Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

Charlie shook his head. ‘Hardly had the chance,’ he said resentfully, a man for whom never being given the chance was the story of his life.

‘Dotty told?’

‘Not in so many words.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Dotty didn’t tell Chas. She told her under-age boyfriend.’

‘And he told?’

Charlie nodded.

‘The little shit. Never trust a reviewer, eh?’ Both men pondered that truth, then Kreitman said, ‘But hang on a minute. If Chas knows that you’ve been propositioning her sister, how come she’s been behaving so calmly down here?’ (Leaving aside the throwing up of her skirts.)

‘She’s only just found out.’

‘The little shit rang her here to tell her?’

‘Not exactly. The little shit sent a fax.’

‘To the hotel?’

‘No, to home.’

‘But you’re not at home.’

‘No. But Kitty and Tim are.’

Kreitman covered his face. Through his fingers, he said. ‘Oh, Charlie, no! Please don’t tell me Tim and Kitty found it.’

Charlie nodded. Timmy Hyphen Smelly-Botty and Kitty-Litter Farnsbarns found it. The end of innocence. He kept nodding. The biggest, saddest nods Kreitman had ever seen. Kreitman rose from the table and put his arms round his friend’s shoulders, squeezing them, then lowered his lips to Charlie’s head. The hair was wet, smelling of trampled leaves and panic. How heavy his head is, Kreitman thought. How hard it must be, sometimes, for him to carry it.

‘And Tim and Kitty,’ he deduced, ‘rang Chas? That was sweet of them. I wonder if mine would have acted with the same consideration.’

‘They didn’t actually. They rang me. But they must have rung while I was talking to the book club. They left a message warning me. Threatening me, too, I suppose. Warning me off. But giving me a chance. The trouble is … Chas always goes through my messages for me.’

Kreitman returned to his seat and made fists of his hands. ‘Ah, the beauty,’ he said, ‘of a trusting marriage.’

Charlie looked at him. ‘Not any more.’

The silence of the grave between them. Had the earth opened there and then, sucking down the table and all its tea things, neither would have been much surprised. Ruination comes quietly, picking off the china, emptying the mantelpiece first. Kreitman heard a clock ticking, which ten minutes before he would not have been able to tell you was in the room. He felt that universal sadness of the sentimental man, slightly bleary as though alcohol had played a part in it, but long anticipated and familiar, as though it were the fulfilment of the very fear with which one comes into the world. Here it is then, the distinguished thing. Or rather — for he had refamiliarised himself with the forestaste every time he waved goodbye to a woman he loved — here it is again . Was this all his fault? Had the example of his looseness, his loose tongue, destabilised Charlie? He felt guilty, too, that even as Charlie’s children were leaving their fatal message on his phone, he, Kreitman, had been begrudging Charlie his life-pass to the Garden of Eden. Choke on your own bile, Kreitman, Kreitman thought.

‘So, the coast is clear,’ Charlie suddenly said.

Kreitman had forgotten that this was where they’d begun. Sex and death. Contemplating the destruction of his marriage, Charlie sought redemption through sperm. What a wonderful thing life is!

‘Wait a bit,’ Kreitman said.

‘What for? Seize the hour, Marvin. I’ve beheaded the monster, I claim the maiden.’

Not a time for Kreitman to be saying he didn’t care to be Chas’s revenge on her husband, or that he did not desire her whatever the conditions. ‘She’ll come round,’ he said. But he didn’t believe it; some crimes against the marriage vows are capital.

‘If you think that,’ Charlie said, employing the logic of the insane, ‘then just do the swap while I’m waiting. Just lend me Hazel.’

To tide you over, Kreitman thought. Among the other things he could not say was, Hazel isn’t mine to lend, not mine in that she was never mine to lend , for God’s sake, Charlie, not mine to give or lend, but also, simply, just not mine . Not now. Not any more.

‘The bugger!’ was what he said instead.

‘The bugger what?’

‘The bugger Nyman has got there before you, Charlie.’

Kreitman did not go down to dinner. He left the room when Hazel came in to change — left quickly and silently, before she could order him out — and returned once he was confident she had gone. Whatever was happening out there would not make for the sort of dinner party he enjoyed. He couldn’t imagine the Merriweathers making a joint showing. Chas may well have driven home by now. Charlie may well have been lying at the bottom of a trout stream. At least he was dressed for it. Or, energised by death, propositioning one of the waitresses. Which left Nyman for Hazel to enjoy unhampered.

He lay on the bed and rang room service. Red wine was what he wanted, red wine as bloody as it came and a thick rare steak, also bleeding. The remote was broken so he had to get up to turn on the television. Shit on every channel. He watched a desolating programme about people who wanted to sing like other people, obscure people who imitated famous people, though he didn’t know who the famous people were either. His daughters would have known. And Nyman of course. For wasn’t that what Nyman was doing, first on his bike and now down here — impersonating some other person in the hope of been recognised for someone he wasn’t? Stars In His Eyes. Dreaming of being famous for reminding people of someone else. Maybe right this minute Nyman was on a high being him, being Kreitman. Big mistake if he hoped thereby to make a favourable impression on Hazel.

But that wasn’t his business.

He fell asleep watching shit and woke up only when his steak arrived. Not bloody enough. But then when ever was it? He ate it sitting up in bed anyway and polished off the wine. Then he got out of bed and turned off the television. Then he got back into bed and rang his mother.

Whenever he was at his lowest, Kreitman rang his mother. He had been doing that since he was small, ringing her from school, ringing her from camp, ringing her from Barcelona, ringing her from his honeymoon hotel, so that she should hear the melancholy in his voice. The blotting-paper effect, partly. You’re my mother, suck up my sorrows. But more than that, Kreitman rang his mother when he was low in order to blame her. Your fault! Nothing specific — she had done him no wrong, other than being his mother. But that seemed to be sufficient reason.

Your fault!

Kreitman admired his mother. He admired the way she kept herself youthful — black-haired and jingling like a gypsy still — and he admired the way she rose above her circumstances. Barely one year into her second marriage she found herself having to support an invalid. There was money over from husband number one, the bitter little key-fob thief who had been Kreitman’s father, but she wasn’t sure how much of that Kreitman was going to need (for he was still bound for Downing Street in those days), and it was important to her that what was left of husband number two should be cared for decently. Young Kreitman didn’t believe it behoved him to look too closely into his mother’s personal life, but he was of the opinion that she had fallen in love in a big way the second time around, even though the object of her devotion was a mouse-man called Norbert who found his fulfilment stamping books and refolding newspapers in a small public library in north London. A person of such quiet deliberation that you could hear the sound his pink-whorled fingers made when they touched a page — a soft, hypnotising, papery phttt which acted voluptuously on Mona Kreitman’s nervous system — Norbert Bellwood was nature’s refutation of Kreitman’s father, the least dyspeptic, most unaggravated man on the planet. Where Kreitman Senior used to dash his food down as though he were getting rid of the remains of someone he’d murdered, the police hammering on his door, Norbert Bellwood ruminated on every morsel until it liquidised into his stomach without his even so much as swallowing. ‘It’s uncanny,’ Mona Kreitman told her friends. ‘No Rennies, no Gaviscon, and not a rumble in the night. He is the answer to my prayers. And you should hear him clean his teeth! Except you can’t. He’s like a ghost with an imaginary brush.’ No need for anyone to call Quiet! in Norbert Bellwood’s library. The unruliest children, the noisiest readers, felt Norbert’s presence and fell silent. The only disturbance, the inking of his rubber stamp and his long gingery eyelashes fanning the air as he read. Even the stroke which made him an invalid and broke Mona Kreitman’s — now Mona Bellwood’s — heart came quietly. One minute he was at his desk calculating a fine, the next he was out on his back on the library carpet, looking up unseeing at a grubby bust of an old philanthropist of the borough. And nobody had heard him moan.