J (31 page)

In answer to the first, Esme doubted whether, even if such people could be found, they’d be reckless enough to quit the places of safety in which they’d settled. And supposing that some were game, they were sure to be adventurers and chancers, misfits and counterfeiters and opportunists, the last people she thought suitable to fill the void that had been left. What no one wanted were more riots within a generation.

In answer to the second, she was firm that the mutual suspicion needed to restore the country’s equipoise of hate was not a moveable feast. Difference, which after all was easy to come by, was not in itself enough. So, with respect, ‘no’ to the Chinese who, though they had always kept themselves to themselves, and had never, for that reason, won the love of the indigenous population, were too unalike to do the job. She was undeviating on this. Alternative objects of suspicion couldn’t simply be plucked out of their fractious society at will, or appointed by diktat, on the assumption that any old hostility or incomprehension would do. She needed her auditors to mark her words and mark them well: You have to see a version of yourself – where you’ve come from or where you might, if you aren’t careful, end up – before you can do the cheek-to-cheek of hate. Family lineaments must be discerned. A reflection you cannot bear to see. An echo you cannot bear to hear. In other words, you must have chewed on the same bone of moral philosophy, subscribed to a similar spirituality and even, at some point in the not too distant past, have worshipped at the same shrines. It was difference where there was so much
that was similar that accounted for the unique antipathy of which they were in search. And only one people with one set of prints fitted that bill.

As for the question of whether they – this ‘version of ourselves’ – would reciprocate our hatred, why it was no question at all. They were the mirror image of our hostility. They too saw the family resemblance and were fascinated and appalled. True, some had been more easily assimilable than others. They fell in love with those who miscomprehended them – the miscomprehension being a fatal allure in itself. They embraced the culture that vilified and disfigured them. Melted to the music and fainted away before the fastidious beauty of the words. But they had solved their own problem and in doing so had solved the first of Esme’s. They had disappeared into the landscape, become their opposites, long before the time that concerned her and her team. For the remainder, if any could be found, the orchestra had only to start up for the dance to begin again.

I feel like a celestial bandleader, Esme thought.

A simple reiteration of a previously dismissed thought was what put Esme’s commission on a new track. The thought that,
WHAT-
EVER HAD HAPPENED
, not everyone could have been destroyed. No operation could have been so successful. Some would of course have escaped. But some, too, would surely have hidden. Not all the country had been up in arms. There were places where feelings had not run so high and blood had not been so plentifully spilled. Out of kindness of heart, principle, godliness, or just the obduracy that flourishes away from big towns and capital cities – that dogged refusal to go along with the majority – people would have offered help, given shelter, taken at least a frightened child in.There was no point in being overly optimistic.The chance of finding entire families living peaceably on rocky outcrops where they’d been hiding out for generations was slim. But failing that, could it be that there was not a single man and single woman of
pure descent to be discovered somewhere in a population of almost one hundred million people? For no more was necessary – just one single man and one single woman, subject to rigorous authentication and in reasonable health, and it could all begin again.

I feel like Noah, Esme thought.

ii

Had she been in better health herself, she’d have remained in charge of the commission. But when her mother died – her poor angry mother who never got to meet a man she liked – Esme knew she had to change the circumstances of her life. She longed for clean air and her damaged limbs needed the exercise of country walks. Working in the field, in both senses, would suit her better, she decided. And by her own logic, the more far-flung that field, the more likely she was to find what she was looking for. Fossilhunting she called it.

She put her father in a home, reminding him that his senescence was punishment for his nature, and travelled north. The fossilhunting did not go well at first. She laughed at her own naivety. Did she expect she would find her necessary opposite sitting up in a field, like a hare at dusk, waiting to be seen? Did she think a family of them would roll up at the public house where she liked to drink a tomato juice before going home to make herself a salad, and wonder what had taken her so long? And would she recognise them when she saw them, anyway?

It was in the nature of the problem that she had never, of course – knowingly, at least – met any. She had done a fair amount of reading but wasn’t sure about the reliability of the sources she consulted.A children’s story from the previous century, for example, cited as distinguishing features the puffy lips, the fleshy eyelids, the low, receding forehead, the large ears like the handles of a coffee cup –
eine Kaffeetasse
– the short arms, the bow-leggedness, the shuffling gait, the jabbering voice, the sickly-sweet odour – I
shouldn’t have too much trouble noticing if one of those stumbles past, Esme laughed. From more recent publications she learnt about the drooping eyes and jowly faces, the thinning hair, the thick eyeglasses, the large floppy breasts (on the men as well as the women). Best of all – she read – throw a handful of coins in a pool, the person quickest to dive in is the person you’re looking for. Well she wasn’t going to do that. But then what reason was there to believe they would still look and act as they had two or three generations earlier? If any had survived was it not likely that they’d have taken care to alter their appearance and demeanour, or more likely still that, exiled from their communities, they’d have assumed the manners and lineaments of their neighbours, and not only forgotten what they were supposed to look like but who they were supposed to be? I could be living next to one and not know, Esme realised. I could be living next door to a whole family and
they
might not know.

She wasn’t, of course, the only person looking, even in as remote a place as Edenhope where she had decided, in her own words, to set up camp. She debriefed agents on a regular basis, sometimes getting them to report to her in person, sometimes by utilityphone conference call. Some she felt she could rely on more than others, and many had not been told who in fact they were looking for. They were paid to keep their eyes open, that was all. For who? For what? Simply for anyone behaving strangely, out of character with the community, anyone local people thought suspicious, of dubious provenance. For a multitude of reasons, but most of all so as not to set up the wrong sort of expectations, Esme omitted all mention of slanting foreheads and shuffling gait. If these lesser agents supposed they were hunting down such minor infractions against the Present as heirloom hoarding or spending too much time in reference libraries then so much the better. Softlee softlee catchee money. Monkey, beg your pardon. She didn’t want any possibles scared off by unsubtle, overenthusiastic investigation. And a reference library, that immemorial refuge of the dispossessed,
was not a bad place to be looking, little help as the limited archives available would give those wondering who they were and where they’d come from.

‘Another wild goose chase,’ she would say wearily to herself, after a trail of clues ended nowhere. Sociologically, it was interesting to discover how many misfits even the smallest hamlets yielded. How many runaway wives or husbands, how many defectors of one sort or the other – from responsibility, from debt, from the law, from careers, from gender – how many were judged, rightly or wrongly, to be foreigners, illegal immigrants, gypsies, visitors from another solar system even.Was there anyone, she sometimes wondered, who wasn’t alien to someone else? The surprise, given this degree of social mistrust, was that more hadn’t
HAPPENED
and indeed wasn’t
HAPPENING
now. But this just went to show how right she had been in her analysis: those who had been the object of
WHAT HAPPENED
weren’t just any old, interchangeable excuse for civil riot, they occupied a particular, even privileged, place in the nation’s taxonomy of fear and loathing.

After several years of unrewarded endeavour, at the end of which Esme Nussbaum thought she had finally worn out what remained of her energies, an exciting piece of information came her way. The agent responsible for it was precisely one of those who knew nothing of what they were about and were therefore always more likely, in Esme’s view, to yield a result. She felt tentatively vindicated. It all came from one or two fairly innocuous questions being asked about boxes of letters found stored in a convent.

A convent! Esme Nussbaum threw her head back and laughed, as she often did at things that weren’t funny, like a crazy woman. She found the idea of a convent so ludicrously incongruous she was certain it was going to yield something. Something big or something small she didn’t know, but something . . .

She suddenly felt years younger.

Barely two months later, she was to be seen extending her hand and flashing her brightest and most motherly smile. ‘Hello, I’m Ez,’ she said.

‘Hello, Ez,’ said Ailinn Solomons.

TEN

Lost and Found and Lost Again

i

T
HERE ARE TIMES
in your life, he thought, when you need to see an animal. Not a dog or a cat – they carried too many associations of the humans whose feet they clung to. Something unconnected. Something wild. Seals, he decided were the thing. From his bench he could sometimes see them, their bald heads bobbing about in the ocean. Were there hunchback seals whose totemic disfigurement at one and the same time shamed their progeny and guaranteed them immunity. Immunity from what? From whatever vengeance seals meted out to one another for offences buried deep in seal history. Your colleagues detest you, the librarian had told him. In fact the word she’d used was ‘mistrust’, but to him that was just splitting hairs. Did seals detest?

They weren’t out there, anyway. After an hour or more of looking, he gave up on them and returned reluctantly to his cottage. There was no explaining why he did that. He could have gone on watching. Or gone for a stiff, dizzying walk. Shaken stuff out of his head. Let the wind blow him about. If there were times in your life when you needed to see an animal, there were also times in your life when you needed to be an animal.

There were no visitors. He had the cliffs to himself. He could have scampered, sniffed the ground, rubbed his nose in droppings, howled, screamed. Beyond a general impression of height and risk and isolation, he didn’t know the cliffs on which he’d so often
walked. He sedulously avoided looking, as though ignorance of his surroundings, particularly an ignorance of what grew beneath his feet, was a metaphysical necessity to him. Now was his chance. But he didn’t take it. Instead, he let monotonous mortal habit claim him. And back down to his cottage he went.

It wasn’t even as though he was in the mood for work. On some days his lathe answered every anxiety. The whirl of the spindle shut out his thoughts, all the concentrated frustration in his body vanished at the point where he held the handle of the chisel as gently as he might have held the fingers of a child. The wood curled beneath its blade, like the hair of that same child becoming unloosed from a bonnet. He favoured a light touch, not always knowing exactly what he wanted to make. Let it turn itself, he thought on good days, let it turn out as it chooses. If the bowl was waiting in the wood, then God was waiting in the bowl as surely as love had been waiting – a long, long time waiting – in the spoons he’d carved for Ailinn. But not today. No curls, no God, no Ailinn. It was like waiting for a storm to break.

He was relieved to find his utility phone flashing. If it was trouble, bring it on, he thought. If it was Ailinn, please let her say she was coming over. It had been weeks since he’d seen her. He had not rung her because he was frightened to encounter a hostile voice. ‘You threw me out. Drop dead!’ She’d have been within her rights to say that and more, then slam the phone down. He’d offered her his bed, his home, his loyalty. You can’t do that and then ask someone to leave, no matter how distraught you feel or how temporary you want their absence to be. A life companion is a life companion. It wasn’t her fault his cottage had been broken into and his Chinese runner straightened. And if he’d meant it when he’d told her that the little he had was hers, then it was her house that had been broken into, her Chinese runner that had been straightened, too. He had to stop thinking of himself as a man alone, unless that was now what, thanks to his own stupidity, he had once again become. Only this time it would not be the
same as before. There was no same as before, not after Ailinn. After Ailinn, nothing.

He wondered whether he should leave the utility phone to flash. All day and all night if necessary. Not rush to find out. Delay the disappointment. Though it was still morning he knew that if he went to bed he would immediately drop into sleep. Anticipation keeps some men awake. It poleaxed Kevern. He thought of it as a gift. When the terrible time came – it didn’t matter which – he would deal with it by passing out. He had warned Ailinn what he would do.

‘Good to know I can count on you,’ she said.

‘Under no circumstances think you can count on me,’ he said, just in case she intended her comment as a joke. ‘I’m not man enough.’

‘I won’t make that mistake,’ she said.

‘I am not your rock.’

‘I understand.’

‘Should anything happen to you I will fall immediately into the deepest sleep known to man. I might never wake up from it. I’d hope never to wake up from it. That’s how impossible I would find life without you. See it as the proof of my devotion. But understand I’d be no use when it comes to getting help or, if you’re beyond help, gathering your friends, organising your funeral, arranging the flowers.’