Who's Sorry Now? (28 page)

That she could paint herself the villain helped her face the night. He wasn't the evil one, she was. In which case, if one of them had the right to second thoughts, it was him. Nothing had been said about – she made mental quotation marks – ‘the night'. They had dropped their bags off at the hotel without registering, then walked straight over, through the gardens, to the exhibition rooms. She had thought the hurry was to postpone embarrassment. Or even to bamboozle her. Night, what night? Now she knew it was simply because Kreitman couldn't wait to get over there and breathe in Elysium. But did that mean he was not calculating on any embarrassment, that it was all dusted down and sorted, he and she a couple – Mr and Mrs Marvin Kreitman! – sharing the one room, the one toothbrush mug, the one bed? Had they had that conversation? If so, she hadn't been listening. Anxiety about the arrangements had been plucking at her peace of mind – ha! her what? – ever since she'd met him on the station platform that morning, looked him over in his over-lapelled Italian suit, stared into his too avid eyes and wondered what the hell she was embarking on. By mid-afternoon her understanding of who was arranging to do what to whom – an understanding that had stopped at fluttering heroines and bad-faced villains – had undergone a quiet revolution. Let's look at it this way, she thought: it was she who had first invited him to meet her at the gym; it was she who had accepted, with what was beginning to look like unseemly alacrity, an offer to accompany him on a buying trip to Harrogate which really was
a buying trip to Harrogate
; and it was she who was wandering round the fair a picture of world-weariness and cynicism, while the heart of the scoundrel bent on seducing her was pounding like a ten-year-old's. If anyone should be wondering whether
this excursion, or whatever you were meant to call it, was the right thing, shouldn't it be him?

Well, he's big enough to tell me to push off, she decided. But by God it helped her, when Kreitman had seen and bought enough, and the hour for sorting out ‘the arrangements' – the hour she'd been dreading – struck, to think of him as the innocent and herself, if not exactly as the abductress, at least as a force, and maybe even the instrumental force, in whatever happened next. It only needed the receptionist to hand her a key to her own room, a room not immediately adjoining Kreitman's at that, not in the same corridor, not on the same floor – briefly, she expected to hear, not even in the same hotel – for her to wonder whether she wasn't the blackguard in this relationship, and furthermore to wonder whether the very word relationship wasn't itself an imposition of impurity on the snow-white blamelessness of Kreitman's intentions.

‘I'd have expected you to be hairier than you are,' she told him, making absent circles with her fingers on his chest, trying to remember girlish ways.

She was in his arms, not easy for her as a non-collapsible woman, but she had found a way of folding down her shoulders and introverting her elbows, which was more comfortable than it ought to have been.

He looked down at himself. ‘I seem hairy enough,' he said, in a voice so gentle he barely recognised it.

‘That's my hair you're looking at, you fool,' she laughed. Her voice had come down off the high wire and was warm and deep again, like turned earth. ‘And I'm not talking about the amount of hair you've got, anyway. I mean I expected it to be more like you, spikier and more aggressive. Your skin, too, is softer than I imagined.'

‘Remembered,' he corrected her.

She knew which word she wanted to use. ‘
Imagined
,' she insisted, warning him off.

But Kreitman knew which word
he
wanted to use. ‘Remembered,' he repeated. ‘Except that it would appear you haven't.'

‘Haven't what, Marvin?'

‘Haven't remembered the feel of me.'

She made a movement to sit up, but he held her to him. ‘You're the one who hasn't remembered,' she said. ‘I haven't ever touched you. Not touch touch. I grabbed you. That was all. Once upon a time, before I was a respectably married woman, I made a grab at you in anger, but of course a man never minds that. I sometimes think you could grab a man's cock off in rage and he'd take it as a sexual compliment.'

‘Try me, Charlie.'

‘I don't feel any rage right now.'

He knew what he could do to change that. He could ask her to describe to him the spirit in which, on the very same spot, and
after
she was a respectably married woman, she had made a grab at Nyman. But why go looking for trouble? Don't spoil it, he told himself. Don't rub at an old itch. Isn't this lovely enough for you?

It even crossed his mind that if this
wasn't
lovely enough for him, he was as good as done for, a dead man.

Fortunately, it
was
lovely enough for him. The pair of them drifting about like ghosts lost in an unknown room, coming in and out of sleep, cautious of each other, watchful of the abrasions which a sudden movement or a false note could cause – abrasions to the body, wounds to the soul. It was what she had dreaded, the whole performance of getting to know another person intimately again, making sure your spirits didn't clash, that your knees didn't bang, that you didn't speak over each other's words, what's your star sign, what's your favourite colour, if there's a God how do you explain Auschwitz, oh sorry, have I already asked you that. That was the reason everybody their age always gave for not
embarking on an affair even when an affair beckoned – who could face the getting-to-be-acquainted ritual one more time. It was what baffled people about Kreitman, how he could go on and on doing that. Without doubt it helped in this case that they already knew each other, but knowing as a friend, more specifically knowing as a friend of your husband, was not the same as knowing as a … well, knowing as a lover, was it? Yet here she was, here
they
were, encased in darkness, feeling their way around each other's hearts, daring to risk questions, only half noticing the answers, making gifts of revelations so tenuous they floated off into the night, finding a whole hidden history of the self here and now in the cradling of foreign arms – in short, doing everything the no-longer young said they never wanted to do again, except that it seemed they did, else why did it feel so heaven-sent.

‘Is this what's always in it for you?' she asked.

He didn't stir. ‘I don't get any part of that question,' he said. They had left the bathroom door ajar and by the faint yellow light coming in from the street he could just make out their distorted reflections in the chromeware, some of him in the taps, some of her in the towel rail, come together more astonishingly, if that could be, than even in their actual conjoined flesh.

She took her time. Infinity was all around them. ‘Is this the reason you go from woman to woman?'

This? Well, he couldn't pretend he didn't know what
this
meant. ‘
This
, Chas, is the reason I'm going nowhere.'

‘No,' she said. ‘It isn't necessary to palm me off. I'd actually prefer to hear it from you that you go from woman to woman in order to keep on feeling this. I can see how it could become compulsive. Looking to be reinvented, again and again, remade in another person's appreciation of you. I can forgive that sooner than some heartless, accumulative thing.'

‘I'm not heartless, I'm humourless. I can't do casualness.'

‘I thought casualness was exactly what you did do.'

‘I know that's what you thought. You were wrong. I do solemnity. I make a wake out of everything. That's to say I
did
.'

‘But I'm not talking about the spirit in which you do numbers, I'm just asking why you do numbers at all.'

‘I don't. Just because they accumulate doesn't mean I'm an accumulator. They accumulate in the course of my trying to pin them down.'

‘But why do you want to pin women down, Marvin? Listen to your own language. Why must they be
down
, and why must you
bring
them down?'

She was disappointed in herself. She had meant to be subtler. He had not acted – so far, so far – as she had expected him to act, yet here was she asking precisely the questions which he must have known she'd ask.

Listening to her, Kreitman felt a fraud, and not a little sorry for them both. If he'd ever had a day as a doer-down of women, a libertine or whatever the word used to be, that day was over. There were no more libertines. The very idea was an anachronism. Only in the heart of Charlie – herself an anachronism – did the fear of libertinage still exist. Only in this bed, next to this woman, was he still a dangerous man. He thought it behoved him to tell her that.

‘Listen, Charlie,' he said, ‘you're fighting an enemy that's packed up and gone home. The great seducers of the past were first and foremost blasphemers and revolutionaries. They got at God and the established order through women. There's no mileage in that any more. Now the worst crime we can charge them with is misogyny. Which is not just feeble psychology – the idea that you would go through women because you hate them – it's also milk-and-water theology. What a downgrading of sin! To reduce evil to such a piddling ambition – the sexual downfall of a gullible woman.'

‘It's not so piddling if you're the woman.'

‘Of course it's not … assuming she exists any more, the poor but honest wictim.'

‘It's still a question why you seek it, Marvin, even if you would rather be fighting God.'

‘I don't seek the downfall of women. I just need them to stay still while I work out what I do seek. Which is more likely to be my own downfall.'

She could hardly stay still herself after that. ‘No fear,' she laughed. She tried to break from his arms, but he kept them close around her, his hands locked in the fuzzy hollow of her back, a smaller space than he'd imagined, a velvety declivity like something unexpected in nature, a mouse hole on a golf course, or a tiny crater from a meteorite. In clothes she seemed all bones, a woman made of calcium and chalk, out of them she was an undulation of smooth surfaces. How this could be, Kreitman had no idea. But then she was all surprises to him.

He could have said that that was one reason why he went, in her quaint phrase, from woman to woman – why he had
once
gone from woman to woman – because you never knew what you were going to find. The ever unfolding amazement. But he was no longer in the grip of unlocated curiosity; what moved him now was the miracle of Chas: why her skin refuted chaos theory; why his own skin seemed to come off under her fingers, so unexpectedly possessive was her touch; why his body received hers as though her imprint had been on him since birth.

He kissed all around her eyes. Two perfect circles. ‘I can't make it sound any good,' he told her, ‘and I ask you not to ask me to name it – but here, now, with you, I have found what I want.'

She blinked something salty into his mouth. ‘Will it do me any good to believe that?' she asked.

‘Not for me to say. I can only tell you what I tell you.'

‘Will it do
you
any good for me to believe that?'

He thought about it. Make a woman believe you and you're in trouble if you're lying. Trouble with yourself. He knew that. Every man knows that. The hard bit is to know whether you're lying or not. All he could think was that he'd come through a sort
of purgatory getting to this point with her. She had been touchy at dinner with his business friends, noisy men who sold sunglasses and weren't at all, to her sense, those easygoing profiteers he'd promised her. ‘I don't know where you're going, Kreitman,' one of them had challenged him, over the third or fourth bottle of champagne, ‘but I'm going this way' – pointing upwards and meaning, if Chas understood him correctly, to the topmost rung of the ladder of success. Before Kreitman had found something witty to say in reply, a second sunglasses man had roared with laughter, offering it as his opinion that ‘that way' – meaning up the stairs of the hotel – was exactly where Kreitman was going too. Just the coarse surmisings Chas had been dreading. God knows, in Kreitman's reading of the situation, she had fought hard to dispel any doubts that she was his tart for the night, by coming down to dinner in an appallingly ill-fitting trouser suit made of green sacking, the jacket loose on her chest, revealing altogether too much of a white armoured brassiere, and too scant behind, showing the label of her trousers, or something even worse; the trousers themselves too floppy and too long, a clown's trousers, through which, whether or not that was the label he could see when she rose to leave the room, was too visible the outline of her underwear. For desire to have got past such an outfit, what was over and what was under, some other element must have come into play. That other element could only have been love.

He buried his face in her neck and breathed in her odours. Hay and plum wine. Upsetting. God knows why. Something autumnal. She was passing and it was his job to hold her back.

‘If you want to know what will do
me
good,' he said sadly, as though speaking of impossibilities, ‘it's you learning to believe what I say to you.'

This time she did break from him, and sat up, pulling the sheets to her neck. She didn't like her white freckled chest, with its striations of middle age, nor did Kreitman; she didn't like her undermined breasts with their flat nipples, unpalatable even to
her babies, as indeed they were to Kreitman – didn't that
prove
it was love?

‘What would you think of me if I took at face value everything you're telling me,' she almost pleaded, ‘and pretended to ignore that you've said it to a hundred other women?'

He sat up himself and reached for the unfinished wine by his bedside, by
her
bedside rather, for he had come to her room, not taken her to his, knocking gently, softly softly, no brusque alarms, even while she was still trying to decide whether she was a blackguard or not. The wine had been waiting, a queer-shaped bottle on a stainless-steel tray, with a card telling you the price around its neck. All part of the twenty-first-century makeover of grand hotels from chintz to stainless steel, the beds twice the size that had sufficed last century's travellers, and no more pretence that fucking wasn't the reason you were here. Gone, the old awkwardness around the signing-in – Mr … and Miss … oops!; gone the shifty expression on the porter's face and the coughing in the lift; gone the morning flurry to remake the bed so the chambermaid should never guess your secret – all gone, anachronisms, just like Kreitman, the last soldier of illicit sex. Now you fouled the sheets before you left the room, so no one should think you'd had a quiet night.