Who's Sorry Now? (24 page)

Too cruel. Too unthinkably cruel that his mother's second crack at romance should have ended so abruptly in this. One bastard, one vegetable – where was the fairness in that?

‘So,' she said. ‘Love-troubles. Have you come to see Shelley?'

‘Ma, I've come to see you.'

‘I know, but have you also come to see Shelley?'

‘No, not today.'

‘Then definitely love-troubles.'

He sat on a step while she continued savaging the roses. ‘I've got something to tell you,' he said, ‘I've left Hazel.'

‘I know,' she said, not bothering to look up.

‘Ma, do me a favour – enough with the psychic powers.'

‘Who's talking about psychic powers? She rang me.'

‘Hazel rang you!'

‘I'm her mother-in-law, why are you surprised?'

‘What did she ring you to say?'

‘What do you think? “Congratulations. You have your wish. Better late than never.”'

‘She said that?'

‘Yes. Brave of her, I thought. First brave thing I've ever heard her say.'

‘And no doubt you told her that?'

‘No. I said I was sorry if either of you was unhappy. Are you?'

‘What did she say to that?'

‘I'm asking you that. Are
you
unhappy?'

Kreitman took off his jacket and folded it on his lap. Linen. He didn't want it creased. ‘What I am,' he said, ‘is bewildered. I can't work out why I like what I like in women.'

‘Simple,' his mother told him. ‘Trouble. You like trouble.'

‘Yes, but that doesn't help. What I want to know is
why
do I like trouble.'

She dropped the secateurs on the lawn and came to join him on the steps. Creakily. He hadn't noticed that in her before. He thought of her as about his age. But up close she wasn't the beggar-maid any more. You can't push your husband around in his wheelchair, smelling infancy and death on him every day, and stay a beggar-maid. ‘What exactly is it you want to hear from me?' she asked. ‘That I did something
to you when you were small? That I gave you a taste for trouble?'

‘Ma, you know I'm not asking you that.'

She shrugged. ‘I may have,' she said. ‘Doesn't your Freud say all mothers do that. Why should I be any different? I tried to make you believe in yourself, and who can say whether that's a good thing. Maybe I made you arrogant. Maybe you thought I was the only one who could appreciate you. And since you couldn't have me – bingo! – trouble.'

‘Freud in a nutshell, Ma. I can't think why you've always been so against him. But I'm not blaming you for anything. I just want to know whether I was always … what I am. When you took me to all those specialists because I kept fainting, did any of them say anything?'

‘Like your boy seems to want trouble from his women? Marvin, you were eight at the time. We weren't looking for woman-associated symptoms.'

‘But I was morbid, wasn't I? That's why you took me.'

‘No one said anything about morbid. The doctors called you sensitive.'

‘But what does sensitive mean?'

‘Sensitive means sensitive. You're still sensitive. Look at the fists you're making.'

She put her hands on his, unlacing his fingers. What he couldn't decide was whether their eyes had met, whether she had mutely said, ‘You like that, don't you, Marvin? You like me to unfist you.'

‘Do you remember,' she suddenly said, ‘telling me about the woman you met in Selfridges?'

He tossed his hair. Jest and no jest. ‘Ma, I've met so many women in Selfridges.'

This time their eyes did meet. Hers were black and Caspian still, but the blaze wasn't what it once had been. He thought they looked sorrowfully into his – not sorry for herself, sorry for
him. She squeezed his hands. ‘You told me you met this one in the bag department. You told me you stopped her buying something. You were excited, you said, because she was as old as I was. A funny thing, Marvin, to tell your mother.'

A phrase he would rather not have remembered came back to him. ‘
You don't use your mouth like other men
.'

That first. How interesting. First the phrase, then the woman.

It was just before he went to university. Out on the prowl, anywhere, it didn't matter, Tottenham Court Road, Piccadilly Circus, Carnaby Street, Regent Street. A late Saturday afternoon, the shops not yet closed, his eyes darting in every direction, then bullseye! he found one – tall, fleshy, sarcastic-looking, self-contained in the manner of a married woman not needing to be on the prowl herself – where else but in Selfridges' handbag department. ‘Don't buy that one,' he'd said. ‘Rubbish leather. The patent will come off in the rain. Clasp will rust and the strap's old-fashioned. This one suits you better.'

His reward a knee-trembler after lasagne and Valpolicella, up against a wall in St Christopher's Place, close to where once stood a urinal in which the downwardly mobile Victorian painter Simeon Solomon – no long-windedly self-righteous Moral Chartist, that one, but a hero of Kreitman's nonetheless – did feloniously attempt the abominable crime of buggery (so Kreitman
could
like a faggot when it suited him) upon one George Roberts, or vice versa. Though no blue plaque marks the spot.

No blue plaque for Marvin Kreitman either, but then no blue plaque was necessary – it was scarred on his brain tissue, the place where he learned he did not use his mouth like other men.

So how did other men use their mouths?

She didn't know how to put it. She'd only come out to buy a handbag when all was said and done. And she wasn't in the habit of doing this. But since he asked – well, more assertively, more animalistically, or something.

Kreitman bit her lip.

She pushed him from her. ‘There's something wrong with you,' she said, before she walked away. ‘You just leave your mouth there, like a baby bird's, waiting for something to be put into it. It's horrible. Then you bite me.'

What sort of mouth did a baby bird have? Soft, red, passive, blindly hungry. Not a flattering comparison, was it? Thereafter he was careful to present a powerful set of mandibles to every woman he kissed. Lock into Marvin Kreitman's jaws and you knew how a mouse felt when an eagle swooped. But the imputation stuck – there was some masculine forcefulness that wasn't his by nature.

And he'd told this to his
mother
?

Marvellous that she remembered. How many years ago was it? Twenty-five? Thirty? But more marvellous still that he'd told her.

Why would he have told her?

‘Yes,' he said, ‘something is vaguely coming back to me.'

‘It worried you at the time, I remember.'

‘It still worries me.'

She shook her head and took his hands, both remade into fists, one in each of hers. ‘You've got your health,' she said. ‘You have two wonderful daughters. You have never been short of girlfriends. You make a good living. What do you have to worry about?'

It always saddened and bemused him, how little his mother expected of him now. Health, for God's sake. Daughters, girlfriends, a living … Where had the other stuff gone? His destiny, his moral spotlessness, his genius? Couldn't she at least be a little bit
disappointed
for him?

Or was that just the mouth issue all over again? Was that why he'd told her – so that she could pity and reprimand him, in equal measure? Did he seek his mother's disappointment?

Christ!

Before he left, his mother took him to see Norbert in the lovely high-ceilinged sunlit room she'd built for him, quiet as his old library, every sound dying in deep lilac carpet, his books and papers, unread, all around him. How old was Norbert? Kreitman wondered. He looked ageless – a thousand years, a thousand days, impossible to tell – a creature washed of all his sins, only his tongue a problem to him, everything else apparently sorted, his eyes off on some unknown journey of their own.

‘Marvin's here to see you,' his mother said.

‘Hi, Norbert,' Kreitman said.

Not a flicker.

Because Kreitman didn't know what else to do, he waved.

Mona Bellwood went over to her husband's chair and rearranged him, lifting him under his arms, as she must once have lifted Marvin, pulling the hair back from his unlined brow, tidying him around the ears, this never unkempt man. She raised her face and saw her son looking at her. She smiled a tired smile. ‘I know what you're thinking,' she said. ‘But he's in here. He hasn't gone. I know that when I touch him I'm reaching him.'

And you, Mother, Kreitman wasn't able to ask, who's reaching you?

‘You're a believer in the soul, then?' he said.

‘I always knew where you were when you were out,' she reminded him, continuing to clean up her husband's face, smoothing away the hairs, absently stroking his cheeks, rearranging his cravat. ‘I could always tell if something bad was happening to you. I don't know whether you call that believing in the soul.'

‘So you know where Norbert is?'

‘I do, yes, definitely.'

‘And is something bad happening to him?'

She started to answer, but then couldn't. Cracks suddenly appeared across her face, like the shattering of glass. She put up her hands to hide her grief, though whether from him or from Norbert he couldn't say. Somehow, with a movement of
her shoulders, she was able to signal him to leave. ‘How could you be so cruel, Marvin?' she collected herself sufficiently to ask. But by that time he was out of the door.

It wasn't safe for him to go out. When he made a call to one of his shops he upset the staff, and when he went to visit his own mother he upset her and himself. Death in the house and his mother ageing, and there was he, who should have been a comfort, absorbed in the trivia of self-damage, wondering what it meant that he wanted his mother to know he didn't kiss like other men, and by natural extension – for all roads lead to the same place when you're in the state Marvin Kreitman was in – wondering what sort of kisser Nyman was. That the reason Chas hadn't taken him up on his offer – too busy kissing the faggot?
A man more rattishly and motivationally stripped down to the bare bones blah-blah than he and Charlie rolled together
– Chas's own words. Meaning exactly what? That as men, as sexual men, as users of the mouth, he and Charlie didn't add up to a hill of beans in Chas's estimation?

It had come to something that he was bracketing himself with Charlie these days. Charlie and Marvin, two absolute no-hopers with women. Except that that description didn't apply to Charlie any more, did it?

He had run into Shelley, when leaving his mother's. On her way in to take up her nursing duties, so not starched yet, still in her civvies, if you could call them that. Thirty years old and wearing a tiny ruffle of a skirt, black convent tights and dinky bower boots, like a fairy who had come down off a Christmas tree, looking for a punch-up. Kreitman sighed. Those were the days.

He had forgotten what women were like. Was this what they did? When Shelley spoke to him she pushed her face forward, as though she wanted him to pat her head, like a cat. Little pink tongue. Little green eyes narrowed. Little cough, due to little fur ball in little throat. Lovely, Kreitman thought. So lovely he
couldn't think how he had forgotten. But no fault line. That's
why
he had forgotten. No wonderment of rude.

So there he was, back to square one.

Not safe for him to go out, so he stayed in. Three calls from Chas in as many weeks, two anguished, one aerobatically cheerful, but still no lunch date. As for his wonderful daughters, they had put their various contractual obligations on hold, postponed the explanatory dinner he'd promised them – no hurry, Daddy – and gone hitchhiking around Thailand, looking for some beach. So who was there for him to go out and see?

Who was there for him to stay in and see, come to that? Sleeping without company had never suited him, even for the odd night, but this was the longest unbroken stretch of it he'd suffered since leaving school, and it was beginning to wreak havoc on his body. A man with a wife and five girlfriends showers at least six times a day. A man moping over an inaccessible woman showers less than that. Not a comment on his bachelor facilities: cramped though his Clapham hermitage was, it lacked for none of the eroticising amenities expected of a modern bathroom. Name a refinement of toiletry, Kreitman had it. Name the most powerful shower head, name a douche appliance, name a Roman bath … No, what Kreitman's unaccompanied life lacked for was inducement. There was no good reason to pamper his body to the degree it had come to expect. Some days he never bothered to dress. Once or twice he never bothered to get out of bed. As a consequence he was beginning to notice upon himself something that looked like mould. The skin of tramps must look like this, he thought. Or the skin of old men. Kreitman's flesh had always been important to him. Not muscles, not toning, not a tan, simply its integumental texture, its general air of lazy and maybe even absorptive, if not to say magnetic, good health. This flesh is in constant pleasurable employment, that was the notice he hung out upon his body. Now he was rotting.