Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

He sipped wine and listened to the silence of the room. Then he said, ‘I am not irresponsible. I don’t have a cruel streak.’

‘I believe you.’

‘I’m a softer-hearted man than you think.’

‘That’s exactly what I’m afraid of. Over the years I’ve heard Hazel say that it wasn’t you following your prick she feared most, it was you following your tears.’

Prick — that word again. She made him light-headed. It was like talking dirty with a Mother Superior. But all he said was, ‘Ah yes, Hazel.’

‘Ah yes, Hazel!’

To change the subject, he said, ‘And what should I fear most, Chas?’

‘From me?’ She laughed a bitter laugh. ‘My cowardice,’ she said. ‘And maybe my inexperience. You have a one-man woman in your bed, remember.’

‘It’s your bed, Chas.’

‘All the more shocking. I may wake up in the morning and regret this.’

‘I won’t let you.’

‘You won’t be here.’

‘Won’t I? Do you mean to expel me?’

‘Well, I could go to your bed and leave you here if that would make you feel better. But I cannot wake with you. Not so soon. I might roll over and call you Charlie.’

‘You have already called me Charlie.’

‘Have I?’

‘On the phone.’

‘That’s different. I haven’t yet rolled over and thought you were Charlie.’

‘I could handle that.’

‘There you are, you see, I couldn’t. We are incompatible when it comes to accustomedness. I’m still all shocks, Marvin.’

But the amazing thing — wonder of wonders — was that so was he.

Charlie, on a strange lavatory, hears Hazel asking for his alibi.

‘Alibi? What alibi?’

‘What’s your alibi? Do you have an alibi ready?’

A hand rattles the doorknob.

‘I’m in here,’ Charlie says. ‘It’s me in here.’

The door is locked, but that doesn’t stop her. And Charlie cannot put his weight against the door because the strange lavatory is long and narrow, almost a passageway, the rattling door at one end, he sitting, without an alibi, at the other.

One more turn of the knob and she is inside. Not Hazel — he had that wrong — but Chas, his wife Chas.

She is wearing a towel piled high around her head, a snow-white turban, as though she has just stepped from the bath. Her face is raw from bathing, too. Chas — fancy Chas being here! His instinct is to get up and greet her — Hello, Chassyboots! — but in the circumstances, lavatory and all that, he cannot. As she advances towards him, she grows. By the time she is upon him she is twice her normal height. He looks up and notices her fingernails. They are splayed, like scissor-hands, longer and redder than Chas ever allowed her nails to grow, not fingernails at all, when you really look, but proper nails, nails for hammering, each one silver, not red, and sharpened to a point. ‘Your alibi,’ she demands again. But before he can think of one, her nailed hands are in his eyes …

Until recently, Charlie was never that much of a dreamer. But he is dreaming a lot now. For him.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Charlie,’ Hazel said, ‘you cannot still be raving over the contents of my cupboards.’

What this time?

Towels.

Lying back in her bubble bath, Hazel marvelled at the pertinacity of her lover’s enthusiasms. Why had no one ever told her a man could be so easy to amaze? First it had been her perfumes, then her oils, then her moisturisers, then her soaps, then her rollers, if you could believe that — her piccaninny Molton Browners which would have thrown Kreitman, had he seen them, into a blue fit — after which her sheets, her pillowcases, her duvet covers, her throwaway slippers and this week, though he’d been drying her with them for months, her towels with the satin borders.

‘Charlie, I’ve been to your home. You wife buys the same towels I do.’

Charlie shook his head. He was too big, really, for a bathroom. He didn’t know where to put himself. But as long as she allowed him into the mysteries of her toilet, let him talk to her while she gently poached her flesh in hand-hot water, how could he take himself off somewhere else.

‘Charlie never bought towels as large and soft as these,’ he said. ‘Charlie bought towels that scratched. I now wonder whether it was deliberate. On the hair-shirt principle — to make me bleed.’

Well, be thankful, Hazel thought. She considered telling him that it was more likely to have been a soap-powder problem in Richmond, but that was hardly her business, was it? And if Charlie believed her towels were softer and caused less pain, who was she to complain?

She called him to hose off her bubbles, then climbed out of the bath, pinker than a porcelain doll, into the marvellous towel he held open for her. If she went limp in his arms, he would enfold her in them and dry her with the heat of his body. If she stiffened, he withdrew. It was like having a dog who could read every nuance of her moods.

She was beginning to tire of him, then? Not at all. She could not now imagine her life without him, or remember what it had been like to have no one there to welcome her out of her bath. But yes, she was taking him just the teensiest bit for granted. His own doing, he was so docile.

Nice sex, was that what Charlie was importing chez Kreitman? I should worry, Hazel thought. And nice sex, anyway, was sex enough for her. But it did sometimes occur to her to be concerned that Charlie was domesticating their bed to an extent that he would ultimately regret, even if she wouldn’t.

Being married for so long to Kreitman had taught her something — that men create the circumstances of their own dissatisfaction.

Their trouble was — and it may have been overstating things to call it a trouble — they didn’t have enough to do. Charlie wasn’t writing. She had set up a study for him at the top of the house, overlooking the garden so he could have green thoughts while he worked, but the loneliness had got to him. He was used to working in tandem with his wife. The pair of them at either end of their old pine table. She pounding at her typewriter, looking under or over her spectacles at him whenever she believed she had written a good sentence, he scratching behind his ear, coughing, getting up to make tea for them both, going for a wander down to the river, where he knew he would find someone with whom to exchange pleasantries, the time of day, anything, anything that employed the real warm words of life. When he told Hazel that the study she had put together for him was too quiet, or at least that his view was too unpeopled, she tried to make sure she was always in the garden while he was at his desk, so that she could animate his landscape, wave at him when he looked out, point to flowers that had recently bloomed, or just nod enthusiastically in response to his hand signals, which invariably illustrated some aspect of the making and drinking of tea. But that tied her to his working patterns rather, or at least would have tied her to his working patterns had he had any. He still couldn’t get going. When she was there he played with her, when she was out he repined. He didn’t know what to write. He wondered if there was any way he and Charlie could resume their collaboration by post, by e-mail, by text messaging even, without alluding to what had passed between them. But who was going to go first? He hadn’t spoken to her since she’d sent him packing. All communications, including her demand that the C. C. Merriweather brand name revert forthwith to her, had been made through their accountants — now her accountants — which he took to be significant in that she hadn’t yet resorted to a solicitor. Could they perhaps go on writing together through their accountants? It was when he reached that point in his creative deliberations that he got up, clattered down the stairs and ran a bath for Hazel.