Who's Sorry Now? (13 page)

‘
Sunday evening, rained all day
,' the diary read, ‘
drenched to the bone and glad to be home. Spent an unlooked-for hour sheltering under
a tree with Mr Leonard Woolf, whose gardens I had gone to inspect. The poor man wretched on account of the recent suicide of his wife by drowning. The sight of all that falling water would not have helped much, I imagine. Whether I should have acceded to his requests in other circumstances I very much doubt. But there was a charitable side to it. And it was only a small favour he asked. Besides, my own curiosity as to the matter of his Jewishness – never having encountered the phenomenon before – spurred me on a little. For myself, cannot say it was a pleasure, cannot say it was not. For him – definitely not
.'

Like her? The same droll obligingness, not devoid of a sense of duty? The same passive recipience of what was and yet was not erotic liberty? Maybe the same. Or, if not the same, similar.

As for Charlie's mother, Dotty on the telephone to Charlie in London swore blind that she had seen the coalman position himself a hot breath behind her at the Shepton Mallet street party for the Queen's Silver Jubilee and manoeuvre her hand into his flies.

‘I don't believe you,' Charlie said. Though she could quite picture the pantomime. Lawk-a-mercy, Mr Brotherton!

‘Then don't believe me. But if you'd seen him bulging in his best suit you'd have wished it was your hand.'

‘Dotty! What did Daddy say?'

‘Daddy? Daddy was away surveying, as usual.'

‘So what did Mummy do?'

‘She kept it there, silly.'

Well, I suppose it
was
a party, Charlie told herself. And in a small, cold community you don't hurt the feelings of the coalman.

She pursed her lips for the traffic cop in Vauxhall, thought about a joke since Hazel was with her, then thought better of it and blew into the bag.

And despite the family susceptivity she truly only opened her mouth for her professor, and never moved away her hand, on that one occasion?

Truly.

And never ever, post Charlie, with anybody else?

Never ever?

Well … just the teensiest time. But that wasn't anything of vital importance either.

‘Shhh!' she ordered him, smoothing his hair.

Kreitman loved nothing more than having a woman's hand in or near his hair. Had someone told him that God was a woman and would stroke his brow and run her fingers through his hair on his arrival in Her presence, he would gladly have gone to Her at once, and to hell with all the others.

Now more than ever. A woman to blow cool air across his brain, that's what he needed. A woman to blow women
out
of his brain.

The cruel paradox of Kreitman's life, as he saw it: he was ill with women, but only a woman could make him better.

He felt a little less ill, opening his eyes this time, than when he'd first come out of his faint on the Soho streets. For Kreitman, fainting was the proof that he would the badly, and that life was an accident, without meaning or purpose. He had been a congenital fainter as a boy. The sight of blood did it. Horror stories did it. Hot food did it. His father did it. Being struck did it. Seeing a hand raised in anger, even if not to him, did it. Nietzsche went mad on the streets of Trieste, seeing a man beating a horse. Marginally less unstable than the philosopher, Marvin Kreitman fainted at the zoo, seeing a parrot, crazed with being caged, denuding itself of its feathers. Kreitman knew how the parrot felt. Not the being caged, but the futility. Sometimes he plucked at himself, ripping out his fingernails and toenails, tearing the skin from his knuckles, pulling out individual hairs from his scalp. And fainting. Told by the doctor that this was merely a phase Marvin was going through, his mother took him to be examined by a specialist. Several thousand pounds of tests
later, Marvin was diagnosed ‘sensitive'. Money well spent. ‘My son is clinically sensitive,' she informed friends. ‘I could have told you that and saved us a fortune,' his father croaked. Whereupon Marvin fainted again.

The fainting itself he could live with. Sometimes it was even pleasurable just to vanish from the scene. What he could not bear was the coming-to. When Kreitman came to after fainting it was as though he were being reassembled. So why wasn't there satisfaction in that? Reunification is meant to be a happy event. Things coming together which have been apart – friends, lovers, nations, ligaments – are deemed to be fortunate. Occasions for a party. Fireworks. Not in Kreitman's case. When Kreitman came to after fainting, he felt he was being reassembled out of parts that were not his and did not fit. There was physical pain in it, the agony of bones going into sockets that would not take them; but the mental anguish was the hardest to support, the nauseating certainty that the mind you'd been given back was not
your
mind, that it was of another colour and configuration from your mind, that the patterns you saw were not the patterns you were accustomed to seeing, that there was a music to the objects you woke to which bore no resemblance to any music you knew, or to any rhythmic pattern or system of notation you recognised or liked. He had been reassembled randomly, thrown together, a stranger to himself, without consideration of suitability or match, and that proved there was no meaning or purpose out there. Kabbalists argued that the Godhead who had once presided over a unified and harmonious universe had become alienated from himself, and as a consequence we were all so many scattered sparks, shaken as through from a falling torch. Fine by Kreitman. There had been meaning once, but there wasn't any now. Unfortunately, he was living now.

Among the scattered sparks that comprised this latest disgusting composition of what wasn't himself was a fiery recollection of loose talk with Charlie Merriweather. What he thought he could
remember couldn't possibly be the actual event. Another person's conversation had been confused with his. As for how he'd spent his own evening, some poor insensible bastard elsewhere on the planet was waking with a dream of that.

But he was still alarmed to find Charlie Merriweather's wife, standing like Florence Nightingale in a spinnaker, by his bed.

‘Where are the others?' he asked her. ‘Or are you here on your own?'

Because Kreitman noticed such things, he noticed that she didn't say, ‘Why, would you
like
me to be here on my own?' But he also noticed that she also didn't say, ‘And what, Marvin, would I be doing here on my own?'

‘Charlemagne's asleep on a bench in the waiting room,' was what she did say, ‘and Hazel's having breakfast with Nyman.'

Here we go again, Kreitman thought. Wrong parts. ‘Nyman?'

‘The cyclist.'

‘Which cyclist? Not the faggot who ran me down?'

Charlie shrugged and shook her head, as though Kreitman's bad language were a poisonous insect that had flown into her hair and she wanted to be rid of it.

‘And he's called Nyman, you say?'

‘Yes. An Anglicisation of Niemand.'

‘How the fuck do you know that?'

‘He tells you.'

‘A German?'

‘I don't know. An Austrian, I think.'

‘There are no such things as Austrians. All Austrians are Germans.'

‘Hush, Marvin.'

‘I don't have to hush. Germans I can say what I like about. That's their function for the next thousand years – to be the butt of everyone who isn't German. Especially when they're faggots who run me down in the street. And Hazel's having breakfast with him, did I hear you say?'

‘Yes.'

‘Loyal of her. And would you have any idea how Hazel happened to run into this Nyman?'

‘He was here. He's been here all night with Charlie.'

‘I'll tell you what,' Kreitman said, ‘why don't you join them for breakfast and leave me to have another little faint. Maybe when I next surface the world will make more sense. It's kind of you to have come, Charlie.'

‘
De nada
,' Chas said.

Neither quite awake, nor quite unconscious, impressionable Kreitman drifts through Spain.

Schlock Spain, but then what other kind is there? Castanets, garlic, warm nights, a dusty bar in a dusty
calle
, beaded curtains rattling like snakes, and a pregnant whore, older than his mother, fingers hotter than hell, thrumming out a malagueña on his thighs.

(Surprising, really, that Kreitman never recounted this experience to his young daughters, lying stiff as lozenges in their beds. For it contained everything he liked in a story – expectation, sensuality, disappointment, failure.)

‘
Todos los otros son fríos
,' the pregnant whore sings – not to him, to the other whores, but it is music to his ears.

All of the others. All cold. All except him cold.

And not just cold as in the opposite to hot. But
friós
. Which sounds icy to his Spanish. Arctic. Freezing in the blood. Frigid and frigidaired with fear.

But not him.

‘
Gracias
,' he says.

She smiles at him. ‘
De nada
.'

He is thirteen, on a school trip to Barcelona. ‘Don't go off the beaten track,' the teacher tells them, so they do. Old Knotty with his twisted teeth. ‘Careful, boys.' So they're not. But it's only beer the five under-age boys are after,
cerveza
in a shady bar where they
can practise their Spanish and get a taste of what it will be like to be men in a foreign country. Sooner than they think.

‘
Aqui!
' the barman orders them. He is wonderfully blind in one eye and lame in one leg. Everyone in Spain is either half blind or half lame. The legacy of the Civil War, according to Knotty. So there's the smell of killing in the
calle
, too. You don't argue with killers. The barman rattles open bead curtains – ‘
Aqui, aqui!
' – to a bare anteroom with a single bullfight poster on the wall. Here, confessions will have been beaten out of traitors. Kreitman has seen the films. Cruel hands shaving the heads of young girls who consorted with the enemy. A scrubbed table awaits them. A jug of beer is slid in. And some colourless liquor in an unlabelled bottle. Did they ask for that? ‘Clip joint,' they all think, their five little hearts beating as one. But they don't know what a clip joint is yet.

After the beer, the whores. One after another they enter, like aunties bearing birthday gifts. A fat one, a thin one, an old one, a young one, and his, the pregnant one, not too far gone, only a blip where her belly is and eyes that dance at him. Older than his mother, but otherwise could
be
his mother. The fat one sits on Gerald Barnish's lap. The thin one inclines her head on Hugo Feaver's shoulder. The old one and the young one carve up the Dorment twins. And Kreitman's drums her fingers on his thighs. Call it the beginning of his life, call it the end. Everything is decided for him at this moment. Whatever it is I'm feeling now, he tells himself, is what I was put on earth to feel. Blood runs like honey through his veins. His bones fold. Tremors skate across his skin as though on a field of melted butter. Now he knows.

And the others? Frightened and wanting to go home.
Fríos
.

He is so whatever the opposite to
frío
is himself, the bottom of his mouth has welded itself to the top. ‘
Cuànto?
' he manages to ask.

‘
Diecinueve
.' Her voice is harsh and alcoholic. A bicycle chain lubricated with aniseed.

‘
Pesetas?
'

Could it be pesetas? For that many pesetas he could have her a hundred times that night and still leave with money in his pocket.

She laughs a gypsy laugh, her drumming fingers scaling heights he did not know were there. ‘
Años
,' she says.

He knows she isn't nineteen
years
. But if lying is to be part of it, he's up for that as well. For lies, too, taste sweet.

‘
Muy hermosa
,' he says.

‘
Quien?
'

‘
Usted
.'

She laughs at him, the little red-faced fiery formal boy. ‘
Gracias, señor
,' she says.

‘
De nada
.'

But he never does find out how many pesetas. Suddenly, Knotty with his twisted teeth is asking for them at the bar. Five boys, in blazers, seen disappearing into a disreputable bodega much like this. Yes, those five. And now, out!

Must he? He feels the tears rise. Will he never see her again? Never, never, never, never?

Relieved to be rescued, even by Old Knotty, the other boys file out. But not Kreitman. Kreitman feels his life is over. The whores shrug lazily. Kreitman shows his tear-torn face to his. She smiles and raps one final melody on his leg. ‘
Adiós
,' she says. ‘
Adiós, mi héroe
.' And then in gargled English, ‘Till the next time.'

And now the next time is all he can think about. Confined to his hotel the following day. Out of town on a bus trip the day after. Musical theatre the evening after that. Something about bells in a village in the Pays Basque. Ding-dong, ding-dong. The clanging of his heart. For he is in love as well as on heat. On his last night, clutching all the pesetas he owns, he gives his frigid school friends the slip and goes looking for her. Down this
calle
and up that. But how to tell one disreputable bodega from another? He has no luck. Every barman has one eye. Every bar
a beaded curtain to a naked anteroom. And because he doesn't know her name he cannot ask for her, even were desperation to give him the courage to shape the sentence. Towards the end of the night, sad and footsore, he thinks he sees her ahead of him. He runs to show her his pesetas. It will be like showing her his heart, for he is not at all dismayed by the element of transaction in this, his first passion, whatever his mother would have said. Not at all. The pesetas define his excitement. In some important way, they
are
the excitement. It was exciting just counting them out. But the woman he overtakes is only a ghastly simulacrum of his woman, respectable and half her age.