Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

And photographs too! Here was a stroke of luck. Passengers coming off the wheel — more airline talk — found their photographs waiting for them, not pinned to a board in the old innocent style of pleasure-boat snaps, but flickering on video screens. Proof, proof in the only medium that mattered, proof on the box!

Kreitman stepped up to the photograph collection point, to see if Chas and Nyman were already up there, arms about each other’s waists, smiling for the birdie. They weren’t. Not yet. Timed to correspond with the numbers leaving the wheel, the pictures on the video screens changed. You had to be quick. You had also, Kreitman soon realised, to have made the decision to be photographed. You weren’t automatically taken. You had to go into a booth before climbing aboard. You had to mean it. You had to want it. Would Chas have done that? Too risky, surely. But then again, think of her on her knees on the croquet lawn. Hadn’t that been all risk? Wasn’t coming here in the first place, all risk?

He kept looking. Terrible fake photographs they were, super-impositions of yourself on an unpeopled pod high above the city, an artificial expression of slightly sickly suspensefulness on your face. They should have studied him before going in if they wanted to know how you looked when you were feeling vertiginous, what a sickened stomach did to your colouring, how terror pulled at the corners of your mouth, how apprehension of disaster blooded your eyes.

He went on staring at the screens, watching them change. He couldn’t stop himself. It was like pornography. The same obsessional repetitiveness, on and on, page after page, hunting for that ideally disgusting image, the one that would give you everything, the one where the stranger’s outlandish pose finally met, in every specific, all the prerequisites of your own deranged desires. And at the back of your mind, never leaving you free to squander yourself without reproach, the horror of waste, the sense of ruined time. Tick-tock, tick-tock, hunting for that stranger who, by the miracle of revealed porn, happened to know the very thing you wanted. Except that today Kreitman wasn’t wanting anything from a stranger.

How long he’d been there he didn’t know. But it was long enough to forget the wheel itself, turning and disgorging, turning and disgorging, just a few feet behind him. Something made him look round. There it was, in all its density and clarity, the overwhelming knitted mass of spokes and almost as an afterthought, a sudden flash of inspiration, those beautiful fish-bowl pods. And there, climbing out of one of them, also as an afterthought, it seemed, was Chas — in his surprise he almost called her name — and there helping her, holding her elbow, tenderly solicitous, not Nyman, no, not Nyman or anyone remotely resembling Nyman, but Charlie, Charlie Merriweather, her lawful husband.

The two Charlies, together again, looking as though nothing had ever come between them.

‘You’d be a fool,’ Dotty had told her sister, a week or so before. ‘You’d be going straight back into all that shit again.’

‘What shit? I didn’t see any shit.’

‘Darling, everybody else saw it for you. Some of us were even forced to tread in it.’

‘Dotty!’

‘Have you forgotten already? Do you want me to remind you of the exact form of his proposition to me? The precise words, darling, were —’

‘Dotty, he was distraught.’

‘Of course he was distraught. He’ll always be distraught. Don’t agree to see him.’

‘I can’t. He’s —’

‘I know — distraught.’

‘I was going to say he’s the father of my children.’

‘Then let them see him.’

‘They won’t.’

‘Very wise of them.’

‘Dotty, I’ve got to see him. I’m drifting about.’

‘Why shouldn’t you be drifting about?’

‘It’s not my way. I need to know where I am.’

‘You’re having an affair, that’s where you are.’

‘It doesn’t suit me. I feel like someone else.’

‘That’s the point of an affair, darling.’

Chas fell silent. Then she repeated what she’d said before, ‘I’ve got to see him.’

‘In that case take Marvin with you at least.’

‘Marvin? Don’t be absurd.’

‘Then take me. Maybe he’ll slip in a quick proposition while he’s on his knees to you.’

‘Would you like that, Dotty?’

Dotty Jumper paused to take in breath. ‘Ah!’ she said. ‘The old sisterly reproach. I’d forgotten what it was like to have the sour taste of your marital sanctimoniousness back in my mouth. Don’t ask me what I think, Charlie, if you’ve already made your own mind up. But do yourself one little favour — he’ll be all over you like a rash, so meet him somewhere you can easily pick him off you and throw him out, once you discover, as I promise you will, that you are a changed woman and don’t like anything about him any more.’

With which Dotty, miffed, put down the phone.

The following evening Chas was on the wheel with Charlemagne.

It took one spin for the wife to voice her grievances — some of them going back almost a quarter of a century — and two more for the husband to admit and take the blame for everything. Almost everything. There followed a couple of necessarily stationary meetings in a coffee shop, in the course of which they had dodged, to each other’s satisfaction, the more difficult implications of rhapsodic infidelity, before they went up for a fourth and final time — the time Kreitman saw them leaving — as a sort of sentimental commemoration of the settlement of their differences.

‘So what was it like,’ Chas had to ask, just the once, ‘your sabbatical?’

To which Charlie had replied, ‘I had never realised how lonely sex for its own sake gets. It unpeoples you.’

‘Sex unpeoples you?’

‘We never saw anyone. We never spoke to anyone.’

‘Wasn’t that because you were wrapped up in each other?’

Get out of that one, Charlie.

He took a deep breath. ‘Sexually, yes,’ he said. Charlie Hyphen Smelly-Botty Fansbarns, lost in a dark wood. ‘Once upon a time,’ he started to tell her, ‘a very naughty man …’

‘Don’t,’ she said.

‘You don’t want to hear about the Lilith the Night Hag, and how she made spells to entrap very naughty men called Charlie Hyphen …’

‘Come on, Charlie,’ she said, ‘be honest. No one trapped you.’

‘Sex can feel like that, though,’ he admitted. ‘You can feel ensnared in it.’

She touched his arm. ‘You don’t have to spare me,’ she said. ‘You must have been in love with her a little bit. Don’t say sex when you mean love.’ They were standing shoulder to shoulder, surveying like astronauts the orb of the city, both of them straining their vision towards Richmond. ‘Be truthful. I can take it.’

‘I mean sex,’ Charlie said. ‘But of course, yes, there was some affection.’ He couldn’t bear to say more. He put his hand in her hair, pulling her head into the sanctuary of his shoulder. He loved having her there again, but there was another good reason for holding her to him — he wasn’t in control of his face, and he didn’t want her to see that.

‘So it was all just silliness?’ she asked at last.

He nodded, not trusting himself to words. But he was just able to say, ‘And you?’

She too wasn’t in control of her face. ‘The same,’ she said, with difficulty. ‘Just silliness.’

Lying in bed, Kreitman revolved the question — To whom was an explanation owing?

No words had been spoken when he saw them coming off the wheel. What was there to say? Might not a woman go for a joyride with the father of her children, her companion for more than two score years, and her collaborator in countless stories for young people? Kreitman did not have an inflated idea of his rights. Not for a moment did it occur to him to make a scene. In one action he saw them and, without waiting or wanting to know whether they had seen him, he fled. Novel for Kreitman, this. He did not recognise himself as a fleer. He had slunk away often enough. Skulked off in hyena shame, with his feeling parts dragging in the dirt. Or even faced up to the obligations of retreat like a man, with a tear in his eye and his hand sportingly outstretched — I did you wrong, may you fare better in the future. But this was the first time he had ever turned icy cold, gathered what he could only call his aura about him, as though there were a ghost self he carried on his shoulders, like a loose coat, and fled .