Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

‘I’m having fun.’

‘And you promise me you are not falling in love with him … or his thoughts.’

‘We all have fun in our own way,’ Chas said, making no promises.

Marvin Kreitman’s idea of fun was different from Chas’s. Marvin Kreitman’s idea of fun was not to go anywhere. Climb up the magic rope ladder, pull up the sheets and snip off the rope. Chas set about changing that. Slowly at first, starting with the kitchen. She taught him to cook, showing him how to stew apples and to crumble butter and flour. She taught him how to make jam, which fruit to use, how not to be frightened of sugar, how to stop before it got to the condition known as sticky. (The way you do with me, he laughed.) She even showed him — taking no notice of any of that — how to make that miracle of eggs, lemon meringue pie, Charlie’s favourite.

He’d baulked at that. ‘You have thought this through?’ he checked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You do know you’re turning me into Charlie.’

‘No danger of that,’ she said. ‘You don’t call me Mrs Chassyboots and rub your stomach and beg for seconds.’

So Kreitman called her Mrs Chassyboots and rubbed his stomach and begged for seconds.

Then they looked at each other and agreed not to try that again.

‘No fridge magnets, either,’ Kreitman warned her.

But how, once he’d said it, could she resist? One morning, after she’d left to go back to Richmond — work, children, all that — Kreitman climbed down his ladder and found I ADORE YOU in little red and yellow letters on his Lamborghini toaster. He thought his legs would go from under him. When Chas turned up again the next evening she found BUT NOTHING LIKE AS MUCH AS I ADORE YOU in letters twice the size running diagonally across the fridge door.

She climbed up the ladder to him and they kissed. ‘That’s so sweet of you,’ she said. ‘I know how much a clear fridge door matters to you.’

But in truth clear fridge doors no longer mattered a jot to him. They had gone out the window with the rest of his prejudices. All he wanted now was to exchange nursery-letter messages of love with Chas on every appliance in his kitchen. The moral infection of nice had claimed him.

‘Soon,’ Chas said, ‘you’ll be buying me a bear.’

So he went out and bought her a bear.

He couldn’t keep it up for ever, of course. One day Chas found I WOULDN’T HALF MIND SLIPPING YOU ONE TONIGHT on the stainless-steel extractor hood. She pretended to shed a furtive tear. ‘I had so hoped it would stay pure between us,’ she lamented. Whereupon Kreitman messed up the letters and wrote WILL YOU MARRY ME.

Whereupon Chas fell very silent.

She took him to the ballet.

‘Anything,’ he’d said, ‘so long as it’s not Swan Lake .’

So she took him to see Swan Lake .

He’d been surprised by her taste. ‘I knew you wouldn’t be modern-modern,’ he told her when she bought the tickets, ‘but I would have expected thirties avant-garde of you.’

‘Are you being rude to me, Marvin?’

‘Not at all. I’m a thirties avant-garde man myself. In everything but ballet, anyway.’

‘And what are you in ballet?’

‘Revolted,’ he told her sweetly.

‘It’s the men’s lunch packs, is it? Charlie was uncertain about those too.’

‘I’m not Charlie. The men are fine. It’s the dirty dresses on the women I have trouble with.’

‘Where do you get the idea that the women wear dirty dresses?’

‘It’s endemic. It’s what people go to see. Slightly grubby ballerinas in yards of discoloured tulle. Don’t ask me why. You’re the enthusiast. I think it’s some perverted, dirty-washing thing.’

She narrowed her eyes at him. Perverted was an objection suddenly?

But what she said was that she’d chosen Swan Lake as the easiest place to start. ‘At least with classical ballet if you can’t stomach the perversion you can enjoy the music’

‘Tchaikovsky!’

In the event, he did even better than that. He enjoyed everything. The athleticism. The body as lyrical instrument, for God’s sake. The poignancy. Even the dirty washing. ‘But don’t forget,’ he said, kissing her during the interval, ‘that it’s because I love being with you and being seen with you.’

He meant what he said. Being with and being seen with. She attracted attention in evening dress. It suited her to be sheathed in plain black, lightly jewelled, hoisted up on imperious heels, her cornfield arms and neck out, her hair down, another of her fault lines showing — a tomboy in a glamour frock, country mouse in the arms of town mouse, and vice versa. Sometimes photographers got excited when they saw her getting out of a taxi. ‘They think I’m Camilla Parker Bowles’ younger sister,’ she whispered to Kreitman, flushing, fearing that who they actually took her for was Camilla Parker Bowles.

‘Gets something,’ Kreitman said proudly. ‘Mistress of a prince.’

But he knew why they were taking her photograph. It was because she gave consciousness of rude.

She felt more herself, however much he liked her glittering (and therefore half somebody else), in her spinnakers and flatties. Walking clothes. She introduced him to where he lived. ‘Road,’ she said. ‘Pavement, strolling area, little park, Common, woods.’

‘Woods my foot,’ he told her. ‘That’s faggot jungle.’

‘Grow up, Marvin,’ she said. ‘You’d cottage if men and women could do it standing up.’

He dared her. But she knew his game. As long as he was daring her he didn’t have to walk. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘You have one of the loveliest commons in London on your doorstep. Look how flat it is.’

And away they went, hand in hand, arm in arm — he liked linking her, the way he’d seen old European men, perhaps even his father, linking women, hanging on to them, almost hanging off them — until she explained that it was better exercise to swing your arms. Hazel used to tell him that as well; but on Hazel’s lips it had seemed a reproach — get your filthy unfaithful hands off me, Marvin Kreitman — whereas from Chas, from Chas he could take anything. Explain that.

She got him into an anorak. Took him to one of those adventure streets in Covent Garden and had him fitted up for toggles. He screamed at first, brushing something off himself with such violence that she thought a tarantula must have sidled out of one the pockets. Even the shop assistant grew alarmed. ‘Is everything all right, sir?’

‘Words,’ he shouted. ‘I’ve got words on me!’

And he had. NORTH FACE, POLARGUY. SCARP.

There were no anoraks without words. Elsewhere, words were vanishing. Soon there would be no words. Now he knew where they were going. On to anoraks.

‘I’ll unpick them,’ Charlie promised.

But of course he got used to the words and in the end rather liked having SHOREWALKER written across his back.

He saw the future, saw his life extending into old age, serene and comfortable, his arm in Chas’s, the Common an explosion of butterflies, he and she white-haired and zipped into matching all-weather parkas, still handsome, still smiling when they caught each other’s glance.

Then, one achingly sweet penitential Sunday — the first and last warm Sunday of the year — he saw Hazel and Charlie also walking arm in arm across Clapham Common. Happy they looked, no get your filthy unfaithful hands off me, Charlie Merriweather, no, none of that, just happily talking, laughing, absorbed entirely in each other, not looking at the world. Funny — Hazel on the Common in dancing shoes, Chas in hiking boots; Hazel dressed for cocktails, Chas for pitching tents. He thought he caught the sound of Hazel’s laughter, tinkling and seductive, like a glass chandelier with breezes blowing through it. Today, for reasons of her own — perhaps a consequence of the melancholy leafiness of the afternoon — Chas was ruminative. Briefly, Kreitman felt a pang for something that had never been: not quite the past, and not quite what he had ever wanted the past to be. But it was a pang of retrospection of some sorts. We are with the wrong women , he thought. We are with the wrong women. Then he quickly took the thought back.