Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

‘Depends how you measure. I don’t feel well served. Anyway, the money’s not in our sort of books any more. Lower-middle-class magic’s back.’

Kreitman wasn’t thinking about money or magic. ‘Then again,’ he persisted, ‘you could always collaborate with someone else?’

‘Oh, yes …?’ For a moment she wondered if he was thinking of himself. ‘Who would that be?’

‘The faggot.’

‘What faggot?’

‘Nyman.’

‘Don’t be absurd.’

‘It’s surely not that absurd. You’ve been collaborating with him fine for most of this weekend.’

She decided against putting marmalade on her toast. ‘From you … From you, Marvin Kreitman,’ she said, pointing her knife at him, ‘I’d have expected better!’

‘Better?’

She met his eyes. Hers viridiscent, a little like the burnish on a spring onion, a little the colour of cheese mould, his blacker than squashed berries, and too crooked, you would have thought, to see straight with. They both looked terrible, sleepless and bedraggled. Kreitman unshaven, in a collarless Hindu shirt that didn’t suit him. Chas in something from Kathmandu, tighter than a pea pod, and with too many toggles. And clown’s trousers. And woollen socks.

‘I’d have expected you to be a little more sophisticated in the matter of a man and woman going for a midnight stroll,’ she said.

A midnight stroll, was it? ‘Well, you know what they say — ’ he said, although nobody he knew had ever said it — ‘sophistication nips out the back door once jealousy enters through the front.’

She made a playground face. ‘I’d like to see you jealous, Marvin Kreitman,’ she said. ‘I’d like to see you trying to work out which facial muscles to pull. I bet you wouldn’t even know which colour to turn.’

‘Green.’

‘You’ve mugged up on it.’

‘Not so. It came to me in the night.’

‘While you were sitting up waiting for Hazel to return? Ha! Serves you right. I’d say good for her for getting her own back, if she didn’t happen to be getting it back with my husband.’

‘Nothing to do with Hazel. To do with you. I was at my window, playing gooseberry …’

She flushed, red on gold like a little fire in the hayrick. ‘Marvin! You had the bad manners to watch?’

His turn now to make a playground face. Naughty Marvin. ‘No choice,’ he said.

‘Of course you had a choice. You could have drawn the curtains.’

‘And missed the moon on the moor?’

Still burning, she laughed. No, she essayed a laugh. ‘You’re a pervert.’

‘I try to be. But it wasn’t pervery. That’s to say it wasn’t primarily pervery.’

‘What primarily was it?

‘What do you think?’

‘Idleness.’

‘Nostalgia.’

She wouldn’t rise to that. She wouldn’t go that far back. One night at a time. ‘It wells up,’ was all she’d say.

‘So how come he isn’t breakfasting?’

Nyman? She shrugged. How should she know? Was she her lover’s keeper? Not that Nyman was by any manner of means her lover. ‘I suspect,’ she said, ‘that he left early. It’s a long way to cycle.’

‘You didn’t spend the night together, then?’ The minute he heard himself put the question, Kreitman realised how infantile the question was. No more baby books, but any amount of baby curiosity.

Charlie pushed her plate aside, put her elbows on the table and clasped her hands. She might have been interviewing him. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I am in some distress. I am not always responsible for what I do when I’m in distress. You of all people’ — she made little quotation marks with her fingers — ‘should know that.’

Kreitman inclined his head, baring his neck.

‘I don’t know why you’re pretending to be jealous,’ she went on, ‘or even interested. You never have been before. But you too, I know, must be in distress. You’ll pretend otherwise, but you must be. If you want to know about Nyman, I’ll tell you. He happened on me at the wrong moment — wrong for me, right for him, you might say. Afterwards he asked if he could come back to my room. I told him I had a husband. He told me he thought I probably didn’t. Then he told me he had no home to go to and asked if I’d put him up in Richmond for a while. I told him no. Then he asked if I would loan him money. I told him no. Then he asked me if I thought Hazel wanted him. I told him I had no idea. Then he asked me if I would mind if he went to Hazel. I told him he should check with Hazel’s husband not with me. He said he thought she probably didn’t have a husband either. I told him I didn’t care what he thought or what he did. He told me he just wanted to be sure he wasn’t hurting my feelings. Jesus, Marvin …’ Here Charlie ran her fingers through her hair, as though all her vexations might be there and she couldn’t wait to comb them out. ‘Jesus Christ — your sex!’

‘My sex? Nyman isn’t my sex.’

She waved away his blustering. ‘I’ll tell you something, Marvin, he’s more of what I understand by a man, more rattishly and motivationally a man, more stripped down to the bare bones of a man, than you and Charlie rolled together. Don’t be insulted by that. It isn’t so terrific to be a man.’

‘Isn’t it?’ Kreitman wondered about that. Wasn’t it? Maybe it wasn’t. Then, not quite sequentially, he said, ‘I thought he was a faggot.’

She shook her head, this time meaning to cause pain. ‘He’s not a faggot,’ she said. ‘Let me assure you, the one thing our friend Nyman is not, is a faggot.’

To the universally jealous Kreitman, the only person on the planet to have gone without contact with the opposite sex the night before, not counting his conversation with his mother, it was as though she had thrust her fingers in his eyes. He could see only blood, falling like rain blown against a window.

Charlie discovered the true depth of her upset when her husband turned up in Richmond after three days of being denuded of his wedding ring in Somerset and asked her to be happy for him retrospectively.

She was sitting at her old manual typewriter, at their table, pecking at the keys. She did not look up.

‘Why should I be happy for you, Charlemagne? For shitting on our marriage?’

He was astonished she saw it like that. ‘I haven’t been shitting on our marriage,’ he told her. ‘I haven’t been doing anything to our marriage. I’ve just been away from it for a while.’

‘Doing what?’

What had he been doing? ‘Having a sabbatical,’ he said.

‘You never wanted a sabbatical before.’

‘I never needed a sabbatical before.’

‘I see — we’re talking needs, are we? Do you really think I’m the person you should be telling this to?’

‘Who else? You’re my best friend.’

‘I’m not your best friend. I’m your wife.’

‘It’s possible to be both, Chas.’

‘Is it? I doubt that. I think it’s possible to be neither, but I doubt it’s possible to be both. Not in the sense of being a wife and a best friend who is happy for you when you sleep with other women. I think you might do better with Dotty. She’d make a good best friend. Try talking to her about your needs — oh, sorry, you already have.’

Ah, Dotty. Charlie Merriweather had forgotten about Dotty.

‘I was dying, Chas,’ he told her. ‘I was this close to being a dead man.’

Still refusing to look up, she missed seeing him measure with his fingers how far he’d been from being a dead man. But then nobody knew better than she did how close to being a dead man he remained.

This close.

She was curious about one thing, though. ‘Tell me what you thought you were dying of, Charlie.’