Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

But how far they were or were not burnt-out cases by their late teens, and how far that made them any different from their peers, is not the question. What we want to know — of the Kreitman girls as well — is how much their routine descent into young persons’ hell was quickened by the recent cataclysmic events in their families. How did the sight of their several parents behaving like kids themselves, tying one another up into a cat’s cradle of sexual irregularity — an all too regular irregularity — and then falling mooningly in love with the new arrangements — how did that gross spectacle strike them?

The fingers which Juliet and Cressida put to their brains on the occasion of Mummy’s making a festive bonfire of Uncle Charlie’s wardrobe on the lawn almost gets it. Fingers down their throats would have been better.

They were universally disgusted.

‘I am too old myself to take account of the distaste of young people,’ Kreitman told Chas when the subject finally climbed into bed with them.

‘Where does that leave you with Hamlet?’ Chas wondered.

‘Wishing he were older.’

‘It’s all right for you,’ she reminded him. ‘Yours are in Thailand, no doubt having a ball and never giving you a thought. I have two going dippy on the spot.’

Not much given at the best of times to considering the feelings of people not within his immediate field of vision, Kreitman had forgotten all about Tim and Kitty on principle, neither enquiring after them nor accepting any of Chas’s invitations at least to meet them for tea — though not at Kreitman’s place, not under the bed — so they could judge (‘Judge what, Mummy?’) with their own eyes. He was determined, on grounds of fastidiousness not far removed from theirs, never to acknowledge Chas’s domestic existence, the fish-pie and fridge-magnet Chas he’d known under the previous dispensation, and that meant never visiting her at home in Richmond, which anyway, by all accounts — that’s to say by Chas’s account — her little ones had turned into a madhouse.

‘I don’t know whether I can face this,’ she would say some mornings, as Kreitman was handing her over to Maurice to Smart back to Richmond. ‘Timmy lying in a pool of vomit with half his nose missing, and Kitty weeping in every room.’

‘Stay with me,’ Kreitman said.

‘And do what with the house?’

‘Torch it.’

‘And the children?’ She knew the answer.

‘Torch them.’

There were times when she was tempted. They were over-egging the pudding, her children.

Yes, of course Kitty had felt betrayed by her father, betrayed on her mother’s behalf and — you didn’t have to be much of a psychologist to work this out — betrayed on her own. If Daddy was going to run away with anyone, blah-blah … Doubly betrayed both ends, remembering that Aunty Hazel was shock number two, shock number one having been Daddy’s assault on the good name of Aunty Dotty. What was it with Daddy and aunties? Good question, Chas thought. ‘I can’t bear to look at him,’ Kitty said, in the immediate aftermath of shock number one. Which turned into ‘I won’t forgive you if you ever see him or speak to him again,’ after shock number two. ‘That’s a little extreme, darling,’ Chas had replied, but since she was feeling pretty extreme herself, she understood. ‘And I don’t want him ever coming to this house, or trying to contact me, or speaking to any of my friends,’ Kitty had gone on, stumbling over her tongue stud. If it’s causing her so much discomfort, Chas thought, why doesn’t she have the bloody thing out? But your daughter’s your daughter. ‘I’m sure he will be too ashamed to try,’ she’d said. ‘Too ashamed of me or too ashamed of himself?’ ‘Why would he be ashamed of you, Kitty?’ ‘Why does he call me a bulldyke? Why did he used to call me Kitty-Litter?’ You know your father and his jokes, Chas half wanted to say. But the words choked in her throat. ‘Your father is a sexually very disturbed person,’ was what she chose to say instead.

All that was fine. Not fine, terrible, but as you would have expected it to be. Charlie had acted despicably and his daughter despised him. What Chas couldn’t fathom was why Kitty was now feeling the same way about her. In the time she was alone, mourning Charlie and their collaboration, Chas had bowed to Kitty’s taunting. ‘You have been such a doormat, Mummy. You invited him to wipe his feet on you. You allowed him to believe he could get away with anything. He treated you with such contempt!’ This didn’t seem a fair description of either of them, but Chas accepted it. She too had failed Kitty in some way and this was her punishment. But oughtn’t it to have followed, now that she had shaken Charlie out of her hair, now that she was mistress of her own affairs, no longer a doormat, no longer a shame to her daughter — oughtn’t it to have followed that Kitty would be applauding her every inch of the way? ‘Go for it, Mummy! Whoo!’ — shouldn’t Kitty have been shouting that?

Instead there were reproachful looks, flouncings out of rooms the minute Chas entered them, bouts of overcast moroseness so electric they fused the mains, sly expressions of regret, almost, for her father, as though Chas had become the betrayer suddenly in the revised history of why their little family was no more. And then, when Chas arrived home late one morning looking admittedly like a woman who’d been up all night wrestling with a gorilla — though the truth, as we know, was that she’d been lying quietly listening to her lover’s body think — the outrageous indictment: ‘Mummy, you should see yourself. You look a slut.’

Quite something, Chas didn’t say, coming from a bulldyke!

And Timmy?

Somewhere in her heart Chas disdained her son. It usually happens that a mother loses all respect for her manchildren about the time they start falling for girls, their once-monastic touch-me-not sons all at once become open house for vagrants, every window in their natures banging open, fools for whoever comes knocking. Kreitman made her feel better by telling her that his mother had misprized him at the same age for exactly the same reasons. ‘It improved,’ he said, ‘when I gave up on expectancy and settled down into unhappiness. Then she felt I was back. A verdant son is a nightmare to a mother.’

‘Well, I’m not sure I’d call Timmy verdant, exactly,’ she said.

Verdancy of the conventional sexual sort Chas wouldn’t have minded. The trouble with Timmy was that he wasn’t just open house, he was vacant house, tenantless, the windows of his nature flapping broken on their hinges.

He seemed greedy to her, without exactly having appetite. He wanted things, without exactly having ambition. He passed judgements, without appearing to have a morality. He denounced his parents’ sexual conduct with vehemence, obscenely, without appearing to know decency.

Kreitman had his own thoughts. Born into what should have been the advantages of a cultivated, middle-class home, with bookshelves on every wall and the Kultur gathered every weekend on the lawn, Tim had been permitted, with barely a demur, to embrace the culture of the council estate. Permitted? No, it was more than that. Encouraged . For what reason? Nostalgie de la boue .

‘Why are there pictures of footballers on his bedroom door?’ Kreitman used to enquire, preferably over dinner in the presence of the Kultur , when there was the chance of whipping up one of those civilised arguments he liked so much.

‘He’s a kid. All kids are interested in football.’

‘But you’re not interested in football, Charlie. You’ve never watched a game of football in your life. I bet you don’t even know how it’s scored.’