Who's Sorry Now? (18 page)

He lay on the bed and rang room service. Red wine was what he wanted, red wine as bloody as it came and a thick rare steak, also bleeding. The remote was broken so he had to get up to turn on the television. Shit on every channel. He watched a desolating programme about people who wanted to sing like other people, obscure people who imitated famous people, though he didn't know who the famous people were either. His daughters would have known. And Nyman of course. For wasn't that what Nyman was doing, first on his bike and now down here – impersonating some other person in the hope of been recognised for someone he wasn't? Stars In His Eyes. Dreaming of being famous for reminding people of someone else. Maybe right this minute Nyman was on a high being him, being Kreitman. Big mistake if he hoped thereby to make a favourable impression on Hazel.

But that wasn't his business.

He fell asleep watching shit and woke up only when his steak arrived. Not bloody enough. But then when ever was it? He ate it sitting up in bed anyway and polished off the wine. Then he got out of bed and turned off the television. Then he got back into bed and rang his mother.

Whenever he was at his lowest, Kreitman rang his mother. He had been doing that since he was small, ringing her from school, ringing her from camp, ringing her from Barcelona, ringing her from his honeymoon hotel, so that she should hear the melancholy in his voice. The blotting-paper effect, partly. You're my mother, suck up my sorrows. But more than that, Kreitman rang his mother when he was low in order to blame her.
Your fault! Nothing specific – she had done him no wrong, other than being his mother. But that seemed to be sufficient reason.

Your fault!

Kreitman admired his mother. He admired the way she kept herself youthful – black-haired and jingling like a gypsy still – and he admired the way she rose above her circumstances. Barely one year into her second marriage she found herself having to support an invalid. There was money over from husband number one, the bitter little key-fob thief who had been Kreitman's father, but she wasn't sure how much of that Kreitman was going to need (for he was still bound for Downing Street in those days), and it was important to her that what was left of husband number two should be cared for decently. Young Kreitman didn't believe it behoved him to look too closely into his mother's personal life, but he was of the opinion that she had fallen in love in a big way the second time around, even though the object of her devotion was a mouse-man called Norbert who found his fulfilment stamping books and refolding newspapers in a small public library in north London. A person of such quiet deliberation that you could hear the sound his pink-whorled fingers made when they touched a page – a soft, hypnotising, papery phttt which acted voluptuously on Mona Kreitman's nervous system – Norbert Bellwood was nature's refutation of Kreitman's father, the least dyspeptic, most unaggravated man on the planet. Where Kreitman Senior used to dash his food down as though he were getting rid of the remains of someone he'd murdered, the police hammering on his door, Norbert Bellwood ruminated on every morsel until it liquidised into his stomach without his even so much as swallowing. ‘It's uncanny,' Mona Kreitman told her friends. ‘No Rennies, no Gaviscon, and not a rumble in the night. He is the answer to my prayers. And you should hear him clean his teeth! Except you can't. He's like a ghost with an imaginary brush.' No need for anyone to call Quiet! in Norbert Bellwood's library. The unruliest children, the noisiest readers, felt Norbert's presence
and fell silent. The only disturbance, the inking of his rubber stamp and his long gingery eyelashes fanning the air as he read. Even the stroke which made him an invalid and broke Mona Kreitman's – now Mona Bellwood's – heart came quietly. One minute he was at his desk calculating a fine, the next he was out on his back on the library carpet, looking up unseeing at a grubby bust of an old philanthropist of the borough. And nobody had heard him moan.

Enough of what Mona had found lovable in Norbert remained for her to want to make it supremely comfortable. A large garden for him. A heated pool for him. An aviary for him, for he had always loved the music small birds made. And to finance all this Mona Bellwood became a sort of bird herself – a vulture, hovering over the remains of the dead. Every community newspaper published in north London was delivered to her door, and no sooner was a family's sorrow announced than Mona Bellwood struck. Something her job taught her – something her marriage to Kreitman's father had taught her – people wanted the wardrobes of the deceased emptied quickly, unemotionally, without a word, and whoever came offering, in a van with its engine turning over outside the front door, was as though sent by God, however small the offer. Out of the house and good riddance before the tears dried, the old suits and dresses, the shoes, the handbags, the shirts, the ties, the furs, the whisky decanters and, more often than you would expect, the jewellery – most of it rubbish, but not all, never
all
. ‘I could claim I perform a service,' Mona said, ‘but it's a business. I do it for Norbert. Not that Norbert knows.'

Kreitman imagined Norbert in a second childhood not unlike Kreitman's first, excited by the takings, fascinated by the sight of the sand-crab notes creaking eerily apart. ‘Why can't I count?' And Mona denying him, showing him how money filthies everything it touches, the palms of your hands, your fingertips. It crossed his mind, sometimes, that she was making not a sou out
of raiding the houses of the dead, and was doing it only as a sort of penitence and abasement, seeking out and subjecting herself to the contamination, just so that Norbert shouldn't have to, even though there was no possibility now of Norbert doing anything. Sacrificing her immortal soul, dirtying it so that he could keep his clean. Just as she had done for Kreitman's.

Was he grateful to her for that? Yes and no. She'd been an example to him. Made him not a radical but at least a student of radicalism. Indirectly put him on to Francis Place. But he blamed her for it as well. Nothing had come of him and Francis Place. He had not known
how
to make anything come of it. Maybe if his mother had let him dirty himself he'd have grown up better equipped to live in a dirty world.

Her fault.

It wasn't all punitive. He wanted her to hear on the phone how bad he felt, but he didn't begrudge her feeling good on that account when the reason he felt bad was a woman. In that sense he was always going back to her, like a faithless lover returning to a forgiving wife, showing how little the infidelity had ever counted. But whereas the most forgiving wife would always insist on knowing why, if it counted so little, he had bothered in the first place – ‘Then why do it, Marvin, why demean yourself and me?' – his mother was content just to have him home.

No one knew better than she did, after all, what refinement of feeling beat in his breast. She had taken him to the specialist when he fainted. She had told all her friends she had a son who was ‘clinically sensitive', which was the next best thing to having a son who had won the Nobel Prize. And who was to say he wouldn't do that next? ‘And this year's prize for Clinical Sensitivity goes to … Marvin Kreitman!'

Sometimes he felt that she was expecting his call, knew to the hour, maybe to the minute, when he would phone. Had he not inherited his sensitivity from her? When he was a boy she claimed powers of sympathetic prescience, a bodily intuition
of his pains that was nothing short of supernatural. At the very moment Marvin took a tumble off his first pair of skates in Regent's Park, Mona Kreitman's knees went from under her as she was standing at the kitchen sink. The night he woke with burning tonsils on his honeymoon in Rome, Mona Kreitman fell out of bed clutching her throat. She knew when something was amiss with him, wherever he was. And that included romantic despondency, despair, satiation, boredom, even disgust. So she had a pretty good idea when the phone was going to ring.

‘I'm in Dartmoor,' he told her.

‘Tell me something I don't know,' she said.

‘Ma, I bet you couldn't find Dartmoor on a map.'

‘You're right. But what's that got to do with anything? Unless you want me to come and collect you. Then I'd find it on a map. Is this business, family or pleasure?'

‘You are cynical, Mother. It's family.'

‘Then I hope you're managing to have a good time.'

‘I'm having a lousy time.'

‘Well, you've always known how to have that. But Hazel likes it down there, doesn't she?'

Ah, yes. Hazel. Mona Bellwood was too subtle ever to risk an explicit criticism, but there hung over every conversation she had with her son an awareness, as fine as mist, of what might have been called the Hazel problem.

‘God knows what Hazel likes,' Kreitman said. ‘But you're right, she does enjoy it here. She believes the air agrees with her …'

An intake of breath and then a moment of silence, during which Mona Bellwood could be heard measuring the qualitative difference between her son's sensitivity and her daughter-in-law's. Egregious, the condition of Hazel's nerves; insufferable, how needy and on edge she was, the little mouse. Dartmoor! Air! What next – the pollen? But not a word, not a word.

‘Well, just try to get a rest,' was all she said. ‘We thought you looked tired when we saw you last.'

The ‘we' constituted an unholy little bond between them. ‘We' meant the women of the house, his mother and Norbert's nurse. ‘We' acknowledged that she knew all about his affair with Shelley and, more than that, reminded him that she may have been the one who had promoted it in the first place.

Your mother, your pimp. Kreitman couldn't decide what he thought of this, ethically. When he was hers alone, his mother wouldn't have dreamed of putting him in the way of women. When he was hers alone, she filled his ears with dire warnings of the ruses of the other sex. They would say anything, do anything, to get him. And the first thing they would do was turn him against her, the best if not the only friend he had. ‘If you really love me, you will rip out your mother's heart and bring it to me in a plastic bag.' And Kreitman, because he was a man, would do their bidding. ‘No, Ma!' ‘Yes, Marvin, yes, you will. You'll see. You'll see how they'll make you dance.' But after Hazel became his wife, the world, or at least that part of it which Mona inhabited, was suddenly filled with interesting, selfless, lovely women to whom she couldn't wait to introduce him. Sometimes, at a family get-together – a birthday party, a golden wedding, a funeral, it didn't matter, and it didn't matter either whether Hazel was in attendance or not – she would actually deliver some girl into his hands, go find her, go fetch her, lead her in by the wrist and hand her over clanking to her son, as though into captivity. Nah, have her, enjoy!

Should a mother do such things? Kreitman's ethical considerations were inevitably coloured by his sentimentality, but no, generally speaking a mother should not do such things, though in this instance the mother was mindful of the specifics of her charge – a clinically sensitive boy who had never enjoyed the advantages of a decent father, who worked hard to support his family, who had not quite fulfilled what had been expected of him, who was easily upset and influenced by women, who was married to one with frayed nerves (never mind who'd frayed them), and who was
therefore exceptionally in need of recreation. So whatever came to him, as it were, gift-wrapped by his mother – here, have, take, don't make a fuss – he could hardly throw back in her face.

But when he was in depressed spirits this was one more thing he could ring her up and blame her for. Another fine mess you've got me into, Ma!

In this instance it pleased him to think of his mother and one of the women he loved discussing his health. If he existed primarily in the solicitudes of women, then he doubly existed when two of them were worrying about him together. And yes, they were right, he was looking tired.

‘I've got this headache that won't go away,' he said, in corroboration.

‘Where?'

‘In my head, where do you think?'

‘Don't be smart with your mother, Marvin. It matters in which part of your head you have it. Don't forget I know about headaches. Norbert began with headaches.'

‘Well, this one's in every part of my head. It's vague. It's sort of all over. But listen, don't worry about it. I shouldn't have said anything. It's nothing. It's probably just a spiritual after-effect of the accident.'

Oops, the accident!

He had promised himself not to trouble her with that. Once upon a time he'd have rung her from the ambulance, let her hear the sirens at close range. ‘Here, Ma, talk to the paramedic while he's pressing on my heart. What's that trickling sound? My blood, Ma, my blood ebbing away, what do you think it is!' But he was a grown man now, older than she was when he went to university, older than she was when he married Hazel even. And there are some things a grown man spares his mother, such as being knocked down in the middle of Soho by a crazed bicycling faggot-impersonator whom his wife must now reasonably be presumed to be fucking. His mother didn't need
to know any of that, did she? And he didn't need to tell her. An impressive decision or what? And he'd done well. For eight whole days he hadn't breathed a word. Until oops, the accident. After which he had absolutely no choice but to spill the beans.

And with such immoderation of language and vehemence of feeling that anybody listening would have thought it was the poor woman's doing.

Which it was, really, for having set him on the road to seriousness.

Her fault.

When he next awoke it was dark. He looked at his watch. It was almost one in the morning. And Hazel not back. The light rain was still falling, but that hadn't deterred some mad fuckers from playing croquet. He heard the chock of the mallet on the ball. That queer colonial sound. Then whispering. Then another hollow chock. Not an urgent game, whoever was playing. Then nothing. He got up and went to the window, much as Hazel had the night before. And saw the watery outline of the moon above the moor, and saw the silhouette of a hermit's chapel on a tor, and saw Nyman leaning on his mallet with a stange expression on his floury face and his
heimat
pants down round his ankles. And on her knees, somewhat abstracted, like a washer woman rubbing shirts upon the pebbles in a river, or a half-hearted nun in her devotions, looking somewhere else, not Hazel, definitely not Hazel, unless the darkness were playing tricks on him, but Chas.