Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

The girls couldn’t help her in this. The girls belonged to a generation that had skipped lingerie, leaving Hazel with the strange sensation that she had been a tarty piece twice over, and her daughters never at all. Then she remembered — her daughters had irony. You can have lingerie or you can have irony. It is not out of the question to wear lingerie ironically — over your clothes, for example, postmodernly, as a joke against itself — but something told her Charlie wouldn’t have wanted that. Pleasing a man again, was she? Back to floaty? Hair soon to resume the halo of a startled lion’s mane? She shook her head over what she saw in the mirror. The recidivist I am! Hopeless, I am a hopeless case. I have not learned a single lesson. I might as well be seventeen still.

But something was different. She racked her brains to find it. Happy, that was it — she was happy. Which meant that this time she could forgive herself. Leave herself alone. She was who she was. And she hadn’t been who she was for a long time. Maybe she hadn’t been who she really was ever . Careful, Hazel, she told herself. No fool like an old fool. But what could she do? She was happy. She had hope. And if hope makes a fool of us, then let us all be fools.

Deciding that twelve shirts will give him a better percentage chance of getting at least a couple right, Charlie Merriweather goes looking again for his collar size — double cuffs, long sleeves, no purple and yellow stripes — and all but knocks over Marvin Kreitman labouring under a dozen of his own. The two men open their mouths simultaneously, simultaneously flush scarlet and simultaneously turn away. Fuelled by champagne, a hysteria has gripped the shirt-buyers; they are not quite pulling garments from one another’s hands, as the hair-netted harridans of popular culture did in the first great January sales of post-rationing Britain, but you don’t dare take too long to make a decision, or you lose out. Who would have thought that men, with their philosophic indifference to goods, would become more obsessive sales addicts, more ferocious squirrellers and snatchers, than women ever were. Nothing to do with saving money, either. The sales just an excuse to acquire. What a gas! If we were still friends, Kreitman thinks, we would pretend to fight each other for our shirts; we would see the funny side of this. Charlie Merriweather thinks the same. But they are fighting each other for their wives, or they have fought each other for their wives, and though in a sense both might be said to have won, or at least to be winning, there is no funny side to it for either of them.

The swap has not worked out the way they wanted it?

Difficult to say, given that they wanted it differently, and that one of them believes he never really wanted it at all. And these are early days yet. They are both nursing tender shoots. They both are tender shoots. But having done the deed, having murdered their marriages where they slept, the two men have no more to say to each other in the aftermath than those who took a dagger to King Duncan.

On top of that, Kreitman is not amused to see Charlie Merriweather shopping where he has always shopped.

Bravado, again, of course. What Kreitman would like to do is put his arms out and wind Charlie into them. But he doesn’t know how to do that.

It is working out easier for Charlie and Hazel than for Marvin and the other Charlie. Perhaps Charlie and Hazel were always the needier, if only in the sense that they’d been growing the crazier — Charlie with sexual curiosity, Hazel with sexual grievance. And because they initiated what happened, taking what happened to date from the hour Hazel kidnapped Charlie from the grounds of the hotel, they are not the ones left looking, ever so slightly, the victims of event.

Over a funereal breakfast at the Baskervilles the morning after, Kreitman had put it to the remaining Charlie that charlies were what they’d been made to look.

She had shown him a steely face. ‘He’s been putting the hard word on my sister,’ she’d said. ‘What is more my children know about it. That’s the unforgivable crime. Where he is now and who he’s charvering is incidental. I don’t care. I never want to speak to him again.’

‘It might not be incidental to me,’ Kreitman informed her. Then, so there should be no mistake, ‘I might care who he’s charvering.’

Charvering? Not a word that came naturally to him. But then what did nature have to do with any of this?

Charlie laughed a bitter laugh. ‘That’ll be the day,’ she said.

Kreitman sought her eyes and swallowed back his answer, as though to let her glimpse a corner of his caringness she knew nothing of. ‘And you too,’ he said, ‘care more than you’re pretending.’

She shook her head. ‘No, I don’t. A little silliness is one thing, asking Dotty for a fuck so publicly the whole of London knows about it, is another. I thought he was happy.’

‘He was happy and he wasn’t. Fidelity does that.’

‘Your company does that.’

Kreitman touched her hand. ‘Don’t lay it on me, Charlie. I wasn’t instrumental in this. It wells up every now and then, that’s all. You can’t stop it. It spills over. It isn’t personal. You of all people should know that.’

‘Me of all people?’

Too soon, Kreitman decided. ‘I mean, you’ve seen it with Dotty. There just comes a time.’

‘Then let him have his time with Hazel… if Hazel’s the best he can do now that Dotty’s knocked him back.’

Kreitman made a halt sign with his hand. Go no further, Chas.

She ignored the warning. ‘This morning of all mornings, Marvin, you can’t expect me to be respectful to that tub of lard you call your wife.’

‘Chas!’

‘Don’t Chas me. A wronged woman has her rights. If Hazel wants him, let Hazel handle the spillage, that’s what I’m saying. But he’s much mistaken if he thinks he can come waddling back to me when his time’s up. I no longer want him. You can tell him that when you next have one of your fourteen-hour lunches.’

How upset was she? How cataclysmically upset? Kreitman couldn’t tell. She was furious — that tub of lard you call your wife was hardly calm or just, God knows. But then who’s ever measured in their views of the trollop humping their husband? And she was fraught, though that could just as well have been the aftermath of the other thing. The thing that had kept him up half the night and her up he didn’t know how much longer. Sex interfered with upset, he knew that. It skewed it temporarily. First, you have to have no sex, then you can think about being upset. First, she had to get the taste of Nyman’s tongue out of her mouth, assuming it had got that far. But when she’d done that , how upset would she be?

‘I don’t believe you really think you can live without Charlie,’ he said.

‘Can’t wait. Just watch me.’

‘That’s braggadocio.’

‘Is it? I don’t think so. He’s been weird for so long it will be a relief. I always thought life without Charlie would be insupportable. But maybe what I was actually thinking was that life without me would be insupportable for him. Well, fuck him! Now I need to think about me. It wells up, Marvin, as you say. It spills over.’

Kreitman considered that. ‘How will you write your books?’ he wondered, after a decent interval of time.

She looked at the chandelier. ‘Balls to our books!’ she said.

Amen to that, Kreitman thought. Let’s drink to that. Balls to all baby books!

‘I think I’ve had it with collaborations, anyway,’ she went on.

‘It’s served you well.’