Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

‘What about Friday?’ Charlie asked.

Kreitman pretended to rustle his diary. ‘Same again. No can do. I’m just hellishly pushed right now.’

Well, who wasn’t hellishly pushed right now?

Not that Charlie honestly believed anyone had pushed him. This time, Charlie in his calmer moments reflected, I’ve gone and jumped. Christ!

He couldn’t believe the hammering his chest was taking. Was this what not-nice sex did to your ribs and diaphragm? And he was only thinking about it!

As yet.

He held on to that. As yet .

A one-time shooting and fishing hotel, then a murder-mystery weekend hotel, then a white-water rafting hotel — a briefer incarnation, this, on account of the absence within a radius of five thousand miles of anything that could reasonably be called white water — and latterly a string quartet and dance alternating with a book club hotel (in which form it was at last returned to the earlier hush of its shooting and fishing days), the Baskervilles had been a favourite of the Kreitmans and the Merriweathers during that brief opportunity for liberty which comes between courtship and children.

Kreitman was still the idealistic historian of English radicalism in those days, and not yet the luggage baron of south London, else he would have shown up at the Baskervilles for his first ever walking holiday on Dartmoor — if truth be told, his first ever walking holiday anywhere — accoutred in rucksacks and map holders and water bottles and walking sticks all finished with the softest leathers. As it was, he arrived looking smarter by a country mile than any of them, though he never got to walk a country mile because of the weather. ‘I don’t care what these boots are built to do,’ he told Hazel, ‘they’re brand new and I’m not going out and putting them in puddles.’ So he sat in the lounge and read Country Life and played with the odd jigsaw while the others experienced the exhilaration of rocky landscape and teeming rain. Come night-time he was the only one with energy and didn’t want to hear that they’d seen eagles. ‘Please, I’m exhausted,’ Hazel said, ‘I can’t even bend my knees.’ But no day was a holiday for the young Kreitman that didn’t end in a fuck. Lying in the stag-wallpapered room next door, the two Charlies listened as Kreitman ground his will out pleasurelessly and Hazel uttered not a sound.

This trip Kreitman wasn’t taking walking boots. By now he knew himself. It was a hot early May, an oasis of hot in a month of showers, too tiring for walking — it was always either too hot or too wet, too misty or too glaring, for walking on Dartmoor — and he had his heart set, since he’d been ordered to turn off that nicely purring engine of his, on sinking into a winged armchair in the mini-palm-court lounge, reading newspapers, smiling at lesbians, consuming pots of tea and anchovy sandwiches, thinking his thoughts and, so long as Hazel kept her distance, ringing up the other women in his life. There was, as Charlie had surmised, though he had overestimated the heat, a fair amount of ringing up and putting right to do. A man actively in love with five women can’t just disappear on holiday when the fancy takes him. Leaving the shops was easier. He had managers and manageresses to tend the shops. But nobody tends your mistresses when you’re not there to see to them yourself. Mistresses? Hardly. That wasn’t the tone of the times. He was more their mistress than they were his. It entailed duties, anyway, whatever it was all called. So he’d said no to the idea of a break at first. ‘I’ve got responsibilities,’ he told his doctor. ‘I’ve got matters I can’t leave,’ he said to Hazel. But two days after his night on the town with Charlie, though his collision with the cyclist had barely left a scratch on him, just a few throbbing aches in the ribs, he fell asleep at his desk in the middle of the afternoon and missed an appointment. He was dead tired, he had to admit that to himself. And among the things he was dead tired of were the women.

Number itself wasn’t the problem. Of course you had to organise your time intelligently if you weren’t to end up with angry women all over town. But Kreitman employed a driver to help him get around, a discreet semi-liveried Kenyan who laughed at everything and for whom Kreitman had provided a ruby-red Smart, manoeuvring and parking being of the essence. And of course lightness of touch — for what could be lighter than a laughing chauffeur with leather patches on his navy polo neck driving a car the size of a bedbug? Men like Charlie who were driven nuts by the fewness of women in their lives were wont to scrutinise Kreitman’s face for signs that he was on overload. ‘Sheesh, Marvin!’ they would say, shaking their heads, meaning, ‘Can’t you see they’re destroying you, man?’ Wishful thinking. Confining himself (and his driver) to those parts of London where he already had business to attend to, he could have coped with any number. What was tiring in five was what was tiring in two — the pity you expended.

Actively love two women, attend to them as you are able only when you’re fucking them (fucking with them, Kreitman tried to remember to think, in deference to his own daughters) — though the truth of it was that they were fucking him, using him like some tart they’d picked up on a street corner in Streatham, for that was the way of it between the sexes now — actively love two women, anyway, the sociology of it apart, and you are forever adjudicating between the hands life has dealt them. Lying with Erica, whose skin seemed made of Christmas-cracker crêpe, so quiveringly taut and percussive was it, he would suddenly experience a revulsion on behalf of Vanessa, who each day collected another purply bump on her shins and thighs, not a bruise, though of course a woman of her age walked into more table edges than Erica did, but marks of inner deterioration, signs that veins were popping with overuse and blood forgetting where to flow. Too cruel that such was the reward, in Erica’s case, for lolling on couches half the day, reading Homes and Gardens , while Vanessa’s blue-black bumps were all the thanks she got for having racked her brains in the service of Book at Bedtime before succumbing to the BBC’s unspoken horror of the un-young, collecting her pay dirt, and turning herself into a teacher of the intellectually impaired. Not fair, either, that the lucky one should have rocked him sensuously in the cradle of inconsequence, and given him sweet dreams, while the solemn one left him agitated, tingling to his fingertips with purposiveness, unable to find rest. By sleeping with them both, Kreitman brought them into moral juxtaposition and felt the universal unfairness of things on their behalf.

Unlikely that these revulsions from beauty and good fortune helped those who had neither, but they deepened the picture. To the simple pleasure which being fucked by women who were beautiful and exuded confidence gave him, he now had to add the complicating fact of his betraying them in his heart. And it was the pressure of this constant ethical refereeing, combined with the conviction that such conscientiousness was enjoined upon him by the amount of fucking he was doing, as though sex were like inherited wealth, entailing greater social responsibilities the more of it you had — it was this that was knocking him out.

Not a cheerful fucker at the best of times, he was now grown heartsore. He seemed overburdened, a bearer of grievous history, an implanter of sorrows, rather than the fun, gag-a-minute guy — lightsome Kreitman — he would have liked to have been.

Take what had happened with Bernadette only the night before the drive to Devon. Ten years his senior, Bernadette was an architect with a deep voice, fearsome cheekbones and a strict manner, the kind of woman you saw from a distance and felt immediately reprimanded by, a woman you put up scaffolds to approach and ascended gingerly, in a harness and a hard hat. Circumstances had taken a swing at Bernadette — the lover before Kreitman pinning a letter to her drawing board saying he couldn’t bear seeing her beauty succumb to age and so was running off with her youngest daughter, take it the right way, Geoffrey. Taking it the wrong way, Bernadette had rung Kreitman, who, as the husband of the woman who employed her ex-daughter-in-law to redesign her house, she had once or twice encountered at dinner parties. ‘My daughter’s fucked off with my lover,’ she told him, ‘and since she doesn’t herself have a lover off with whom I can fuck in return, I thought I’d try some other woman’s man. Are you busy?’