Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

‘I knew you were coming,’ she said.

Kreitman, standing ill at ease on the lawn with his arms folded, laughed. ‘No you didn’t.’

She tapped the side of her face, just below her eye, the nerve centre of her sympathetic prescience. ‘I told Norbert you’d be here, just half an hour ago.’

He met her gaze. Don’t say anything, her eyes warned him. Make no comment about the fact that when you’re not here I’m talking to someone who cannot talk back to me and who most of the time doesn’t understand a word I say.

She walked him round the garden, showing him flowers. A new side to his mother. There’d been no flowers in the days of his father. But then Bruno the Broygis would probably have kicked their heads off on his way in.

Kreitman didn’t ask how Norbert was. He knew the routine. No mention. What there was to be told, he would be told. Sometimes his mother would take him up to see Norbert, sometimes he would be wheeled out. But if he wasn’t, he wasn’t. And Kreitman knew not to wander round the house. A man who has had a stroke as serious as Norbert’s leaves a swinging thurible of baby smell, damp and dead, in every room he’s been in. Mona Bellwood showed no sign that that distressed or shamed her. If she was careful who she allowed to go where, that was to spare them.

Too cruel. Too unthinkably cruel that his mother’s second crack at romance should have ended so abruptly in this. One bastard, one vegetable — where was the fairness in that?

‘So,’ she said. ‘Love-troubles. Have you come to see Shelley?’

‘Ma, I’ve come to see you.’

‘I know, but have you also come to see Shelley?’

‘No, not today.’

‘Then definitely love-troubles.’

He sat on a step while she continued savaging the roses. ‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ he said, ‘I’ve left Hazel.’

‘I know,’ she said, not bothering to look up.

‘Ma, do me a favour — enough with the psychic powers.’

‘Who’s talking about psychic powers? She rang me.’

‘Hazel rang you!’

‘I’m her mother-in-law, why are you surprised?’

‘What did she ring you to say?’

‘What do you think? “Congratulations. You have your wish. Better late than never.”’

‘She said that?’

‘Yes. Brave of her, I thought. First brave thing I’ve ever heard her say.’

‘And no doubt you told her that?’

‘No. I said I was sorry if either of you was unhappy. Are you?’

‘What did she say to that?’

‘I’m asking you that. Are you unhappy?’

Kreitman took off his jacket and folded it on his lap. Linen. He didn’t want it creased. ‘What I am,’ he said, ‘is bewildered. I can’t work out why I like what I like in women.’

‘Simple,’ his mother told him. ‘Trouble. You like trouble.’

‘Yes, but that doesn’t help. What I want to know is why do I like trouble.’

She dropped the secateurs on the lawn and came to join him on the steps. Creakily. He hadn’t noticed that in her before. He thought of her as about his age. But up close she wasn’t the beggar-maid any more. You can’t push your husband around in his wheelchair, smelling infancy and death on him every day, and stay a beggar-maid. ‘What exactly is it you want to hear from me?’ she asked. ‘That I did something to you when you were small? That I gave you a taste for trouble?’

‘Ma, you know I’m not asking you that.’

She shrugged. ‘I may have,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t your Freud say all mothers do that. Why should I be any different? I tried to make you believe in yourself, and who can say whether that’s a good thing. Maybe I made you arrogant. Maybe you thought I was the only one who could appreciate you. And since you couldn’t have me — bingo! — trouble.’

‘Freud in a nutshell, Ma. I can’t think why you’ve always been so against him. But I’m not blaming you for anything. I just want to know whether I was always … what I am. When you took me to all those specialists because I kept fainting, did any of them say anything?’

‘Like your boy seems to want trouble from his women? Marvin, you were eight at the time. We weren’t looking for woman-associated symptoms.’

‘But I was morbid, wasn’t I? That’s why you took me.’

‘No one said anything about morbid. The doctors called you sensitive.’

‘But what does sensitive mean?’

‘Sensitive means sensitive. You’re still sensitive. Look at the fists you’re making.’

She put her hands on his, unlacing his fingers. What he couldn’t decide was whether their eyes had met, whether she had mutely said, ‘You like that, don’t you, Marvin? You like me to unfist you.’

‘Do you remember,’ she suddenly said, ‘telling me about the woman you met in Selfridges?’

He tossed his hair. Jest and no jest. ‘Ma, I’ve met so many women in Selfridges.’

This time their eyes did meet. Hers were black and Caspian still, but the blaze wasn’t what it once had been. He thought they looked sorrowfully into his — not sorry for herself, sorry for him. She squeezed his hands. ‘You told me you met this one in the bag department. You told me you stopped her buying something. You were excited, you said, because she was as old as I was. A funny thing, Marvin, to tell your mother.’

A phrase he would rather not have remembered came back to him. ‘ You don’t use your mouth like other men .’

That first. How interesting. First the phrase, then the woman.

It was just before he went to university. Out on the prowl, anywhere, it didn’t matter, Tottenham Court Road, Piccadilly Circus, Carnaby Street, Regent Street. A late Saturday afternoon, the shops not yet closed, his eyes darting in every direction, then bullseye! he found one — tall, fleshy, sarcastic-looking, self-contained in the manner of a married woman not needing to be on the prowl herself — where else but in Selfridges’ handbag department. ‘Don’t buy that one,’ he’d said. ‘Rubbish leather. The patent will come off in the rain. Clasp will rust and the strap’s old-fashioned. This one suits you better.’

His reward a knee-trembler after lasagne and Valpolicella, up against a wall in St Christopher’s Place, close to where once stood a urinal in which the downwardly mobile Victorian painter Simeon Solomon — no long-windedly self-righteous Moral Chartist, that one, but a hero of Kreitman’s nonetheless — did feloniously attempt the abominable crime of buggery (so Kreitman could like a faggot when it suited him) upon one George Roberts, or vice versa. Though no blue plaque marks the spot.

No blue plaque for Marvin Kreitman either, but then no blue plaque was necessary — it was scarred on his brain tissue, the place where he learned he did not use his mouth like other men.

So how did other men use their mouths?

She didn’t know how to put it. She’d only come out to buy a handbag when all was said and done. And she wasn’t in the habit of doing this. But since he asked — well, more assertively, more animalistically, or something.

Kreitman bit her lip.

She pushed him from her. ‘There’s something wrong with you,’ she said, before she walked away. ‘You just leave your mouth there, like a baby bird’s, waiting for something to be put into it. It’s horrible. Then you bite me.’

What sort of mouth did a baby bird have? Soft, red, passive, blindly hungry. Not a flattering comparison, was it? Thereafter he was careful to present a powerful set of mandibles to every woman he kissed. Lock into Marvin Kreitman’s jaws and you knew how a mouse felt when an eagle swooped. But the imputation stuck — there was some masculine forcefulness that wasn’t his by nature.