Who's Sorry Now? Read online

  CONTENTS

  Book I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Book II

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Book III

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Finale

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  To Jenny – with love

  The sacred lowe o’ weel-plac’d love,

  Luxuriantly indulge it;

  But never tempt th’illicit rove,

  Tho’ naething should divulge it:

  I waive the quantum o’ the sin,

  The hazard of concealing;

  But, och! it hardens a’ within

  And petrifies the feeling!

  Robert Burns

  The fuck it does.

  Marvin Kreitman

  Book I

  Chapter One

  You can learn a lot about a man from the sorts of bedtime stories he tells his children. Marvin Kreitman, archivist of himself, put his daughters to sleep – when he was at home – with reminiscences so painful to him, they might have been designed to hurry the girls out of childhood altogether.

  This was one of them:

  Every Thursday, Friday, Saturday night, come wind, come rain, small squishy-hearted Marvin Kreitman – that’s me – watched his father, the Purse King – that’s your grandfather – shake from his leather apron, like rats from a rat-catcher’s sack, the takings from his market stall. Spellbound, he watched the crumpled notes creak like sand crabs in a huddle, slowly open, move sideways and come apart. Every Thursday, Friday, Saturday night the same. And every Thursday, Friday, Saturday night, small squishy-hearted Marvin Kreitman was excluded from the count.

  ‘Go up to your room and do your homework.’ Your grandmother talking.

  ‘I’ve done my homework.’

  ‘Marvin, you can never do too much homework!’

  ‘Can’t I just stay to straighten the fivers?’

  ‘Fivers! Fivers!’ Theatrically, like a woman concealing a terrible secret, a crime or a deformity, Mona Kreitman interposed herself between her only child and the contents of the sack. ‘Do you know what my dream for you is?’ she asked. I did, but I waited for her to tell me anyway. ‘My dream for you is that you won’t ever have to touch money. My dream for you is that you will be above money. Look what money does to you.’ She showed me how dirty money was, how it got into the grains of your skin, how it stained the palms of your hands and blackened the tips of your fingers the way newspapers did, only worse. Had she been able to tear open her chest for me, and show how money discoloured the soul as well, of course she would have done so.

  ‘So why do you touch it then?’

  ‘Ha!’ A bitter laughless laugh, full of narrative promise. Once upon a time … But a grown-up story with no good fairies in it. Unless the good fairy was her. She lowered herself into the notes, a mermaid in a sea of creaking crabs, until we were the same size. ‘We do what we do, Marvin,’ she sang to me, on her knees, making ‘we’ a tragical and lonely word, ‘because we have no choice. You, on the other hand, have a choice. We have given you that choice. You ask me why we touch money? So that you won’t ever have to. Now do your homework and become Prime Minister.’

  Not to be argumentative, but because I wanted to stay swimming in the warm pools of her eyes, I said, ‘Prime ministers get to touch money.’

  ‘Oh, do they now! So what do you think the Chancellor of the Exchequer is for?’

  ‘Then I’ll be Chancellor of the Exchequer.’

  ‘See! There only has to be money on the floor and already you’re thinking small. Listen to me … A little boy as clever as you are doesn’t ever have to settle for second-best. You just do your homework and become Prime Minister.’ Whereupon she put her arms around me and kissed me, more as if I were a little king than a politician, the king Cophetua and she, with her blazing black Caspian eyes, her gold hooped earrings and her filthy fingertips, the beggar-maid.

  ‘If you want to count something,’ my father chipped in, a croak from the house of the dead, ‘count your blessings.’

  But blessings are less easy to count than money and Marvin Kreitman never did learn to count his.

  ‘Not even us, Daddy?’ the girls were too young, in those days, to have asked.

  Which might have given him pause for thought. As it was, determined to be a better parent than his own father, loving if a little absent, at his most comfortable with them once they’d actually gone to sleep, he rose from the tiny toadstool chair by their beds, put his cheek to each of theirs, smelled their hair, as sharp as Chardonnay, kissed the tangy gristle of their ears, and wished them sweet dreams.

  ‘And tomorrow night, if you’re good’ – and if he happened to be home – ‘I’ll tell you what they did to Daddy next …’

  Charlie Merriweather, on the other hand, a father who was always at home, sprawled on the bed with his children and invented stories calculated to make them splutter into each other’s necks and slither about all over him like sea lions.

  For example:

  One day, Timmy Hyphen Smelly-Botty Farnsbarns, brother of Kitty-Litter Farnsbarns, was hiding in the school lavs reading the Financial Times – as he did every morning in summer, preferring to keep the Daily Telegraph, which, as you know, is warmer, for the winter months – when suddenly the headmaster, who also happened to be his father, the Right Reverend Doctor Arty-Farty Farnsbarns, hammered at the door with a dire warning. ‘If you don’t come out of there in the next seven and a half hours, Timmy Hyphen Smelly-Botty, you won’t only end up being flushed away along with your dooh–dahs, you will miss the school outing to Feelgood Hall. And you know what that means, don’t you?’

  Timmy Hyphen Smelly-Botty knew only too well what missing the school outing to Feelgood Hall meant. It meant missing a ride in the school bus, singing ‘Ten Green Bottles’. It meant missing sitting next to his girlfriend, Dymphna No Hyphen Droopy Drawers and stealing dolly mixtures from her socks. It meant going without isosceles triangles of cucumber-and-cream-cheese sandwiches, and trapeziums of treacle tarts, and rhomboids of hot rhubarb crumble drowning in lumpy-dumpy custard, to say nothing of his favourite – lemon meringue pie, served in crystal icosahedral dishes with the arms of Feelgood Hall engraved into their bottoms. But above all it meant not seeing the First Lord Felix Very Very Feelgood, who also had the family coat of arms engraved into his bottom, and who was often to be found by the lily pond with one leg tucked under him like a duck, reciting the poem Timmy Hyphen Smelly-Botty Farnsbarns loved best in all the world –

  I’ll tell thee everything I can:

  There’s little to relate.

  I saw an aged, aged man.

  A-sitting on a gate.

  But then Charlie Merriweather was a professional, one half of the team who wrote the much-loved (if these days … but to hell with these days) C. C. Merriweather books for children. Whereas Marvin Kreitman, despite all the eloquent interventions of his mother, only sold purses.

  Why Kreitman saw selling purses as an ‘only’, considering the number of them he did sell – his father’s boy, after all, the luggage baron of south London in his own right now, with not-quite-prime-site shops all the way from Battersea to Peckham – only someone who has been groomed to be Prime Minister, but has never sto
od for Parliament, can understand.

  And as he had once tried to explain to his children, lying stiff and startled, if not downright terrified, in their beds, he was not a man gifted with the grace to count his blessings.

  Chapter Two

  Which is not a reason for our refusing to count them for him.

  Handsome, clever and rich, white, male and whole, a sperm-tank heterosexual, though not a heave-ho heterosexual, youthfully middle-aged, with a comfortably over-furnished home, an only middlingly cheerless disposition by the suicidal standards of the age, and, as of his most recent precautionary Wellman going-over, entirely clot-, cholesterol- and cancer-free. Prostate firmer than a green mango and a colon so clean he could have invited his mother to take tea in it. Put your ear to Kreitman’s squishy, wire-haired chest and you’d hear the engine purring nicely. Forty-five thousand on the clock and who would dare say there wasn’t another forty-five thousand left in him. For Kreitman is of the generation that might just live for ever.

  But let’s not go overboard. Handsome only if you like bruised summer-berry lips and eyes that appear permanently – and painfully to the person who must look at them – punched out; clever, if you don’t too much mind assertive, though not so assertive as to have done anything worthwhile with his PhD, such as become the Prime Minister he was meant to be, or Chancellor, or even, as many of his contemporaries had become, ball polisher, language juggler, or brave-face artist to one or to the other; and no more than moderately rich given what everybody else was earning, south London only being south London – so not eat-your-heart-out or Hello! magazine rich, not a multi or a funky millionaire, but certainly well-enough-to-do to have fulfilled the first of his mother’s ambitions for him, and to have kept his hands free of the stain of paper money.

  To complete his happiness, he loved – without much thinking about them – four women: his mother (of course), his wife (which was more unusual for a Kreitman), and his daughters Juliet and Cressida. And was in love with – that’s to say he thought about them every second of every day, except for when he was lying whimpering in the arms of any individual one of them, during which time, as a matter of erotic rectitude, he thought only about her – five more. His mother’s second husband’s nurse, his wife’s interior decorator, the curator of his daughter Cressida’s first mixed show, and the mothers, unsuspected of course by their daughters or daughters-in-law, of his wife’s interior decorator’s ex-husband, and of a window dresser with whom he’d been in love in earlier times.

  It isn’t necessary to memorise all these. Kreitman didn’t.

  That’s bravado, of course. Though he was sexually squeamish and shrank from being thought dissolute or lecherous – anyone less lecherous than himself he had never met – Marvin Kreitman did entertain a nostalgic affection for many of the old discredited categories of masculinist swagger. He would have liked to cut a swathe. He would have liked to leap from balcony to balcony, the edge of his sword a flash of silver lightning in the Venetian night. But he wasn’t enough of a blasphemer to be a rake. Had any frozen statue confronted Kreitman with his misdeeds, he’d have cried ‘God help me!’ and run a mile. In fact, he was just a serial faller-in-love, a sentimental maker of goo-goo eyes like Thomas Hardy or H. G. Wells, rheumy, sad moustachioed men in frock coats and tight Edwardian trousers. Kreitman could do sad and rheumy as well as anyone, but because he was dark and shiny, with a complexion as polished as the carapace of a beetle, people took him to be a hunter and a carnivore. He was the victim of his appearance. He looked the way men were no longer supposed to look.

  Which might explain why he got on well with women of an earlier generation. Mothers of the girls he went out with always liked him more than their daughters did. And mostly he felt the same about them. Give him a mother and he’d forget the daughter, any time. There was a quality of disappointment or disillusion in mothers that agreed with him. Offered the choice, he would rather have sarcasm in a woman than sweetness. Maybe he felt he could do something for sarcastic women; console them or compensate them. Maybe he felt that their bitterness exonerated him in advance: at worst he would only confirm what their experience had already taught them. Or maybe, if this isn’t altogether too simple an explanation, he could never be on the end of too much mothering. Whatever the reason, one way or another, he went in for mothers.

  So how come he had made such a dog’s dinner of relations with his wife’s mother?

  The very question Marvin Kreitman put to Hazel Kreitman (then Hazel Nossiter) at the time of their engagement, more than twenty years before. ‘So what’s wrong with your mother?’

  What could Hazel Nossiter say? ‘She doesn’t like you.’

  ‘I know she doesn’t like me. Why doesn’t she like me?’

  And what could Hazel Nossiter say to that? She doesn’t like you because your father sells purses on a street market in Balham? She doesn’t like you because you’re sulky and never look at her? Instead she said, and this was also true, ‘She doesn’t like you because you’ve never let her like you.’

  Kreitman’s mother-in-law kept a photograph on her dressing table of her daughter with her arms around a man. The man was not Kreitman. The man was a soldier in the Israeli Defence Forces. Yossi. A grinner with more teeth visible than Kreitman had in the whole of his mouth. Hazel had met Yossi on holiday the year before she met Kreitman. She had been travelling with a student Christian group to the Holy Places. She wasn’t Christian in the Christian sense, but it was something to do. Hazel was like that: people asked her to go somewhere with them, so she went. As witness Yossi. He had stopped the bus Hazel was travelling on, ordered her off at rifle-point, walked her into the Negev and strip-searched her.

  It was love at first sight. As soon as Kreitman’s mother-in-law saw Yossi’s photograph she fell in love with him.

  That Yossi was no more than an outdoor version of Kreitman, Kreitman without his shirt on, only made it worse for Kreitman and for Hazel. ‘If you’re so hot for Yossi, how come you aren’t hot at all for Marvin?’ Hazel asked.

  ‘Because Yossi smiles,’ her mother explained. ‘And because he doesn’t have a pleading expression in his eyes. And because he doesn’t look as though he thinks he’s done something wrong. And because his father doesn’t sell purses on a street market in Balham. Are those enough reasons for you, darling?’

  This was why Kreitman had never let his mother-in-law like him enough for him to fall in love with her. She was already in love with another man. And Kreitman only fell in love with women who were already a bit in love with him. Which shows, as Mrs Nossiter had shrewdly noticed, how little confidence in himself he had.

  Despite which, or more likely because of which, he was head over heels in love with five women and not insusceptible to a sixth. For once you start falling in love with women it is impossible to stop.

  And once you start counting …

  But Kreitman had to count something. No one can get through life indifferent to numbers. Money, blessings, lovers – we are too ethereal to do without the material world, and too indeterminate to tell ourselves apart without measuring how much material we’ve commandeered. Call it ballast, call it markings. So many tons, so many stripes. The God-fearing count their beads, and even the most self-denying anchorite tots up what he’s relinquished at the end of every day.

  Making a distinction between those he didn’t think about and those he thought about all the time, between those who were so conjunctive to his life and soul he didn’t need to think about them and those who renewed him with the novelty of their affections, Kreitman counted to five. When his life made no sense to him he would try counting backwards, to include every woman he had ever loved, and every woman who had ever loved him, but there was something pathetic about that. He’d save retrospective accumulation for when he was an old man. For the time being, five (plus four) would do. Not too few. Not too many.

  Though of course any number can be too many for some people. Take his friend, Charlie Merriweath
er …

  ‘I get nightmares after talking to you,’ Charlie told him over their weekly pretend-pauper dim sum lunch in Lisle Street. ‘I dream about waking up in bed with someone whose name I can’t remember.’

  Excluding his daughter, whom he could never not think of as his little girl – for ever the wriggly Kitty-Litter Farnsbarns – Charlie loved just the one woman. And her name he had no difficulty at all remembering in bed, seeing as it was the same as his. Charlotte Jane – the other half of C. C. Merriweather, the composite writer of children’s stories – known as Charlie since before she could remember. A tomboy name. And a tomboy she had looked, protruding like a sheaf of wheat from her wedding dress, unconfined and boisterous, even as she and Charlie exchanged their marriage vows. ‘Charlie Juniper, do you take Charlie Merriweather? Charlie Merriweather, do you take Charlie Juniper?’ Both unprotected, lacking eyelashes, big-boned and trundling, with the air of having been left out in all seasons, like the Cerne Abbas giant and his wife. Did the Charlies take? Of course the Charlies took. ‘I now pronounce you … You may kiss …’ And they’d been kissing each other, to the exclusion of all others, ever since. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. Just fancy, Marvin Kreitman thought, wondering if it was like kissing yourself.

  ‘I’m interested to hear,’ were his actual words, ‘that when you go to bed what you dream about is going to bed.’

  ‘Only after seeing you.’

  ‘I wouldn’t think that one through, Charlie.’

  Charlie Merriweather laid down his chopsticks and sighed one of his big sad cheery sighs. ‘Not the homo routine, Marvin.’

  ‘I can’t help it. I’m homophobic.’

  ‘You affect to be homophobic.’

  ‘Only because I’m a latent homosexual.’

  ‘You’re not a latent homosexual. And anyway, no homosexual would have you.’

  ‘That’s why I’m homophobic.’

  ‘All this,’ Charlie said, trying to change the mood, ‘to disguise the fact that you think I’m the bent one.’