Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

He had made no fuss about moving out. He had peered into Hazel’s bedroom and cried. Then he had opened the lid of Hazel’s piano stool — Chopin and Debussy, unplayed for however many years — and cried. Then he had taken a last look at Hazel’s bag museum, everything strewn around malevolently, like some holy place that had been sacked by infidels, and this time cried long and seriously. Then he did whatever else he had to do. He left a note for Hazel telling her that she’d been right all along, that a den was the very thing he needed, and cheerio. She knew how to reach him. She wasn’t in immediate need of anything. She had her own chequebook and credit cards. Her own car. Her own interests. And now her own lover. For his daughters too he left a note, saying he’d take them out to dinner as soon as he’d got his head straight. They’d understand that.

It didn’t enter Kreitman’s calculations that Charlie would actually interpret the terms of the swap (some swap!) quite so literally: take up residence in Kreitman’s house, put his shirts in Kreitman’s wardrobe, sleep in Kreitman’s bed. When he thought about Hazel he thought of her as he’d known her, living the same life only with him not there. Not that different from before. He had no intention of padding pyjamaed up the Merriweather staircase himself, so Charlie’s whereabouts vis-à-vis Chas was equally immaterial. He was somewhere. Who cared where. Kreitman was not going to buy into the domestic farce of dodging and being dodged. The situation was already indecorous enough by virtue of its symmetry. Some men are natural born swappers, some aren’t. Kreitman wasn’t. He lacked the mirth.

The same squeamishness told him to keep his distance from Chas in the first days after their grin-and-bear-it breakfast on Dartmoor. She had driven him back to London in her mobile picnic basket, neither of them speaking much, silenced by the amount of Charlie the vehicle contained — Wellingtons, anoraks, walking sticks, Glyndebourne umbrellas, all the tramping-in-mud and sitting-on-damp-grass gear that had been the glue of the Merriweather marriage. But this would have been a time for quiet anyway. Kreitman had said what he’d needed to say. Shown Chas that she was able to hurt him. And she had shown him that hurting was something she might come to enjoy. Eventually. Anything further, for the time being, would have been unsubtle.

He rang her only twice in the first week, alluding to as little as possible, not even telling her that he had moved out of his house. The first call was no more than a polite thank-you for the lift and a discreet enquiry as to her spirits. Nothing knowing. Just was she all right.

Her voice was like a tall building in a high gale. She was fine. Why shouldn’t she be?

‘No reason,’ Kreitman said.

‘No reason other than that my husband has just come home asking me to be happy for him.’

Kreitman said nothing. Not even, ‘And are you?’

‘He tells me he’s been on sabbatical. I don’t suppose you’ve ever thought of Hazel as a sabbatical yourself.’

‘No,’ Kreitman said.

‘No,’ she jeered, extending the vowel so that it took in all the women Kreitman had thought of as a sabbatical.

Don’t rise, Kreitman cautioned himself. Don’t go near it. He wondered what else Charlie had told his wife. That he had swapped her for Hazel? That she was now obliged, by the terms of the deal, to do something nice for Marvin. Surely even Charlie knew the difference between a venial sin and a capital offence. ‘You’ll work it out,’ was what he said.

‘We have worked it out,’ she told him. ‘We’ve worked him out. He’s gone.’

‘What do you mean, he’s gone?’

‘Gone. Gone gone. I ordered the prick off the premises and he obligingly packed his bags and skedaddled.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Kreitman said. But he was thinking how unconvincingly she swore. Had she ever called anyone a prick before? Skedaddling was pure Chas, her hand not quite in the glove of the vernacular, and ordering people off premises had something of her soul in it too, but prick …?

They were both listening hard. ‘You’re sorry?’ Was she wondering if he’d ever used that word before?

‘I truly am, Charlie.’

‘Are you?’ she said. She was weeping now, walled about in tears. ‘I wonder if you are …’

And Kreitman, alert and lonely in his bachelor pad, heard something in that that gave him hope.

When he rang again it was to ask her out. For lunch, not dinner. Somewhere casual, not somewhere significant. To dry her tears, was the implication. To offer his shoulder, in the event of Charlie still being gone, or his counsel in the event of Charlie’s having returned. She said no, of course. No to Charlie’s having returned, no to her ever wanting him to return, and no to lunch. But she didn’t say he had a fucking nerve.

‘Call me if you change your mind,’ he said.

‘We’ll see,’ she’d said. But weepily.

The next day she did call, but only to tell him how hurt she was that he had let her rave on about her husband but hadn’t informed her that he wasn’t just knocking off Hazel but had actually moved in with her.

‘Charlie’s moved in with Hazel?’

‘Come off it, Marvin.’

‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it, I swear to you.’

She didn’t believe him. ‘Marvin, your house isn’t that big.’

‘I’m not in the house …’

He waited for her to digest that information, measure its import for herself, but she said nothing.

‘I haven’t been in the house since I got back from Dartmoor,’ he continued.

‘Aha,’ she said. Pull the other one.

‘Think about it, Chas. What would I be doing there? Tucking them in and taking them Ovaltine?’

‘I wouldn’t put that past you.’

‘You think I’m a pander as well as a sabbaticalist?’

‘I think you’re capable of anything, Marvin.’

‘Maybe, but not that. I’ve told you, I’m motivated by nostalgia, not pervery.’

‘I’m surprised you call it pervery.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning you might think of it as companionable — your wife, your best friend … and you.’

‘Forget it, Charlie. That’s not my scene.’

‘Not your scene? ’ She let out a mock gasp. ‘I don’t suppose you remember the violence, Marvin, with which you once publicly dumped on me for using that expression.’

‘I don’t. But I apologise.’

‘For dumping on me?’

‘For that too. But it shows how agitated talking to you makes me. What I should have said was, “Threesomes? My thoughts do not that way tend.”’

‘Which is why you left the house?’

‘I’ve told you, I’d left the house already.’

‘To live alone or with some girl?’

Was she jealous?

‘I don’t do girls. But yes, to live alone.’

‘I can’t see your thoughts tending to loneliness for long, Marvin.’

She was. She was jealous.

‘You know damn well where my thoughts are tending, Charlie,’ he told her.

She paused, listening, listening. ‘Well, we’ll see,’ she said again. But still she made no reference to lunch.

‘I am ill with grief over my husband,’ she told Dotty, ‘and this guy keeps ringing me up and asking me out. But I’m well aware you’re not the person to be saying this to.’

They had been to The Mikado — ‘Just take me to see anything, just get me away from the house,’ Chas had begged her sister — and now they were sitting in the American Bar at the Savoy, drinking burgundy, picking at olives and looking striking. The Juniper girls up from the country, smelling of hay, but with the sun in their hair.

‘And who’s the guy?’ Dotty asked.