Who's Sorry Now? (23 page)

Looking at himself in his bathroom mirror, he saw a lonely man. Was this the loneliest he'd ever been? Was he lonelier now than on that last lost night in Barcelona, heartbreak paella perfuming the cobbled streets and his hot fist stuffed with pesetas? Much lonelier. Then he could only guess what he was missing. Now he was in a position to count losses until his hair turned grey.

There is some mischief in numbers. Waiting for you in the midst of plenty, zilch. The more Kreitman counted the less he had. So was that all he'd been amassing over so many years – nothing?

Other than Charlie, who was not available to him at the
moment, he had no male friends. It's a choice you make: either you go chasing women or you have friends. There isn't room for both. Kreitman's women
were
his friends, which worked well, kept him in company, conversation and games of chess, so long as they remained his women. But he had no appetite for any of his women now, not since he'd watched Chas on her knees on the croquet lawn, in a black-mass mockery of prayer to a man for whom she had no regard. Some sights blind you to all others. Fix your gaze on Sodom and Gomorrah going up in sulphur on the Plain of Mamre and you turn to stone. Kreitman had disobeyed the injunctions of decency and wisdom and kept his curtains open. Only he hadn't turned to stone; he'd turned to jelly.

If he were tucking his grown-up daughters into bed and telling them what life had thrown at Marvin Kreitman next, they wouldn't have been much impressed with the adult content of his story. ‘Now, when it's too late, you're telling us fairy stories. In the catalogue of contemporary carnalities, Daddy, touching someone's dick is not that mega.'

Where had he been, their old man? What would he say if they told him about a triple anal?

It was true. He knew it. He had stood at the window, aghast, watching not that much happening. But how much
had
to happen? For Marvin Kreitman, sitting in a cinema and waiting for the twelve-foot kiss – just that, just two lips brushing – was a shattering experience. No matter how trashy the plot, no matter how cheesy the actors, he hung on the coming kiss in palpitating suspense – was it soon … was it near … was it
now
! And when at last it did come, it was as though he'd never seen one before: it dried up his mouth, soaked the collar of his shirt, bound steel hoops around his chest. Try breathing now, Kreitman!

No small thing, a kiss, whatever happened next. And as for reaching out for body parts …

In the end it's all about susceptibility to shock. If it feels rude,
it is rude. Call it wonderment. The wonderment of rude. Some of us never have it, some of us don't know how to keep it. Chas had it and so far Chas had kept it. That was enough for Kreitman. He had looked out on to the moor, seen consciousness of rude and gone up in flames.

Who among those he'd been fucking for dear life only a month before – he'd show them triple anal! – could lodge anything in his head to rival Chas giving wonder? Ooshi in her rubber corset, playing the dominatrix with one eye on the clock? ‘Beg, Kreitman!' Erica wetting his ear with what she'd done with other women? ‘Then I … then she … then I … after which we …' Forget it. Yes, he'd begged abjectly enough in his time – ‘Please, Ooshi, oh God no, oh God yes, not that, yes that!' Sure, he'd urged Erica on in her flagging fantasies – ‘You didn't, you couldn't, you never!' But their day was over. They were bored with him and he was bored with them. Who started it didn't matter. They'd lost the trick of rude. They were too overt, too seamlessly the thing they were. They weren't respectable
and
lewd. They weren't confident
and
gauche. They didn't have fault lines running through them, on one side of which they kicked husbands off the premises, like queens of infinite space, and on the other pronounced prick as though it were the brand name of a tuck-shop lolly. No fault line, no desire; and if he no longer desired them (or, indeed, they him) there was no point seeing them. Here was the catch in his erotic reasoning. His social life waited on his dick. His dick waited on his imagination. So if his imagination was not stirred, he ate alone.

He rang his mother just once, then put the phone down. How was that for restraint! If ever there were a blame and kiss-it-better time, this was it, Kreitman up to his ears in his own bhuna chicken juices and reduced to playing chess with a computer. All your doing, Ma. Behold the glory and the ruination of your works! But Chas was the only person it excited him to blame for his decline and fall now. She was the woman in his life – let her fix it!

He had to force himself to leave the flat. One morning he found himself being tailed by a ruby-red Smart driven by an African chauffeur. It took him ten minutes of quickening then reducing his pace, and a further ten trying to work out who would be putting a detective on him – Hazel, obviously, but why? – before he remembered that the car and its chauffeur were his.

‘Maurice, I'd forgotten I had you,' he said, when the driver wound down his window.

‘You should get out more, Mr Kreitman,' the driver laughed.

He got Maurice to take him the rounds of his furthest flung shops, Lewisham, Crystal Palace, Penge, swinging back towards Putney via Thornton Heath and Wimbledon. Was this his life? He totted up what he amounted to – so many hundreds of Ander suitcases, so many thousands of Manchester United schoolbags, so many hundreds of thousands of coin-tray purses, still selling though you would have thought the penny-pinching bachelor gent who shuffled his coins on to the tray to inspect them, exactly as an ailing German will inspect his stools, was a thing of the past. Was it time for him, Kreitman, to have a coin-tray purse of his own? She loves me – shuffle, shuffle – she loves me not. She loves me …

Because it gave him something to take his mind off himself he was pleased to walk into a staff problem at his West Norwood branch. An assistant not in the first flush of youth, nor in any sort of flush of presentableness, come to that – only West Norwood, you see – was taking a bag down from a shelf. The bag, unlike the assistant, was hard-edged, highly polished, brittle as a diamond, not cheap. ‘A good choice, madam,' he overheard the assistant saying, ‘I've been thinking of buying that one for myself for weeks.' He took her aside, though not aside enough, once the sale had fallen through. ‘Peggy,' he said, ‘I mean this in the nicest way, but ask yourself why it would be a recommendation to a woman let's say half your age and let's guess twice your height, a woman with an air (I say no more than that) of having a degree
from Oxford
and
from Cambridge and a house in every road in Dulwich, that the handbag on which her attention happens to have alighted is the very handbag chosen above all others for its fashionableness and elegance by
you
?'

It came out ruder than he meant it to, but what help was there? The shop fell quiet. The grey-haired assistant blinked three times, lowered her head and disappeared into the stockroom. Kreitman followed, inhaling leather. He loved a stockroom. ‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘I could have put that better.'

‘You could have put it to me
in private
, Mr Kreitman,' she corrected him, sniffing.

Kreitman took her point and apologised again. He had broken one of Francis Place's three golden recollections to himself, and played the tyrant. And for no reason other than that he was love-sick and idle. In the days when he counted off his women he was considerate to his staff. Was being in love with one woman making a pig of him? He wondered if Peggy was going to hand in her notice and then sue him for unfair dismissal. Staff were no picnic any more. Hire a person to stuff travel bags with newspapers and you have taken on a responsibility as onerous as marriage. More. Easier to shed a wife than a sales assistant.

‘As you were,' he saluted to the shop in general, as he left. But none of the remaining staff looked up from what they were doing or otherwise showed they thought his joke particularly funny.

‘Right, Maurice,' he said, folding himself back into the Smart, ‘let's see what trouble I can cause in Mitcham.'

He was better off indoors with his unrequited gypsy music and his shove-halfpenny board. Waiting for the call from Chas.

He couldn't stop thinking about her. She had turned golden in his imagination, come in out of the sun-bled fields and taken possession of the great glittering indoors, made lustrous by artificial light. Once upon a time he had not liked the sameness of her palette, her corn-stook hair, yellow to her shoulders, framing dully her corn-stook complexion; now the homogeneity of her
colouring seemed to him the very model of beauty, her yellow become bronze, its evenness of shading stirringly at odds with the unruliness of her character. When he heard her voice he tried to picture what she was wearing, even though he couldn't stomach a single item in her wardrobe. When his phone rang he hoped to God it was her and was unable to prevent his own voice dropping when it turned out to be someone else. ‘Come on, come on, get off the line,' he muttered into his teeth, rocking on the balls of his feet, aflame with impatience, even though the caller had once whispered up all the devils of hell for his entertainment. But there you are, they were the wrong devils, not a one of them Chas in her knitted cucumber top and spinnaker skirt, down on her lavender-gathering knees on a croquet lawn, confusing the categories, mixing up his head.

He jumped when he heard his mail delivered, or the bell ring, or the door rattle. When he looked out of his window he thought he saw her in the street, reading the shop numbers, looking up for a sight of him, smiling one of those blind person's smiles of hers – fantastical because she didn't have an inkling where his flat was, but that didn't stop him imagining her coming up the stairs, knocking on his door, seeing how he was living and feeling sorry for him.

‘You've reduced yourself to this for me?'

‘For you, Charlie.'

And then one of them running into the other's arms.

No, not one of them,
him
. Running into hers.

Jelly. He'd turned to jelly, grown passive, become the victim of events. He never thought of going to her, always of her coming to him. Never of his kissing her, always of her kissing him. He imagined being touched by her – her hands on him, not his on her – cudgelling his brains to recall how his skin felt the one time she had touched him. But too much had happened since then, four children had been born, innumerable other touchings had taken place, and he'd been too drunk, and she'd been too
drunk, and there'd been more bravado than skin in it, anyway, and more tease than touch. And more irony than he'd had the wit to register.

Ironic women had always been his weakness. He had fallen for Hazel because she'd been sardonic about herself. Of his current crop of lapsed lovers, Bernadette had been his favourite because she put up ironic buildings – libraries too dark to read a book in, old people's homes which were death traps even for the young and virile – and because she looked to him to confirm her bleak view of existence. Chas's irony, though, was different. Something to do with protectiveness. She'd mocked Charlie protectively for however many years. Become a sort of mother to him and assumed a sort of care. Ironically
sort of
. My baby, my poor weak baby. With hindsight, Kreitman now believed there might all along have been a touch of that in her tone to him too. Was it something to do with her brand of sex? The satiric half-accidental handjob, after which she was liberated to show pity? Had she been mothering him ironically for twenty years without his ever noticing? And did she therefore feel motherly to that nonentity Nyman as well? Was she nursing Nyman in a leaded-windowed bedroom with a view of the Thames in Richmond right this minute, fumbling in his pants and rocking him in her arms, even as Kreitman uncorked his third bottle of Shiraz and ripped open his second packet of malted-milk biscuits for the night?

Do I know anything, Kreitman wondered, of what has or hasn't happened?

After all, he needed to talk to his mother.

She had moved north, when she became Mrs Bellwood, to the quiet of Rickmansworth, then further north again, nudging at the Chilterns, after Norbert had his stroke. She greeted Kreitman in her garden, a cigarette in her hand. He loved it that his mother smoked. It made her raffish in his eyes.

‘I'm dead-heading the roses,' she said.

‘With a cigarette?'

She showed him the secateurs sticking out of her apron pocket. Secateurs he cared for less than cigarettes, then remembered he'd seen Chas wielding them in Richmond and wondered if maybe they could be rendered raffish, by association, too.

‘I knew you were coming,' she said.

Kreitman, standing ill at ease on the lawn with his arms folded, laughed. ‘No you didn't.'

She tapped the side of her face, just below her eye, the nerve centre of her sympathetic prescience. ‘I told Norbert you'd be here, just half an hour ago.'

He met her gaze. Don't say anything, her eyes warned him. Make no comment about the fact that when you're not here I'm talking to someone who cannot talk back to me and who most of the time doesn't understand a word I say.

She walked him round the garden, showing him flowers. A new side to his mother. There'd been no flowers in the days of his father. But then Bruno the Broygis would probably have kicked their heads off on his way in.

Kreitman didn't ask how Norbert was. He knew the routine. No mention. What there was to be told, he would be told. Sometimes his mother would take him up to see Norbert, sometimes he would be wheeled out. But if he wasn't, he wasn't. And Kreitman knew not to wander round the house. A man who has had a stroke as serious as Norbert's leaves a swinging thurible of baby smell, damp and dead, in every room he's been in. Mona Bellwood showed no sign that that distressed or shamed her. If she was careful who she allowed to go where, that was to spare them.