Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

But store them up for what? Store them up for when? Her old age? Her lonely old age? Never mind, never mind. She might soon get knocked down by a bus. She might feel a stab in her chest and fold over. You never know what’s waiting for you. All you can do is store. Just store.

In order to make Charlie feel that he was no fly-by-night, that Kennington was his even though none of his friends ever visited him there, Hazel had changed the message on the answering machine. Not what a modern woman was supposed to do, but she’d done it. Now it was Charlie who said, ‘Neither Hazel nor Charlie is available to come to the phone at the moment …’ She would leave the message on. Kreitman she had wiped off years ago. Charlie she would leave on for ever. She played it again. ‘Neither Hazel nor Charlie is available to come to the phone at the moment …’ In his booming voice. Falling over his own larynx. Grammatically precise. Jocular. As though the reason neither he nor Hazel was available to come to the phone at the moment was that they were lying laughing in each other’s arms.

Store it up.

That’s what I am now, she thought. I am like my mother. A storehouse.

She went into her office and pulled from her cupboards the plans and the wallcharts and the calendars and the timetables she had put away when Charlie moved in with her, hoping she would never have to consult them again. Then she changed into clothes more suitable for doing business and began ringing her contractors and decorators. It didn’t take long before she was shouting. No need to worry about Charlie. He couldn’t hear. He was sitting in the study she’d built him at the top of the house, unproductive, moving his lips like a man composing a very long letter to himself, barely aware of the rain which fell and fell and fell.

Standing in the wet didn’t bother Kreitman. Ordinarily it would have maddened him, ordinarily he couldn’t bear being baited by the elements, but standing watching the wheel, he didn’t mind. Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks? Not exactly. He was in no fighting mood. No call to have the cocks drowned or the steeples drenched. Just himself. Dampen me, you elements. Drip, rain, and put me out.

Besides, the seeping discomfort was appropriate to the activity. Two-bit private eyes don’t go everywhere in raincoats for no reason. They carry the dismal weather around with them, in their hearts.

Kreitman was amazed how quiet Soho was among the rooftops, a mere four or five storeys up. You heard the fire engines and the police cars and the occasional blood-curdling scream — usually a joke — but otherwise he felt he could have been in a suburb. Richmond, say. Even the pounding jungle music coming from car radios was no worse than you’d have got in Richmond. As for the din of the streets themselves — ‘Honk, honk, urgent delivery!’ — barely a whisper.

But then, as he’d have been the first to admit, he was engrossed. He couldn’t decide whether or not he’d chosen the right location. Would it have suited his purposes better to be positioned where he could see the capsules front on, looming suddenly on the wheel’s peak, hoving, hovering, then coming crashing down on him like a waterfall? Or even from behind, where he could watch their backs as they ascended from the ground, rose and arched and slowly vanished — the goodbye view? The spectacle he’d opted for, of the entire rotating wheel full-face, like the sun, all but the very lowest capsules visible simultaneously, was picturesque but less dramatic. There’d be no jolt of invidious recognition this way, no lurch of the stomach as the pod containing people you recognised, people you loved and people you hated, people you loved with people you hated, swung brutally into your face. Was he sparing himself, after all?

He was too far away. His binoculars were powerful, but he knew he was kidding himself if he thought he was going to distinguish any individual or individuals with any certainty among the crowds. As for whether he’d be able to make out what they were up to, paddling palms, exchanging reechy kisses, fumbling for each other’s loose change — forget it. A handjob in silhouette in an empty pod, yes, he’d be able to pick that out, from Mars he’d be able to pick that out. But the pods weren’t travelling empty.

On the evening Chas stood him up, Kreitman watched until the Eye disappeared into the rain mists. Twice he thought he’d seen Chas. Her strong profile. The stiff billow of her spinnaker. A hundred times he’d seen Nyman. Insinuating as a rat. But not once together. Being discreet, were they?

Back in his flat he wondered about the logic of Chas’s actions. How many times could she face making circles over London with her lover? Wouldn’t that pall quickly? Silly question, since you would have thought Nyman would pall quickly, since you would have thought he’d pall immediately, but apparently he didn’t. But pall or no pall, why meet somewhere so crowded, so inconvenient, for so short a time, so often? Secrecy, yes, but had Chas not heard of hotels? One possible answer was that she was tormenting Nyman by granting him the favour of her company for no longer than a single revolution of the wheel. A subtle torture, worthy of Scheherazade, that inappropriate patron saint of the children’s story, and a subtle moral prevarication — driving Nyman barmy while keeping herself respectable, confining her infidelity to a single rotation in a public place, and in that way, if Kreitman could only see it, limiting the damage she was doing to him. ‘I am only unfaithful to you Marvin, for the time it takes the London Eye to go round once.’ Could a man who’d lived as he’d lived deny her that?

Perhaps he couldn’t, but in the meantime it was himself to whom he was denying nothing.

The following day Chas cancelled again, and then again the day after that. Still holidaying. ‘No need to follow her,’ Kreitman told Maurice. ‘Just give me a call if you see her getting into a taxi.’

And that was how, late one autumn afternoon, Kreitman came to be mingling with the crowds queuing to climb aboard the wheel. For all the world a holidaymaker himself, until you got close and smelt the agitation on him.

He had no plan of action. If he found them, would he confront them on the spot? He didn’t know. Unlikely. Would he use bad language? He didn’t know. Unlikely. Would he keep his distance, follow them, muffled, into the capsule, wait until they had attained the apex of the ride and unmask them in the very act? Pretty difficult to achieve, given the numbers of people and the regimented ticket-buying. And, no, not what he wanted anyway. He stood back from the mêlée, exhilarated by the machinery, the giant spokes, the great engines painted red like toy trains on their backs, the tensed cables strung very nearly as tight as his nervous system. He leaned against a sculpture dedicated to the International Brigade, THEY WENT BECAUSE THEIR OPEN EYES COULD SEE NO OTHER WAY. Him too. He was here in the same cause, a martyr to the open eye, an international brigadier of love.

Ideally, he would find them, follow them, hop into the capsule next to theirs and spy on them from there. Nothing else. That would do it. Just that. Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course and never blinking an eye.

But first find them in the jostle. The fact of it was that anyone not queuing, anyone on the perimeter like him, was a thousand times more conspicuous than the funsters waiting to climb on. If they were there, they’d see him before he saw them. He decided against looking for them in the check-in lines — he hated the facetious airline vocabulary British Airways had brought to the wheel: it wasn’t a fucking flight, it was a ride — and took himself instead to the disembarkation point. Never mind following them on, he’d follow them off. Catch them not in flagrante but post factum, post festum, post coitum . Not as much fun, not as much pain, but decisive. And in that way, taking the long view, maybe more extended pain eventually. Because it would mean he had allowed the thing to happen, connived at it.