Who's Sorry Now? (14 page)

In bars he cannot find, women sing with the voices of men. The smell of melancholy, now and for ever, is garlic prawn. Hot nights in cobbled alleys will always remind him of desire gone begging.

He never does find her. Never, never, never, never. But for a whole year he thinks about her all the time, and for the rest of his life he thinks about her some of the time.
Todos los otros son fríos
…

It helps to have that said in your hearing. It explains your difference from other men.

And now he knows that he never is and never will be happy unless he is suffering the pain of hope gone begging, of thwarted desire and of unbearable loss.

Ordered to get some rest, Kreitman agreed to let Hazel drive him down slowly to a hotel they both liked, though Kreitman less than Hazel, on one of the softer edges of Dartmoor.

It wasn't just being knocked down he needed rest from. He needed rest from Charlie. All week, as though ducking flying bullets, Kreitman had been dodging his friend's calls. You know when someone's desperate to reach you. You hear it in the way the phone rings. And every time Kreitman's phone rang he knew it was Charlie, demented, ill with fidelity, pushing for the swap.

You also know when someone's avoiding you. Conversing with his women, Charlie thought. Making assignations even while his bones ache. Talking dirty. Three on a phone. The couple of times he did get through, Kreitman cut him short. ‘Up to my ears, Charlie. Let's have another day in Soho again soon. Yes, exactly – on the principle that a man who crashes his car should start driving it again without delay. This Thursday? Love to, but let me see, let me see – no, can't.'

Wouldn't, more like. He'd been trying not to think about Charlie, but when he did, he understood that the best reason for denying him – sanity and decency aside – was that he didn't want him in so close, didn't want to forgo the experience of having him out there as a dumbstruck spectator of his irregularities. Everything else was pointing to the conventionality of Kreitman's
routines. Twenty years ago he'd been a wild man, the Casanova of University College, now what he did his own daughters considered too naff even to tackle him about. Yuk, Daddy, adultery? Get a life! But Charlie at least was still bulging his eyes. Shame to lose that. And lose it he would once he and Charlie became, so to speak, brothers in arms.

‘What about Friday?' Charlie asked.

Kreitman pretended to rustle his diary. ‘Same again. No can do. I'm just hellishly pushed right now.'

Well, who
wasn't
hellishly pushed right now?

Not that Charlie honestly believed anyone had pushed him. This time, Charlie in his calmer moments reflected, I've gone and jumped. Christ!

He couldn't believe the hammering his chest was taking. Was this what not-nice sex did to your ribs and diaphragm? And he was only
thinking
about it!

As yet.

He held on to that.
As yet
.

A one-time shooting and fishing hotel, then a murder-mystery weekend hotel, then a white-water rafting hotel – a briefer incarnation, this, on account of the absence within a radius of five thousand miles of anything that could reasonably be called white water – and latterly a string quartet and dance alternating with a book club hotel (in which form it was at last returned to the earlier hush of its shooting and fishing days), the Baskervilles had been a favourite of the Kreitmans and the Merriweathers during that brief opportunity for liberty which comes between courtship and children.

Kreitman was still the idealistic historian of English radicalism in those days, and not yet the luggage baron of south London, else he would have shown up at the Baskervilles for his first ever walking holiday on Dartmoor – if truth be told, his first ever walking holiday
anywhere
– accoutred in rucksacks and map
holders and water bottles and walking sticks all finished with the softest leathers. As it was, he arrived looking smarter by a country mile than any of them, though he never got to walk a country mile because of the weather. ‘I don't care what these boots are built to do,' he told Hazel, ‘they're brand new and I'm not going out and putting them in puddles.' So he sat in the lounge and read
Country Life
and played with the odd jigsaw while the others experienced the exhilaration of rocky landscape and teeming rain. Come night-time he was the only one with energy and didn't want to hear that they'd seen eagles. ‘Please, I'm exhausted,' Hazel said, ‘I can't even bend my knees.' But no day was a holiday for the young Kreitman that didn't end in a fuck. Lying in the stag-wallpapered room next door, the two Charlies listened as Kreitman ground his will out pleasurelessly and Hazel uttered not a sound.

This trip Kreitman wasn't taking walking boots. By now he knew himself. It was a hot early May, an oasis of hot in a month of showers, too tiring for walking – it was always either too hot or too wet, too misty or too glaring, for walking on Dartmoor – and he had his heart set, since he'd been ordered to turn off that nicely purring engine of his, on sinking into a winged armchair in the mini-palm-court lounge, reading newspapers, smiling at lesbians, consuming pots of tea and anchovy sandwiches, thinking his thoughts and, so long as Hazel kept her distance, ringing up the other women in his life. There was, as Charlie had surmised, though he had overestimated the heat, a fair amount of ringing up and putting right to do. A man actively in love with five women can't just disappear on holiday when the fancy takes him. Leaving the shops was easier. He had managers and manageresses to tend the shops. But nobody tends your mistresses when you're not there to see to them yourself. Mistresses? Hardly. That wasn't the tone of the times. He was more their mistress than they were his. It entailed duties, anyway, whatever it was all called. So he'd said no to the idea of a break at first. ‘I've got responsibilities,' he told
his doctor. ‘I've got matters I can't leave,' he said to Hazel. But two days after his night on the town with Charlie, though his collision with the cyclist had barely left a scratch on him, just a few throbbing aches in the ribs, he fell asleep at his desk in the middle of the afternoon and missed an appointment. He was dead tired, he had to admit that to himself. And among the things he was dead tired of were the women.

Number itself wasn't the problem. Of course you had to organise your time intelligently if you weren't to end up with angry women all over town. But Kreitman employed a driver to help him get around, a discreet semi-liveried Kenyan who laughed at everything and for whom Kreitman had provided a ruby-red Smart, manoeuvring and parking being of the essence. And of course lightness of touch – for what could be lighter than a laughing chauffeur with leather patches on his navy polo neck driving a car the size of a bedbug? Men like Charlie who were driven nuts by the fewness of women in their lives were wont to scrutinise Kreitman's face for signs that he was on overload. ‘Sheesh, Marvin!' they would say, shaking their heads, meaning, ‘Can't you see they're destroying you, man?' Wishful thinking. Confining himself (and his driver) to those parts of London where he already had business to attend to, he could have coped with any number. What was tiring in five was what was tiring in two – the pity you expended.

Actively love two women, attend to them as you are able only when you're fucking them (fucking
with
them, Kreitman tried to remember to think, in deference to his own daughters) – though the truth of it was that they were fucking him, using him like some tart they'd picked up on a street corner in Streatham, for that was the way of it between the sexes now – actively
love
two women, anyway, the sociology of it apart, and you are forever adjudicating between the hands life has dealt them. Lying with Erica, whose skin seemed made of Christmas-cracker crêpe, so quiveringly taut and percussive was
it, he would suddenly experience a revulsion on behalf of Vanessa, who each day collected another purply bump on her shins and thighs, not a bruise, though of course a woman of her age walked into more table edges than Erica did, but marks of inner deterioration, signs that veins were popping with overuse and blood forgetting where to flow. Too cruel that such was the reward, in Erica's case, for lolling on couches half the day, reading
Homes and Gardens
, while Vanessa's blue-black bumps were all the thanks she got for having racked her brains in the service of
Book at Bedtime
before succumbing to the BBC's unspoken horror of the un-young, collecting her pay dirt, and turning herself into a teacher of the intellectually impaired. Not fair, either, that the lucky one should have rocked him sensuously in the cradle of inconsequence, and given him sweet dreams, while the solemn one left him agitated, tingling to his fingertips with purposiveness, unable to find rest. By sleeping with them both, Kreitman brought them into moral juxtaposition and felt the universal unfairness of things on their behalf.

Unlikely that these revulsions from beauty and good fortune helped those who had neither, but they deepened the picture. To the simple pleasure which being fucked by women who were beautiful and exuded confidence gave him, he now had to add the complicating fact of his betraying them in his heart. And it was the pressure of this constant ethical refereeing, combined with the conviction that such conscientiousness was enjoined upon him by the amount of fucking he was doing, as though sex were like inherited wealth, entailing greater social responsibilities the more of it you had – it was this that was knocking him out.

Not a cheerful fucker at the best of times, he was now grown heartsore. He seemed overburdened, a bearer of grievous history, an implanter of sorrows, rather than the fun, gag-a-minute guy – lightsome Kreitman – he would have liked to have been.

Take what had happened with Bernadette only the night before the drive to Devon. Ten years his senior, Bernadette
was an architect with a deep voice, fearsome cheekbones and a strict manner, the kind of woman you saw from a distance and felt immediately reprimanded by, a woman you put up scaffolds to approach and ascended gingerly, in a harness and a hard hat. Circumstances had taken a swing at Bernadette – the lover before Kreitman pinning a letter to her drawing board saying he couldn't bear seeing her beauty succumb to age and so was running off with her youngest daughter, take it the right way, Geoffrey. Taking it the wrong way, Bernadette had rung Kreitman, who, as the husband of the woman who employed her ex-daughter-in-law to redesign her house, she had once or twice encountered at dinner parties. ‘My daughter's fucked off with my lover,' she told him, ‘and since she doesn't herself have a lover off with whom I can fuck in return, I thought I'd try some other woman's man. Are you busy?'

Kreitman loved fucking her because
she
, even more than all the others, over and above what the times insisted on, fucked
him
. Ironically and with her steel-grey eyes wide open, waiting for him to make her laugh. That was all she wanted from him, exactly what he'd wanted from his father – jokes, anecdotes, messages from the breathing world, the blacker the better. Any sign of his losing himself on her breast or otherwise thinking about ecstasy and she stopped moving. Sometimes, before visiting her, he'd have to go cap in hand to his own staff, to beg for the latest joke. It was like feeding a monster. Entertain her harshly and she was his. Bore her with sweet talk and she'd be gone. Then, the night before Devon, he lost her in the bed. Simply couldn't find her. Called her name and she didn't answer. Nothing on the pillow. Nothing under the duvet. When he pulled all the bedclothes back, there she was at the bottom of the mattress, flattened like her own shadow, extruded as though flayed and thrown away and only the outer skin of her remaining. ‘What are you doing?' he said. ‘Where've you gone?' She didn't know what he was talking about. ‘I'm lying here waiting for you to
amuse me,' she said. ‘But you've made yourself vanish,' he said. ‘It's too upsetting, seeing you do that.' She sat up with her knees against her chest and lit a cigarette. ‘I think it's time we took a rain check, Marvin,' she said. ‘I think you're getting a trifle tragic for me.'

He was.

Looking forward to the rest, he was disappointed, when they checked in to the Baskervilles, to discover that Hazel had planned him a surprise. This weekend the hotel book club was addressing the subject of children's literature as adult literature, and in attendance to address it with them were the C. C. Merriweathers, Charlie J. and Charlie K. So for the Merriweathers and the Kreitmans (when the Merriweathers weren't discussing their craft) – this was Hazel's cute, recuperative idea – it would be a little bit like old times.

That was the first part of the surprise.

The second part of the surprise concerned Nyman. Guess what? He was here too.

‘So tell me about yourself,' Kreitman said over dinner. ‘I missed out on the introductions and the breakfasts. What do you do when you're not biking urgent deliveries around Soho?'

Sitting on his hands, Charlie Merriweather gave thanks that Kreitman hadn't asked him what he did when he wasn't being a faggot.

What everybody found personable about Nyman was his absence of personality. Nyman too found this personable about himself. ‘There is nothing to tell,' he said. ‘And I don't even deliver packages any more. I only pretend to do that.'

‘To make yourself interesting?' Kreitman wondered.

But killingness was wasted on Nyman who had long ago embarked upon the course of killing himself. Finding if he had a self first, then killing it. ‘Exactly so,' he said. He had a round
blank floury face, the texture of one of Charlie's baps, but angled to look sad, like a white-faced clown's. And a small, perfectly circular mouth, shaped as though to receive slender rolled-up magazines, the
Spectator
or the
New Statesman
.