Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

‘There you are! That’s not the question you’re meant to ask, Dotty. You’re so sideways. A sister shouldn’t be sideways.’

‘How should a sister be?’

‘Straight.’

Dotty crossed her legs, rattling her sequins, and sat back in her chair, her chest out. (Incapable of not flirting, Chas thought, even with me.) ‘This straight enough for you? Now what’s the question I’m meant to ask?’

‘Why am I ill with grief for my husband.’

‘And why are you?’

‘Oh, Dotty, what a question. Twenty-three years!’

Dotty opened her eyes very wide, not because she was surprised by the amount of time her sister and her brother-in-law had been together but because she had read that opening her eyes wide for long periods prevented crow’s feet. ‘All the more reason for accepting it’s over,’ she said. ‘A hundred years ago you’d have been dead already. Victorian expectations of one marriage to one man no longer apply. It’s mortality that decides morality. Always has been. A woman of the twenty-first century can expect to live until she’s eighty-five at least. With your constitution you’ll probably make it to a hundred and five. That means you’ll need a minimum — a minimum, Charlie! — of three husbands. Let this one go. Divorce him and marry this other guy. Who is he?’

‘You forget that we were more than husband and wife. More than friends even. We collaborated. Twenty-seven books! It wasn’t me who used to say we were a marriage of true minds, it was Charlemagne.’

Dotty uncrossed her legs, winnowing with light the sequins on her antique dress. One of their grandmother’s. Chas noticed that Dotty had taken to wearing these more and more often lately, as though needing to clothe her forward behaviour in the garments of a more withdrawn time. A proof, Chas believed — and this was a belief she held dearly to — that modern women like her sister only affected abandon, while in their hearts they remained as self-restrained as their grandmothers. This affectation was what Chas meant by silliness. On the other hand she could see that Dotty was looking very beautiful tonight, that she was enjoying showing the room (and the waiters) her sequins (and her legs), that the burgundy which she’d been drinking to excess had made her voice deep and that taken all round her silliness became her.

But it wasn’t only to draw attention to herself that Dotty went on changing her position; she was also looking for a posture suggestive of confidentiality. ‘Listen to me, darling,’ she said. ‘The marriage of true minds you speak of was also going down the plughole. It’s not for me to pry but I bet your sales have been plummeting. What do you expect? You’ve been stuck in the eighties for years. Your other half was bom stuck in the eighties — the eighteen eighties. He was making you stale, Charlie. He was holding you back.’

‘Everybody’s sales are plummeting,’ Charlie said.

‘Not true. I can name some whose sales are soaring.’

‘Please don’t,’ Charlie said.

‘I wouldn’t be so crude.’

‘I mean, please don’t go on with this subject.’ She was annoyed. Suddenly she could detect the agitating influence of the malicious boy-of-letters with the frayed cuffs, the true face of Dotty’s silliness. She could hear the Publishers Weekly pillow talk — ‘That sister of yours is on a bit of a loser with that husband, wouldn’t you say? Have you seen their sales figures recently? Not that they ever were much cop as a writing team, but at least they had the ear of the market once, when every child was a Little Lord Fauntleroy. How come no one’s told them the Fauntleroys have died out? No wonder the big clown is after a piece of you. You’re his last chance to enter the modern world. That’s if he has anything left to enter you with …’

Following her thoughts, part of the way at least, Dotty uncrossed her legs, her sequins hissing like a snake, and put her arms round her sister. ‘Face facts, darling,’ she said. ‘All good collaborations come to an end. Think of… I don’t know … help me … Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.’

‘I’m surprised you go so far back culturally any more,’ Chas said. ‘I’d have imagined, given the circles you move in now, that Wham! would have been the first example that sprung to mind.’

Dotty looked at the ceiling and comically pretended to tap her brow. Actually tapping her brow would have broken the skin. ‘Who’s Wham!?’ she said. Then she signalled the wine waiter for more burgundy. ‘Oh, Charlie,’ she said, ‘you don’t think Whami’s of now , do you?’

Charlie shrugged. ‘I’m not the one who’s desperate to keep up,’ she said.

‘And I can’t help it if I attract young men,’ Dotty retorted. ‘It runs in the family.’

‘Dotty, it does not!’

‘Oh, doesn’t it! And Mummy?’

‘What about Mummy? You’re not going to give me that coalman routine again.’

‘Never mind the coalman, what about Tony Almond?’

‘I’ve never heard of Tony Almond. You’ve made him up. Mummy would never have gone near a man called Tony Almond. It’s a hairdresser’s name.’

‘Not quite. He was a wine merchant. Half Mummy’s age. He had that shop in the high street with all the vintage whiskies in the window. Almond’s. He used to help Mummy choose her Christmas wine.’

‘Took her down to his wine cellars, I suppose?’

‘That’s exactly what he did. Every Christmas until she was too old to negotiate the stairs. Then he just closed the shop for the afternoon.’

‘Dotty, how come you know all these things and I don’t?’

‘Mummy confided in me. She wouldn’t tell you because she thought you were a prude. “Charlie would just say I was being silly,” she said. But I can see you don’t want to believe me. Suit yourself. I find it helps, knowing I’m following in Mummy’s footsteps. Keeping up the grand Juniper tradition. I wish you’d do the same.’

‘Mummy was a Dunmore, not a Juniper.’

Dotty inverted her lips. ‘You’ll go to the grave a pedant, Charlie.’

Charlie crossed her arms on the little table and slumped her head on them. Could Dotty be telling the truth? Was any of it the truth? Had her mother really gone down into his cellar with the wine merchant? Even just the once? Even just for fun? And did it matter one iota if she had?

Grandma too, whose coruscations Dotty did not scruple to borrow — what about Grandma and Leonard Woolf?

Not to mention herself; only think what she was capable of, simply out of incompetent politeness, or raging grief.

When she looked up she was surprised to find that her own thoughts had taken an inconsequent turn. ‘Would you forgive him?’ she asked.

‘Tony Almond?’

‘Don’t be an ass, Dotty. My husband.’

‘What do you want me to say, Charlie?’

‘I don’t want you to say anything. Would you forgive him?’

Dotty opened her eyes wide, made a letter box of her mouth, looked at her reflection in the wine that had just arrived, shook out her sequins and sighed. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. And not because he’s fucking that slack cow, but because he demeaned you by wandering around looking desperate. I’m surprised it took him so long to come on to me. Charlie, he was making a fool of you. His tongue was hanging out. He slobbered over everything that moved. Who wants to be with a man who can’t get himself laid?’

Charlie would have liked to be able to open her own eyes wide, and make a letter box of her mouth, but her eyes were small and wet with tears, and her mouth was shut fast with unhappiness. ‘Was it really as bad as that?’ she asked.

‘Worse. I’m sorry, darling — and don’t forget I was very fond of Charlemagne myself — but it was ghastly. You’d have been better off with a fucker.’