Who's Sorry Now? (22 page)

‘I'm not in the house …'

He waited for her to digest that information, measure its import for herself, but she said nothing.

‘I haven't been in the house since I got back from Dartmoor,' he continued.

‘Aha,' she said. Pull the other one.

‘Think about it, Chas. What would I be doing there? Tucking them in and taking them Ovaltine?'

‘I wouldn't put that past you.'

‘You think I'm a pander as well as a sabbaticalist?'

‘I think you're capable of anything, Marvin.'

‘Maybe, but not that. I've told you, I'm motivated by nostalgia, not pervery.'

‘I'm surprised you call it pervery.'

‘Meaning?'

‘Meaning you might think of it as companionable – your wife, your best friend … and you.'

‘Forget it, Charlie. That's not my scene.'

‘Not your
scene?
' She let out a mock gasp. ‘I don't suppose you remember the violence, Marvin, with which you once publicly dumped on me for using that expression.'

‘I don't. But I apologise.'

‘For dumping on me?'

‘For that too. But it shows how agitated talking to you makes me. What I should have said was, “Threesomes? My thoughts do not that way tend.”'

‘Which is why you left the house?'

‘I've told you, I'd left the house already.'

‘To live alone or with some girl?'

Was she jealous?

‘I don't do girls. But yes, to live alone.'

‘I can't see your thoughts tending to loneliness for long, Marvin.'

She was. She
was
jealous.

‘You know damn well where my thoughts are tending, Charlie,' he told her.

She paused, listening, listening. ‘Well, we'll see,' she said again. But still she made no reference to lunch.

‘I am ill with grief over my husband,' she told Dotty, ‘and this guy keeps ringing me up and asking me out. But I'm well aware you're not the person to be saying this to.'

They had been to
The Mikado
– ‘Just take me to see anything, just get me away from the house,' Chas had begged her sister – and now they were sitting in the American Bar at the Savoy, drinking burgundy, picking at olives and looking striking. The Juniper girls up from the country, smelling of hay, but with the sun in their hair.

‘And who's the guy?' Dotty asked.

‘There you are! That's not the question you're meant to ask, Dotty. You're so sideways. A sister shouldn't be sideways.'

‘How should a sister be?'

‘Straight.'

Dotty crossed her legs, rattling her sequins, and sat back in her chair, her chest out. (Incapable of not flirting, Chas thought, even with me.) ‘This straight enough for you? Now what's the question I'm meant to ask?'

‘Why am I ill with grief for my husband.'

‘And why are you?'

‘Oh, Dotty, what a question. Twenty-three years!'

Dotty opened her eyes very wide, not because she was surprised by the amount of time her sister and her brother-in-law had been together but because she had read that opening her eyes wide for long periods prevented crow's feet. ‘All the more reason for accepting it's over,' she said. ‘A hundred years ago you'd have been dead already. Victorian expectations of one marriage to one man no longer apply. It's mortality that decides morality. Always has been. A woman of the twenty-first century can expect to live until she's eighty-five at least. With your constitution you'll probably make it to a hundred and five. That means you'll need a minimum – a minimum, Charlie! – of three husbands. Let this one go. Divorce him and marry this other guy. Who is he?'

‘You forget that we were more than husband and wife. More than friends even. We collaborated. Twenty-seven books! It wasn't me who used to say we were a marriage of true minds, it was Charlemagne.'

Dotty uncrossed her legs, winnowing with light the sequins on her antique dress. One of their grandmother's. Chas noticed that Dotty had taken to wearing these more and more often lately, as though needing to clothe her forward behaviour in the garments of a more withdrawn time. A proof, Chas believed – and this was a belief she held dearly to – that modern women like her sister only affected abandon, while in their hearts they remained
as self-restrained as their grandmothers. This affectation was what Chas meant by silliness. On the other hand she could see that Dotty was looking very beautiful tonight, that she was enjoying showing the room (and the waiters) her sequins (and her legs), that the burgundy which she'd been drinking to excess had made her voice deep and that taken all round her silliness became her.

But it wasn't only to draw attention to herself that Dotty went on changing her position; she was also looking for a posture suggestive of confidentiality. ‘Listen to me, darling,' she said. ‘The marriage of true minds you speak of was also going down the plughole. It's not for me to pry but I bet your sales have been plummeting. What do you expect? You've been stuck in the eighties for years. Your other half was
bom
stuck in the eighties – the eighteen eighties. He was making you stale, Charlie. He was holding you back.'

‘Everybody's sales are plummeting,' Charlie said.

‘Not true. I can name some whose sales are soaring.'

‘Please don't,' Charlie said.

‘I wouldn't be so crude.'

‘I mean, please don't go on with this subject.' She was annoyed. Suddenly she could detect the agitating influence of the malicious boy-of-letters with the frayed cuffs, the true face of Dotty's silliness. She could hear the
Publishers Weekly
pillow talk – ‘That sister of yours is on a bit of a loser with that husband, wouldn't you say? Have you seen their sales figures recently? Not that they ever were much cop as a writing team, but at least they had the ear of the market once, when every child was a Little Lord Fauntleroy. How come no one's told them the Fauntleroys have died out? No wonder the big clown is after a piece of you. You're his last chance to enter the modern world. That's if he has anything left to enter you with …'

Following her thoughts, part of the way at least, Dotty uncrossed her legs, her sequins hissing like a snake, and put her arms round her sister. ‘Face facts, darling,' she said. ‘All good
collaborations come to an end. Think of… I don't know … help me … Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.'

‘I'm surprised you go so far back culturally any more,' Chas said. ‘I'd have imagined, given the circles you move in now, that Wham! would have been the first example that sprung to mind.'

Dotty looked at the ceiling and comically pretended to tap her brow.
Actually
tapping her brow would have broken the skin. ‘Who's Wham!?' she said. Then she signalled the wine waiter for more burgundy. ‘Oh, Charlie,' she said, ‘you don't think Whami's of
now
, do you?'

Charlie shrugged. ‘I'm not the one who's desperate to keep up,' she said.

‘And I can't help it if I attract young men,' Dotty retorted. ‘It runs in the family.'

‘Dotty, it does not!'

‘Oh, doesn't it! And Mummy?'

‘What about Mummy? You're not going to give me that coalman routine again.'

‘Never mind the coalman, what about Tony Almond?'

‘I've never heard of Tony Almond. You've made him up. Mummy would never have gone near a man called Tony Almond. It's a hairdresser's name.'

‘Not quite. He was a wine merchant. Half Mummy's age. He had that shop in the high street with all the vintage whiskies in the window. Almond's. He used to help Mummy choose her Christmas wine.'

‘Took her down to his wine cellars, I suppose?'

‘That's exactly what he did. Every Christmas until she was too old to negotiate the stairs. Then he just closed the shop for the afternoon.'

‘Dotty, how come you know all these things and I don't?'

‘Mummy confided in me. She wouldn't tell you because she thought you were a prude. “Charlie would just say I was being
silly,” she said. But I can see you don't want to believe me. Suit yourself. I find it helps, knowing I'm following in Mummy's footsteps. Keeping up the grand Juniper tradition. I wish you'd do the same.'

‘Mummy was a Dunmore, not a Juniper.'

Dotty inverted her lips. ‘You'll go to the grave a pedant, Charlie.'

Charlie crossed her arms on the little table and slumped her head on them. Could Dotty be telling the truth? Was
any
of it the truth? Had her mother really gone down into his cellar with the wine merchant? Even just the once? Even just for fun? And did it matter one iota if she had?

Grandma too, whose coruscations Dotty did not scruple to borrow – what about Grandma and Leonard Woolf?

Not to mention herself; only think what she was capable of, simply out of incompetent politeness, or raging grief.

When she looked up she was surprised to find that her own thoughts had taken an inconsequent turn. ‘Would you forgive him?' she asked.

‘Tony Almond?'

‘Don't be an ass, Dotty. My husband.'

‘What do you want me to say, Charlie?'

‘I don't
want
you to say anything. Would you forgive him?'

Dotty opened her eyes wide, made a letter box of her mouth, looked at her reflection in the wine that had just arrived, shook out her sequins and sighed. ‘No,' she said. ‘No. And not because he's fucking that slack cow, but because he demeaned you by wandering around looking desperate. I'm surprised it took him so long to come on to me. Charlie, he was making a fool of you. His tongue was hanging out. He slobbered over everything that moved. Who wants to be with a man who can't get himself laid?'

Charlie would have liked to be able to open her own eyes wide,
and
make a letter box of her mouth, but her eyes were small and
wet with tears, and her mouth was shut fast with unhappiness. ‘Was it really as bad as that?' she asked.

‘Worse. I'm sorry, darling – and don't forget I was very fond of Charlemagne myself – but it was ghastly. You'd have been better off with a fucker.'

‘Like Marvin Kreitman?'

The sisters exchanged a long look. ‘Out of the frying pan into the fire,' Dotty said.

‘Come on. You said I'd have been better off with a fucker. Have the courage of your convictions. Would I have been happier with Marvin Kreitman?'

‘I didn't say you'd have been happier with a fucker, I said better off, less demeaned.'

‘So would I have been less demeaned with Kreitman?'

Dotty thought about it. ‘He's a bit of a throwback.'

‘Meaning?'

‘He's a sort we thought we were rid of. I feel a certain nostalgia for the type myself, but I can see that his was a virus we needed to knock out. Are you telling me there's about to be another outbreak of him?'

‘Dotty, will you be straight! Would I have been less demeaned married to a man like Kreitman, whether or not he was fucking every woman in sight, than I was – than you
say
I was – married to a man who was visibly dying of
not
fucking anybody?'

Dotty thought about it some more. She held an olive out before her lips for so long that Chas thought she was going to scream. ‘Jesus, Dotty!' she cried. ‘Is this another of your facial exercises?'

‘I will conscientiously answer your question,' Dotty said.

‘When? Next week? Next year?'

‘Now.'

‘And … ?'

Dotty swallowed her olive and looked long into her sister's eyes. ‘God help any woman who has to make that choice,' she said.

Waiting for her to call, Kreitman put on flamenco music – Lorca's sore-throat
cante jondo
was what he loved, not the heel-clicking tourist rubbish – and lay on his bed listening to it all the day and half the night, drowning out the club opposite, the rasping melancholy of unrequitedness. How good sex was when you couldn't get it! Why, on the night of their soul-searching, had he not frogmarched Charlie Merriweather out of the restaurant and over to Virgin Records on Oxford Street, bought him every piece of gypsy music in the store, and ordered him to go home and enjoy cultivating the exquisite art of doing without, instead of indulging his unseemly wondering and allowing it to bring them both to this pass?

When he wanted a break from flamenco he played shove-halfpenny with himself, hours at a time. Exhausted by that, he challenged his computer to chess. Pissed off with losing, he dusted down some of his old college books and grew maudlin. Beginning his early married life in the most straitened circumstances, Francis Place had cautioned against cramped living quarters. ‘Nothing conduces so much to the degradation of a man and a woman …' Well, there was no woman living in these cramped quarters, and in Kreitman's view nothing conduced so much to a man's degradation as that.