Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

Among the other things he liked about Dotty was coming upon her in one of the Merriweathers’ bathrooms doing mouth exercises in the mirror. Dotty had read that in order for her jawline not to go wrinkly-custardy she had a) never to smile and b) to put in as many hours in front of mirrors as she could manage, curling her lips inwards like little Swiss rolls and tensing her neck. Since this seemed to Kreitman to be exactly what lizards did and lizards had the most wrinkly jawlines in creation, he wasn’t confident Dotty was following the best advice. He loved catching her doing it, however, and seeing through the mirror if he could get her to forget injunction a). This too — Dotty’s facial exercise regime — Charlie considered silly.

‘Silly? I’d say it was desperate.’

‘Call it what you like, she’s behaving like Madame Bovary.’

‘And you’d like her to behave like who? Old Mother Riley?’

In fact, if she was behaving like anybody, Kreitman thought it was Anna Karenina. The last time he’d met Dotty was at a grand publishing party to mark the Merriweathers’ twenty-fifth work of collaboration, a sort of silver wedding of true minds. All very well for Kreitman to be ironic, but the truth was he clung to the Merriweathers’ literary and artistic connections like a shipwrecked sailor to a plank from the captain’s table. Being the retail luggage baron of south London had its social compensations, and Kreitman was careful not to go his father’s way and turn his nose up at them: trade fairs in Italy and Germany, the hospitality of wholesalers and importers, visits to manufacturers in Israel, Morocco, India, and sometimes, if he could get in when his staff weren’t looking, just serving in a shop and meeting customers. To this day, against the grain though it was, singing the praises of a purse he’d seen made in Rajasthan and then selling it in Camberwell — count the compartments! look at the stitching! feel how soft! — filled Kreitman with the purest satisfaction he knew, though of course he left it to others to handle the money. But he had loved university, revered people whose professions were their minds, and missed just hanging about, having time, talking over matters that need never be put to any practical or commercial test. Mental irresponsibility — that was what he craved and what the Merriweathers’ social circle gave him. And of course better sex, because as everyone knows, women in ideas deliver more imaginatively than women in business. As witness, maybe , Dotty Karenina.

Against her sister’s wishes (because there was no way Angus couldn’t be invited), Dotty brought along her beau, a surprisingly sweet-faced boy, considering his reputation for malice, who was famous for the number of books on any subject he was able to review in one week, and for the number of mentions of writers other than the ones reviewed he was able to squeeze into six hundred words. As a person meticulous about shirts, Kreitman disliked Dolly’s boyfriend because he purposely let his frayed cuffs hang out of his jacket sleeves unfastened, and didn’t always wear collars — a look Kreitman took to denote honest and even old-fashioned labour of the mind. Kreitman could easily have been wrong about this, but he believed the person you were meant to be reminded of was George Gissing, slave to Grub Street. ‘In your dreams!’ Kreitman thought. But he should have been more understanding. Although he dressed like Frankie ‘the Hat’ Lampeggiare now, at one time he had aspired to look like Francis Place, the radical. It was at this party, anyway, that Angus finally lost his nerve, abusing his wife in a loud and clanging voice, calling her a cradle-snatching, name-dropping adulteress, attempting to slap her face but missing, and subsequently leaving, slamming doors. A wound in the celebrations which healed no sooner than it was inflicted. Adulteress? Big deal! Except that it was a big deal to Charlie Kate who was looking for less silliness all round. And also a big deal to Kreitman, who could never commit enough adulteries of his own to feel easy with the idea of them going on elsewhere. For him, no less than for Charlie, adultery was a disturbing concept and an adulteress a dangerously inflammatory personage. Why wasn’t she committing adultery with him, being the first of many flaming questions she inspired. Hearing the word, Kreitman immediately sought Dotty’s crinkled eyes. Twist eyebeams with one of the parties to an adultery and it can be almost as good as the real thing. Nothing doing, though, at least not this time round. But an hour later, still observing her from across the room, Kreitman watched as Dotty, in a black linty woollen skirt and matching short-sleeved fluff-fraught top, inadvertently (or not) trailed her forearm through a platter of coleslaw. Was she watching him watching her? Slowly, she raised her arm to her mouth, sent out a tongue whose length and coloration were foreign to Kreitman on account of his only ever having seen her with her jaw set, and licked herself. Three darting probes followed by one wet lingering caress. Then she flushed, threw back her head and laughed like one of those humourless princesses in Ukranian fairy stories, finally tickled into gaiety by the antics of an uncoordinated peasant boy. Was Kreitman that peasant boy? Was the laugh a gift to him? He decided not. Dotty had turned crimson for the room. In that moment at least, she was whore to the universe.

Of all the things he thought about Dotty in the immediate aftermath of this, it never once occurred to Kreitman to ask how come the whore of the universe could be Mrs Charlie Merriweather’s sister. And you pay for omissions such as those.

‘When somebody you’re not sure you know seems to be smiling at you but might not be,’ Charles asked, after the meal, ‘what’s the sophisticated response?’

‘Keep your eyes down and your face straight,’ Kreitman answered. ‘Why? Who do you think’s smiling at you?’

Charlie Merriweather nodded in the direction of a woman whom Kreitman thought he recognised as someone his daughter admired, a sculptor like herself, only of a seriously older generation, say twenty-six, whose pieces were much in demand by public galleries though not, needless to say, by private buyers who couldn’t run the risk of their cleaners doing what Charlie’s mother used to do with Charlie’s anguished letters from his freezing school and throwing them in the bin. ‘I’m not going to fall into the trap of asking by what aesthetic this is art,’ Kreitman had joshed his daughter, ‘but why call it sculpture when she doesn’t sculpt?’ To which her reply was, ‘Oh, Dad, just leave it.’

‘Well, if she’s who I think she is,’ Kreitman said to Charlie, ‘she’s one of Ooshi’s.’

‘Ooshi’s?’

‘A dealer. I’m not sure but I think her name’s Nicolette Halliwell and she does things with trash.’

‘What does she do with trash?’

‘Conceals speakers in it, I think.’

‘Then what?’

‘Then she arranges it to look like trash again. Talking trash. You have the air of a man who would like her to do something similar with you.’

‘I wish,’ Charlie said.

‘You don’t,’ Kreitman said. ‘You don’t wish anything. You’re happily monogamous and even if you weren’t, why her?’

‘The slut thing.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Charlie! Those are just cold sores.’

But Charlie was beginning, in a general way, to smile back. ‘Don’t you think she’s sexy?’ he said, more to the air and its angels than to Kreitman.

‘Not to my eye,’ Kreitman said. ‘To my eye she looks seasick. Queasy, like a half-drowned rat.’

‘Then there’s something wrong with your eye,’ Charlie said. ‘To mine she’s drop-dead gorgeous.’

‘Do me one favour,’ Kreitman said, ‘don’t talk like your children. Dangerously close to whose age, incidentally, she is. So do you know her or not?’