The following day, Kreitman sat in a metal chair – one of thirty or forty arranged in book-club formation around the Moriarty Room – and listened to the Merriweathers taking questions from their fans. The usual: where do you get your ideas, how do you find a publisher, how are you able to work together, do you try your stories (sorry, did you try your stories) on your own children, what would you like to be if you weren’t writers. Sour for all sorts of reasons, but at his sourest in the presence of book readers and their providers, for he had imagined such a life for himself once, touring the world discussing Francis Place and the glory that was once the English mind, Kreitman allowed his own mind to turn against his friends. What would you like to be if you weren’t writers? Excuse me – what the Merriweathers, Charlie and Charlie, did was not write. Writers wrote for adults, not for children. As for where they got their ideas – ha! The Merriweather books did not contain ideas. Kreitman did not know that for a fact. He hadn’t read, properly read, any of the Merriweather books. But he knew it as an intuition. He didn’t approve of children’s books. He had not read children’s books as a child himself and to the degree that he had been allowed a say in the matter he had not permitted his own children to read them. What was wrong with The Mill on the Floss? What was wrong with Jane Eyre? What was wrong with A Tale of Two Cities? What was wrong with lying listening to Daddy telling you about himself? If John Stuart Mill could be enjoying Herodotus in the original when he was three, Kreitman was not going to give his children Thomas the Fucking Tank Engine. It was sometimes put to him that John Stuart Mill suffered a nervous breakdown in later years, as though that negated the Herodotus, as though readers of Thomas the Fucking Tank Engine didn’t also suffer nervous breakdowns. Nothing makes us sane, Kreitman believed, but some things make us smart. Smart – what a word of now! In his head he took it back. Not smart, intelligent. And that most definitely was not a word of now.
I am the sole guardian of the culture, Kreitman thought, and I sell purses.
An attentive observer will have noted some ambiguity in Kreitman’s feelings about his friends the Merriweathers. As a professional couple at the soft end of the writing profession, and he a mere bagman, they kept open a number of doors to his idealised past which would otherwise have creaked closed. But Kreitman was a puritan who loved art for its strenuousness and history for the stories it told of struggle. Whatever came easy was of no value to Kreitman. And that that included fucking we already know. The problem with the Merriweathers, viewed solely as a couple now, considered only as a literary entity, was that they had neither struggled to find their métier, nor struggled with it once found. A niche opened for them and they fell into it. The same of course could be said for him, but in his case the casket of riches that fell open was not prized by the Kultur. The more money Kreitman made, the further into the background of the nation he felt himself recede. Money ruled, without doubt. The catch for Kreitman, though, was that the way you made it also ruled, and except in so far as it showed him in a picturesque costermonger light, the way he made his (dirty fingers, Kreitman) did him no favours precisely where a favour would have been appreciated. ‘Ah, purses!’ an academic philosopher with a boy’s brow and a soldier’s back had once repeated, meeting Kreitman on the Merriweather lawn, and the Thames flowing sweetly, and the blackbirds melodic, and the shadows lengthening. ‘Ah, handbags and the like!’ And he had remained with his pale hand to his cheek and his Mekon head thrown back in contemplation for so long, that Kreitman wondered whether his profession had turned the thinker to stone. His own fault for caring? Decidedly. No one knew that better than he did. But what could he do? He’d gone out and got Kultur, and for Kultur when it infects the un-kultured there is no known cure. With the Merriweathers, though, it all went, as it had always gone, swimmingly. He had not been able to imagine how the Charlies were going to survive leaving university. He remembered waving goodbye to them when they drove off on their honeymoon, immediately after graduating. To this day he could see their big unsheltered eyes receding, seeming to plead with him to call them back. It was like watching Adam and Eve leaving the Garden. It all but broke his squishy heart. But he had got it completely wrong. They weren’t leaving the Garden at all, they were entering it. The one excluded from the Garden was him, Marvin Kreitman. Thereafter, there always seemed to be someone giving one or other of the Charlies something. This one bought them a house. That one bought them furniture. Another paid their first child’s school fees. Not relatives, either. Not even friends, as far as Kreitman could make out. Just people. Folk. Personages of the Kultur. Until the Merriweathers in turn became personages of the Kultur themselves, ready to assist whoever came passing the hat round in the Garden next.
Some friend, that Kreitman! But what choice did he have? There was never an orphan yet who did not envy a big family. And the truth is, he would have bought them a house if no one else had. And furnished it for them. And paid for Timmy the Pierced, latterly of Blind Date, to go to Bedales. It was possible to feel concern for those you loved and to feel resentful of them at the same time. Possible? In Kreitman’s estimation it was a universal law.
He slipped away from the book readers as soon as it was respectable to do so and took a stroll around the gardens. Sitting on a sun-bleached bench, she in linens, which he’d watched her steaming with her travel-steamer after silent breakfast, he in heimat urchin mountain pants cut off halfway down his legs, she animated, he not, she the watering can, he the flower, were Hazel and Nyman. Kreitman turned and walked the other way. Finding a bench of his own, he took out his mobile phone, scrolled through the names in his phone book, paused at one he fancied and punched OK. There was a time when Saturday imposed the most arduous obligations. On sofas and daybeds all over London, Kreitman’s lovers pining for their prince. And he, with his pockets full of change (what would his mother have said!), darting into every phone box he could find. Oh, for a mobile phone in those days. Now he had the technology, the occasion for it was gone. Wasn’t that always the way. Five numbers, and not a one of them was answering. Five women, and not a one of them was home.
No one on the planet more lonely than me, Kreitman thought. It wasn’t self-pity, it was self-punishment. For Kreitman understood loneliness as a species of failure. It disgusted him to be alone. It showed him to be incompetent in the art of not being alone. It shamed him. It angered him. And he turned the anger on himself.
Crossing the lawn, oblivious of him, careless of the sun except as it illuminated each for the other, a young couple entwined, he in a loose short-sleeved shirt with his arm around her shoulder, she in a clinging strawberry-patterned summer frock, as undulant as the sea, with her arm around his waist. Be happy for them, Kreitman thought. Be happy for humanity, of which you are no less a part than they. Share with them. Share in them.
Fat chance of that. The fact was, other people’s erotic happiness took from his. Their absorption in themselves excluded him. Which of course was exactly what it was meant to do. But that was no consolation. It was beyond reason and beyond cure, but he could not stroll through a garden, he could not cross the street, he could not enter one of his own shops, he could not wait at a carousel for his luggage or at a counter for a sandwich and see a woman with her hands on a man without the sight diminishing him. Talk was even worse. Conceal Kreitman where he might overhear dalliance or description, a woman declaring her love, a woman confiding her love, a woman no more than wondering if she might be in love, and let the lover not be him, not be Marvin Kreitman, and he would suffer convulsions of jealousy. What did that man have that Kreitman did not? What business had those women, anyway, falling in love with another man, any other man, before they had met him? He was in sexual competition with everybody, not only those he knew and had already challenged, but with men he had never seen and never would see, men already dead and men still waiting to be born, men who had no shape or appearance in his eyes, men whose age he could not guess and whose intentions he could not fathom, but who were vividly alive to him by virtue of nothing but their being the object of a girl’s devotion.
All biological, no doubt. Kreitman’s genes seeking their perpetuation to the exclusion of all others. But what did knowing that solve?
Mid-afternoon, a light rain falling, Charlie came looking for him. The two men met between pots of foliage, on the steps to the lounge. Afternoon teatime. ‘Join me,’ Kreitman said. Devonshire tea – jam, clotted cream, the works. Charlie bit the air, which Kreitman took to signal assent.
He had seen Charlie crossing the lawn to him and was struck by how deranged he looked, his mouth open and closing, yammering wordlessly like a madman. He was dressed peculiarly, too, in a heavy jacket with green and yellow squares, a ribbed cricket sweater and a scarf thrown around his neck. Winter towpath clothes, for Dartmoor in May.
‘I see that something is the matter,’ Kreitman said, pouring.
‘I’ve beheaded the monster,’ Charlie said.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I’ve beheaded the monster guarding the labyrinth where my other selves are hidden. I’m free. The swap’s ready.’ Kreitman could hear his breathing.
‘I thought we’d agreed to say no more about all that,’ Kreitman said.
‘Did we? I don’t remember any agreement of the kind. I haven’t agreed to stop anything.’ His jaw was trembling. ‘Are you chickening out on me now?’
‘Charlie, there’s nothing to chicken out on. We were pissed.’
‘Oh yes there is. You get Chas, I get Hazel. You get to taste fidelity, I get to taste the opposite. That’s what we agreed.’
‘It’s not my recollection that you were to get Hazel, Charlie. I thought we hadn’t decided who you were getting.’
‘Ah! So you do remember!’
Kreitman thought of Chas throwing up her skirts for Nyman. ‘I remember that we behaved like clowns,’ he said. ‘But how come you’ve decided on Hazel suddenly? Because she’s been slobbering up to Nyman?’
Charlie thought of Hazel, rooting under the table to steal a second marvel over Nyman’s pumped-up calves. ‘Everyone’s been slobbering up to Nyman. You’ve been slobbering up to Nyman.’
‘He seems to make one do that,’ Kreitman agreed.
‘Not me.’
‘No, not you. But then your mind has been on other things.’
‘And not yours? I’ve watched you, Marvin. I’ve watched you eyeing Chas. Well, now’s your chance. She’s ready.’
Kreitman laughed. ‘You’ve prepared her for me, have you?’
‘She’s prepared herself. She’d do anything to pay me back.’
‘For what, Charlie? For staying out late on a Friday night with me?’
‘Nothing to do with you. To do with me. To do with me and women.’
Kreitman laughed at the incongruity of the phrase ‘me and women’ on Charlie’s lips. Charlie as bastard. ‘You’re not telling me you’ve fucked Hazel already?’
Charlie’s mouth started to move silently again. A diadem of sweat appeared from nowhere on his brow. ‘Not Hazel,’ he said. He wasn’t eating anything, Kreitman noticed. Not rubbing his hands over the fruit scones. A bad sign. ‘No. Not Hazel.’
Kreitman sat up in his chair and wiped all trace of Devonshire tea from his face. For what he was about to hear he wanted to look dignified. ‘Then who, Charlie?’
‘It’s not who I’ve fucked, it’s who I’ve propositioned for a fuck.’
Kreitman appeared to mull that over. ‘Go on,’ he said.
Charlie took a deep breath. ‘I’ve been seeing Dotty,’ he said.
‘Dotty!’ Now it was Kreitman’s turn to yammer like a madman. ‘Dotty! What do you mean you’ve been seeing Dotty? You didn’t tell me you were seeing Dotty when we last talked.’
‘You didn’t tell me you were seeing her when we last talked.’
‘I wasn’t. I’ve taken her out to lunch once, for God’s sake. That’s it.’
‘Me too. I took her out to lunch once – only that wasn’t it.’
‘Taking your wife’s sister out to lunch isn’t seeing her.’
‘Maybe not. Why are we arguing over the meaning of seeing? Seeing her or not, I took her out to lunch and asked her to sleep with me. Do you want to correct me over the meaning of sleep?’
‘You took your wife’s sister out and asked her to sleep with you? I hope this was a very long time ago.’
‘What difference when it was? But it was last week, if you want to know.’
‘And she said no?’
‘Of course she said no.’
‘Then everything’s all right,’ he very nearly said. Good job Hazel wasn’t there to hear him very nearly say that. The spectacle of you putting your mind to the rights and the wrongs of anything, Marvin, is too horrible to contemplate. He tried to do better. Everything wasn’t all right. Not intelligent to proposition your wife’s sister, and not nice, either. Not something you should do and not something you would want your wife to get to hear about. But then why should she get to hear about it? Good job Hazel wasn’t there to hear him very nearly think that. Cat-house morality. But it was a conviction written into the lining of Kreitman’s soul – a lie was always better for everyone than a confession. Better in the sense of more humane. Suddenly he remembered what Charlie had told him of his fear of guilt, lying like a garrulous third person in his marriage bed. ‘Oh, Charlie,’ he said, ‘you haven’t been owning up?’
Charlie shook his head. ‘Hardly had the chance,’ he said resentfully, a man for whom never being given the chance was the story of his life.
‘Dotty told?’
‘Not in so many words.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Dotty didn’t tell Chas. She told her under-age boyfriend.’
‘And he told?’
Charlie nodded.
‘The little shit. Never trust a reviewer, eh?’ Both men pondered that truth, then Kreitman said, ‘But hang on a minute. If Chas knows that you’ve been propositioning her sister, how come she’s been behaving so calmly down here?’ (Leaving aside the throwing up of her skirts.)
‘She’s only just found out.’
‘The little shit rang her here to tell her?’
‘Not exactly. The little shit sent a fax.’
‘To the hotel?’
‘No, to home.’
‘No. But Kitty and Tim are.’
Kreitman covered his face. Through his fingers, he said. ‘Oh, Charlie, no! Please don’t tell me Tim and Kitty found it.’
Charlie nodded. Timmy Hyphen Smelly-Botty and Kitty-Litter Farnsbarns found it. The end of innocence. He kept nodding. The biggest, saddest nods Kreitman had ever seen. Kreitman rose from the table and put his arms round his friend’s shoulders, squeezing them, then lowered his lips to Charlie’s head. The hair was wet, smelling of trampled leaves and panic. How heavy his head is, Kreitman thought. How hard it must be, sometimes, for him to carry it.
‘And Tim and Kitty,’ he deduced, ‘rang Chas? That was sweet of them. I wonder if mine would have acted with the same consideration.’
‘They didn’t actually. They rang me. But they must have rung while I was talking to the book club. They left a message warning me. Threatening me, too, I suppose. Warning me off. But giving me a chance. The trouble is … Chas always goes through my messages for me.’
Kreitman returned to his seat and made fists of his hands. ‘Ah, the beauty,’ he said, ‘of a trusting marriage.’
Charlie looked at him. ‘Not any more.’
The silence of the grave between them. Had the earth opened there and then, sucking down the table and all its tea things, neither would have been much surprised. Ruination comes quietly, picking off the china, emptying the mantelpiece first. Kreitman heard a clock ticking, which ten minutes before he would not have been able to tell you was in the room. He felt that universal sadness of the sentimental man, slightly bleary as though alcohol had played a part in it, but long anticipated and familiar, as though it were the fulfilment of the very fear with which one comes into the world. Here it is then, the distinguished thing. Or rather – for he had refamiliarised himself with the forestaste every time he waved goodbye to a woman he loved – here it is again. Was this all his fault? Had the example of his looseness, his loose tongue, destabilised Charlie? He felt guilty, too, that even as Charlie’s children were leaving their fatal message on his phone, he, Kreitman, had been begrudging Charlie his life-pass to the Garden of Eden. Choke on your own bile, Kreitman, Kreitman thought.
‘So, the coast is clear,’ Charlie suddenly said.
Kreitman had forgotten that this was where they’d begun. Sex and death. Contemplating the destruction of his marriage, Charlie sought redemption through sperm. What a wonderful thing life is!
‘Wait a bit,’ Kreitman said.
‘What for? Seize the hour, Marvin. I’ve beheaded the monster, I claim the maiden.’
Not a time for Kreitman to be saying he didn’t care to be Chas’s revenge on her husband, or that he did not desire her whatever the conditions. ‘She’ll come round,’ he said. But he didn’t believe it; some crimes against the marriage vows are capital.
‘If you think that,’ Charlie said, employing the logic of the insane, ‘then just do the swap while I’m waiting. Just lend me Hazel.’
To tide you over, Kreitman thought. Among the other things he could not say was, Hazel isn’t mine to lend, not mine in that she was never mine to lend, for God’s sake, Charlie, not mine to give or lend, but also, simply, just not mine. Not now. Not any more.
‘The bugger!’ was what he said instead.
‘The bugger what?’
‘The bugger Nyman has got there before you, Charlie.’
Kreitman did not go down to dinner. He left the room when Hazel came in to change – left quickly and silently, before she could order him out – and returned once he was confident she had gone. Whatever was happening out there would not make for the sort of dinner party he enjoyed. He couldn’t imagine the Merriweathers making a joint showing. Chas may well have driven home by now. Charlie may well have been lying at the bottom of a trout stream. At least he was dressed for it. Or, energised by death, propositioning one of the waitresses. Which left Nyman for Hazel to enjoy unhampered.
He lay on the bed and rang room service. Red wine was what he wanted, red wine as bloody as it came and a thick rare steak, also bleeding. The remote was broken so he had to get up to turn on the television. Shit on every channel. He watched a desolating programme about people who wanted to sing like other people, obscure people who imitated famous people, though he didn’t know who the famous people were either. His daughters would have known. And Nyman of course. For wasn’t that what Nyman was doing, first on his bike and now down here – impersonating some other person in the hope of been recognised for someone he wasn’t? Stars In His Eyes. Dreaming of being famous for reminding people of someone else. Maybe right this minute Nyman was on a high being him, being Kreitman. Big mistake if he hoped thereby to make a favourable impression on Hazel.
But that wasn’t his business.
He fell asleep watching shit and woke up only when his steak arrived. Not bloody enough. But then when ever was it? He ate it sitting up in bed anyway and polished off the wine. Then he got out of bed and turned off the television. Then he got back into bed and rang his mother.
Whenever he was at his lowest, Kreitman rang his mother. He had been doing that since he was small, ringing her from school, ringing her from camp, ringing her from Barcelona, ringing her from his honeymoon hotel, so that she should hear the melancholy in his voice. The blotting-paper effect, partly. You’re my mother, suck up my sorrows. But more than that, Kreitman rang his mother when he was low in order to blame her. Your fault! Nothing specific – she had done him no wrong, other than being his mother. But that seemed to be sufficient reason.
Your fault!
Kreitman admired his mother. He admired the way she kept herself youthful – black-haired and jingling like a gypsy still – and he admired the way she rose above her circumstances. Barely one year into her second marriage she found herself having to support an invalid. There was money over from husband number one, the bitter little key-fob thief who had been Kreitman’s father, but she wasn’t sure how much of that Kreitman was going to need (for he was still bound for Downing Street in those days), and it was important to her that what was left of husband number two should be cared for decently. Young Kreitman didn’t believe it behoved him to look too closely into his mother’s personal life, but he was of the opinion that she had fallen in love in a big way the second time around, even though the object of her devotion was a mouse-man called Norbert who found his fulfilment stamping books and refolding newspapers in a small public library in north London. A person of such quiet deliberation that you could hear the sound his pink-whorled fingers made when they touched a page – a soft, hypnotising, papery phttt which acted voluptuously on Mona Kreitman’s nervous system – Norbert Bellwood was nature’s refutation of Kreitman’s father, the least dyspeptic, most unaggravated man on the planet. Where Kreitman Senior used to dash his food down as though he were getting rid of the remains of someone he’d murdered, the police hammering on his door, Norbert Bellwood ruminated on every morsel until it liquidised into his stomach without his even so much as swallowing. ‘It’s uncanny,’ Mona Kreitman told her friends. ‘No Rennies, no Gaviscon, and not a rumble in the night. He is the answer to my prayers. And you should hear him clean his teeth! Except you can’t. He’s like a ghost with an imaginary brush.’ No need for anyone to call Quiet! in Norbert Bellwood’s library. The unruliest children, the noisiest readers, felt Norbert’s presence and fell silent. The only disturbance, the inking of his rubber stamp and his long gingery eyelashes fanning the air as he read. Even the stroke which made him an invalid and broke Mona Kreitman’s – now Mona Bellwood’s – heart came quietly. One minute he was at his desk calculating a fine, the next he was out on his back on the library carpet, looking up unseeing at a grubby bust of an old philanthropist of the borough. And nobody had heard him moan.
Enough of what Mona had found lovable in Norbert remained for her to want to make it supremely comfortable. A large garden for him. A heated pool for him. An aviary for him, for he had always loved the music small birds made. And to finance all this Mona Bellwood became a sort of bird herself – a vulture, hovering over the remains of the dead. Every community newspaper published in north London was delivered to her door, and no sooner was a family’s sorrow announced than Mona Bellwood struck. Something her job taught her – something her marriage to Kreitman’s father had taught her – people wanted the wardrobes of the deceased emptied quickly, unemotionally, without a word, and whoever came offering, in a van with its engine turning over outside the front door, was as though sent by God, however small the offer. Out of the house and good riddance before the tears dried, the old suits and dresses, the shoes, the handbags, the shirts, the ties, the furs, the whisky decanters and, more often than you would expect, the jewellery – most of it rubbish, but not all, never all. ‘I could claim I perform a service,’ Mona said, ‘but it’s a business. I do it for Norbert. Not that Norbert knows.’
Kreitman imagined Norbert in a second childhood not unlike Kreitman’s first, excited by the takings, fascinated by the sight of the sand-crab notes creaking eerily apart. ‘Why can’t I count?’ And Mona denying him, showing him how money filthies everything it touches, the palms of your hands, your fingertips. It crossed his mind, sometimes, that she was making not a sou out of raiding the houses of the dead, and was doing it only as a sort of penitence and abasement, seeking out and subjecting herself to the contamination, just so that Norbert shouldn’t have to, even though there was no possibility now of Norbert doing anything. Sacrificing her immortal soul, dirtying it so that he could keep his clean. Just as she had done for Kreitman’s.
Was he grateful to her for that? Yes and no. She’d been an example to him. Made him not a radical but at least a student of radicalism. Indirectly put him on to Francis Place. But he blamed her for it as well. Nothing had come of him and Francis Place. He had not known how to make anything come of it. Maybe if his mother had let him dirty himself he’d have grown up better equipped to live in a dirty world.
Her fault.
It wasn’t all punitive. He wanted her to hear on the phone how bad he felt, but he didn’t begrudge her feeling good on that account when the reason he felt bad was a woman. In that sense he was always going back to her, like a faithless lover returning to a forgiving wife, showing how little the infidelity had ever counted. But whereas the most forgiving wife would always insist on knowing why, if it counted so little, he had bothered in the first place – ‘Then why do it, Marvin, why demean yourself and me?’ – his mother was content just to have him home.
No one knew better than she did, after all, what refinement of feeling beat in his breast. She had taken him to the specialist when he fainted. She had told all her friends she had a son who was ‘clinically sensitive’, which was the next best thing to having a son who had won the Nobel Prize. And who was to say he wouldn’t do that next? ‘And this year’s prize for Clinical Sensitivity goes to … Marvin Kreitman!’
Sometimes he felt that she was expecting his call, knew to the hour, maybe to the minute, when he would phone. Had he not inherited his sensitivity from her? When he was a boy she claimed powers of sympathetic prescience, a bodily intuition of his pains that was nothing short of supernatural. At the very moment Marvin took a tumble off his first pair of skates in Regent’s Park, Mona Kreitman’s knees went from under her as she was standing at the kitchen sink. The night he woke with burning tonsils on his honeymoon in Rome, Mona Kreitman fell out of bed clutching her throat. She knew when something was amiss with him, wherever he was. And that included romantic despondency, despair, satiation, boredom, even disgust. So she had a pretty good idea when the phone was going to ring.
‘I’m in Dartmoor,’ he told her.
‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ she said.
‘Ma, I bet you couldn’t find Dartmoor on a map.’
‘You’re right. But what’s that got to do with anything? Unless you want me to come and collect you. Then I’d find it on a map. Is this business, family or pleasure?’
‘You are cynical, Mother. It’s family.’
‘Then I hope you’re managing to have a good time.’
‘I’m having a lousy time.’
‘Well, you’ve always known how to have that. But Hazel likes it down there, doesn’t she?’
Ah, yes. Hazel. Mona Bellwood was too subtle ever to risk an explicit criticism, but there hung over every conversation she had with her son an awareness, as fine as mist, of what might have been called the Hazel problem.
‘God knows what Hazel likes,’ Kreitman said. ‘But you’re right, she does enjoy it here. She believes the air agrees with her …’
An intake of breath and then a moment of silence, during which Mona Bellwood could be heard measuring the qualitative difference between her son’s sensitivity and her daughter-in-law’s. Egregious, the condition of Hazel’s nerves; insufferable, how needy and on edge she was, the little mouse. Dartmoor! Air! What next – the pollen? But not a word, not a word.
‘Well, just try to get a rest,’ was all she said. ‘We thought you looked tired when we saw you last.’
The ‘we’ constituted an unholy little bond between them. ‘We’ meant the women of the house, his mother and Norbert’s nurse. ‘We’ acknowledged that she knew all about his affair with Shelley and, more than that, reminded him that she may have been the one who had promoted it in the first place.
Your mother, your pimp. Kreitman couldn’t decide what he thought of this, ethically. When he was hers alone, his mother wouldn’t have dreamed of putting him in the way of women. When he was hers alone, she filled his ears with dire warnings of the ruses of the other sex. They would say anything, do anything, to get him. And the first thing they would do was turn him against her, the best if not the only friend he had. ‘If you really love me, you will rip out your mother’s heart and bring it to me in a plastic bag.’ And Kreitman, because he was a man, would do their bidding. ‘No, Ma!’ ‘Yes, Marvin, yes, you will. You’ll see. You’ll see how they’ll make you dance.’ But after Hazel became his wife, the world, or at least that part of it which Mona inhabited, was suddenly filled with interesting, selfless, lovely women to whom she couldn’t wait to introduce him. Sometimes, at a family get-together – a birthday party, a golden wedding, a funeral, it didn’t matter, and it didn’t matter either whether Hazel was in attendance or not – she would actually deliver some girl into his hands, go find her, go fetch her, lead her in by the wrist and hand her over clanking to her son, as though into captivity. Nah, have her, enjoy!
Should a mother do such things? Kreitman’s ethical considerations were inevitably coloured by his sentimentality, but no, generally speaking a mother should not do such things, though in this instance the mother was mindful of the specifics of her charge – a clinically sensitive boy who had never enjoyed the advantages of a decent father, who worked hard to support his family, who had not quite fulfilled what had been expected of him, who was easily upset and influenced by women, who was married to one with frayed nerves (never mind who’d frayed them), and who was therefore exceptionally in need of recreation. So whatever came to him, as it were, gift-wrapped by his mother – here, have, take, don’t make a fuss – he could hardly throw back in her face.
But when he was in depressed spirits this was one more thing he could ring her up and blame her for. Another fine mess you’ve got me into, Ma!
In this instance it pleased him to think of his mother and one of the women he loved discussing his health. If he existed primarily in the solicitudes of women, then he doubly existed when two of them were worrying about him together. And yes, they were right, he was looking tired.
‘I’ve got this headache that won’t go away,’ he said, in corroboration.
‘Where?’
‘In my head, where do you think?’
‘Don’t be smart with your mother, Marvin. It matters in which part of your head you have it. Don’t forget I know about headaches. Norbert began with headaches.’
‘Well, this one’s in every part of my head. It’s vague. It’s sort of all over. But listen, don’t worry about it. I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s nothing. It’s probably just a spiritual after-effect of the accident.’
Oops, the accident!
He had promised himself not to trouble her with that. Once upon a time he’d have rung her from the ambulance, let her hear the sirens at close range. ‘Here, Ma, talk to the paramedic while he’s pressing on my heart. What’s that trickling sound? My blood, Ma, my blood ebbing away, what do you think it is!’ But he was a grown man now, older than she was when he went to university, older than she was when he married Hazel even. And there are some things a grown man spares his mother, such as being knocked down in the middle of Soho by a crazed bicycling faggot-impersonator whom his wife must now reasonably be presumed to be fucking. His mother didn’t need to know any of that, did she? And he didn’t need to tell her. An impressive decision or what? And he’d done well. For eight whole days he hadn’t breathed a word. Until oops, the accident. After which he had absolutely no choice but to spill the beans.
And with such immoderation of language and vehemence of feeling that anybody listening would have thought it was the poor woman’s doing.
Which it was, really, for having set him on the road to seriousness.
Her fault.
When he next awoke it was dark. He looked at his watch. It was almost one in the morning. And Hazel not back. The light rain was still falling, but that hadn’t deterred some mad fuckers from playing croquet. He heard the chock of the mallet on the ball. That queer colonial sound. Then whispering. Then another hollow chock. Not an urgent game, whoever was playing. Then nothing. He got up and went to the window, much as Hazel had the night before. And saw the watery outline of the moon above the moor, and saw the silhouette of a hermit’s chapel on a tor, and saw Nyman leaning on his mallet with a stange expression on his floury face and his heimat pants down round his ankles. And on her knees, somewhat abstracted, like a washer woman rubbing shirts upon the pebbles in a river, or a half-hearted nun in her devotions, looking somewhere else, not Hazel, definitely not Hazel, unless the darkness were playing tricks on him, but Chas.
Chas? Chas of Charlie and Chas?
Chas.
Whereupon it all came back, an event of no special coloration in the aftermath, though surprising enough at the time, shoved away with other matters of little consequence or sin in the sock drawer of his marital memory. He and Chas of twenty years ago, on that very lawn, drunken, idle, irascible, impatient suddenly of the others, giving them the slip and larking about to the extent of his offering her his tongue, and her taking it. Taking his penis in her hand as well was her idea, her defiance, if you like, of him. Who cares … anything you can do … that sort of thing.
Had he enjoyed it? Had she? Had it meant anything?
God knows. Certainly it had never cropped up conversationally between them since. They hadn’t alluded, hadn’t colluded, hadn’t smiled over it, hadn’t fretted over it, hadn’t worried that the other might blab or want more, hadn’t anything. Wonderful, but there it is. In certain circumstances a woman might link her thumb and forefinger and make a hangman’s noose around a perfect stranger’s dick (for he might just as well have been a perfect stranger as far as contact of that kind was concerned) and neither of them think twice about the matter again, thereby reinforcing what Kreitman had always believed: that in itself the flesh of man and woman is entirely neutral, that neither morality nor magic inhere in it, until a decision is made to invest it with one or the other, or with both.
And since neither he nor she had invested the other’s flesh with anything at all, nothing at all had happened.
In which case, why did the sight of her playing hangman with Nyman’s penis affect him so powerfully? Sourness flooded into his throat, as though a bag of sherbet lemons had exploded in his stomach. That was how jealousy tasted, but what was he doing being jealous? Of all possible permutations of their little party, this was the very one, perhaps the only one, that should have left him cold. Chas and Nyman – what were Chas and Nyman to him? Come to that, what were Chas and Nyman to each other?
Here was the question, natural enough in the circumstances, that finally threw a bridge between curiosity and desire. Nyman was nothing to Chas, yet there she was on her knees kneading him. And he, Kreitman, was nothing to Chas, and yet there she’d been, on her knees – the tall woman’s recourse – kneading him. He’d tried it on with her twenty years ago in a spirit of supreme male carelessness, and she’d matched him every inch of the way. You don’t care, I don’t care. Nothing to you, nothing to me. In the mood for disconnected sex? Then let me show you just how disconnected sex can be.
Was that, then, why it had gone into the sock drawer – not because it hadn’t counted but because he hadn’t counted, and, thank you very much, he didn’t care to recall that? Was Kreitman such a conventional Don Juan that he chose to remember only encounters that flattered him? No, that cannot be right, for Kreitman was a devotee of pain. A sexual insult to Marvin Kreitman was more rousing than any flattering come-on could ever be to men who like their pleasures straight. And Chas had insulted him, he saw that now. He had put it down to inexperience and forgotten about it because he couldn’t afford not to forget about it. He was in love with Hazel. Charlie was his friend. There was nothing to be gained by his dwelling on Chas having out-bravado’d him one scratchy night on a manicured hotel lawn in Dartmoor. Better to call it gaucherie and have done.
Now, in the light of the queerly conventual scene being played out before him, he could mentally renegotiate what had passed between them. Yes, it hurt watching. Yes, it stung. Yes, he found himself dreading that the kneading would lead to something else, that Chas’s lips would take over from Chas’s tiring hands. Dreading, or hoping? Like rip-raps fizzing about a school playground, the sherbet lemons went on exploding in his gut. But then no one gets to renegotiate the past without paying for it.
Any third party knowing the players and observing them through a window must have felt some of what he felt. C. C. Merriweather – how could you! For sure, your husband has been out and about propositioning your sister, not to mention, did you but know it, bartering you for another man’s wife, but even so, C. C., how could you touch that! Kreitman, though, was not merely experiencing that universal jealousy which assails sentimental men when they see a virtuous wife and mother throwing away her good name, whatever the provocation, on a wretch. No. Kreitman understood that Chas was playing a deeper game. She was returning feelinglessness for feelinglessness. Nyman in his ignorance may have thought he was picking up a handjob on the cheap; in fact he was having his characterlessness dismanded by an expert.
Kreitman knew. It had been done to him.
And now he wanted to see if he could dispossess Chas of her irony and make her love him for himself.
Nothing cold about that premeditation. Nothing of his daughter’s calculated installations. And nothing of the elegantly symmetric quid pro quo urged by Chas’s demented husband. Heated at the coolest of times, Kreitman’s body exhaled its own silhouette upon the moor-chilled window of the hotel. Suddenly alive to every sexual rebuff Chas had delivered him over half a lifetime, including turning up her nose at purses and threatening him with the RSPCA, Kreitman burned with an old and yet pristine desire for her.
Nice sex?
Finally he was convinced. Nice sex? OK, he’d try some.
Only when he got back into bed and tossed aside the bedclothes did it occur to him to wonder where – since he could definitely locate Chas and Nyman – Charlie Merriweather and Hazel had got to.
Any fool could have given him the answer to that. They were in another county, on another coast, consoling each other for their several cruel rejections, entwined like unhappy children frightened of the dark, engaging in some nice sex of their own.
At least that’s how it felt to Hazel.
For Charlie, on the other hand, it was wildness come at last.