Carnival in Jermyn Street.
The July sun shining, the cheese shops boisterous, the SALE signs up in every shirtmaker’s window, and on the footpaths trestle tables behind which girls in regatta boaters, blouses striped gayer than a barber’s pole, and skirts red enough to madden half the bulls in Pamplona, pour strawberried champagne for whoever has the time to stop.
Inside, clutching nine SALE shirts to his chest – three for one hundred pounds, nine for two hundred and seventy-five – Charlie Merriweather watches two shirt-sharp black Gatsbys snapping up phosphorescent ties – three for fifty. One of the men gathers the ties he wants in his fist, like flowers. The other drapes them over his arm, periodically pausing to inspect the colours, as though his aim is to complete the prismatic spectrum. Occasionally he shakes his head and puts a tie back on the rack. Charlie smiles at them over his shirts. He is a bit of a black man himself right now. Juiced up. Flamboyant. The lover of a woman who shows her legs, another man’s wife whose nipples jab at her cardigan, an incontestable statement – two incontestable statements – that she is a woman roused.
Are nine shirts enough? More to the point, are they the right shirts? ‘You’ll buy your own,’ she’s told him. ‘I’m not doing any of that mothering nonsense you’ve been used to. You’ll choose your own, just stay away from purple and yellow stripes. You were never a member of the Conservative Cabinet and you’ve never looked after pigs. And see if you can find some ties that don’t have regimental insignia on them.’
He can. Phosphorescent ties. The colour of blood and wine. Three for fifty, nine for one hundred and thirty-five.
They’re dressing each other from scratch. She’s got him out of farm clothes and he’s buying her lingerie. Neither wants the other to own anything from before. It’s like a rebirth for both of them. ‘Take off the lot,’ she told him the first time, in sight of the Porlock sea. ‘And your wristwatch. And your wedding ring.’ He’d never been more naked. He shivered. He wanted to cry, and wondered whether that would make him more naked still. He asked her permission. ‘No, not tears,’ she said. ‘I don’t like tears in men.’ She wanted to cry herself, so long had it been since any man, clothed or naked, had trembled in her presence.
She touched his chest lightly. His skin was so tight she feared she might put a hole in him, pierce him and blow him apart. The poor man! She was careful only to lay the flats of her hands on him. Nothing sharp. Nothing sudden. And he pushed into the flatness of her hands like a dog, showing how trusting he was, and how grateful.
She imagined he would feel guilty when it was all over, reach for his clothes and jam himself back into his wedding ring. ‘Oh, God, Chas!’ she expected him to say. ‘What have I done! My poor wife!’ She had as good as kidnapped him, after all. Found him, after dinner – after a dinner from which Chas had for some reason excluded him, leaving just the two women to slurp soup in company with Nyman – bundled him into her car, not told him where they were going, because she had not known where they were going, just somewhere as far away as possible from a husband who disgusted her and a boy who was playing mind games with her and who disgusted her with herself. God knows, Charlie would have been within his rights to take what she was offering and then go into the usual male revulsion routine. Maybe she even hoped he would. Be guilty and be gone. In and out in the manner favoured by her husband. Not that she could imagine Kreitman ever saying, ‘My poor wife!’ But then come the event, neither did Charlie. Not a word of it. Could such a thing be? The phrase ‘Poor Chas’ hung in the air right enough – whether or not she had got her comeuppance for flirting like a mad thing with Nyman all evening – but strange to say the only person who was thinking it seemed to be Hazel!
Sisters under the skin, suddenly. ‘Poor Chas!’ Hypocritical of me, Hazel thought. But there you go. I have stolen your husband, I have betrayed our friendship, I have ruined your marriage … Whatever! Back to thinking about the man.
So much of what Charlie did and said was unfamiliar to her that she felt she had stumbled upon a hitherto undiscovered gender. He beamed, for one. Did men beam after sex? He glowed. He gave out light. He put his hands on her face and kissed her eyes. He told her she was lovely and that she’d saved his life. That was extreme, wasn’t it? Then he leaned back on the pillows with his hands behind his head, the hairs under his arms soft and gingery – not wiry, not man-hard – and said, ‘I can’t tell you, I just can’t tell you. I feel like a blind man who has had his sight restored.’ Then he kissed her eyes a second time, told her he loved her – which was certainly extreme – and started to shiver and tremble again.
That was when she realised they might be able to do something for each other, beyond this one night.
You fool, Hazel, she thought. But hope swept through her like a fire and she didn’t want to put it out.
When he moved in with her, a few days later, she burned all his clothes except for one outfit in which he could go out and re-wardrobe himself. They had a sacrificial bonfire on the lawn – stoking the flames – with the girls watching from their bedroom windows. Juliet put a finger to her brains and twisted it. Screwy. Cressida put two fingers to her brains and blew them out. But neither of those gestures, of course, was meant to be judgemental.
Charlie wanted to throw a reciprocal bonfire for her clothes, before Hazel explained it wasn’t so simple for a woman. And anyway, some of her clothes were worth keeping. But she allowed him to do the new-underwear thing. That his taste turned out to be identical to her husband’s didn’t come as any shock to her. Underwear sorted the men from the boys, allowing that there were only boys. Charlie may have been of a hitherto undiscovered gender, but all genders have their young and Charlie was still a stripling. She said no to an ankle chain but otherwise went along with his wishes, whistling through her teeth (to keep up her courage) at the sight of herself trussed like a Christmas bird again. Do I look ridiculous? she wondered. Can I trust him to tell me if I look ridiculous? Does it matter?
The girls couldn’t help her in this. The girls belonged to a generation that had skipped lingerie, leaving Hazel with the strange sensation that she had been a tarty piece twice over, and her daughters never at all. Then she remembered – her daughters had irony. You can have lingerie or you can have irony. It is not out of the question to wear lingerie ironically – over your clothes, for example, postmodernly, as a joke against itself—but something told her Charlie wouldn’t have wanted that. Pleasing a man again, was she? Back to floaty? Hair soon to resume the halo of a startled lion’s mane? She shook her head over what she saw in the mirror. The recidivist I am! Hopeless, I am a hopeless case. I have not learned a single lesson. I might as well be seventeen still.
But something was different. She racked her brains to find it. Happy, that was it – she was happy. Which meant that this time she could forgive herself. Leave herself alone. She was who she was. And she hadn’t been who she was for a long time. Maybe she hadn’t been who she really was ever. Careful, Hazel, she told herself. No fool like an old fool. But what could she do? She was happy. She had hope. And if hope makes a fool of us, then let us all be fools.
Deciding that twelve shirts will give him a better percentage chance of getting at least a couple right, Charlie Merriweather goes looking again for his collar size – double cuffs, long sleeves, no purple and yellow stripes – and all but knocks over Marvin Kreitman labouring under a dozen of his own. The two men open their mouths simultaneously, simultaneously flush scarlet and simultaneously turn away. Fuelled by champagne, a hysteria has gripped the shirt-buyers; they are not quite pulling garments from one another’s hands, as the hair-netted harridans of popular culture did in the first great January sales of post-rationing Britain, but you don’t dare take too long to make a decision, or you lose out. Who would have thought that men, with their philosophic indifference to goods, would become more obsessive sales addicts, more ferocious squirrellers and snatchers, than women ever were. Nothing to do with saving money, either. The sales just an excuse to acquire. What a gas! If we were still friends, Kreitman thinks, we would pretend to fight each other for our shirts; we would see the funny side of this. Charlie Merriweather thinks the same. But they are fighting each other for their wives, or they have fought each other for their wives, and though in a sense both might be said to have won, or at least to be winning, there is no funny side to it for either of them.
The swap has not worked out the way they wanted it?
Difficult to say, given that they wanted it differently, and that one of them believes he never really wanted it at all. And these are early days yet. They are both nursing tender shoots. They both are tender shoots. But having done the deed, having murdered their marriages where they slept, the two men have no more to say to each other in the aftermath than those who took a dagger to King Duncan.
On top of that, Kreitman is not amused to see Charlie Merriweather shopping where he has always shopped.
Bravado, again, of course. What Kreitman would like to do is put his arms out and wind Charlie into them. But he doesn’t know how to do that.
It is working out easier for Charlie and Hazel than for Marvin and the other Charlie. Perhaps Charlie and Hazel were always the needier, if only in the sense that they’d been growing the crazier – Charlie with sexual curiosity, Hazel with sexual grievance. And because they initiated what happened, taking what happened to date from the hour Hazel kidnapped Charlie from the grounds of the hotel, they are not the ones left looking, ever so slightly, the victims of event.
Over a funereal breakfast at the Baskervilles the morning after, Kreitman had put it to the remaining Charlie that charlies were what they’d been made to look.
She had shown him a steely face. ‘He’s been putting the hard word on my sister,’ she’d said. ‘What is more my children know about it. That’s the unforgivable crime. Where he is now and who he’s charvering is incidental. I don’t care. I never want to speak to him again.’
‘It might not be incidental to me,’ Kreitman informed her. Then, so there should be no mistake, ‘I might care who he’s charvering.’
Charvering? Not a word that came naturally to him. But then what did nature have to do with any of this?
Charlie laughed a bitter laugh. ‘That’ll be the day,’ she said.
Kreitman sought her eyes and swallowed back his answer, as though to let her glimpse a corner of his caringness she knew nothing of. ‘And you too,’ he said, ‘care more than you’re pretending.’
She shook her head. ‘No, I don’t. A little silliness is one thing, asking Dotty for a fuck so publicly the whole of London knows about it, is another. I thought he was happy.’
‘He was happy and he wasn’t. Fidelity does that.’
‘Your company does that.’
Kreitman touched her hand. ‘Don’t lay it on me, Charlie. I wasn’t instrumental in this. It wells up every now and then, that’s all. You can’t stop it. It spills over. It isn’t personal. You of all people should know that.’
‘Me of all people?’
Too soon, Kreitman decided. ‘I mean, you’ve seen it with Dotty. There just comes a time.’
‘Then let him have his time with Hazel… if Hazel’s the best he can do now that Dotty’s knocked him back.’
Kreitman made a halt sign with his hand. Go no further, Chas.
She ignored the warning. ‘This morning of all mornings, Marvin, you can’t expect me to be respectful to that tub of lard you call your wife.’
‘Chas!’
‘Don’t Chas me. A wronged woman has her rights. If Hazel wants him, let Hazel handle the spillage, that’s what I’m saying. But he’s much mistaken if he thinks he can come waddling back to me when his time’s up. I no longer want him. You can tell him that when you next have one of your fourteen-hour lunches.’
How upset was she? How cataclysmically upset? Kreitman couldn’t tell. She was furious – that tub of lard you call your wife was hardly calm or just, God knows. But then who’s ever measured in their views of the trollop humping their husband? And she was fraught, though that could just as well have been the aftermath of the other thing. The thing that had kept him up half the night and her up he didn’t know how much longer. Sex interfered with upset, he knew that. It skewed it temporarily. First, you have to have no sex, then you can think about being upset. First, she had to get the taste of Nyman’s tongue out of her mouth, assuming it had got that far. But when she’d done that, how upset would she be?
‘I don’t believe you really think you can live without Charlie,’ he said.
‘That’s braggadocio.’
‘Is it? I don’t think so. He’s been weird for so long it will be a relief. I always thought life without Charlie would be insupportable. But maybe what I was actually thinking was that life without me would be insupportable for him. Well, fuck him! Now I need to think about me. It wells up, Marvin, as you say. It spills over.’
Kreitman considered that. ‘How will you write your books?’ he wondered, after a decent interval of time.
She looked at the chandelier. ‘Balls to our books!’ she said.
Amen to that, Kreitman thought. Let’s drink to that. Balls to all baby books!
‘I think I’ve had it with collaborations, anyway,’ she went on.
‘It’s served you well.’
‘Depends how you measure. I don’t feel well served. Anyway, the money’s not in our sort of books any more. Lower-middle-class magic’s back.’
Kreitman wasn’t thinking about money or magic. ‘Then again,’ he persisted, ‘you could always collaborate with someone else?’
‘Oh, yes … ?’ For a moment she wondered if he was thinking of himself. ‘Who would that be?’
‘The faggot.’
‘What faggot?’
‘Nyman.’
‘Don’t be absurd.’
‘It’s surely not that absurd. You’ve been collaborating with him fine for most of this weekend.’
She decided against putting marmalade on her toast. ‘From you … From you, Marvin Kreitman,’ she said, pointing her knife at him, ‘I’d have expected better!’
‘Better?’
She met his eyes. Hers viridiscent, a little like the burnish on a spring onion, a little the colour of cheese mould, his blacker than squashed berries, and too crooked, you would have thought, to see straight with. They both looked terrible, sleepless and bedraggled. Kreitman unshaven, in a collarless Hindu shirt that didn’t suit him. Chas in something from Kathmandu, tighter than a pea pod, and with too many toggles. And clown’s trousers. And woollen socks.
‘I’d have expected you to be a little more sophisticated in the matter of a man and woman going for a midnight stroll,’ she said.
A midnight stroll, was it? ‘Well, you know what they say – ’ he said, although nobody he knew had ever said it – ‘sophistication nips out the back door once jealousy enters through the front.’
She made a playground face. ‘I’d like to see you jealous, Marvin Kreitman,’ she said. ‘I’d like to see you trying to work out which facial muscles to pull. I bet you wouldn’t even know which colour to turn.’
‘Green.’
‘You’ve mugged up on it.’
‘Not so. It came to me in the night.’
‘While you were sitting up waiting for Hazel to return? Ha! Serves you right. I’d say good for her for getting her own back, if she didn’t happen to be getting it back with my husband.’
‘Nothing to do with Hazel. To do with you. I was at my window, playing gooseberry …’
She flushed, red on gold like a little fire in the hayrick. ‘Marvin! You had the bad manners to watch?’
His turn now to make a playground face. Naughty Marvin. ‘No choice,’ he said.
‘Of course you had a choice. You could have drawn the curtains.’
‘And missed the moon on the moor?’
Still burning, she laughed. No, she essayed a laugh. ‘You’re a pervert.’
‘I try to be. But it wasn’t pervery. That’s to say it wasn’t primarily pervery.’
‘What primarily was it?
‘What do you think?’
‘Idleness.’
‘Nostalgia.’
She wouldn’t rise to that. She wouldn’t go that far back. One night at a time. ‘It wells up,’ was all she’d say.
‘So how come he isn’t breakfasting?’
Nyman? She shrugged. How should she know? Was she her lover’s keeper? Not that Nyman was by any manner of means her lover. ‘I suspect,’ she said, ‘that he left early. It’s a long way to cycle.’
‘You didn’t spend the night together, then?’ The minute he heard himself put the question, Kreitman realised how infantile the question was. No more baby books, but any amount of baby curiosity.
Charlie pushed her plate aside, put her elbows on the table and clasped her hands. She might have been interviewing him. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I am in some distress. I am not always responsible for what I do when I’m in distress. You of all people’ – she made little quotation marks with her fingers – ‘should know that.’
Kreitman inclined his head, baring his neck.
‘I don’t know why you’re pretending to be jealous,’ she went on, ‘or even interested. You never have been before. But you too, I know, must be in distress. You’ll pretend otherwise, but you must be. If you want to know about Nyman, I’ll tell you. He happened on me at the wrong moment – wrong for me, right for him, you might say. Afterwards he asked if he could come back to my room. I told him I had a husband. He told me he thought I probably didn’t. Then he told me he had no home to go to and asked if I’d put him up in Richmond for a while. I told him no. Then he asked if I would loan him money. I told him no. Then he asked me if I thought Hazel wanted him. I told him I had no idea. Then he asked me if I would mind if he went to Hazel. I told him he should check with Hazel’s husband not with me. He said he thought she probably didn’t have a husband either. I told him I didn’t care what he thought or what he did. He told me he just wanted to be sure he wasn’t hurting my feelings. Jesus, Marvin …’ Here Charlie ran her fingers through her hair, as though all her vexations might be there and she couldn’t wait to comb them out. ‘Jesus Christ – your sex!’
‘My sex? Nyman isn’t my sex.’
She waved away his blustering. ‘I’ll tell you something, Marvin, he’s more of what I understand by a man, more rattishly and motivationally a man, more stripped down to the bare bones of a man, than you and Charlie rolled together. Don’t be insulted by that. It isn’t so terrific to be a man.’
‘Isn’t it?’ Kreitman wondered about that. Wasn’t it? Maybe it wasn’t. Then, not quite sequentially, he said, ‘I thought he was a faggot.’
She shook her head, this time meaning to cause pain. ‘He’s not a faggot,’ she said. ‘Let me assure you, the one thing our friend Nyman is not, is a faggot.’
To the universally jealous Kreitman, the only person on the planet to have gone without contact with the opposite sex the night before, not counting his conversation with his mother, it was as though she had thrust her fingers in his eyes. He could see only blood, falling like rain blown against a window.
Charlie discovered the true depth of her upset when her husband turned up in Richmond after three days of being denuded of his wedding ring in Somerset and asked her to be happy for him retrospectively.
She was sitting at her old manual typewriter, at their table, pecking at the keys. She did not look up.
‘Why should I be happy for you, Charlemagne? For shitting on our marriage?’
He was astonished she saw it like that. ‘I haven’t been shitting on our marriage,’ he told her. ‘I haven’t been doing anything to our marriage. I’ve just been away from it for a while.’
‘Doing what?’
What had he been doing? ‘Having a sabbatical,’ he said.
‘You never wanted a sabbatical before.’
‘I never needed a sabbatical before.’
‘I see – we’re talking needs, are we? Do you really think I’m the person you should be telling this to?’
‘Who else? You’re my best friend.’
‘I’m not your best friend. I’m your wife.’
‘It’s possible to be both, Chas.’
‘Is it? I doubt that. I think it’s possible to be neither, but I doubt it’s possible to be both. Not in the sense of being a wife and a best friend who is happy for you when you sleep with other women. I think you might do better with Dotty. She’d make a good best friend. Try talking to her about your needs – oh, sorry, you already have.’
Ah, Dotty. Charlie Merriweather had forgotten about Dotty.
‘I was dying, Chas,’ he told her. ‘I was this close to being a dead man.’
Still refusing to look up, she missed seeing him measure with his fingers how far he’d been from being a dead man. But then nobody knew better than she did how close to being a dead man he remained.
This close.
She was curious about one thing, though. ‘Tell me what you thought you were dying of, Charlie.’
He racked his brains. It wasn’t that he didn’t know. More that he didn’t know how best to put it. For two pins, had circumstances been different, he’d have rung up Kreitman. Help me with this one, Marvin. You know women.
In the end, his belief that honesty was always the best policy prevailed. ‘Nice sex,’ he told her.
And that was when she began to cry, great wailing cries which he had no idea she had it in her to make, cries which were more like an animal’s than a woman’s, howls beyond the hurt or bafflement of the conscious mind, gasps and eructations of brute bodily pain, as though sealers who had already claimed her young ones were now unleashing their fury upon her with wooden clubs.
Had he done that? Just by taking his clothes off, staying away for a few days and giving himself a little leeway, had he caused that?
It was when she began banging her head on their table, on their old sacred space, dashing her own brains out now, hammering herself free of him, hammering him out of her skull, that he started to howl himself. Nothing compared to hers, even he could hear the difference. Mere schoolyard blubberings – cold, lonely, hungry, bullied, far from home. Help-me-mummy cries, uttered without the slightest expectation of success, because his mother had never helped anyone. But at least they quietened Chas. She caught her breath several times, made a fist and banged her chest, pushed her hands up under her chin, behind her ears, pressing into her head. That was where the pain was. There.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked her through his tears. ‘Are you going to be all right?’
‘Get out!’ she shouted. ‘I’ve wasted my life on you. You’re a moron – get out!’
An hour later he brought her tea. She hadn’t moved. ‘I thought I’d told you,’ she said.
An hour after that he brought her a brandy. She still hadn’t moved. ‘Do I have to plead with you?’ she said. ‘Give me back my life. Get out of the house.’
‘Chassyboots,’ he said, putting out his hand to touch her hair.
‘Don’t make me wish you were dead,’ she said. ‘Don’t drive me to want to kill you.’
And that was when he moved in with Hazel.
Nothing comparably upsetting happened in Kennington. Far more civilised, the Kreitmans. Get the betrayals over early in a marriage and you spare yourself the seal-clubbing. Kreitman was out of his house, in all the essentials at least, before Hazel was back from her extra-marital escapade in the West Country. What more was there to discuss? Their marriage came to an end, what was left of it, on the night he vampired in on her distress and tried to sucker her into tell-me sex. ‘Fuck me, Nyman’ – that stuff either lands you the big prize or lands you in big trouble. No mistaking where it landed Kreitman. Never mind the punch on the nose; the coldness of Hazel’s turned back was the coldness of finality. Kreitman was attuned to finality. He knew it from his mother’s dismissal of his father, despatching all memory of him, along with his cut-glass decanters, in a matter of weeks.
He had never thought he would leave Hazel. The French windows open, butterflies on the lawn and Hazel at her piano – that had been how he’d seen his life, extending like a sunlit country road for miles and miles and miles, before vanishing off the edge of the world. Yet he had also known he would leave Hazel, because he foretold just as vividly the turning of her back. No scenes, no sad goodbyes – if there had to be goodbyes he’d never go – just a leaving of the house as on any other day, except that this time he would never return to it. Not his doing, her doing. Not what he wanted, what she wanted. He granted women this – the primacy of their desires. He just did what he was told.
But in truth he’d closed his own doors. Had he been able to summon a single rousing image of Hazel in the arms of Charlie he might have tried to salvage something. Not a nice way of gauging how much you did or didn’t love somebody, but that was Kreitman. He was an incorrigible sentimentalist of anguish. Where there was jealousy there was life. And there was none. He couldn’t put his imagination to work. He could see no picture. He could hear no talk, not even talk derogatory of him. This was partly because he could not take Charlie seriously as a rival. Charlie of the putrid penis? Impossible. For all it excited or upset him, Hazel might as well have been sleeping with Donald Duck. Nyman on the other hand, Nyman of the putrid disposition, Nyman who was everywhere and nowhere, who was everything and nothing, Nyman had piqued him. Nyman he could think of as the enemy of his soul. How much that was to do with the faggot himself and how much to do with Hazel wanting a piece and Chas taking it was the big question. Whatever the answer, it was Chas who was on his mind now. Exclusively on his mind. For the first time since he could remember, for the first time since he was Cophetua to his mother’s beggar-maid, he was down imaginatively to only one woman. And that meant being returned to the torments of only one woman, because he wasn’t at all sure that Chas was feeling the same way about him.
He moved into the least formal of his convenience love nests, a narrow high-ceilinged would-be warehouse, the shape of an up-ended matchbox, above his shop on Clapham High Street, opposite a nightclub. The flats attached to his other shops were all copies of the Philippe Starck hotel rooms he’d stayed in on his buying trips around the world, places to fuck quickly and cleanly in; but this one, though hardly a home, at least reflected his unsatisfied temper, housed his books, his personal papers, the things that had no place in his marriage. It had been Hazel’s suggestion, originally, that as he spent so much time away, physically and mentally somewhere else, he could do worse than fix himself up an office space to store the possessions it always made him melancholy to look at, the memoranda of the intellectual life he’d abandoned, the junk of the bachelor existence he’d sacrificed (the dartboards and snooker cues and flamenco records dating back to his first holiday in Spain), all of which was just cluttering up space she could put to better use. ‘Think of it as a den,’ she said. ‘All men like a den, don’t they?’
‘Yes, but usually at the bottom of the garden. Not at the other end of London.’
She threw him a look, the look, meaning men who want to make sentimental noises about the bottoms of their gardens would do well to know where the bottoms of their gardens are.
And she reminded him that Clapham and Kennington were not exactly at opposite ends of London.
By the time he had stuffed it with what mattered to him – shelves of the writings of the English radicals going up into the girders and reachable only by ladders, box files containing his old lectures and lecture notes, an old sea chest holding letters from his mother, an antique shove-halfpenny board on mahogany legs, a wind-up record player for his 78s, all his curry spices and a collection of Jack Nicholson movies on video – there was scarcely room for a bed. He was pleased that he had put the bed last. It refuted something about him. In the end he had a mezzanine floor built which he festooned with rugs. That was the bed. Opulent but hard to get to. The ladders for his books were at least made of steel. The ladder to his bed was made of rope. And how did the varicosed mothers of the women he loved negotiate that? They didn’t. Without knowing it while it was happening, he now realised he had been saving Clapham High Street. For whom? For Chas, of course.
In time she would climb up to his bed and he would hack off the rungs of the ladder behind her. And that would be that.
He had made no fuss about moving out. He had peered into Hazel’s bedroom and cried. Then he had opened the lid of Hazel’s piano stool – Chopin and Debussy, unplayed for however many years – and cried. Then he had taken a last look at Hazel’s bag museum, everything strewn around malevolently, like some holy place that had been sacked by infidels, and this time cried long and seriously. Then he did whatever else he had to do. He left a note for Hazel telling her that she’d been right all along, that a den was the very thing he needed, and cheerio. She knew how to reach him. She wasn’t in immediate need of anything. She had her own chequebook and credit cards. Her own car. Her own interests. And now her own lover. For his daughters too he left a note, saying he’d take them out to dinner as soon as he’d got his head straight. They’d understand that.
It didn’t enter Kreitman’s calculations that Charlie would actually interpret the terms of the swap (some swap!) quite so literally: take up residence in Kreitman’s house, put his shirts in Kreitman’s wardrobe, sleep in Kreitman’s bed. When he thought about Hazel he thought of her as he’d known her, living the same life only with him not there. Not that different from before. He had no intention of padding pyjamaed up the Merriweather staircase himself, so Charlie’s whereabouts vis-à-vis Chas was equally immaterial. He was somewhere. Who cared where. Kreitman was not going to buy into the domestic farce of dodging and being dodged. The situation was already indecorous enough by virtue of its symmetry. Some men are natural born swappers, some aren’t. Kreitman wasn’t. He lacked the mirth.
The same squeamishness told him to keep his distance from Chas in the first days after their grin-and-bear-it breakfast on Dartmoor. She had driven him back to London in her mobile picnic basket, neither of them speaking much, silenced by the amount of Charlie the vehicle contained – Wellingtons, anoraks, walking sticks, Glyndebourne umbrellas, all the tramping-in-mud and sitting-on-damp-grass gear that had been the glue of the Merriweather marriage. But this would have been a time for quiet anyway. Kreitman had said what he’d needed to say. Shown Chas that she was able to hurt him. And she had shown him that hurting was something she might come to enjoy. Eventually. Anything further, for the time being, would have been unsubtle.
He rang her only twice in the first week, alluding to as little as possible, not even telling her that he had moved out of his house. The first call was no more than a polite thank-you for the lift and a discreet enquiry as to her spirits. Nothing knowing. Just was she all right.
Her voice was like a tall building in a high gale. She was fine. Why shouldn’t she be?
‘No reason,’ Kreitman said.
‘No reason other than that my husband has just come home asking me to be happy for him.’
Kreitman said nothing. Not even, ‘And are you?’
‘He tells me he’s been on sabbatical. I don’t suppose you’ve ever thought of Hazel as a sabbatical yourself.’
‘No,’ Kreitman said.
‘No,’ she jeered, extending the vowel so that it took in all the women Kreitman had thought of as a sabbatical.
Don’t rise, Kreitman cautioned himself. Don’t go near it. He wondered what else Charlie had told his wife. That he had swapped her for Hazel? That she was now obliged, by the terms of the deal, to do something nice for Marvin. Surely even Charlie knew the difference between a venial sin and a capital offence. ‘You’ll work it out,’ was what he said.
‘We have worked it out,’ she told him. ‘We’ve worked him out. He’s gone.’
‘What do you mean, he’s gone?’
‘Gone. Gone gone. I ordered the prick off the premises and he obligingly packed his bags and skedaddled.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Kreitman said. But he was thinking how unconvincingly she swore. Had she ever called anyone a prick before? Skedaddling was pure Chas, her hand not quite in the glove of the vernacular, and ordering people off premises had something of her soul in it too, but prick … ?
They were both listening hard. ‘You’re sorry?’ Was she wondering if he’d ever used that word before?
‘I truly am, Charlie.’
‘Are you?’ she said. She was weeping now, walled about in tears. ‘I wonder if you are …’
And Kreitman, alert and lonely in his bachelor pad, heard something in that that gave him hope.
When he rang again it was to ask her out. For lunch, not dinner. Somewhere casual, not somewhere significant. To dry her tears, was the implication. To offer his shoulder, in the event of Charlie still being gone, or his counsel in the event of Charlie’s having returned. She said no, of course. No to Charlie’s having returned, no to her ever wanting him to return, and no to lunch. But she didn’t say he had a fucking nerve.
‘Call me if you change your mind,’ he said.
‘We’ll see,’ she’d said. But weepily.
The next day she did call, but only to tell him how hurt she was that he had let her rave on about her husband but hadn’t informed her that he wasn’t just knocking off Hazel but had actually moved in with her.
‘Charlie’s moved in with Hazel?’
‘Come off it, Marvin.’
‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it, I swear to you.’
She didn’t believe him. ‘Marvin, your house isn’t that big.’
‘I’m not in the house …’
He waited for her to digest that information, measure its import for herself, but she said nothing.
‘I haven’t been in the house since I got back from Dartmoor,’ he continued.
‘Aha,’ she said. Pull the other one.
‘Think about it, Chas. What would I be doing there? Tucking them in and taking them Ovaltine?’
‘I wouldn’t put that past you.’
‘You think I’m a pander as well as a sabbaticalist?’
‘I think you’re capable of anything, Marvin.’
‘Maybe, but not that. I’ve told you, I’m motivated by nostalgia, not pervery.’
‘I’m surprised you call it pervery.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning you might think of it as companionable – your wife, your best friend … and you.’
‘Forget it, Charlie. That’s not my scene.’
‘Not your scene?’ She let out a mock gasp. ‘I don’t suppose you remember the violence, Marvin, with which you once publicly dumped on me for using that expression.’
‘I don’t. But I apologise.’
‘For dumping on me?’
‘For that too. But it shows how agitated talking to you makes me. What I should have said was, “Threesomes? My thoughts do not that way tend.”’
‘Which is why you left the house?’
‘I’ve told you, I’d left the house already.’
‘To live alone or with some girl?’
Was she jealous?
‘I don’t do girls. But yes, to live alone.’
‘I can’t see your thoughts tending to loneliness for long, Marvin.’
She was. She was jealous.
‘You know damn well where my thoughts are tending, Charlie,’ he told her.
She paused, listening, listening. ‘Well, we’ll see,’ she said again. But still she made no reference to lunch.
‘I am ill with grief over my husband,’ she told Dotty, ‘and this guy keeps ringing me up and asking me out. But I’m well aware you’re not the person to be saying this to.’
They had been to The Mikado – ‘Just take me to see anything, just get me away from the house,’ Chas had begged her sister – and now they were sitting in the American Bar at the Savoy, drinking burgundy, picking at olives and looking striking. The Juniper girls up from the country, smelling of hay, but with the sun in their hair.
‘And who’s the guy?’ Dotty asked.
‘There you are! That’s not the question you’re meant to ask, Dotty. You’re so sideways. A sister shouldn’t be sideways.’
‘How should a sister be?’
‘Straight.’
Dotty crossed her legs, rattling her sequins, and sat back in her chair, her chest out. (Incapable of not flirting, Chas thought, even with me.) ‘This straight enough for you? Now what’s the question I’m meant to ask?’
‘Why am I ill with grief for my husband.’
‘And why are you?’
‘Oh, Dotty, what a question. Twenty-three years!’
Dotty opened her eyes very wide, not because she was surprised by the amount of time her sister and her brother-in-law had been together but because she had read that opening her eyes wide for long periods prevented crow’s feet. ‘All the more reason for accepting it’s over,’ she said. ‘A hundred years ago you’d have been dead already. Victorian expectations of one marriage to one man no longer apply. It’s mortality that decides morality. Always has been. A woman of the twenty-first century can expect to live until she’s eighty-five at least. With your constitution you’ll probably make it to a hundred and five. That means you’ll need a minimum – a minimum, Charlie! – of three husbands. Let this one go. Divorce him and marry this other guy. Who is he?’
‘You forget that we were more than husband and wife. More than friends even. We collaborated. Twenty-seven books! It wasn’t me who used to say we were a marriage of true minds, it was Charlemagne.’
Dotty uncrossed her legs, winnowing with light the sequins on her antique dress. One of their grandmother’s. Chas noticed that Dotty had taken to wearing these more and more often lately, as though needing to clothe her forward behaviour in the garments of a more withdrawn time. A proof, Chas believed – and this was a belief she held dearly to – that modern women like her sister only affected abandon, while in their hearts they remained as self-restrained as their grandmothers. This affectation was what Chas meant by silliness. On the other hand she could see that Dotty was looking very beautiful tonight, that she was enjoying showing the room (and the waiters) her sequins (and her legs), that the burgundy which she’d been drinking to excess had made her voice deep and that taken all round her silliness became her.
But it wasn’t only to draw attention to herself that Dotty went on changing her position; she was also looking for a posture suggestive of confidentiality. ‘Listen to me, darling,’ she said. ‘The marriage of true minds you speak of was also going down the plughole. It’s not for me to pry but I bet your sales have been plummeting. What do you expect? You’ve been stuck in the eighties for years. Your other half was bom stuck in the eighties – the eighteen eighties. He was making you stale, Charlie. He was holding you back.’
‘Everybody’s sales are plummeting,’ Charlie said.
‘Not true. I can name some whose sales are soaring.’
‘Please don’t,’ Charlie said.
‘I wouldn’t be so crude.’
‘I mean, please don’t go on with this subject.’ She was annoyed. Suddenly she could detect the agitating influence of the malicious boy-of-letters with the frayed cuffs, the true face of Dotty’s silliness. She could hear the Publishers Weekly pillow talk – ‘That sister of yours is on a bit of a loser with that husband, wouldn’t you say? Have you seen their sales figures recently? Not that they ever were much cop as a writing team, but at least they had the ear of the market once, when every child was a Little Lord Fauntleroy. How come no one’s told them the Fauntleroys have died out? No wonder the big clown is after a piece of you. You’re his last chance to enter the modern world. That’s if he has anything left to enter you with …’
Following her thoughts, part of the way at least, Dotty uncrossed her legs, her sequins hissing like a snake, and put her arms round her sister. ‘Face facts, darling,’ she said. ‘All good collaborations come to an end. Think of… I don’t know … help me … Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.’
‘I’m surprised you go so far back culturally any more,’ Chas said. ‘I’d have imagined, given the circles you move in now, that Wham! would have been the first example that sprung to mind.’
Dotty looked at the ceiling and comically pretended to tap her brow. Actually tapping her brow would have broken the skin. ‘Who’s Wham!?’ she said. Then she signalled the wine waiter for more burgundy. ‘Oh, Charlie,’ she said, ‘you don’t think Whami’s of now, do you?’
Charlie shrugged. ‘I’m not the one who’s desperate to keep up,’ she said.
‘And I can’t help it if I attract young men,’ Dotty retorted. ‘It runs in the family.’
‘Dotty, it does not!’
‘Oh, doesn’t it! And Mummy?’
‘What about Mummy? You’re not going to give me that coalman routine again.’
‘Never mind the coalman, what about Tony Almond?’
‘I’ve never heard of Tony Almond. You’ve made him up. Mummy would never have gone near a man called Tony Almond. It’s a hairdresser’s name.’
‘Not quite. He was a wine merchant. Half Mummy’s age. He had that shop in the high street with all the vintage whiskies in the window. Almond’s. He used to help Mummy choose her Christmas wine.’
‘Took her down to his wine cellars, I suppose?’
‘That’s exactly what he did. Every Christmas until she was too old to negotiate the stairs. Then he just closed the shop for the afternoon.’
‘Dotty, how come you know all these things and I don’t?’
‘Mummy confided in me. She wouldn’t tell you because she thought you were a prude. “Charlie would just say I was being silly,” she said. But I can see you don’t want to believe me. Suit yourself. I find it helps, knowing I’m following in Mummy’s footsteps. Keeping up the grand Juniper tradition. I wish you’d do the same.’
‘Mummy was a Dunmore, not a Juniper.’
Dotty inverted her lips. ‘You’ll go to the grave a pedant, Charlie.’
Charlie crossed her arms on the little table and slumped her head on them. Could Dotty be telling the truth? Was any of it the truth? Had her mother really gone down into his cellar with the wine merchant? Even just the once? Even just for fun? And did it matter one iota if she had?
Grandma too, whose coruscations Dotty did not scruple to borrow – what about Grandma and Leonard Woolf?
Not to mention herself; only think what she was capable of, simply out of incompetent politeness, or raging grief.
When she looked up she was surprised to find that her own thoughts had taken an inconsequent turn. ‘Would you forgive him?’ she asked.
‘Tony Almond?’
‘Don’t be an ass, Dotty. My husband.’
‘What do you want me to say, Charlie?’
‘I don’t want you to say anything. Would you forgive him?’
Dotty opened her eyes wide, made a letter box of her mouth, looked at her reflection in the wine that had just arrived, shook out her sequins and sighed. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. And not because he’s fucking that slack cow, but because he demeaned you by wandering around looking desperate. I’m surprised it took him so long to come on to me. Charlie, he was making a fool of you. His tongue was hanging out. He slobbered over everything that moved. Who wants to be with a man who can’t get himself laid?’
Charlie would have liked to be able to open her own eyes wide, and make a letter box of her mouth, but her eyes were small and wet with tears, and her mouth was shut fast with unhappiness. ‘Was it really as bad as that?’ she asked.
‘Worse. I’m sorry, darling – and don’t forget I was very fond of Charlemagne myself – but it was ghastly. You’d have been better off with a fucker.’
‘Like Marvin Kreitman?’
The sisters exchanged a long look. ‘Out of the frying pan into the fire,’ Dotty said.
‘Come on. You said I’d have been better off with a fucker. Have the courage of your convictions. Would I have been happier with Marvin Kreitman?’
‘I didn’t say you’d have been happier with a fucker, I said better off, less demeaned.’
‘So would I have been less demeaned with Kreitman?’
Dotty thought about it. ‘He’s a bit of a throwback.’
‘Meaning?’
‘He’s a sort we thought we were rid of. I feel a certain nostalgia for the type myself, but I can see that his was a virus we needed to knock out. Are you telling me there’s about to be another outbreak of him?’
‘Dotty, will you be straight! Would I have been less demeaned married to a man like Kreitman, whether or not he was fucking every woman in sight, than I was – than you say I was – married to a man who was visibly dying of not fucking anybody?’
Dotty thought about it some more. She held an olive out before her lips for so long that Chas thought she was going to scream. ‘Jesus, Dotty!’ she cried. ‘Is this another of your facial exercises?’
‘I will conscientiously answer your question,’ Dotty said.
‘When? Next week? Next year?’
‘Now.’
‘And … ?’
Dotty swallowed her olive and looked long into her sister’s eyes. ‘God help any woman who has to make that choice,’ she said.
Waiting for her to call, Kreitman put on flamenco music – Lorca’s sore-throat cante jondo was what he loved, not the heel-clicking tourist rubbish – and lay on his bed listening to it all the day and half the night, drowning out the club opposite, the rasping melancholy of unrequitedness. How good sex was when you couldn’t get it! Why, on the night of their soul-searching, had he not frogmarched Charlie Merriweather out of the restaurant and over to Virgin Records on Oxford Street, bought him every piece of gypsy music in the store, and ordered him to go home and enjoy cultivating the exquisite art of doing without, instead of indulging his unseemly wondering and allowing it to bring them both to this pass?
When he wanted a break from flamenco he played shove-halfpenny with himself, hours at a time. Exhausted by that, he challenged his computer to chess. Pissed off with losing, he dusted down some of his old college books and grew maudlin. Beginning his early married life in the most straitened circumstances, Francis Place had cautioned against cramped living quarters. ‘Nothing conduces so much to the degradation of a man and a woman …’ Well, there was no woman living in these cramped quarters, and in Kreitman’s view nothing conduced so much to a man’s degradation as that.
Looking at himself in his bathroom mirror, he saw a lonely man. Was this the loneliest he’d ever been? Was he lonelier now than on that last lost night in Barcelona, heartbreak paella perfuming the cobbled streets and his hot fist stuffed with pesetas? Much lonelier. Then he could only guess what he was missing. Now he was in a position to count losses until his hair turned grey.
There is some mischief in numbers. Waiting for you in the midst of plenty, zilch. The more Kreitman counted the less he had. So was that all he’d been amassing over so many years – nothing?
Other than Charlie, who was not available to him at the moment, he had no male friends. It’s a choice you make: either you go chasing women or you have friends. There isn’t room for both. Kreitman’s women were his friends, which worked well, kept him in company, conversation and games of chess, so long as they remained his women. But he had no appetite for any of his women now, not since he’d watched Chas on her knees on the croquet lawn, in a black-mass mockery of prayer to a man for whom she had no regard. Some sights blind you to all others. Fix your gaze on Sodom and Gomorrah going up in sulphur on the Plain of Mamre and you turn to stone. Kreitman had disobeyed the injunctions of decency and wisdom and kept his curtains open. Only he hadn’t turned to stone; he’d turned to jelly.
If he were tucking his grown-up daughters into bed and telling them what life had thrown at Marvin Kreitman next, they wouldn’t have been much impressed with the adult content of his story. ‘Now, when it’s too late, you’re telling us fairy stories. In the catalogue of contemporary carnalities, Daddy, touching someone’s dick is not that mega.’
Where had he been, their old man? What would he say if they told him about a triple anal?
It was true. He knew it. He had stood at the window, aghast, watching not that much happening. But how much had to happen? For Marvin Kreitman, sitting in a cinema and waiting for the twelve-foot kiss – just that, just two lips brushing – was a shattering experience. No matter how trashy the plot, no matter how cheesy the actors, he hung on the coming kiss in palpitating suspense – was it soon … was it near … was it now! And when at last it did come, it was as though he’d never seen one before: it dried up his mouth, soaked the collar of his shirt, bound steel hoops around his chest. Try breathing now, Kreitman!
No small thing, a kiss, whatever happened next. And as for reaching out for body parts …
In the end it’s all about susceptibility to shock. If it feels rude, it is rude. Call it wonderment. The wonderment of rude. Some of us never have it, some of us don’t know how to keep it. Chas had it and so far Chas had kept it. That was enough for Kreitman. He had looked out on to the moor, seen consciousness of rude and gone up in flames.
Who among those he’d been fucking for dear life only a month before – he’d show them triple anal! – could lodge anything in his head to rival Chas giving wonder? Ooshi in her rubber corset, playing the dominatrix with one eye on the clock? ‘Beg, Kreitman!’ Erica wetting his ear with what she’d done with other women? ‘Then I … then she … then I … after which we …’ Forget it. Yes, he’d begged abjectly enough in his time – ‘Please, Ooshi, oh God no, oh God yes, not that, yes that!’ Sure, he’d urged Erica on in her flagging fantasies – ‘You didn’t, you couldn’t, you never!’ But their day was over. They were bored with him and he was bored with them. Who started it didn’t matter. They’d lost the trick of rude. They were too overt, too seamlessly the thing they were. They weren’t respectable and lewd. They weren’t confident and gauche. They didn’t have fault lines running through them, on one side of which they kicked husbands off the premises, like queens of infinite space, and on the other pronounced prick as though it were the brand name of a tuck-shop lolly. No fault line, no desire; and if he no longer desired them (or, indeed, they him) there was no point seeing them. Here was the catch in his erotic reasoning. His social life waited on his dick. His dick waited on his imagination. So if his imagination was not stirred, he ate alone.
He rang his mother just once, then put the phone down. How was that for restraint! If ever there were a blame and kiss-it-better time, this was it, Kreitman up to his ears in his own bhuna chicken juices and reduced to playing chess with a computer. All your doing, Ma. Behold the glory and the ruination of your works! But Chas was the only person it excited him to blame for his decline and fall now. She was the woman in his life – let her fix it!
He had to force himself to leave the flat. One morning he found himself being tailed by a ruby-red Smart driven by an African chauffeur. It took him ten minutes of quickening then reducing his pace, and a further ten trying to work out who would be putting a detective on him – Hazel, obviously, but why? – before he remembered that the car and its chauffeur were his.
‘Maurice, I’d forgotten I had you,’ he said, when the driver wound down his window.
‘You should get out more, Mr Kreitman,’ the driver laughed.
He got Maurice to take him the rounds of his furthest flung shops, Lewisham, Crystal Palace, Penge, swinging back towards Putney via Thornton Heath and Wimbledon. Was this his life? He totted up what he amounted to – so many hundreds of Ander suitcases, so many thousands of Manchester United schoolbags, so many hundreds of thousands of coin-tray purses, still selling though you would have thought the penny-pinching bachelor gent who shuffled his coins on to the tray to inspect them, exactly as an ailing German will inspect his stools, was a thing of the past. Was it time for him, Kreitman, to have a coin-tray purse of his own? She loves me – shuffle, shuffle – she loves me not. She loves me …
Because it gave him something to take his mind off himself he was pleased to walk into a staff problem at his West Norwood branch. An assistant not in the first flush of youth, nor in any sort of flush of presentableness, come to that – only West Norwood, you see – was taking a bag down from a shelf. The bag, unlike the assistant, was hard-edged, highly polished, brittle as a diamond, not cheap. ‘A good choice, madam,’ he overheard the assistant saying, ‘I’ve been thinking of buying that one for myself for weeks.’ He took her aside, though not aside enough, once the sale had fallen through. ‘Peggy,’ he said, ‘I mean this in the nicest way, but ask yourself why it would be a recommendation to a woman let’s say half your age and let’s guess twice your height, a woman with an air (I say no more than that) of having a degree from Oxford and from Cambridge and a house in every road in Dulwich, that the handbag on which her attention happens to have alighted is the very handbag chosen above all others for its fashionableness and elegance by you?’
It came out ruder than he meant it to, but what help was there? The shop fell quiet. The grey-haired assistant blinked three times, lowered her head and disappeared into the stockroom. Kreitman followed, inhaling leather. He loved a stockroom. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I could have put that better.’
‘You could have put it to me in private, Mr Kreitman,’ she corrected him, sniffing.
Kreitman took her point and apologised again. He had broken one of Francis Place’s three golden recollections to himself, and played the tyrant. And for no reason other than that he was love-sick and idle. In the days when he counted off his women he was considerate to his staff. Was being in love with one woman making a pig of him? He wondered if Peggy was going to hand in her notice and then sue him for unfair dismissal. Staff were no picnic any more. Hire a person to stuff travel bags with newspapers and you have taken on a responsibility as onerous as marriage. More. Easier to shed a wife than a sales assistant.
‘As you were,’ he saluted to the shop in general, as he left. But none of the remaining staff looked up from what they were doing or otherwise showed they thought his joke particularly funny.
‘Right, Maurice,’ he said, folding himself back into the Smart, ‘let’s see what trouble I can cause in Mitcham.’
He was better off indoors with his unrequited gypsy music and his shove-halfpenny board. Waiting for the call from Chas.
He couldn’t stop thinking about her. She had turned golden in his imagination, come in out of the sun-bled fields and taken possession of the great glittering indoors, made lustrous by artificial light. Once upon a time he had not liked the sameness of her palette, her corn-stook hair, yellow to her shoulders, framing dully her corn-stook complexion; now the homogeneity of her colouring seemed to him the very model of beauty, her yellow become bronze, its evenness of shading stirringly at odds with the unruliness of her character. When he heard her voice he tried to picture what she was wearing, even though he couldn’t stomach a single item in her wardrobe. When his phone rang he hoped to God it was her and was unable to prevent his own voice dropping when it turned out to be someone else. ‘Come on, come on, get off the line,’ he muttered into his teeth, rocking on the balls of his feet, aflame with impatience, even though the caller had once whispered up all the devils of hell for his entertainment. But there you are, they were the wrong devils, not a one of them Chas in her knitted cucumber top and spinnaker skirt, down on her lavender-gathering knees on a croquet lawn, confusing the categories, mixing up his head.
He jumped when he heard his mail delivered, or the bell ring, or the door rattle. When he looked out of his window he thought he saw her in the street, reading the shop numbers, looking up for a sight of him, smiling one of those blind person’s smiles of hers – fantastical because she didn’t have an inkling where his flat was, but that didn’t stop him imagining her coming up the stairs, knocking on his door, seeing how he was living and feeling sorry for him.
‘You’ve reduced yourself to this for me?’
‘For you, Charlie.’
And then one of them running into the other’s arms.
No, not one of them, him. Running into hers.
Jelly. He’d turned to jelly, grown passive, become the victim of events. He never thought of going to her, always of her coming to him. Never of his kissing her, always of her kissing him. He imagined being touched by her – her hands on him, not his on her – cudgelling his brains to recall how his skin felt the one time she had touched him. But too much had happened since then, four children had been born, innumerable other touchings had taken place, and he’d been too drunk, and she’d been too drunk, and there’d been more bravado than skin in it, anyway, and more tease than touch. And more irony than he’d had the wit to register.
Ironic women had always been his weakness. He had fallen for Hazel because she’d been sardonic about herself. Of his current crop of lapsed lovers, Bernadette had been his favourite because she put up ironic buildings – libraries too dark to read a book in, old people’s homes which were death traps even for the young and virile – and because she looked to him to confirm her bleak view of existence. Chas’s irony, though, was different. Something to do with protectiveness. She’d mocked Charlie protectively for however many years. Become a sort of mother to him and assumed a sort of care. Ironically sort of. My baby, my poor weak baby. With hindsight, Kreitman now believed there might all along have been a touch of that in her tone to him too. Was it something to do with her brand of sex? The satiric half-accidental handjob, after which she was liberated to show pity? Had she been mothering him ironically for twenty years without his ever noticing? And did she therefore feel motherly to that nonentity Nyman as well? Was she nursing Nyman in a leaded-windowed bedroom with a view of the Thames in Richmond right this minute, fumbling in his pants and rocking him in her arms, even as Kreitman uncorked his third bottle of Shiraz and ripped open his second packet of malted-milk biscuits for the night?
Do I know anything, Kreitman wondered, of what has or hasn’t happened?
After all, he needed to talk to his mother.
She had moved north, when she became Mrs Bellwood, to the quiet of Rickmansworth, then further north again, nudging at the Chilterns, after Norbert had his stroke. She greeted Kreitman in her garden, a cigarette in her hand. He loved it that his mother smoked. It made her raffish in his eyes.
‘I’m dead-heading the roses,’ she said.
She showed him the secateurs sticking out of her apron pocket. Secateurs he cared for less than cigarettes, then remembered he’d seen Chas wielding them in Richmond and wondered if maybe they could be rendered raffish, by association, too.
‘I knew you were coming,’ she said.
Kreitman, standing ill at ease on the lawn with his arms folded, laughed. ‘No you didn’t.’
She tapped the side of her face, just below her eye, the nerve centre of her sympathetic prescience. ‘I told Norbert you’d be here, just half an hour ago.’
He met her gaze. Don’t say anything, her eyes warned him. Make no comment about the fact that when you’re not here I’m talking to someone who cannot talk back to me and who most of the time doesn’t understand a word I say.
She walked him round the garden, showing him flowers. A new side to his mother. There’d been no flowers in the days of his father. But then Bruno the Broygis would probably have kicked their heads off on his way in.
Kreitman didn’t ask how Norbert was. He knew the routine. No mention. What there was to be told, he would be told. Sometimes his mother would take him up to see Norbert, sometimes he would be wheeled out. But if he wasn’t, he wasn’t. And Kreitman knew not to wander round the house. A man who has had a stroke as serious as Norbert’s leaves a swinging thurible of baby smell, damp and dead, in every room he’s been in. Mona Bellwood showed no sign that that distressed or shamed her. If she was careful who she allowed to go where, that was to spare them.
Too cruel. Too unthinkably cruel that his mother’s second crack at romance should have ended so abruptly in this. One bastard, one vegetable – where was the fairness in that?
‘So,’ she said. ‘Love-troubles. Have you come to see Shelley?’
‘Ma, I’ve come to see you.’
‘I know, but have you also come to see Shelley?’
‘No, not today.’
‘Then definitely love-troubles.’
He sat on a step while she continued savaging the roses. ‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ he said, ‘I’ve left Hazel.’
‘I know,’ she said, not bothering to look up.
‘Ma, do me a favour – enough with the psychic powers.’
‘Who’s talking about psychic powers? She rang me.’
‘Hazel rang you!’
‘I’m her mother-in-law, why are you surprised?’
‘What did she ring you to say?’
‘What do you think? “Congratulations. You have your wish. Better late than never.”’
‘She said that?’
‘Yes. Brave of her, I thought. First brave thing I’ve ever heard her say.’
‘And no doubt you told her that?’
‘No. I said I was sorry if either of you was unhappy. Are you?’
‘What did she say to that?’
‘I’m asking you that. Are you unhappy?’
Kreitman took off his jacket and folded it on his lap. Linen. He didn’t want it creased. ‘What I am,’ he said, ‘is bewildered. I can’t work out why I like what I like in women.’
‘Simple,’ his mother told him. ‘Trouble. You like trouble.’
‘Yes, but that doesn’t help. What I want to know is why do I like trouble.’
She dropped the secateurs on the lawn and came to join him on the steps. Creakily. He hadn’t noticed that in her before. He thought of her as about his age. But up close she wasn’t the beggar-maid any more. You can’t push your husband around in his wheelchair, smelling infancy and death on him every day, and stay a beggar-maid. ‘What exactly is it you want to hear from me?’ she asked. ‘That I did something to you when you were small? That I gave you a taste for trouble?’
‘Ma, you know I’m not asking you that.’
She shrugged. ‘I may have,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t your Freud say all mothers do that. Why should I be any different? I tried to make you believe in yourself, and who can say whether that’s a good thing. Maybe I made you arrogant. Maybe you thought I was the only one who could appreciate you. And since you couldn’t have me – bingo! – trouble.’
‘Freud in a nutshell, Ma. I can’t think why you’ve always been so against him. But I’m not blaming you for anything. I just want to know whether I was always … what I am. When you took me to all those specialists because I kept fainting, did any of them say anything?’
‘Like your boy seems to want trouble from his women? Marvin, you were eight at the time. We weren’t looking for woman-associated symptoms.’
‘But I was morbid, wasn’t I? That’s why you took me.’
‘No one said anything about morbid. The doctors called you sensitive.’
‘But what does sensitive mean?’
‘Sensitive means sensitive. You’re still sensitive. Look at the fists you’re making.’
She put her hands on his, unlacing his fingers. What he couldn’t decide was whether their eyes had met, whether she had mutely said, ‘You like that, don’t you, Marvin? You like me to unfist you.’
‘Do you remember,’ she suddenly said, ‘telling me about the woman you met in Selfridges?’
He tossed his hair. Jest and no jest. ‘Ma, I’ve met so many women in Selfridges.’
This time their eyes did meet. Hers were black and Caspian still, but the blaze wasn’t what it once had been. He thought they looked sorrowfully into his – not sorry for herself, sorry for him. She squeezed his hands. ‘You told me you met this one in the bag department. You told me you stopped her buying something. You were excited, you said, because she was as old as I was. A funny thing, Marvin, to tell your mother.’
A phrase he would rather not have remembered came back to him. ‘You don’t use your mouth like other men.’
That first. How interesting. First the phrase, then the woman.
It was just before he went to university. Out on the prowl, anywhere, it didn’t matter, Tottenham Court Road, Piccadilly Circus, Carnaby Street, Regent Street. A late Saturday afternoon, the shops not yet closed, his eyes darting in every direction, then bullseye! he found one – tall, fleshy, sarcastic-looking, self-contained in the manner of a married woman not needing to be on the prowl herself – where else but in Selfridges’ handbag department. ‘Don’t buy that one,’ he’d said. ‘Rubbish leather. The patent will come off in the rain. Clasp will rust and the strap’s old-fashioned. This one suits you better.’
His reward a knee-trembler after lasagne and Valpolicella, up against a wall in St Christopher’s Place, close to where once stood a urinal in which the downwardly mobile Victorian painter Simeon Solomon – no long-windedly self-righteous Moral Chartist, that one, but a hero of Kreitman’s nonetheless – did feloniously attempt the abominable crime of buggery (so Kreitman could like a faggot when it suited him) upon one George Roberts, or vice versa. Though no blue plaque marks the spot.
No blue plaque for Marvin Kreitman either, but then no blue plaque was necessary – it was scarred on his brain tissue, the place where he learned he did not use his mouth like other men.
So how did other men use their mouths?
She didn’t know how to put it. She’d only come out to buy a handbag when all was said and done. And she wasn’t in the habit of doing this. But since he asked – well, more assertively, more animalistically, or something.
She pushed him from her. ‘There’s something wrong with you,’ she said, before she walked away. ‘You just leave your mouth there, like a baby bird’s, waiting for something to be put into it. It’s horrible. Then you bite me.’
What sort of mouth did a baby bird have? Soft, red, passive, blindly hungry. Not a flattering comparison, was it? Thereafter he was careful to present a powerful set of mandibles to every woman he kissed. Lock into Marvin Kreitman’s jaws and you knew how a mouse felt when an eagle swooped. But the imputation stuck – there was some masculine forcefulness that wasn’t his by nature.
And he’d told this to his mother?
Marvellous that she remembered. How many years ago was it? Twenty-five? Thirty? But more marvellous still that he’d told her.
Why would he have told her?
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘something is vaguely coming back to me.’
‘It worried you at the time, I remember.’
‘It still worries me.’
She shook her head and took his hands, both remade into fists, one in each of hers. ‘You’ve got your health,’ she said. ‘You have two wonderful daughters. You have never been short of girlfriends. You make a good living. What do you have to worry about?’
It always saddened and bemused him, how little his mother expected of him now. Health, for God’s sake. Daughters, girlfriends, a living … Where had the other stuff gone? His destiny, his moral spotlessness, his genius? Couldn’t she at least be a little bit disappointed for him?
Or was that just the mouth issue all over again? Was that why he’d told her – so that she could pity and reprimand him, in equal measure? Did he seek his mother’s disappointment?
Christ!
Before he left, his mother took him to see Norbert in the lovely high-ceilinged sunlit room she’d built for him, quiet as his old library, every sound dying in deep lilac carpet, his books and papers, unread, all around him. How old was Norbert? Kreitman wondered. He looked ageless – a thousand years, a thousand days, impossible to tell – a creature washed of all his sins, only his tongue a problem to him, everything else apparently sorted, his eyes off on some unknown journey of their own.
‘Marvin’s here to see you,’ his mother said.
‘Hi, Norbert,’ Kreitman said.
Not a flicker.
Because Kreitman didn’t know what else to do, he waved.
Mona Bellwood went over to her husband’s chair and rearranged him, lifting him under his arms, as she must once have lifted Marvin, pulling the hair back from his unlined brow, tidying him around the ears, this never unkempt man. She raised her face and saw her son looking at her. She smiled a tired smile. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said. ‘But he’s in here. He hasn’t gone. I know that when I touch him I’m reaching him.’
And you, Mother, Kreitman wasn’t able to ask, who’s reaching you?
‘You’re a believer in the soul, then?’ he said.
‘I always knew where you were when you were out,’ she reminded him, continuing to clean up her husband’s face, smoothing away the hairs, absently stroking his cheeks, rearranging his cravat. ‘I could always tell if something bad was happening to you. I don’t know whether you call that believing in the soul.’
‘So you know where Norbert is?’
‘I do, yes, definitely.’
‘And is something bad happening to him?’
She started to answer, but then couldn’t. Cracks suddenly appeared across her face, like the shattering of glass. She put up her hands to hide her grief, though whether from him or from Norbert he couldn’t say. Somehow, with a movement of her shoulders, she was able to signal him to leave. ‘How could you be so cruel, Marvin?’ she collected herself sufficiently to ask. But by that time he was out of the door.
It wasn’t safe for him to go out. When he made a call to one of his shops he upset the staff, and when he went to visit his own mother he upset her and himself. Death in the house and his mother ageing, and there was he, who should have been a comfort, absorbed in the trivia of self-damage, wondering what it meant that he wanted his mother to know he didn’t kiss like other men, and by natural extension – for all roads lead to the same place when you’re in the state Marvin Kreitman was in – wondering what sort of kisser Nyman was. That the reason Chas hadn’t taken him up on his offer – too busy kissing the faggot? A man more rattishly and motivationally stripped down to the bare bones blah-blah than he and Charlie rolled together – Chas’s own words. Meaning exactly what? That as men, as sexual men, as users of the mouth, he and Charlie didn’t add up to a hill of beans in Chas’s estimation?
It had come to something that he was bracketing himself with Charlie these days. Charlie and Marvin, two absolute no-hopers with women. Except that that description didn’t apply to Charlie any more, did it?
He had run into Shelley, when leaving his mother’s. On her way in to take up her nursing duties, so not starched yet, still in her civvies, if you could call them that. Thirty years old and wearing a tiny ruffle of a skirt, black convent tights and dinky bower boots, like a fairy who had come down off a Christmas tree, looking for a punch-up. Kreitman sighed. Those were the days.
He had forgotten what women were like. Was this what they did? When Shelley spoke to him she pushed her face forward, as though she wanted him to pat her head, like a cat. Little pink tongue. Little green eyes narrowed. Little cough, due to little fur ball in little throat. Lovely, Kreitman thought. So lovely he couldn’t think how he had forgotten. But no fault line. That’s why he had forgotten. No wonderment of rude.
So there he was, back to square one.
Not safe for him to go out, so he stayed in. Three calls from Chas in as many weeks, two anguished, one aerobatically cheerful, but still no lunch date. As for his wonderful daughters, they had put their various contractual obligations on hold, postponed the explanatory dinner he’d promised them – no hurry, Daddy – and gone hitchhiking around Thailand, looking for some beach. So who was there for him to go out and see?
Who was there for him to stay in and see, come to that? Sleeping without company had never suited him, even for the odd night, but this was the longest unbroken stretch of it he’d suffered since leaving school, and it was beginning to wreak havoc on his body. A man with a wife and five girlfriends showers at least six times a day. A man moping over an inaccessible woman showers less than that. Not a comment on his bachelor facilities: cramped though his Clapham hermitage was, it lacked for none of the eroticising amenities expected of a modern bathroom. Name a refinement of toiletry, Kreitman had it. Name the most powerful shower head, name a douche appliance, name a Roman bath … No, what Kreitman’s unaccompanied life lacked for was inducement. There was no good reason to pamper his body to the degree it had come to expect. Some days he never bothered to dress. Once or twice he never bothered to get out of bed. As a consequence he was beginning to notice upon himself something that looked like mould. The skin of tramps must look like this, he thought. Or the skin of old men. Kreitman’s flesh had always been important to him. Not muscles, not toning, not a tan, simply its integumental texture, its general air of lazy and maybe even absorptive, if not to say magnetic, good health. This flesh is in constant pleasurable employment, that was the notice he hung out upon his body. Now he was rotting.
Time to get a grip on himself, even if he couldn’t get a grip on Chas. A visit to his doctor, to the chemist, to the herbalist, to his hairdresser and to his outfitters was in order. Clean up the act.
Which was how he happened to run into Charlie Merriweather on Jermyn Street, loaded down with shirts, looking mighty pleased with the world and his own place in it, a man conscious of not having anything putrid anywhere about his body.