Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

The first thing Chas and Hazel did after Charlie rang them to say he was sitting in St Thomas’s waiting for Marvin to wake up after being run down by a cyclist but not to worry, was to ring each other. If Chas was driving in from Richmond, then Hazel would take a taxi to Wandsworth where the girls had gone to a friend’s house to rave, from which Chas could pick them up without seriously going out of her way and deliver them all to St Thomas’s. Had any man been party to this arrangement he would have pointed out its logical and geographic flaws and come up with an alternative suggestion. Such as, ‘Go separately.’ This was the joy, for Hazel at least, of having no man party any longer to anything.

In fact, the girls pointed out the chief flaw as they saw it when their mother came to collect them, to whit: if Daddy wasn’t dying, why did they have to see him this very minute when this very minute they were enjoying juggling little, graven love tablets on the tips of their tongues and dancing with bottles of Evian water? Shit, Mummy!

‘He is concussed, darlings,’ Hazel said. But could think of nothing further to add when her daughters smiled sweetly back at her and said, ‘But, Mummy, so are we.’

That being the case, Charlie picked Hazel up from Wandsworth and the two women motored in on their mercy errand without the hindrance of other company.

‘Kind of you to do this,’ Hazel said.

‘ De nada .’

Chas and Charlie had recently been to Seville for a children’s literature festival, and now Chas was speaking joke Spanish. In the Merriweathers’ world you weren’t expected to be very good at anything, especially languages. A conviction of the propriety of lightness, which Hazel secretly envied. Oh, to be not very good at anything and see it as a virtue!

‘The last time I did anything like this,’ Chas said, moving up the gears, ‘was when Timmy’s headmaster rang to say he’d fallen from his dormitory window while trying to launch himself back into it from a drainpipe.’

‘What was Timmy’s headmaster doing on a drainpipe?’

The two women laughed. They felt like the mothers of small children again. Suddenly bruised knees were back in their lives.

‘So how come yours didn’t get hurt and mine did?’ Hazel asked.

‘Yours will have been doing something wilder.’

‘To a pedal bike?’

‘Even an argument with a pedal bike’s beyond Charlemagne. He’s too big a baby to get into any real trouble. He walks through danger unaware. He’d have walked through the Russian Revolution without getting a scratch. No one notices he’s there. It’s his height. He seems to be above it. But I bet he’s as jealous of Marvin as anything. He’d love it to be him we were charging in to see with champagne and flowers.’

‘You’ve brought champagne and flowers?’

‘Well, egg sandwiches anyway.’

Chas the provider. Because there was never any room in the boot or back seat of Chas’s car, taken up with umbrellas, Wellingtons and anoraks, Hazel had to sit with the Glyndebourne picnic basket between her feet. Hazel knew what would be in it. Not champagne, but rather more than just egg sandwiches. Hand-raised pork pies, which Charlie loved. Cold potato salad with lashings of mayonnaise, which Charlie loved. Taramasalata and thin wheat crackers, which Charlie loved. A bottle of retsina, which Charlie loved. Runny raspberry cheesecake, which Charlie adored. Lemon meringue pie in which Charlie would have bathed, had he been allowed. Why doesn’t she simply fill it with jars of mashed rhubarb and strained peach and have done, Hazel wondered. Chas the mother of Charlemagne the big baby.

Although she liked and admired Chas in the abstract, positively revered her when she didn’t see her, idealising her capabilities and her appearance, loving her pretend-clumsy handsomeness, the way she seemed to get her face tied up in her spectacles, the way she looked as though she were at any minute going to trip over her own legs, or lose her way in her own kitchen, even while she was single-handedly catering for thirty — although Chas, in absentia, had been her best friend ever since their glory days, when they’d been the girlfriends of that inseparable duo, Charlie Merriweather and Marvin Kreitman — in the flesh Hazel wasn’t sure she liked Chas very much at all. What she forgot, when Chas was not in front of her very eyes to remind her of them, were the notices she hung on all their conversations. ‘Don’t touch my baby.’ ‘Don’t harm my baby.’ ‘Please don’t take my baby away from me.’

As if, Hazel thought.

It wasn’t that she hadn’t noticed Charlie’s charms in the time she’d known him. Or that he hadn’t let her know he’d noticed hers. He took you in all right, Charlie Merriweather. He shot you sudden penetrating glances, along the beams of which you had no choice but to send him penetrating glances back. In this regard, if in no other — and in the end what other is there? — he was a man in working order. Big too, unthreateningly strong, and lovable in the bumbling manner of men of that class and generation. A sweet man. But she didn’t know of a single woman, all questions of hurting or not hurting Chas apart, who viewed him as any sort of proposition. A pet was for life and so was Charlie. You couldn’t quickly let him in on the understanding that he’d quickly let himself back out. Which she suspected was exactly the quality women liked in her husband. Marvin Kreitman would cry over you longer than you might find easy, but he’d be gone fairly smartly thereafter. She could vouch for that. It was very nearly a matter of wifely pride. In fact, in Chas’s company, it was a matter of wifely pride. For there was ultimately something unforgivably insulting about the protective playpen Chas constructed around Charlemagne — insulting to the people the playpen was constructed to keep out, never mind to the big baby it was constructed to keep in — as though one had so few consolations of one’s own that one was bound to want to snaffle Chas’s.

I know what it is she makes me feel, Hazel thought — she makes me feel as though she pities me for having a collapsed womb or lazy ovaries. And she makes me feel as though she fears me for the same reason. Beware! — unnatural, unreproductive woman about.

For her part, though she never much cared for Hazel in the abstract, positively hating her when she didn’t see her, denigrating her for never having made her own career, running down her second-hand stylishness, her reliance upon outside help — architects, landscape gardeners, designers, personal trainers, party chefs, wine waiters — and satirising her transformation from frightened sylvan creature to huntswoman of the savannah, in the flesh Chas admired her, felt calmed by her compact presence and relieved to be in the company of someone who appeared to be as cynical about the sort of silliness upon which Dotty had embarked as she was. In short, though she had been challenged if not affronted by Hazel’s part in those first overheard acts of sexual mayhem and murder with Kreitman, and then alarmed by the cold marital accommodation she’d subsequently come to with him (which still, somehow, did not take from the idea one had of her as his accomplice), these days she did not feel that Hazel was capable of dropping down on her from the trees and sinking her jaws into her defenceless family. If anything, Hazel had given up and gone middle-aged before the rest of them. Which of course made her excellent company.

Only one teeny-weeny anxiety remained. That orphaned stuff that Hazel had once gone in for, all that business about how not having a father robbed you of resistant force — Chas had never believed a word of it. She hadn’t seen much of her father herself while she was growing up. Most of the time she’d been as fatherless as Hazel, but that hadn’t made of her a feather to every breeze that blew. Quite the opposite. In Chas’s view, not having a father on whom to practise the arts of pleasing had made her independent and strong-willed. She was father to herself. What had made Hazel weak was not fatherlessness but spinelessness — if spinelessness was the word for always needing a man to lean on and to blame. Not that Hazel was spineless any longer. But you never knew with weaknesses of that sort, whether they were ever completely gone.