Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

Kreitman knew. It had been done to him.

And now he wanted to see if he could dispossess Chas of her irony and make her love him for himself.

Nothing cold about that premeditation. Nothing of his daughter’s calculated installations. And nothing of the elegantly symmetric quid pro quo urged by Chas’s demented husband. Heated at the coolest of times, Kreitman’s body exhaled its own silhouette upon the moor-chilled window of the hotel. Suddenly alive to every sexual rebuff Chas had delivered him over half a lifetime, including turning up her nose at purses and threatening him with the RSPCA, Kreitman burned with an old and yet pristine desire for her.

Nice sex?

Finally he was convinced. Nice sex? OK, he’d try some.

Only when he got back into bed and tossed aside the bedclothes did it occur to him to wonder where — since he could definitely locate Chas and Nyman — Charlie Merriweather and Hazel had got to.

Any fool could have given him the answer to that. They were in another county, on another coast, consoling each other for their several cruel rejections, entwined like unhappy children frightened of the dark, engaging in some nice sex of their own.

At least that’s how it felt to Hazel.

For Charlie, on the other hand, it was wildness come at last.

Carnival in Jermyn Street.

The July sun shining, the cheese shops boisterous, the SALE signs up in every shirtmaker’s window, and on the footpaths trestle tables behind which girls in regatta boaters, blouses striped gayer than a barber’s pole, and skirts red enough to madden half the bulls in Pamplona, pour strawberried champagne for whoever has the time to stop.

Inside, clutching nine SALE shirts to his chest — three for one hundred pounds, nine for two hundred and seventy-five — Charlie Merriweather watches two shirt-sharp black Gatsbys snapping up phosphorescent ties — three for fifty. One of the men gathers the ties he wants in his fist, like flowers. The other drapes them over his arm, periodically pausing to inspect the colours, as though his aim is to complete the prismatic spectrum. Occasionally he shakes his head and puts a tie back on the rack. Charlie smiles at them over his shirts. He is a bit of a black man himself right now. Juiced up. Flamboyant. The lover of a woman who shows her legs, another man’s wife whose nipples jab at her cardigan, an incontestable statement — two incontestable statements — that she is a woman roused.

Are nine shirts enough? More to the point, are they the right shirts? ‘You’ll buy your own,’ she’s told him. ‘I’m not doing any of that mothering nonsense you’ve been used to. You’ll choose your own, just stay away from purple and yellow stripes. You were never a member of the Conservative Cabinet and you’ve never looked after pigs. And see if you can find some ties that don’t have regimental insignia on them.’

He can. Phosphorescent ties. The colour of blood and wine. Three for fifty, nine for one hundred and thirty-five.

They’re dressing each other from scratch. She’s got him out of farm clothes and he’s buying her lingerie. Neither wants the other to own anything from before. It’s like a rebirth for both of them. ‘Take off the lot,’ she told him the first time, in sight of the Porlock sea. ‘And your wristwatch. And your wedding ring.’ He’d never been more naked. He shivered. He wanted to cry, and wondered whether that would make him more naked still. He asked her permission. ‘No, not tears,’ she said. ‘I don’t like tears in men.’ She wanted to cry herself, so long had it been since any man, clothed or naked, had trembled in her presence.

She touched his chest lightly. His skin was so tight she feared she might put a hole in him, pierce him and blow him apart. The poor man! She was careful only to lay the flats of her hands on him. Nothing sharp. Nothing sudden. And he pushed into the flatness of her hands like a dog, showing how trusting he was, and how grateful.

She imagined he would feel guilty when it was all over, reach for his clothes and jam himself back into his wedding ring. ‘Oh, God, Chas!’ she expected him to say. ‘What have I done! My poor wife!’ She had as good as kidnapped him, after all. Found him, after dinner — after a dinner from which Chas had for some reason excluded him, leaving just the two women to slurp soup in company with Nyman — bundled him into her car, not told him where they were going, because she had not known where they were going, just somewhere as far away as possible from a husband who disgusted her and a boy who was playing mind games with her and who disgusted her with herself. God knows, Charlie would have been within his rights to take what she was offering and then go into the usual male revulsion routine. Maybe she even hoped he would. Be guilty and be gone. In and out in the manner favoured by her husband. Not that she could imagine Kreitman ever saying, ‘My poor wife!’ But then come the event, neither did Charlie. Not a word of it. Could such a thing be? The phrase ‘Poor Chas’ hung in the air right enough — whether or not she had got her comeuppance for flirting like a mad thing with Nyman all evening — but strange to say the only person who was thinking it seemed to be Hazel!

Sisters under the skin, suddenly. ‘Poor Chas!’ Hypocritical of me, Hazel thought. But there you go. I have stolen your husband, I have betrayed our friendship, I have ruined your marriage … Whatever! Back to thinking about the man.

So much of what Charlie did and said was unfamiliar to her that she felt she had stumbled upon a hitherto undiscovered gender. He beamed, for one. Did men beam after sex? He glowed. He gave out light. He put his hands on her face and kissed her eyes. He told her she was lovely and that she’d saved his life. That was extreme, wasn’t it? Then he leaned back on the pillows with his hands behind his head, the hairs under his arms soft and gingery — not wiry, not man-hard — and said, ‘I can’t tell you, I just can’t tell you. I feel like a blind man who has had his sight restored.’ Then he kissed her eyes a second time, told her he loved her — which was certainly extreme — and started to shiver and tremble again.

That was when she realised they might be able to do something for each other, beyond this one night.

You fool, Hazel, she thought. But hope swept through her like a fire and she didn’t want to put it out.

When he moved in with her, a few days later, she burned all his clothes except for one outfit in which he could go out and re-wardrobe himself. They had a sacrificial bonfire on the lawn — stoking the flames — with the girls watching from their bedroom windows. Juliet put a finger to her brains and twisted it. Screwy. Cressida put two fingers to her brains and blew them out. But neither of those gestures, of course, was meant to be judgemental.

Charlie wanted to throw a reciprocal bonfire for her clothes, before Hazel explained it wasn’t so simple for a woman. And anyway, some of her clothes were worth keeping. But she allowed him to do the new-underwear thing. That his taste turned out to be identical to her husband’s didn’t come as any shock to her. Underwear sorted the men from the boys, allowing that there were only boys. Charlie may have been of a hitherto undiscovered gender, but all genders have their young and Charlie was still a stripling. She said no to an ankle chain but otherwise went along with his wishes, whistling through her teeth (to keep up her courage) at the sight of herself trussed like a Christmas bird again. Do I look ridiculous? she wondered. Can I trust him to tell me if I look ridiculous? Does it matter?