Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

‘And how do you do that?’ Kreitman asked. ‘By being even more common than everybody else?’

‘It is not a sin,’ Hazel replied with heat, ‘to be unexceptional.’

‘Thank you, Hazel,’ Nyman said. ‘You have found my word. I want to go on television to show that I am exceptionally unexceptional.’ He was so pleased he actually clapped his hands together like a seal. ‘It is you, Hazel,’ he continued, letting his blank barm-bun stare, with its distant snowy reflections, last long upon her, ‘who understands me best.’

At this, Chas did something which no one who was watching had ever seen her, or come to that anyone else, do before. She threw up her canvas skirts. Outside of a Victorian novel, Kreitman thought, I have never heard of a woman throwing up her skirts. He tried to think of Peggotty, but it wasn’t Peggotty Chas reminded him off. It was someone more French.

Realising how her action could be misconstrued, Chas affected to be worrying about crumbs, and exaggeratedly shook herself out. But a raised skirt is a raised skirt, and her cheeks blazed.

‘And now can we play croquet on the lawn?’ Nyman asked.

‘Too late,’ Kreitman said. ‘Croquet is a daylight game.’

‘Doesn’t have to be,’ said Hazel. ‘There are floodlights.’

Kreitman closed his face as though closing a door. ‘It’s not a floodlit activity. You can’t measure the distances right. The shadows interfere with your judgement. And with your safety. You’ll end up cracking your shins, or cracking someone else’s, with the mallet. And anyway, the lawn will be starting to get dewy. The balls will skid.’

‘How good it is,’ Hazel said, ‘to be married to an authority.’

But instead of edging her one of his glances of blank complicity, Nyman suddenly turned to Charlie. ‘Charles,’ he said, ‘I think of you as the authority on all things English — what do you think? Is it your opinion that croquet is out of the question?’

And had Kreitman been wearing skirts himself, he too might well have flung them over his head.

‘So what’s this all about?’ Kreitman asked.

They were lying on their backs in their separate beds, like a lately deceased Pharaoh and his queen, waiting to be embalmed.

‘What’s all what about?’

‘Come on, Hazel. It’s called Nyman. What’s it about?’

‘You mind your affairs, Marvin, I’ll mind mine.’

‘It’s an affair now, is it? You only met him a week ago, isn’t that a bit soon?’

‘We don’t discuss these things, Marvin. Your rule.’

‘If you don’t want the boy discussed then you shouldn’t have brought him here. Your rule.’

‘What is it about him you want to discuss? The way you’ve been trying to woo him all night.’

‘Woo Nyman, me? Why would I do that?’

‘Because you’re a wooer, Marvin. Because you have no choice. People have to notice you, be fascinated by you, then love you. Women, preferably. But if no new woman happens to be present, you’ll make do with something else. It’s the way you operate.’

‘Not with Nyman it’s not,’ Marvin said. ‘You’re lucky I’m civil to him. The faggot put me into hospital, in case you’ve forgotten.’ He was staring at the ceiling from which, if he could trust his memory, a dusty chandelier used to hang. Now it was downlighting. Twenty years ago they made hay in a four-poster. Now mummified in twin beds.

Hazel got out of hers and went to the window. She was wearing a straight white Victorian shift she had bought in an antique shop. Shapeless and innocent, with lace on the sleeves. Kreitman noticed her feet, like a little girl’s. From his experience it was an unvarying truth about women — even the oldest of them had feet like a little girl’s. It was the one part of them, at least that you could see, that stayed young. No wonder he was upset all the time. The more you had to do with women the more sadness you encountered.

Once upon a time I could have gone over to her, Kreitman thought, and slid my hands around her through the sleeves of her nightgown, and she would have leaned back into me with all her weight, utterly trusting. He had loved that, the trust, the weight of her, and the way her leaning into him raised her breasts infinitessimally, their undersides softer than peeled fruit. Brand new skin, never before touched, never before seen.

How long now since he’d touched or seen?

She stood at the window, looking out in silence. Moonlight on the moor, Kreitman thought. She is probably thinking what I’m thinking. How long it’s been. How much we’ve lost. But what he didn’t know was that she was watching Nyman crouching on the lawn, inspecting the croquet hoops, and the Merriweathers bent over him, presumably explaining the rules.

‘You’ll get cold,’ he said.

‘It’s not in the slightest bit cold,’ she said.

Then he noticed she was crying. Dry tears, not sobs, the dry tears every faithless husband fears he is the reason for. I have dried up even her accesses to sorrow, the swine I am.

‘Why can’t I?’ she said. ‘Why can’t I ever?’

Kreitman’s ears pricked. ‘Why can’t you what?’

She wasn’t really talking to him. ‘Why can’t I ever have what I want? Always so hard, always so much soul-searching, always such a fuss. This to consider, that to consider. What the girls would think. What you would think, as though I’m obliged to care a tinker’s damn what you would think. Why can’t I be more like you? Want something? Take something. A click of the fingers — Here, you!’

‘Here who?’

‘Why do you think I can’t do it, Marvin? Why do you think I can’t take him, have him and be done with him, Kreitman-style?’

If it wasn’t cold, why was he cold? ‘Why can’t you have whom?’

‘ Whom ! Don’t whom me, Marvin. You know perfectly fucking well whom . Why can’t I fuck him without you fucking with my head? Why do you have to have an attitude? Why do you always have to be there? I’ve kept out of your way, why can’t you keep out of mine?’

‘Hazel, you brought me here. You organised this.’

Outside on the lawn, Chas was standing closer to Nyman than the rules of croquet, let alone the etiquette of explaining the rules of croquet, demanded. Hazel turned from the window and showed her husband her distraught face, furrowed with tears which wouldn’t flow. ‘I’m not crying for the reason you think I’m crying,’ she said. ‘I’m crying because it’s so demeaning to be back feeling all this again.’

‘It’s so demeaning to be back feeling what?’ (Tell me, tell me.)

‘It’s so not what I wanted.’

‘Then stop feeling it,’ Kreitman said.

For a moment he thought she might come over to him and hit him. ‘How dare you say that to me!’ she hissed. ‘How dare you, of all people, make it sound so blithe — you who have never denied yourself a feeling in your life. Except the feeling of loyalty.’

He withdrew his face, as though frightened for it. But he couldn’t withdraw himself. Too interested. Too interesting, all this. ‘Then if you want to fuck him, fuck him,’ he said.

My fault, Hazel thought, my own stupid fault for introducing the fuck word. Introduce the fuck word to my husband and he’ll shake its fucking hand off.

‘Don’t!’ she said.

‘Don’t what?’

‘Just don’t! The spectacle of you putting your mind to the rights and wrongs of anything is too horrible to contemplate. I’m ashamed to be married to you. If you want to fuck him, fuck him . Where did you pick up your code of ethics, Marvin — in a cat house?’

‘Do you think you might be a little bit in love with him?’