Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

Kreitman loved fucking her because she , even more than all the others, over and above what the times insisted on, fucked him . Ironically and with her steel-grey eyes wide open, waiting for him to make her laugh. That was all she wanted from him, exactly what he’d wanted from his father — jokes, anecdotes, messages from the breathing world, the blacker the better. Any sign of his losing himself on her breast or otherwise thinking about ecstasy and she stopped moving. Sometimes, before visiting her, he’d have to go cap in hand to his own staff, to beg for the latest joke. It was like feeding a monster. Entertain her harshly and she was his. Bore her with sweet talk and she’d be gone. Then, the night before Devon, he lost her in the bed. Simply couldn’t find her. Called her name and she didn’t answer. Nothing on the pillow. Nothing under the duvet. When he pulled all the bedclothes back, there she was at the bottom of the mattress, flattened like her own shadow, extruded as though flayed and thrown away and only the outer skin of her remaining. ‘What are you doing?’ he said. ‘Where’ve you gone?’ She didn’t know what he was talking about. ‘I’m lying here waiting for you to amuse me,’ she said. ‘But you’ve made yourself vanish,’ he said. ‘It’s too upsetting, seeing you do that.’ She sat up with her knees against her chest and lit a cigarette. ‘I think it’s time we took a rain check, Marvin,’ she said. ‘I think you’re getting a trifle tragic for me.’

He was.

Looking forward to the rest, he was disappointed, when they checked in to the Baskervilles, to discover that Hazel had planned him a surprise. This weekend the hotel book club was addressing the subject of children’s literature as adult literature, and in attendance to address it with them were the C. C. Merriweathers, Charlie J. and Charlie K. So for the Merriweathers and the Kreitmans (when the Merriweathers weren’t discussing their craft) — this was Hazel’s cute, recuperative idea — it would be a little bit like old times.

That was the first part of the surprise.

The second part of the surprise concerned Nyman. Guess what? He was here too.

‘So tell me about yourself,’ Kreitman said over dinner. ‘I missed out on the introductions and the breakfasts. What do you do when you’re not biking urgent deliveries around Soho?’

Sitting on his hands, Charlie Merriweather gave thanks that Kreitman hadn’t asked him what he did when he wasn’t being a faggot.

What everybody found personable about Nyman was his absence of personality. Nyman too found this personable about himself. ‘There is nothing to tell,’ he said. ‘And I don’t even deliver packages any more. I only pretend to do that.’

‘To make yourself interesting?’ Kreitman wondered.

But killingness was wasted on Nyman who had long ago embarked upon the course of killing himself. Finding if he had a self first, then killing it. ‘Exactly so,’ he said. He had a round blank floury face, the texture of one of Charlie’s baps, but angled to look sad, like a white-faced clown’s. And a small, perfectly circular mouth, shaped as though to receive slender rolled-up magazines, the Spectator or the New Statesman .

‘Then tell us all some of the other things you do to make yourself interesting,’ Kreitman persisted.

‘Well, for example,’ Nyman said, ‘I can bend my thumbs to meet my wrist.’

‘Show us,’ Kreitman said. Then, when Nyman had showed them, ‘And is there anything else?’

‘Well, for example,’ Nyman said, ‘I can make my eyes squeak.’

‘I don’t think we want to see that,’ Hazel said.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Kreitman corrected her.

So Nyman put his knuckles in the sockets of his eyes, and ground them until they squeaked.

Chas and Hazel looked away.

‘That it?’ Kreitman enquired.

‘Well, for another example,’ Nyman said, ‘I have bicycled down here.’

Chas gasped. ‘You’ve cycled here from London?’

Hazel also gasped. ‘Today?’

‘No, I left first thing yesterday morning. Last night I slept under a ditch …’

‘ In a ditch,’ Kreitman corrected him, ‘or under a hedge.’

Because he had had less opportunity to talk to Nyman than the others, Kreitman continued to work on the assumption that he was German. That was why he took the liberty of correcting his English. Kreitman regularly attended trade fairs in Germany, Germans having an atavistic love of leather — echt leder , how could you put it better? — and he knew that Teutonic longings to overmaster the English persisted, also atavistically, in a dream of mastery of the English language. Help them with idiomatic expression and they would spare your family. But there was every possibility that Nyman wasn’t German at all. Not even foreign.

Just foreign to the English tongue.

‘Yes, under a hedge. Then I began again early, with the birds, and got here as you see me now.’

‘You must be whacked,’ Hazel said.

‘Well, I am pumped, certainly,’ he said, rolling up a trouser leg and inviting Hazel to inspect his calf muscle.

Fluttering her hands like a princess about to feel her first frog, Hazel bent and made a stab at Nyman’s muscle. ‘I should say so,’ she laughed, her voice ringing with little girlish bells, as though still not sure whether pond life agreed with her. ‘Pumped’s the word!’

You can tell, thought Chas, that she has never nursed a boy child.

Some instinct for propriety had told Nyman not to come to dinner, nor to come near Kreitman at any time, wearing cycling gear. Instead he wore a crushed sandy suit, which went with his colouring, a crushed sandy shirt, a crushed sandy tie and sandy shoes. His general appearance was crushed, of course, as a consequence of being folded in a saddlebag for two whole days and one night under a ditch, but there was no questioning its muscular conformability.

Why is the little prick wearing camouflage on Dartmoor? Kreitman wondered.

How variously he dresses, Hazel thought, remembering the elasticated green lunchbox shorts and sleeveless thunder and lightning cycling vest he had on when she first met him. How nice it is to see a man prepared to experiment with his appearance, unlike Marvin with his invariable sharp suits, declaring this is the man I am, this is the man I am, this is the man I am. How pliant and gender-undemonstrative Nyman is, for a man with so hard a body, and how he starts when I look at him.

How she starts when he looks at her, Chas noticed. Yet how pointedly he averts his eyes from mine. What is it he wants me to see he doesn’t want from me? Alternatively, what doesn’t he want me to see he does want from me?

Chas was wearing a Butler and Wilson dragonfly on the lapel of her jacket. From time to time she fingered it, changing its position so that it might catch the light and maybe dazzle him. And did he dazzle her? Of course not. No man could be less dazzling than Nyman. He did not emit light, he absorbed it. He was a black hole, and by the magic of physics, all sources of light sought their extinction in him.

A mystery to Kreitman, this, even as the blackness drew him to it. Kreitman was of the generation that believed you had to be brilliant to win a woman’s attention, that you had to sparkle conversationally, that you had to make wisdom fall from your lips like rubies, while your eyes danced like showers of falling stars. You laboured at your coruscations and the woman was the reward. He could not conceive that a woman might find attractive what she had to labour to win.

Flash, flash, went Chas’s glittering dragonfly.

Of the group, only Charlie was incurious about Nyman. But then Charlie had his mind on other things. From where he sat there was a view through the hotel window of one of those warty tors for which Dartmoor is famous. He wasn’t sure whether he could see people on the tor, or merely sheep, but the distant prospect made him melancholy. Distant prospects always did that for Charlie, especially when they were of tors and the tors were pink-tipped by the sun, like the nipples on a flat-chested girl stretched out on a beach or, more melancholy still, asleep in a summer meadow buzzed by flies. He gazed out of the window absently, tying his linen napkin into love knots, unaware of Nyman.