One night Charlie dreamed that Chas turned up and found him in his dressing gown with Hazel. Chas was carrying a teapot and smiling, but when she saw the dressing gown and then saw Hazel she burst into tears. The cruellest sort of tears, not tears that stream but tears that spurt out as though the eyes have sprung a leak. As she cried, she let the tea spill from the teapot on to Hazel’s carpet. ‘What’s she doing here?’ Hazel demanded, and although Charlie knew the answer he didn’t want to say.
Unable to decide to whom he owed his loyalty, Charlie woke up with a pain in his heart.
But he would have been better advised not to tell Hazel about his dream.
‘If you’re having second thoughts,’ she said, ‘I’d prefer you acted on them now, before I get too used to you.’
‘Second thoughts? I’ve never been happier,’ Charlie told her.
‘Exactly. Guilt.’
‘Why should being happy make me guilty?’
‘Don’t be a baby, Charlie. I didn’t have the dream, you did.’
Sometimes Hazel understood why her husband had been so scathing of the C. C. Merriweather books. Morally, Charlie lived in Tiggy-Winkle Land. He had learned no hard lessons from experience. She could hear Marvin’s explanation: ‘Hazel, he’s had no experience; he’s been happily married for a quarter of a century.’
But then morally Marvin lived in the lowest circle of Dante’s Inferno. And what sort of a companion did that make him?
It touched her to be the person who was bringing experience to Charlie, she who had never believed she had anything to bring to anybody, least of all knowledge. Suddenly she realised it was all in the luck of the draw. Some people needed you to be the grown-up one, so you mouthed wisdom; others wanted to reveal life to you, so you hung your bottom lip like a dunce. So far she’d encountered only teachers. Not like that, Hazel, like this. The curse of Kreitman. Even Yossi in the Negev had unpeeled her as though instructing her in how to eat fruit. And she’d extended her hands obediently, limply, like a little girl being helped out of her blazer. Until she stood in the desert without an item of school uniform left on her, waiting to be told what next.
Now she felt as old as Oedipus, discovering the riddles of the Sphinx to the frightened inhabitants of Tiggy-Winkle Land. She’d had to explain to Charlie why his children were having difficulty with what he’d done: why his daughter had told her mother she’d never speak to her again if she ever spoke to Daddy again; and why his son was rumoured to be clubbing till all hours, stuffing powders up his nose and not answering his father’s phone calls. ‘They must be able to see for themselves that I’m happy,’ Charlie had said. ‘It’s not as though they’re babies, for God’s sake. Kitty-Litter’s a bulldyke and Timmy’s been on Blind Date.’
‘Daddies are meant to stay with mummies,’ Hazel reminded him.
‘At their age?’
‘No, at your age.’
‘Chas must have said something to them.’
‘That’s very likely.’
‘No, I mean she must have turned them against me.’
‘Instead of what? Convincing them how sweet you are?’
‘Is that beyond the pale?’
‘It’s beyond human nature, Charlie.’
‘If Chas ran off with someone?’
‘Sure.’
‘And if I ran off with someone?’
‘That’s different.’
She shook her head over him. ‘What the fuck am I doing with you?’ she said.
When she wasn’t Oedipus she was Jocasta. Barely a month’s difference in their ages, but she felt she’d carried him in her womb. Not only that, but whenever he wanted to crawl back whence he’d come she had to show him the way. A gazetteer of her own body suddenly, Hazel Kreitman née Nossiter, who until now had been a mystery to herself, an unmapped continent for intrepid mariners to chart. In their early days Marvin had drawn a verbal picture of the parts of her she couldn’t see. Which made her feel as incidental as a feather on a breeze. Was she there only by virtue of Marvin’s descriptive powers? If he lost words would she shed tissue? Not any more. This way, Charlie, throw a right, no a right, and now straight on …
Same with his body. Hands in the air, feet together, not her coming out of her clothes this time, but him. ‘I have the urge to sew labels into your shorts,’ she told him.
His eyes brimmed. ‘My father had to do that for me,’ he remembered. ‘And buttons. My mother wouldn’t risk pricking her pretty finger.’
The sad, motherless boy, unlabelled, unbuttoned and unloved. Once upon a time, Charlie Hyphen Smelly-Botty Farnsbarns found himself all alone in a big wide field with no labels in his shorts. How am I possibly to know who I am, cried Charlie Hyphen Smelly-Botty Farnsbarns, if I don’t have labels in my shorts … ?
Lost, love-lorn, without the first clue who he belonged to. Now found a home for at last.
‘But Chas must have done your sewing …’
Chas? Oh God, yes. Chas. Yes, of course, Chas had done his sewing, now she came to mention it. But he was emotionally skipping Chas. Chas hadn’t happened. In the context in which he was now living, Chas had no measurable existence. There’d been loneliness and then boom! – in a flash – Hazel.
When Charlie asked Chas to be happy for him, on account of his enjoying a satisfactory sabbatical from their marriage, he may not have known what he was about but he knew what he meant. I am not a complete fool, he would have told her had she only given him the chance. I know that you cannot really be happy for me. I know that such selflessness as I am asking for does not exist. But I am trying to mark a difference between you, the woman I have always loved, the mother of my children, the companion of my labours, and Hazel, the mother of someone else’s children, the companion of someone else’s labours, a woman I have never loved and, to be frank with you, barely noticed. She is so unlike you, she is circumstanced so dissimilarly, that she is not so much another woman as another species. Therefore I find it impossible to think of her as an infidelity to you. Yes, yes, I grant you, Dotty would have been an infidelity. Dotty I regret. Dotty was wrong. Dotty was a choice against you. But then Dotty was a suicidal act and she didn’t happen anyway. Only Hazel happened, and Hazel isn’t a betrayal of you because she isn’t an alternative to you. Hazel’s from another planet. So now will you be happy for me?
What Charlie meant by Hazel being from another planet was that she made him feel he was on another planet. The planet Impurity. The planet Wrongdoing. Some nights the planet Filth. Some mornings the planet Bliss. But never, Chas, absolutely never, the planet Nice.
He was not, whatever anybody thought, a complete fool. He knew he couldn’t tell Chas he was now domiciled on the planet Sensuality, a place he’d never set foot on with her, not even for the weekend. And what was the planet Sensuality, when all was said and done, if not a satellite of the planet Wrongdoing? Hazel was all wrongdoing. She was his best friend’s wife. She was among his wife’s best friends. She was the mother of children his children had grown up with. She was a middle-aged woman whose appeal he had never much registered, almost a sister to him. And he had won her in a sort of wager. How many wrongs was that?
He could season most of that wrongdoing, if not with right, at least with a pinch of something morally neutral. For example, Hazel might have been his best friend’s wife but his best friend didn’t deserve her, had spares galore and probably didn’t even notice she was missing. Nor was Hazel really Chas’s friend; the two had only tried to get on for their husbands’ sakes, and left to their own devices would have despised each other, did despise each other most of the time. As for his children, why invoke them? They were behaving strangely – badly, in his view, selfishly – and didn’t have much to do with it one way or another. In the matter of Hazel’s having been a sort of sister to him, sort of is only sort of. And finally, he hadn’t really won her in a wager; rather she had come to him, coincidentally, of her own imperious volition, as a consequence of a train of events which certainly originated in that evening of wild talk in Soho but which no one could have calculated.
Then why, in that case, did he go on shaking with a sense of wrongdoing whenever he approached her? After the first time Charlie slept with Hazel he never believed there was going to be a second. After the second he never believed there was going to be a third. A hundred and one days of Sodom later, he still submitted to the turning-out of the lights, descended into the mouthing dark, resigned to the likelihood that she would not be there in the morning. He almost did not want to wake, he so dreaded putting out his hand and finding a note on the snow-cold pillow next to him, or seeing her sitting up in one of her round-backed leather boudoir chairs, fully dressed, in the belted-up Alida Valli trenchcoat he’d bought her (war-torn, though a little on the short side), with her bag on her lap, waiting to tell him it had all been a mistake. So that when he did open his eyes to discover her still there, smiling, pleased to see him, leaning on an elbow willing him to wake, her breasts all about her like a tray of canapés, or up and about in the kitchen in high-heeled slippers, making him his bacon and tomato breakfast, he couldn’t believe his good fortune. Another day, then, in which she wasn’t going to give him his marching orders. Another day stolen from propriety and probability. Was it really out of the question for Chas to recognise how little this had to do with her, or with their old life together? It’s the desperation of it, Chas. It’s the head-hurting uncertainty. Not like us, not like you and me in our bedsocks, Missus, Chasser, Mrs C. C. Chassyboots …
There was another way of putting this. In the only story not for children he had ever dared to write, Charlie Merriweather, then twenty-six, had set about trying to describe, in unflinchingly adult yet tender language, the fondness he and the other Charlie felt for each other. ‘And you tell me this is the first grown-up story you have written?’ Kreitman asked him. Charlie nodded. He was keen to know what Kreitman thought. Not least as the story had grown out of the fears the two Charlies entertained for Kreitman in the light of what seemed to them his sexual cruelty not just to Hazel (that part was obvious) but to himself. In a sense the story was as much about the Kreitmans and damage as it was about the Merriweathers and healing.
‘Then my advice to you, for what it’s worth,’ Kreitman said, ‘is not to write another. I doubt you have the gift of addressing the over-twelves. Few do. It’s a calling, Charlie.’
Ouch! A thousand lances in the beanbag of Charlie’s self-esteem.
Deflated, he nonetheless knew where the offence actually lay. It lay in his description of the protagonist’s penis. The ‘instrument of friendliness’. He had watched Kreitman come to that passage and seen his jaw drop. The instrument of friendliness would be an obstacle between them for as long they lived. Recalling it over dim sum lunches sometimes, Kreitman would put his finger down his throat and pretend to throw up. Now, years after the writing of the offending tale, Charlie understood why Kreitman had baulked. An instrument of friendliness was not what a woman like Hazel made you feel you possessed. Because she appeared to be shocked by Charlie’s penis whenever and no matter how often she beheld it, Charlie began to feel differently about it himself. A weapon of terror, was that it? A battering-ram of tyranny? Not exactly. He hadn’t been away from home that long. Enough that its distinguishing feature was no longer an innocent amicability. And that was the other way he might have put what was not like his life with Chas about his life with Hazel. These days, if his poor wife could only grasp it, he walked about with something dangerous between his legs.
For her part, though she was no more hooked on the specifics of a man’s anatomy than any other woman, Hazel Kreitman would not entirely have demurred from this. Against all expectation, Charlie Merriweather was possessed of what she’d heard her mother call a ‘fearfully big thing’, a brute of a penis whose weight had impressed her from the off, and though Charlie had been altogether too embarrassed initially – too embarrassed, too broken and too grateful – to wield it with anything like the expertness it merited, he wielded it with enough for Hazel. Before Kreitman, whose maleness was too mental for you ever to concentrate much on body parts – big brain, that was what Kreitman wanted you to feel inside you, the hard-on of his intelligence – Hazel had encountered two or three fearfully big things. They were always a disappointment in that they were always attached to soppy men. Whether this was an evolutionary imperative, or an unseen consequence of one – the male of the species sad to be reduced to mere functionalism—she didn’t know; but as sure as night followed day a man with a big penis sobbed on your breast after orgasm, idealised you until you wanted to puke and begged you to try to love him for his gentle qualities. Charlie was a sentimentalist right enough, overdid the gratitude and gazed at her as though nothing like her had ever existed in creation, but he didn’t pull back from the obligations of his size. He enjoyed being a big man, enjoyed towering over her when they went out, his hand on her shoulder or even sometimes Latin lover-like on her neck, enjoyed being able to change a light bulb without a chair, understood what she wanted when she asked him to lie on top of her, letting her feel the full length and weight of him, crushing the wind out of her if that was her desire and not too apologetic when he hurt her. She could read that old butterfly shit in his eyes, the same ephemerality crap with which Kreitman had wooed her – ‘When I open my hand, will you be gone, I wonder?’ – but he didn’t want to be gone himself. Unlike Kreitman, he didn’t fuck in order to make himself disappear.
‘I like it that you don’t seem to be going anywhere in your head,’ she told him once, reclining like a girl in the strong sour crook of his arm.
‘Where would I be going that’s any better than here?’
‘I suppose I shouldn’t be telling you this,’ she said, ‘but in my experience men are always on a journey somewhere else. Even in the early days when he was happy just to be with me – unless I got that wrong, too – Marvin used to maraud me, ransack my body as though he’d lost something. Is it here? No. Is it here, then? No. It was like being Treasure Island, like having Long John Silver stomping across you with a spade and bucket. That was before he decided the treasure wasn’t anywhere to be found on me and went looking for it on some other island.’
Charlie listened. ‘And why shouldn’t you be telling me this?’
‘In case it puts you off me.’
‘Nothing could put me off you.’
‘Or gives you ideas.’
‘There’s only one idea you give me,’ he said, wanting to break into her sadness, booming his big bedtime laugh and rolling her on to his chest, tapping his broad, straightforward intentions down the taut xylophone that was her spine.
What would Chas have said? ‘Charlie! Stop it, Charlie, you’ll break the bed.’ With Chas it had been all panto. Dames in bloomers, giant sausages, sticky sweets for the children, oops-a-daisy, he’s behind you! With Chas the sex had been continuous with family, a funny misadventure ending in a picnic and a roll down a grassy bank with his arms round Kitty or Timmy. Whereas with Hazel … with Hazel it ended in itself.
Undoubtedly, it helped that in Kennington, all five Georgian storeys of it, there was nobody else at home. The Merriweather house had always been in a state of preparation for invited guests or unexpected droppers-in; it was a cooking house, centred on the kitchen, the latest holiday snaps and newsy postcards affixed under magnets to the refrigerator door, the subject of conversation warming in the oven. A child was always on the phone or waiting to be driven somewhere. But Hazel frowned on fridge-magnet culture, ate out more often than she cooked and had never encouraged her daughters to treat home as a club house. Both girls had their own places to live, and though they popped in as a matter of course normally, they weren’t popping in at the moment because they’d fled to Thailand. Fled? In a manner of speaking.
‘Not me, is it?’ Charlie asked. ‘Oh Lord!’
‘Of course not,’ Hazel reassured him, pinching his cheeks. ‘Why would anyone want to flee from you?’
And it wasn’t him. It was her. Her and him. Them. Hazel knew her daughters. Had Kreitman brought a woman into the house they’d have hit the roof. But for Mummy to be shacked up with a new bloke was cool, even if the new bloke was only soppy Uncle Charles. So disgust wasn’t what motivated them to go to travelling. Not moral disgust, anyway. Aesthetic disgust was nearer the mark. They were not keen on how their mother was dressing for Charlie, and vice versa. Too short, the skirts. Too whispering, the dresses. Too pink and white, Uncle Charles’s chest, scarcely covered by his blue candlewick dressing gown, and too white and blue his unshod feet. Kreitman had been a model father as far as the decorum of the domestic wardrobe went: he wore leather slippers with a crest on them, silk pyjamas and a sort of pasha’s robe that tied around him twice. Sometimes he wore a smoking jacket. And on rare occasions a braided fez. Whatever was uncomfortable. As far as his daughters were concerned this made him a prize old fart, but a prize old fart was how your dad was meant to look. Uncle Charles on the other hand was getting about like a disreputable lodger their mother was knocking off on the side. That dressing gown! The one item in his wardrobe he had not let Hazel burn. At any moment, the girls feared, this appalling ancient garment was going to fall off his shoulders, unravel or undo, or he would simply omit, one fine morning, to wear it at all. And they were sufficiently Kreitman’s daughters not to want to be there when that happened. Gross – that was their verdict on the new situation. Gross and sad. But as they didn’t want to upset their mother by telling her that, they upped and left. Fingers crossed that by the time they returned Uncle Charles would have gone home to Aunty Chas and Mummy would be back wearing trousers.
This couldn’t have suited Charlie better. With the girls gone, it was as if they had never been. No trace of them. How did some families do that? To remove the atmosphere of offspring from his house – his old house – you would have had to flood, earthquake and firebomb it. Twice. And even then a little dolly with a missing arm would surely have survived the flames.
Wonderful, no matter how the effect had been achieved, to move about a space free of consequences. Free of memories as well, for there was no sign that Kreitman had once been here either. Every impression of him upholstered over. So non-repercussive did the place feel, so without recall or aftermath, it could just as well have been a brothel – not that Charlie had ever been inside a brothel – as a home. What was the opposite to nice sex? Nasty sex? No. Just sex from which nothing flowed or issued except more of itself. As long as Hazel wasn’t planning to flick it all away from him, Charlie believed he could at last count himself a happy and disreputable man.
Whereas Hazel – what Hazel loved about Charlie was the aura he gave off of being domiciled. Had anyone charged her with upholstering away all memory of Kreitman she’d have flown into a rage. ‘Excuse me – he upholstered away all memory of himself. He was like a ghost, my husband. When he rose from a chair he left not a dent behind. When he looked in a mirror there was no reflection. He wasn’t here. He never lived here. Tell me I dreamed him and I’ll believe you. The only person you’ll find to vouch for Marvin Kreitman’s existence is his mother, and she’s a ghoul.’
Charlie, on the other hand, left his imprint on everything and smelt of every chair he’d ever sat in. Kreitman had scoffed at Charlie for living bodilessly, for being embarrassed by his own skin. But Kreitman’s judgements were all erotic, and since the erotic life for Kreitman was situated between his ears, he was the last one to talk of incorporeality. Kreitman didn’t need a body; he propelled his penis with his mind. Poor Charlie may have been a bit behind the door sexually, but there was a body there to call on right enough.
‘I’m a fatherless girl,’ she told him. ‘I find it marvellous that when I wake up you’re still there.’
So they both felt it. Wonder of wonders, they each disappeared dreading into the dark, and each woke grateful and relieved that the other had not gone.
‘Do that thing with your eyes,’ Charlie said.
‘What thing?’
‘That thing when you sneak a look across at me with everything upturned. That sly, peeping thing. Ascertaining that I haven’t crept away, but not wanting me to see that you’re checking. Like a child on Christmas Eve, keeping a lookout for her presents.’
‘Do I do that?’
‘Often.’
‘I don’t.’
‘You do. I promise.’
‘That’s because I had no dad. No one to dress as Father Christmas. I always knew it was my mother creeping in.’
‘I’ll be your dad.’
She looked alarmed. Like a child waiting for her presents to be taken away from her. ‘Don’t say that, Charlie.’
He put his arms round her, folding her inside him. ‘I only mean that it touches me, the thing you do with your eyes.’
‘It doesn’t frighten you off?’
‘God, no. I love it. I love the way your eyes hold the light when you do it. I love the way they seem to steal all the light that’s in the room.’
‘They are lit with the light of you,’ she told him.
Whereupon he kissed them, making them better.
Wonder of wonders.
Then, out of the blue, ‘Hey, why don’t we’ – Chas ringing Kreitman to suggest – ‘meet up at my health club?’
Kreitman’s first instinct – to smell a rat. ‘I thought health clubs were single-sex institutions,’ he said.
‘Those are health farms. I’m talking about my gym.’
‘I didn’t know you had a gym.’
‘I have now.’
‘Why do you want me to meet you at a gym? Do they serve food there?’
‘I wonder why you associate seeing me with eating, Marvin.’
‘I associate seeing anybody with eating.’
‘I’m just “anybody”, then?’
‘If you were just anybody, Chas, I wouldn’t be in the state I’m in.’
‘What state are you in? Have you gone to pieces over me?’
She’s hysterical, Kreitman thought. ‘I’m a wreck,’ he said.
‘That’s exciting. Tell me more.’
More than hysterical. Hyperphasic.
‘About as exciting as an unweeded garden,’ he said. But he decided against mentioning the mould.
‘Then it sounds to me that a gym is just what you need.’
‘What will I have to do there?’
‘Don’t tell me you’ve never been to a gym.’
‘Not since school. Gym then was something everybody dreaded. It astounds me that these days people pay to go somewhere they once avoided like the plague. Will I be required to do handstands against wallbars?’
‘You can if you want, Charlie.’
Charlie!
‘Marvin,’ he corrected her.
She laughed her mistake away with a carillon of little bells, making nothing and everything of it. ‘Come tomorrow at ten,’ she said. ‘It’s quiet then. Do you have things?’
‘Things?’ Did she mean condoms?
‘Shorts, trainers …’
‘Those I’ll buy,’ Kreitman said. He had already mentally picked the bag he was going to carry his things in – South American leather, very soft, lots of zip pockets, with a tartan lining, on sale in his own shop right below him, a snip at three hundred and fifty smackers, but then it came to him at half that.
She gave him the address. ‘Ten o’clock, then.’
‘Ten o’clock then. Oh, and Charlie, how will I recognise you?’
‘Has it been so long?’
‘An eternity.’
She laughed, but didn’t hesitate. ‘I’ll be wearing a scarlet leotard.’
As I dreaded, Kreitman thought.
He slept badly. No man sleeps well before a prizegiving. Now that she was almost within his grasp – he didn’t mean that in any predatory sense, but her confusing her husband’s name with his did seem to signal some significant mental changing of the guard on her part – it was natural that he should consult with himself on the question of whether or not he really prized or wanted her. What if he didn’t? If he didn’t, there was no explaining why he’d been moping about without the consolation of company all these weeks – but what if he didn’t? She seemed a responsibility, suddenly. A burden. You don’t take on lightly a woman whose husband has left her, a woman whose husband has left her for your wife and whose voice has risen to perilous heights. Chas normally had a loamy, vegetable contralto – soothing rather than thrilling, like being tucked up in a warm bed. Now her voice was skidding about the upper register, as though it were on ice skates. She sounded like a woman in need of support. Remembering his cat Cobbett, Kreitman wondered whether support was something he had it in him to provide.
He was at the gym shortly before ten, his driver unable to resist a joke about the location. ‘You decided to take up bodybuilding, Mr Kreitman?’
‘Time to get a bit of fat off, Maurice,’ Kreitman said. He thought he caught Maurice grinning Africanly at his new overnighter.
Chas wasn’t waiting for him in reception. They told him at the desk that she was already upstairs in the gym, but it wasn’t going to be as easy as nipping up to find her and having a quick run-around. First he had to enrol as a temporary member, choosing a full-peak, off-peak or semi-off-peak tariff, then he had to fill out a questionnaire about his health, then he had to have his photograph taken, then he had to swap a credit card for a key to the locker room and a towel, and even then they wouldn’t let him up in case he intended getting on to one of the machines prior to medical assessment and without supervision. An insurance thing. ‘I’ve got plenty of insurance of my own,’ Kreitman said. ‘But anyway, I promise I won’t go on anything. I still have a note in my pocket from my mother, forbidding me to climb on to anything mechanical. It’s held good for over thirty years. Trust me, I just want to talk to Mrs Charlie Merriweather. So far you’ve relieved me of the best part of three hundred pounds – that must buy me ten minutes of conversation. Please let me go up.’
The unilluminated women at the desk – he would not have employed them, not even for West Norwood – took pity on themselves, rather than on him, for gyms are wordless places and Kreitman had already spoken more sentences in a minute than they heard here in a month. ‘That way’ – pointing him in the direction of the locker rooms. Not like school showers, no echoing tiles, no rotting timber draining boards for feet, none of that hot badger’s-lair smell of what, before the advent of trainers, they used to call pumps; but still the old discomfort around undressing in the company of people of the same sex. The woman didn’t exist before whom Kreitman wouldn’t, in the blinking of an eye, display his genitals. How many had seen them? How many hundreds? How many thousands, even? In Ispagna … mille e tre. But men, no. To men he remained a secret. Nor did he want to see theirs. Nor their buttocks, though that was the way men generally made it easy on one another, effecting a three-quarter turn so that any genitalia you got, you got in profile; otherwise innocuous rump. Except it never was. Very shocking to Kreitman, the plump wire-haired backside of a man. Naked with one another, men were too naked. Kreitman found them frightening. What they found him was another matter. A man who did not use his mouth like other men? Automatically, he undressed as he’d last undressed as a schoolboy, keeping his shirt on till last, then sliding his shorts on under that.
Chas laughed when she saw him. Pressed polo sweatshirt, socks with a horizontal blue stripe in them pulled halfway to his knees, clumping snow-white trainers the size of moon boots. And still carrying his leather overnighter.
‘You look ready for anything …’ she noted, ‘… except exercise.’
‘I haven’t come here for exercise,’ he reminded her, going over to where she was langlaufing like a mad woman, beating eggs with both hands.
She pushed buttons on her machine and slowed down. A bank of numbers appeared on the dial, followed by a heart, lit up and pounding. She had high colour in her cheeks, no doubt from the exertion. But also, Kreitman thought, from hypermania. He was surprised to recall that he hadn’t seen her since she’d driven him home from Dartmoor in a knitted hat (her in a knitted hat), with so much left unsaid between them. So how was she looking after all this time, other than perfervid? Was he still in love with her, after weeks and weeks of imagining, now that she was flesh again?
The other and perhaps more important question to ask – was she at all (never mind still) in love with him?
One phrase will suffice for both: Who knows.
What counted was that from this moment they felt locked into it: they had talked of meeting, they had toyed with meeting and now they had actually met – to go backwards from that would have been more tiresome than to go on.
‘I’m sorry about the way I look,’ Kreitman said, offering to read her mind.
‘Is that another way of saying you’re sorry about the way I look?’ Chas said, reading his.
He took her in. Hair pulled up in a fairground-coloured alligator clip, cheeks on fire, chest flat under a taut white body garment whose manufacturer’s label was out and which must have stud-fastened under the crotch, given how lumpy the crotch appeared to be, legs spidery, with too much space between them, and that superabundance of gusset and seam that makes you avert your face when you see it on little girls kitted out for the ballet. How did she look? Shit was how she looked. But who was he to talk? They both looked shit, just like the last time they’d met. Was that their fate, always to look shit for each other?
But if he’d wanted smart he could have stuck with Erica, couldn’t he. Not a fold or seam awry anywhere on Erica. Not a label showing. Ditto Hazel, who went to the gym once in a blue moon, carrying a little too much weight certainly, grown top-heavy over the years (though definitely no tub of lard), but always nicely coordinated and zesty, still capable of turning heads. And Ooshi in running shorts – taking it as read that unshaven legs kindled wild desire in other men as well – was a sight to make an atheist believe in divine purpose. But Kreitman wanted none of those. Kreitman wanted Chas.
‘You look the way I hoped you’d look,’ he lied, and when she peered down her nose at him quizzically, as though over spectacles, though she wore no spectacles for the gym, then extended her long milkmaid’s arms (at the end of which her little afterthought hands, denuded, he noticed, of all rings) – a handshake was what she gave him, not a kiss, her pumping cheesemaker’s handshake – he realised he wasn’t lying at all. He did like the way she looked – she, Chas, as opposed to what she had capitulated to, her unspeakable end-of-civilisation aerobic-wear – liked her because she was contradictory, droll and solemn, stern and wicked, capable of everything that was opposite to her nature. The old fault line.
And she?
Terrified.
Terrified of what she was doing. Terrified of herself, of her own temerity. Terrified of him.
Hard to credit, watching him on the treadmill while she flailed for another fifteen minutes across Norway, a man so unrhythmic, so unaccustomed to any bodily exertion except the little of it imposed by lovemaking, that the slightest unevenness in the revolutions of the rubber tread he toiled along, like Mother Courage, made his head spin and his balance precarious – hard to credit that such a man could inspire terror in anyone. But yes, she was afraid of him. It was possible she had chosen to meet him in the gym precisely so she could put him at a disadvantage and see him at his least fearsome. If so, it didn’t help. His reputation came before him. He was unreliable. He was a man who let you down, whatever he looked like on a treadmill. He made promises he couldn’t keep. ‘It’s not as though I don’t know what I’ll be letting myself in for,’ she e-mailed Dotty, only the day before she asked Kreitman out, supposing you could call this ‘out’. ‘And I am not so naive as to suppose I can be the one to change him.’
‘Which doesn’t stop you from supposing you just might be,’ Dotty e-mailed back.
‘Are you laughing at me?’ Chas typed.
‘No. I think you should have a good time and hang the consequences,’ Dotty promptly replied.
‘Which are bound to be dreadful?’
‘Dire, darling. Have fun.’
So fun was what Chas had logged off and decided to have.