Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

He racked his brains. It wasn’t that he didn’t know. More that he didn’t know how best to put it. For two pins, had circumstances been different, he’d have rung up Kreitman. Help me with this one, Marvin. You know women.

In the end, his belief that honesty was always the best policy prevailed. ‘Nice sex,’ he told her.

And that was when she began to cry, great wailing cries which he had no idea she had it in her to make, cries which were more like an animal’s than a woman’s, howls beyond the hurt or bafflement of the conscious mind, gasps and eructations of brute bodily pain, as though sealers who had already claimed her young ones were now unleashing their fury upon her with wooden clubs.

Had he done that? Just by taking his clothes off, staying away for a few days and giving himself a little leeway, had he caused that?

It was when she began banging her head on their table, on their old sacred space, dashing her own brains out now, hammering herself free of him, hammering him out of her skull, that he started to howl himself. Nothing compared to hers, even he could hear the difference. Mere schoolyard blubberings — cold, lonely, hungry, bullied, far from home. Help-me-mummy cries, uttered without the slightest expectation of success, because his mother had never helped anyone. But at least they quietened Chas. She caught her breath several times, made a fist and banged her chest, pushed her hands up under her chin, behind her ears, pressing into her head. That was where the pain was. There.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked her through his tears. ‘Are you going to be all right?’

‘Get out!’ she shouted. ‘I’ve wasted my life on you. You’re a moron — get out!’

An hour later he brought her tea. She hadn’t moved. ‘I thought I’d told you,’ she said.

An hour after that he brought her a brandy. She still hadn’t moved. ‘Do I have to plead with you?’ she said. ‘Give me back my life. Get out of the house.’

‘Chassyboots,’ he said, putting out his hand to touch her hair.

‘Don’t make me wish you were dead,’ she said. ‘Don’t drive me to want to kill you.’

And that was when he moved in with Hazel.

Nothing comparably upsetting happened in Kennington. Far more civilised, the Kreitmans. Get the betrayals over early in a marriage and you spare yourself the seal-clubbing. Kreitman was out of his house, in all the essentials at least, before Hazel was back from her extra-marital escapade in the West Country. What more was there to discuss? Their marriage came to an end, what was left of it, on the night he vampired in on her distress and tried to sucker her into tell-me sex. ‘Fuck me, Nyman’ — that stuff either lands you the big prize or lands you in big trouble. No mistaking where it landed Kreitman. Never mind the punch on the nose; the coldness of Hazel’s turned back was the coldness of finality. Kreitman was attuned to finality. He knew it from his mother’s dismissal of his father, despatching all memory of him, along with his cut-glass decanters, in a matter of weeks.

He had never thought he would leave Hazel. The French windows open, butterflies on the lawn and Hazel at her piano — that had been how he’d seen his life, extending like a sunlit country road for miles and miles and miles, before vanishing off the edge of the world. Yet he had also known he would leave Hazel, because he foretold just as vividly the turning of her back. No scenes, no sad goodbyes — if there had to be goodbyes he’d never go — just a leaving of the house as on any other day, except that this time he would never return to it. Not his doing, her doing. Not what he wanted, what she wanted. He granted women this — the primacy of their desires. He just did what he was told.

But in truth he’d closed his own doors. Had he been able to summon a single rousing image of Hazel in the arms of Charlie he might have tried to salvage something. Not a nice way of gauging how much you did or didn’t love somebody, but that was Kreitman. He was an incorrigible sentimentalist of anguish. Where there was jealousy there was life. And there was none. He couldn’t put his imagination to work. He could see no picture. He could hear no talk, not even talk derogatory of him. This was partly because he could not take Charlie seriously as a rival. Charlie of the putrid penis? Impossible. For all it excited or upset him, Hazel might as well have been sleeping with Donald Duck. Nyman on the other hand, Nyman of the putrid disposition, Nyman who was everywhere and nowhere, who was everything and nothing, Nyman had piqued him. Nyman he could think of as the enemy of his soul. How much that was to do with the faggot himself and how much to do with Hazel wanting a piece and Chas taking it was the big question. Whatever the answer, it was Chas who was on his mind now. Exclusively on his mind. For the first time since he could remember, for the first time since he was Cophetua to his mother’s beggar-maid, he was down imaginatively to only one woman. And that meant being returned to the torments of only one woman, because he wasn’t at all sure that Chas was feeling the same way about him.

He moved into the least formal of his convenience love nests, a narrow high-ceilinged would-be warehouse, the shape of an up-ended matchbox, above his shop on Clapham High Street, opposite a nightclub. The flats attached to his other shops were all copies of the Philippe Starck hotel rooms he’d stayed in on his buying trips around the world, places to fuck quickly and cleanly in; but this one, though hardly a home, at least reflected his unsatisfied temper, housed his books, his personal papers, the things that had no place in his marriage. It had been Hazel’s suggestion, originally, that as he spent so much time away, physically and mentally somewhere else, he could do worse than fix himself up an office space to store the possessions it always made him melancholy to look at, the memoranda of the intellectual life he’d abandoned, the junk of the bachelor existence he’d sacrificed (the dartboards and snooker cues and flamenco records dating back to his first holiday in Spain), all of which was just cluttering up space she could put to better use. ‘Think of it as a den,’ she said. ‘All men like a den, don’t they?’

‘Yes, but usually at the bottom of the garden. Not at the other end of London.’

She threw him a look, the look, meaning men who want to make sentimental noises about the bottoms of their gardens would do well to know where the bottoms of their gardens are .

And she reminded him that Clapham and Kennington were not exactly at opposite ends of London.

By the time he had stuffed it with what mattered to him — shelves of the writings of the English radicals going up into the girders and reachable only by ladders, box files containing his old lectures and lecture notes, an old sea chest holding letters from his mother, an antique shove-halfpenny board on mahogany legs, a wind-up record player for his 78s, all his curry spices and a collection of Jack Nicholson movies on video — there was scarcely room for a bed. He was pleased that he had put the bed last. It refuted something about him. In the end he had a mezzanine floor built which he festooned with rugs. That was the bed. Opulent but hard to get to. The ladders for his books were at least made of steel. The ladder to his bed was made of rope. And how did the varicosed mothers of the women he loved negotiate that? They didn’t. Without knowing it while it was happening, he now realised he had been saving Clapham High Street. For whom? For Chas, of course.

In time she would climb up to his bed and he would hack off the rungs of the ladder behind her. And that would be that.