No sooner had Charlie Merriweather rung Hazel Kreitman than he regretted it. What if he’d done the wrong thing? What if Kreitman was expected somewhere else in the early hours? What if Hazel was the last person Kreitman wanted to open his eyes and find? Too late now, but if he’d thought of it first he could have gone through the call list on Kreitman’s mobile, which he’d actually caught as it flew from Kreitman’s pocket in the fracas, and checked if it really was Hazel he had rung earlier in the evening to say he’d be late home. Home? Where was home? And how many homes did Kreitman have?
Sexual curiosity can be a terrible affliction when it gets its teeth into a grown man. Charlie Merriweather believed it was slowly separating him from his reason. No, not slowly – rapidly! How long does it take to go mad? Overnight, if you’ve been putting in the groundwork for thirty years.
When he was a boy Charlie had wondered along with every other boy how things worked, where things went and when he was going to get his turn to find out. They were in it together. It was all part of the fun. He remembered one boy who was more precocious than everyone else, who had a moustache when he was eleven and was locked into a serious relationship with a girl when he was barely thirteen. Simon Lawrence. He wore a locket containing his girlfriend’s picture round his neck and was reputed to have inside knowledge of oral sex. The others envied him crazily, as goes without saying. They stole the locket and put shoe polish on his balls so that his girlfriend wouldn’t like the taste, though there was some controversy in the matter of whether tasting balls formed a part of oral sex. Charlie Merriweather had thought not. Why would any girl want to taste Simon Lawrence’s balls? Simon Lawrence sealed his own fate on that one. ‘Why shouldn’t she?’ he said. So on went the polish. They also wrapped a turd in silver paper and hid it in his schoolbag. With a bit of luck his girlfriend would find it and think it was a gift to her. End of relationship. That much they did know about girls. But their envy was equivocal. Simon Lawrence’s experience put him offside, excluded him from the group. He seemed to spend every break reading letters, biting pencils and then composing answers. It was like extra homework. He looked sad most of the time, frowning, burdened by his dark knowledge. It was better to be with the others and know nothing. Knowing nothing was at least a laugh. But now Charlie felt he was the one cast out, the last one left standing in the playground in the freezing dark, wondering what hilarity drew the others to the pavilion. And kept them there.
He had been a shy boy. Up to a point they had all been shy boys. Being a boy is a shying business. Over and above that, though, he’d been an unlucky boy. He was the child of odder than usual parents. The son of a more handsome than usual mother. And of a sadder than usual father. Few of his friends went home to happy households at the weekend, but Charlie knew of no one else who went home to find his father quaking under the kitchen table in his raincoat.
Long before then, when Charlie was little, his father used to embarrass him by turning cartwheels in public places, standing on his head while reciting ‘You are old, Father William’, and otherwise playing the eccentric English schoolmaster. Sometimes, for garden parties or village fêtes, he wore a mortarboard, sometimes plus-fours and a shirt with a frilly front. ‘Mon jabot,’ he called it. ‘Mon jabot du Jabberwock.’ Who was he being? Charlie didn’t know. Just someone from the past. Someone harmless. Someone curiously learned. And ineffective. Charlie’s father had golden hair and a cherub’s face. Even the wrong way up he looked angelic. Outside the family, Charlie noticed, everybody acted as though they adored his father and couldn’t get enough of him upside down reciting nonsense. But a child takes his cue from his mother in matters of embarrassment, and Charlie Merriweather’s mother was abashed, therefore so was Charlie.
Back home after another spontaneous recitation in the park –
O My agèd Uncle Arly!
Sitting on a heap of Barley
Thro’ the silent hours of night, –
Close beside a leafy thicket; –
On his nose there was a Cricket, –
In his hat a Railway-Ticket; –
– Edwin (‘Teddy’) Merriweather would submit to his lovely wife’s latest ultimatum. ‘Humiliate me like that again and you’ll be sleeping on a heap of barley,’ she warned him. ‘What you do the rest of the time is your business, but I insist you remember you are a headmaster when you are out with me. Having brought us to this hellhole, I consider it the least you can do.’
But his shoes were far too tight,
Teddy Merriweather concluded wistfully, by way of reply.
‘Grow up, Daddy,’ his daughters told him.
Even when he was annoyed with his father for not remembering to act like a headmaster, Charlie loved the precise and yet irresponsible way he spoke, as though nothing was either serious or funny but somehow both. Charlie had heard somebody called the Archbishop of Canterbury speaking on the wireless, and he thought his father’s voice was a cross between the organ pipes of the Archbishop and the burbling whiffles of that Jabberwock whose jabot his father wore.
In his heart, Charlie felt sorry for his father, going from applause to vilification in the time it took him to cross the threshold of his own house. It would have made sense, he often thought, for his father never to have come home at all. But then who would Charlie have looked to for forbearance? In his hurry to please his mother, before it dawned on him that he would never succeed, not ever, not ever ever, Charlie was constantly being flustered into mixing up his words and saying the opposite to what it was in his mind to say. He said yes when he meant no; he said up when he meant down; when she offered him her glacial cheek at bedtime, barely bothering to look up from her crossword, he would sometimes get so flustered he would call her Dada and wish her many happy returns instead of good night. Once she flew into a rage and boxed his ears, leaving him listening to silence for a morning, because he wouldn’t stop going on about the mats and rice he’d seen scuttling about the garden shed, chewing paper and disappearing into bags of plant feed. ‘What in God’s name are you talking about?’ she railed. ‘How can mats and rice chew paper? Is this some cuteness?’ His father understood. ‘It’s no wonder the boy makes such a hotchpotch of his sentences when you keep flummoxing him,’ Charlie thought he heard him say. ‘Anyway, it’s perfectly clear to me what he means. The Reverend W. A. Spooner would have understood him.’ ‘Then you and the Reverend W. A. Spooner talk to him,’ Mrs Merriweather said. ‘Nonsense is your medium, after all.’
But being frightened imposes its own obligations, and being understood was no compensation for being shamed. What Charlie gathered from his mother was that his father’s engagingness outside the house degraded all of them. A man in his position had no business turning himself into a jackass for other people’s amusement. If she’d wanted a clown to be the father of her children, she’d have gone looking for a husband in the circus. Listening to her, even with his ears ringing, Charlie was convinced. Somehow his father was wasting something that belonged to them.
Once, when Charlie was six, his father took him to a stately home in Derbyshire. Just the two of them. They had tea together – triangles of cucumber sandwiches, chocolate cake, slices of lemon on a little plate – then walked by a lake where Charlie’s father taught Charlie the names of different breeds of duck, showed him how to make stones skip across the water and, balancing on one leg with the other leg hidden behind his back, said:
I’ll tell thee everything I can:
There’s little to relate.
I saw an aged, aged man,
A-sitting on a gate.
And Charlie thought how wonderful it was to have a funny father who could rhyme and recite to him and who held his hand and didn’t hurry him. But in their leisurely wanderings they hadn’t noticed a sign saying PRIVATE and suddenly there was the aged, aged man, only he wasn’t a-sitting on a gate, he was a-standing behind it, holding back two barking dogs with cheeks as pouched and furious as his were, and he was brandishing a walking stick and shouting, ‘Be off with you, can’t you read?’ and instead of shouting back, ‘I’m a headmaster, of course I can read! I can read a damn sight better than you can!’ or standing on his head, or reciting a funny poem, Charlie’s father flushed scarlet, lowered his eyes, stammered out an apology as flummoxed as any of Charlie’s own, and hurried away, breathing audibly and holding Charlie’s hand so hard he thought it would burn up with the heat. Charlie could not remember ever having felt so sad. It wasn’t just that a perfect day had been ruined; Charlie felt that this incident would stay with him for the rest of his life and that there would never again be a day when he would not feel sad on account of it. Propping up his sadness, like poles supporting a rotting pier, Charlie recognised two distinct sensations. Firstly, he was hurt on his father’s behalf by the telling-off. How much it hurt his father he could tell from how tightly his father held on to his hand. Secondly, he felt let down, that his father hadn’t stuck up for them both and told the aged, aged man what he could do with his stick. A boy doesn’t want to see his father disgraced, whatever the rights or wrongs of the case. Was this what his mother meant when she accused her husband of lowering himself, and of lowering her and her children with him? Well, Charlie could now vouch for that with his own eyes. He had seen his father talked to like a servant. And he had seen his father bow his head and accept the talking-to, as though a servant was all he was.
Those were the happy carefree years. The blithe times, when Charlie’s father still had his powers of recovery, could take a rebuff one day and could spring back upside down in his knickerbockers the next, before comprehensivisation did what his wife had never quite been able to do, and drove him under the table.
Charlie was eight or nine, growing taller, growing lonelier, growing shyer, when the table-shrinking started. Although his father was on a pension and there were uncles to help with mortgages and school bills and the like, the change in circumstances moved his mother to the sort of action countenanced by women of her class only during times of national crisis. She went out to work! More exceptionally still, she went out to work as a dental receptionist! It occurred to Charlie that although his mother gave as her only motive money, the real reason she went out to work was so as not to have to look at his father curled up on the floor with his briefcase. An explanation contested by the remains of the person in question who, during one of his periods of lucidity, crawled out from underneath the table to accuse his wife of taking a job as a dental receptionist only in order to be close to people in pain.
‘In which case,’ he shouted after her, ‘you might just as well have stayed home with me.’
But she was buttoned up in her National Health blue uniform by then, belted and badged as though there were a war on, and already in the street.
Once a week a lady with a mutating mole on her neck and no flesh on her bones visited the house to do the cleaning. Catherine. ‘Ah, Catherine, Catherine – and would that be Catherine Wheel or Catherine the Great?’ Teddy Merriweather hummed when he was apprised of her appointment. ‘Catherine the Great Unwashed,’ his wife corrected him with a snort. Charlie was frightened of Catherine because of her mole, because poverty had ingrained her skin with soot, because she called him ‘Sonny Jim’, and because she seemed to find the height of him amusing. Once she pushed open the door when he was sitting on the lavatory. Once she found him leaning out of his bedroom window, throwing lead soldiers at the garden shed to see if he could frighten out the mats and rice. Another time she sneaked up on him when he was lying on his bed, talking to Pobble, the bear he’d owned since he was a baby. She moved so silently about the house, on slippers which must have been distributed charitably to the poor, for he had never seen any but poor people wearing them, that he was never given warning she was coming. It seemed to Charlie that she was spying on him, deliberately seeking him out in compromising positions so she could wag her finger at him, call him Sonny Jim and laugh in his face.
But he had been brought up to be a little gentleman, albeit a little tall gentleman, which meant going to the rescue, sometimes, even of people you didn’t like. So he knew what to do the day he came home from school early on account of a teacher committing suicide and found a man with no clothes on pressing Catherine to the floor, presumably with a view to robbing her or murdering her or both. Entirely against his instinct, which was to leave her there and let the man rob and murder her as often as he had a mind to, Charlie grabbed an umbrella from the umbrella stand and began striking the man’s back with it. Only when the man turned around did Charlie realise it was his father. Charlie recognised the expression on his face. The last time he’d seen his father with a face like that was when the person with the two angry-cheeked dogs had accused him of being unable to read and ordered him off his property.
Charlie was right. Thanks to his father he was never not going to feel sad again. Never.
Although he had no words for what had happened, Charlie knew it was wrong in some way that would upset his mother. ‘I won’t tell that you were robbing Catherine,’ he told his father, who was back under the table now, holding on to his briefcase and sobbing like a child.
But Catherine too must have needed reassuring, because she sat him on the sofa and snuggled up to him not long after and thanked him for saving her and asked him to name his reward. Charlie couldn’t think of anything he wanted. ‘How about an introduction to Miss Cuntalina Fuckleton?’ Catherine asked. When Charlie said he did not know who Miss Cuntalina Fuckleton was, Catherine roared with the sort of laughter Charlie associated with witches and took his hand and introduced him, whereupon it was Charlie’s turn to begin sobbing like a child, though he at least had the excuse of being a child.
He was an unlucky boy. Unlucky in his parents, unlucky to have been carted off to Leicestershire and then sent back down to Lewes to finish his schooling, unlucky in his encounters with the lower classes and, until he met Charlie and his luck changed, unlucky in love. He couldn’t find anybody. One by one the other boys caught up with Simon Lawrence. Oral sex? Nothing to it. Straight sex? A breeze. Now they were all biting pencils and wearing lockets. All except Charlie. He bought a locket of course, but put his mother’s picture in it. ‘Miss Cuntalina Fuckleton,’ he would have said, had anybody enquired. Some love charm! – the chain gave him a neck rash while the locket itself smacked into his sternum whenever he moved. Small wonder he continued to be lacking in the necessary confidence. They can smell it on me, he thought, I must stink of everything I haven’t done. He did. At school dances girls shied away from him, put off by the avidity with which he stared at them, frightened of his big hungry face, repelled by the odour of his virginity. He believed it was his penis that stank, and washed it in a basin a hundred times a day. He thought he had some disease, he thought his penis was putrefying. He thought his sperm smelt off. But of course it had nothing to do with his penis or his sperm. It was his attitude that stank. Marvin Kreitman pointed that out to him when they met in their first week at university. He emptied a bottle of Givenchy over Charlie, advised him to keep his drawers and cupboards open for a year, recommended he stop wearing vests and change into clean underpants every morning, put it to him that he might consider circumcision, but above all ordered him to stop looking so needy.
‘How do I do that?’ Charlie wanted to know.
‘You put your tongue back inside your mouth for a start.’
‘Do you know what the worst of it is,’ he told Kreitman, ‘legs and nipples.’ He longed for legs and nipples. Ached for them. It was an Indian summer and all the girls had their legs bare and their nipples pushing at their shirts and cardigans, like eyes in the wrong place. ‘Why eyes in the wrong place should get to me the way they do, I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but they do and I’m going mad for a pair.’
‘Your nipples are fine,’ Kreitman told him.
‘Listen to me, Kreitman,’ Charlie said, ‘if I don’t get to walk out with someone with nipplissimus erectibissimus before this term’s out I’ll shoot myself.’
Soon after, rather than let that happen, Kreitman introduced him to Charlie.
And guess what? She had tiny introverted nipples and wore brassières and men’s jackets.
And long canvas skirts.
And woolly winter tights.
But Charlie fell in love with her for all that.
And should have lived happily ever after, if there were any fairness in the universe. Yet here he was again, at the beginning of another century, wondering to what end those shadows on the walls of the school pavilion leapt and cavorted.
As a general rule other people did not have as much fun as you feared they were having; he had learnt that as he’d got older. The grass isn’t always greener. Your neighbour is invariably as dissatisfied with his ox as you are with yours. Figuratively speaking, he wasn’t the only one who had worn his mother’s portrait round his neck. Everybody added a little to the truth. ‘No one ever goes to as wild a party as you throw for them in your head, Charlemagne,’ his wife used to tell him when she feared he was growing restless. Some such calculation of human sameness is necessary to keep us all in a passable state of contentment and it had been enough for Charlie for twenty years. Nice sex with Chas twice a month – and Charlie in his peroration to Marvin Kreitman had not exaggerated how nice sex between them was, sex so nice he sometimes wanted to cry while he was having it – nice books to write about children who were only comically not nice, nice sales, nice house on the river at Richmond, nice friends. He even sent off self-effacing articles to fogey journals in praise of his lifestyle, joys of suburbia, charm of the old-fashioned, what you don’t know you don’t miss, better a buffoon than a bounder, as if he’d clean forgotten what it was like to fear you had a putrefying penis. And it was enough. It did. More than that, it was true. The rest was lies. Silliness and lies. Then suddenly it wasn’t. Suddenly the rest was truth and he was lies.
What had happened? Nothing in his relations with Charlie, he was sure of that. Dear Chas – they still worked as they had always done, on ancient clitter-clatter typewriters at opposite ends of a large pine table with a vase of freshly cut flowers between them, and he still had only to raise his eyes from his machine and see her engrossed in hers, poking her little fingers into the keyboard, as conscientious and unworldly as a head girl at a convent school; still had only to catch her looking quizzically at him over her bifocals, ascertaining whether he was genuinely listening to what she was reading (‘Charlemagne, attend!’ she would say when she thought his attention was wandering), and his soul would leap as it had always leapt to nuzzle into hers. So, no, nothing to do with Chas. Nothing to do, either, with his son getting his nipple pierced (talking of nipples) and showing up without a word of warning on Blind Date. ‘My name’s Tim Merriweather and I’m from Rich … mond!’ Nor with his daughter getting her nipple pierced and informing them that while she wasn’t once and for all committed and they mustn’t think that that was her settled for the duration and that she wouldn’t be giving them grandchildren eventually, she did fancy having a tentative stab at the other thing. ‘Kitty’s a bulldyke!’ Charlie announced with a wail, during a party for grown-ups on the lawn, and all their friends roared with laughter. Strangers boating on the Thames roared with laughter too. Not at the daughter’s waywardness but at the father’s drollery. Who cared if there was or wasn’t another bulldyke in the world? It was all regulation Richmond. As was, when all was said and done, Dotty with her frayed-sleeved toyboy – yawn, yawn. Respectable Middle England which had never, in truth, been in the slightest bit respectable at all, simply opened its insatiable maw and swallowed the lot. No, none of Charlie’s externals had changed. Something had just switched on in his body. Or in his head. Maybe he’d banged himself. Walked into a wall or ricked his neck rolling off Charlie. Smack, rick, switch – behold, a pervert! No one was ever having as much fun as you feared they were having? The hell they weren’t! Look at Kreitman. Well, don’t look at him just this minute, with blood in his nostrils and tyre marks on his shirt; but in a general way, look at him.
How many houses did Kreitman have? How many love nests? With how many lovers in each? A new woman every night, was that his routine? Two new women? Two together? Should he have asked for two before Kreitman walked into the cyclist? Would Kreitman remember anything of the conversation when he woke? Would he know if Charlie told him that the deal was two – his beloved Chas for any two of Kreitman’s? Or three? Would he remember enough to know that three had never been on the table?
He was parting company with his reason but there was nothing he could do to reverse the process. He wanted to be parted from his reason. The poison had entered his body. Never mind Kreitman, he was the one they should be jabbing against tetanus.
Contrary to what moralists tell you, an excessive preoccupation with sex makes you serious. Or perhaps that should go the other way round: only the serious are able to brave wholeheartedly the repercussions of sexual thought. The young are excepted from this. Sex in the young is another matter, unphilosophical, a necessity not a luxury, the fulfilment of an instinct not an illness. Thought to be a jolly person in the past, though tinged of course with that melancholy incident to any man who has looked about him or been sent to public school, Charlie Merriweather was now possessed of so much of the gravitas of unsatisfied desire he barely recognised the weight of his own limbs.
The other burden he had to carry, of course, was that of treachery, and treachery’s twin brother, loneliness. He didn’t feel he was acting against Chas in his heart, but of course he was. They had done everything together since he was a young man. When he’d been unhappy or uncertain he’d told her and she’d kissed him better. His unhappiness was her unhappiness. They were a couple. They shared. But she couldn’t share this one, could she? He was acting against her, thinking against her, by simple virtue of the fact that what he was thinking he couldn’t tell her. There was the betrayal – not the imaginary other women themselves, but his having to exclude her from all knowledge of them. For the first time since they’d become a pair, he had reverted to being single. And the cruelty of that, for him, was that he had no one to talk to just when he needed someone to talk to most.
So it wasn’t with any idling lightness that he sat looking at Kreitman’s rescued mobile and thought about the contents of its databank. Pick a number, press a key, and that lurid world of which Charlie Merriweather had for so many years denied the very existence would at once dance into lunatic life. He turned it about in his fingers, picking at the stitches of its leather case (everything Kreitman owned came in a leather case), while he waited for Chas to turn up with the tea and egg baps. Nyman wasn’t watching; fearing he may have killed a man, the cyclist slumped with his head between his cycling shorts, intermittently leaping to his feet to make another desperate representation to the receptionist.
‘Nyman, why don’t you go home?’ Charlie said. ‘Nothing’s going to happen.’ But the minute he said it he realised his mistake. By his own confession – ‘I am Nyman,’ was how he had introduced himself while they were watching Kreitman being stretchered into the ambulance, ‘I am no one in particular’ – Nyman had been waiting for such an evening all his life. Nyman the Killer – so that’s who I am!
‘I will get some air,’ he said. ‘Please to call me if there are developments.’
Charlie wasn’t certain he believed the cyclist was Austrian or German, let alone, as Kreitman had insisted, a faggot, however many German faggots on bicycles Kreitman said there were in Soho. He watched Nyman’s back recede, in its pretend athletic vest, then went like a thief into the phone book of Kreitman’s mobile and pressed a key.
The name Erica appeared on the display. He pressed another key. Bernadette. Then Jane. Then Ooshi. Then Vanessa. Then Dotty. Then Shelley …
Then who was that? He went back a number. Dotty? Kreitman was in the habit of ringing Dotty?
He felt the blood run into his neck. Was Kreitman already halfway to enjoying both sisters? The thought sent a sewer of bile into Charlie’s stomach. A man should not fuck sisters, whatever attitude the Old Testament took to Jacob fucking Leah and Rachel. A man should not fuck sisters. In a decent world a man would not even think about fucking sisters. Not Chas and Dotty. Not Dotty and Chas. So where did that leave him? Up in flames, longing for abominations and going madder by the minute.
Hope and pray it was a different Dotty. Kreitman must have known a thousand Dotties. Charlie did not recognise the number, but then Charlie did not recognise any number. In his house Chas did all the ringing. She had even programmed his mobile for him – just as she still put together his outfits for the day, which socks with which pants – showing him how to operate the phone book, though the only number he could find in it was his own. He checked his watch – fast approaching two in the morning – then pressed the yes key anyway. If this was Dotty’s number and she was asleep she’d either have her phone off or switched over to answering machine, the way Chas did theirs. Anyone else, well, what the hell. His own needs came first. The phone rang four times, then someone picked it up. The voice irascible with broken sleep – ‘Who’s that?’ Dotty! Dotty, for sure. Remembering to pinch her lips together, even though barely awake, lest words made the muscles round her mouth collapse. ‘Wh’s tht?’ Dotty without a doubt. ‘Oh, Lord!’ Charlie said, whereupon Dotty said, ‘Charlie, is that you? What’s the matter? Is everything all right? Has anything happened to Charlie?’ And all Charlie could think of saying in return was, ‘I’m losing my mind.’
The first thing Chas and Hazel did after Charlie rang them to say he was sitting in St Thomas’s waiting for Marvin to wake up after being run down by a cyclist but not to worry, was to ring each other. If Chas was driving in from Richmond, then Hazel would take a taxi to Wandsworth where the girls had gone to a friend’s house to rave, from which Chas could pick them up without seriously going out of her way and deliver them all to St Thomas’s. Had any man been party to this arrangement he would have pointed out its logical and geographic flaws and come up with an alternative suggestion. Such as, ‘Go separately.’ This was the joy, for Hazel at least, of having no man party any longer to anything.
In fact, the girls pointed out the chief flaw as they saw it when their mother came to collect them, to whit: if Daddy wasn’t dying, why did they have to see him this very minute when this very minute they were enjoying juggling little, graven love tablets on the tips of their tongues and dancing with bottles of Evian water? Shit, Mummy!
‘He is concussed, darlings,’ Hazel said. But could think of nothing further to add when her daughters smiled sweetly back at her and said, ‘But, Mummy, so are we.’
That being the case, Charlie picked Hazel up from Wandsworth and the two women motored in on their mercy errand without the hindrance of other company.
‘Kind of you to do this,’ Hazel said.
‘De nada.’
Chas and Charlie had recently been to Seville for a children’s literature festival, and now Chas was speaking joke Spanish. In the Merriweathers’ world you weren’t expected to be very good at anything, especially languages. A conviction of the propriety of lightness, which Hazel secretly envied. Oh, to be not very good at anything and see it as a virtue!
‘The last time I did anything like this,’ Chas said, moving up the gears, ‘was when Timmy’s headmaster rang to say he’d fallen from his dormitory window while trying to launch himself back into it from a drainpipe.’
‘What was Timmy’s headmaster doing on a drainpipe?’
The two women laughed. They felt like the mothers of small children again. Suddenly bruised knees were back in their lives.
‘So how come yours didn’t get hurt and mine did?’ Hazel asked.
‘Yours will have been doing something wilder.’
‘To a pedal bike?’
‘Even an argument with a pedal bike’s beyond Charlemagne. He’s too big a baby to get into any real trouble. He walks through danger unaware. He’d have walked through the Russian Revolution without getting a scratch. No one notices he’s there. It’s his height. He seems to be above it. But I bet he’s as jealous of Marvin as anything. He’d love it to be him we were charging in to see with champagne and flowers.’
‘You’ve brought champagne and flowers?’
‘Well, egg sandwiches anyway.’
Chas the provider. Because there was never any room in the boot or back seat of Chas’s car, taken up with umbrellas, Wellingtons and anoraks, Hazel had to sit with the Glyndebourne picnic basket between her feet. Hazel knew what would be in it. Not champagne, but rather more than just egg sandwiches. Hand-raised pork pies, which Charlie loved. Cold potato salad with lashings of mayonnaise, which Charlie loved. Taramasalata and thin wheat crackers, which Charlie loved. A bottle of retsina, which Charlie loved. Runny raspberry cheesecake, which Charlie adored. Lemon meringue pie in which Charlie would have bathed, had he been allowed. Why doesn’t she simply fill it with jars of mashed rhubarb and strained peach and have done, Hazel wondered. Chas the mother of Charlemagne the big baby.
Although she liked and admired Chas in the abstract, positively revered her when she didn’t see her, idealising her capabilities and her appearance, loving her pretend-clumsy handsomeness, the way she seemed to get her face tied up in her spectacles, the way she looked as though she were at any minute going to trip over her own legs, or lose her way in her own kitchen, even while she was single-handedly catering for thirty – although Chas, in absentia, had been her best friend ever since their glory days, when they’d been the girlfriends of that inseparable duo, Charlie Merriweather and Marvin Kreitman – in the flesh Hazel wasn’t sure she liked Chas very much at all. What she forgot, when Chas was not in front of her very eyes to remind her of them, were the notices she hung on all their conversations. ‘Don’t touch my baby.’ ‘Don’t harm my baby.’ ‘Please don’t take my baby away from me.’
As if, Hazel thought.
It wasn’t that she hadn’t noticed Charlie’s charms in the time she’d known him. Or that he hadn’t let her know he’d noticed hers. He took you in all right, Charlie Merriweather. He shot you sudden penetrating glances, along the beams of which you had no choice but to send him penetrating glances back. In this regard, if in no other – and in the end what other is there? – he was a man in working order. Big too, unthreateningly strong, and lovable in the bumbling manner of men of that class and generation. A sweet man. But she didn’t know of a single woman, all questions of hurting or not hurting Chas apart, who viewed him as any sort of proposition. A pet was for life and so was Charlie. You couldn’t quickly let him in on the understanding that he’d quickly let himself back out. Which she suspected was exactly the quality women liked in her husband. Marvin Kreitman would cry over you longer than you might find easy, but he’d be gone fairly smartly thereafter. She could vouch for that. It was very nearly a matter of wifely pride. In fact, in Chas’s company, it was a matter of wifely pride. For there was ultimately something unforgivably insulting about the protective playpen Chas constructed around Charlemagne – insulting to the people the playpen was constructed to keep out, never mind to the big baby it was constructed to keep in – as though one had so few consolations of one’s own that one was bound to want to snaffle Chas’s.
I know what it is she makes me feel, Hazel thought – she makes me feel as though she pities me for having a collapsed womb or lazy ovaries. And she makes me feel as though she fears me for the same reason. Beware! – unnatural, unreproductive woman about.
For her part, though she never much cared for Hazel in the abstract, positively hating her when she didn’t see her, denigrating her for never having made her own career, running down her second-hand stylishness, her reliance upon outside help – architects, landscape gardeners, designers, personal trainers, party chefs, wine waiters – and satirising her transformation from frightened sylvan creature to huntswoman of the savannah, in the flesh Chas admired her, felt calmed by her compact presence and relieved to be in the company of someone who appeared to be as cynical about the sort of silliness upon which Dotty had embarked as she was. In short, though she had been challenged if not affronted by Hazel’s part in those first overheard acts of sexual mayhem and murder with Kreitman, and then alarmed by the cold marital accommodation she’d subsequently come to with him (which still, somehow, did not take from the idea one had of her as his accomplice), these days she did not feel that Hazel was capable of dropping down on her from the trees and sinking her jaws into her defenceless family. If anything, Hazel had given up and gone middle-aged before the rest of them. Which of course made her excellent company.
Only one teeny-weeny anxiety remained. That orphaned stuff that Hazel had once gone in for, all that business about how not having a father robbed you of resistant force – Chas had never believed a word of it. She hadn’t seen much of her father herself while she was growing up. Most of the time she’d been as fatherless as Hazel, but that hadn’t made of her a feather to every breeze that blew. Quite the opposite. In Chas’s view, not having a father on whom to practise the arts of pleasing had made her independent and strong-willed. She was father to herself. What had made Hazel weak was not fatherlessness but spinelessness – if spinelessness was the word for always needing a man to lean on and to blame. Not that Hazel was spineless any longer. But you never knew with weaknesses of that sort, whether they were ever completely gone.
Chas drove as if driving were a romp, like climbing over stiles in a high gale. She wore special glasses for it which she peered over comically, and kept getting her feet, which were far too big for the pedals, in each other’s way. And the more entangled her feet became, the faster she drove.
‘Do you want me to take over?’ Hazel asked. ‘It’s tiring driving in the lights with all these late-night lunatics around.’
‘What you could do,’ Chas said, ‘is help me off with my jacket, thank you, and pull my skirt up between my legs, it’s so I can find the brakes.’
As long as Hazel could remember, Chas had dressed in a man’s double-breasted navy jacket, usually buttoned over a top that might have been knitted out of cucumbers, and a long canvas skirt resembling a spinnaker, always (even on the hottest days) worn with thick ribbed tights. It was a blue-stocking get-up – sensible, rural, droll – which was partly forced on Chas, Hazel understood, by the longness of her limbs and the flatness of her chest, but she wore it so unapologetically that Hazel wondered if it wasn’t also provenly a vote winner, that’s to say arousing to someone – some person or persons – other than her husband. Marvin, an individual of such refinement he had pulled his wife weeping (he weeping) from the contamination of smutty jokes, had once offered it as his opinion that Chas was unfuckable to anyone but Charlie, and for all he knew unfuckable to Charlie too, because no man relished the prospect of a mouthful of hot woolly winter hosiery. ‘You fuck with your mouth now, do you, darling?’ Hazel enquired. ‘There was a time when you knew perfectly well how I fucked,’ Kreitman responded. And for the briefest of moments, as they both thought ‘joylessly’, they were more together than they’d been for years.
And had one asked Chas whether she thought she was fuckable to men other than her husband, whether she wore what she wore because she knew something about what men liked that Hazel in her tailored MaxMara suits did not, and which might or might not have been a mouthful of hot woolly winter hosiery, what then? Would she have turned crimson with anger or embarrassment or both – would she have said she didn’t care whether she was fuckable to other men or not, that she was a woman of the twenty-first century who had better things to think about, and that the question, anyway, if it had to be asked at all, was whether other men were fuckable to her – or would she have lengthened her face and looked over the rim of her comical glasses and very loudly said nothing, like a woman whose soul was her own secret?
She was a virgin when she met Charlie, which made two of them; and from the solemn hour she had been asked if she took Charlie to be her lawful, and she had replied ‘I do’, she had never once committed, or so much as thought about committing adultery. Are we to take it, therefore, that on the night she drove Hazel Kreitman to the hospital, so recklessly she almost ploughed into a queue of kids waiting to get into a club at Clapham Junction, and then had to suffer the ignominy of a breath test on Albert Embankment, Chas Merriweather was a woman who could put her hand on her heart and swear she had carnally known no man who was not her husband? Yes and no.
Adultery is violation of the marriage bed, and though she had already met Charlie she had not yet given herself in marriage to him, nor had her professor given himself in marriage to anybody, when midway through discussing her essay on Chekhov (which, incidentally, he thought magical), he had pulled her to him, thrust his little pink tongue into her mouth, suggested his little pink penis into her hand and told her that he loved her. Not an unusual academic event in those days, but unusual for her, unusual for Chas, in that she neither spat out the tongue nor suggested the penis back inside the professor’s pants. Unusual or not, leaving everything where it was hardly constituted adultery, surely to God, regardless of the marital state of either of them. Indeed, in Chas’s view, as it was happening, it didn’t even constitute sex.
Years afterwards, a president of the United States of America would cause an etymological storm by defining fellatio as a performance of something or other entirely non-sexual, and therefore entirely unblameworthy, in its nature. Did Chas beat the president to it? Was this an earlier (if less controversial) instance of not-sex she was having with a man old enough to be her father, whose brain she revered, and whose translations of the Russian masters she knew by heart? Charlotte Juniper, as she was then, was subtler than the president. She thought kissing and holding on to her professor just the once, and not allowing him to come in her hand – though it alarmed her to remember that he came on her essay – both was not sex and yet was not something she should have been doing either. She felt terrible about it and she didn’t. And the reason she felt terrible about it later was that she hadn’t felt terrible about it at the time.
In another corner of her mind, however, for even a good wife keeps corners which her husband never gets to visit, Chas was exhilarated. She had been mistress of events. When she encountered the professor coming in and out of lectures she perched her sunflower head even prouder on its stalk than usual and smiled an adventuress’s smile, while he slunk past, hidden in the folds of his gown, not knowing whether she thought him a lecher, not knowing whether she thought him a fool, not knowing whether she was going to tell on him to the authorities or to other students. It was a time for women to prove they could be as insouciant as men, and Chas believed she had passed the test. Sex wasn’t supposed to matter to men, and now she had shown it needn’t matter to her. Except, of course, that it wasn’t sex.
So what was it?
She had a feeling it ran in the family. She didn’t mean Dotty. In Dotty’s case it ran away from the family. But discounting Dotty, who was the anomaly, there was, she fancied, a proneness to minor quasi-sexual mishap (if that wasn’t putting it too strongly) extending matrilineally she did not know how far back. Her mother and her grandmother were countrywomen of unassailable propriety, the wives of successful public men – the first a surveyor, the second a doctor – but eminent in their own right as well, both serving officers of their respective parish councils, both voluntary educationalists, conservationists, preservationists, indefatigible charity egg-beaters and National Trusters against whom not a breath of malicious rumour was ever raised. Let a working man tip his hat to Charlie’s grandmother too familiarly and he ran the risk of being elbowed on to the road. Charlie’s mother, too, bore herself sternly, wearing corsets as impregnable as armour long after such protection had gone out of fashion, even in Shepton Mallet. And yet to Charlie’s eye they both appeared vulnerable to solicitation of an absurd or accidental nature. There was something of the pantomime dame about them both, now starched and forbidding, now capable of ending up on the straw with their skirts raised. It was almost as though, in proportion as they armed themselves against direct assault, they courted compromising surprise. Not because they hankered for adventure, quite the opposite – because being compromised proved how gauche and therefore how unfitted for adventure they were. Like her? Well, she wasn’t sure about that. But an entry in her grandmother’s diary, bequeathed to her on that formidable lady’s death, only months after her own inconsequent interlude with her professor, certainly rang bells.
‘Sunday evening, rained all day,’ the diary read, ‘drenched to the bone and glad to be home. Spent an unlooked-for hour sheltering under a tree with Mr Leonard Woolf, whose gardens I had gone to inspect. The poor man wretched on account of the recent suicide of his wife by drowning. The sight of all that falling water would not have helped much, I imagine. Whether I should have acceded to his requests in other circumstances I very much doubt. But there was a charitable side to it. And it was only a small favour he asked. Besides, my own curiosity as to the matter of his Jewishness – never having encountered the phenomenon before – spurred me on a little. For myself, cannot say it was a pleasure, cannot say it was not. For him – definitely not.’
Like her? The same droll obligingness, not devoid of a sense of duty? The same passive recipience of what was and yet was not erotic liberty? Maybe the same. Or, if not the same, similar.
As for Charlie’s mother, Dotty on the telephone to Charlie in London swore blind that she had seen the coalman position himself a hot breath behind her at the Shepton Mallet street party for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and manoeuvre her hand into his flies.
‘I don’t believe you,’ Charlie said. Though she could quite picture the pantomime. Lawk-a-mercy, Mr Brotherton!
‘Then don’t believe me. But if you’d seen him bulging in his best suit you’d have wished it was your hand.’
‘Dotty! What did Daddy say?’
‘Daddy? Daddy was away surveying, as usual.’
‘So what did Mummy do?’
‘She kept it there, silly.’
Well, I suppose it was a party, Charlie told herself. And in a small, cold community you don’t hurt the feelings of the coalman.
She pursed her lips for the traffic cop in Vauxhall, thought about a joke since Hazel was with her, then thought better of it and blew into the bag.
And despite the family susceptivity she truly only opened her mouth for her professor, and never moved away her hand, on that one occasion?
And never ever, post Charlie, with anybody else?
Never ever?
Well … just the teensiest time. But that wasn’t anything of vital importance either.
‘Shhh!’ she ordered him, smoothing his hair.
Kreitman loved nothing more than having a woman’s hand in or near his hair. Had someone told him that God was a woman and would stroke his brow and run her fingers through his hair on his arrival in Her presence, he would gladly have gone to Her at once, and to hell with all the others.
Now more than ever. A woman to blow cool air across his brain, that’s what he needed. A woman to blow women out of his brain.
The cruel paradox of Kreitman’s life, as he saw it: he was ill with women, but only a woman could make him better.
He felt a little less ill, opening his eyes this time, than when he’d first come out of his faint on the Soho streets. For Kreitman, fainting was the proof that he would the badly, and that life was an accident, without meaning or purpose. He had been a congenital fainter as a boy. The sight of blood did it. Horror stories did it. Hot food did it. His father did it. Being struck did it. Seeing a hand raised in anger, even if not to him, did it. Nietzsche went mad on the streets of Trieste, seeing a man beating a horse. Marginally less unstable than the philosopher, Marvin Kreitman fainted at the zoo, seeing a parrot, crazed with being caged, denuding itself of its feathers. Kreitman knew how the parrot felt. Not the being caged, but the futility. Sometimes he plucked at himself, ripping out his fingernails and toenails, tearing the skin from his knuckles, pulling out individual hairs from his scalp. And fainting. Told by the doctor that this was merely a phase Marvin was going through, his mother took him to be examined by a specialist. Several thousand pounds of tests later, Marvin was diagnosed ‘sensitive’. Money well spent. ‘My son is clinically sensitive,’ she informed friends. ‘I could have told you that and saved us a fortune,’ his father croaked. Whereupon Marvin fainted again.
The fainting itself he could live with. Sometimes it was even pleasurable just to vanish from the scene. What he could not bear was the coming-to. When Kreitman came to after fainting it was as though he were being reassembled. So why wasn’t there satisfaction in that? Reunification is meant to be a happy event. Things coming together which have been apart – friends, lovers, nations, ligaments – are deemed to be fortunate. Occasions for a party. Fireworks. Not in Kreitman’s case. When Kreitman came to after fainting, he felt he was being reassembled out of parts that were not his and did not fit. There was physical pain in it, the agony of bones going into sockets that would not take them; but the mental anguish was the hardest to support, the nauseating certainty that the mind you’d been given back was not your mind, that it was of another colour and configuration from your mind, that the patterns you saw were not the patterns you were accustomed to seeing, that there was a music to the objects you woke to which bore no resemblance to any music you knew, or to any rhythmic pattern or system of notation you recognised or liked. He had been reassembled randomly, thrown together, a stranger to himself, without consideration of suitability or match, and that proved there was no meaning or purpose out there. Kabbalists argued that the Godhead who had once presided over a unified and harmonious universe had become alienated from himself, and as a consequence we were all so many scattered sparks, shaken as through from a falling torch. Fine by Kreitman. There had been meaning once, but there wasn’t any now. Unfortunately, he was living now.
Among the scattered sparks that comprised this latest disgusting composition of what wasn’t himself was a fiery recollection of loose talk with Charlie Merriweather. What he thought he could remember couldn’t possibly be the actual event. Another person’s conversation had been confused with his. As for how he’d spent his own evening, some poor insensible bastard elsewhere on the planet was waking with a dream of that.
But he was still alarmed to find Charlie Merriweather’s wife, standing like Florence Nightingale in a spinnaker, by his bed.
‘Where are the others?’ he asked her. ‘Or are you here on your own?’
Because Kreitman noticed such things, he noticed that she didn’t say, ‘Why, would you like me to be here on my own?’ But he also noticed that she also didn’t say, ‘And what, Marvin, would I be doing here on my own?’
‘Charlemagne’s asleep on a bench in the waiting room,’ was what she did say, ‘and Hazel’s having breakfast with Nyman.’
Here we go again, Kreitman thought. Wrong parts. ‘Nyman?’
‘The cyclist.’
‘Which cyclist? Not the faggot who ran me down?’
Charlie shrugged and shook her head, as though Kreitman’s bad language were a poisonous insect that had flown into her hair and she wanted to be rid of it.
‘And he’s called Nyman, you say?’
‘Yes. An Anglicisation of Niemand.’
‘How the fuck do you know that?’
‘He tells you.’
‘A German?’
‘I don’t know. An Austrian, I think.’
‘There are no such things as Austrians. All Austrians are Germans.’
‘Hush, Marvin.’
‘I don’t have to hush. Germans I can say what I like about. That’s their function for the next thousand years – to be the butt of everyone who isn’t German. Especially when they’re faggots who run me down in the street. And Hazel’s having breakfast with him, did I hear you say?’
‘Loyal of her. And would you have any idea how Hazel happened to run into this Nyman?’
‘He was here. He’s been here all night with Charlie.’
‘I’ll tell you what,’ Kreitman said, ‘why don’t you join them for breakfast and leave me to have another little faint. Maybe when I next surface the world will make more sense. It’s kind of you to have come, Charlie.’
‘De nada,’ Chas said.