Who's Sorry Now? by Howard Jacobson Page A

beside a leafy thicket; –
On his nose there was a Cricket, –
In his hat a Railway-Ticket; –
    â€“ Edwin (‘Teddy’) Merriweather would submit to his lovely wife’s latest ultimatum. ‘Humiliate me like that again and you’ll be
sleeping
on a heap of barley,’ she warned him. ‘What you do the rest of the time is your business, but I insist you remember you are a headmaster when you are out with me. Having brought us to this hellhole, I consider it the least you can do.’
    But his shoes were far too tight,
    Teddy Merriweather concluded wistfully, by way of reply.
    â€˜Grow up, Daddy,’ his daughters told him.
    Even when he was annoyed with his father for not remembering to act like a headmaster, Charlie loved the precise and yet irresponsible way he spoke, as though nothing was either serious or funny but somehow both. Charlie had heard somebody called the Archbishop of Canterbury speaking on the wireless, and hethought his father’s voice was a cross between the organ pipes of the Archbishop and the burbling whiffles of that Jabberwock whose jabot his father wore.
    In his heart, Charlie felt sorry for his father, going from applause to vilification in the time it took him to cross the threshold of his own house. It would have made sense, he often thought, for his father never to have come home at all. But then who would Charlie have looked to for forbearance? In his hurry to please his mother, before it dawned on him that he would never succeed, not ever, not ever ever, Charlie was constantly being flustered into mixing up his words and saying the opposite to what it was in his mind to say. He said yes when he meant no; he said up when he meant down; when she offered him her glacial cheek at bedtime, barely bothering to look up from her crossword, he would sometimes get so flustered he would call her Dada and wish her many happy returns instead of good night. Once she flew into a rage and boxed his ears, leaving him listening to silence for a morning, because he wouldn’t stop going on about the mats and rice he’d seen scuttling about the garden shed, chewing paper and disappearing into bags of plant feed. ‘What in God’s name are you talking about?’ she railed. ‘How can mats and rice chew paper? Is this some cuteness?’ His father understood. ‘It’s no wonder the boy makes such a hotchpotch of his sentences when you keep flummoxing him,’ Charlie thought he heard him say. ‘Anyway, it’s perfectly clear to me what he means. The Reverend W. A. Spooner would have understood him.’ ‘Then you and the Reverend W. A. Spooner talk to him,’ Mrs Merriweather said. ‘Nonsense is your medium, after all.’
    But being frightened imposes its own obligations, and being understood was no compensation for being shamed. What Charlie gathered from his mother was that his father’s engagingness outside the house degraded all of them. A man in his position had no business turning himself into a jackass for other people’s amusement. If she’d wanted a clown to be the father of her children,she’d have gone looking for a husband in the circus. Listening to her, even with his ears ringing, Charlie was convinced. Somehow his father was wasting something that belonged to them.
    Once, when Charlie was six, his father took him to a stately home in Derbyshire. Just the two of them. They had tea together – triangles of cucumber sandwiches, chocolate cake, slices of lemon on a little plate – then walked by a lake where Charlie’s father taught Charlie the names of different breeds of duck, showed him how to make stones skip across the water and, balancing on one leg with the other leg hidden behind his back, said:
    I’ll tell thee everything I can:
There’s little to relate.
I saw an aged, aged man,
A-sitting on a gate.
    And Charlie thought how wonderful it was to have a funny father