Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

What was wrong with that for a plan? He was obviously in love with Chas — there could be no other explanation for his missing Hazel, assuming for the moment that it was Hazel he’d been missing. He knew himself. In the process of his affections passing from one woman to another, he suffered. Something in the brain: the migrating affections, crushing over the pons Varolii, pressed upon a cranial nerve. That was how he knew, definitively, he was in love with woman Y — the agonies he suffered remembering woman X.

Not that he lacked the proof he needed in his feelings for Chas herself. The old fault-line appeal hadn’t led him astray. He continued to marvel at how unlike herself she could be. He loved the surprisingness of being with her. He believed she loved the surprisingness of being with him. The sex, to isolate a single component at random, was extraordinary, by virtue of how her skin felt under his fingers — neither flaking nor about to spill — and by her virtue of how his felt under hers — her hand the collar, her arm the chain. That would change, of course, he knew that. One day his fingers would not feel what they felt now and one day the collar at the end of her chain would loosen. Infinitessimally on both counts, but that’s all it takes. No matter. They would have the continuing unexpectedness of each other. You and me, us ; who would ever have thought that when you stole my cat Cobbett from me?

And who would ever have thought this — you and me, us — when you picked me up at a party all those years ago, taught me the Bump, and then handed me over to Charlie?

Nice, wasn’t it, when life turned out so differently from the way you expected it?

Very nice.

And very nice back at the Kreitman residence where Charlie was waiting for Hazel, out visiting her mother, with a big bunch of red roses, a lemon meringue pie in a pretty cardboard box tied with violet ribbon and what looked suspiciously like a complete set of the novels of P. G. Wodehouse.

He leapt at her like a labrador when she came in. ‘I’ve missed you,’ he said.

‘I’ve missed you,’ she told him.

Then he bent to her and they kissed, balancing to perfection, you would have thought, sensuality and affection.

Maybe, thought Hazel, I don’t have anything to worry about after all.

If a person is happy for the first sixty-nine years of his life and unhappy for the last one, does he die an unhappy man?

When is it reasonable to call ‘Time’ on happiness? Think no man happy until he’s dead and you save yourself a lot of bother. But that’s routine pessimism, and routine pessimism is merely a sort of showing off. It also dodges the question. As a young man Kreitman liked saying that you should call no man dead until he was happy — but that too was only swagger.

The trouble is that happiness, as a summation of an observable condition of life, is arbitrary. It all depends where you decide to stop. Cut the deck here and you draw happy, cut it there and you draw sad.

This might be why we like to have a painting above our mantelpiece. A painting freezes time, offering the illusion that a loveliness of nature, or an expression of human contentment, can last for ever. In the best paintings you can feel Change breathing just beyond the canvas, panting to be let off the lead. But look again the next day and he is still where he was, still eager, still chomping, but still restrained.

Someone should have painted Hazel and Charlie just before Charlie cut into the lemon meringue pie.

Or Kreitman on his knees to Chas.

‘I wish I had a camera,’ Chas laughed, flushing, flustered even, ‘but haven’t you forgotten something?’

‘What’s that?’

‘That you are already married.’

‘Oh, Hazel will be glad to be rid of me,’ Kreitman said.

‘Is that a recommendation?’

‘Do I need a recommendation?’

Chas thought about it. ‘And the other thing you’ve forgotten,’ she said, ‘is that I too am already married.’

‘To which I cannot, with any gallantry, reply that Charlie will be glad to be rid of you.’

‘No,’ Chas laughed, ‘you can’t.’

It made her sad, suddenly, to hear the words that Kreitman couldn’t say.

‘Leave it,’ she said, helping Kreitman to his feet. ‘This is very sweet of you and entirely unexpected, but let’s leave things as they are for the moment, eh?’

She was surprised how disconsolate he looked. ‘Come on,’ she said, taking him by the shoulders and straightening his back. It was like cheering up a child. She felt she had to put the briskness of hope back into him. ‘Come on,’ she said again, kissing him. ‘We’re all right as we are, aren’t we, eh? Eh, eh?’

It had been her great thing as a wife and mother, instilling briskness. Let’s go for a walk, let’s buy an ice cream, let’s bake a cake. She had excelled at it. But she had never been a wife or mother to Kreitman, from whose eyes the tears rolled inconsolably, like a baby’s.

The moment Charlie cut into the lemon meringue pie his heart crashed through his stomach.

He had been here before. Once before or a hundred times — it didn’t matter. There was the lawn running down to the river, and there were the children — his darling Kitty-Litter, his laughing boy Timmy Hyphen Smelly-Botty — doing what children do, and there were the de Selincourts and the Gosses sipping Charlie’s Greek wine, and there, viewed through the kitchen window, was Chas in a comically harassed turban rolling pastry or boiling gnocchi or stringing beans — and there in the sky was the sun, and there on the river were the rowers, and there, just there, in the middle of it all, was Charlie himself standing at a trestle table, shouting ‘Yummy!’ and slicing lemon meringue pie for everyone. There’d been a discussion about clothes lines — when wasn’t there, on the Merriweather lawn, a discussion about clothes lines, given Charlemagne’s queer predilection for them? — in the course of which everyone had agreed that the clothes line, however useful, was a social menace and an aesthetic blight, and Charlie in a fit of lugubrious self-denial had made a face and said, ‘Oh, all right then, I’ll wear wet chinos from now on,’ and to everyone’s delight had taken the rusted garden shears and with an exaggerated grunt had snipped the clothes line in the middle, sending a solitary wooden peg flying into the air, where it triple-somersaulted like an acrobat before landing to great applause in Chas’s homemade lemon meringue pie.

Were the Kreitmans there? Charlie couldn’t see them. Let him close his eyes however many times, he could just about make out Marvin on the lawn, but not Hazel. Had she never been there, or had he never noticed her? Funny, because he had noticed every other woman. His own wife he had not, of course, noticed in that sense. Chas was just Chas, not there to be noticeable in that sense. Even as his heart was crashing through his stomach his memory did not rearrange her to be a visual stimulus to him. What he missed, with an ache like a wound, was the familiarity of her — however unfamiliar that was now, after all the months he hadn’t clapped eyes on her — and that included, as a matter of course, the dissatisfactions which had driven him to look too closely and with too much undisguised desire at every other woman on the lawn. Every other woman excluding Hazel, that is. Without a doubt, she had been there. Coldly, he could enumerate the occasions on which she was bound to have been there. So why couldn’t he see her there? He could come up with only one rational answer to that — he didn’t want to see her there. You don’t wipe a person out of your visual history unless your eyes reject them.