Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

And he was the same when he was buying, too. No shrewd reserve. No horse-trading or circumspection. Simply — ‘Love those, love those, not so keen on those, love those, how soon can you deliver?’ — and that was that. On to the next treat.

Was he doing it for her? To show her he wasn’t Flash Harry? To show he had a heart? No, he was doing it for him. She had never seen him so happily engaged in anything. Normally, if there was a normally now that she and Charlie weren’t Mr and Mrs Merriweather, but normally in the sense of previously, Kreitman would burst upon them in Richmond like a change in the weather, looking for some social fix, itching for trouble, vexed and vexatious. She would never have guessed he had it in him to enjoy something so lacking in disputatiousness as placing an order for wallets. Since he enjoyed it so much, and enjoyed the intercourse that went with it — stockist to supplier, leatherman to leatherman — she was at a loss to understand why he was always looking elsewhere for his satisfactions, why he wasn’t content to do the thing he did, instead of semi-professionally upsetting women. But then Chas didn’t know the father of whom Kreitman was the son.

And how otherwise had Chas imagined the afternoon going? What had she pictured — Kreitman counting notes out of his briefcase and tormenting unpractised artisans with the smell of city money? ‘Never mind what’s on the price list, how much to me , sunshine?’ Something more businessy , was that what she’d been expecting? Something that smacked a little more of the cold mercantilism of Saudi Arabia, say? — though that hardly made any sense, did it, since Saudi Arabia was hot. What then? She knew what she’d expected and wouldn’t name it. Shame on me, she thought.

That she could paint herself the villain helped her face the night. He wasn’t the evil one, she was. In which case, if one of them had the right to second thoughts, it was him. Nothing had been said about — she made mental quotation marks — ‘the night’. They had dropped their bags off at the hotel without registering, then walked straight over, through the gardens, to the exhibition rooms. She had thought the hurry was to postpone embarrassment. Or even to bamboozle her. Night, what night? Now she knew it was simply because Kreitman couldn’t wait to get over there and breathe in Elysium. But did that mean he was not calculating on any embarrassment, that it was all dusted down and sorted, he and she a couple — Mr and Mrs Marvin Kreitman! — sharing the one room, the one toothbrush mug, the one bed? Had they had that conversation? If so, she hadn’t been listening. Anxiety about the arrangements had been plucking at her peace of mind — ha! her what? — ever since she’d met him on the station platform that morning, looked him over in his over-lapelled Italian suit, stared into his too avid eyes and wondered what the hell she was embarking on. By mid-afternoon her understanding of who was arranging to do what to whom — an understanding that had stopped at fluttering heroines and bad-faced villains — had undergone a quiet revolution. Let’s look at it this way, she thought: it was she who had first invited him to meet her at the gym; it was she who had accepted, with what was beginning to look like unseemly alacrity, an offer to accompany him on a buying trip to Harrogate which really was a buying trip to Harrogate ; and it was she who was wandering round the fair a picture of world-weariness and cynicism, while the heart of the scoundrel bent on seducing her was pounding like a ten-year-old’s. If anyone should be wondering whether this excursion, or whatever you were meant to call it, was the right thing, shouldn’t it be him?

Well, he’s big enough to tell me to push off, she decided. But by God it helped her, when Kreitman had seen and bought enough, and the hour for sorting out ‘the arrangements’ — the hour she’d been dreading — struck, to think of him as the innocent and herself, if not exactly as the abductress, at least as a force, and maybe even the instrumental force, in whatever happened next. It only needed the receptionist to hand her a key to her own room, a room not immediately adjoining Kreitman’s at that, not in the same corridor, not on the same floor — briefly, she expected to hear, not even in the same hotel — for her to wonder whether she wasn’t the blackguard in this relationship, and furthermore to wonder whether the very word relationship wasn’t itself an imposition of impurity on the snow-white blamelessness of Kreitman’s intentions.

‘I’d have expected you to be hairier than you are,’ she told him, making absent circles with her fingers on his chest, trying to remember girlish ways.

She was in his arms, not easy for her as a non-collapsible woman, but she had found a way of folding down her shoulders and introverting her elbows, which was more comfortable than it ought to have been.

He looked down at himself. ‘I seem hairy enough,’ he said, in a voice so gentle he barely recognised it.

‘That’s my hair you’re looking at, you fool,’ she laughed. Her voice had come down off the high wire and was warm and deep again, like turned earth. ‘And I’m not talking about the amount of hair you’ve got, anyway. I mean I expected it to be more like you, spikier and more aggressive. Your skin, too, is softer than I imagined.’

‘Remembered,’ he corrected her.

She knew which word she wanted to use. ‘ Imagined ,’ she insisted, warning him off.

But Kreitman knew which word he wanted to use. ‘Remembered,’ he repeated. ‘Except that it would appear you haven’t.’

‘Haven’t what, Marvin?’

‘Haven’t remembered the feel of me.’

She made a movement to sit up, but he held her to him. ‘You’re the one who hasn’t remembered,’ she said. ‘I haven’t ever touched you. Not touch touch. I grabbed you. That was all. Once upon a time, before I was a respectably married woman, I made a grab at you in anger, but of course a man never minds that. I sometimes think you could grab a man’s cock off in rage and he’d take it as a sexual compliment.’

‘Try me, Charlie.’

‘I don’t feel any rage right now.’

He knew what he could do to change that. He could ask her to describe to him the spirit in which, on the very same spot, and after she was a respectably married woman, she had made a grab at Nyman. But why go looking for trouble? Don’t spoil it, he told himself. Don’t rub at an old itch. Isn’t this lovely enough for you?

It even crossed his mind that if this wasn’t lovely enough for him, he was as good as done for, a dead man.

Fortunately, it was lovely enough for him. The pair of them drifting about like ghosts lost in an unknown room, coming in and out of sleep, cautious of each other, watchful of the abrasions which a sudden movement or a false note could cause — abrasions to the body, wounds to the soul. It was what she had dreaded, the whole performance of getting to know another person intimately again, making sure your spirits didn’t clash, that your knees didn’t bang, that you didn’t speak over each other’s words, what’s your star sign, what’s your favourite colour, if there’s a God how do you explain Auschwitz, oh sorry, have I already asked you that. That was the reason everybody their age always gave for not embarking on an affair even when an affair beckoned — who could face the getting-to-be-acquainted ritual one more time. It was what baffled people about Kreitman, how he could go on and on doing that. Without doubt it helped in this case that they already knew each other, but knowing as a friend, more specifically knowing as a friend of your husband, was not the same as knowing as a … well, knowing as a lover, was it? Yet here she was, here they were, encased in darkness, feeling their way around each other’s hearts, daring to risk questions, only half noticing the answers, making gifts of revelations so tenuous they floated off into the night, finding a whole hidden history of the self here and now in the cradling of foreign arms — in short, doing everything the no-longer young said they never wanted to do again, except that it seemed they did, else why did it feel so heaven-sent.