Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

As for Hazel, she didn’t have enough to do either. Overseeing conversions and complaining to tradespeople had seemed a full-time occupation before. Now that she had Charlie at home with her she was less willing to have her house redesigned, let alone to open it to builders. ‘Apart from anything else there’s your concentration to think about,’ she told him, as an explanation for why the Jacuzzi hadn’t gone in.

‘Yes, there’s my concentration to think about,’ Charlie agreed. ‘Though we could go away for a week while they do it.’

For similar reasons — a relief, this, to service industries throughout the capital — her telephone complaints routine had stalled. She had other things to do with her mornings now. Nor did she dress any longer in the sort of clothes that had once made complaining easy. In a tailored suit she was not a person to be trifled with, even on the telephone; but wearing the sorts of frills and spikes Charlie liked to see her in, trifle was her middle name. The best explanation of why Hazel’s phones slumbered quietly on their cradles, however, lay in the change that had come over her temper: she wasn’t complaining because she had nothing to complain about. She was happy.

Of her old discontented habits only one remained — testing the returns policy of every shop in London. She had not been born a taker-back of clothes. Like kleptomania, of which it is a near relative, the taking-back of clothes is a function of despair, and despair had entered Hazel’s life only when she discovered that her husband’s tears were universal. He substituted one woman for another, shedding tears along the way, and she did the same with clothes. It was an addiction she could not shrug off, even though she had shrugged off Kreitman. The clothes she bought continued to look wrong the minute she got them home, didn’t fit although she’d tried them on in the shop, looked different in different light, looked wrong, looked stupid, made her angry. But these days, instead of seething up and down the West End in the rain, her hands full of creaking carrier bags, she ambled in and out of her favourite New Bond Street stores with a carefree smile on her face, and Charlie on her arm.

It suited him. If he was taking back with Hazel he couldn’t suffer those bouts of unproductive loneliness in his study. And if he was taking back with Hazel he could get to see her nipping out from behind curtains in her underwear. Here was another example of how his life had changed. With Chas, shopping for clothes had been one humiliation piled upon another, a saga of fluster and concealment, annoyance, embarrassment, misjudgement, despair — and that was just him. Off they’d go to get her out of her spinnaker, and back they’d come after a thousand disappointments and alarms with a spinnaker no different from all the others. ‘Nothing else fits me, Charlemagne. This is all there is. Don’t say anything!’ For Chas, a changing room was a torment somewhere higher up the scale of mortifications than the ducking-stool, whereas for Hazel — well, for Hazel, a changing room was almost like a public stage. Back the curtains went and there she was, half naked, entirely unabashed, careless who saw her — ‘Have you got this in a fourteen?’— waiting only for Charlie to leap from his upholstered sugar-daddy’s chair and cry Bravo !

What a gift it is, Charlie thought, what a gift some women have for sensuality, for making life easy, for filling it with enchantment. And how lucky that makes me!

A gift for making life easy! — Hazel the difficult, Hazel who was courted in her early years by men leaving nuts outside her door, to see if they could tempt her out, so wild and easily frightened a creature did she seem — a gift for filling life with enchantment, Hazel the terminally disillusioned!

My lottery theory confirmed, she thought, noticing how she’d changed. You are who you fall in love with. And I wouldn’t have understood that had I not fallen in love with who I’ve fallen in love with.

And if she hadn’t? She didn’t want to think about it. If she was now a lovely person only because she had stumbled upon Charlie, what would have happened to her had she stumbled upon the Yorkshire Ripper? Idle question. She had stumbled upon Marvin Kreitman and look at the sort of person that had made her. Please God don’t send me back there again, Hazel pleaded. Please God let me stay happy and lovely and with Charlie.

Happy in the bath and lovely in Fenwick’s changing rooms and Charlie never out of her sight.

But when they weren’t bathing or taking back, they were light on what Hazel, with some recapitulated disgust, called a ‘social life’. Kreitman’s phrase for the foremost of a man’s entitlements, and hence Hazel’s bitter euphemism for the same. As a consequence of the indignities to which marriage to Marvin Kreitman had reduced her, Hazel had more or less finished with a social life. Other than the Merriweathers — and they were now off the list — she saw none of her old university chums. She had a few similarly placed women friends she met in the restaurants of art galleries and with whom she abstractly discussed castration and lesbianism and the like — the ones who’d cheered her on when she’d cropped her hair, accused Kreitman of fucking her brain and kicked him out of her bed — but they would not have approved of the comprehensiveness with which, to please panting Charlie Merriweather, she’d reverted to the bad taste of a passive wardrobe. Which left only her daughters, expected back from Thailand any day, much missed by her, but in fairness no more a diversion for Charlie than he was a diversion for them.

The staidness of Hazel’s life when she wasn’t in New Bond Street, the monastic quietness of her house, astounded and dismayed Charlie, who had always considered himself a social orphan but in truth lived in the centre of that maelstrom Kreitman was quick to call the Kultur . Publishers of presses which had been failing since the forties, biographers of Surtees and Trollope, literary down-and-outs who carried their manuscripts with them everywhere in plastic bags, men who bore the names and obscurely benefited from the estates of Gosse and de Selincourt and Quiller Couch, faded beauties who had once given their hearts to Desmond MacCarthy, rock climbers, swimmers, explorers, cads and fogeys of every description, and of course writers of children’s books by the magic busload — all these were regular visitors of the Merriweathers. If they weren’t all there together on the lawn at weekends, waiting for Charlie to pour them Greek wine and Chas to rustly them up fish pie while pretending she couldn’t find the fish, they turned up unannounced, in dribs and drabs, on weekdays. Frequently one would come to complain about the other, though not infrequently the other would already be there, complaining about the one. Sometimes the older among them would be found exhausted on the Merriweather doorstep after getting lost in Safeway’s or being savaged by rutting deer in Richmond Park — actually bearing wounds, some of them, actually pitting the steps with blood the colour of pink gin — or just as likely having blundered out of their own quarters on a quite different errand the reason for which had subsequently escaped them. Not so much the nerve centre of the Kultur , then, as a hospice for it? Same difference, in Kreitman’s view. The Kultur as shaped by the British loved a hospice as it loved itself, revered infirmity and thrived in sick rooms. Old men on drips pulled the levers, while young men old before their time, like Dotty’s beau, padded in and out of the wards, took down their memoirs and did their bidding. But that, of course, was only Kreitman’s view. And who was he to be an arbiter of rude health? Call these gatherings what you will, the consequence was that time never hung heavy at the Merriweathers’. Whereas at the Kreitmans’, once lovemaking and towelling were finished for the day, you could hear the movement of the second finger as it dragged itself across the face of Hazel’s bedside clock.