Who's Sorry Now? (11 page)

He was an unlucky boy. Unlucky in his parents, unlucky to have been carted off to Leicestershire and then sent back down to Lewes to finish his schooling, unlucky in his encounters with the lower classes and, until he met Charlie and his luck changed, unlucky in love. He couldn't find anybody. One by one the other boys caught up with Simon Lawrence. Oral sex? Nothing to it. Straight sex? A breeze. Now they were all biting pencils and wearing lockets. All except Charlie. He bought a locket of course, but put his mother's picture in it. ‘Miss Cuntalina Fuckleton,' he
would have said, had anybody enquired. Some love charm! – the chain gave him a neck rash while the locket itself smacked into his sternum whenever he moved. Small wonder he continued to be lacking in the necessary confidence. They can smell it on me, he thought, I must stink of everything I haven't done. He did. At school dances girls shied away from him, put off by the avidity with which he stared at them, frightened of his big hungry face, repelled by the odour of his virginity. He believed it was his penis that stank, and washed it in a basin a hundred times a day. He thought he had some disease, he thought his penis was putrefying. He thought his sperm smelt off. But of course it had nothing to do with his penis or his sperm. It was his attitude that stank. Marvin Kreitman pointed that out to him when they met in their first week at university. He emptied a bottle of Givenchy over Charlie, advised him to keep his drawers and cupboards open for a year, recommended he stop wearing vests and change into clean underpants every morning, put it to him that he might consider circumcision, but above all ordered him to stop looking so needy.

‘How do I do that?' Charlie wanted to know.

‘You put your tongue back inside your mouth for a start.'

‘Do you know what the worst of it is,' he told Kreitman, ‘legs and nipples.' He longed for legs and nipples. Ached for them. It was an Indian summer and all the girls had their legs bare and their nipples pushing at their shirts and cardigans, like eyes in the wrong place. ‘Why eyes in the wrong place should get to me the way they do, I don't know,' he said, ‘but they do and I'm going mad for a pair.'

‘Your nipples are fine,' Kreitman told him.

‘Listen to me, Kreitman,' Charlie said, ‘if I don't get to walk out with someone with nipplissimus erectibissimus before this term's out I'll shoot myself.'

Soon after, rather than let that happen, Kreitman introduced him to Charlie.

And guess what? She had tiny introverted nipples and wore brassières and men's jackets.

And long canvas skirts.

And woolly winter tights.

But Charlie fell in love with her for all that.

And should have lived happily ever after, if there were any fairness in the universe. Yet here he was again, at the beginning of another century, wondering to what end those shadows on the walls of the school pavilion leapt and cavorted.

As a general rule other people did not have as much fun as you feared they were having; he had learnt that as he'd got older. The grass isn't always greener. Your neighbour is invariably as dissatisfied with his ox as you are with yours. Figuratively speaking, he wasn't the only one who had worn his mother's portrait round his neck. Everybody added a little to the truth. ‘No one ever goes to as wild a party as you throw for them in your head, Charlemagne,' his wife used to tell him when she feared he was growing restless. Some such calculation of human sameness is necessary to keep us all in a passable state of contentment and it had been enough for Charlie for twenty years. Nice sex with Chas twice a month – and Charlie in his peroration to Marvin Kreitman had not exaggerated how nice sex between them was, sex so nice he sometimes wanted to cry while he was having it – nice books to write about children who were only comically not nice, nice sales, nice house on the river at Richmond, nice friends. He even sent off self-effacing articles to fogey journals in praise of his lifestyle, joys of suburbia, charm of the old-fashioned, what you don't know you don't miss, better a buffoon than a bounder, as if he'd clean forgotten what it was like to fear you had a putrefying penis. And it
was
enough. It did. More than that, it was true. The rest was lies. Silliness and lies. Then suddenly it wasn't. Suddenly the rest was truth and he was lies.

What had happened? Nothing in his relations with Charlie, he
was sure of that. Dear Chas – they still worked as they had always done, on ancient clitter-clatter typewriters at opposite ends of a large pine table with a vase of freshly cut flowers between them, and he still had only to raise his eyes from his machine and see her engrossed in hers, poking her little fingers into the keyboard, as conscientious and unworldly as a head girl at a convent school; still had only to catch her looking quizzically at him over her bifocals, ascertaining whether he was genuinely listening to what she was reading (‘Charlemagne, attend!' she would say when she thought his attention was wandering), and his soul would leap as it had always leapt to nuzzle into hers. So, no, nothing to do with Chas. Nothing to do, either, with his son getting his nipple pierced (talking of nipples) and showing up without a word of warning on
Blind Date
. ‘My name's Tim Merriweather and I'm from
Rich
… mond!' Nor with his daughter getting
her
nipple pierced and informing them that while she wasn't once and for all committed and they mustn't think that that was her settled for the duration and that she wouldn't be giving them grandchildren eventually, she did fancy having a tentative stab at the other thing. ‘Kitty's a bulldyke!' Charlie announced with a wail, during a party for grown-ups on the lawn, and all their friends roared with laughter. Strangers boating on the Thames roared with laughter too. Not at the daughter's waywardness but at the father's drollery. Who cared if there was or wasn't another bulldyke in the world? It was all regulation Richmond. As was, when all was said and done, Dotty with her frayed-sleeved toyboy – yawn, yawn. Respectable Middle England which had never, in truth, been in the slightest bit respectable at all, simply opened its insatiable maw and swallowed the lot. No, none of Charlie's externals had changed. Something had just switched on in his body. Or in his head. Maybe he'd banged himself. Walked into a wall or ricked his neck rolling off Charlie. Smack, rick, switch – behold, a pervert!
No one was ever having as much fun as you feared they were having?
The hell they weren't! Look at Kreitman. Well,
don't look at him just this minute, with blood in his nostrils and tyre marks on his shirt; but in a general way, look at him.

How many houses did Kreitman have? How many love nests? With how many lovers in each? A new woman every night, was that his routine? Two new women? Two together? Should he have asked for two before Kreitman walked into the cyclist? Would Kreitman remember anything of the conversation when he woke? Would he know if Charlie told him that the deal was
two
– his beloved Chas for any two of Kreitman's? Or three? Would he remember enough to know that three had never been on the table?

He was parting company with his reason but there was nothing he could do to reverse the process. He
wanted
to be parted from his reason. The poison had entered his body. Never mind Kreitman, he was the one they should be jabbing against tetanus.

Contrary to what moralists tell you, an excessive preoccupation with sex makes you serious. Or perhaps that should go the other way round: only the serious are able to brave wholeheartedly the repercussions of sexual thought. The young are excepted from this. Sex in the young is another matter, unphilosophical, a necessity not a luxury, the fulfilment of an instinct not an illness. Thought to be a jolly person in the past, though tinged of course with that melancholy incident to any man who has looked about him or been sent to public school, Charlie Merriweather was now possessed of so much of the gravitas of unsatisfied desire he barely recognised the weight of his own limbs.

The other burden he had to carry, of course, was that of treachery, and treachery's twin brother, loneliness. He didn't feel he was acting against Chas in his heart, but of course he was. They had done everything together since he was a young man. When he'd been unhappy or uncertain he'd told her and she'd kissed him better. His unhappiness was her unhappiness. They were a couple. They shared. But she couldn't share this one, could she? He was acting against her, thinking against her, by simple virtue
of the fact that what he was thinking he couldn't tell her.
There
was the betrayal – not the imaginary other women themselves, but his having to exclude her from all knowledge of them. For the first time since they'd become a pair, he had reverted to being single. And the cruelty of that, for him, was that he had no one to talk to just when he needed someone to talk to most.

So it wasn't with any idling lightness that he sat looking at Kreitman's rescued mobile and thought about the contents of its databank. Pick a number, press a key, and that lurid world of which Charlie Merriweather had for so many years denied the very existence would at once dance into lunatic life. He turned it about in his fingers, picking at the stitches of its leather case (everything Kreitman owned came in a leather case), while he waited for Chas to turn up with the tea and egg baps. Nyman wasn't watching; fearing he may have killed a man, the cyclist slumped with his head between his cycling shorts, intermittently leaping to his feet to make another desperate representation to the receptionist.

‘Nyman, why don't you go home?' Charlie said. ‘Nothing's going to happen.' But the minute he said it he realised his mistake. By his own confession – ‘I am Nyman,' was how he had introduced himself while they were watching Kreitman being stretchered into the ambulance, ‘I am no one in particular' – Nyman had been waiting for such an evening all his life. Nyman the Killer – so that's who I am!

‘I will get some air,' he said. ‘Please to call me if there are developments.'

Charlie wasn't certain he believed the cyclist was Austrian or German, let alone, as Kreitman had insisted, a faggot, however many German faggots on bicycles Kreitman said there were in Soho. He watched Nyman's back recede, in its pretend athletic vest, then went like a thief into the phone book of Kreitman's mobile and pressed a key.

The name Erica appeared on the display. He pressed another
key. Bernadette. Then Jane. Then Ooshi. Then Vanessa. Then Dotty. Then Shelley …

Then
who
was that? He went back a number. Dotty? Kreitman was in the habit of ringing
Dotty?

He felt the blood run into his neck. Was Kreitman already halfway to enjoying both sisters? The thought sent a sewer of bile into Charlie's stomach. A man should not fuck sisters, whatever attitude the Old Testament took to Jacob fucking Leah and Rachel. A man should not fuck sisters. In a decent world a man would not even
think
about fucking sisters. Not Chas
and
Dotty. Not Dotty
and
Chas. So where did that leave him? Up in flames, longing for abominations and going madder by the minute.

Hope and pray it was a different Dotty. Kreitman must have known a thousand Dotties. Charlie did not recognise the number, but then Charlie did not recognise
any
number. In his house Chas did all the ringing. She had even programmed his mobile for him – just as she still put together his outfits for the day, which socks with which pants – showing him how to operate the phone book, though the only number he could find in it was his own. He checked his watch – fast approaching two in the morning – then pressed the yes key anyway. If this was Dotty's number and she was asleep she'd either have her phone off or switched over to answering machine, the way Chas did theirs. Anyone else, well, what the hell. His own needs came first. The phone rang four times, then someone picked it up. The voice irascible with broken sleep – ‘Who's that?' Dotty! Dotty, for sure. Remembering to pinch her lips together, even though barely awake, lest words made the muscles round her mouth collapse. ‘Wh's tht?' Dotty without a doubt. ‘Oh, Lord!' Charlie said, whereupon Dotty said, ‘Charlie, is that you? What's the matter? Is everything all right? Has anything happened to Charlie?' And all Charlie could think of saying in return was, ‘I'm losing my mind.'

The first thing Chas and Hazel did after Charlie rang them to say he was sitting in St Thomas's waiting for Marvin to wake up after being run down by a cyclist but not to worry, was to ring each other. If Chas was driving in from Richmond, then Hazel would take a taxi to Wandsworth where the girls had gone to a friend's house to rave, from which Chas could pick them up without seriously going out of her way and deliver them all to St Thomas's. Had any man been party to this arrangement he would have pointed out its logical and geographic flaws and come up with an alternative suggestion. Such as, ‘Go separately.' This was the joy, for Hazel at least, of having no man party any longer to anything.