Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

‘What have my interests got to do with it?’ Charlie exclaimed, cheered on by everyone at dinner. For these were the great democratising days of parenting, when nothing was feared more than the intrusive influence of parents themselves.

‘Everything, Charlie. That’s the point of Tim having you for a father and not someone else. You should be passing on your advantages.’

‘We do. We send him to a good school.’

‘Where’s he allowed to do the same?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘And when he comes home, it’s to this?’

‘As you know very well, Marvin, kids go their own way.’

‘Not if you make efforts to save them.’

‘ Save them! This is the purest melodrama. Save them from what?’ It was usually Chas who upped the tempo of the challenge at this point. Unless it was Hazel.

‘Come on. You know what they have to be saved from. At best, triviality. At worst, degradation.’

‘Degradation!’ This ejaculation from everybody. For these were the great days of moral relativity, when whoever expressed a preference was a sermoniser.

‘Commonness then, if degradation is too hot for you. Tell me something, Charlie — since I know you don’t read the Sun , tell me why Tim has page-three girls on his wall.’

‘Boys do that, Marvin. Boys like looking at girls.’

‘Not girls like that, they don’t. Plumbers like looking at girls like that. It’s an acquired taste. Commonness always is. We glamourise commonness, thinking it’s a state of nature. It isn’t — nature is altogether more refined. So why, if it’s acquired, are you allowing your boy to acquire it?’

Two invariable answers to that. You’re a snob, Marvin. And you’re making a great deal about very little, because kids grow out of their pin-ups and their football posters.

Kreitman doubted that. Kreitman believed you could always see the scars. What had he, for example, ever grown out of? (Seeking to disappoint his mother? Had he grown out of that?) But of course he did not now tell Chas what he thought — that Tim, like half the other kids in the country, was dying, if he were not already dead, of the culture of the council estate.

Chas’s own view was altogether less apocalyptic than this. Timmy had been a lovely baby and a sweet child. A laugher. There were still pictures on the fridge of little Timmy stuffing candyfloss into Kitty’s face and laughing. All being well he would be like that again, given time. She had made allowances, like all sensible mothers, for the spermy thing. Now she had to make allowances — extra allowances, given the destabilisation caused by the break-up of her marriage — for the sniffy thing.

‘And what about the telly thing?’ Kreitman asked her.

She wasn’t sure about the telly thing.

Maybe from something somewhere on the telly Timmy would learn a little understanding, even compassion, if moral complexity from someone his age was too much to hope for — which Kreitman assured her it was.

And Nyman? Without whom, etc., etc. …

How went the world for the man with no visible means of support, no prospects and no attributes?

It was a question Kreitman was frequently on the point of asking Chas. How fares the faggot, Chas? But he had resisted, not wanting to do anything to break the spell that held them, not wanting to stir her into anger, and not wanting to hear the answer, for fear of the pain it might cause him.

Does that mean Kreitman dreaded learning that she secretly saw Nyman, or thought about him, or made efforts to hear of him? Or does it mean he dreaded luxuriating in Chas’s falsity, if false she turned out to be?

Ah, if he only knew that.

But one thing he did know — Chas was a new life to him, a deliverance from his old self, and therefore he would have been as a dog returning to its vomit, had he sought to reinstitute the bad habits of earlier times.

So don’t ask Kreitman about Nyman, however drawn he was to the smell.

He liked it fine where he was.

Although there’d been nothing in her marital experience to prepare her for the perversities of a man like Kreitman — Charlie, before setting foot on the planet Wrongdoing, having been an exemplary husband of the strictly horizontal school of sexual adventurism — Chas knew to keep the stopper on Nyman. That wasn’t difficult; he was of no interest to her. In extraordinary circumstances she had flirted with Nyman (the most extraordinary of the circumstances being that everybody else had flirted with him too), and then, under duress — force of events as much as any coercion coming from him — she had reverted to that queer family dutifulness which, not for the first time, had landed her in the soup. Flattering to a woman nearly twice his age that Nyman had asked for more, but not that flattering — every man was an Oliver Twist at heart, up for another helping whatever the dish. Quite what to make of Kreitman’s interest in a piece of nonsense that didn’t concern him and from which, as a gentleman, not to say as her husband’s friend, he should have turned his eyes, she wasn’t sure, but something told her no good could come of it. All right, simple jealousy might have heated his engines intially, but they were past that now. They were running. According to Dotty, who was no slouch herself, they were speeding. And there was nothing to be jealous of, anyway, given that what she’d done she’d done in rage. You can only play the cards you’ve been dealt. Not equipped to dress a man down verbally, and not strong enough to punch him in the face, Chas expressed her contempt by whacking him off. Which, even allowing that she had once done the same to him, was none of Kreitman’s business.

It should follow from the above that her assurances to Kreitman, both during their breakfast of bitter herbs on Dartmoor and after — that she had sent Nyman packing, that she had refused to help him, that she neither knew nor cared anything of his whereabouts — were truthful. They weren’t. When Nyman asked her for a loan she gave him one. Five hundred pounds to tide him over. The idea of her paying him for a kiss and a feel-up was so disgusting to her that she couldn’t say no to it. If nothing else, it proved what Charlie had reduced her to. She had heard of betrayed women cutting off their hair, or painting their faces grotesquely, as an act of terrible submission to their debasement. Chas kept her hair intact but paid a cyclist nearly half her age five hundred pounds for having let her hold his dick. Put the hard word on my sister, would you, Charlie? Now look!

She also gave him her address and told him that though he couldn’t possibly stay there at present while the wheels were coming off her marriage — no, not even for the odd night, not even on the floor, not even in the garage, no, not even in a sleeping roll at the bottom of her garden — she might be able to offer him a bed at some later date. With a view to further sex which she would pay for? Absolutely not. But if he thought that, she wouldn’t disabuse him. She would be the more demeaned. Or rather Charlie, by the same logic, the more reviled.

Five or six weeks after Charlie moved out, at around about the time that Kreitman was losing to himself nightly at shove-halfpenny, she allowed Nyman to move in. That was how he saw it, anyway. He drove up in a small van, packed with his things, his bicycle on the roof. Chas sent him away. ‘You can come back and stay for a maximum of two nights,’ she told him, ‘provided you are carrying a suitcase no bigger than this.’ She opened her arms to give him the dimensions and noticed he was taking the opportunity to evaluate her chest. No one ever evaluated Chas’s chest. ‘A mistake,’ she told herself. ‘The boy is deranged.’