Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

And not a twinge of jealousy that Juliet (named, of course, after her mother’s sad little balcony overlooking the British Museum) was making hay with her research? All right, a twinge. But you can live through your children, and Hazel was squaring her accounts through hers. Good for Juliet if she’d done a deal with a publisher on the strength of someone else’s thoughts and her own good looks. According to Juliet every girl in her college that wasn’t an out-and-out dog had a book deal. Historians with big tits were particularly voguish, but a philologist with a nice arse or even just a pretty face was also in with a shout. ‘Bad luck if you happen to be George Eliot,’ Kreitman had said. ‘But, Daddy, I’m not George Eliot,’ Juliet had reminded him. Hazel had listened to that exchange while sitting airing grievances on her office phone. Inexpressible, the satisfaction it gave her. But, Daddy, I’m not George Eliot . What a long way back that went! What a merciless stripping down of however many thousands of years of male hypocrisy in the matter of beauty and intelligence. Now deal with this — the beauty you commodified we are commodifying back, so what was that about our not being intelligent? Daddy, our beauty is our intelligence. The thing has happened that you always dreaded: we have learned to exploit your weakness for our weakness. Only this time not in a whorehouse. And you can’t be certain whether we are laughing at ourselves or at you.

How wonderful, Hazel thought, to have put such a creature into the world. Her very own consolatory act of vengeance. And Cressida made two.

And was anything else making her happy? Some spicy little intrigue independent of her daughters? Some gentleman?

‘Oh, please,’ was her automatic answer to any enquiries of that sort. ‘No more butterfly chasers, thank you very much.’

‘Go into the bottom drawer of my bureau,’ her mother told her, ‘take out the round Fortnum’s scented violet creams box, untie the ribbons and help yourself to as much cash as you need for a fortnight in the Negev.’

‘Mother, he’ll be dead by now. They’ll have shot him. Or he’ll be fat and living in Haifa with a wife in a long dress and ten children.’

‘Then you should spend more time standing with me on my balcony. Such distinguished scholars you get to see from here.’

‘Not any more you don’t, Mother. They’ve closed the library. Those are tourists, you’re looking at. And most of them are Russian Mafia. Not that that makes any difference to me. I’ve done men. I’ve done being blubbered over.’

But that was before she met Nyman, an Anglicisation of Niemand, as he made no bones about explaining. Niemand meaning Nobody. Not merely Man with No Qualities but Man with No Prospects of Qualities. The cocksucking cyclist who knocked her husband flat in Old Compton Street. Except that he wasn’t a cocksucker. Unless he was. The point about having no qualities and no prospects being that you don’t know who or what you are. And a little ambiguity, in the meantime, gets you by.

No wonder Hazel liked him when she talked to him in Emergency, while Kreitman lay comatose in the corridor. He reminded her — startled yet aggressive, at a bit of a loss really, but no pushover — of her old unindividuated self. Charlie Merriweather had rung her, telling her not to worry and not even to come to the hospital if she couldn’t face it. Marvin was out cold, sleeping rather than unconscious, and not seriously injured. A quick tetanus jab when he woke and they’d probably send him right home. In the meantime he’d stay to keep an eye on him, since in a manner of speaking it was his fault. Chas was driving in to keep him company, no doubt preparing a flask of hot tea and wrapping the runny egg baps in silver foil as they spoke. On top of that, the cyclist who’d done the damage was seeing the vigil through as well, feeling pretty bad about it, although the worst you could charge him with was posing while in control of a pedal bike. So Marvin wasn’t exactly short of well-wishers.

‘Did you say pedal bike?’

Charlie was not able to see the importance of the word, but yes, pedal bike.

Hazel roared with laughter. ‘God, can’t my husband even succeed in getting himself knocked down by something decent? I thought we were talking a Harley-Davidson at least.’

‘Does that mean you won’t be coming?’ Charlie asked.

‘Lord, no, I’m a wife. It’s a wife’s job to be at her husband’s side whatever he’s knocked flat by.’

As for where she was when her husband finally came to — she was across the road in Waterloo station, enjoying a hearty English breakfast with the pedal cyclist in question, the Man with No Anything.

No sooner had Charlie Merriweather rung Hazel Kreitman than he regretted it. What if he’d done the wrong thing? What if Kreitman was expected somewhere else in the early hours? What if Hazel was the last person Kreitman wanted to open his eyes and find? Too late now, but if he’d thought of it first he could have gone through the call list on Kreitman’s mobile, which he’d actually caught as it flew from Kreitman’s pocket in the fracas, and checked if it really was Hazel he had rung earlier in the evening to say he’d be late home. Home? Where was home? And how many homes did Kreitman have?

Sexual curiosity can be a terrible affliction when it gets its teeth into a grown man. Charlie Merriweather believed it was slowly separating him from his reason. No, not slowly — rapidly! How long does it take to go mad? Overnight, if you’ve been putting in the groundwork for thirty years.

When he was a boy Charlie had wondered along with every other boy how things worked, where things went and when he was going to get his turn to find out. They were in it together. It was all part of the fun. He remembered one boy who was more precocious than everyone else, who had a moustache when he was eleven and was locked into a serious relationship with a girl when he was barely thirteen. Simon Lawrence. He wore a locket containing his girlfriend’s picture round his neck and was reputed to have inside knowledge of oral sex. The others envied him crazily, as goes without saying. They stole the locket and put shoe polish on his balls so that his girlfriend wouldn’t like the taste, though there was some controversy in the matter of whether tasting balls formed a part of oral sex. Charlie Merriweather had thought not. Why would any girl want to taste Simon Lawrence’s balls? Simon Lawrence sealed his own fate on that one. ‘Why shouldn’t she?’ he said. So on went the polish. They also wrapped a turd in silver paper and hid it in his schoolbag. With a bit of luck his girlfriend would find it and think it was a gift to her. End of relationship. That much they did know about girls. But their envy was equivocal. Simon Lawrence’s experience put him offside, excluded him from the group. He seemed to spend every break reading letters, biting pencils and then composing answers. It was like extra homework. He looked sad most of the time, frowning, burdened by his dark knowledge. It was better to be with the others and know nothing. Knowing nothing was at least a laugh. But now Charlie felt he was the one cast out, the last one left standing in the playground in the freezing dark, wondering what hilarity drew the others to the pavilion. And kept them there.

He had been a shy boy. Up to a point they had all been shy boys. Being a boy is a shying business. Over and above that, though, he’d been an unlucky boy. He was the child of odder than usual parents. The son of a more handsome than usual mother. And of a sadder than usual father. Few of his friends went home to happy households at the weekend, but Charlie knew of no one else who went home to find his father quaking under the kitchen table in his raincoat.