Who's Sorry Now? (16 page)

‘And now can we play croquet on the lawn?' Nyman asked.

‘Too late,' Kreitman said. ‘Croquet is a daylight game.'

‘Doesn't have to be,' said Hazel. ‘There are floodlights.'

Kreitman closed his face as though closing a door. ‘It's not a floodlit activity. You can't measure the distances right. The shadows interfere with your judgement. And with your safety. You'll end up cracking your shins, or cracking someone else's, with the mallet. And anyway, the lawn will be starting to get dewy. The balls will skid.'

‘How good it is,' Hazel said, ‘to be married to an authority.'

But instead of edging her one of his glances of blank complicity, Nyman suddenly turned to Charlie. ‘Charles,' he said, ‘I think of you as the authority on all things English – what do you think? Is it your opinion that croquet is out of the question?'

And had Kreitman been wearing skirts himself, he too might well have flung them over his head.

‘So what's this all about?' Kreitman asked.

They were lying on their backs in their separate beds, like a lately deceased Pharaoh and his queen, waiting to be embalmed.

‘What's all what about?'

‘Come on, Hazel. It's called Nyman. What's it about?'

‘You mind your affairs, Marvin, I'll mind mine.'

‘It's an affair now, is it? You only met him a week ago, isn't that a bit soon?'

‘We don't discuss these things, Marvin. Your rule.'

‘If you don't want the boy discussed then you shouldn't have brought him here.
Your
rule.'

‘What is it about him you want to discuss? The way you've been trying to woo him all night.'

‘Woo Nyman, me? Why would I do that?'

‘Because you're a wooer, Marvin. Because you have no choice. People have to notice you, be fascinated by you, then love you. Women, preferably. But if no new woman happens to be present, you'll make do with something else. It's the way you operate.'

‘Not with Nyman it's not,' Marvin said. ‘You're lucky I'm civil to him. The faggot put me into hospital, in case you've forgotten.' He was staring at the ceiling from which, if he could trust his memory, a dusty chandelier used to hang. Now it was downlighting. Twenty years ago they made hay in a four-poster. Now mummified in twin beds.

Hazel got out of hers and went to the window. She was wearing a straight white Victorian shift she had bought in an antique shop. Shapeless and innocent, with lace on the sleeves. Kreitman noticed her feet, like a little girl's. From his experience it was an unvarying truth about women – even the oldest of them had feet like a little girl's. It was the one part of them, at least that you could see, that stayed young. No wonder he was upset all the time. The more you had to do with women the more sadness you encountered.

Once upon a time I could have gone over to her, Kreitman thought, and slid my hands around her through the sleeves of
her nightgown, and she would have leaned back into me with all her weight, utterly trusting. He had loved that, the trust, the weight of her, and the way her leaning into him raised her breasts infinitessimally, their undersides softer than peeled fruit. Brand new skin, never before touched, never before seen.

How long now since he'd touched or seen?

She stood at the window, looking out in silence. Moonlight on the moor, Kreitman thought. She is probably thinking what I'm thinking. How long it's been. How much we've lost. But what he didn't know was that she was watching Nyman crouching on the lawn, inspecting the croquet hoops, and the Merriweathers bent over him, presumably explaining the rules.

‘You'll get cold,' he said.

‘It's not in the slightest bit cold,' she said.

Then he noticed she was crying. Dry tears, not sobs, the dry tears every faithless husband fears he is the reason for. I have dried up even her accesses to sorrow, the swine I am.

‘Why can't I ?' she said. ‘Why can't I ever?'

Kreitman's ears pricked. ‘Why can't you what?'

She wasn't really talking to him. ‘Why can't
I
ever have what
I
want? Always so hard, always so much soul-searching, always such a fuss. This to consider, that to consider. What the girls would think. What you would think, as though I'm obliged to care a tinker's damn what you would think. Why can't I be more like you? Want something? Take something. A click of the fingers – Here, you!'

‘Here who?'

‘Why do you think I can't do it, Marvin? Why do
you
think I can't take him, have him and be done with him, Kreitman-style?'

If it wasn't cold, why was he cold? ‘Why can't you have whom?'

‘
Whom
! Don't
whom
me, Marvin. You know perfectly fucking well
whom
. Why can't I fuck him without you fucking with my
head? Why do you have to have an attitude? Why do you always have to be there? I've kept out of your way, why can't you keep out of mine?'

‘Hazel, you brought me here. You organised this.'

Outside on the lawn, Chas was standing closer to Nyman than the rules of croquet, let alone the etiquette of explaining the rules of croquet, demanded. Hazel turned from the window and showed her husband her distraught face, furrowed with tears which wouldn't flow. ‘I'm not crying for the reason you think I'm crying,' she said. ‘I'm crying because it's so demeaning to be back feeling all this again.'

‘It's so demeaning to be back feeling what?' (Tell me, tell me.)

‘It's so not what I wanted.'

‘Then stop feeling it,' Kreitman said.

For a moment he thought she might come over to him and hit him. ‘How dare you say that to me!' she hissed. ‘How dare you, of all people, make it sound so blithe – you who have never denied yourself a feeling in your life. Except the feeling of loyalty.'

He withdrew his face, as though frightened for it. But he couldn't withdraw himself. Too interested. Too interesting, all this. ‘Then if you want to fuck him, fuck him,' he said.

My fault, Hazel thought, my own stupid fault for introducing the fuck word. Introduce the fuck word to my husband and he'll shake its fucking hand off.

‘Don't!' she said.

‘Don't what?'

‘Just don't! The spectacle of you putting your mind to the rights and wrongs of anything is too horrible to contemplate. I'm ashamed to be married to you.
If you want to fuck him, fuck him
. Where did you pick up your code of ethics, Marvin – in a cat house?'

‘Do you think you might be a little bit in love with him?'

‘Stop it, Marvin!'

He began to cry himself, the full waterworks she remembered so well from the platform at Paddington, and after that every station you could name. She knew what they were worth. She could price the downpour, tear by tear. Nothing was what they were worth. Not a farthing. But she was lonely and horrified by herself, to be feeling what she was feeling, to be at the mercy of all that old pestiferous stuff again – desire of so little consequence it made your stomach turn, but still, somehow, desire. ‘Move over,' she said, ‘and let me in.'

He folded her in his arms, surprised, as he had always been, by how small she could make herself. ‘It's all right,' he said. ‘It's OK.'

‘It isn't OK,' she said.

He knew what she meant by that. A dread clutched his heart. When women who had loved you lay in your arms and said it wasn't OK it only ever meant one thing. It meant that they were in the grip of an uncontrollable longing for someone else. A melodramatist of sex, as are all dedicated adulterers and fornicators, Kreitman conceived such longing as a force so irrefutable and destructive that nothing could possibly survive it. Not duty, not home, not decency, not reason, not God, not him. The dread that clutched his heart was a foreboding of his own obliteration. No half measures for Kreitman, when it came to the gains and losses of sex. You won everything, you lost everything. What was marvellous was how alike those two extremes could be. Embracing his obliteration, shutting his ears to every sound except his lurching heartbeat, Kreitman felt desire for his would-be faithless wife race like poison through his body. ‘How bad is it?' he whispered. ‘How much do you want to fuck him?' At once, as though she were some washed-up shell creature, poked at by a callous boy, Hazel closed and went rigid in his arms. Kreitman knew what he had to do. He had to shut the fuck up. Not say another single fucking syllable. But he too was at the mercy of an ungovernable longing. ‘Tell me,' he said.
‘Speak to me. You can imagine I'm him, if it will make you feel better. Call me Nyman. I am your husband's enemy. Beg me to fuck you …'

And this time Hazel did hit him.

The following day, Kreitman sat in a metal chair – one of thirty or forty arranged in book-club formation around the Moriarty Room – and listened to the Merriweathers taking questions from their fans. The usual: where do you get your ideas, how do you find a publisher, how are you able to work together, do you try your stories (sorry,
did
you try your stories) on your own children, what would you like to be if you weren't writers. Sour for all sorts of reasons, but at his sourest in the presence of book readers and their providers, for he had imagined such a life for himself once, touring the world discussing Francis Place and the glory that was once the English mind, Kreitman allowed his own mind to turn against his friends.
What would you like to be if you weren't writers?
Excuse me – what the Merriweathers, Charlie and Charlie, did was not write. Writers wrote for adults, not for children. As for where they got their ideas – ha! The Merriweather books did not contain ideas. Kreitman did not know that for a fact. He hadn't read, properly
read
, any of the Merriweather books. But he knew it as an intuition. He didn't approve of children's books. He had not read children's books as a child himself and to the degree that he had been allowed a say in the matter he had not permitted his own children to read them. What was wrong with
The Mill on the Floss?
What was wrong with
Jane Eyre?
What was wrong with
A Tale of Two Cities?
What was wrong with lying listening to Daddy telling you about himself?
If John Stuart Mill could be enjoying Herodotus in the original when he was three, Kreitman was not going to give his children
Thomas the Fucking Tank Engine
. It was sometimes put to him that John Stuart Mill suffered a nervous breakdown in later years, as though that negated the Herodotus, as though readers of
Thomas the Fucking Tank Engine
didn't also suffer nervous breakdowns. Nothing makes us sane, Kreitman believed, but some things make us smart.
Smart
– what a word of now! In his head he took it back. Not smart, intelligent. And that most definitely was
not
a word of now.

I am the sole guardian of the culture, Kreitman thought, and I sell purses.

An attentive observer will have noted some ambiguity in Kreitman's feelings about his friends the Merriweathers. As a professional couple at the soft end of the writing profession, and he a mere bagman, they kept open a number of doors to his idealised past which would otherwise have creaked closed. But Kreitman was a puritan who loved art for its strenuousness and history for the stories it told of struggle. Whatever came easy was of no value to Kreitman. And that that included fucking we already know. The problem with the Merriweathers, viewed solely as a couple now, considered only as a literary entity, was that they had neither struggled to find their
métier
, nor struggled
with
it once found. A niche opened for them and they fell into it. The same of course could be said for him, but in his case the casket of riches that fell open was not prized by the
Kultur
. The more money Kreitman made, the further into the background of the nation he felt himself recede. Money ruled, without doubt. The catch for Kreitman, though, was that the way you made it also ruled, and except in so far as it showed him in a picturesque costermonger light, the way he made his (dirty fingers, Kreitman) did him no favours precisely where a favour would have been appreciated. ‘Ah, purses!' an academic philosopher with a boy's brow and a soldier's back had once repeated, meeting Kreitman
on the Merriweather lawn, and the Thames flowing sweetly, and the blackbirds melodic, and the shadows lengthening. ‘Ah, handbags and the like!' And he had remained with his pale hand to his cheek and his Mekon head thrown back in contemplation for so long, that Kreitman wondered whether his profession had turned the thinker to stone. His own fault for caring? Decidedly. No one knew that better than he did. But what could he do? He'd gone out and got
Kultur
, and for
Kultur
when it infects the un-
kultured
there is no known cure. With the Merriweathers, though, it all went, as it had always gone, swimmingly. He had not been able to imagine how the Charlies were going to survive leaving university. He remembered waving goodbye to them when they drove off on their honeymoon, immediately after graduating. To this day he could see their big unsheltered eyes receding, seeming to plead with him to call them back. It was like watching Adam and Eve leaving the Garden. It all but broke his squishy heart. But he had got it completely wrong. They weren't leaving the Garden at all, they were entering it. The one excluded from the Garden was him, Marvin Kreitman. Thereafter, there always seemed to be someone giving one or other of the Charlies something. This one bought them a house. That one bought them furniture. Another paid their first child's school fees. Not relatives, either. Not even friends, as far as Kreitman could make out. Just people. Folk. Personages of the
Kultur
. Until the Merriweathers in turn became personages of the
Kultur
themselves, ready to assist whoever came passing the hat round in the Garden next.