Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

Unaware of Hazel too, it appeared, though it might reasonably be supposed, given the time he’d spent trying to raise and remind Kreitman of this last week, that his absent-minded love knot was for her. But Charlie wasn’t counting his chickens. For the time being it was some lovely glorious nippled nothing he was seeing. Miss Cuntalina Fuckleton.

‘But apart from cycling,’ Kreitman persisted with Nyman, ‘what is it you want from life? Presumably there isn’t much of a living in cycling …’

‘My husband is always curious to know what there is or there isn’t much of a living in,’ Hazel interrupted.

‘I see,’ said Nyman. ‘A businessman.’

‘A captain of industry no less,’ Hazel said. ‘The luggage baron of south London.’

‘Your husband has a tide?’ Nyman marvelled.

‘They say his father was a king,’ Chas threw in.

Kreitman bridled. No one in Charlotte Juniper’s family had ever worked a market stall. They had survived genteelly, on charity when necessary, for however many hundreds of years, but no stain of any market stall to darken their good name. ‘Who am I dining out with here,’ Kreitman asked, ‘the Tunbridge Wells chapter of the Communist Party? I am making small talk. I am asking Nyman what he wants from life.’

‘Marvin’s idea of small talk,’ Chas threw in again — ‘ “And how do you explain creation, young man?”’

To her enormous satisfaction, Nyman laughed. A curious ripple that ran up his chest and shook his shoulders, before dying in his face. She wasn’t sure, but wasn’t this, in their company at least, Nyman’s first ever laugh? Discovering that she could coax a sound, or at least a sight, suggestive of mirth out of a person as ruthlessly mysterious, and therefore mirthless, as Nyman heated Chas’s blood. It was a joy comparable to gardening, like watering a parched bed and watching the flowers open. In her excitement, she danced her dragonfly and watched it disappear into the colourless immensity which was Nyman.

For no reason she could put a name to, Hazel dropped her napkin and while retrieving it accidentally effected a second graze of Nyman’s well-pumped calf.

The quick look Nyman shot her — two pale points of Arctic light — was perceived by Chas at the very moment it was perceived by Kreitman, who believed he noted a similar roundelay of exchanges beginning with Hazel and ending he wasn’t certain where. Only Charlie remained outside the circle of infatuation.

‘Somehow, in all this merriment,’ Kreitman said, ‘my question has been lost. I suspect you’re going to tell me you’re an artist. Everybody seems to be an artist at the moment, all our children, all our wives. The only person I know who isn’t an artist is me, though even I sometimes design a handbag or a suitcase with something approaching artistry, let my daughter insist all she likes that artistry is not to be confused with artisanship. But if you are an artist, please don’t tell me that the art you make is yourself.’

‘No,’ said Nyman, ‘the art I make is not myself. I do not have a self.’

‘So I understand,’ said Kreitman, ‘though to me you have a very distinct self — I still feel the bruises from it. But you are, then, an artist? Do you blaze a trail or do you leave a path?’

‘Jesus, Marvin!’ Hazel said. Then to Nyman she added, ‘You are not obliged to be interrogated, you know.’

‘Unless you happen to enjoy it,’ Chas said, putting her face on a slant, as though the world of abstruse enjoyments were her oyster.

‘No, it’s all right,’ Nyman said. And that was when Kreitman noticed he was being aped, that Nyman was twirling his wine glass between his fingers exactly as Kreitman twirled his, and that he was making a fist of his other hand, rubbing it absently into the tablecloth, as though kneading dough, as though killing dough, again as Kreitman did. Kreitman’s rigid fist was infamous among his women, each of whom began by hoping she would be the one to get him to open his fingers and release his murderous grip on himself. Now he could see what it looked like and why, as a discrete object, like some tiny meteorite humming with unearthly tension, it upset those who had to eat and drink in its vicinity. But what was Nyman up to? Was he making merry with Kreitman’s mannerisms? Was he learning what Kreitman was with a view to doing him some damage? Or was he just being Kreitman because Kreitman was a good thing to be? Had the little cocksucker chosen to admire him suddenly?

Whatever the answer to those questions, Kreitman found himself wanting to go on holding Nyman’s attention and winning his approval. If the boy had a yen to be like him he wasn’t going to be dog in the manger about it — he would show the boy how to be like him. The first consequence of which was that he was unable to remember how his own voice worked naturally and started to shout.

‘Shush,’ Hazel said. ‘They don’t want to hear you at the far end of the room.’

‘You don’t know that. They might very well want to hear me at the far end of the room,’ Kreitman boomed again. And he twinkled at Nyman who, for a black hole, made a pretty good fist, since we are talking fists, of twinkling back.

Over coffee in the lounge, for the Baskervilles remained one of those hotels that could not bear to serve coffee to its patrons until they were seated too low down to drink it comfortably, Nyman finally told them what he wanted out of life. He wanted to be on television.

A moment or two of silence greeted this revelation. All of their children wanted to be on television. Sardonic as a matter of generational principle though their children were, and doubly sardonic when it came to television, they had no other medium for appraising worth, and no other measure for knowing whether or not a thing existed. If it didn’t flicker it didn’t count. But until now neither the Kreitmans nor the Merriweathers had quite thought of Nyman as being of their children’s vocational kith and kin.

Then, ‘You’d be good on television,’ Hazel said.

‘You think so?’

‘Yes, yes I do. I think you’d make people sit up.’

‘But then it’s always possible,’ Chas put in, ‘that Nyman doesn’t want to make people sit up. He might want to make people sit down. That’s how we normally watch television.’

‘My guess,’ said Kreitman, ‘is that Nyman wants to go on television to do neither. My guess is that Nyman wants to go on television simply to subvert the form. I think when Nyman says he wants to be on television he’s taking the piss. Nicht wahr , Nyman?’

They waited, husband, wife and someone else’s wife, for the stranger with no character or prospects to tell them who was right. Kreitman saw that Nyman was making a white-knuckled fist with the hand that wasn’t raising the coffee cup, and felt confident. Hazel sank lower in her chair and showed Nyman her neck.

‘I think I don’t know yet what I want to do on television,’ Nyman said. ‘I think I just want to be on it.’

‘Aha!’ Kreitman said.

‘I think I want to show that I am … What is the word?’

‘A humorist,’ Kreitman suggested.

Nyman shook his head. ‘I believe I have no humour.’

‘Palpable,’ Chas tried. ‘You want to go on television to materialise yourself. We all do.’

Nyman looked evenly at her, almost granting her what he had granted Hazel, those two pale points of distant Arctic light. ‘ Palpable … That’s not so bad.’

But Hazel had not yet had her go. ‘A winner,’ she said. ‘I think you want to show that you can win.’

‘Win at what?’ Kreitman wanted to know.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Hazel said. ‘Specific achievement is out. You’re so stuck in the past, Marvin, with your winning at what. With television you win simply by being on it. You exceed the common.’