BooksBarbecue
Back Peeping Tom Save as PDF
Chapters (27)
  1. Contents
  2. About the Book
  3. About the Author
  4. Also by Howard Jacobson
  5. Dedication
  6. Title Page
  7. Prologue
  8. Part One
  9. Chapter I
  10. Chapter II
  11. Chapter III
  12. Chapter IV
  13. Chapter V
  14. Chapter VI
  15. Chapter VII
  16. Part Two
  17. Chapter I
  18. Chapter II
  19. Chapter III
  20. Chapter IV
  21. Chapter V
  22. Chapter VI
  23. Chapter VII
  24. Chapter VIII
  25. Chapter IX
  26. Chapter X
  27. Copyright

But what was I to do? I had been brought up – or at least I had brought myself up – to spare women. I had been accustomed to viewing the grossest distortion of truth as the subtlest form of tenderness. I produced a lie as another man might have produced a spray of flowers, as a mark of devotion, from the heart. I would never have dreamed of causing Sharon pain, for example, with accounts of what I’d done behind her back, and similarly I saw no reason for making other women miserable with the truth of my feelings for my wife. You see I felt that I owed them all something. Even in my blithest days with Sharon, when my heart rose as high as her skirts, I couldn’t bear to punish all the others with her. I denied her for their sakes. I’d be happier with you, my eyes would say as I passed a stranger in the streets; and if that improved her day and Sharon was none the wiser, what then? Barney Fugleman, the spreader of underhand universal joy!

Camilla understood the implications of my constitutional incapacity for truth in these matters, from the start. ‘If you can’t come clean to me about your relations with other women, how are you ever going to come clean to your other women about your relations with me?’

I found that a difficult sentence to unravel but I believed I had the gist of it. ‘There aren’t any other women,’ I assured her. ‘There never will be any other women.’

‘There you go again.’

‘I’m sparing you,’ I explained to her.

‘What from?’

What from? I shrugged. How should I know what from? I was the liar in the house. I was the last one to ask. If she’d pressed me I might have said something like, ‘From the chaos of the affections that causes my father to confuse names.’ Which would have turned out to be a bit of a joke, considering that it was the chaos of Camilla’s affections that finally confounded me. But she didn’t press me to say it.

‘Don’t spare me, thanks,’ she warned me instead.

But of course I did.

And of course I still do. I make my daily expiatory expeditions. I haunt the village and the weird shoreline, up the cliff, down, till I’m – well, till I’m what I want to be. I guard the rights of my remorse jealously. I can’t be expected to give up everything that makes me a man.

Chapter IV

CHAPTER IV

[1]