Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

Then why, in that case, did he go on shaking with a sense of wrongdoing whenever he approached her? After the first time Charlie slept with Hazel he never believed there was going to be a second. After the second he never believed there was going to be a third. A hundred and one days of Sodom later, he still submitted to the turning-out of the lights, descended into the mouthing dark, resigned to the likelihood that she would not be there in the morning. He almost did not want to wake, he so dreaded putting out his hand and finding a note on the snow-cold pillow next to him, or seeing her sitting up in one of her round-backed leather boudoir chairs, fully dressed, in the belted-up Alida Valli trenchcoat he’d bought her (war-torn, though a little on the short side), with her bag on her lap, waiting to tell him it had all been a mistake. So that when he did open his eyes to discover her still there, smiling, pleased to see him, leaning on an elbow willing him to wake, her breasts all about her like a tray of canapés, or up and about in the kitchen in high-heeled slippers, making him his bacon and tomato breakfast, he couldn’t believe his good fortune. Another day, then, in which she wasn’t going to give him his marching orders. Another day stolen from propriety and probability. Was it really out of the question for Chas to recognise how little this had to do with her, or with their old life together? It’s the desperation of it, Chas. It’s the head-hurting uncertainty. Not like us, not like you and me in our bedsocks, Missus, Chasser, Mrs C. C. Chassyboots …

There was another way of putting this. In the only story not for children he had ever dared to write, Charlie Merriweather, then twenty-six, had set about trying to describe, in unflinchingly adult yet tender language, the fondness he and the other Charlie felt for each other. ‘And you tell me this is the first grown-up story you have written?’ Kreitman asked him. Charlie nodded. He was keen to know what Kreitman thought. Not least as the story had grown out of the fears the two Charlies entertained for Kreitman in the light of what seemed to them his sexual cruelty not just to Hazel (that part was obvious) but to himself. In a sense the story was as much about the Kreitmans and damage as it was about the Merriweathers and healing.

‘Then my advice to you, for what it’s worth,’ Kreitman said, ‘is not to write another. I doubt you have the gift of addressing the over-twelves. Few do. It’s a calling, Charlie.’

Ouch! A thousand lances in the beanbag of Charlie’s self-esteem.

Deflated, he nonetheless knew where the offence actually lay. It lay in his description of the protagonist’s penis. The ‘instrument of friendliness’. He had watched Kreitman come to that passage and seen his jaw drop. The instrument of friendliness would be an obstacle between them for as long they lived. Recalling it over dim sum lunches sometimes, Kreitman would put his finger down his throat and pretend to throw up. Now, years after the writing of the offending tale, Charlie understood why Kreitman had baulked. An instrument of friendliness was not what a woman like Hazel made you feel you possessed. Because she appeared to be shocked by Charlie’s penis whenever and no matter how often she beheld it, Charlie began to feel differently about it himself. A weapon of terror, was that it? A battering-ram of tyranny? Not exactly. He hadn’t been away from home that long. Enough that its distinguishing feature was no longer an innocent amicability. And that was the other way he might have put what was not like his life with Chas about his life with Hazel. These days, if his poor wife could only grasp it, he walked about with something dangerous between his legs.

For her part, though she was no more hooked on the specifics of a man’s anatomy than any other woman, Hazel Kreitman would not entirely have demurred from this. Against all expectation, Charlie Merriweather was possessed of what she’d heard her mother call a ‘fearfully big thing’, a brute of a penis whose weight had impressed her from the off, and though Charlie had been altogether too embarrassed initially — too embarrassed, too broken and too grateful — to wield it with anything like the expertness it merited, he wielded it with enough for Hazel. Before Kreitman, whose maleness was too mental for you ever to concentrate much on body parts — big brain, that was what Kreitman wanted you to feel inside you, the hard-on of his intelligence — Hazel had encountered two or three fearfully big things. They were always a disappointment in that they were always attached to soppy men. Whether this was an evolutionary imperative, or an unseen consequence of one — the male of the species sad to be reduced to mere functionalism — she didn’t know; but as sure as night followed day a man with a big penis sobbed on your breast after orgasm, idealised you until you wanted to puke and begged you to try to love him for his gentle qualities. Charlie was a sentimentalist right enough, overdid the gratitude and gazed at her as though nothing like her had ever existed in creation, but he didn’t pull back from the obligations of his size. He enjoyed being a big man, enjoyed towering over her when they went out, his hand on her shoulder or even sometimes Latin lover-like on her neck, enjoyed being able to change a light bulb without a chair, understood what she wanted when she asked him to lie on top of her, letting her feel the full length and weight of him, crushing the wind out of her if that was her desire and not too apologetic when he hurt her. She could read that old butterfly shit in his eyes, the same ephemerality crap with which Kreitman had wooed her — ‘When I open my hand, will you be gone, I wonder?’ — but he didn’t want to be gone himself. Unlike Kreitman, he didn’t fuck in order to make himself disappear.

‘I like it that you don’t seem to be going anywhere in your head,’ she told him once, reclining like a girl in the strong sour crook of his arm.

‘Where would I be going that’s any better than here?’

‘I suppose I shouldn’t be telling you this,’ she said, ‘but in my experience men are always on a journey somewhere else. Even in the early days when he was happy just to be with me — unless I got that wrong, too — Marvin used to maraud me, ransack my body as though he’d lost something. Is it here? No. Is it here, then? No. It was like being Treasure Island, like having Long John Silver stomping across you with a spade and bucket. That was before he decided the treasure wasn’t anywhere to be found on me and went looking for it on some other island.’

Charlie listened. ‘And why shouldn’t you be telling me this?’

‘In case it puts you off me.’

‘Nothing could put me off you.’

‘Or gives you ideas.’

‘There’s only one idea you give me,’ he said, wanting to break into her sadness, booming his big bedtime laugh and rolling her on to his chest, tapping his broad, straightforward intentions down the taut xylophone that was her spine.

What would Chas have said? ‘Charlie! Stop it, Charlie, you’ll break the bed.’ With Chas it had been all panto. Dames in bloomers, giant sausages, sticky sweets for the children, oops-a-daisy, he’s behind you! With Chas the sex had been continuous with family, a funny misadventure ending in a picnic and a roll down a grassy bank with his arms round Kitty or Timmy. Whereas with Hazel … with Hazel it ended in itself.

Undoubtedly, it helped that in Kennington, all five Georgian storeys of it, there was nobody else at home. The Merriweather house had always been in a state of preparation for invited guests or unexpected droppers-in; it was a cooking house, centred on the kitchen, the latest holiday snaps and newsy postcards affixed under magnets to the refrigerator door, the subject of conversation warming in the oven. A child was always on the phone or waiting to be driven somewhere. But Hazel frowned on fridge-magnet culture, ate out more often than she cooked and had never encouraged her daughters to treat home as a club house. Both girls had their own places to live, and though they popped in as a matter of course normally, they weren’t popping in at the moment because they’d fled to Thailand. Fled? In a manner of speaking.