Who's Sorry Now? (20 page)

Deciding that twelve shirts will give him a better percentage chance of getting at least a couple right, Charlie Merriweather goes looking again for his collar size – double cuffs, long sleeves, no purple and yellow stripes – and all but knocks over Marvin Kreitman labouring under a dozen of his own. The two men open their mouths simultaneously, simultaneously flush scarlet and simultaneously turn away. Fuelled by champagne, a hysteria has gripped the shirt-buyers; they are not quite pulling garments from one another's hands, as the hair-netted harridans of popular culture did in the first great January sales of post-rationing Britain, but you don't dare take too long to make a decision, or you lose out. Who would have thought that men, with their philosophic indifference to goods, would become more obsessive sales addicts, more ferocious squirrellers and snatchers, than women ever were. Nothing to do with saving money, either. The sales just an excuse to acquire. What a gas! If we were still friends, Kreitman thinks, we would pretend to fight each other for our shirts; we would see the funny side of this. Charlie Merriweather thinks the same. But they are fighting each other for their wives, or they have fought each other for their wives, and though in a sense both might be said to have won, or at least to be winning, there is no funny side to it for either of them.

The swap has not worked out the way they wanted it?

Difficult to say, given that they wanted it differently, and that one of them believes he never really wanted it at all. And these are early days yet. They are both nursing tender shoots. They both
are
tender shoots. But having done the deed, having murdered their marriages where they slept, the two men have no more to say to each other in the aftermath than those who took a dagger to King Duncan.

On top of that, Kreitman is not amused to see Charlie Merriweather shopping where he has always shopped.

Bravado, again, of course. What Kreitman would like to do
is put his arms out and wind Charlie into them. But he doesn't know how to do that.

It is working out easier for Charlie and Hazel than for Marvin and the other Charlie. Perhaps Charlie and Hazel were always the needier, if only in the sense that they'd been growing the crazier – Charlie with sexual curiosity, Hazel with sexual grievance. And because they initiated what happened, taking what happened to date from the hour Hazel kidnapped Charlie from the grounds of the hotel, they are not the ones left looking, ever so slightly, the victims of event.

Over a funereal breakfast at the Baskervilles the morning after, Kreitman had put it to the remaining Charlie that charlies were what they'd been made to look.

She had shown him a steely face. ‘He's been putting the hard word on my sister,' she'd said. ‘What is more my children know about it. That's the unforgivable crime. Where he is now and who he's charvering is incidental. I don't care. I never want to speak to him again.'

‘It might not be incidental to me,' Kreitman informed her. Then, so there should be no mistake, ‘I might care who he's charvering.'

Charvering?
Not a word that came naturally to him. But then what did nature have to do with any of this?

Charlie laughed a bitter laugh. ‘That'll be the day,' she said.

Kreitman sought her eyes and swallowed back his answer, as though to let her glimpse a corner of his caringness she knew nothing of. ‘And you too,' he said, ‘care more than you're pretending.'

She shook her head. ‘No, I don't. A little silliness is one thing, asking Dotty for a fuck so publicly the whole of London knows about it, is another. I thought he was happy.'

‘He was happy and he wasn't. Fidelity does that.'

‘Your company does that.'

Kreitman touched her hand. ‘Don't lay it on me, Charlie. I wasn't instrumental in this. It wells up every now and then, that's all. You can't stop it. It spills over. It isn't personal. You of all people should know that.'

‘Me of all people?'

Too soon, Kreitman decided. ‘I mean, you've seen it with Dotty. There just comes a time.'

‘Then let him have his time with Hazel… if Hazel's the best he can do now that Dotty's knocked him back.'

Kreitman made a halt sign with his hand. Go no further, Chas.

She ignored the warning. ‘This morning of all mornings, Marvin, you can't expect me to be respectful to that tub of lard you call your wife.'

‘Chas!'

‘Don't Chas me. A wronged woman has her rights. If Hazel wants him, let Hazel handle the spillage, that's what I'm saying. But he's much mistaken if he thinks he can come waddling back to me when his time's up. I no longer want him. You can tell him that when you next have one of your fourteen-hour lunches.'

How upset was she? How
cataclysmically
upset? Kreitman couldn't tell. She was furious –
that tub of lard you call your wife
was hardly calm or just, God knows. But then who's ever measured in their views of the trollop humping their husband? And she was fraught, though that could just as well have been the aftermath of the other thing. The thing that had kept him up half the night and her up he didn't know how much longer. Sex interfered with upset, he knew that. It skewed it temporarily. First, you have to have no sex, then you can think about being upset. First, she had to get the taste of Nyman's tongue out of her mouth, assuming it had got that far. But when she'd done
that
, how upset would she be?

‘I don't believe you really think you can live without Charlie,' he said.

‘Can't wait. Just watch me.'

‘That's braggadocio.'

‘Is it? I don't think so. He's been weird for so long it will be a relief. I always thought life without Charlie would be insupportable. But maybe what I was actually thinking was that life without me would be insupportable for him. Well, fuck him! Now I need to think about me. It wells up, Marvin, as you say. It spills over.'

Kreitman considered that. ‘How will you write your books?' he wondered, after a decent interval of time.

She looked at the chandelier. ‘Balls to our books!' she said.

Amen to that, Kreitman thought. Let's drink to that. Balls to all baby books!

‘I think I've had it with collaborations, anyway,' she went on.

‘It's served you well.'

‘Depends how you measure. I don't feel well served. Anyway, the money's not in our sort of books any more. Lower-middle-class magic's back.'

Kreitman wasn't thinking about money or magic. ‘Then again,' he persisted, ‘you could always collaborate with someone else?'

‘Oh, yes … ?' For a moment she wondered if he was thinking of himself. ‘Who would that be?'

‘The faggot.'

‘What faggot?'

‘Nyman.'

‘Don't be absurd.'

‘It's surely not that absurd. You've been collaborating with him fine for most of this weekend.'

She decided against putting marmalade on her toast. ‘From you … From you, Marvin Kreitman,' she said, pointing her knife at him, ‘I'd have expected better!'

‘Better?'

She met his eyes. Hers viridiscent, a little like the burnish on
a spring onion, a little the colour of cheese mould, his blacker than squashed berries, and too crooked, you would have thought, to see straight with. They both looked terrible, sleepless and bedraggled. Kreitman unshaven, in a collarless Hindu shirt that didn't suit him. Chas in something from Kathmandu, tighter than a pea pod, and with too many toggles. And clown's trousers. And woollen socks.

‘I'd have expected you to be a little more sophisticated in the matter of a man and woman going for a midnight stroll,' she said.

A midnight stroll, was it? ‘Well, you know what they say – ' he said, although nobody he knew had ever said it – ‘sophistication nips out the back door once jealousy enters through the front.'

She made a playground face. ‘I'd like to see you jealous, Marvin Kreitman,' she said. ‘I'd like to see you trying to work out which facial muscles to pull. I bet you wouldn't even know which colour to turn.'

‘Green.'

‘You've mugged up on it.'

‘Not so. It came to me in the night.'

‘While you were sitting up waiting for Hazel to return? Ha! Serves you right. I'd say good for her for getting her own back, if she didn't happen to be getting it back with my husband.'

‘Nothing to do with Hazel. To do with you. I was at my window, playing gooseberry …'

She flushed, red on gold like a little fire in the hayrick. ‘Marvin! You had the bad manners to watch?'

His turn now to make a playground face. Naughty Marvin. ‘No choice,' he said.

‘Of course you had a choice. You could have drawn the curtains.'

‘And missed the moon on the moor?'

Still burning, she laughed. No, she essayed a laugh. ‘You're a pervert.'

‘I try to be. But it wasn't pervery. That's to say it wasn't
primarily
pervery.'

‘What primarily was it?

‘What do you think?'

‘Idleness.'

‘Nostalgia.'

She wouldn't rise to that. She wouldn't go that far back. One night at a time. ‘It wells up,' was all she'd say.

‘So how come he isn't breakfasting?'

Nyman? She shrugged. How should she know? Was she her lover's keeper? Not that Nyman was by any manner of means her lover. ‘I suspect,' she said, ‘that he left early. It's a long way to cycle.'

‘You didn't spend the night together, then?' The minute he heard himself put the question, Kreitman realised how infantile the question was. No more baby books, but any amount of baby curiosity.

Charlie pushed her plate aside, put her elbows on the table and clasped her hands. She might have been interviewing him. ‘Look,' she said, ‘I am in some distress. I am not always responsible for what I do when I'm in distress. You of all people' – she made little quotation marks with her fingers – ‘should know that.'

Kreitman inclined his head, baring his neck.

‘I don't know why you're pretending to be jealous,' she went on, ‘or even interested. You never have been before. But you too, I know, must be in distress. You'll pretend otherwise, but you must be. If you want to know about Nyman, I'll tell you. He happened on me at the wrong moment – wrong for me, right for him, you might say. Afterwards he asked if he could come back to my room. I told him I had a husband. He told me he thought I probably didn't. Then he told me he had no home to go to and asked if I'd put him up in Richmond for a while. I told him no. Then he asked if I would loan him money. I told him no. Then he asked me if I thought Hazel wanted him. I told him I had no
idea. Then he asked me if I would mind if he went to Hazel. I told him he should check with Hazel's husband not with me. He said he thought she probably didn't have a husband either. I told him I didn't care what he thought or what he did. He told me he just wanted to be sure he wasn't hurting my feelings. Jesus, Marvin …' Here Charlie ran her fingers through her hair, as though all her vexations might be there and she couldn't wait to comb them out. ‘Jesus Christ – your sex!'

‘My sex? Nyman isn't
my
sex.'

She waved away his blustering. ‘I'll tell you something, Marvin, he's more of what I understand by a man, more rattishly and motivationally a man, more stripped down to the bare bones of a man, than you and Charlie rolled together. Don't be insulted by that. It isn't so terrific to be a man.'

‘Isn't it?' Kreitman wondered about that. Wasn't it? Maybe it wasn't. Then, not quite sequentially, he said, ‘I thought he was a faggot.'

She shook her head, this time meaning to cause pain. ‘He's not a faggot,' she said. ‘Let me assure you, the one thing our friend Nyman is not, is a faggot.'

To the universally jealous Kreitman, the only person on the planet to have gone without contact with the opposite sex the night before, not counting his conversation with his mother, it was as though she had thrust her fingers in his eyes. He could see only blood, falling like rain blown against a window.

Charlie discovered the true depth of her upset when her husband turned up in Richmond after three days of being denuded of his wedding ring in Somerset and asked her to be happy for him retrospectively.

She was sitting at her old manual typewriter, at
their
table, pecking at the keys. She did not look up.

‘Why should I be happy for you, Charlemagne? For shitting on our marriage?'

He was astonished she saw it like that. ‘I haven't been shitting on our marriage,' he told her. ‘I haven't been doing anything to our marriage. I've just been away from it for a while.'

‘Doing what?'

What had he been doing? ‘Having a sabbatical,' he said.

‘You never wanted a sabbatical before.'

‘I never needed a sabbatical before.'

‘I see – we're talking needs, are we? Do you really think I'm the person you should be telling this to?'

‘Who else? You're my best friend.'

‘I'm not your best friend. I'm your wife.'

‘It's possible to be both, Chas.'

‘Is it? I doubt that. I think it's possible to be neither, but I doubt it's possible to be both. Not in the sense of being a wife
and
a best friend who is happy for you when you sleep with other women. I think you might do better with Dotty. She'd make a good best friend. Try talking to her about your needs – oh, sorry, you already have.'

Ah, Dotty. Charlie Merriweather had forgotten about Dotty.

‘I was dying, Chas,' he told her. ‘I was this close to being a dead man.'

Still refusing to look up, she missed seeing him measure with his fingers how far he'd been from being a dead man. But then nobody knew better than she did how close to being a dead man he remained.