Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

Unable to decide to whom he owed his loyalty, Charlie woke up with a pain in his heart.

But he would have been better advised not to tell Hazel about his dream.

‘If you’re having second thoughts,’ she said, ‘I’d prefer you acted on them now, before I get too used to you.’

‘Second thoughts? I’ve never been happier,’ Charlie told her.

‘Exactly. Guilt.’

‘Why should being happy make me guilty?’

‘Don’t be a baby, Charlie. I didn’t have the dream, you did.’

Sometimes Hazel understood why her husband had been so scathing of the C. C. Merriweather books. Morally, Charlie lived in Tiggy-Winkle Land. He had learned no hard lessons from experience. She could hear Marvin’s explanation: ‘Hazel, he’s had no experience; he’s been happily married for a quarter of a century.’

But then morally Marvin lived in the lowest circle of Dante’s Inferno. And what sort of a companion did that make him ?

It touched her to be the person who was bringing experience to Charlie, she who had never believed she had anything to bring to anybody, least of all knowledge. Suddenly she realised it was all in the luck of the draw. Some people needed you to be the grown-up one, so you mouthed wisdom; others wanted to reveal life to you, so you hung your bottom lip like a dunce. So far she’d encountered only teachers. Not like that, Hazel, like this. The curse of Kreitman. Even Yossi in the Negev had unpeeled her as though instructing her in how to eat fruit. And she’d extended her hands obediently, limply, like a little girl being helped out of her blazer. Until she stood in the desert without an item of school uniform left on her, waiting to be told what next.

Now she felt as old as Oedipus, discovering the riddles of the Sphinx to the frightened inhabitants of Tiggy-Winkle Land. She’d had to explain to Charlie why his children were having difficulty with what he’d done: why his daughter had told her mother she’d never speak to her again if she ever spoke to Daddy again; and why his son was rumoured to be clubbing till all hours, stuffing powders up his nose and not answering his father’s phone calls. ‘They must be able to see for themselves that I’m happy,’ Charlie had said. ‘It’s not as though they’re babies, for God’s sake. Kitty-Litter’s a bulldyke and Timmy’s been on Blind Date .’

‘Daddies are meant to stay with mummies,’ Hazel reminded him.

‘At their age?’

‘No, at your age.’

‘Chas must have said something to them.’

‘That’s very likely.’

‘No, I mean she must have turned them against me.’

‘Instead of what? Convincing them how sweet you are?’

‘Is that beyond the pale?’

‘It’s beyond human nature, Charlie.’

‘I hope I’d do better.’

‘If Chas ran off with someone?’

‘Sure.’

‘And if I ran off with someone?’

‘That’s different.’

She shook her head over him. ‘What the fuck am I doing with you?’ she said.

When she wasn’t Oedipus she was Jocasta. Barely a month’s difference in their ages, but she felt she’d carried him in her womb. Not only that, but whenever he wanted to crawl back whence he’d come she had to show him the way. A gazetteer of her own body suddenly, Hazel Kreitman née Nossiter, who until now had been a mystery to herself, an unmapped continent for intrepid mariners to chart. In their early days Marvin had drawn a verbal picture of the parts of her she couldn’t see. Which made her feel as incidental as a feather on a breeze. Was she there only by virtue of Marvin’s descriptive powers? If he lost words would she shed tissue? Not any more. This way, Charlie, throw a right, no a right , and now straight on …

Same with his body. Hands in the air, feet together, not her coming out of her clothes this time, but him. ‘I have the urge to sew labels into your shorts,’ she told him.

His eyes brimmed. ‘My father had to do that for me,’ he remembered. ‘And buttons. My mother wouldn’t risk pricking her pretty finger.’

The sad, motherless boy, unlabelled, unbuttoned and unloved. Once upon a time, Charlie Hyphen Smelly-Botty Farnsbarns found himself all alone in a big wide field with no labels in his shorts. How am I possibly to know who I am, cried Charlie Hyphen Smelly-Botty Farnsbarns, if I don’t have labels in my shorts …?

Lost, love-lorn, without the first clue who he belonged to. Now found a home for at last.

‘But Chas must have done your sewing …’

Chas? Oh God, yes. Chas. Yes, of course, Chas had done his sewing, now she came to mention it. But he was emotionally skipping Chas. Chas hadn’t happened. In the context in which he was now living, Chas had no measurable existence. There’d been loneliness and then boom! — in a flash — Hazel.

When Charlie asked Chas to be happy for him, on account of his enjoying a satisfactory sabbatical from their marriage, he may not have known what he was about but he knew what he meant. I am not a complete fool, he would have told her had she only given him the chance. I know that you cannot really be happy for me. I know that such selflessness as I am asking for does not exist. But I am trying to mark a difference between you, the woman I have always loved, the mother of my children, the companion of my labours, and Hazel, the mother of someone else’s children, the companion of someone else’s labours, a woman I have never loved and, to be frank with you, barely noticed. She is so unlike you, she is circumstanced so dissimilarly, that she is not so much another woman as another species. Therefore I find it impossible to think of her as an infidelity to you. Yes, yes, I grant you, Dotty would have been an infidelity. Dotty I regret. Dotty was wrong. Dotty was a choice against you. But then Dotty was a suicidal act and she didn’t happen anyway. Only Hazel happened, and Hazel isn’t a betrayal of you because she isn’t an alternative to you. Hazel’s from another planet. So now will you be happy for me?

What Charlie meant by Hazel being from another planet was that she made him feel he was on another planet. The planet Impurity. The planet Wrongdoing. Some nights the planet Filth. Some mornings the planet Bliss. But never, Chas, absolutely never, the planet Nice.

He was not, whatever anybody thought, a complete fool. He knew he couldn’t tell Chas he was now domiciled on the planet Sensuality, a place he’d never set foot on with her, not even for the weekend. And what was the planet Sensuality, when all was said and done, if not a satellite of the planet Wrongdoing? Hazel was all wrongdoing. She was his best friend’s wife. She was among his wife’s best friends. She was the mother of children his children had grown up with. She was a middle-aged woman whose appeal he had never much registered, almost a sister to him. And he had won her in a sort of wager. How many wrongs was that?

He could season most of that wrongdoing, if not with right, at least with a pinch of something morally neutral. For example, Hazel might have been his best friend’s wife but his best friend didn’t deserve her, had spares galore and probably didn’t even notice she was missing. Nor was Hazel really Chas’s friend; the two had only tried to get on for their husbands’ sakes, and left to their own devices would have despised each other, did despise each other most of the time. As for his children, why invoke them? They were behaving strangely — badly, in his view, selfishly — and didn’t have much to do with it one way or another. In the matter of Hazel’s having been a sort of sister to him, sort of is only sort of. And finally, he hadn’t really won her in a wager; rather she had come to him, coincidentally, of her own imperious volition, as a consequence of a train of events which certainly originated in that evening of wild talk in Soho but which no one could have calculated.