Charlie, on a strange lavatory, hears Hazel asking for his alibi.
‘Alibi? What alibi?’
‘What’s your alibi? Do you have an alibi ready?’
A hand rattles the doorknob.
‘I’m in here,’ Charlie says. ‘It’s me in here.’
The door is locked, but that doesn’t stop her. And Charlie cannot put his weight against the door because the strange lavatory is long and narrow, almost a passageway, the rattling door at one end, he sitting, without an alibi, at the other.
One more turn of the knob and she is inside. Not Hazel – he had that wrong – but Chas, his wife Chas.
She is wearing a towel piled high around her head, a snow-white turban, as though she has just stepped from the bath. Her face is raw from bathing, too. Chas – fancy Chas being here! His instinct is to get up and greet her – Hello, Chassyboots! – but in the circumstances, lavatory and all that, he cannot. As she advances towards him, she grows. By the time she is upon him she is twice her normal height. He looks up and notices her fingernails. They are splayed, like scissor-hands, longer and redder than Chas ever allowed her nails to grow, not fingernails at all, when you really look, but proper nails, nails for hammering, each one silver, not red, and sharpened to a point. ‘Your alibi,’ she demands again. But before he can think of one, her nailed hands are in his eyes …
Until recently, Charlie was never that much of a dreamer. But he is dreaming a lot now. For him.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Charlie,’ Hazel said, ‘you cannot still be raving over the contents of my cupboards.’
What this time?
Towels.
Lying back in her bubble bath, Hazel marvelled at the pertinacity of her lover’s enthusiasms. Why had no one ever told her a man could be so easy to amaze? First it had been her perfumes, then her oils, then her moisturisers, then her soaps, then her rollers, if you could believe that – her piccaninny Molton Browners which would have thrown Kreitman, had he seen them, into a blue fit – after which her sheets, her pillowcases, her duvet covers, her throwaway slippers and this week, though he’d been drying her with them for months, her towels with the satin borders.
‘Charlie, I’ve been to your home. You wife buys the same towels I do.’
Charlie shook his head. He was too big, really, for a bathroom. He didn’t know where to put himself. But as long as she allowed him into the mysteries of her toilet, let him talk to her while she gently poached her flesh in hand-hot water, how could he take himself off somewhere else.
‘Charlie never bought towels as large and soft as these,’ he said. ‘Charlie bought towels that scratched. I now wonder whether it was deliberate. On the hair-shirt principle – to make me bleed.’
Well, be thankful, Hazel thought. She considered telling him that it was more likely to have been a soap-powder problem in Richmond, but that was hardly her business, was it? And if Charlie believed her towels were softer and caused less pain, who was she to complain?
She called him to hose off her bubbles, then climbed out of the bath, pinker than a porcelain doll, into the marvellous towel he held open for her. If she went limp in his arms, he would enfold her in them and dry her with the heat of his body. If she stiffened, he withdrew. It was like having a dog who could read every nuance of her moods.
She was beginning to tire of him, then? Not at all. She could not now imagine her life without him, or remember what it had been like to have no one there to welcome her out of her bath. But yes, she was taking him just the teensiest bit for granted. His own doing, he was so docile.
Nice sex, was that what Charlie was importing chez Kreitman? I should worry, Hazel thought. And nice sex, anyway, was sex enough for her. But it did sometimes occur to her to be concerned that Charlie was domesticating their bed to an extent that he would ultimately regret, even if she wouldn’t.
Being married for so long to Kreitman had taught her something – that men create the circumstances of their own dissatisfaction.
Their trouble was – and it may have been overstating things to call it a trouble – they didn’t have enough to do. Charlie wasn’t writing. She had set up a study for him at the top of the house, overlooking the garden so he could have green thoughts while he worked, but the loneliness had got to him. He was used to working in tandem with his wife. The pair of them at either end of their old pine table. She pounding at her typewriter, looking under or over her spectacles at him whenever she believed she had written a good sentence, he scratching behind his ear, coughing, getting up to make tea for them both, going for a wander down to the river, where he knew he would find someone with whom to exchange pleasantries, the time of day, anything, anything that employed the real warm words of life. When he told Hazel that the study she had put together for him was too quiet, or at least that his view was too unpeopled, she tried to make sure she was always in the garden while he was at his desk, so that she could animate his landscape, wave at him when he looked out, point to flowers that had recently bloomed, or just nod enthusiastically in response to his hand signals, which invariably illustrated some aspect of the making and drinking of tea. But that tied her to his working patterns rather, or at least would have tied her to his working patterns had he had any. He still couldn’t get going. When she was there he played with her, when she was out he repined. He didn’t know what to write. He wondered if there was any way he and Charlie could resume their collaboration by post, by e-mail, by text messaging even, without alluding to what had passed between them. But who was going to go first? He hadn’t spoken to her since she’d sent him packing. All communications, including her demand that the C. C. Merriweather brand name revert forthwith to her, had been made through their accountants – now her accountants – which he took to be significant in that she hadn’t yet resorted to a solicitor. Could they perhaps go on writing together through their accountants? It was when he reached that point in his creative deliberations that he got up, clattered down the stairs and ran a bath for Hazel.
As for Hazel, she didn’t have enough to do either. Overseeing conversions and complaining to tradespeople had seemed a full-time occupation before. Now that she had Charlie at home with her she was less willing to have her house redesigned, let alone to open it to builders. ‘Apart from anything else there’s your concentration to think about,’ she told him, as an explanation for why the Jacuzzi hadn’t gone in.
‘Yes, there’s my concentration to think about,’ Charlie agreed. ‘Though we could go away for a week while they do it.’
For similar reasons – a relief, this, to service industries throughout the capital – her telephone complaints routine had stalled. She had other things to do with her mornings now. Nor did she dress any longer in the sort of clothes that had once made complaining easy. In a tailored suit she was not a person to be trifled with, even on the telephone; but wearing the sorts of frills and spikes Charlie liked to see her in, trifle was her middle name. The best explanation of why Hazel’s phones slumbered quietly on their cradles, however, lay in the change that had come over her temper: she wasn’t complaining because she had nothing to complain about. She was happy.
Of her old discontented habits only one remained – testing the returns policy of every shop in London. She had not been born a taker-back of clothes. Like kleptomania, of which it is a near relative, the taking-back of clothes is a function of despair, and despair had entered Hazel’s life only when she discovered that her husband’s tears were universal. He substituted one woman for another, shedding tears along the way, and she did the same with clothes. It was an addiction she could not shrug off, even though she had shrugged off Kreitman. The clothes she bought continued to look wrong the minute she got them home, didn’t fit although she’d tried them on in the shop, looked different in different light, looked wrong, looked stupid, made her angry. But these days, instead of seething up and down the West End in the rain, her hands full of creaking carrier bags, she ambled in and out of her favourite New Bond Street stores with a carefree smile on her face, and Charlie on her arm.
It suited him. If he was taking back with Hazel he couldn’t suffer those bouts of unproductive loneliness in his study. And if he was taking back with Hazel he could get to see her nipping out from behind curtains in her underwear. Here was another example of how his life had changed. With Chas, shopping for clothes had been one humiliation piled upon another, a saga of fluster and concealment, annoyance, embarrassment, misjudgement, despair – and that was just him. Off they’d go to get her out of her spinnaker, and back they’d come after a thousand disappointments and alarms with a spinnaker no different from all the others. ‘Nothing else fits me, Charlemagne. This is all there is. Don’t say anything!’ For Chas, a changing room was a torment somewhere higher up the scale of mortifications than the ducking-stool, whereas for Hazel – well, for Hazel, a changing room was almost like a public stage. Back the curtains went and there she was, half naked, entirely unabashed, careless who saw her – ‘Have you got this in a fourteen?’– waiting only for Charlie to leap from his upholstered sugar-daddy’s chair and cry Bravo!
What a gift it is, Charlie thought, what a gift some women have for sensuality, for making life easy, for filling it with enchantment. And how lucky that makes me!
A gift for making life easy! – Hazel the difficult, Hazel who was courted in her early years by men leaving nuts outside her door, to see if they could tempt her out, so wild and easily frightened a creature did she seem – a gift for filling life with enchantment, Hazel the terminally disillusioned!
My lottery theory confirmed, she thought, noticing how she’d changed. You are who you fall in love with. And I wouldn’t have understood that had I not fallen in love with who I’ve fallen in love with.
And if she hadn’t? She didn’t want to think about it. If she was now a lovely person only because she had stumbled upon Charlie, what would have happened to her had she stumbled upon the Yorkshire Ripper? Idle question. She had stumbled upon Marvin Kreitman and look at the sort of person that had made her. Please God don’t send me back there again, Hazel pleaded. Please God let me stay happy and lovely and with Charlie.
Happy in the bath and lovely in Fenwick’s changing rooms and Charlie never out of her sight.
But when they weren’t bathing or taking back, they were light on what Hazel, with some recapitulated disgust, called a ‘social life’. Kreitman’s phrase for the foremost of a man’s entitlements, and hence Hazel’s bitter euphemism for the same. As a consequence of the indignities to which marriage to Marvin Kreitman had reduced her, Hazel had more or less finished with a social life. Other than the Merriweathers – and they were now off the list – she saw none of her old university chums. She had a few similarly placed women friends she met in the restaurants of art galleries and with whom she abstractly discussed castration and lesbianism and the like – the ones who’d cheered her on when she’d cropped her hair, accused Kreitman of fucking her brain and kicked him out of her bed – but they would not have approved of the comprehensiveness with which, to please panting Charlie Merriweather, she’d reverted to the bad taste of a passive wardrobe. Which left only her daughters, expected back from Thailand any day, much missed by her, but in fairness no more a diversion for Charlie than he was a diversion for them.
The staidness of Hazel’s life when she wasn’t in New Bond Street, the monastic quietness of her house, astounded and dismayed Charlie, who had always considered himself a social orphan but in truth lived in the centre of that maelstrom Kreitman was quick to call the Kultur. Publishers of presses which had been failing since the forties, biographers of Surtees and Trollope, literary down-and-outs who carried their manuscripts with them everywhere in plastic bags, men who bore the names and obscurely benefited from the estates of Gosse and de Selincourt and Quiller Couch, faded beauties who had once given their hearts to Desmond MacCarthy, rock climbers, swimmers, explorers, cads and fogeys of every description, and of course writers of children’s books by the magic busload – all these were regular visitors of the Merriweathers. If they weren’t all there together on the lawn at weekends, waiting for Charlie to pour them Greek wine and Chas to rustly them up fish pie while pretending she couldn’t find the fish, they turned up unannounced, in dribs and drabs, on weekdays. Frequently one would come to complain about the other, though not infrequently the other would already be there, complaining about the one. Sometimes the older among them would be found exhausted on the Merriweather doorstep after getting lost in Safeway’s or being savaged by rutting deer in Richmond Park – actually bearing wounds, some of them, actually pitting the steps with blood the colour of pink gin – or just as likely having blundered out of their own quarters on a quite different errand the reason for which had subsequently escaped them. Not so much the nerve centre of the Kultur, then, as a hospice for it? Same difference, in Kreitman’s view. The Kultur as shaped by the British loved a hospice as it loved itself, revered infirmity and thrived in sick rooms. Old men on drips pulled the levers, while young men old before their time, like Dotty’s beau, padded in and out of the wards, took down their memoirs and did their bidding. But that, of course, was only Kreitman’s view. And who was he to be an arbiter of rude health? Call these gatherings what you will, the consequence was that time never hung heavy at the Merriweathers’. Whereas at the Kreitmans’, once lovemaking and towelling were finished for the day, you could hear the movement of the second finger as it dragged itself across the face of Hazel’s bedside clock.
Charlie mentally prepared himself for visitors, but no visitors ever came. As for inviting his own people, he remained squeamish about that on account of Chas. A tact thing. But perhaps he was nervous on his own account as well, not knowing what they would make of him looking so well.
He kept contact with those of the Richmond Kultur to whom he’d been closest. Phone calls mainly; inconsequential conversations which skidded away from anything dangerous; chit-chat of a literary complaining sort, stuff in the papers, gossip about what was happening in the television soaps, which Charlie and his set watched religiously, as an affront to those who inhabited a sniffier Kultur than they did. He did a pub lunch once with Clarence Odger, the friend who carried five hundred thousand words of manuscript with him everywhere in two plastic Waitrose bags, but that didn’t work out too well. In the first place the friend couldn’t concentrate on anything Charlie was saying to him because he couldn’t take his eyes off his plastic bags, and in the second, when he did remember his manners long enough to ask Charlie how his new life was going, there seemed to be some gleam in his eye which, in Charlie’s view, denoted salacious knowledge. Was that how his friends thought about him now – salaciously? Was that in some way how he thought about himself?
Thereafter he made no further arrangements to see anybody.
‘So, apart from me, did Marvin have no friends?’ he asked Hazel one evening.
Hazel opened her eyes wide at him. ‘You know what Marvin had.’
‘And when you were together … ?’
‘Which wasn’t often.’
‘No, but when … what did you do ?’
Hazel shrugged. What did they do? Had she forgotten already? Had nothing happened?
‘Meals,’ she said. ‘I recall a lot of meals.’
‘In or out?’
‘Oh, out. My husband loved being out.’
‘So what did you do when you were in?’
Knowing Charlie liked looking at the arch of her throat, Hazel threw back her head. ‘In?’ she repeated ‘Now there I think you’ve finally got me.’
‘You didn’t read to each other?’
Hazel laughed a bitter laugh. ‘Marvin spat chips, Charlie. You were his friend, you know that. He spat chips in front of the television, he spat chips when we went to see a film or a play, and he spat chips when he opened a book. Where would have been the fun of reading together? I needed to hear him spit even more chips? I once suggested he pick up his old academic ambitions and write a book of his own. Call it Spitting Chips. But you can imagine his reaction to that. He spat chips. Nothing he hated more than gerundival tides.’
‘Don’t I remember it,’ Charlie said. ‘Don’t I remember the scorn he poured on our Flying Away series.’
‘He would have,’ Hazel said, blinking. She was inclined to forget that Charlie had once been a writer of fictional self-improvement books for young adults. Flying Away must have driven her husband bananas. ‘Ing me no ings, he used to say. It should go on his tombstone. Ing me no ings. Cute fucker!’
So Charlie read to Hazel.
‘I can’t tell you where I am,’ Chas said, returning Dotty’s far too early Sunday phone call, ‘because I don’t know where I am. But I’ll give you a clue – I got here by rope ladder.’
‘Christ, Charlie, are you abroad?’
‘In a manner of speaking. Though in fact I’m on Clapham High Street … I think.’
‘You think?’
‘Well, I’m brought here, like some empress on a palanquin, only it’s not a palanquin it’s a Smart.’
‘It sounds as though you’ve been kidnapped.’
‘It feels a little as though I’ve been kidnapped.’
‘Sounds like you’re having fun, though.’
She thought about it. Was she having fun? ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m having fun.’
‘And you’ll remember to be careful?’
‘On the ladder?’
‘No, not on the ladder. On the you-know-what.’
Chas laughed. ‘I’m damned if I know what the you-know-what is,’ she said, ‘unless you’re meaning to be crudely graphic. But no, as a matter of fact I have no intention of remembering to be careful.’
Then, because Kreitman was shinning up with a pot of coffee, she rang off.
He liked seeing her up there, high among his books, angular like the girders, a great creature, the biggest of the non-flying birds, nesting in his aviary. With her mobile phone to her ear.
‘There’s no good reason, is there,’ he said, blowing hard, ‘so long as you’ve got your phone to keep you nominally connected to the world, there’s no good reason why you shouldn’t stay up here for ever.’
‘Until you get bored.’
‘I won’t get bored.’
‘Until my children need me.’
‘Have them round.’
‘Oh yes. I can see that. They didn’t like you very much, Marvin, when you weren’t charvering their mummy.’
Kreitman shrugged. He was only trying to meet her objections. ‘Then don’t have them round. Just phone them occasionally and visit them a lot.’
‘And my work?’
‘You can dictate. I’ll be your stenographer. You might find the child in me.’
‘Marvin, I think it’s the man in you we need to locate.’
That’s how far advanced they were. They could insult each other and not expect to be misunderstood. Half the art of falling in love – attaining the foolish intimacy of schoolchildren.
Then her phone rang again. And then it rang three or four times after that. Dotty for a second time, warning against silliness. She knew her sister would like that. The other calls were from those of Chas’s friends who were also members of her profession. ‘Sunday morning,’ she told Kreitman between conversations, pulling a contrite face, ‘the Sunday-morning ringaround. You’ll have to learn to live with this if you want me never to leave your bed. On Sunday morning I catch up with the general rejoicing.’
To Kreitman’s sensitised ears – greedy for tidings from the Kultur – rejoicing wasn’t quite the word for it. ‘You’re joking!’ he heard Chas say. ‘You’re kidding me! She didn’t! The Smarties? I’d have given her more chance of winning the Peace Prize …’
Sometimes she set her mouth, compressing her lips to a bloodless scar, zipped tight across her face. Sometimes she tapped irritably at her temples, as though to loosen congealed matter. Sometimes, in a bound, she went from hilarity to despair.
‘What is it?’ Kreitman asked when she was done. ‘What have you heard?’
She sat with her knees up on his bed of rugs and tapped the space next to her. Lie here, my love.
She was confident of him. Confidently possessive of him, even on his territory. Lie here, my love – and he did.
Then she told him the terrible truth, that even writers of children’s stories felt bad about one another’s success, begrudged each other every penny, resented every word of praise bestowed on someone else.
‘I’d never have guessed it,’ Kreitman said.
She made as if to push him from the bed. ‘You needn’t be sarcastic. I’m just trying to be frank with you. I know how much you idealise my profession. So I think it’s time you heard it from my lips. I am not pleased for X. I cannot ever be pleased for X. I count every tick on her page a cross on mine.’
Tell me about it, Kreitman thought. Tell me something I don’t already know. As with letters, so with love. Every tick on his page, a cross on mine.
He smiled up at her and stroked her arm. Lolloping arms, he had once thought them. Mere farmyard implements. Now, transfigured by desire, they were a warrior maiden’s arms, long and tapering and strong, beautiful, victorious, the arms of Boadicea.
‘It’s because we die,’ he said. ‘If we didn’t the we could afford to be more magnanimous. But we only get one shot. We can’t forgive the person who shoots further.’
She patted him like a child. ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘We cannot forgive or bear it. So what we do in our profession is make sure that no one else can forgive or bear it either. When you hear a rumour of someone else’s good fortune, you pass it on. Passing the Pain, Charlie used to call it. A parlour game for two or more writers.’
‘Except,’ said Kreitman, ‘that you don’t have to be writers.’
‘You pass the pain in purses, Marvin?’
He winced. She could still do that to him. ‘I pass the pain in love, Chas,’ was his reply.
‘“I shall still lose my temper with Ivan the coachman, I shall still embark on useless discussions and express my opinions inopportunely,”’ Charlie read, ‘“there will still be the same wall between the sanctuary of my inmost soul and other people, even my wife … but my life now, my whole life …”’
‘Lovely,’ Hazel said. ‘I’d forgotten how positive a book could be.’
Charlie closed the novel and kissed her. They were sitting up in bed, supported by banks of pillows, his reading light on, hers not, so that shadows kept half of her obscure from him, still so much of her he could only guess at. ‘Tomorrow night we’ll start Barchester Towers,’ he said.
She clapped her hands. ‘Goody, goody,’ she said.
When they put out the light and finally turned aside from each other, Hazel found herself cursing her husband. What did it take to make her happy? Had it really been beyond him to read her a story once in a blue moon? Would it not have made him happy too – or at least been balm to his troubled soul, if happiness was too much too expect of him, the gloomy fucker – would it not have been preferable to all that frantic running around in erotic misery, just to have stayed in with her, fluffed up their pillows and read a book together?
This was the one canker eating away at her contentment – the sweeter it was with Charlie, the less she could forgive Kreitman for having made it so sour. What Charlie did – effortlessly most of the time – Kreitman, too, could have done.
So one doesn’t escape, Hazel realised. Happiness now doesn’t erase misery then. What perverseness, to be punishing now with then, almost out of jealousy of oneself, as though, once miserable, one never has the right to happiness again.
Thank you, Marvin.
And was Charlie thinking along similar lines?
Similar, but not the same. Charlie, before he disappeared into fevered dreamland, was thinking how like his new life was, sometimes, to his old.
Some of us wake well, some of us wake badly. Chas Merriweather woke in pieces. Nothing worked. Nothing was attached. Half her hair seemed to have fallen out and all colour had been bled from her in the night. ‘Don’t look at me,’ she told Kreitman. Her face was corrugated but queerly virginal, like the soles of her feet. She woke blotched, fraught, exhausted, as though the single purpose of the day would be to get her back to the condition in which she’d gone to sleep.
But Kreitman looked at her. What is more he enjoyed looking at her.
‘Why are you laughing at me?’ she cried, hiding herself under the sheets.
Was he laughing? He thought he was smiling. Pleased to see her. Pleased to see her there, with him. Pleased to witness the morning miracle of Chas putting herself back together.
I am maturing, Kreitman thought. I am not waking desperate to be gone. I like it that she comes to looking like the Battersea Dogs’ Home. I am becoming fond.
From either side of her fault line he was putting things back together himself, but not too tidily if he could help it. He was fonder than he had been, and also more roused than he had been: those two states could not be unconnected, of course they couldn’t, but he was not going to swap perverseness for harmony quite yet. What roused him, surely, was the novelty of the fondness, and of course the novelty of its object. Sensual, overwhelming all his senses, a woman who refused sensuality, who thought it was silly, and who woke the colour of her feet – explain that!
In the matter of his touching her, what Kreitman couldn’t figure out was how, even in the darkness, his fingers were able to measure a quality he had no adequate words for but which, roughly, he thought of as the underlay of her skin. He loved the deep give in her, what he would have called her substance were it not for that word’s associations of stoutness and amplitude, neither of which Chas possessed in the slightest. How best to put it? A woman like Shelley had skin so fine you feared it might flake off under your caresses. A woman like Bernadette, on the other hand, seemed to be stitched into a hide. You didn’t stroke Bernadette, you polished her. And then again there was Hazel, whose whole vascular system seemed to be in motion when she rolled her hips, or swung her heavy breasts above his face, first one and then another, just beyond his reach, making him search for them blindly, with frantic lips – a thing she hadn’t done for twenty years or more, not with him anyway. But Chas’s flesh structure was not like any of these. She didn’t leave him desolate, that was the best explanation he could give. She didn’t spill out from between his fingers like mercury, or crumble under them like rose petals. She wasn’t too much or too little. She was just the right amount.
In the matter of her touching him, there were fewer mystifications. She touched him, full stop. Or rather she held him, full stop. She took hold. It was the taking he loved, the way her little hand claimed possession of him – his penis, he specifically meant, but the moment she took hold he was all penis – encircling him with the most deceptive lightness, as though she were leading him into painless but permanent captivity, her hand the collar and her arm the chain.
Where had she learned to do that?
He knew the answer. She had learned it from him. She had listened to the silent desires of his body and discovered what to do. But then of course she had listened to her own silent desires as well.
Accord was what you called this. Though whether it comes only when you are in love, or is itself the reason you get to be in love, no one will ever know.
And she? Well, she wouldn’t have taken such complete possession of Kreitman if she hadn’t wanted to, would she?
‘I’ve never spent so long in bed in daylight hours,’ she told her sister.
‘I’m glad,’ Dotty said, ‘that you’ve finally released the pagan in yourself.’
Chas thought about that. ‘I’m not entirely sure it’s pagan,’ she said. ‘It’s very intense.’
‘Oh, Charlie, you aren’t going to go religious on me.’
‘No, I mean intense in another way. It’s almost as though I’ve taken up with a nervous system wrapped in tissue paper.’
‘You are having sex?’
‘God, yes, oodles of it. But he’s a strange man. Not at all like Charlie. Being with Charlemagne was like being with a bear. He rolled all over me. He made me feel I was covered in honey. This one goes very still, as if he’s listening for something. His body seems to think, Dotty.’
‘That comes as no news to me, darling. Haven’t we all always known what Kreitman’s dick was thinking? Just as long as you don’t make the mistake of believing you can make it think something else.’
‘Dotty, you are terminally trivial. I am trying to talk metaphysics to you. You used the word pagan – I simply wish you to know that we’re not just thrashing about up here.’
‘I understand, darling. Your bodies are thinking together. Thoughts, I am sure, far too deep for me. But that doesn’t have to preclude all fun, does it? Tell me at least that you are having fun.’
‘And you promise me you are not falling in love with him … or his thoughts.’
‘We all have fun in our own way,’ Chas said, making no promises.