.’

Her mother all over again, after all.

Sometimes her heart almost failed her, so close was this to the chill she’d always dreaded. Let me be anything but this. But he had already damaged her heart beyond repair anyway. Her own fault. No resistance. Well, that had changed at least. Now she was all resistance.

No bad thing, either. She breathed in the thin brave air of independence, filled her lungs with it, strode out into the world in shoes that didn’t kill her, made choices without reference to another person, heard her own voice ring out loud and clear. Was that really her she heard? It was. Hazel Nossiter — forget the Kreitman — speaking for herself. And people listening. Yes, Hazel. No, Hazel. Right away, Hazel. No bad thing? A fucking wonderful thing, that was the truth of it. If only she hadn’t been brought up to believe that being one of two, one half of someone else, and the quiescent half at that, was what life had up its sleeve for her. Strong one minute, she fell back the next, going over it and over it. Not getting over it, but going over it.