Which is not a reason for our refusing to count them for him.
Handsome, clever and rich, white, male and whole, a sperm-tank heterosexual, though not a heave-ho heterosexual, youthfully middle-aged, with a comfortably over-furnished home, an only middlingly cheerless disposition by the suicidal standards of the age, and, as of his most recent precautionary Wellman going-over, entirely clot-, cholesterol- and cancer-free. Prostate firmer than a green mango and a colon so clean he could have invited his mother to take tea in it. Put your ear to Kreitman’s squishy, wire-haired chest and you’d hear the engine purring nicely. Forty-five thousand on the clock and who would dare say there wasn’t another forty-five thousand left in him. For Kreitman is of the generation that might just live for ever.
But let’s not go overboard. Handsome only if you like bruised summer-berry lips and eyes that appear permanently – and painfully to the person who must look at them – punched out; clever, if you don’t too much mind assertive, though not so assertive as to have done anything worthwhile with his PhD, such as become the Prime Minister he was meant to be, or Chancellor, or even, as many of his contemporaries had become, ball polisher, language juggler, or brave-face artist to one or to the other; and no more than moderately rich given what everybody else was earning, south London only being south London – so not eat-your-heart-out or Hello! magazine rich, not a multi or a funky millionaire, but certainly well-enough-to-do to have fulfilled the first of his mother’s ambitions for him, and to have kept his hands free of the stain of paper money.
To complete his happiness, he loved – without much thinking about them – four women: his mother (of course), his wife (which was more unusual for a Kreitman), and his daughters Juliet and Cressida. And was in love with – that’s to say he thought about them every second of every day, except for when he was lying whimpering in the arms of any individual one of them, during which time, as a matter of erotic rectitude, he thought only about her – five more. His mother’s second husband’s nurse, his wife’s interior decorator, the curator of his daughter Cressida’s first mixed show, and the mothers, unsuspected of course by their daughters or daughters-in-law, of his wife’s interior decorator’s ex-husband, and of a window dresser with whom he’d been in love in earlier times.
It isn’t necessary to memorise all these. Kreitman didn’t.
That’s bravado, of course. Though he was sexually squeamish and shrank from being thought dissolute or lecherous – anyone less lecherous than himself he had never met – Marvin Kreitman did entertain a nostalgic affection for many of the old discredited categories of masculinist swagger. He would have liked to cut a swathe. He would have liked to leap from balcony to balcony, the edge of his sword a flash of silver lightning in the Venetian night. But he wasn’t enough of a blasphemer to be a rake. Had any frozen statue confronted Kreitman with his misdeeds, he’d have cried ‘God help me!’ and run a mile. In fact, he was just a serial faller-in-love, a sentimental maker of goo-goo eyes like Thomas Hardy or H. G. Wells, rheumy, sad moustachioed men in frock coats and tight Edwardian trousers. Kreitman could do sad and rheumy as well as anyone, but because he was dark and shiny, with a complexion as polished as the carapace of a beetle, people took him to be a hunter and a carnivore. He was the victim of his appearance. He looked the way men were no longer supposed to look.
Which might explain why he got on well with women of an earlier generation. Mothers of the girls he went out with always liked him more than their daughters did. And mostly he felt the same about them. Give him a mother and he’d forget the daughter, any time. There was a quality of disappointment or disillusion in mothers that agreed with him. Offered the choice, he would rather have sarcasm in a woman than sweetness. Maybe he felt he could do something for sarcastic women; console them or compensate them. Maybe he felt that their bitterness exonerated him in advance: at worst he would only confirm what their experience had already taught them. Or maybe, if this isn’t altogether too simple an explanation, he could never be on the end of too much mothering. Whatever the reason, one way or another, he went in for mothers.
So how come he had made such a dog’s dinner of relations with his wife’s mother?
The very question Marvin Kreitman put to Hazel Kreitman (then Hazel Nossiter) at the time of their engagement, more than twenty years before. ‘So what’s wrong with your mother?’
What could Hazel Nossiter say? ‘She doesn’t like you.’
‘I know she doesn’t like me. Why doesn’t she like me?’
And what could Hazel Nossiter say to that? She doesn’t like you because your father sells purses on a street market in Balham? She doesn’t like you because you’re sulky and never look at her? Instead she said, and this was also true, ‘She doesn’t like you because you’ve never let her like you.’
Kreitman’s mother-in-law kept a photograph on her dressing table of her daughter with her arms around a man. The man was not Kreitman. The man was a soldier in the Israeli Defence Forces. Yossi. A grinner with more teeth visible than Kreitman had in the whole of his mouth. Hazel had met Yossi on holiday the year before she met Kreitman. She had been travelling with a student Christian group to the Holy Places. She wasn’t Christian in the Christian sense, but it was something to do. Hazel was like that: people asked her to go somewhere with them, so she went. As witness Yossi. He had stopped the bus Hazel was travelling on, ordered her off at rifle-point, walked her into the Negev and strip-searched her.
It was love at first sight. As soon as Kreitman’s mother-in-law saw Yossi’s photograph she fell in love with him.
That Yossi was no more than an outdoor version of Kreitman, Kreitman without his shirt on, only made it worse for Kreitman and for Hazel. ‘If you’re so hot for Yossi, how come you aren’t hot at all for Marvin?’ Hazel asked.
‘Because Yossi smiles,’ her mother explained. ‘And because he doesn’t have a pleading expression in his eyes. And because he doesn’t look as though he thinks he’s done something wrong. And because his father doesn’t sell purses on a street market in Balham. Are those enough reasons for you, darling?’
This was why Kreitman had never let his mother-in-law like him enough for him to fall in love with her. She was already in love with another man. And Kreitman only fell in love with women who were already a bit in love with him. Which shows, as Mrs Nossiter had shrewdly noticed, how little confidence in himself he had.
Despite which, or more likely because of which, he was head over heels in love with five women and not insusceptible to a sixth. For once you start falling in love with women it is impossible to stop.
And once you start counting …
But Kreitman had to count something. No one can get through life indifferent to numbers. Money, blessings, lovers – we are too ethereal to do without the material world, and too indeterminate to tell ourselves apart without measuring how much material we’ve commandeered. Call it ballast, call it markings. So many tons, so many stripes. The God-fearing count their beads, and even the most self-denying anchorite tots up what he’s relinquished at the end of every day.
Making a distinction between those he didn’t think about and those he thought about all the time, between those who were so conjunctive to his life and soul he didn’t need to think about them and those who renewed him with the novelty of their affections, Kreitman counted to five. When his life made no sense to him he would try counting backwards, to include every woman he had ever loved, and every woman who had ever loved him, but there was something pathetic about that. He’d save retrospective accumulation for when he was an old man. For the time being, five (plus four) would do. Not too few. Not too many.
Though of course any number can be too many for some people. Take his friend, Charlie Merriweather …
‘I get nightmares after talking to you,’ Charlie told him over their weekly pretend-pauper dim sum lunch in Lisle Street. ‘I dream about waking up in bed with someone whose name I can’t remember.’
Excluding his daughter, whom he could never not think of as his little girl – for ever the wriggly Kitty-Litter Farnsbarns – Charlie loved just the one woman. And her name he had no difficulty at all remembering in bed, seeing as it was the same as his. Charlotte Jane – the other half of C. C. Merriweather, the composite writer of children’s stories – known as Charlie since before she could remember. A tomboy name. And a tomboy she had looked, protruding like a sheaf of wheat from her wedding dress, unconfined and boisterous, even as she and Charlie exchanged their marriage vows. ‘Charlie Juniper, do you take Charlie Merriweather? Charlie Merriweather, do you take Charlie Juniper?’ Both unprotected, lacking eyelashes, big-boned and trundling, with the air of having been left out in all seasons, like the Cerne Abbas giant and his wife. Did the Charlies take? Of course the Charlies took. ‘I now pronounce you … You may kiss …’ And they’d been kissing each other, to the exclusion of all others, ever since. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. Just fancy, Marvin Kreitman thought, wondering if it was like kissing yourself.
‘I’m interested to hear,’ were his actual words, ‘that when you go to bed what you dream about is going to bed.’
‘Only after seeing you.’
‘I wouldn’t think that one through, Charlie.’
Charlie Merriweather laid down his chopsticks and sighed one of his big sad cheery sighs. ‘Not the homo routine, Marvin.’
‘I can’t help it. I’m homophobic.’
‘You affect to be homophobic.’
‘Only because I’m a latent homosexual.’
‘You’re not a latent homosexual. And anyway, no homosexual would have you.’
‘That’s why I’m homophobic.’
‘All this,’ Charlie said, trying to change the mood, ‘to disguise the fact that you think I’m the bent one.’
Kreitman laughed. People liked getting Kreitman to laugh because his laughter always seemed to take him by surprise, as though it was a sound he didn’t know he had it in him to make.
‘Charlie, not for one moment have I ever thought of you as bent. To be candid with you, and I’d like this not to go any further than these four walls, I don’t believe anyone is bent. Not really. Not in their hearts. My theory is that they’re all pretending. But you … Why are you shaking your head?’
‘Because you aren’t being candid with me. Why won’t you admit you’re not able to come up with any other satisfactory explanation.’
‘For what? The mincing way you pick at your food? You don’t have to be gay to burn your fingers on pork-and-chive dumplings.’
Charlie Merriweather inspected his fingers, velvety and padded like a dog’s paws. He appeared to be thinking about licking them clean. ‘Now that’s homophobic,’ he said.
‘Tell me about it.’
‘You think I’m peculiar, Marvin, because I don’t have affairs.’
‘Charlie, it’s not my business whether you have affairs or not. Besides, for all I know you have hundreds. I’ve seen you at book signings.’
‘You’ve seen us both at book signings. And the people we sign for are all under twelve.’
‘Twelve going on seventy. They’re getting older, your readers, I’ve noticed that.’
‘Your usual point is that they’re getting younger.’
‘The old are getting younger – I think that’s my usual point.’
‘You’ll also have noticed, since you notice so much, that I haven’t had an affair since I met Charlie.’
‘When I first knew you you were complaining you hadn’t had an affair before you met Charlie.’
‘Oh, Lord, was I? Then that just proves it. I’m not an affair person. That’s why you’re starting to wonder about me.’
‘People who wonder whether people are wondering about them are usually wondering about themselves. But I’d leave being gay out of it. Doesn’t the received wisdom have it that gays tend more to promiscuity than the other thing?’
‘Not the happily married ones, Marvin.’
‘Ah!’
Kreitman finally let the hovering Chinese waitress take away his bowl. She’d been eyeing it from the minute Kreitman started eating. But that’s the way of it in Lisle Street, where the restaurants tend to be tiny and the clearing-away matters more than the cooking. What Kreitman and Merriweather both liked about this restaurant was having to step over the yellow plastic slop buckets at the entrance. It gave them the feeling of being in Shanghai.
‘Ah what?’ Merriweather wanted to know.
‘Just Ah,’ Kreitman said. He wiped his mouth with his napkin and closed his face down. Not another word until the quarters of orange arrived. And the hot barbers’ towels, exploding out of their hygienic wrappers. Bang! Bang! Untouched by human hand. (There was a joke, in the backstreets of Shanghai, WI – fastidiousness!) Only after he’d exploded his towel did Kreitman explain himself. ‘Are you on an errand from Hazel via Charlie? Is that what this is all about? Are we raising questions of sexual irregularity so that you can steer the conversation round to mine?’
‘Charlie and I don’t discuss your marriage, Marvin. Much, no doubt, as you would like us to. You’ve been trying to wring disapproval out of me for twenty years. Sorry – no can do. I have no attitude to the way you live.’
‘The way I live?’ Unbidden, the face of Shelley, his mother’s second husband’s nurse, invaded Kreitman’s thoughts. They had been to the theatre the night before where Kreitman had been struck by the prettiness of her concentration. He had told her so, whereupon, without changing her expression, she had called him a patronising bastard. He was remembering how prettily she said that.
‘I have no attitude to you and women other than maybe some sneaking envy. I think you’re a lucky devil …’
‘Luck doesn’t come in to it, Charlie.’ Unbidden, the long unshaven legs of Ooshi.
‘I don’t mean I think you’re lucky because of what you get. I mean you’re lucky to have the temperament you have. Lucky to be able to do it. I couldn’t. Can’t. Don’t want to, either, in the end. I think I’ve become used to nice sex …’
‘Run that by me again.’
‘Nice sex …’
‘You mean tired sex.’
‘I mean nice sex. Same person, same place, same time – I like that. But that doesn’t mean I disapprove of your way. It’s not for me. I just don’t have the balls.’
Followed by the bill.
Two old friends, one steadfastly in love with the same woman all his married life, one not, meeting regularly to decide who is the unhappier. And then losing their nerve.
Some days, so engrossed were they in not getting round to having the conversation they would like to have had, they couldn’t part. They would idle about Soho, back through Chinatown, across Shaftesbury Avenue and into the wicked warren of Berwick and Brewer and Broadwick, where every window was suggestive of deviance, even those with only cream cakes or rolls of calico on display. Then they would cut back through the street market, past the fish and veggie men playing furtive stand-up poker with the barber outside the King of Corsica, past the fruiterers offering ‘A pound a scoo’ ‘ere!’ – three tomatoes, five lemons, seven onions, take your pick, pre-weighed in stainless-steel bowls, scoops, like winnings at a fairground – then out via suppurating Peter Street, where the pimps pick their teeth with match ends, into Wardour, dog-legging through Old Compton, getting gayer, into Dean and Frith, scenes of some jittery escapades in the skin trade when they were students, or at least when Kreitman was, but sorted out and hardened now, pedestrianised, masculinised, production company’d, cappuccino’d. What they were waiting for was a decent interval to elapse between lunch and afternoon tea. They needed to go on sitting opposite each other, eating and drinking, skirting the issues of their lives, almost saying what they wanted to say. Space allowing, they would crush into Patisserie Valerie where it was too public to break down and weep, failing that one of the new coffee houses, though preferably not one that was too exclusively or too hostilely butch.
Genuinely bothered by gays, were they? No. Yes. No. Yes. No, not bothered exactly. More destabilised. How could they be otherwise? The public hand-holding was so new and so challenging. And intended to be destabilising, was it not, in the way that a protest march is intended to shake the convictions of those happy with the status quo. Of the two, Kreitman was more agitated by gayness than Charlie, for whom the hetero life was baffling enough. The beauty of monogamy is that nothing outside its magic circle impinges on it; it has its own worries to attend to. Kreitman, though, was in a sort of competition with gayness. He felt seriously undermined by it. Challenged on the very ground where he had planted his colours. He meant it when he said he wasn’t sure he believed anyone really wanted to mess around in his own sex. Other, other – that had been his driving force since he could remember. As much other as you could muster. They had even called it other, he and his friends. ‘Cop any other, last night?’ Other when life was ribald, other when it grew more serious. The nobleness of life is to do thus … He being Antony, the other being Cleopatra (blazing black eyes, gold hooped earrings and dirty fingertips). But apparently not. Not necessarily so. What about the nobleness of life is to do thus – he being Antony, the other being … well, you tell me? Was that the great love story of our time – Antony and Antony? In which case where did that leave him, toiling at an activity no longer prized? Carrying home the cups and pennants no one else wanted or could be bothered to compete for?
Only recently, while sitting at a bar in an exhibition hall in Hamburg – off buying purses – he had fallen into conversation with a couple of Biedermeier gays from Berlin. He had liked them, found them handsome, found their neatness transfixing, enjoyed the musky smell of them, got drunk and allowed his tongue to run away with him. ‘This gay business …’ He was speaking as a man’s man himself, he hoped they understood. Which they did, perfectly. The only thing they didn’t understand was why a man’s man chose to spend so much time – so much quality time, they laughed – in the company of women. ‘What?’ He was surprised by his own surprise. As were they. Had he really never stopped to ask himself before today what it said about his masculinity that it shied so nervously – they were only taking him at his own word here – from masculinity in others. They didn’t put it to him like this, of course, they were altogether far too urbane, but if anyone were to be called a sissy …
Was the cyclist who shouted ‘Honk, honk, urgent delivery’ and deliberately all but ran Kreitman down on the corner of Broadwick and Poland Street gay? He rode as though dozing in an armchair, not remotely urgent, his head thrown back, his hands insolently off his handlebars, wearing green bulging lunch-pack shorts, a thunder and lightning sleeveless vest, a pink and purple nylon baseball cap reversed, with a matching pink and purple nylon backpack scarcely big enough to hold an eyeliner pencil and a couple of tightly rolled condoms – what did that say?
‘My fucking right of way!’ Kreitman yelled after him. ‘Try that again, you moron, and I’ll have you in the fucking gutter!’
Almost out of sight by now, for Kreitman delivered long sentences, the cyclist put one of his free hands behind his back and showed Kreitman his finger. Was it painted?
‘Make me Mayor of London for just five minutes, Charlie,’ Kreitman fumed, ‘invest me with the power and I’ll have every sanctimonious fucking faggot cyclist in the capital in clink.’
‘Only the faggot ones?’
‘What gets me is they think they’ve got some God-given dispensation, the lot of them, just because they’re not punching holes in the ozone layer. I’ve seen the future, Charlie – we fetishise these arseholes and they run us down! Serves us right.’
What amazed Charlie was how furious Kreitman had become, how quickly and seamlessly furious, given the smallness of the offence and the number of reasons (five plus four) Kreitman had to be happy.
This didn’t happen every time the two men lunched late in town. Mostly they would plunge back peaceably into twilit Soho, enjoying the nightly handover, the silver cans of film spilling stardust as they skipped between production houses, the workers leaking home and the theatregoers nosing out, the shops shuttering, the rubbish piling, the bars starting to fill, the daytime beggars leaving with their sleeping bags over their shoulders, ceding to the night shift, and the mobs of inflamed teenage boys from penurious countries, bound in a sort of helix of indecision, drifting apart but always attached to one another, like the arms of a kindergarten mobile. In their different ways, both Marvin Kreitman and Charlie Merriweather felt at home here; nothing to do with the film and television industry, or the wholesale jewellery trade, or the silk merchants, or the Lithuanian lowlifes; what they enjoyed was the peculiarly English early-evening melancholy, the sensible damped-down expectancy, the scruffiness taking from the excitement, unless scruffiness happened to be what excited you …
‘What I can’t decide,’ Kreitman said, ‘is whether it’s like peeling off an expensive whore and finding cheap cotton underwear, or undressing a scrubber and finding La Perla.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Merriweather, setting his big chin. ‘I wouldn’t know either way.’
Whereupon they would decrease their pace, ring their wives on their mobiles, and decide on somewhere to have dinner.
Tonight, and it was to be a night different from all other nights for both of them, they chose a big noisy Italian which Kreitman’s window dresser had told him about and where, therefore, he couldn’t take her mother – one of the new steel-cool New York Italians, sans napery and sans space between the tables, in which, supposing they let you in, you were laughed at if you asked for fegato or tiramisu and waitresses as touchy as grenades took you through pastas named after eminent Mafiosi.
‘Christ, Charlie, what’s cavatappi?’
‘I’m frightened to. But it comes with a sauce of smoked turkey, seared leeks and brandied shallots. Nice and light. I’ll have that. You?’
‘Elicoidali with five cheeses.’
‘What’s elicoidali?’
‘What it sounds like. Italian for coronary.’
‘Then don’t have it.’
‘Too late to start worrying about that.’
He rubbed his great dog’s-paw hands together, daring death. Charlie the high-risk voluptuary. Around food he was still the prep-school glutton, smacking his chops and popping his cheeks to cram in one more lolly. Be the same around the you-know-what, Kreitman thought, deliberately courting ugliness, not himself yet, not recovered from the affront of being almost knocked down by a cocksucker. And lectured to by his best friend – was it a lecture? – about nice sex.
‘And a bottle of Brunello di Montecello,’ he told the waitress. It was time to start that.
Had they not eaten Chinese for lunch they might well have gone for Indian tonight. Not the poncy stuff. Not cuisine vindaloo, served on big white plates – two dry lamb chops presented with their legs in the air, like Soho pole-dancers, in a baby-powdering of fenugreek. By Indian, the two friends still meant stainless-steel bowls of blistering brown slop, suddenly called balti. They had lived in Indian restaurants in their student days, shovelling down old-fashioned bhunas and madrases in Camden High Street before and after going to see Jack Nicholson movies. Kreitman’s choice; Charlie Merriweather didn’t care for movies and only went to have somewhere quiet to sleep off one curry and dream of the next. Kreitman (who could have passed for an Indian anywhere but in India – Sabu, they had called him at school) even got around to learning to cook festive Indian dishes, sitting cross-legged in the kitchen of his too expensive digs, crumbling saffron and separating sheets of vark, the edible silver leaf of which angels’ tongues are made, with a view to transforming the humble pilau into an offering to the gods. And Charlie? He rubbed his hands and watched. Sometimes he rubbed his stomach and salivated. ‘Knives and forks, Charlie!’ Kreitman would shout. ‘Bowls! Pickles! Spoons!’
Considering their upbringings – Charlie left to fend for himself at an unheated minor public school near Lewes, Kreitman encouraged to run riot at a progressive in Farnborough and never once to make a bed or rinse a toothbrush if he wasn’t minded – you would have put your money on Charlie turning out the housemaker. But Charlie had been awed by university and fell helpless the moment he got there. His bulk embarrassed him. When he went to lectures, he felt his head was too big and annoyed the people behind. He tried slumping, but that only drew sarcasm from the lecturer who told him that if he was as tired as he looked perhaps he ought not to have got up. He was ashamed of his voice which was too public school for the crowd he had half fallen in with, and too loud as well. ‘Don’t boom at me,’ a girl from Newcasde had told him on what couldn’t quite pass for a date, and that had made him more ashamed and somehow, as though to compensate, more booming still. By the end of his first term he was racked with confusion, a person who was too noisy and too shy, who was too much there and yet not there at all. He drooped disconsolately, like a puppy who had grown too big for its owner and been thrown on to the streets. ‘I’m just waiting for someone to take pity on me,’ he told Kreitman. ‘I’ve taken pity on you,’ Kreitman reminded him. ‘No,’ Charlie said, ‘I mean a woman.’ Someone to take pity on him, adore him, cook him breakfast and give him a good home.
Whereas Kreitman was putting mileage, fast, between himself and the idea of a man instanced by his father, the Purse King. Sullen at work, sullen back from work, whisky from the cut-glass decanters on the solid-silver tray on the walnut sideboard, scoff without a thank-you, empty apron, count, curse, packet of Rennies, five spoons of Gaviscon, half a gallon of Andrews Liver Salts, gallstones, ulcer, cancer, heart attack, swear, snore, stroke. Maybe at first the decanters weren’t cut glass, or the tray solid silver, or the whisky single malt, but Rome wasn’t built in a day; by the time the purse empire had extended to two markets, then to three, then to the first of the shops in Streatham High Street – KREITMAN THE RIGHTMAN FOR SMALL LEATHER – nothing conducive to Bruno Kreitman’s well-being, not that he ever enjoyed any well-being, wasn’t of the best. Why did Kreitman hate his father so intensely on account of those whisky decanters? Because they bottled up curiosity. Because they denied the random mess of life. His father could have come home from the markets with funny stories, anecdotes of the pedlar’s life, traveller’s tales. Guess what happened to me today … ? Who do you think I ran into … ? Listen, you’ll enjoy this … But he didn’t see himself as a pedlar and therefore wasn’t able to avail himself of any of the pedlar’s consolations. The fact that it was small leather he was peddling only made it worse. You can’t distance yourself from the public when you’re flogging them small leather. Purses and wallets infect mankind with a distraction close to madness. But he could have made a virtue of that, couldn’t he? Could have come home expert in the rich insanity of his trade – ‘You should see them at my stall, like perverts loosed into a playground. Fingering, poking, probing. Sniffing the leather. Rubbing the suede against their cheeks. You’re the clever dick, Marvin, you explain to me why every woman over fifty, whether she intends to buy a new purse or not, feels she has to show you the contents of her old one.’ Marvin Kreitman, growing into a speculative boy, would have enjoyed putting his mind to that. ‘Could it be love they crave, Dad? Could purse-buying be like exhibitionism, a cry of sexual loneliness?’ Bad luck, in that case, if you happened on Kreitman Senior. Nothing doing there. He rebuffed all cries for help and told the punters not to finger his goods if they weren’t buying. Swore at them, too, if they persisted or grew tetchy or had the effrontery to haggle. Take it or fucking leave it. Sambo! Yes, Sambo as well, under his poisoned breath. Anybody call Bruno Kreitman a kike and he’d have had the Haganah in and instigated another Nuremberg. But Sambo awakened no consciousness of equivalence in him. He would still be swearing when he got home, reliving the mortifications of his day: the bleeders – curses aimed at his own chest, blows to his own heart – the bleeders! Turning Kreitman’s soul to ash. It amazed the boy that with manners as gruff as his, his father ever managed to sell anything. But there’s the mystery of the purse. In the end it will sell itself.
So if he didn’t see himself as a pedlar, what did Kreitman’s father see himself as? Simple – a man with a round stomach and a bald head who wore silver-grey waistcoats and black mourning ties and drank whisky from cut-glass decanters. A sort of maître d’ in his own house. Everything else took from his dignity. Kreitman went buying with his father sometimes, accompanying him in silence from warehouse to warehouse in Stepney and Stamford Hill, where it upset him to see how cheerfully other purse sellers embraced the ups and downs of purse-selling, and how much they reciprocated his father’s icy loathing of them. There was always laughter in the warehouses, exaggerated comedy even when expected lines had not arrived, or returns were being dealt with, or someone was accusing someone else of pinching from his trolley. Everybody, from the smallest tuppenny-ha’penny stallholder in Brixton to the owner of the biggest bag arcade in Hammersmith, everybody including the person in the mobster suit and expensive wig whose warehouse they were in, rejoiced in the rubbish around which their lives revolved. ‘Look at this! Henry, look at what you’re asking me to buy. The clasp doesn’t fasten. The lining’s hanging out. The zip’s the wrong colour. And the dye’s coming off in my hand.’ ‘It’s fashion. It’s what the kids want.’ ‘Henry, you’ve been stocking this same bag since the Coronation. And it wasn’t in fashion then.’ ‘Morris, you know what your trouble is? You’re a short-term merchant. If I’ve been stocking this bag since the Coronation, what does it tell you?’ ‘That it’s such drek you can’t sell it.’ ‘No, that it’s such drek I can’t get enough. So how many do you want?’ ‘I’ll take a gross.’
Everybody making the best of the worst except his father, Bruno the Bagman, known to his fellow bagmen as Bruno the Broygis – that’s to say Bruno the Bad-Tempered, Bruno the Taker of Umbrage, Bruno the Bilious.
‘You’re not a bad kid,’ one of the bagmen took Marvin Kreitman aside to tell him once, ‘but if you want to know why we can’t stomach your old pot and pan, it’s because he acts as though there’s a bad smell under his nose all the time, and we get the impression that the bad smell is us. He’s a gantse k’nacker, you understand? He acts like a big shot, like he’s superior to us. But there’s something we all want to know. You tell me. What exactly is your father superior at?’
Marvin Kreitman, blushing to the roots of his hair, shrugged his shoulders. ‘You’ll have to ask somebody else that,’ he said. But he had no idea who that would be.
It also upset him to discover that his father stole from the warehouses, removing the newsprint and tissue-paper stuffing from briefcases and overnight bags when no one was looking, and filling them with key fobs and billfolds. Were they so badly off that his father needed to do that? No. His father stole as an expression of umbrage. He did it to spite. And who knows, perhaps to besmirch himself in his own eyes; to confirm his fall from a grace he hadn’t attained. And was he never found out? Years later, buying on his own account, Kreitman learned that his father’s petty thieving had been common knowledge, tolerated because he bought big – thought big, bought big – and also, it seemed, because those he stole from knew that Kreitman’s father was thereby slowly poisoning himself, and were content, for the price of a few key fobs, that his death should be as horrible and protracted as possible. Which it was. Not gallstones or ulcers or cancer that claimed him in the end. Strictly speaking there was no end. He just went on being himself until his constitution had had enough. Cause of death – if that which has never lived can the – gangrene of the personality. Unable to support it any longer, the body coughed up black bile streaked with black blood, collapsed in a bucket of Andrews Liver Salts and was gone. Six weeks after the non-event his mother took up with a man who didn’t think the world owed him deference because he looked like a Hungarian waiter, and cleared out the previous incumbent’s things. The market stalls she gave away. Washed her hands of them. The shops she sold. Kreitman got the decanters, which he donated, without unwrapping them, to Oxfam.
These were some of the reasons why Kreitman tried to remember to smile if he possibly could, did his best to memorise and tell jokes, cooked curries, never thieved a single book from the student bookshop, and became interested in Francis Place, the radical, a journeyman breeches-maker who had reason to believe he could have been better employed, but never repined, never turned his back on self-improvement, never stinted himself in a cause, never acted as though there were a bad smell under his nose and, as far as Kreitman’s searches could discover, never set much store by what he drank his whisky from.
Kreitman’s eventual turning of his own back on Francis Place, as good as abandoning all his researches into the great puritanical tradition of English radicalism, forsaking a university career and forswearing radicalism itself in favour, once and for all, of purses, was not to be ascribed, in Kreitman’s own view, to genetic or moral backsliding, but to the times. He had meant to be high-minded and disinterested at a historical moment unpropitious for any motive except advantageous low-minded selfishness. He remembered the hour everything he valued flew out of the window, the hour hobbledehoy Thatcherism blew its first triumphalist fanfaronade, sending disinterestedness orphaned into the night, where for years it could be heard shivering and scratching at windowpanes, like the ghost of a relation no one dared claim. It didn’t feel like cynicism, his abandonment of his projects, his reversion to family form – cynicism never does. Nor did it feel like defeatism. What it felt like was getting pissed. Just giving up on being sober for a night. There is no such thing as society, proclaimed Mrs Thatcher – always looking suspiciously pissed herself, sozzled more the word, her patent heels never less than precarious, like Minnie Mouse’s – and Marvin Kreitman, along with most other people, was mightily relieved to hear it. Three cheers for ourselves! It was like the lifting of an oppressive burden. Society, society! Was there to be no end to it? Society, the societal, the socio, the sociogenic, the sociographic, the sociosocio … Give us a break already! And she did. For even the most industrious won’t say no to a holiday when it’s the boss’s suggestion. Drinks all round on Mrs T! That was what it felt like to Kreitman, anyway – time off; not a greedy going to work at hard-heartedness, but a needful holiday from soft; in his particular case, a needful holiday from squishy. Though as it turned out, not even G&T and don’t spare the ice Thatcherism could prevent the tears from rolling down his cheeks whenever he had to remove himself, if only for a weekend, from the company of a woman he loved.
He remained a romantic, then, through all the every-man-his-own-island (every man own his own island) years, opening one shop after another, branching out from small leather to large luggage, hiring and firing and fucking in between? Oh, yes. Romantic, sentimental and, as night follows day – for where else can sentimentality lead? – perfidious. As loose as careless talk.
Leave the guy alone. His head banged and falling in love incontinently gave him some relief. He had climbed back into his father’s shadow scarcely before he’d left it – easy to do: he knew where all the warehouses were – and he couldn’t blame it all on Mrs Thatcher. He had married young and fathered two children, neither of which was her fault. And he had expensive habits over and above fathering, which weren’t her fault either. Not all her fault, though of course had she paid academics better …
False reasoning, and he knew it. All the money in the world wouldn’t have kept Kreitman in the academy. He felt wrong there, a traitor to something in himself. Maybe even a traitor to his father, to what his father did and should have done better. He felt ashamed, catching his reflection in leaded windows, striding through quadrangles with his books under his arm and students clinging to his gown, as though teaching even at that level still smacked of the servility of domestic service, like being a governess or the tutor to a rich man’s children. And even if it didn’t, what pride could a mature man take in being King of the Kids? Stay doing that till he was fifty and he’d have grown that parchment skin, neither old nor young, that mask of squandered sempiternity, which is the reward for passing all your days in the company of eighteen-year-olds. Yet those of his university friends who went into commerce fared no better in his estimation either – slaves to some corporation, dirtying themselves not with notes but with the principle underlying notes, which was even worse. Whichever way you committed yourself you were demeaned; so better not to commit at all, to step outside and have a leg in both camps, and in that way to be fully recognisable to neither, a thorn in the flesh of each (as if either cared!) and a continuing puzzle to yourself.
Besides, in abandoning Francis Place, Kreitman wasn’t entirely abandoning Francis Place’s example. Place himself had opened a shop, improving his mind and doing much to improve the country’s on the back of a flourishing tailoring business. ‘I had three things continually in my recollection,’ Place wrote in an autobiography too unwieldy ever to be published in full. ‘The first, and by far the most important, was to get money, and yet to avoid entertaining a mercenary, money-getting spirit; to get money as a means to an end, and not for its own sake.’ And the other two things continually in his recollection? Kreitman knew them off by heart. Not to allow the ‘contumelious treatment’ he had received in his breeches-making days to make him a ‘sneaking wretch’ to those above him or a ‘tyrant’ to those below; and to be forever on guard against presumption and arrogance.
As a matter of more than passing interest to Kreitman, Francis Place went on, in the course of a long public life, to campaign for birth control and free love. Though not, of course, in any sensual spirit. And his second wife was an actress, named Mrs Chatterley. Though not, of course, Connie Chatterley.
Kreitman didn’t know why the chill wind of self-congratulatory integrity that blew through nineteenth-century English radicalism, utilitarianism, Moral Chartism and the like, appealed to him as it did. His hatred of his father explained it partly. He revered everything his father wasn’t. Principled Englishness, above all. He didn’t know where his father was from. It was never discussed. Kreitman assumed Hungary, but it could have been somewhere equally horrible. Romania. Bulgaria. Albania. The Balkans. One of the thin-skinned, contumelious countries. Not England, though, of that he could be sure. And for his own part, perhaps because of his mother’s example, he felt at home with long-winded moralists, loved the rapaciousness of their restraint. Give him a page of sententious prose, the gluttonous elaboration of the principles of self-denial, that tireless puritanism of the intellect which mowed down every frivolity in its path, and Kreitman was a happy man. Throw in a sentimental fuck with the mother of one of his lady-friends and he’d have called himself delirious.
He also liked selling purses. Proving it could be done, partly; proving it could be done with a good heart. But also he enjoyed testing his taste against the market. Seeing whether, in purses if in nothing else, he could harmonise himself with the spirit of the age. And he loved playing shop. The money part was necessary but not interesting to him. For accumulation for its own sake he had even less enthusiasm than Francis Place had. What interested him was what he already employed staff for – unpacking cartons, stacking shelves and making sales. Like Christmas, the physical excitement of taking receipt of stock. Like all his Christmases and all his birthdays rolled into one, counting the boxes, getting down on his knees and ripping open the cardboard, cutting his hands on the staples, breaking his fingernails in his impatience to snap the tape and see what was inside. Yes, yes, he knew already – obviously he did, since in those early days he was the one who did all the buying – but it pleased him to take custody of the new lines, to recall and reaffirm his original enthusiasm, expressed at some trade fair months before, and now to touch and smell it. Intoxicating, the cheap Moroccan wallets, squashed and flattened in their elasticated dozens, which he eased apart like squeeze-boxes, releasing their scent of oxhide, of urine, of all the dyes and spices of the kasbah. And more voluptuous still, the squeaky-tanned Italian handbags in smoky colours – brandy, Armagnac, blood-spot cognac – individually wrapped in branded, rusding paper, sometimes boxed, sometimes in linen shoebags (bags in which to keep your bags), ornamental as the Florentine bridge on which they’d been stitched, as still as works of art, answering as they never would again to the philosophical idea of handbag – the Platonic bag to which all other bags aspired – prior to the gross contingencies of use.
And then into the window with his sleeves rolled up, engineering his display on the simple joyous principle of ascent, the stock rising in vertiginous tiers like an Umbrian hill town. Why did he love that effect so much? One set of rooftops rising behind another. The purses and wallets first, then the handbags, then the vanity cases, then the sports bags, then the travellers and shoppers, and at last the suitcases. Infinity; was that it? Was he building a graduated Tower of Babel to the heavens, leaving no space for God to express His indifference? It looked shit, anyway, as his first manageress found the courage to tell him. Nobody had dressed a window like that since 1930. She was wrong, as he showed her, walking her up and down Tooting Broadway. Everybody in travel goods dressed their windows like that. She wrinkled her nose like a money pouch. Wasn’t that her point? Did that make it any less shit? He took her meaning and shortly after took her to bed. Mixing business with pleasure? No – mixing pleasure with pleasure. Do that wrinkle thing with your nose again. Make your loose change clink. But on the question of window-dressing he knew what he knew, the great lesson learned from his father – purses sell themselves. And cases too.
He surrendered in the end. Had to. Other people opened the cartons and other people designed his windows. He didn’t get it. One bag in a window – what kind of come-on was that? But the times were changing around him. He was an inordinate man, dumped into an age of minimalism. Little by little the smell of rutting camels faded from his nostrils. Purses grew plainer. Handbags more coldly sculptured. The briefcase with its once mysterious vertical recesses, its deep suede slits and dark concertinaed divisions, was now a moulded shell which opened horizontally with an empty-headed click. Even the lovely creaking leather satchel of his childhood had given way to the nylon sportsbag with ARSENAL printed on the side – more capacious, he granted, but less redolent of the hot, serious adventure of learning. Over time, fearful of his pertinacious taste for the bazaar, his staff began to dread his appearances; all he had to do was take off his jacket and start to roll his sleeves up and he’d hear them groan. What choice did he have but to leave them to it? He looked away, distanced himself from the fun of shops and just opened more. A reluctant tycoon. And because his head banged and his heart squelched – accept that a man must somehow express the inordinacy of his emotions – a sentimental votary of love, looser than gossip.
Tonight, though, by one of those queer reversals incident to an old intimacy, it was Charles Merriweather whose eye was squeaking loosely in its unprotected socket, pending the arrival of his coronary elicoidali. ‘She’s gorgeous,’ he said, meaning almost anyone.
Almost anyone, thought Kreitman, shaking his head, who happens not to be his wife. He didn’t bother to follow his friend’s gaze. He knew its promiscuity. Anything on two legs. Fewer, if fewer were all there were. No pattern, no coherence, no discernible predilection, nothing that answered, say, to Kreitman’s refined and, when you thought about it, wholly consistent preference for mothers of women he liked. Simply skirt. Not for the first time, Kreitman was almost ashamed to be seen out with Charlie Merriweather. These constant husbands! Christ! These unispousal gallants! Daring to pronounce the phrase nice sex with a mouth full of dim sum one minute and then to be up for every other sort the next. So what kind of sex was this which Charlie couldn’t deny himself, squirming around in his low-backed steel chair, lapping at everything that clattered past – not nice or nicer?
‘Charlie, she’s young enough to be your reader.’
‘Oh, crikey, is she? Nice, though.’
So there – not nicer, not not nice, simply nice, simply as nice.
After more than twenty years of veering from the straight and narrow, Marvin Kreitman wondered if he had only now touched the bottom of betrayal. As nice. Eeny meeny miny mo. Shall it be you or shall it be you? True, the cesspit of sameness of which poor Charlie had vouchsafed him a glimpse was only in his head, but was that what the insides of the heads of all good husbands necessarily looked like? In which case which of them was the better husband – Charlie, who would do unto others (if he could) exactly what he did unto his wife (if she still let him), or himself, Marvin the Cad Kreitman, who knew what he liked but never, on principle, felt the same way (tears apart) or spoke the same words twice?
Kreitman gave in to a twinge of concern for the other Charlie. He was marginally responsible for their marriage, having introduced them, on a hunch, at a student party. Charlie, meet Charlie. He had pulled her out of a chair for himself at first, liking her long lolloping milkmaid’s body, her boxer’s jaw and her unexpectedly tiny hands. ‘Oh, God, I don’t think I can,’ she had laughed, meaning do the dance of the hour, the Bump. ‘Nonsense,’ Kreitman had said, ‘you’re built for it.’ And she was. When Charlie bumped you you stayed bumped. ‘Try to be more rubbery,’ he suggested. ‘Try to bounce off the other person’s hip, and also not to put the other person in hospital.’
‘Oh, God, I’m sorry. I did tell you. You can put me back where you found me, if you like. I don’t mind if you pass on me.’
He didn’t do that, but he did decide to pass her on. She was a happy find, a lovely girl, brimming over, beyond the common, exciting at some level, maybe potentially exciting, exciting in the bud, but she was just too raw for him. The vegetable in her seemed to outweigh the animal. He smelled parsnip on her. She made him think of the frost-hard earth. And of those English counties he found least congenial. Given the choice, he went for women who evoked the inside rather than the outside world, women who whiffed of chemical things, perfume rather than sward, and who had shiny surfaces like him, who reflected light rather than bled it out. But he believed he knew the very panting puppy to go snuffling after her skirts as she traipsed across the golden glebe. And he was proved right. It worked. They adored each other from the off. No sooner were the Charlies an item than she was dressing him, not altering the way he looked exactly, for he was close enough already to perfection in her eyes in his shambling cords and thick all-season lemon socks, but actually doing the buying for him – comprehensively, cap-a-pié, not just the handkerchief for his hacking jacket, or the knitted ties for his Vyella shirts, but the shirts themselves, the big parsnip-tramping shoes, the loose vests, the floppy pyjamas, the vast underpants. Look under the table this very evening and there were Charlie’s sturdy limbs encased in chinos Charlie chose for him from a catalogue. They went from strangers to familiars, knowing everything about and concealing nothing from each other, coining nicknames – she Chas, he Charlemagne – in a matter of hours. He became her child, yes, that was easy to see. And even Kreitman, as a rule squishier hearted about himself than his friends, could not begrudge him that. Poor Charlie had been subjected to the freeze of sensible parenting, ordered about and made downcast by a mother who believed she was failing of her maternal responsibilities if she didn’t remind her children at least twice a day that she believed them to be nincompoops. ‘Doesn’t do for a person to have ideas above his station, or for a child to think he has brains when he hasn’t,’ she told Kreitman when she met him for the first time at Charlie’s wedding. ‘What do you think of this girl, then?’
Though of an advanced age, Charlie Merriweather’s mother was so remotely beautiful, so flintily elegant and straight-backed in the abstemious manner of that last generation of the genuinely colonial English, those who still remembered careering about the globe in boats, attending to one international botheration after another (because who else if not them?), and who to this day bathed in great rusting rectilinear tubs, practising the self-denial they preached – what is more she was so attentive to him, as though he were her beau, a shipboard romance on the way to Cape Town or Aden – that Kreitman would have fallen in love with her on the spot had he not, only an hour earlier, fallen in love with the mother of her new daughter-in-law’s bridesmaid. He took it that her beauty was one of the reasons she had mothered so unsympathetically. There never was a beautiful woman yet who didn’t think her life had turned out less sensationally than her beauty merited, or who didn’t blame her children for every ravage. ‘I’m a widow, you know,’ she told Kreitman. ‘You can write to me, if you like.’
‘I’ll write to you,’ Kreitman agreed.
‘What? Speak into this ear. I’m hard of hearing.’
‘I’ll write to you,’ Kreitman repeated.
‘Well, that’s what I said.’
‘Then I will.’
‘But you must promise you won’t write rubbish.’
‘I’ll try not to.’
‘Charlie used to write me the most stupid letters from school, always complaining about being cold and hungry. As if I wanted to hear any of that. He never had any news. Unless you call an ailment news. Or being bullied. Aren’t you a bit big to be bullied, I wrote back. But he said that was why they bullied him – because he was so big. I told him to put his head down and charge like a rhino, the way I did when girls bullied me at school. But I doubt he took any notice. Bullying one week, cold and starvation the next. Utter rubbish. I used to toss his letters in the bin the minute I’d read them.’
‘As long as you didn’t toss them in the bin before you read them,’ Kreitman said.
She threw him a baffled look. ‘Why would I do that?’
The other certainty about beautiful women, especially the flinty ones – they didn’t comprehend the rudiments of play. Or at least they didn’t comprehend Kreitman’s.
‘I’ll make a point of not writing to you about being cold or being hungry,’ he said.
‘Why? Are you cold and hungry?’
‘Some of the time,’ Kreitman heard himself saying.
‘Then come up to Twyford and see me. I can’t help you if you’re cold, my husband was always cold and I couldn’t help him – I think people just imagine they’re cold most of the time – but I can feed you up. I’ll give you fish pie, Charlie’s favourite. Do you like fish pie? Charlie used to eat so much fish pie when he was small he started to look like a fish. Finnie Haddock, his sisters called him, whenever they wanted to make him cry.’
‘What did you call him?’
‘Charlie.’
‘The same. Finnie Haddock.’
‘And did Charlie’s father also like fish pie?’
‘I’m not sure I ever discovered what Charlie’s father liked. He was a headmaster, you know. Only of a miserable little state-maintained grammar school in the wastes of Leicestershire, to which I dutifully followed him and for which I was never thanked, but he loved it. Used to stand on his head outside his office on the first day of term, reciting Lewis Carroll. Then they changed it into a comprehensive overnight. That finished him. Never once stood on his head again. He was a weak person. Like Charlie in many ways. He cried a lot. Wouldn’t go out of the house. Just hid under the table in his raincoat, holding his briefcase, sobbing like a housemaid, the poor man. We sedated him in the end. Filled him full of happy pills. He turned the colour of fruit salad and sat grinning like the Cheshire cat. But at least that stopped the crying.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Kreitman said,
‘Why should you be sorry? It wasn’t your fault. I hope you’re not going to write me letters saying you’re sorry all the time.’
But Kreitman wasn’t able to reassure her because the hour to make the speeches and cut the cake had come.
‘Very clear,’ Mrs Merriweather told him when he’d finished his eulogy to the happy couple. ‘I heard every word.’ But throughout Charlie’s speech, she talked in a loud voice to Kreitman. ‘I’m amazed where he’s found the courage,’ she said.
‘To get married?’
‘Of course not. Doesn’t take courage to do that. Any fool can marry. To stand up and talk, I mean. He wouldn’t say boo to a goose when he was small. Not that he looks particularly confident now. Shaking inside, I suppose, like his father. I hope he doesn’t end up underneath the table.’
So, no, Kreitman didn’t begrudge his friend a second attempt at filiality. Besides, his own penchant for women his mother’s age hardly put him in a strong position to pass judgement. The two cases weren’t identical. Kreitman didn’t do helpless mutt. Kreitman did saucy whelp. He liked making a gift of his friskiness to women who had forgotten what friskiness looked like, or at least had not expected to have it chewing up their carpets again. Soon enough, to be sure, the eyes drooped and the chops fell and the young pup was moping about the house like an old dog. But dogs do that. They age. And bore easily. Either way, the short of it was that both men landed panting in their loved ones’ laps, but Kreitman moved more.
Up and down, side to side – not playfully but restively – then off…
Whereas Charlie stayed … And practised nice sex.
Pleasing to Kreitman that the match he’d made had worked well, if only in the still-together sense, which, when all is said and done, is probably the only measurement there is. Otherwise, he hadn’t paid much attention to it. A happy marriage in the still-together sense wasn’t a drama that beguiled him. And he didn’t suppose that his fractious marriage to Hazel – though also working well in the still-together sense – was of consuming interest to the Merriweathers. Occasionally his nostrils would fill with the parsnip odour of Charlie Kate’s kitchen-garden disapproval of ‘the way he lived’, but nothing was said. The nearest she came to a declaration wasn’t over women at all, but over Cobbett, the Kreitmans’ cat. Kreitman was at war with Cobbett on account of the way he arched his back against Kreitman’s shin bone the second Kreitman got out of bed. Until Cobbett hit upon this method of ingratiation, Kreitman had not thought of himself as a man with unusually sensitive tibia; but now his shins were like blackboards awaiting the shiny squeak of chalk. That there was an emotional no less than a physical aspect to this shrinking from the feather pressure of his own cat Kreitman didn’t doubt. Cobbett caught him out in an insufficiency: among all the other dishes on his menu of cravings, the cat wanted affection, and Kreitman, knowing his was not a nature that could turn affection on as from a tap, even supposing it had affection to give, felt as though his soul, with all its inadequacies, was being tickled open. So when Cobbett came asking on the stairs, quivering and death-rattling and making a horseshoe of his back, Kreitman did what he was not able to do when any human asked affection of him, and kicked. Hearing about this brutality from Hazel, who made a brave show of seeing the funny side of Cobbett taking the quick way down from the top of the house to the bottom, Charlie Merriweather threatened to turn Kreitman in to the RSPCA unless he either give her his word he would learn indifference, if love was beyond him, or better still give her the cat. Without discussing it with his daughters or his wife, Kreitman gave her the cat. Other than that, he wasn’t sure what Charlie thought of him as a paterfamilias or husband. In so far as the Merriweathers and the Kreitmans argued their couply differences out, they did so as it were by proxy, taking advantage of the mishaps of third parties.
‘I can forgive the wilfulness, the selfishness, even the conceit,’ was one of Charlie’s most recent pronouncements on her older sister’s erotic leap, at the age of forty-seven, into the arms of a man half her age, ‘but what I can’t turn a blind eye to is the silliness.’
‘Silliness?’ Kreitman wondered.
‘It’s silly of Dotty to go running round one day telling everybody how blissed out she is, and then to go running round the next slagging off Angus for acting unreasonably.’ (Angus being the husband who, partly for that reason, was proving to be every bit as pissed off as Dotty was blissed out.)
Over the years, Kreitman had met Dotty many times at the Merriweathers’ and had always been a little bit in love with her, firstly on account of her being an assistant to the deputy literary editor of a small-circulation journal – and Kreitman gorged on any company he could find that wasn’t purse- or luggage-yoked – and secondly on account of the heat of imminence she gave off. Anyone with a brain in his head, Kreitman thought, would have noticed that Dotty had so far not leapt for her erotic life only because no man of her acquaintance had so far opened his arms and shouted ‘Jump!’ A pity his own had been so full whenever he met her …
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?’
‘Not.’
‘Then she isn’t smiling at you. Turn away.’
Try telling that to Lot’s wife. Still convinced her radiance was for him, and dangerously woozy now, Charlie Merriweather shone his countenance across the distance of three tables and gave Nicolette Halliwell the benefit of that trample-me expression which had served him so well with Charlie several decades earlier, and no doubt continued to prove useful, Kreitman thought, in keeping him in her favours.
In their day a mistake was a mistake and everyone was careful to help one another out of an embarrassment. Things were different now that there was no such thing as society. Public personalities come and go quicker than a burning match, but ideas take longer to blow out and reignite. Thatcherism had fallen off its patent heels, an absurd memory today, like trying to recall Mr Pastry; yet society hadn’t, as a consequence, been fanfaronaded back inside. It suited everyone, even the new socialists, especially the new socialists, to pretend it had gone away of its own accord and wasn’t coming back. Without it, we could be as charitable or as hurtful as we felt like being, for we weren’t on any journey together. Hence Nicolette Halliwell’s too loud snort, her dismissive wave of her bejewelled fingers – funeral rings, she collected, trash from the past, one on each finger – and her zonked ejaculation: ‘Not you, saddo!’ And then, to her company, but for everyone in the restaurant to hear – ‘The leery old prick thinks I’m smiling at him.’
Sozzled? Freaked out? Who could say. Kreitman couldn’t tell who was on what any more. His daughters came home not themselves for different chemical reasons every night of the week. One of his lovers had taken to laughing during orgasm. Another to weeping on the lavatory. Only their mothers seemed to be together. For two pins he’d have marched over to the artist’s table and beaten an apology out of her (his second imaginary assault that night), however forcefully the stubbly beards that grinned approval round her might have tried to stop him. But why draw even more attention to Charlie’s mortification? He was drained of blood, the colour of mozzarella, and didn’t seem to know what to do with his face.
‘Let’s go,’ Kreitman said. ‘We’ll pay at the desk.’
But Charlie couldn’t, or didn’t want to move. ‘Coffee,’ he said. ‘I think coffee. And I think another bottle of wine. Oh, God!’
And over coffee and wine and more coffee and more wine he asked Kreitman what he thought the matter with him was, why he was so unhappy, why he was so prone to make a fool of himself these days, why he was forever catching his children giving him long anxious sideways looks, as if they feared he was going to run away or fall over or fall away or be run over the moment they took their eyes off him, why he was sleeping badly, why he seemed to be getting on Charlie’s nerves, why he was ratded by what was going on in his sister-in-law’s love life, why he wished sometimes that it was he who was knocking her off, except of course that he didn’t, and why, in short, his life was fucking falling apart.
Kreitman put his fingers together. ‘Well now …’ he said.
‘Don’t take the piss out of me, Marvin. We’ve been talking about nothing for ten hours. Let’s be honest, we’ve been talking about nothing for twenty years. Just this once, eh? Eh?’
‘All right, Charlie, then it isn’t your life that’s falling apart, it’s your marriage that’s fucking killing you.’
‘Well, you would say that.’
‘In that case don’t ask me.’
‘You’ve been wanting to tell me that my marriage is fucking killing me since you first met me.’
‘You weren’t married when I first met you.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Charlie, I don’t know what you mean. I promoted your marriage. I would even say, were I given to like marriages, that I particularly liked yours. But this conversation has got nothing to do with what I want to say, or even with what I happen to think. I’m just watching you. You’re behaving like a man whose marriage is fucking killing him. You’ve not stopped looking at women all day. Not even women, Charlie – girls! When a man of your years can’t take his eyes off every under-age bit of skirt that flounces by, that hasn’t even grown tits yet, it’s fair to deduce his marriage is in trouble.’
‘That’s different. Marriage in trouble is not the same as marriage killing me.’
‘Then go fuck one of these titless girls and get your marriage out of trouble. Give yourself a little leeway. I’ll get up and have a word with the trash queen for you. I doubt she holds to any position for very long …’
‘If I were to “fuck one of those girls” Chas would never forgive me. It would break her heart.’
‘Don’t tell her.’
‘She’ll find out.’
‘How will she find out, Charlie?’
‘She finds out everything. She knows me backwards. I can’t dream about a fuck without Chas knowing.’
‘There you are – your marriage is fucking killing you. And I’ll tell you which part of it is killing you – the nice-sex part. Fantasy, Charlie. Sex isn’t nice.’
‘Maybe not for you, Marvin.’
‘Leave me out of it. It isn’t nice for you, otherwise …’ Kreitman made a weary, exasperated gesture with his hands, taking in the waitresses, the sculptor and every other damn distraction that had made a monkey out of Charlie Merriweather this night. Made a monkey out of him as well, because even late and in the company of men he hated marriage talk, wife talk, love talk, fuck talk. For he too was a good husband in his way, and believed he owed it to Hazel not to discuss her. Or her interior decorator. Or his daughter’s curator. Or his one-time lover and her mother. ‘Look, Charlie,’ he went on – in now, in for a penny, in for a pound – ‘why don’t we have this nice-sex thing out once and for all? You think I don’t get it. OK – I certainly don’t get it. And if I don’t get it we can’t talk about it. You started this. You said your life’s falling apart. I’m saying you can chalk that down to nice sex. So you go ahead and prove to me why I’m wrong. You explain to me what I’ve been missing all these years.’
‘Deprivation.’
‘Paradoxes now. I could surprise you, Charlie. I’ve done plenty of doing without.’
‘Yes, but not systematically. Nice sex is about agreeing to do without. It’s a trade-off. In return for relinquishing everyone else – and that doesn’t mean not having an eye for everyone else, Marvin – you enjoy a closeness you wouldn’t otherwise have. I’m not talking about trust only. Partly the closeness is contingent on the sacrifice …’
‘You get hot thinking about everything you both haven’t done? It’s like talking dirty, is it? Only it’s talking clean? Tell me about it, darling, whisper it in my ear – Who didn’t you fuck today?’
‘Is that what you think?’
‘I don’t think. About nice sex I have no thoughts. You’re the expert.’
‘You might not remember this, Marvin, but when we were first married and living in Market Harborough you and Hazel used to stay with us for weekends. You two weren’t married yet. It’s possible you weren’t even thinking of getting married at that stage. One night we gave you our bedroom. I can’t remember why, maybe you’d just got engaged or something, maybe it was Hazel’s birthday. Maybe it was mine. Anyway, you slept in our bed. We were both astonished by the noises you made. Like creatures in pain, Charlie said.’
‘You were listening to us?’
‘No, we weren’t listening, we heard. We couldn’t not hear. The dead would have heard. And when we got our bed back in the morning we couldn’t believe what you’d done to it. You’d ripped the sheets. You’d mangled two pillowcases and somehow shrunk a third. You’d torn the headboard off the bed. You’d bitten chunks out of the mattress …’
‘I’ll buy you another mattress.’
‘Marvin – just once in your life, shut up! Believe me, there were bloodstains on the ceiling. If that’s what your friend does to someone he loves, Charlie said, I wouldn’t want to be in the next room when he’s with someone he hates. I know, I see it on your face – what right did we have to sit in judgement on sex Marvin Kreitman-style? But we weren’t sitting in judgement. We were just frightened for you.’
‘Oh, come on, Chaiiie, frightened?’
‘You didn’t hear yourself. Anyway, whatever the rights of it, whatever you meant by half-throttling Hazel or letting her half-throttle you, and whatever we were doing having any sort of attitude to it, that wasn’t nice sex. I trust you will at least agree to that. Nice sex, Marvin, isn’t about finding another form for murder. I couldn’t have raised a hand to Charlie even in play, nor she to me. What is it Hamlet says about his father’s lovingness to his mother – ‘he might not beteem the winds of heaven visit her face too roughly’? That was me. That was us. Even a vulgar slap and tickle would have been impossible between us. Is impossible between us. It’s not for me to enquire about the hows and whys of it now, but you and Hazel used to make no bones about it – you fought like tigers, and then you fucked like tigers. Your own phrase, Marvin – the clash of mighty opposites. Well, Charlie and I didn’t feel opposite, we felt the same. We weren’t reconciling differences in sex, we were confirming congruences. In bed together, sometimes, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you where I ended and she began. My cock, her … What’s wrong, Marvin. Why are you gagging?’
‘You know darn well why I’m gagging.’
‘Of course I do. I’ve drunk too much and you hate sex talk that isn’t adversarial.’
‘You’re wrong. What I hate is the word cock. Watcha, cock! Use dick, it’s more respectful.’
‘Yes, yes, the famous Kreitman niceness around the organs. Nice around the nomenclature, less nice around the usage.’
‘You’re the nice one, Charlie.’
‘Well, you’re certainly not. Listen, you asked, so I’m telling you. Nice sex – it means what it sounds as though it means. Sex that is all consideration. Smug too, if you like. An expression of how much you like each other and everyone else can go to hell. And that’s why I’ve always found it impossible to do anything if I’m away from home, in a foreign country or wherever – I know I wouldn’t be able to think of anyone but Charlie. So what would be the point? Then when I got back I would be guilty, and when we made love I would be unable to think about anything but my guilt, lying there lewdly between us like a third party each of us thought the other had invited. Three in a bed. Something you’re not averse to, I know. But not me. I don’t judge it, I’m not against it, I just can’t do it. So that’s something else about nice sex – it’s sex strictly for the two of you. Sex you don’t go round experimenting with …’
‘Sex that’s not sex, you mean?’ Unbidden, Erica, his wife’s interior decorator, sitting on his chest in nothing but black hold-ups, her hands crossed on his throat, saying ‘Make me!’ Unbidden, but he bade the apparition go. ‘Sex that’s no fun, you mean?’
‘Wrong. That wasn’t fun you were having with Hazel all those years ago. That wasn’t even play, Marvin. That was hang, draw and quarter. And you both looked like you’d narrowly escaped the mob when you came down to breakfast. You’ve always looked like that after sex. Another close shave. Got away with my life again – just. Don’t forget how many times I’ve seen you after you’ve been fucking. And you never once looked as though you’d been having fun. People smile when they’re having fun. When did you last smile at Hazel, Marvin?’
‘This morning.’
‘After sex?’
Marvin Kreitman put his elbows on the table and supported his chin on his fists. ‘Charlie,’ he said wearily, ‘Hazel isn’t the person I do the deed with these days. Decent men don’t badger their wives of twenty years for sexual satisfaction.’
Charlie waved away any imaginary imputation that he might be curious who, in that case, Kreitman did badger for sexual satisfaction these days. ‘The last time you smiled at anybody post-coitally, Marvin? Or even pre-coitally, come to that?’
Kreitman thought about it. ‘Do you want the year or the day?’
‘The year will do.’
‘Nineteen seventy-three.’
‘Then that was the last time you had nice sex.’
And in such a manner, had the discussion been about Kreitman’s misery and not Charlie’s, would the evening have ended. Go home and sleep on that one, Marvin. He was quite prepared to. Nice sex, eh? Well, why not. Two in a bed, no thought of a third, and a smile before and after? Thinking of the smile worried him by virtue of its unlooked-for allure. Forget the rest, but a smile wouldn’t have gone amiss. Nineteen seventy-three was a lie. Kreitman had never smiled before or after sex. Or, if he had, he had forgotten, and where was the point of a smile you couldn’t remember?
He sat with his chin still on his fists, staring into the blood-red lake of his wine glass, listening to the long silence of Charlie’s triumphant refutation. He was head over heels in love with five women – discounting the other four he loved in a calmer fashion – and he couldn’t drag from the bottom of the wine-dark Brunello sea a single recollection of a sex-related, sense-drenched smile. Not on his part anyway. What he could see, if he concentrated, were sometime smiles directed to him. A fatalistic but comradely creasing of the eyes only the day before yesterday from Bernadette, mother of his wife’s interior designer’s former husband, registering the black folly of life. A playful grin after the theatre, because she scarcely knew him yet, from Shelley, nursing Kreitman all of a sudden when a violent cramp threw him howling off her. Did they count? If you inspired a smile did that mean you were the reason for nice sex in others, even though you were not a participant in it yourself? Could just one of you have nice sex?
What do you think, Charlie?
No, was what Charlie thought. No way, no how. Just as nice sex couldn’t be for more than two, so it couldn’t be for less.
‘You’re a stickler for numbers,’ Kreitman said.
‘Rich, coming from you,’ Charlie said.
‘You know what this is all about?’ Kreitman said, as though struck by it for the first time. ‘Sentimentality. Masculine sentimentality. We both love ourselves in the love women bear us.’
‘Women don’t bear me anything,’ Charlie said.
‘It comes to the same thing,’ Kreitman said. ‘You love the image of yourself as a nice man which Charlie reflects back to you. I love the image of myself as a bastard which Hazel and the rest reflect back to me. That’s why you can’t betray Charlie – she has a sentimental hold over you. She is the monster guarding the labyrinth where your other selves are hidden.’
‘So I have to behead her to find out who else I could be?’
‘That’s only if you want a fuck, Charlie.’
‘I want a fuck, Marvin.’
‘Then behead her.’
‘And you?’
‘I’m happy as I am.’
‘You aren’t. You’ve let me see you aren’t. You’d like to smile before you die.’
Would he? ‘Then who do I behead?’
‘That you must tell me. I don’t know who’s guarding your labyrinth.’
‘I have told you. They all are.’
‘Then behead them all.’
‘Ah,’ Kreitman said, ‘I can’t do that.’
‘Then choose one,’ Charlie said, ‘and give her to me.’
Kreitman threw his head back and laughed. A waitress in a short black leather apron, whose pants you could see when she cleared a table, whose pants she was no doubt contracted to let you see when she cleared a table, came to check how they were for wine. ‘Gendemen?’
‘We’re all right,’ Kreitman said. ‘But my friend’s in love with you.’
‘I’m not,’ Charlie said, ‘I love my wife. I only take advantage of other women. And we’ll have two brandies. Any. The best.’ Then to Kreitman he said, ‘So?’
‘So what, Charlie?’
‘So which are you going to sacrifice?’
‘You’re drunk, Charlie.’
‘Maybe, but I’m clear. If it’s the women who are stopping us from doing what we’d like to – in my case from fucking someone else; in your case from finding out what it’s like to be fucking only one – then we change the women. Exchange the women. What’s wrong with that? You have Charlie, I have whichever one you’re prepared to part with.’
‘I have Charlie!’
‘You don’t want Charlie?’
‘What do my wants have to do with anything? Do you honestly envisage Charlie leaping into bed with me? Have you forgotten that she nearly had me arrested by the RSPCA? She blackmailed me out of my own cat. She thinks I’m a brute.’
‘You are a brute, Marvin. But I’m not offering you the cat …’
‘No, that’s right, you’re offering me Charlie. Who is of course renowned for her easygoingness in matters sexual. Look how she’s taking Dotty’s indiscretions. If she finds those silly, how’s she’s going to react to this? Sillier still, Charlie. A lot sillier still.’
‘Why don’t you just leave Chas to me. I have a feeling you’ll be surprised by her. Now who do I get? I’d be happy with Hazel but if you’re not fucking her and she’s not expecting you to, there might not be any point. I want whichever one will best reflect back to me the image of myself as bastard.’
‘Oh well, in that case, any one of them would do,’ Kreitman said. ‘They all know about bastards. Why don’t you take the lot?’
For the first time since the quick consumption of his elicoidali, the ever hungry prep-school boy with a gob full of lollies appeared in Charlie Merriweather’s place. But only fleetingly. ‘No,’ he said, after giving Kreitman’s offer a decent period of consideration, ‘I think it’s important you should choose. Make it equally costly. Who’s it going to be, Marvin?’
‘Charlie, enough.’
‘Come on, play the game. Which one … ?’
And so out at last, brandied, into the roaring Soho night, remorseless with clubbers, boys bald as missiles, girls gashed red across the face as though with razors, and Kreitman exclaiming, ‘Christ, these kids!’ and Charlie swaying off the pavement, agreeing, ‘Yes, beautiful, aren’t they, so much more sure of themselves than I ever was, splendid really, so come on, Marvin, who’s it going to be?’ and then the cyclist – that cyclist! – with his hands off the bars, pink and purple luminous under the street lights, crying, ‘Honk, honk, urgent delivery,’ and Kreitman’s chance, come sooner than expected, to unseat the cocksucker before he mowed down his jabbering friend, and the next thing flat out under the vomiting moon with tyre marks across his chest.
Not liking anything about the world when he came to in it, with a fright more nauseating than birth, back as though from hell with all its devils, only to find more of them waiting to pitchfork his soul, and Charlie not sobered, still with his big white jaw hanging open, wanting an answer to his crazy question – ‘Which one, Marvin? Who are you going to give me?’ – Kreitman went to sleep again on the street.
When he came to a second time it was already another day and he was lying on a castored metal trolley in a corridor off Emergency.
‘Is this where they are laid who tangle with a faggot?’ he enquired.
Whereupon someone smoothed his hair and said ‘Shhh!’ And strike him dead – strike him dead again – if that someone wasn’t Charlie, not Charlie his old chum but Charlie his old chum’s wife. Charlie otherwise known as Chas.
That Charlie!