Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

Since they had become they , Chas and Marvin, Nyman had not cropped up much in their conversation. He was gone from her house, gone from her life, gone from her thoughts, and Kreitman had his own reasons for not reminding her of him. Once, on their first night in Harrogate, he had loomed and then been beaten down, and once again, weeks and weeks later, he had put in a guest appearance, Kreitman having succumbed to twinges in that part of his back which had come into contact with Nyman’s bicycle. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t kick shit out of the little arselicker when I had the chance,’ Kreitman cursed, rolling on to the grass and trying to remember the muscle-stretching exercises the physio had taught him.

They’d been sitting on a bench in Regent’s Park, holding hands, watching the ducks. One of the few dry days of late summer. The lake was scuffed with the scurrying of birds. A swan rose on the water and arched its neck. A home-loving heron they had spotted on previous walks — a pathologically uxorious heron with whom Kreitman had indentified — was playing pick-up-sticks to furnish an empty nest. All things that loved the sun were out of doors, even the women of the jaballah and the veil, their eyes dancing in the letter-box slots of their wintry yashmaks. From what place in himself, on such a benign afternoon, Chas wondered, had Marvin called up such violence?

She fancied she had dispelled all unseasonable ill-temperedness from his nature. She felt it was a mark against her , somehow, that it had resurfaced. What wasn’t she giving him? It was in the face of this disappointment with herself that she let down her guard. ‘What is it about that boy that galls you so much?’ she asked.

Kreitman straightened himself up, stood on one foot, much like the heron, grabbed the other foot by the toe which the heron did not do, repeated the exercise, this time changing feet, shook the grass from his suit, for Kreitman would not go into so public a park as this in his cagoule, then rejoined her on the bench. ‘He rode into me, deliberately. Twice in one evening. What other explanation do you need?’

‘Your anger always seems over and above that, Marvin.’

‘Over and above being knocked down?’ He laughed. ‘Measure me, then, the anger appropriate to being run over twice.’

‘You know perfect well what I’m saying,’ she insisted. Miffed, she jutted her jaw. ‘You go looking for anger where he is concerned. You hear his name and beckon rage into your heart. I used to think it was a joke. The boy hardly merits so much passion, after all. Now I think he’s a pretext.’

He stood up again, linked his hands in a double fist behind his back and breathed in. A relaxation exercise. He caught her eye and held it longer than was comfortable for either of them. ‘Indeed the boy hardly merits so much passion,’ his face said — ‘from either of us.’ But his actual words were less challenging: ‘A pretext for what, Chas?’

‘I don’t know. I’m asking you. Violence? Unhappiness? Dissatisfaction with me?’

He went on fisting his shoulder blades. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘The boy, as you call him, puts himself about as a faggot, and you assure me he isn’t. Will that do?’

She opened her hands, as though to accept responsibility for the unpleasant topic, and in the hope that it would fly away, now she had released it. ‘It will do me if it will do you,’ she said. But it didn’t look as though it did her.

Or him, come to that. ‘If you want to know,’ he relented, ‘I fear him. I fear his nothingness.’

She was surprised by the confession. Relieved, too. She would have liked to hear him deny the charge of dissatisfaction with her, but failing that, leaving her out of it altogether was second-best. ‘That surely is to accept him at his own valuation,’ she said.

‘I fear that as well. To a person as fixed as I am, even playing with looseness is unnerving. Anyone whose motives or movements I can’t count on, I fear. I fear him as I fear clowns or madmen. They negate everything. They negate me, anyway.’

‘But that’s exactly what he wants to do.’

‘I know that. It makes no difference. Faggot jokes are the same. Let’s elevate trash and see if we can make seriousness lose its nerve. Nothing could be more transparent. But it works. I lose my nerve. When everything else has been destroyed, two things will be left in control of the planet — cockroaches and camp.’

‘Marvin, he isn’t camp,’ she wanted to say. But wasn’t that where they came in? Here was the perfect opportunity to tell him about Norman. Your indestructible vermin, Marvin, is actually a Norman.

But she backed off. She didn’t have the words, and she couldn’t claim to understand the psychology; but she had the feeling, lying listening to Kreitman’s body think, that even as it thought about her it sometimes thought, and sometimes thought too long, about Nyman as well. And she didn’t want to be a party to any of that stuff, whatever it was.

At what point Charlie Merriweather realised he hadn’t changed his life at all — not radically changed it — and was back to having nice sex, only with someone not his wife, it is hard to say. A realisation of this magnitude does not come upon you suddenly. It creeps into your bed.

The wet weather was disagreeing with Charlie. The more it rained, the fewer the opportunities to go shopping with Hazel, and the fewer opportunities to go shopping, the fewer opportunities to go taking back. It mattered to him, this aspect of their life together, because it was one of the few opportunities the pair of them had to go public, to make any kind of show of the love they bore each other. Day after day it rained, and nobody visited. Night after night they stayed in, and no one visited. He read to her, novel after novel. ‘Very soon now,’ he joked, ‘there won’t be any novels left to read.’

‘Then you’ll have to write some, Charlie,’ she joked. But his words struck fear into her. Were they running out of a resource already? Was running out of novels just another way of saying that he was running out of something else?

They discussed inviting some of his friends round. What about Basil Vavasor, great-nephew of Aubrey de Selincourt? What about Giles Akersham, great-great-grandson and biographer of Edmund Gosse? What about Clarence Odger? Charlie thought about each one in turn, then shook his head. They belonged as much to Chas as to him. They belonged to the family. In the earlier days, before the Merriweathers were launched, they had financed the family. Sent Timmy to school. Paid for Kitty’s piano lessons. Built the extension. They would be embarrassed meeting him in another context. And maybe saddened. They hadn’t financed him into another context. And he too would be embarrassed. And maybe saddened.

‘You aren’t ashamed of me?’ Hazel asked.

Ashamed of her? Ashamed of Hazel? What a thing to ask. He’d never been prouder of any woman, and never prouder of himself as any woman’s man. But it’s a queer thing about that question — once it’s asked, once it’s seriously posed, it raises doubts and changes, ever so subtly, the balance of power. If Hazel truly feared he could be ashamed of her, what did that say about her sexual self-confidence — so important to him as a man who had travelled at twice the speed of sound from the planet Nice to the planet Wrongdoing — and furthermore, what did it say about his need to make that journey in the first place? Never mind had he overestimated Hazel, had he underestimated himself?

The rains fell and Charlie burned off the pages.

‘ “ But, in spite of these deficiencies, the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony, were fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union …”’