At what point Charlie Merriweather realised he hadn’t changed his life at all – not radically changed it – and was back to having nice sex, only with someone not his wife, it is hard to say. A realisation of this magnitude does not come upon you suddenly. It creeps into your bed.
The wet weather was disagreeing with Charlie. The more it rained, the fewer the opportunities to go shopping with Hazel, and the fewer opportunities to go shopping, the fewer opportunities to go taking back. It mattered to him, this aspect of their life together, because it was one of the few opportunities the pair of them had to go public, to make any kind of show of the love they bore each other. Day after day it rained, and nobody visited. Night after night they stayed in, and no one visited. He read to her, novel after novel. ‘Very soon now,’ he joked, ‘there won’t be any novels left to read.’
‘Then you’ll have to write some, Charlie,’ she joked. But his words struck fear into her. Were they running out of a resource already? Was running out of novels just another way of saying that he was running out of something else?
They discussed inviting some of his friends round. What about Basil Vavasor, great-nephew of Aubrey de Selincourt? What about Giles Akersham, great-great-grandson and biographer of Edmund Gosse? What about Clarence Odger? Charlie thought about each one in turn, then shook his head. They belonged as much to Chas as to him. They belonged to the family. In the earlier days, before the Merriweathers were launched, they had financed the family. Sent Timmy to school. Paid for Kitty’s piano lessons. Built the extension. They would be embarrassed meeting him in another context. And maybe saddened. They hadn’t financed him into another context. And he too would be embarrassed. And maybe saddened.
‘You aren’t ashamed of me?’ Hazel asked.
Ashamed of her? Ashamed of Hazel? What a thing to ask. He’d never been prouder of any woman, and never prouder of himself as any woman’s man. But it’s a queer thing about that question – once it’s asked, once it’s seriously posed, it raises doubts and changes, ever so subtly, the balance of power. If Hazel truly feared he could be ashamed of her, what did that say about her sexual self-confidence – so important to him as a man who had travelled at twice the speed of sound from the planet Nice to the planet Wrongdoing – and furthermore, what did it say about his need to make that journey in the first place? Never mind had he overestimated Hazel, had he underestimated himself?
The rains fell and Charlie burned off the pages.
‘ “But, in spite of these deficiencies, the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony, were fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union …”’
Next –
‘ “But I know that my dearest little pets are very pretty, and that my darling is very beautiful, and that my husband is very handsome, and that my guardian has the brightest and most benevolent face that ever was seen …”’
Next –
‘ “L—d! said my mother, what is all this story about? –
‘ “A Cock and a Bull, said Yorick – And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard.”’
‘Not quite to my taste, that one,’ Hazel said.
‘Too ludic, for you?’ Charlie asked.
‘Too what?’
‘Ludic. One of your husband’s words. Playful without being funny. This was where he laid the blame for all the facetiousness of twentieth-century literature.’
‘Then read it to me again slowly, my love,’ Hazel, falling back on her pillows, implored sweetly.
The rains fell and Hazel grew anxious. She could count the changes. Charlie no longer marvelled over her soaps and towels. He no longer trembled when she took him in her arms. He no longer asked her to ‘do that thing’ with her eyes, that ‘sly peeping thing’, ascertaining that he hadn’t crept away and left her fatherless again. He was still attentive to her, still loved getting her to put on heels and little else, and he was still generous with his weight, climbing on top of her on the sofa or the floor, letting her feel the full length of him, the moment she requested it. But attentiveness and responsiveness were small potatoes compared to that feast of demandingness and initiation, of watching and waiting, of desperation and gratitude, which in their early days he was up and about preparing, before she had even opened her sly peeping eyes. Funny: there was a time – long, long ago it seemed – when she saw Charlie as the very antithesis to her husband – a man to be avoided at all costs because it would be impossible to be rid of him. A puppy-dog man – shoo! Charlie, shoo! – whose rump sank lower and lower in puppy-dog gratitude the more you kicked it. Now, suddenly, she caught herself wondering what she would have to do to stop him from leaving. She had no instinct for any of this. There was demeaning oneself and there was demeaning oneself. To a fault she had been a pleaser, brought up to go along with whatever a man wanted, but trying to work out what a man wanted, giving your every waking hour to anticipating his desires, to pre-empting or quickening his appetite, to creating novelties for him every time he walked into the house, no, no, that was too low even for her. She remembered her girlfriends at university publicising their stratagems for keeping men simultaneously satisfied and hungry – never wearing pants, dyeing your pubic hair, always being certain to be caught sitting on the edge of the bed playing with yourself when he arrived back from work or from being with his wife. But as Hazel was keeping company with Kreitman for most of her university career, she was never reduced to the vulgarities of second-guessing: Kreitman commanded her not to wear pants. All that had changed since, of course. Now if her daughters second-guessed a man it was in order not to give him what he wanted. Allowing that Charlie was of an older time, Hazel wondered if she shouldn’t be lending an ear to some of the older teaching. It was hard to imagine what, of the basics, they were missing. The pants thing she already did, even though what she wore was so scant Charlie generally preferred her with them on. He had her nipples jutting night and day. He had her teetering on stilts. He had her painting her nails purple. As for playing with herself on the edge of the bed while waiting for Charlie to get back, that was not going to work for the reason that Charlie never went out.
She supposed she could always try incorporating it into their readings. ‘ “… for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs …”’ Oh, Charlie, Charlie, oh, oh, Charlie, ohhh …
And throw in the odd ‘sweet Jesus!’ Wasn’t that what women at their most irreligious, were meant to cry? Oh, sweet Jesus!
Can’t see it, Hazel thought. Can’t see Charlie appreciating my vying with him for climaxes, however low on tides we’re running.
Bizarre, but the person she might most have benefited from a word with was her husband. What would keep you here, Kreitman, if you were him? But where that was bound to lead she definitely could see. First, whisper in my ear, Hazel, everything you have been doing for him so far. Be conscientious. Don’t leave out any detail, no matter how apparently significant. I’ll decide what’s important and what isn’t. My ear is open. Start.
So prolix, her husband, even in his curiosity. Such a dirty-minded prolix bastard. The dirty-mindedness she could almost forgive. But the prolixity!
As for her daughters, who would no doubt have advice of their own to offer – along the lines of ‘Don’t wait for him to go, you be sure to give him the shove first, Mummy’ – they were back, but keeping their distance. They had brought Charlie a beautiful tie-dyed kaftan back from Thailand. And matching slippers so that he should get the message it was for wearing around the house. It did no good. He tried it on once to great applause, decided it was too lovely to wear except on important occasions, and reverted to his blue candlewick dressing gown, bare feet and general air of obscene imminence.
‘What if I asked Uncle Charlie to lend me his dressing gown for one of my sculptures?’ Cressida proposed to her mother.
‘Don’t you dare,’ Hazel warned her.
‘Even if I could promise him it would eventually hang in the Tate?’
‘Leave Charlie alone,’ Hazel said. ‘He makes an old lady very happy.’
‘What about you, Mummy?’
At which Hazel laughed, until her laughter turned to tears.
Shocked to see her cry, for Hazel had always been a dry-eyed woman, especially with her children, Cressida put her arms around her. ‘Is something wrong, Mummy?’ she asked softly, for all the world a mummy herself. Ironic about everything else, they were infinitely patient with grief, artists of Cressida’s generation. In their line of work they had to handle lots of upset.
Hazel let herself go limp in her daughter’s arms. It was the nearest she had got in years, she thought, to knowing who Cressida was. So she was capable of doing this! Wasn’t that extraordinary! She had a daughter who could give comfort. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Juliet too was capable of taking her in her arms and making her feel well.
All at once her spirits roused. She was the mother of a line. A matriarch. In her veins the future throbbed. Of what earthly significance, compared to that great fact, was Charlie Merriweather’s cooling ardour?
‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Someone must have walked across my grave.’
But in the night, sleepless, watching Charlie labouring at his dreams, she succumbed again to sorrow. Was his ardour really cooling?
And this time she walked across her own grave.
Not on the same night, for that would be altogether too neat, even for an entanglement made of neatness, but on nights not far apart in time, Charlie and Kreitman dreamed a similar dream. Charlie’s dream concerned Chas, though by implication it also concerned Hazel. Kreitman’s dream was the purer in that it concerned only him.
In Charlie’s dream, Chas came out of the pumping darkness, not looking or behaving much like herself, and straddled his chest. Her hair was long and in his face, but she did not smell of anything. She put her hand behind her back to find his penis which she tried in vain to force inside her. In vain because the position was altogether wrong. Oh, brave new Charlie’s penis, but it wasn’t so brave or so new that it could stretch that far, even in a dream and no matter who was pulling it. But also vain in that his penis was limp. Chas recognised her mistake and shifted her body so that it was better positioned to take his. Again she reached for his penis, but it remained resolutely limp. In her desperation to force him inside her, Chas began to perspire and then to cry softly. How am I going to tell her? Charlie thought. How am I going to break it to her? But when he awoke, in great distress, he wasn’t sure what news he had to break, or who the person was he had to break it to.
In Kreitman’s dream the person lying on the breast was him. The person weeping was him too. He was trying to say the words, ‘It’s a mistake,’ but his weeping wouldn’t let him. The arms around his neck were very soft. Not clinging, protective rather. Arms of understanding. Except that he was sure she didn’t understand or, if you like, that she misunderstood, that she mistook him, which was why it was a matter of such great urgency to him to say the words, ‘It’s a mistake.’ ‘Hush,’ she said. ‘It’s all right. Hush.’ Then he realised the weeping he had been listening to was not his but hers. That was the mistake. The cause of this great convulsion of sadness was her not him. And then her weeping grew so inconsolable he knew his heart would break if he didn’t force himself to wake.
So who was she? Kreitman didn’t know. Or if he knew, he wasn’t letting on. This is the sense in which the dream concerned only him: it was a dream of grief but the only party to the grief he recognised was himself, Marvin Kreitman. Was the weeping woman in whose arms he nearly died simply every woman he had ever slept with? Was she the continuum that stretched the whole way back to his mother, the first cause of all love and discontentment in him? She wasn’t Chas, he was sure of that. She wasn’t either of his daughters. She wasn’t Erica or Bernadette or Shelley or Vanessa. Nor was she Hazel, though it took him a little longer to rule her out. No, she wasn’t Hazel. She wasn’t. Hazel didn’t weep like that. But she coincided with a sudden burst of longing for his wife, an ache for her physical presence, which he thought would shatter the insides of his brain.
‘He’s missing her,’ Chas phoned her sister to say.
‘Missing the tub of lard? You’re joking. He never took the slightest interest in her. Are you sure it’s not me he’s missing? Are you sure he’s not missing a broken toenail?’
‘No, he’s missing her. I can hear it.’
‘Oh, darling, you aren’t still listening to his body? This is Marvin Kreitman we’re talking about. His body is certain to be lying. If it says he’s missing her I shouldn’t worry – it means he isn’t.’
‘I appreciate your words of comfort, Dolly, but I know what I’m talking about. I am beginning to understand him. He’s all about loss. I don’t mean the usual sexual thing about only wanting what you can’t have. To my surprise, he isn’t like that. He isn’t losing interest in me because I’m available. Quite the opposite. On that score I have no complaints to make …’
‘Don’t boast, darling.’
‘I am allowed to boast, Dolly. I only wish I could boast that he thinks only of me. But he doesn’t. He’ll think only of me when he’s on to the next one. First he has to lose me, then he’ll love me.’
‘Well, for your sake I hope that isn’t soon,’ Dotty said.
‘Hope it isn’t soon he loves me?’
‘Hope it isn’t soon he loses you.’
‘Same thing,’ Chas told her.
‘Well, you know what I think,’ Hazel’s mother told her.
‘Mother, if the Palestinians haven’t shot him or he isn’t in prison for selling secrets to the Iranians he’ll be wearing ringlets down to his knees.’
‘Hazel, you are always at least twenty-five years and a dozen sentences behind me,’ Hetta Nossiter said, adjusting the dimmer slightly on the lamp beside her.
Although her mother had all her faculties about her, Hazel noted she had been growing tetchy recently with the light. Either there was too little of it coming in from Great Russell Street, dying in the courtyard and finally smothered by the classical façade of the British Museum, or there was too much coming through the worn parchment lampshades. Was this what became of you when you lived alone? Was nothing ever exactly the way you wanted it?
‘Are your eyes all right, Mother?’ Hazel asked.
‘Ha! You should have eyesight as good as mine. Between the two of us, my dear, there is only one set of eyes, and they belong to me.’
‘It belongs to you.’
‘Don’t cheek your mother. My grammar was never any disappointment to Cabinet ministers. It’s you who’s the disappointment, not me.’
Hazel shrank from these words as though they were missiles. ‘Mother!’ she cried.
‘Well, I’m sorry, but I have to be cruel to be kind with you. You’re so prickly. How many times have I had to tell you – you don’t keep a man by making his life a hair shirt. When you find a man, Hazel, you feather-bed him.’
‘The way you encouraged me to feather-bed Marvin?’
Hetta Nossiter turned up the dimmer on her lamp. ‘Ach, Marvin.’
My own fault, Hazel thought, looking out at the touristic dismalness of Bloomsbury, busier than when she’d grown up in it, but more aimless, no longer a place for people on some errand of the mind – my own fault for coming here.
Her mother had met Charlie Merriweather once, quite recently, in this very room, and liked him. Hazel had brought him on a hunch – correctly guessing that Charlie would be amused by her mother on account of her faded fifties associations (Charlie loved faded), and that she would be taken by him partly because his own deportment had something of the fifties about it, partly because he was tall, but mainly because he wasn’t Marvin. ‘An agreeable change to see you with someone whose father didn’t sell purses on a market,’ she whispered to Hazel, while Charlie was looking round the little flat. ‘A nice build on him too. He’d look good in uniform. Is he too young to have done national service?’
‘Wonderful woman,’ Charlie had said after meeting her. ‘I love the smell of gin around women of that era.’
This was news to Hazel. ‘Does my mother smell of gin?’
‘Not so much her as the apartment block,’ Charlie said quickly. ‘A lot of secret tippling goes on in Bloomsbury. Always has. It’s either that or they blow their brains out. It’s my favourite stratum of English society, what’s left of it, ex-civil servants and fallen gentry, antiquarians and owners of military bookshops, all coming apart at the seams but still managing to keep going on boiled cabbage and iced gin and bleary recollections of buggery …’
‘Buggery, Charlie? My mother!’
‘The men, Hazel. The men.’
‘And the women?’
He thought about it. What recollections were the women living on? All the women Charlie knew were living on recollections of being in love with V. S. Pritchett and Geoffrey Grigson. Broken hearts of another age. Was that the universal fate of women? Was it caused by men like him? ‘I like your mother very much,’ was all he’d say. ‘She’s a dear.’
So it seemed to Hazel that with so much instantaneous affection between them they amounted to a sort of alliance or network – could she actually mean a bulwark? – which she could count on in her heart. No reason, now he liked her mother, not to take Charlie round to meet her again. And no reason, now her mother liked Charlie, not to tell her that she sometimes feared her life with Charlie was built on sand.
‘But I don’t think,’ she said, ‘that I could make things any more comfortable for him than I already do.’
‘Do you cook exotically for him? Do you serve him sweetbreads? Men love entrails, you know.’
‘I cook as exotically as is consistent with the tastes of a man who puts tomato ketchup on his kedgeree and whose idea of a treat is a fruit scone.’
‘Do you remember to put cream on his scone?’
‘Marmalade’s better.’
‘Charlie’s a jam man.’
‘What about your clothes?’ Without appearing to, she surveyed her daughter, not disapprovingly. She was less tailored than she had been. A good sign. ‘Are your clothes feminine enough for him?’
‘Mother, look at me. If I went any more feminine I wouldn’t be able to stand up.’
‘There you are,’ her mother said. ‘What are you doing wanting to stand up with a man?’
Hazel looked around the room, decorated in pink and gold, with portraits of statesmen (one of them her father) on the walls and figurines of shepherdesses (one of them her mother) on the mantelpiece. She shook her head. She had been born here. Grown up here. Educated into womanhood here. ‘You know, sometimes,’ she said, ‘I think it’s a miracle I’ve achieved even the little I have. A husband, for a time. A lover, for a time. Two daughters, I hope, for ever. How, given the example you have shown me, have I managed that?’
‘Well, you haven’t managed a sense of humour,’ Hetta Nossiter replied.
‘No,’ Hazel said. ‘No one can accuse me of managing one of those.’
And not for the first time she trudged out of Bloomsbury like a heroine in one of those great novels of humourlessness Charlie had been reading aloud to her – that’s when they weren’t great novels of facetiousness – footsore and weary, determined to put the shames of her past life behind her, but uncertain where her future was to be found.
Kreitman knew the longing he was feeling couldn’t be for Hazel. It made no sense. He had longed for Hazel, first when he was very young and she had gone off to see a school friend for the weekend, leaving him weeping like a baby at the railway station, wondering if he would ever see her again, praying no accident would befall her, longing for her, actually longing for her presence, within minutes of her being gone; and then, an older man, when she had had enough of his delusive tears and turned her back on him, denying him anything that would remind him of their earlier days, no reminiscent smile, no recapitulations in the voice or retrospection in the body, nothing, stone dead nothing – then he would go out walking on his own, and long for her, quite simply and disconnectedly yearn, as for a person who was no more, with that same chasm in the heart the bereaved know, long, long to have the space left by that one shape filled by that one shape – until maybe he would meet some girl and postpone the longing for another time. Yes, yes, he knew how that was judged. Some man of feeling you are, Kreitman, to be deflected from your feelings by any trull that passes! Well, first of all hold with the trull. You haven’t met her. And don’t suppose that a capacity for deflection only ever denotes callousness or coldness. We are many-chambered creatures; the squishy-hearted, the inconsolable weepers at railway stations, having maybe a chamber or two more than most men. And full of longing though we are in one chamber, we are fitted with the means to be full of something else in another. Yeah, full of shit, Kreitman! Suit yourself. But the truth’s the truth: they did not console him, the other women, whether they were women for five minutes or a fortnight or for life, they did not console or compensate or distract him, they simply existed concurrently. They also were.
Shouldn’t it then follow that Kreitman’s longing for Hazel had never gone away but also was, perhaps for all time, in the chamber where his longings were stored? Asked that question a week before, Kreitman would have pooh-poohed it. Longing for Hazel had died. She’d killed it. He’d killed it. Vicissitude had killed it. Sadness was another thing. He would always be sad about Hazel, sad for Hazel, sad from Hazel. But longing was of another order. Longing was as tangible as touching. What you longed for you as good as held, except that you didn’t, which was why your heart broke. And he didn’t feel that way about Hazel. Hazel he did not want to hold. But here was the mystery – if he didn’t want to hold her, why was he imagining her in his hands, and if he wasn’t longing for her, why did his heart break when he realised his hands were empty?
The afternoons were worse. At the best of times Kreitman was not good at afternoons. Work helped as a rule. A shop to go to helped. But the habits of non-attendance which Kreitman had acquired in the weeks waiting for Chas to make her mind up and materialise had stayed with him even now that they were palpably a pair. Most mornings, Chas left him in bed and went to Richmond where there was room at least to swing a cat and write children’s stories. Since Kreitman wouldn’t hear of it that she went home by any method but the Smart, he was Smartless for several hours himself. By the time the Smart was back, Kreitman had lost the will to do anything with his day but wait for it to return to Richmond and collect Chas. ‘I should just give you Maurice,’ he said. ‘That way you’ll end up resenting me for ruining your business,’ she said. ‘Do I have a business?’ he asked her. ‘It was your business that made me fall for you, remember,’ she reminded him. ‘It was your business that showed me you didn’t have a heart of steel.’
So between kissing Chas goodbye and waiting for her return, on those days when she did return, Kreitman idled through his afternoons. The rain hammered on his roof. There was nothing to see from his windows but the tops of umbrellas and the amphibian feet of uncomplaining Londoners. Bizarre to him, the patience of these people. Did nothing stir them to revolt? By three o’clock, flamenco was on his record player and the smell of Moorish dust was in his nostrils. Whereupon the longing started.
Ridiculous, but there was nothing he could do. Anyone seeing me, he thought, would say I have finally got my comeuppance. But then if that’s what I have got, that’s what I have got. It’s not within my power to do anything but suffer it. You can’t get up, pull yourself together and walk away from your comeuppance.
Tears poured down his face. He would walk around the flat to keep his circulation moving, smiting his chest an inch or two above his heart, great thumps with a clenched fist, as though he meant to knock himself off his feet. Maybe a bottle of red wine, maybe not. Occasionally a cigar. He did not want to become a creature of habit. By four he was too upset to trust himself to his feet and had collapsed on his desk, his forehead on his gouging knuckles, the longing banging in his ears.
But tell him this: if the longing was for Hazel, how come it was sparked off by flamenco – music for which Hazel had never expressed the slightest enthusiasm nor shown the remotest aptitude. Had Hazel been a flamenco dancer – no mystery. Had she loved the guitar even – no mystery. But the brutal truth was that Hazel hated flamenco with a passion and, in the days before Kreitman moved his enthusiasms to his den on Clapham High Street, had never missed an opportunity to deride his devotion to it. ‘Finding the gypsy in your soul, Marvin?’ she would call when she caught him with his ears to his speakers, crouched like a beast in pain. In more playful moods she would imitate the castanets, making sluttish expressions with her mouth, as though to imply this was music for the sort of tramps in whose name he had trashed their marriage. On the blackest days she would simply yell, ‘For Christ’s sake, Marvin, will you turn that crap down!’
You see his quandary. How could flamenco move him to yearnings for a woman to whom flamenco was crap?
What he decided was that he was in mourning for companionship, for the companionship of just one woman, and was yearning to be happy. Flamenco reminded him of all the ways a man could be unhappy. Stop playing it. Chas was all set to be the companion of his heart, but she was out of his sight too often. Stop letting her go.
Of course, the way things stood, she had to go. There was no room for her here. To get into bed she had to perform a manoeuvre of which an SAS man would have been proud. To get out of it, especially in the middle of the night, was more perilous still. There was nowhere for her to write. And she had a pair of children growing loopier by the hour to keep an eye on. There was only one resolution to this. He would buy a house for them both. In Richmond if that was what she wanted, though not on the same side of the street as the house she already had. He would get down on one knee, ask her to marry him and buy them a house.
What was wrong with that for a plan? He was obviously in love with Chas – there could be no other explanation for his missing Hazel, assuming for the moment that it was Hazel he’d been missing. He knew himself. In the process of his affections passing from one woman to another, he suffered. Something in the brain: the migrating affections, crushing over the pons Varolii, pressed upon a cranial nerve. That was how he knew, definitively, he was in love with woman Y – the agonies he suffered remembering woman X.
Not that he lacked the proof he needed in his feelings for Chas herself. The old fault-line appeal hadn’t led him astray. He continued to marvel at how unlike herself she could be. He loved the surprisingness of being with her. He believed she loved the surprisingness of being with him. The sex, to isolate a single component at random, was extraordinary, by virtue of how her skin felt under his fingers – neither flaking nor about to spill – and by her virtue of how his felt under hers – her hand the collar, her arm the chain. That would change, of course, he knew that. One day his fingers would not feel what they felt now and one day the collar at the end of her chain would loosen. Infinitessimally on both counts, but that’s all it takes. No matter. They would have the continuing unexpectedness of each other. You and me, us; who would ever have thought that when you stole my cat Cobbett from me?
And who would ever have thought this – you and me, us – when you picked me up at a party all those years ago, taught me the Bump, and then handed me over to Charlie?
Nice, wasn’t it, when life turned out so differently from the way you expected it?
Very nice.
And very nice back at the Kreitman residence where Charlie was waiting for Hazel, out visiting her mother, with a big bunch of red roses, a lemon meringue pie in a pretty cardboard box tied with violet ribbon and what looked suspiciously like a complete set of the novels of P. G. Wodehouse.
He leapt at her like a labrador when she came in. ‘I’ve missed you,’ he said.
‘I’ve missed you,’ she told him.
Then he bent to her and they kissed, balancing to perfection, you would have thought, sensuality and affection.
Maybe, thought Hazel, I don’t have anything to worry about after all.