Who's Sorry Now? (26 page)

‘I like it that you don't seem to be going anywhere in your head,' she told him once, reclining like a girl in the strong sour crook of his arm.

‘Where would I be going that's any better than here?'

‘I suppose I shouldn't be telling you this,' she said, ‘but in my experience men are always on a journey somewhere else. Even in the early days when he was happy just to be with me – unless I got that wrong, too – Marvin used to maraud me, ransack my body as though he'd lost something. Is it here? No. Is it here, then? No. It was like being Treasure Island, like having Long John Silver stomping across you with a spade and bucket. That was before he decided the treasure wasn't anywhere to be found on me and went looking for it on some other island.'

Charlie listened. ‘And why shouldn't you be telling me this?'

‘In case it puts you off me.'

‘Nothing could put me off you.'

‘Or gives you ideas.'

‘There's only one idea you give me,' he said, wanting to break into her sadness, booming his big bedtime laugh and rolling her
on to his chest, tapping his broad, straightforward intentions down the taut xylophone that was her spine.

What would Chas have said? ‘Charlie! Stop it, Charlie, you'll break the bed.' With Chas it had been all panto. Dames in bloomers, giant sausages, sticky sweets for the children, oops-a-daisy, he's behind you! With Chas the sex had been continuous with family, a funny misadventure ending in a picnic and a roll down a grassy bank with his arms round Kitty or Timmy. Whereas with Hazel … with Hazel it ended in itself.

Undoubtedly, it helped that in Kennington, all five Georgian storeys of it, there was nobody else at home. The Merriweather house had always been in a state of preparation for invited guests or unexpected droppers-in; it was a cooking house, centred on the kitchen, the latest holiday snaps and newsy postcards affixed under magnets to the refrigerator door, the subject of conversation warming in the oven. A child was always on the phone or waiting to be driven somewhere. But Hazel frowned on fridge-magnet culture, ate out more often than she cooked and had never encouraged her daughters to treat home as a club house. Both girls had their own places to live, and though they popped in as a matter of course normally, they weren't popping in at the moment because they'd fled to Thailand. Fled? In a manner of speaking.

‘Not me, is it?' Charlie asked. ‘Oh Lord!'

‘Of course not,' Hazel reassured him, pinching his cheeks. ‘Why would anyone want to flee from you?'

And it wasn't him. It was her. Her and him.
Them
. Hazel knew her daughters. Had Kreitman brought a woman into the house they'd have hit the roof. But for Mummy to be shacked up with a new bloke was cool, even if the new bloke was only soppy Uncle Charles. So disgust wasn't what motivated them to go to travelling. Not moral disgust, anyway. Aesthetic disgust was nearer the mark. They were not keen on how their mother was dressing for Charlie, and vice versa. Too short, the skirts. Too whispering, the dresses. Too pink and white, Uncle Charles's
chest, scarcely covered by his blue candlewick dressing gown, and too white and blue his unshod feet. Kreitman had been a model father as far as the decorum of the domestic wardrobe went: he wore leather slippers with a crest on them, silk pyjamas and a sort of pasha's robe that tied around him twice. Sometimes he wore a smoking jacket. And on rare occasions a braided fez. Whatever was uncomfortable. As far as his daughters were concerned this made him a prize old fart, but a prize old fart was how your dad was meant to look. Uncle Charles on the other hand was getting about like a disreputable lodger their mother was knocking off on the side. That dressing gown! The one item in his wardrobe he had not let Hazel burn. At any moment, the girls feared, this appalling ancient garment was going to fall off his shoulders, unravel or undo, or he would simply omit, one fine morning, to wear it at all. And they were sufficiently Kreitman's daughters not to want to be there when that happened. Gross – that was their verdict on the new situation. Gross and sad. But as they didn't want to upset their mother by telling her that, they upped and left. Fingers crossed that by the time they returned Uncle Charles would have gone home to Aunty Chas and Mummy would be back wearing trousers.

This couldn't have suited Charlie better. With the girls gone, it was as if they had never been. No trace of them. How did some families do that? To remove the atmosphere of offspring from his house – his
old
house – you would have had to flood, earthquake and firebomb it. Twice. And even then a little dolly with a missing arm would surely have survived the flames.

Wonderful, no matter how the effect had been achieved, to move about a space free of consequences. Free of memories as well, for there was no sign that Kreitman had once been here either. Every impression of him upholstered over. So non-repercussive did the place feel, so without recall or aftermath, it could just as well have been a brothel – not that Charlie had ever been inside a brothel – as a home. What was the
opposite to nice sex? Nasty sex? No. Just sex from which nothing flowed or issued except more of itself. As long as Hazel wasn't planning to flick it all away from him, Charlie believed he could at last count himself a happy and disreputable man.

Whereas Hazel – what Hazel loved about Charlie was the aura he gave off of being domiciled. Had anyone charged her with upholstering away all memory of Kreitman she'd have flown into a rage. ‘Excuse me – he upholstered away all memory of himself. He was like a ghost, my husband. When he rose from a chair he left not a dent behind. When he looked in a mirror there was no reflection. He wasn't here. He never lived here. Tell me I dreamed him and I'll believe you. The only person you'll find to vouch for Marvin Kreitman's existence is his mother, and she's a ghoul.'

Charlie, on the other hand, left his imprint on everything and smelt of every chair he'd ever sat in. Kreitman had scoffed at Charlie for living bodilessly, for being embarrassed by his own skin. But Kreitman's judgements were all erotic, and since the erotic life for Kreitman was situated between his ears, he was the last one to talk of incorporeality. Kreitman didn't need a body; he propelled his penis with his mind. Poor Charlie may have been a bit behind the door sexually, but there was a body there to call on right enough.

‘I'm a fatherless girl,' she told him. ‘I find it marvellous that when I wake up you're still there.'

So they both felt it. Wonder of wonders, they each disappeared dreading into the dark, and each woke grateful and relieved that the other had not gone.

‘Do that thing with your eyes,' Charlie said.

‘What thing?'

‘That thing when you sneak a look across at me with everything upturned. That sly, peeping thing. Ascertaining that I haven't
crept away, but not wanting me to see that you're checking. Like a child on Christmas Eve, keeping a lookout for her presents.'

‘Do I do that?'

‘Often.'

‘I don't.'

‘You do. I promise.'

‘That's because I had no dad. No one to dress as Father Christmas. I always knew it was my mother creeping in.'

‘I'll be your dad.'

She looked alarmed. Like a child waiting for her presents to be taken away from her. ‘Don't say that, Charlie.'

He put his arms round her, folding her inside him. ‘I only mean that it touches me, the thing you do with your eyes.'

‘It doesn't frighten you off?'

‘God, no. I love it. I love the way your eyes hold the light when you do it. I love the way they seem to steal all the light that's in the room.'

‘They are lit with the light of you,' she told him.

Whereupon he kissed them, making them better.

Wonder of wonders.

Then, out of the blue, ‘Hey, why don't we' – Chas ringing Kreitman to suggest – ‘meet up at my health club?'

Kreitman's first instinct – to smell a rat. ‘I thought health clubs were single-sex institutions,' he said.

‘Those are health
farms
. I'm talking about my gym.'

‘I didn't know you had a gym.'

‘I have now.'

‘Why do you want me to meet you at a gym? Do they serve food there?'

‘I wonder why you associate seeing me with eating, Marvin.'

‘I associate seeing anybody with eating.'

‘I'm just “anybody”, then?'

‘If you were just anybody, Chas, I wouldn't be in the state I'm in.'

‘What state are you in? Have you gone to pieces over me?'

She's hysterical, Kreitman thought. ‘I'm a wreck,' he said.

‘That's exciting. Tell me more.'

More than hysterical. Hyperphasic.

‘About as exciting as an unweeded garden,' he said. But he decided against mentioning the mould.

‘Then it sounds to me that a gym is just what you need.'

‘What will I have to do there?'

‘Don't tell me you've never been to a gym.'

‘Not since school. Gym then was something everybody dreaded. It astounds me that these days people pay to go somewhere they once avoided like the plague. Will I be required to do handstands against wallbars?'

‘You can if you want, Charlie.'

Charlie!

‘Marvin,' he corrected her.

She laughed her mistake away with a carillon of little bells, making nothing and everything of it. ‘Come tomorrow at ten,' she said. ‘It's quiet then. Do you have things?'

‘Things?' Did she mean condoms?

‘Shorts, trainers …'

‘Those I'll buy,' Kreitman said. He had already mentally picked the bag he was going to carry his things in – South American leather, very soft, lots of zip pockets, with a tartan lining, on sale in his own shop right below him, a snip at three hundred and fifty smackers, but then it came to him at half that.

She gave him the address. ‘Ten o'clock, then.'

‘Ten o'clock then. Oh, and Charlie, how will I recognise you?'

‘Has it been so long?'

‘An eternity.'

She laughed, but didn't hesitate. ‘I'll be wearing a scarlet leotard.'

As I dreaded, Kreitman thought.

He slept badly. No man sleeps well before a prizegiving. Now that she was almost within his grasp – he didn't mean that in any predatory sense, but her confusing her husband's name with his did seem to signal some significant mental changing of the guard on her part – it was natural that he should consult with himself on the question of whether or not he really prized or wanted her. What if he didn't?
If
he didn't, there was no explaining why he'd been moping about without the consolation of company all these weeks – but
what
if he didn't? She seemed a responsibility, suddenly. A burden. You don't take on lightly a woman whose husband has left her, a woman whose husband has left her for your wife and whose voice has risen to perilous heights. Chas normally had a loamy, vegetable contralto – soothing rather than thrilling, like being tucked up in a warm bed. Now her voice was skidding about the upper register, as though it were on ice skates. She sounded like a woman in need of support. Remembering his cat Cobbett, Kreitman wondered whether support was something he had it in him to provide.

He was at the gym shortly before ten, his driver unable to resist a joke about the location. ‘You decided to take up bodybuilding, Mr Kreitman?'

‘Time to get a bit of fat off, Maurice,' Kreitman said. He thought he caught Maurice grinning Africanly at his new overnighter.

Chas wasn't waiting for him in reception. They told him at the desk that she was already upstairs in the gym, but it wasn't going to be as easy as nipping up to find her and having a quick run-around. First he had to enrol as a temporary member, choosing a full-peak, off-peak or semi-off-peak tariff, then he had to fill out a questionnaire about his health, then he had to have his photograph taken, then he had to swap a credit card for a key to the locker room and a towel, and even then they wouldn't let him up in case he intended getting on to one of the machines prior to
medical assessment and without supervision. An insurance thing. ‘I've got plenty of insurance of my own,' Kreitman said. ‘But anyway, I promise I won't go on anything. I still have a note in my pocket from my mother, forbidding me to climb on to anything mechanical. It's held good for over thirty years. Trust me, I just want to talk to Mrs Charlie Merriweather. So far you've relieved me of the best part of three hundred pounds – that must buy me ten minutes of conversation. Please let me go up.'

The unilluminated women at the desk – he would not have employed them, not even for West Norwood – took pity on themselves, rather than on him, for gyms are wordless places and Kreitman had already spoken more sentences in a minute than they heard here in a month. ‘That way' – pointing him in the direction of the locker rooms. Not like school showers, no echoing tiles, no rotting timber draining boards for feet, none of that hot badger's-lair smell of what, before the advent of trainers, they used to call pumps; but still the old discomfort around undressing in the company of people of the same sex. The woman didn't exist before whom Kreitman wouldn't, in the blinking of an eye, display his genitals. How many had seen them? How many hundreds? How many thousands, even?
In Ispagna … mille e tre
. But men, no. To men he remained a secret. Nor did he want to see theirs. Nor their buttocks, though that was the way men generally made it easy on one another, effecting a three-quarter turn so that any genitalia you got, you got in profile; otherwise innocuous rump. Except it never was. Very shocking to Kreitman, the plump wire-haired backside of a man. Naked with one another, men were
too
naked. Kreitman found them frightening. What they found him was another matter. A man who did not use his mouth like other men? Automatically, he undressed as he'd last undressed as a schoolboy, keeping his shirt on till last, then sliding his shorts on under that.