Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

He slipped away from the book readers as soon as it was respectable to do so and took a stroll around the gardens. Sitting on a sun-bleached bench, she in linens, which he’d watched her steaming with her travel-steamer after silent breakfast, he in heimat urchin mountain pants cut off halfway down his legs, she animated, he not, she the watering can, he the flower, were Hazel and Nyman. Kreitman turned and walked the other way. Finding a bench of his own, he took out his mobile phone, scrolled through the names in his phone book, paused at one he fancied and punched OK. There was a time when Saturday imposed the most arduous obligations. On sofas and daybeds all over London, Kreitman’s lovers pining for their prince. And he, with his pockets full of change (what would his mother have said!), darting into every phone box he could find. Oh, for a mobile phone in those days. Now he had the technology, the occasion for it was gone. Wasn’t that always the way. Five numbers, and not a one of them was answering. Five women, and not a one of them was home.

No one on the planet more lonely than me, Kreitman thought. It wasn’t self-pity, it was self-punishment. For Kreitman understood loneliness as a species of failure. It disgusted him to be alone. It showed him to be incompetent in the art of not being alone. It shamed him. It angered him. And he turned the anger on himself.

Crossing the lawn, oblivious of him, careless of the sun except as it illuminated each for the other, a young couple entwined, he in a loose short-sleeved shirt with his arm around her shoulder, she in a clinging strawberry-patterned summer frock, as undulant as the sea, with her arm around his waist. Be happy for them, Kreitman thought. Be happy for humanity, of which you are no less a part than they. Share with them. Share in them.

Fat chance of that. The fact was, other people’s erotic happiness took from his. Their absorption in themselves excluded him. Which of course was exactly what it was meant to do. But that was no consolation. It was beyond reason and beyond cure, but he could not stroll through a garden, he could not cross the street, he could not enter one of his own shops, he could not wait at a carousel for his luggage or at a counter for a sandwich and see a woman with her hands on a man without the sight diminishing him. Talk was even worse. Conceal Kreitman where he might overhear dalliance or description, a woman declaring her love, a woman confiding her love, a woman no more than wondering if she might be in love, and let the lover not be him, not be Marvin Kreitman, and he would suffer convulsions of jealousy. What did that man have that Kreitman did not? What business had those women, anyway, falling in love with another man, any other man, before they had met him? He was in sexual competition with everybody, not only those he knew and had already challenged, but with men he had never seen and never would see, men already dead and men still waiting to be born, men who had no shape or appearance in his eyes, men whose age he could not guess and whose intentions he could not fathom, but who were vividly alive to him by virtue of nothing but their being the object of a girl’s devotion.

All biological, no doubt. Kreitman’s genes seeking their perpetuation to the exclusion of all others. But what did knowing that solve?

Mid-afternoon, a light rain falling, Charlie came looking for him. The two men met between pots of foliage, on the steps to the lounge. Afternoon teatime. ‘Join me,’ Kreitman said. Devonshire tea — jam, clotted cream, the works. Charlie bit the air, which Kreitman took to signal assent.

He had seen Charlie crossing the lawn to him and was struck by how deranged he looked, his mouth open and closing, yammering wordlessly like a madman. He was dressed peculiarly, too, in a heavy jacket with green and yellow squares, a ribbed cricket sweater and a scarf thrown around his neck. Winter towpath clothes, for Dartmoor in May.

‘I see that something is the matter,’ Kreitman said, pouring.

‘I’ve beheaded the monster,’ Charlie said.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I’ve beheaded the monster guarding the labyrinth where my other selves are hidden. I’m free. The swap’s ready.’ Kreitman could hear his breathing.

‘I thought we’d agreed to say no more about all that,’ Kreitman said.

‘Did we? I don’t remember any agreement of the kind. I haven’t agreed to stop anything.’ His jaw was trembling. ‘Are you chickening out on me now?’

‘Charlie, there’s nothing to chicken out on. We were pissed.’

‘Oh yes there is. You get Chas, I get Hazel. You get to taste fidelity, I get to taste the opposite. That’s what we agreed.’

‘It’s not my recollection that you were to get Hazel, Charlie. I thought we hadn’t decided who you were getting.’

‘Ah! So you do remember!’

Kreitman thought of Chas throwing up her skirts for Nyman. ‘I remember that we behaved like clowns,’ he said. ‘But how come you’ve decided on Hazel suddenly? Because she’s been slobbering up to Nyman?’

Charlie thought of Hazel, rooting under the table to steal a second marvel over Nyman’s pumped-up calves. ‘Everyone’s been slobbering up to Nyman. You’ve been slobbering up to Nyman.’

‘He seems to make one do that,’ Kreitman agreed.

‘Not me.’

‘No, not you. But then your mind has been on other things.’

‘And not yours? I’ve watched you, Marvin. I’ve watched you eyeing Chas. Well, now’s your chance. She’s ready.’

Kreitman laughed. ‘You’ve prepared her for me, have you?’

‘She’s prepared herself. She’d do anything to pay me back.’

‘For what, Charlie? For staying out late on a Friday night with me?’

‘Nothing to do with you. To do with me. To do with me and women.’

Kreitman laughed at the incongruity of the phrase ‘me and women’ on Charlie’s lips. Charlie as bastard. ‘You’re not telling me you’ve fucked Hazel already?’

Charlie’s mouth started to move silently again. A diadem of sweat appeared from nowhere on his brow. ‘Not Hazel,’ he said. He wasn’t eating anything, Kreitman noticed. Not rubbing his hands over the fruit scones. A bad sign. ‘No. Not Hazel.’

Kreitman sat up in his chair and wiped all trace of Devonshire tea from his face. For what he was about to hear he wanted to look dignified. ‘Then who, Charlie?’

‘It’s not who I’ve fucked, it’s who I’ve propositioned for a fuck.’

Kreitman appeared to mull that over. ‘Go on,’ he said.

Charlie took a deep breath. ‘I’ve been seeing Dotty,’ he said.

‘Dotty!’ Now it was Kreitman’s turn to yammer like a madman. ‘Dotty! What do you mean you’ve been seeing Dotty? You didn’t tell me you were seeing Dotty when we last talked.’

‘You didn’t tell me you were seeing her when we last talked.’

‘I wasn’t. I’ve taken her out to lunch once, for God’s sake. That’s it.’

‘Me too. I took her out to lunch once — only that wasn’t it.’

‘Taking your wife’s sister out to lunch isn’t seeing her.’

‘Maybe not. Why are we arguing over the meaning of seeing? Seeing her or not, I took her out to lunch and asked her to sleep with me. Do you want to correct me over the meaning of sleep? ’

‘You took your wife’s sister out and asked her to sleep with you? I hope this was a very long time ago.’

‘What difference when it was? But it was last week, if you want to know.’

‘And she said no?’

‘Of course she said no.’

‘Then everything’s all right,’ he very nearly said. Good job Hazel wasn’t there to hear him very nearly say that. The spectacle of you putting your mind to the rights and the wrongs of anything, Marvin, is too horrible to contemplate . He tried to do better. Everything wasn’t all right. Not intelligent to proposition your wife’s sister, and not nice, either. Not something you should do and not something you would want your wife to get to hear about. But then why should she get to hear about it? Good job Hazel wasn’t there to hear him very nearly think that. Cat-house morality. But it was a conviction written into the lining of Kreitman’s soul — a lie was always better for everyone than a confession. Better in the sense of more humane. Suddenly he remembered what Charlie had told him of his fear of guilt, lying like a garrulous third person in his marriage bed. ‘Oh, Charlie,’ he said, ‘you haven’t been owning up?’