Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

Enough of what Mona had found lovable in Norbert remained for her to want to make it supremely comfortable. A large garden for him. A heated pool for him. An aviary for him, for he had always loved the music small birds made. And to finance all this Mona Bellwood became a sort of bird herself — a vulture, hovering over the remains of the dead. Every community newspaper published in north London was delivered to her door, and no sooner was a family’s sorrow announced than Mona Bellwood struck. Something her job taught her — something her marriage to Kreitman’s father had taught her — people wanted the wardrobes of the deceased emptied quickly, unemotionally, without a word, and whoever came offering, in a van with its engine turning over outside the front door, was as though sent by God, however small the offer. Out of the house and good riddance before the tears dried, the old suits and dresses, the shoes, the handbags, the shirts, the ties, the furs, the whisky decanters and, more often than you would expect, the jewellery — most of it rubbish, but not all, never all . ‘I could claim I perform a service,’ Mona said, ‘but it’s a business. I do it for Norbert. Not that Norbert knows.’

Kreitman imagined Norbert in a second childhood not unlike Kreitman’s first, excited by the takings, fascinated by the sight of the sand-crab notes creaking eerily apart. ‘Why can’t I count?’ And Mona denying him, showing him how money filthies everything it touches, the palms of your hands, your fingertips. It crossed his mind, sometimes, that she was making not a sou out of raiding the houses of the dead, and was doing it only as a sort of penitence and abasement, seeking out and subjecting herself to the contamination, just so that Norbert shouldn’t have to, even though there was no possibility now of Norbert doing anything. Sacrificing her immortal soul, dirtying it so that he could keep his clean. Just as she had done for Kreitman’s.

Was he grateful to her for that? Yes and no. She’d been an example to him. Made him not a radical but at least a student of radicalism. Indirectly put him on to Francis Place. But he blamed her for it as well. Nothing had come of him and Francis Place. He had not known how to make anything come of it. Maybe if his mother had let him dirty himself he’d have grown up better equipped to live in a dirty world.

Her fault.

It wasn’t all punitive. He wanted her to hear on the phone how bad he felt, but he didn’t begrudge her feeling good on that account when the reason he felt bad was a woman. In that sense he was always going back to her, like a faithless lover returning to a forgiving wife, showing how little the infidelity had ever counted. But whereas the most forgiving wife would always insist on knowing why, if it counted so little, he had bothered in the first place — ‘Then why do it, Marvin, why demean yourself and me?’ — his mother was content just to have him home.

No one knew better than she did, after all, what refinement of feeling beat in his breast. She had taken him to the specialist when he fainted. She had told all her friends she had a son who was ‘clinically sensitive’, which was the next best thing to having a son who had won the Nobel Prize. And who was to say he wouldn’t do that next? ‘And this year’s prize for Clinical Sensitivity goes to … Marvin Kreitman!’

Sometimes he felt that she was expecting his call, knew to the hour, maybe to the minute, when he would phone. Had he not inherited his sensitivity from her? When he was a boy she claimed powers of sympathetic prescience, a bodily intuition of his pains that was nothing short of supernatural. At the very moment Marvin took a tumble off his first pair of skates in Regent’s Park, Mona Kreitman’s knees went from under her as she was standing at the kitchen sink. The night he woke with burning tonsils on his honeymoon in Rome, Mona Kreitman fell out of bed clutching her throat. She knew when something was amiss with him, wherever he was. And that included romantic despondency, despair, satiation, boredom, even disgust. So she had a pretty good idea when the phone was going to ring.

‘I’m in Dartmoor,’ he told her.

‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ she said.

‘Ma, I bet you couldn’t find Dartmoor on a map.’

‘You’re right. But what’s that got to do with anything? Unless you want me to come and collect you. Then I’d find it on a map. Is this business, family or pleasure?’

‘You are cynical, Mother. It’s family.’

‘Then I hope you’re managing to have a good time.’

‘I’m having a lousy time.’

‘Well, you’ve always known how to have that. But Hazel likes it down there, doesn’t she?’

Ah, yes. Hazel. Mona Bellwood was too subtle ever to risk an explicit criticism, but there hung over every conversation she had with her son an awareness, as fine as mist, of what might have been called the Hazel problem.

‘God knows what Hazel likes,’ Kreitman said. ‘But you’re right, she does enjoy it here. She believes the air agrees with her …’

An intake of breath and then a moment of silence, during which Mona Bellwood could be heard measuring the qualitative difference between her son’s sensitivity and her daughter-in-law’s. Egregious, the condition of Hazel’s nerves; insufferable, how needy and on edge she was, the little mouse. Dartmoor! Air! What next — the pollen? But not a word, not a word.

‘Well, just try to get a rest,’ was all she said. ‘We thought you looked tired when we saw you last.’

The ‘we’ constituted an unholy little bond between them. ‘We’ meant the women of the house, his mother and Norbert’s nurse. ‘We’ acknowledged that she knew all about his affair with Shelley and, more than that, reminded him that she may have been the one who had promoted it in the first place.

Your mother, your pimp. Kreitman couldn’t decide what he thought of this, ethically. When he was hers alone, his mother wouldn’t have dreamed of putting him in the way of women. When he was hers alone, she filled his ears with dire warnings of the ruses of the other sex. They would say anything, do anything, to get him. And the first thing they would do was turn him against her, the best if not the only friend he had. ‘If you really love me, you will rip out your mother’s heart and bring it to me in a plastic bag.’ And Kreitman, because he was a man, would do their bidding. ‘No, Ma!’ ‘Yes, Marvin, yes, you will. You’ll see. You’ll see how they’ll make you dance.’ But after Hazel became his wife, the world, or at least that part of it which Mona inhabited, was suddenly filled with interesting, selfless, lovely women to whom she couldn’t wait to introduce him. Sometimes, at a family get-together — a birthday party, a golden wedding, a funeral, it didn’t matter, and it didn’t matter either whether Hazel was in attendance or not — she would actually deliver some girl into his hands, go find her, go fetch her, lead her in by the wrist and hand her over clanking to her son, as though into captivity. Nah, have her, enjoy!

Should a mother do such things? Kreitman’s ethical considerations were inevitably coloured by his sentimentality, but no, generally speaking a mother should not do such things, though in this instance the mother was mindful of the specifics of her charge — a clinically sensitive boy who had never enjoyed the advantages of a decent father, who worked hard to support his family, who had not quite fulfilled what had been expected of him, who was easily upset and influenced by women, who was married to one with frayed nerves (never mind who’d frayed them), and who was therefore exceptionally in need of recreation. So whatever came to him, as it were, gift-wrapped by his mother — here, have, take, don’t make a fuss — he could hardly throw back in her face.