Who's Sorry Now?: A Novel by Jacobson Howard

Author:Jacobson, Howard [Jacobson, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781608197446
Amazon: B00DB24H1C
Goodreads: 20411756
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2002-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

‘I am ill with grief over my husband,’ she told Dotty, ‘and this guy keeps ringing me up and asking me out. But I’m well aware you’re not the person to be saying this to.’

They had been to The Mikado – ‘Just take me to see anything, just get me away from the house,’ Chas had begged her sister – and now they were sitting in the American Bar at the Savoy, drinking burgundy, picking at olives and looking striking. The Juniper girls up from the country, smelling of hay, but with the sun in their hair.

‘And who’s the guy?’ Dotty asked.

‘There you are! That’s not the question you’re meant to ask, Dotty. You’re so sideways. A sister shouldn’t be sideways.’

‘How should a sister be?’

‘Straight.’

Dotty crossed her legs, rattling her sequins, and sat back in her chair, her chest out. (Incapable of not flirting, Chas thought, even with me.) ‘This straight enough for you? Now what’s the question I’m meant to ask?’

‘Why am I ill with grief for my husband.’

‘And why are you?’

‘Oh, Dotty, what a question. Twenty-three years!’

Dotty opened her eyes very wide, not because she was surprised by the amount of time her sister and her brother-in-law had been together but because she had read that opening her eyes wide for long periods prevented crow’s feet. ‘All the more reason for accepting it’s over,’ she said. ‘A hundred years ago you’d have been dead already. Victorian expectations of one marriage to one man no longer apply. It’s mortality that decides morality. Always has been. A woman of the twenty-first century can expect to live until she’s eighty-five at least. With your constitution you’ll probably make it to a hundred and five. That means you’ll need a minimum – a minimum, Charlie! – of three husbands. Let this one go. Divorce him and marry this other guy. Who is he?’

‘You forget that we were more than husband and wife. More than friends even. We collaborated. Twenty-seven books! It wasn’t me who used to say we were a marriage of true minds, it was Charlemagne.’

Dotty uncrossed her legs, winnowing with light the sequins on her antique dress. One of their grandmother’s. Chas noticed that Dotty had taken to wearing these more and more often lately, as though needing to clothe her forward behaviour in the garments of a more withdrawn time. A proof, Chas believed – and this was a belief she held dearly to – that modern women like her sister only affected abandon, while in their hearts they remained as self-restrained as their grandmothers. This affectation was what Chas meant by silliness. On the other hand she could see that Dotty was looking very beautiful tonight, that she was enjoying showing the room (and the waiters) her sequins (and her legs), that the burgundy which she’d been drinking to excess had made her voice deep and that taken all round her silliness became her.

But it wasn’t only to draw attention to herself that Dotty went on changing her position; she was also looking for a posture suggestive of confidentiality.

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