Who's Sorry Now? (32 page)

Hazel snuggled into him, for protection and shade. Who cared who else was crossing the Common that day?

So everyone on planet Nice is happy, then?

And the children?

And Nyman, without whom, in all fairness, so much happiness might never have been spread abroad?

In the days before he was caught up quite so intimately in their fate, Kreitman had not been above firing the occasional cheap shot at the Merriweathers' example of parenting – semi-pseudonymous writers of (at one time) highly successful self-improvement novels for children age category 11-14, parents of actual children who were going to the dogs.

Like yours, Kreitman?

He wouldn't have denied it. Just like mine. Only I'm in purses, not in children's books. I
expect
children to go to the dogs.

In fact – had Kreitman been talking facts – the C. C. Merriweather books were not quite as anodyne as he imagined them. True, the
Flying Away
series of which Kreitman disapproved, all questions of content aside, purely on gerundival grounds, suffered from being too obviously post Peter Pan. It was Charlemagne who had planted the seed, telling Mrs C. C. Chassyboots during the interval of a performance of the play that he too, as a boy, had tried jumping off the wardrobe.

‘To see if you could fly, Charlie?'

‘To see if I could commit suicide.'

Not long after that, they together hit upon the idea of talking
the world's children down from their wardrobes by reminding them that there were other ways of flying. Becoming a pilot, for example. Or an air hostess. Or an astronaut. Or a balloonist. Or First Girl on the Moon – the fastest seller of the lot.

‘What about bungee jumping next?' their editor wondered. After thinking about it, they arrived at a mutual decision that bungee jumping was more about not hitting the ground than taking to the air, wasn't strictly speaking a profession, and wasn't really something they felt they ought to be encouraging their young readers to try.

In this,
Flying Away
was not typical of the C. C. Merriweather books. Normally they took greater risks. Slightly greater risks. While other children's writers were banging out their myths and fantasies, their legends of Ungala, their spook stories and sagas in the manner of
The Hobbit
, the Charlies stuck to their guns and wrote about what they called real kids living now. They tackled race, venereal disease, depression, drunkenness, drugs, Aids, illegal immigrants and even, latterly, affairs between schoolchildren and their teachers. They weren't comfortable writing about poor kids – never having met any – and they knew there was only a limited fantasy market for books about rich kids, so they pitched it somewhere in between, inventing little classless striplings who never smoked or swore but knew where smoking and swearing were to be found, and little sexless hoydens who were never once penetrated no matter how far they allowed relations with the head of geography to go. ‘Goodbye,' the relevant member of staff always lamented on the last page, ‘I will never forget you or what you have taught me.' Moral? Goodness is its own lesson. And you don't have to give away everything to make a lasting impression.

There
was the problem: the C. C. Merriweathers weren't excessive enough for the children for whom they thought they wrote. Some critics believed they'd been losing their touch and their audience for years. Others admired them for not taking
the easy route of witchcraft and horror. But all of that went for nothing anyway when, out of nowhere, old-fashioned owl-eyed boys with secret powers flew back with a vengeance on a magic broomstick.

What price depression in a suburban comprehensive now?

As for the Charlies' own real-life children, they were no more going to the dogs than anybody else's. So Tim had been on
Blind Date
and now fantasised about getting on
Big Brother?
From whom, under the age of twenty-five, did that significantly mark him out? And with regard to Kitty the bulldyke – a) she was no such thing, the bull part being a fiction entirely of her father's making, the extravagance of the word and the activities it denoted having caught his fancy; and b) a little light dykery was de rigueur, if not by now all but passé, among girls of her class and generation. Kreitman wouldn't have known because he never went to such places, but girls experimentally making out with girls was a commonplace in every clubbing venue in the country. His own daughters could have told him that.

But how far they were or were not burnt-out cases by their late teens, and how far that made them any different from their peers, is not the question. What we want to know – of the Kreitman girls as well – is how much their routine descent into young persons' hell was quickened by the recent cataclysmic events in their families. How did the sight of their several parents behaving like kids themselves, tying one another up into a cat's cradle of sexual irregularity – an all too regular irregularity – and then falling mooningly in love with the new arrangements – how did that gross spectacle strike them?

The fingers which Juliet and Cressida put to their brains on the occasion of Mummy's making a festive bonfire of Uncle Charlie's wardrobe on the lawn almost gets it. Fingers down their throats would have been better.

They were universally disgusted.

‘I am too old myself to take account of the distaste of young
people,' Kreitman told Chas when the subject finally climbed into bed with them.

‘Where does that leave you with Hamlet?' Chas wondered.

‘Wishing he were older.'

‘It's all right for you,' she reminded him. ‘Yours are in Thailand, no doubt having a ball and never giving you a thought. I have two going dippy on the spot.'

Not much given at the best of times to considering the feelings of people not within his immediate field of vision, Kreitman had forgotten all about Tim and Kitty on principle, neither enquiring after them nor accepting any of Chas's invitations at least to meet them for tea – though not at Kreitman's place, not under the bed – so they could judge (‘Judge what, Mummy?') with their own eyes. He was determined, on grounds of fastidiousness not far removed from theirs, never to acknowledge Chas's domestic existence, the fish-pie and fridge-magnet Chas he'd known under the previous dispensation, and that meant never visiting her at home in Richmond, which anyway, by all accounts – that's to say by Chas's account – her little ones had turned into a madhouse.

‘I don't know whether I can face this,' she would say some mornings, as Kreitman was handing her over to Maurice to Smart back to Richmond. ‘Timmy lying in a pool of vomit with half his nose missing, and Kitty weeping in every room.'

‘Stay with me,' Kreitman said.

‘And do what with the house?'

‘Torch it.'

‘And the children?' She knew the answer.

‘Torch them.'

There were times when she was tempted. They were over-egging the pudding, her children.

Yes, of course Kitty had felt betrayed by her father, betrayed on her mother's behalf and – you didn't have to be much of a psychologist to work this out – betrayed on her own. If Daddy was going to run away with anyone, blah-blah … Doubly betrayed
both ends, remembering that Aunty Hazel was shock number two, shock number one having been Daddy's assault on the good name of Aunty Dotty. What was it with Daddy and aunties? Good question, Chas thought. ‘I can't bear to look at him,' Kitty said, in the immediate aftermath of shock number one. Which turned into ‘I won't forgive you if you ever see him or speak to him again,' after shock number two. ‘That's a little extreme, darling,' Chas had replied, but since she was feeling pretty extreme herself, she understood. ‘And I don't want him ever coming to this house, or trying to contact me, or speaking to any of my friends,' Kitty had gone on, stumbling over her tongue stud. If it's causing her so much discomfort, Chas thought, why doesn't she have the bloody thing out? But your daughter's your daughter. ‘I'm sure he will be too ashamed to try,' she'd said. ‘Too ashamed of me or too ashamed of himself?' ‘Why would he be ashamed of you, Kitty?' ‘Why does he call me a bulldyke? Why did he used to call me Kitty-Litter?' You know your father and his jokes, Chas half wanted to say. But the words choked in her throat. ‘Your father is a sexually very disturbed person,' was what she chose to say instead.

All that was fine. Not fine, terrible, but as you would have expected it to be. Charlie had acted despicably and his daughter despised him. What Chas couldn't fathom was why Kitty was now feeling the same way about her. In the time she was alone, mourning Charlie and their collaboration, Chas had bowed to Kitty's taunting. ‘You have been such a doormat, Mummy. You invited him to wipe his feet on you. You allowed him to believe he could get away with anything. He treated you with
such
contempt!' This didn't seem a fair description of either of them, but Chas accepted it. She too had failed Kitty in some way and this was her punishment. But oughtn't it to have followed, now that she had shaken Charlie out of her hair, now that she was mistress of her own affairs, no longer a doormat, no longer a shame to her daughter – oughtn't it to have followed that Kitty would
be applauding her every inch of the way? ‘Go for it, Mummy! Whoo!' – shouldn't Kitty have been shouting that?

Instead there were reproachful looks, flouncings out of rooms the minute Chas entered them, bouts of overcast moroseness so electric they fused the mains, sly expressions of regret, almost, for her father, as though Chas had become the betrayer suddenly in the revised history of why their little family was no more. And then, when Chas arrived home late one morning looking admittedly like a woman who'd been up all night wrestling with a gorilla – though the truth, as we know, was that she'd been lying quietly listening to her lover's body think – the outrageous indictment: ‘Mummy, you should see yourself. You look a slut.'

Quite something, Chas didn't say, coming from a bulldyke!

And Timmy?

Somewhere in her heart Chas disdained her son. It usually happens that a mother loses all respect for her manchildren about the time they start falling for girls, their once-monastic touch-me-not sons all at once become open house for vagrants, every window in their natures banging open, fools for whoever comes knocking. Kreitman made her feel better by telling her that his mother had misprized him at the same age for exactly the same reasons. ‘It improved,' he said, ‘when I gave up on expectancy and settled down into unhappiness. Then she felt I was back. A verdant son is a nightmare to a mother.'

‘Well, I'm not sure I'd call Timmy verdant, exactly,' she said.

Verdancy of the conventional sexual sort Chas wouldn't have minded. The trouble with Timmy was that he wasn't just open house, he was vacant house, tenantless, the windows of his nature flapping broken on their hinges.

He seemed greedy to her, without exactly having appetite. He wanted things, without exactly having ambition. He passed judgements, without appearing to have a morality. He denounced
his parents' sexual conduct with vehemence, obscenely, without appearing to know decency.

Kreitman had his own thoughts. Born into what should have been the advantages of a cultivated, middle-class home, with bookshelves on every wall and the
Kultur
gathered every weekend on the lawn, Tim had been permitted, with barely a demur, to embrace the culture of the council estate. Permitted? No, it was more than that.
Encouraged
. For what reason?
Nostalgie de la boue
.

‘Why are there pictures of footballers on his bedroom door?' Kreitman used to enquire, preferably over dinner in the presence of the
Kultur
, when there was the chance of whipping up one of those civilised arguments he liked so much.

‘He's a kid. All kids are interested in football.'

‘But you're not interested in football, Charlie. You've never watched a game of football in your life. I bet you don't even know how it's scored.'

‘What have my interests got to do with it?' Charlie exclaimed, cheered on by everyone at dinner. For these were the great democratising days of parenting, when nothing was feared more than the intrusive influence of parents themselves.

‘Everything, Charlie. That's the point of Tim having you for a father and not someone else. You should be passing on your advantages.'

‘We do. We send him to a good school.'

‘Where's he allowed to do the same?'

‘I don't know.'

‘And when he comes home, it's to this?'

‘As you know very well, Marvin, kids go their own way.'

‘Not if you make efforts to save them.'

‘
Save
them! This is the purest melodrama. Save them from what?' It was usually Chas who upped the tempo of the challenge at this point. Unless it was Hazel.

‘Come on. You know what they have to be saved from. At best, triviality. At worst, degradation.'

‘Degradation!' This ejaculation from everybody. For these were the great days of moral relativity, when whoever expressed a preference was a sermoniser.

‘Commonness then, if degradation is too hot for you. Tell me something, Charlie – since I know you don't read the
Sun
, tell me why Tim has page-three girls on his wall.'

‘Boys do that, Marvin. Boys like looking at girls.'

‘Not girls like that, they don't. Plumbers like looking at girls like that. It's an acquired taste. Commonness always is. We glamourise commonness, thinking it's a state of nature. It isn't – nature is altogether more refined. So why, if it's acquired, are you allowing your boy to acquire it?'

Two invariable answers to that. You're a snob, Marvin. And you're making a great deal about very little, because kids grow out of their pin-ups and their football posters.