Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

‘It’s because we die,’ he said. ‘If we didn’t the we could afford to be more magnanimous. But we only get one shot. We can’t forgive the person who shoots further.’

She patted him like a child. ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘We cannot forgive or bear it. So what we do in our profession is make sure that no one else can forgive or bear it either. When you hear a rumour of someone else’s good fortune, you pass it on. Passing the Pain, Charlie used to call it. A parlour game for two or more writers.’

‘Except,’ said Kreitman, ‘that you don’t have to be writers.’

‘You pass the pain in purses, Marvin?’

He winced. She could still do that to him. ‘I pass the pain in love, Chas,’ was his reply.

‘ “I shall still lose my temper with Ivan the coachman, I shall still embark on useless discussions and express my opinions inopportunely,”’ Charlie read, ‘ “there will still be the same wall between the sanctuary of my inmost soul and other people, even my wife … but my life now, my whole life …”’

‘Lovely,’ Hazel said. ‘I’d forgotten how positive a book could be.’

Charlie closed the novel and kissed her. They were sitting up in bed, supported by banks of pillows, his reading light on, hers not, so that shadows kept half of her obscure from him, still so much of her he could only guess at. ‘Tomorrow night we’ll start Barchester Towers ,’ he said.

She clapped her hands. ‘Goody, goody,’ she said.

When they put out the light and finally turned aside from each other, Hazel found herself cursing her husband. What did it take to make her happy? Had it really been beyond him to read her a story once in a blue moon? Would it not have made him happy too — or at least been balm to his troubled soul, if happiness was too much too expect of him, the gloomy fucker — would it not have been preferable to all that frantic running around in erotic misery, just to have stayed in with her, fluffed up their pillows and read a book together?

This was the one canker eating away at her contentment — the sweeter it was with Charlie, the less she could forgive Kreitman for having made it so sour. What Charlie did — effortlessly most of the time — Kreitman, too, could have done.

So one doesn’t escape, Hazel realised. Happiness now doesn’t erase misery then. What perverseness, to be punishing now with then, almost out of jealousy of oneself, as though, once miserable, one never has the right to happiness again.

Thank you, Marvin.

And was Charlie thinking along similar lines?

Similar, but not the same. Charlie, before he disappeared into fevered dreamland, was thinking how like his new life was, sometimes, to his old.

Some of us wake well, some of us wake badly. Chas Merriweather woke in pieces. Nothing worked. Nothing was attached. Half her hair seemed to have fallen out and all colour had been bled from her in the night. ‘Don’t look at me,’ she told Kreitman. Her face was corrugated but queerly virginal, like the soles of her feet. She woke blotched, fraught, exhausted, as though the single purpose of the day would be to get her back to the condition in which she’d gone to sleep.

But Kreitman looked at her. What is more he enjoyed looking at her.

‘Why are you laughing at me?’ she cried, hiding herself under the sheets.

Was he laughing? He thought he was smiling. Pleased to see her. Pleased to see her there , with him. Pleased to witness the morning miracle of Chas putting herself back together.

I am maturing, Kreitman thought. I am not waking desperate to be gone. I like it that she comes to looking like the Battersea Dogs’ Home. I am becoming fond .

From either side of her fault line he was putting things back together himself, but not too tidily if he could help it. He was fonder than he had been, and also more roused than he had been: those two states could not be unconnected, of course they couldn’t, but he was not going to swap perverseness for harmony quite yet. What roused him, surely, was the novelty of the fondness, and of course the novelty of its object. Sensual, overwhelming all his senses, a woman who refused sensuality, who thought it was silly, and who woke the colour of her feet — explain that!

In the matter of his touching her, what Kreitman couldn’t figure out was how, even in the darkness, his fingers were able to measure a quality he had no adequate words for but which, roughly, he thought of as the underlay of her skin. He loved the deep give in her, what he would have called her substance were it not for that word’s associations of stoutness and amplitude, neither of which Chas possessed in the slightest. How best to put it? A woman like Shelley had skin so fine you feared it might flake off under your caresses. A woman like Bernadette, on the other hand, seemed to be stitched into a hide. You didn’t stroke Bernadette, you polished her. And then again there was Hazel, whose whole vascular system seemed to be in motion when she rolled her hips, or swung her heavy breasts above his face, first one and then another, just beyond his reach, making him search for them blindly, with frantic lips — a thing she hadn’t done for twenty years or more, not with him anyway. But Chas’s flesh structure was not like any of these. She didn’t leave him desolate, that was the best explanation he could give. She didn’t spill out from between his fingers like mercury, or crumble under them like rose petals. She wasn’t too much or too little. She was just the right amount.

In the matter of her touching him, there were fewer mystifications. She touched him, full stop. Or rather she held him, full stop. She took hold. It was the taking he loved, the way her little hand claimed possession of him — his penis, he specifically meant, but the moment she took hold he was all penis — encircling him with the most deceptive lightness, as though she were leading him into painless but permanent captivity, her hand the collar and her arm the chain.

Where had she learned to do that?

He knew the answer. She had learned it from him. She had listened to the silent desires of his body and discovered what to do. But then of course she had listened to her own silent desires as well.

Accord was what you called this. Though whether it comes only when you are in love, or is itself the reason you get to be in love, no one will ever know.

And she? Well, she wouldn’t have taken such complete possession of Kreitman if she hadn’t wanted to, would she?

‘I’ve never spent so long in bed in daylight hours,’ she told her sister.

‘I’m glad,’ Dotty said, ‘that you’ve finally released the pagan in yourself.’

Chas thought about that. ‘I’m not entirely sure it’s pagan,’ she said. ‘It’s very intense.’

‘Oh, Charlie, you aren’t going to go religious on me.’

‘No, I mean intense in another way. It’s almost as though I’ve taken up with a nervous system wrapped in tissue paper.’

‘You are having sex?’

‘God, yes, oodles of it. But he’s a strange man. Not at all like Charlie. Being with Charlemagne was like being with a bear. He rolled all over me. He made me feel I was covered in honey. This one goes very still, as if he’s listening for something. His body seems to think, Dotty.’

‘That comes as no news to me, darling. Haven’t we all always known what Kreitman’s dick was thinking? Just as long as you don’t make the mistake of believing you can make it think something else.’

‘Dotty, you are terminally trivial. I am trying to talk metaphysics to you. You used the word pagan — I simply wish you to know that we’re not just thrashing about up here.’

‘I understand, darling. Your bodies are thinking together. Thoughts, I am sure, far too deep for me. But that doesn’t have to preclude all fun, does it? Tell me at least that you are having fun.’