Who's Sorry Now? (15 page)

‘Then tell us all some of the other things you do to make yourself interesting,' Kreitman persisted.

‘Well, for example,' Nyman said, ‘I can bend my thumbs to meet my wrist.'

‘Show us,' Kreitman said. Then, when Nyman had showed them, ‘And is there anything else?'

‘Well, for example,' Nyman said, ‘I can make my eyes squeak.'

‘I don't think we want to see that,' Hazel said.

‘Oh, I don't know,' Kreitman corrected her.

So Nyman put his knuckles in the sockets of his eyes, and ground them until they squeaked.

Chas and Hazel looked away.

‘That it?' Kreitman enquired.

‘Well, for another example,' Nyman said, ‘I have bicycled down here.'

Chas gasped. ‘You've cycled here from London?'

Hazel also gasped. ‘Today?'

‘No, I left first thing yesterday morning. Last night I slept under a ditch …'

‘
In
a ditch,' Kreitman corrected him, ‘or
under
a hedge.'

Because he had had less opportunity to talk to Nyman than the others, Kreitman continued to work on the assumption that he was German. That was why he took the liberty of correcting his English. Kreitman regularly attended trade fairs in Germany, Germans having an atavistic love of leather –
echt leder
, how could you put it better? – and he knew that Teutonic longings to overmaster the English persisted, also atavistically, in a dream of mastery of the English language. Help them with idiomatic expression and they would spare your family. But there was every possibility that Nyman wasn't German at all. Not even foreign.

Just foreign to the English tongue.

‘Yes, under a hedge. Then I began again early, with the birds, and got here as you see me now.'

‘You must be whacked,' Hazel said.

‘Well, I am pumped, certainly,' he said, rolling up a trouser leg and inviting Hazel to inspect his calf muscle.

Fluttering her hands like a princess about to feel her first frog, Hazel bent and made a stab at Nyman's muscle. ‘I should say so,' she laughed, her voice ringing with little girlish bells, as though still not sure whether pond life agreed with her. ‘Pumped's the word!'

You can tell, thought Chas, that she has never nursed a boy child.

Some instinct for propriety had told Nyman not to come to dinner, nor to come near Kreitman at any time, wearing cycling gear. Instead he wore a crushed sandy suit, which went with his colouring, a crushed sandy shirt, a crushed sandy tie and sandy shoes. His general appearance was crushed, of course, as a consequence of being folded in a saddlebag for two whole days and one night under a ditch, but there was no questioning its muscular conformability.

Why is the little prick wearing camouflage on Dartmoor? Kreitman wondered.

How variously he dresses, Hazel thought, remembering the elasticated green lunchbox shorts and sleeveless thunder and lightning cycling vest he had on when she first met him. How nice it is to see a man prepared to experiment with his appearance, unlike Marvin with his invariable sharp suits, declaring this is the man I am, this is the man I am, this is the man I am. How pliant and gender-undemonstrative Nyman is, for a man with so hard a body, and how he starts when I look at him.

How she starts when he looks at her, Chas noticed. Yet how pointedly he averts his eyes from mine. What is it he wants me
to see he doesn't want from me? Alternatively, what doesn't he want me to see he
does
want from me?

Chas was wearing a Butler and Wilson dragonfly on the lapel of her jacket. From time to time she fingered it, changing its position so that it might catch the light and maybe dazzle him. And did he dazzle her? Of course not. No man could be less dazzling than Nyman. He did not emit light, he absorbed it. He was a black hole, and by the magic of physics, all sources of light sought their extinction in him.

A mystery to Kreitman, this, even as the blackness drew him to it. Kreitman was of the generation that believed you had to be brilliant to win a woman's attention, that you had to sparkle conversationally, that you had to make wisdom fall from your lips like rubies, while your eyes danced like showers of falling stars. You laboured at your coruscations and the woman was the reward. He could not conceive that a woman might find attractive what
she
had to labour to win.

Flash, flash, went Chas's glittering dragonfly.

Of the group, only Charlie was incurious about Nyman. But then Charlie had his mind on other things. From where he sat there was a view through the hotel window of one of those warty tors for which Dartmoor is famous. He wasn't sure whether he could see people on the tor, or merely sheep, but the distant prospect made him melancholy. Distant prospects always did that for Charlie, especially when they were of tors and the tors were pink-tipped by the sun, like the nipples on a flat-chested girl stretched out on a beach or, more melancholy still, asleep in a summer meadow buzzed by flies. He gazed out of the window absently, tying his linen napkin into love knots, unaware of Nyman.

Unaware of Hazel too, it appeared, though it might reasonably be supposed, given the time he'd spent trying to raise and remind Kreitman of this last week, that his absent-minded love knot was for her. But Charlie wasn't counting his chickens. For the time
being it was some lovely glorious nippled nothing he was seeing. Miss Cuntalina Fuckleton.

‘But apart from cycling,' Kreitman persisted with Nyman, ‘what is it you want from life? Presumably there isn't much of a living in cycling …'

‘My husband is always curious to know what there is or there isn't much of a living in,' Hazel interrupted.

‘I see,' said Nyman. ‘A businessman.'

‘A captain of industry no less,' Hazel said. ‘The luggage baron of south London.'

‘Your husband has a tide?' Nyman marvelled.

‘They say his father was a king,' Chas threw in.

Kreitman bridled. No one in Charlotte Juniper's family had ever worked a market stall. They had survived genteelly, on charity when necessary, for however many hundreds of years, but no stain of any market stall to darken their good name. ‘Who am I dining out with here,' Kreitman asked, ‘the Tunbridge Wells chapter of the Communist Party? I am making small talk. I am asking Nyman what he wants from life.'

‘Marvin's idea of small talk,' Chas threw in again – ‘ “And how do you explain creation, young man?”'

To her enormous satisfaction, Nyman laughed. A curious ripple that ran up his chest and shook his shoulders, before dying in his face. She wasn't sure, but wasn't this, in their company at least, Nyman's first ever laugh? Discovering that she could coax a sound, or at least a sight, suggestive of mirth out of a person as ruthlessly mysterious, and therefore mirthless, as Nyman heated Chas's blood. It was a joy comparable to gardening, like watering a parched bed and watching the flowers open. In her excitement, she danced her dragonfly and watched it disappear into the colourless immensity which was Nyman.

For no reason she could put a name to, Hazel dropped her napkin and while retrieving it accidentally effected a second graze of Nyman's well-pumped calf.

The quick look Nyman shot her – two pale points of Arctic light—was perceived by Chas at the very moment it was perceived by Kreitman, who believed he noted a similar roundelay of exchanges beginning with Hazel and ending he wasn't certain where. Only Charlie remained outside the circle of infatuation.

‘Somehow, in all this merriment,' Kreitman said, ‘my question has been lost. I suspect you're going to tell me you're an artist. Everybody seems to be an artist at the moment, all our children, all our wives. The only person I know who isn't an artist is me, though even I sometimes design a handbag or a suitcase with something approaching artistry, let my daughter insist all she likes that artistry is not to be confused with artisanship. But if you are an artist, please don't tell me that the art you make is yourself.'

‘No,' said Nyman, ‘the art I make is not myself. I do not have a self.'

‘So I understand,' said Kreitman, ‘though to me you have a very distinct self – I still feel the bruises from it. But you are, then, an artist? Do you blaze a trail or do you leave a path?'

‘Jesus, Marvin!' Hazel said. Then to Nyman she added, ‘You are not obliged to be interrogated, you know.'

‘Unless you happen to enjoy it,' Chas said, putting her face on a slant, as though the world of abstruse enjoyments were her oyster.

‘No, it's all right,' Nyman said. And that was when Kreitman noticed he was being aped, that Nyman was twirling his wine glass between his fingers exactly as Kreitman twirled his, and that he was making a fist of his other hand, rubbing it absently into the tablecloth, as though kneading dough, as though killing dough, again as Kreitman did. Kreitman's rigid fist was infamous among his women, each of whom began by hoping she would be the one to get him to open his fingers and release his murderous grip on himself. Now he could see what it looked like and why, as a discrete object, like some tiny meteorite humming with unearthly tension, it upset those who had to eat and drink in its vicinity. But
what was Nyman up to? Was he making merry with Kreitman's mannerisms? Was he learning what Kreitman was with a view to doing him some damage? Or was he just being Kreitman because Kreitman was a good thing to be? Had the little cocksucker chosen to admire him suddenly?

Whatever the answer to those questions, Kreitman found himself wanting to go on holding Nyman's attention and winning his approval. If the boy had a yen to be like him he wasn't going to be dog in the manger about it – he would
show
the boy how to be like him. The first consequence of which was that he was unable to remember how his own voice worked naturally and started to shout.

‘Shush,' Hazel said. ‘They don't want to hear you at the far end of the room.'

‘You don't know that. They might very well want to hear me at the far end of the room,' Kreitman boomed again. And he twinkled at Nyman who, for a black hole, made a pretty good fist, since we are talking fists, of twinkling back.

Over coffee in the lounge, for the Baskervilles remained one of those hotels that could not bear to serve coffee to its patrons until they were seated too low down to drink it comfortably, Nyman finally told them what he wanted out of life. He wanted to be on television.

A moment or two of silence greeted this revelation. All of their children wanted to be on television. Sardonic as a matter of generational principle though their children were, and doubly sardonic when it came to television, they had no other medium for appraising worth, and no other measure for knowing whether or not a thing existed. If it didn't flicker it didn't count. But until now neither the Kreitmans nor the Merriweathers had quite thought of Nyman as being of their children's vocational kith and kin.

Then, ‘You'd be good on television,' Hazel said.

‘You think so?'

‘Yes, yes I do. I think you'd make people sit up.'

‘But then it's always possible,' Chas put in, ‘that Nyman doesn't want to make people sit up. He might want to make people sit down. That's how we normally watch television.'

‘My guess,' said Kreitman, ‘is that Nyman wants to go on television to do neither. My guess is that Nyman wants to go on television simply to subvert the form. I think when Nyman says he wants to be on television he's taking the piss.
Nicht wahr
, Nyman?'

They waited, husband, wife and someone else's wife, for the stranger with no character or prospects to tell them who was right. Kreitman saw that Nyman was making a white-knuckled fist with the hand that wasn't raising the coffee cup, and felt confident. Hazel sank lower in her chair and showed Nyman her neck.

‘I think I don't know yet what I want to do on television,' Nyman said. ‘I think I just want to be on it.'

‘Aha!' Kreitman said.

‘I think I want to show that I am … What is the word?'

‘A humorist,' Kreitman suggested.

Nyman shook his head. ‘I believe I have no humour.'

‘Palpable,' Chas tried. ‘You want to go on television to materialise yourself. We all do.'

Nyman looked evenly at her, almost granting her what he had granted Hazel, those two pale points of distant Arctic light. ‘
Palpable …
That's not so bad.'

But Hazel had not yet had her go. ‘A winner,' she said. ‘I think you want to show that you can win.'

‘Win at what?' Kreitman wanted to know.

‘It doesn't matter,' Hazel said. ‘Specific achievement is out. You're so stuck in the past, Marvin, with your winning at what. With television you win simply by being on it. You exceed the common.'

‘And how do you do that?' Kreitman asked. ‘By being even more common than everybody else?'

‘It is not a sin,' Hazel replied with heat, ‘to be unexceptional.'

‘Thank you, Hazel,' Nyman said. ‘You have found my word. I want to go on television to show that I am exceptionally unexceptional.' He was so pleased he actually clapped his hands together like a seal. ‘It is you, Hazel,' he continued, letting his blank barm-bun stare, with its distant snowy reflections, last long upon her, ‘who understands me best.'

At this, Chas did something which no one who was watching had ever seen her, or come to that anyone else, do before. She threw up her canvas skirts. Outside of a Victorian novel, Kreitman thought, I have never
heard
of a woman throwing up her skirts. He tried to think of Peggotty, but it wasn't Peggotty Chas reminded him off. It was someone more French.

Realising how her action could be misconstrued, Chas affected to be worrying about crumbs, and exaggeratedly shook herself out. But a raised skirt is a raised skirt, and her cheeks blazed.