Ordered to get some rest, Kreitman agreed to let Hazel drive him down slowly to a hotel they both liked, though Kreitman less than Hazel, on one of the softer edges of Dartmoor.
It wasn’t just being knocked down he needed rest from. He needed rest from Charlie. All week, as though ducking flying bullets, Kreitman had been dodging his friend’s calls. You know when someone’s desperate to reach you. You hear it in the way the phone rings. And every time Kreitman’s phone rang he knew it was Charlie, demented, ill with fidelity, pushing for the swap.
You also know when someone’s avoiding you. Conversing with his women, Charlie thought. Making assignations even while his bones ache. Talking dirty. Three on a phone. The couple of times he did get through, Kreitman cut him short. ‘Up to my ears, Charlie. Let’s have another day in Soho again soon. Yes, exactly – on the principle that a man who crashes his car should start driving it again without delay. This Thursday? Love to, but let me see, let me see – no, can’t.’
Wouldn’t, more like. He’d been trying not to think about Charlie, but when he did, he understood that the best reason for denying him – sanity and decency aside – was that he didn’t want him in so close, didn’t want to forgo the experience of having him out there as a dumbstruck spectator of his irregularities. Everything else was pointing to the conventionality of Kreitman’s routines. Twenty years ago he’d been a wild man, the Casanova of University College, now what he did his own daughters considered too naff even to tackle him about. Yuk, Daddy, adultery? Get a life! But Charlie at least was still bulging his eyes. Shame to lose that. And lose it he would once he and Charlie became, so to speak, brothers in arms.
‘What about Friday?’ Charlie asked.
Kreitman pretended to rustle his diary. ‘Same again. No can do. I’m just hellishly pushed right now.’
Well, who wasn’t hellishly pushed right now?
Not that Charlie honestly believed anyone had pushed him. This time, Charlie in his calmer moments reflected, I’ve gone and jumped. Christ!
He couldn’t believe the hammering his chest was taking. Was this what not-nice sex did to your ribs and diaphragm? And he was only thinking about it!
As yet.
He held on to that. As yet.
A one-time shooting and fishing hotel, then a murder-mystery weekend hotel, then a white-water rafting hotel – a briefer incarnation, this, on account of the absence within a radius of five thousand miles of anything that could reasonably be called white water – and latterly a string quartet and dance alternating with a book club hotel (in which form it was at last returned to the earlier hush of its shooting and fishing days), the Baskervilles had been a favourite of the Kreitmans and the Merriweathers during that brief opportunity for liberty which comes between courtship and children.
Kreitman was still the idealistic historian of English radicalism in those days, and not yet the luggage baron of south London, else he would have shown up at the Baskervilles for his first ever walking holiday on Dartmoor – if truth be told, his first ever walking holiday anywhere – accoutred in rucksacks and map holders and water bottles and walking sticks all finished with the softest leathers. As it was, he arrived looking smarter by a country mile than any of them, though he never got to walk a country mile because of the weather. ‘I don’t care what these boots are built to do,’ he told Hazel, ‘they’re brand new and I’m not going out and putting them in puddles.’ So he sat in the lounge and read Country Life and played with the odd jigsaw while the others experienced the exhilaration of rocky landscape and teeming rain. Come night-time he was the only one with energy and didn’t want to hear that they’d seen eagles. ‘Please, I’m exhausted,’ Hazel said, ‘I can’t even bend my knees.’ But no day was a holiday for the young Kreitman that didn’t end in a fuck. Lying in the stag-wallpapered room next door, the two Charlies listened as Kreitman ground his will out pleasurelessly and Hazel uttered not a sound.
This trip Kreitman wasn’t taking walking boots. By now he knew himself. It was a hot early May, an oasis of hot in a month of showers, too tiring for walking – it was always either too hot or too wet, too misty or too glaring, for walking on Dartmoor – and he had his heart set, since he’d been ordered to turn off that nicely purring engine of his, on sinking into a winged armchair in the mini-palm-court lounge, reading newspapers, smiling at lesbians, consuming pots of tea and anchovy sandwiches, thinking his thoughts and, so long as Hazel kept her distance, ringing up the other women in his life. There was, as Charlie had surmised, though he had overestimated the heat, a fair amount of ringing up and putting right to do. A man actively in love with five women can’t just disappear on holiday when the fancy takes him. Leaving the shops was easier. He had managers and manageresses to tend the shops. But nobody tends your mistresses when you’re not there to see to them yourself. Mistresses? Hardly. That wasn’t the tone of the times. He was more their mistress than they were his. It entailed duties, anyway, whatever it was all called. So he’d said no to the idea of a break at first. ‘I’ve got responsibilities,’ he told his doctor. ‘I’ve got matters I can’t leave,’ he said to Hazel. But two days after his night on the town with Charlie, though his collision with the cyclist had barely left a scratch on him, just a few throbbing aches in the ribs, he fell asleep at his desk in the middle of the afternoon and missed an appointment. He was dead tired, he had to admit that to himself. And among the things he was dead tired of were the women.
Number itself wasn’t the problem. Of course you had to organise your time intelligently if you weren’t to end up with angry women all over town. But Kreitman employed a driver to help him get around, a discreet semi-liveried Kenyan who laughed at everything and for whom Kreitman had provided a ruby-red Smart, manoeuvring and parking being of the essence. And of course lightness of touch – for what could be lighter than a laughing chauffeur with leather patches on his navy polo neck driving a car the size of a bedbug? Men like Charlie who were driven nuts by the fewness of women in their lives were wont to scrutinise Kreitman’s face for signs that he was on overload. ‘Sheesh, Marvin!’ they would say, shaking their heads, meaning, ‘Can’t you see they’re destroying you, man?’ Wishful thinking. Confining himself (and his driver) to those parts of London where he already had business to attend to, he could have coped with any number. What was tiring in five was what was tiring in two – the pity you expended.
Actively love two women, attend to them as you are able only when you’re fucking them (fucking with them, Kreitman tried to remember to think, in deference to his own daughters) – though the truth of it was that they were fucking him, using him like some tart they’d picked up on a street corner in Streatham, for that was the way of it between the sexes now – actively love two women, anyway, the sociology of it apart, and you are forever adjudicating between the hands life has dealt them. Lying with Erica, whose skin seemed made of Christmas-cracker crêpe, so quiveringly taut and percussive was it, he would suddenly experience a revulsion on behalf of Vanessa, who each day collected another purply bump on her shins and thighs, not a bruise, though of course a woman of her age walked into more table edges than Erica did, but marks of inner deterioration, signs that veins were popping with overuse and blood forgetting where to flow. Too cruel that such was the reward, in Erica’s case, for lolling on couches half the day, reading Homes and Gardens, while Vanessa’s blue-black bumps were all the thanks she got for having racked her brains in the service of Book at Bedtime before succumbing to the BBC’s unspoken horror of the un-young, collecting her pay dirt, and turning herself into a teacher of the intellectually impaired. Not fair, either, that the lucky one should have rocked him sensuously in the cradle of inconsequence, and given him sweet dreams, while the solemn one left him agitated, tingling to his fingertips with purposiveness, unable to find rest. By sleeping with them both, Kreitman brought them into moral juxtaposition and felt the universal unfairness of things on their behalf.
Unlikely that these revulsions from beauty and good fortune helped those who had neither, but they deepened the picture. To the simple pleasure which being fucked by women who were beautiful and exuded confidence gave him, he now had to add the complicating fact of his betraying them in his heart. And it was the pressure of this constant ethical refereeing, combined with the conviction that such conscientiousness was enjoined upon him by the amount of fucking he was doing, as though sex were like inherited wealth, entailing greater social responsibilities the more of it you had – it was this that was knocking him out.
Not a cheerful fucker at the best of times, he was now grown heartsore. He seemed overburdened, a bearer of grievous history, an implanter of sorrows, rather than the fun, gag-a-minute guy – lightsome Kreitman – he would have liked to have been.
Take what had happened with Bernadette only the night before the drive to Devon. Ten years his senior, Bernadette was an architect with a deep voice, fearsome cheekbones and a strict manner, the kind of woman you saw from a distance and felt immediately reprimanded by, a woman you put up scaffolds to approach and ascended gingerly, in a harness and a hard hat. Circumstances had taken a swing at Bernadette – the lover before Kreitman pinning a letter to her drawing board saying he couldn’t bear seeing her beauty succumb to age and so was running off with her youngest daughter, take it the right way, Geoffrey. Taking it the wrong way, Bernadette had rung Kreitman, who, as the husband of the woman who employed her ex-daughter-in-law to redesign her house, she had once or twice encountered at dinner parties. ‘My daughter’s fucked off with my lover,’ she told him, ‘and since she doesn’t herself have a lover off with whom I can fuck in return, I thought I’d try some other woman’s man. Are you busy?’
Kreitman loved fucking her because she, even more than all the others, over and above what the times insisted on, fucked him. Ironically and with her steel-grey eyes wide open, waiting for him to make her laugh. That was all she wanted from him, exactly what he’d wanted from his father – jokes, anecdotes, messages from the breathing world, the blacker the better. Any sign of his losing himself on her breast or otherwise thinking about ecstasy and she stopped moving. Sometimes, before visiting her, he’d have to go cap in hand to his own staff, to beg for the latest joke. It was like feeding a monster. Entertain her harshly and she was his. Bore her with sweet talk and she’d be gone. Then, the night before Devon, he lost her in the bed. Simply couldn’t find her. Called her name and she didn’t answer. Nothing on the pillow. Nothing under the duvet. When he pulled all the bedclothes back, there she was at the bottom of the mattress, flattened like her own shadow, extruded as though flayed and thrown away and only the outer skin of her remaining. ‘What are you doing?’ he said. ‘Where’ve you gone?’ She didn’t know what he was talking about. ‘I’m lying here waiting for you to amuse me,’ she said. ‘But you’ve made yourself vanish,’ he said. ‘It’s too upsetting, seeing you do that.’ She sat up with her knees against her chest and lit a cigarette. ‘I think it’s time we took a rain check, Marvin,’ she said. ‘I think you’re getting a trifle tragic for me.’
He was.
Looking forward to the rest, he was disappointed, when they checked in to the Baskervilles, to discover that Hazel had planned him a surprise. This weekend the hotel book club was addressing the subject of children’s literature as adult literature, and in attendance to address it with them were the C. C. Merriweathers, Charlie J. and Charlie K. So for the Merriweathers and the Kreitmans (when the Merriweathers weren’t discussing their craft) – this was Hazel’s cute, recuperative idea – it would be a little bit like old times.
That was the first part of the surprise.
The second part of the surprise concerned Nyman. Guess what? He was here too.
‘So tell me about yourself,’ Kreitman said over dinner. ‘I missed out on the introductions and the breakfasts. What do you do when you’re not biking urgent deliveries around Soho?’
Sitting on his hands, Charlie Merriweather gave thanks that Kreitman hadn’t asked him what he did when he wasn’t being a faggot.
What everybody found personable about Nyman was his absence of personality. Nyman too found this personable about himself. ‘There is nothing to tell,’ he said. ‘And I don’t even deliver packages any more. I only pretend to do that.’
‘To make yourself interesting?’ Kreitman wondered.
But killingness was wasted on Nyman who had long ago embarked upon the course of killing himself. Finding if he had a self first, then killing it. ‘Exactly so,’ he said. He had a round blank floury face, the texture of one of Charlie’s baps, but angled to look sad, like a white-faced clown’s. And a small, perfectly circular mouth, shaped as though to receive slender rolled-up magazines, the Spectator or the New Statesman.
‘Then tell us all some of the other things you do to make yourself interesting,’ Kreitman persisted.
‘Well, for example,’ Nyman said, ‘I can bend my thumbs to meet my wrist.’
‘Show us,’ Kreitman said. Then, when Nyman had showed them, ‘And is there anything else?’
‘Well, for example,’ Nyman said, ‘I can make my eyes squeak.’
‘I don’t think we want to see that,’ Hazel said.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Kreitman corrected her.
So Nyman put his knuckles in the sockets of his eyes, and ground them until they squeaked.
Chas and Hazel looked away.
‘That it?’ Kreitman enquired.
‘Well, for another example,’ Nyman said, ‘I have bicycled down here.’
Chas gasped. ‘You’ve cycled here from London?’
Hazel also gasped. ‘Today?’
‘No, I left first thing yesterday morning. Last night I slept under a ditch …’
‘In a ditch,’ Kreitman corrected him, ‘or under a hedge.’
Because he had had less opportunity to talk to Nyman than the others, Kreitman continued to work on the assumption that he was German. That was why he took the liberty of correcting his English. Kreitman regularly attended trade fairs in Germany, Germans having an atavistic love of leather – echt leder, how could you put it better? – and he knew that Teutonic longings to overmaster the English persisted, also atavistically, in a dream of mastery of the English language. Help them with idiomatic expression and they would spare your family. But there was every possibility that Nyman wasn’t German at all. Not even foreign.
Just foreign to the English tongue.
‘Yes, under a hedge. Then I began again early, with the birds, and got here as you see me now.’
‘You must be whacked,’ Hazel said.
‘Well, I am pumped, certainly,’ he said, rolling up a trouser leg and inviting Hazel to inspect his calf muscle.
Fluttering her hands like a princess about to feel her first frog, Hazel bent and made a stab at Nyman’s muscle. ‘I should say so,’ she laughed, her voice ringing with little girlish bells, as though still not sure whether pond life agreed with her. ‘Pumped’s the word!’
You can tell, thought Chas, that she has never nursed a boy child.
Some instinct for propriety had told Nyman not to come to dinner, nor to come near Kreitman at any time, wearing cycling gear. Instead he wore a crushed sandy suit, which went with his colouring, a crushed sandy shirt, a crushed sandy tie and sandy shoes. His general appearance was crushed, of course, as a consequence of being folded in a saddlebag for two whole days and one night under a ditch, but there was no questioning its muscular conformability.
Why is the little prick wearing camouflage on Dartmoor? Kreitman wondered.
How variously he dresses, Hazel thought, remembering the elasticated green lunchbox shorts and sleeveless thunder and lightning cycling vest he had on when she first met him. How nice it is to see a man prepared to experiment with his appearance, unlike Marvin with his invariable sharp suits, declaring this is the man I am, this is the man I am, this is the man I am. How pliant and gender-undemonstrative Nyman is, for a man with so hard a body, and how he starts when I look at him.
How she starts when he looks at her, Chas noticed. Yet how pointedly he averts his eyes from mine. What is it he wants me to see he doesn’t want from me? Alternatively, what doesn’t he want me to see he does want from me?
Chas was wearing a Butler and Wilson dragonfly on the lapel of her jacket. From time to time she fingered it, changing its position so that it might catch the light and maybe dazzle him. And did he dazzle her? Of course not. No man could be less dazzling than Nyman. He did not emit light, he absorbed it. He was a black hole, and by the magic of physics, all sources of light sought their extinction in him.
A mystery to Kreitman, this, even as the blackness drew him to it. Kreitman was of the generation that believed you had to be brilliant to win a woman’s attention, that you had to sparkle conversationally, that you had to make wisdom fall from your lips like rubies, while your eyes danced like showers of falling stars. You laboured at your coruscations and the woman was the reward. He could not conceive that a woman might find attractive what she had to labour to win.
Flash, flash, went Chas’s glittering dragonfly.
Of the group, only Charlie was incurious about Nyman. But then Charlie had his mind on other things. From where he sat there was a view through the hotel window of one of those warty tors for which Dartmoor is famous. He wasn’t sure whether he could see people on the tor, or merely sheep, but the distant prospect made him melancholy. Distant prospects always did that for Charlie, especially when they were of tors and the tors were pink-tipped by the sun, like the nipples on a flat-chested girl stretched out on a beach or, more melancholy still, asleep in a summer meadow buzzed by flies. He gazed out of the window absently, tying his linen napkin into love knots, unaware of Nyman.
Unaware of Hazel too, it appeared, though it might reasonably be supposed, given the time he’d spent trying to raise and remind Kreitman of this last week, that his absent-minded love knot was for her. But Charlie wasn’t counting his chickens. For the time being it was some lovely glorious nippled nothing he was seeing. Miss Cuntalina Fuckleton.
‘But apart from cycling,’ Kreitman persisted with Nyman, ‘what is it you want from life? Presumably there isn’t much of a living in cycling …’
‘My husband is always curious to know what there is or there isn’t much of a living in,’ Hazel interrupted.
‘I see,’ said Nyman. ‘A businessman.’
‘A captain of industry no less,’ Hazel said. ‘The luggage baron of south London.’
‘Your husband has a tide?’ Nyman marvelled.
‘They say his father was a king,’ Chas threw in.
Kreitman bridled. No one in Charlotte Juniper’s family had ever worked a market stall. They had survived genteelly, on charity when necessary, for however many hundreds of years, but no stain of any market stall to darken their good name. ‘Who am I dining out with here,’ Kreitman asked, ‘the Tunbridge Wells chapter of the Communist Party? I am making small talk. I am asking Nyman what he wants from life.’
‘Marvin’s idea of small talk,’ Chas threw in again – ‘ “And how do you explain creation, young man?”’
To her enormous satisfaction, Nyman laughed. A curious ripple that ran up his chest and shook his shoulders, before dying in his face. She wasn’t sure, but wasn’t this, in their company at least, Nyman’s first ever laugh? Discovering that she could coax a sound, or at least a sight, suggestive of mirth out of a person as ruthlessly mysterious, and therefore mirthless, as Nyman heated Chas’s blood. It was a joy comparable to gardening, like watering a parched bed and watching the flowers open. In her excitement, she danced her dragonfly and watched it disappear into the colourless immensity which was Nyman.
For no reason she could put a name to, Hazel dropped her napkin and while retrieving it accidentally effected a second graze of Nyman’s well-pumped calf.
The quick look Nyman shot her – two pale points of Arctic light—was perceived by Chas at the very moment it was perceived by Kreitman, who believed he noted a similar roundelay of exchanges beginning with Hazel and ending he wasn’t certain where. Only Charlie remained outside the circle of infatuation.
‘Somehow, in all this merriment,’ Kreitman said, ‘my question has been lost. I suspect you’re going to tell me you’re an artist. Everybody seems to be an artist at the moment, all our children, all our wives. The only person I know who isn’t an artist is me, though even I sometimes design a handbag or a suitcase with something approaching artistry, let my daughter insist all she likes that artistry is not to be confused with artisanship. But if you are an artist, please don’t tell me that the art you make is yourself.’
‘No,’ said Nyman, ‘the art I make is not myself. I do not have a self.’
‘So I understand,’ said Kreitman, ‘though to me you have a very distinct self – I still feel the bruises from it. But you are, then, an artist? Do you blaze a trail or do you leave a path?’
‘Jesus, Marvin!’ Hazel said. Then to Nyman she added, ‘You are not obliged to be interrogated, you know.’
‘Unless you happen to enjoy it,’ Chas said, putting her face on a slant, as though the world of abstruse enjoyments were her oyster.
‘No, it’s all right,’ Nyman said. And that was when Kreitman noticed he was being aped, that Nyman was twirling his wine glass between his fingers exactly as Kreitman twirled his, and that he was making a fist of his other hand, rubbing it absently into the tablecloth, as though kneading dough, as though killing dough, again as Kreitman did. Kreitman’s rigid fist was infamous among his women, each of whom began by hoping she would be the one to get him to open his fingers and release his murderous grip on himself. Now he could see what it looked like and why, as a discrete object, like some tiny meteorite humming with unearthly tension, it upset those who had to eat and drink in its vicinity. But what was Nyman up to? Was he making merry with Kreitman’s mannerisms? Was he learning what Kreitman was with a view to doing him some damage? Or was he just being Kreitman because Kreitman was a good thing to be? Had the little cocksucker chosen to admire him suddenly?
Whatever the answer to those questions, Kreitman found himself wanting to go on holding Nyman’s attention and winning his approval. If the boy had a yen to be like him he wasn’t going to be dog in the manger about it – he would show the boy how to be like him. The first consequence of which was that he was unable to remember how his own voice worked naturally and started to shout.
‘Shush,’ Hazel said. ‘They don’t want to hear you at the far end of the room.’
‘You don’t know that. They might very well want to hear me at the far end of the room,’ Kreitman boomed again. And he twinkled at Nyman who, for a black hole, made a pretty good fist, since we are talking fists, of twinkling back.
Over coffee in the lounge, for the Baskervilles remained one of those hotels that could not bear to serve coffee to its patrons until they were seated too low down to drink it comfortably, Nyman finally told them what he wanted out of life. He wanted to be on television.
A moment or two of silence greeted this revelation. All of their children wanted to be on television. Sardonic as a matter of generational principle though their children were, and doubly sardonic when it came to television, they had no other medium for appraising worth, and no other measure for knowing whether or not a thing existed. If it didn’t flicker it didn’t count. But until now neither the Kreitmans nor the Merriweathers had quite thought of Nyman as being of their children’s vocational kith and kin.
Then, ‘You’d be good on television,’ Hazel said.
‘You think so?’
‘Yes, yes I do. I think you’d make people sit up.’
‘But then it’s always possible,’ Chas put in, ‘that Nyman doesn’t want to make people sit up. He might want to make people sit down. That’s how we normally watch television.’
‘My guess,’ said Kreitman, ‘is that Nyman wants to go on television to do neither. My guess is that Nyman wants to go on television simply to subvert the form. I think when Nyman says he wants to be on television he’s taking the piss. Nicht wahr, Nyman?’
They waited, husband, wife and someone else’s wife, for the stranger with no character or prospects to tell them who was right. Kreitman saw that Nyman was making a white-knuckled fist with the hand that wasn’t raising the coffee cup, and felt confident. Hazel sank lower in her chair and showed Nyman her neck.
‘I think I don’t know yet what I want to do on television,’ Nyman said. ‘I think I just want to be on it.’
‘Aha!’ Kreitman said.
‘I think I want to show that I am … What is the word?’
‘A humorist,’ Kreitman suggested.
Nyman shook his head. ‘I believe I have no humour.’
‘Palpable,’ Chas tried. ‘You want to go on television to materialise yourself. We all do.’
Nyman looked evenly at her, almost granting her what he had granted Hazel, those two pale points of distant Arctic light. ‘Palpable … That’s not so bad.’
But Hazel had not yet had her go. ‘A winner,’ she said. ‘I think you want to show that you can win.’
‘Win at what?’ Kreitman wanted to know.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Hazel said. ‘Specific achievement is out. You’re so stuck in the past, Marvin, with your winning at what. With television you win simply by being on it. You exceed the common.’
‘And how do you do that?’ Kreitman asked. ‘By being even more common than everybody else?’
‘It is not a sin,’ Hazel replied with heat, ‘to be unexceptional.’
‘Thank you, Hazel,’ Nyman said. ‘You have found my word. I want to go on television to show that I am exceptionally unexceptional.’ He was so pleased he actually clapped his hands together like a seal. ‘It is you, Hazel,’ he continued, letting his blank barm-bun stare, with its distant snowy reflections, last long upon her, ‘who understands me best.’
At this, Chas did something which no one who was watching had ever seen her, or come to that anyone else, do before. She threw up her canvas skirts. Outside of a Victorian novel, Kreitman thought, I have never heard of a woman throwing up her skirts. He tried to think of Peggotty, but it wasn’t Peggotty Chas reminded him off. It was someone more French.
Realising how her action could be misconstrued, Chas affected to be worrying about crumbs, and exaggeratedly shook herself out. But a raised skirt is a raised skirt, and her cheeks blazed.
‘And now can we play croquet on the lawn?’ Nyman asked.
‘Too late,’ Kreitman said. ‘Croquet is a daylight game.’
‘Doesn’t have to be,’ said Hazel. ‘There are floodlights.’
Kreitman closed his face as though closing a door. ‘It’s not a floodlit activity. You can’t measure the distances right. The shadows interfere with your judgement. And with your safety. You’ll end up cracking your shins, or cracking someone else’s, with the mallet. And anyway, the lawn will be starting to get dewy. The balls will skid.’
‘How good it is,’ Hazel said, ‘to be married to an authority.’
But instead of edging her one of his glances of blank complicity, Nyman suddenly turned to Charlie. ‘Charles,’ he said, ‘I think of you as the authority on all things English – what do you think? Is it your opinion that croquet is out of the question?’
And had Kreitman been wearing skirts himself, he too might well have flung them over his head.
‘So what’s this all about?’ Kreitman asked.
They were lying on their backs in their separate beds, like a lately deceased Pharaoh and his queen, waiting to be embalmed.
‘What’s all what about?’
‘Come on, Hazel. It’s called Nyman. What’s it about?’
‘You mind your affairs, Marvin, I’ll mind mine.’
‘It’s an affair now, is it? You only met him a week ago, isn’t that a bit soon?’
‘We don’t discuss these things, Marvin. Your rule.’
‘If you don’t want the boy discussed then you shouldn’t have brought him here. Your rule.’
‘What is it about him you want to discuss? The way you’ve been trying to woo him all night.’
‘Woo Nyman, me? Why would I do that?’
‘Because you’re a wooer, Marvin. Because you have no choice. People have to notice you, be fascinated by you, then love you. Women, preferably. But if no new woman happens to be present, you’ll make do with something else. It’s the way you operate.’
‘Not with Nyman it’s not,’ Marvin said. ‘You’re lucky I’m civil to him. The faggot put me into hospital, in case you’ve forgotten.’ He was staring at the ceiling from which, if he could trust his memory, a dusty chandelier used to hang. Now it was downlighting. Twenty years ago they made hay in a four-poster. Now mummified in twin beds.
Hazel got out of hers and went to the window. She was wearing a straight white Victorian shift she had bought in an antique shop. Shapeless and innocent, with lace on the sleeves. Kreitman noticed her feet, like a little girl’s. From his experience it was an unvarying truth about women – even the oldest of them had feet like a little girl’s. It was the one part of them, at least that you could see, that stayed young. No wonder he was upset all the time. The more you had to do with women the more sadness you encountered.
Once upon a time I could have gone over to her, Kreitman thought, and slid my hands around her through the sleeves of her nightgown, and she would have leaned back into me with all her weight, utterly trusting. He had loved that, the trust, the weight of her, and the way her leaning into him raised her breasts infinitessimally, their undersides softer than peeled fruit. Brand new skin, never before touched, never before seen.
How long now since he’d touched or seen?
She stood at the window, looking out in silence. Moonlight on the moor, Kreitman thought. She is probably thinking what I’m thinking. How long it’s been. How much we’ve lost. But what he didn’t know was that she was watching Nyman crouching on the lawn, inspecting the croquet hoops, and the Merriweathers bent over him, presumably explaining the rules.
‘You’ll get cold,’ he said.
‘It’s not in the slightest bit cold,’ she said.
Then he noticed she was crying. Dry tears, not sobs, the dry tears every faithless husband fears he is the reason for. I have dried up even her accesses to sorrow, the swine I am.
‘Why can’t I ?’ she said. ‘Why can’t I ever?’
Kreitman’s ears pricked. ‘Why can’t you what?’
She wasn’t really talking to him. ‘Why can’t I ever have what I want? Always so hard, always so much soul-searching, always such a fuss. This to consider, that to consider. What the girls would think. What you would think, as though I’m obliged to care a tinker’s damn what you would think. Why can’t I be more like you? Want something? Take something. A click of the fingers – Here, you!’
‘Here who?’
‘Why do you think I can’t do it, Marvin? Why do you think I can’t take him, have him and be done with him, Kreitman-style?’
If it wasn’t cold, why was he cold? ‘Why can’t you have whom?’
‘Whom! Don’t whom me, Marvin. You know perfectly fucking well whom. Why can’t I fuck him without you fucking with my head? Why do you have to have an attitude? Why do you always have to be there? I’ve kept out of your way, why can’t you keep out of mine?’
‘Hazel, you brought me here. You organised this.’
Outside on the lawn, Chas was standing closer to Nyman than the rules of croquet, let alone the etiquette of explaining the rules of croquet, demanded. Hazel turned from the window and showed her husband her distraught face, furrowed with tears which wouldn’t flow. ‘I’m not crying for the reason you think I’m crying,’ she said. ‘I’m crying because it’s so demeaning to be back feeling all this again.’
‘It’s so demeaning to be back feeling what?’ (Tell me, tell me.)
‘It’s so not what I wanted.’
‘Then stop feeling it,’ Kreitman said.
For a moment he thought she might come over to him and hit him. ‘How dare you say that to me!’ she hissed. ‘How dare you, of all people, make it sound so blithe – you who have never denied yourself a feeling in your life. Except the feeling of loyalty.’
He withdrew his face, as though frightened for it. But he couldn’t withdraw himself. Too interested. Too interesting, all this. ‘Then if you want to fuck him, fuck him,’ he said.
My fault, Hazel thought, my own stupid fault for introducing the fuck word. Introduce the fuck word to my husband and he’ll shake its fucking hand off.
‘Don’t!’ she said.
‘Don’t what?’
‘Just don’t! The spectacle of you putting your mind to the rights and wrongs of anything is too horrible to contemplate. I’m ashamed to be married to you. If you want to fuck him, fuck him. Where did you pick up your code of ethics, Marvin – in a cat house?’
‘Do you think you might be a little bit in love with him?’
‘Stop it, Marvin!’
He began to cry himself, the full waterworks she remembered so well from the platform at Paddington, and after that every station you could name. She knew what they were worth. She could price the downpour, tear by tear. Nothing was what they were worth. Not a farthing. But she was lonely and horrified by herself, to be feeling what she was feeling, to be at the mercy of all that old pestiferous stuff again – desire of so little consequence it made your stomach turn, but still, somehow, desire. ‘Move over,’ she said, ‘and let me in.’
He folded her in his arms, surprised, as he had always been, by how small she could make herself. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s OK.’
‘It isn’t OK,’ she said.
He knew what she meant by that. A dread clutched his heart. When women who had loved you lay in your arms and said it wasn’t OK it only ever meant one thing. It meant that they were in the grip of an uncontrollable longing for someone else. A melodramatist of sex, as are all dedicated adulterers and fornicators, Kreitman conceived such longing as a force so irrefutable and destructive that nothing could possibly survive it. Not duty, not home, not decency, not reason, not God, not him. The dread that clutched his heart was a foreboding of his own obliteration. No half measures for Kreitman, when it came to the gains and losses of sex. You won everything, you lost everything. What was marvellous was how alike those two extremes could be. Embracing his obliteration, shutting his ears to every sound except his lurching heartbeat, Kreitman felt desire for his would-be faithless wife race like poison through his body. ‘How bad is it?’ he whispered. ‘How much do you want to fuck him?’ At once, as though she were some washed-up shell creature, poked at by a callous boy, Hazel closed and went rigid in his arms. Kreitman knew what he had to do. He had to shut the fuck up. Not say another single fucking syllable. But he too was at the mercy of an ungovernable longing. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Speak to me. You can imagine I’m him, if it will make you feel better. Call me Nyman. I am your husband’s enemy. Beg me to fuck you …’
And this time Hazel did hit him.