J (35 page)

And that’s before we get to the father whom he once described to me as a glassblower in wood, but that might just have been to put me off the scent. What if his candlesticks were ironically discoordinated – a veritable attack on Hellenistic proportion – to their very wicks and tails? Is there not even, now I put my mind to it, a grotesquerie of misshapen elaboration in the figures with which Kevern himself decorates his lovespoons?

Just thinking about all this sends me into a moral tailspin. I love the man. Like the man, at least. All right, all right – I don’t mind the man. It’s possible, then, that I’d have not minded one or two of his confrères. But I am reminded that on grounds of their aesthetic I’d have been tempted to pick up a stone myself had I been alive at the time. I don’t say to throw it, just pick it up. But who’s to say that the action would not have been enough to encourage me to do something worse. Having said that, I trust that my love of beauty would eventually have won out, stopped my hand and bade me turn my back.

PS And now here’s more news. Detective Inspector Gutkind has been found with his throat cut in his own ‘home’. His cat too. Both of them shrouded in white dust. Sounds like something Kevern Cohen’s mother might have drawn. Speaking of whom – the son not the mother – isn’t he now likely to be a prime suspect?

Not too good for me, all this. Not a good reflection on my acuity.

iii

She was impressed by how well Ailinn took what she had to tell her – or at least that much of it which, initially, was all she dared tell her. She read the letters that had come down to her, not with calm exactly, but with the fatalism of someone who expected nothing better and had half-dreaded something worse, and this omened well, Esme thought, for how she would deal with further revelations. But Ailinn was a slow burner. ‘And your role in this?’ she asked after a period of reflection.

‘That of a well-wisher.’

‘Please don’t treat me like a fool.’

‘You think I intend harm to you?’

‘I don’t know what you intend. But you have deceived me so far, so why shouldn’t I think you will deceive me more? Who are you and what do you want?’

‘You know who I am.’

‘No I don’t. I thought you were someone I just happened to meet at a book group and who needed a friend. But there was obviously no “just happened” about it. Don’t look at me in that bruised way, Ez. You have lied to me all along. Are you a policewoman?’

‘Do I look like a policewoman?’

‘What do looks have to do with it? You looked like my friend.’

‘I am your friend.’

‘But it’s clear from the way you say it that our friendship was a happy accident. What are you actually?’

‘I’m your guardian angel.’

‘There is no such thing. And even if there were, you aren’t it. Why do you know so much about me? Why have you made a project of my life? Nothing better to do with your own?’

‘That’s cruel, Ailinn.’

‘Yes it is. But what you’ve been doing is cruel. Did you think
I’d be grateful when I discovered you’d been digging the dirt on me?’

‘It isn’t dirt.’

‘That’s a matter of opinion. But you can hardly deny you’ve been digging.’

‘I stumbled upon you, Ailinn, that’s all.’

‘
Stumbled
?’

For a horrible moment Esme wondered if Ailinn intended to jeer at the way she walked. But that wasn’t what had struck the girl. ‘Stumbled upon me in the course of what line of work, Ez?’

‘You could say I’ve been trying to right the wrongs done to your family.’

‘Was that your ambition after you met me or before? It makes a difference. Did you know of me before you knew of my “family”, as you laughingly call it, or were you aware of “family” before you’d heard of me?’

Esme Nussbaum made a gesture suggestive of weighing with her hands. On the one hand this, on the other hand that . . .

It was not a gesture that satisfied Ailinn. ‘There is something you aren’t telling me. You aren’t my mother, by any chance, are you?’

Esme experienced a momentary pang. It would have been no terrible thing, would it, being Ailinn’s mother? ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m not your mother. I would not have abandoned you had I been.’

Ailinn was not going to show she’d heard that. ‘Did you
know
my mother?’

‘I did not. I know none of your family. I only know of them. And what I know I’ve passed on to you. There’s nothing else.’

She felt a fraud as she said these words. It wasn’t that she knew more so much as that she knew less – next to nothing if truth were told. What had she exhumed other than the dry bones of a story of desperation and deceit that Ailinn might with reason have preferred to leave buried? It wasn’t all that long ago she’d been scrutinising the girl’s features for telltale signs of genetic depravity.

Viewed from one angle she was no better than a specimen collector. Ailinn had reason to be angry without knowing the half of what Esme was about.

‘So the point of all this is what?’ Ailinn asked. ‘Am I the inheritor of a fortune of which you believe yourself entitled to a sizeable percentage? Are you some sort of bounty hunter?’

Esme wondered if she dared risk saying,‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’ But while she thought about it Ailinn read her silence. She was on the edge of the bed, swinging her ugly feet. ‘Does this have to do with Kevern?’ she asked.‘Is there something you require of both of us?’

‘Oh,
require
. . .’

‘Expect, hope for, want . . . Choose the verb that best applies. You brought us together, didn’t you? That’s the short of it. You promoted his cause with me from the very start. You looked worried every time we were on the point of breaking up. OK, I accept you’re not my mother. I think I’d know if you were. But it wouldn’t surprise me, given your concern for his welfare – I
assume
it was because you wanted him to be happy that you did your best to keep us together – it really wouldn’t surprise me now if you turned out to be his.’

Esme did not this time experience a momentary maternal pang. ‘It’s a funny idea,’ she said, ‘but no, I am not Kevern’s mother. I am of the wrong – how can I best put this: persuasion, denomination, credo? – to be Kevern’s mother.’

Ailinn stared.

‘So you knew Kevern’s mother?’

‘Trust me. I did not.’

‘But you know her “persuasion”? Does that mean you know something about Kevern’s that he doesn’t?’

‘Trust me,’ Esme repeated, taking the girl’s hands between hers. ‘Trust me on the generalities.The details I’ll give you later. Kevern’s mother was who he thought she was. Maybe not “what” he thought she was, but certainly “who”. And I don’t qualify. I’m not
his fairy godmother, either, though I think fairy godmothers are not bound by the laws of matrilineality. But you’re right that I wanted you for him. I wanted you for each other. I still want you for each other.’

‘Why? Would you like us to have a baby for you or something?’

The question surprised Esme into giving an answer that surprised her even more. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘as a matter of fact I would.’

She was always going to have to come out with it, but not in that way, not quite so abruptly and callously. Not yet.

Ailinn caught her breath. ‘If you’ve been wanting Kevern’s baby so badly you could always have slept with him, you know. I’m not saying I wouldn’t have minded but I think I’d have preferred it to this.’

‘I haven’t been wanting Kevern’s baby.’

‘So it’s mine you want?’

Whereupon, because she had nowhere else conversationally to go, and it had to be told sometime, Esme told her that she wanted Ailinn and Kevern to renew the future of their people.

iv

‘How would you feel,’ Ailinn asked him, ‘if you found out we are not together by an act of our wills alone?’

‘Is anybody?’

She didn’t want him to go philosophical on her. ‘What if you didn’t choose me?’ she said. ‘What if I didn’t choose you?’

‘I did choose you.’

‘You’ve forgotten. The pig auctioneer chose me for you.’

‘No, he didn’t. He pointed you out, that was all. An entirely redundant act, as it transpired. I didn’t need you pointing out. I was already well aware of your presence. I was irradiated by it. The fact that his judgement coincided with mine didn’t make it material to mine. If anything, he could have put me off you.’

‘In which case his judgement
was
material to yours.’

‘Negatively, but even then not quite.’

‘I didn’t know you had nearly been put off me.’

‘Isn’t there always a moment of hovering? Is this her or isn’t it? Do I leap or do I wait?’

‘I didn’t hover. I leapt.’

‘But then you leapt back when I told you your feet were too big.’

‘Not for long, though. I was on the phone to you almost immediately, though it took you an eternity to pick up.’ She remembered Ez, telling her to ring him. Ez sitting on her bed. Ez getting in too close and getting on her nerves. Ez playing with their lives.

‘Then there you are,’ he said, encircling her with his arms. ‘We chose each other. But what’s this about?’

‘Ez.’

‘Ez brought us together?’

‘You knew?’

‘Well I do now. I guess it makes perfect sense. Ez had something about your past she needed to tell you and feared how you would take it. As she saw it, you needed someone capable of supporting you, someone physically strong, unwavering and emotionally resolute, so she hired the pig man to look out for a likely candidate, and he found me.’

‘
Someone physically strong, unwavering and emotionally resolute
?’

‘Yes.’

‘This the pig man saw in the middle of a field?’

‘Why not? I saw who you were in the middle of a field.’

He’s going to need all his unwavering emotional resolution now, Ailinn thought.

‘There was something about me you didn’t see,’ she said.

He waved the idea away. There was nothing he hadn’t seen.

‘You didn’t see what Ez saw.’

‘Ez, Ez . . . why is there so much talk of Ez?’

They’d been lying down, looking at the ceiling, but now she
swung her legs out of bed and went to stand by the window. It was quiet out there, no wind, no gulls, even the blowhole subdued. The sky was low, without colour or promise. ‘God, it can feel dead down here sometimes,’ she said.

He remembered his mother saying the same. ‘It’s like being in a coffin,’ she said once. ‘With the lid down.’

Was that before or after the free meat, he wondered.

‘Look on the bright side,’ his father had answered. ‘At least there’ll be no surprises when they screw you in.’

His light-touched father.

He liked watching Ailinn naked at the window. He’d often thought of carving her, not just in miniature on a lovespoon, but as a candlestick maybe. Would he be able to render the responsiveness of her flesh, the reserves of life that were in her flanks, the strength of her legs? The springiness of her that made him believe in life?

‘While we’re laying cards on the table,’ he blurted out, ‘my grandfather was a hunchback.’

She didn’t turn around.

‘You never told me that before.’

‘I never knew before.’

‘So how come you know now?’

‘Kroplik told me.’

‘How does he know?’

‘He knows everything. Like your beloved Ez.’

‘Does it bother you?’

‘To know I’m from crooked stock? Yes. But Kroplik reckons I should be grateful. It was the hunchback who kept us safe.’

‘Safe from what?’

‘I don’t know. Whatever.’

‘And how does Kroplik say he managed that?’

‘By scaring people and being lucky. Apparently you don’t mess with a hunchback. Or at least you don’t in these parts.’

‘Do you ever wonder . . .’ she started to say, then relented.

‘Do I ever wonder what?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Yes it does. Do I ever wonder what?’

‘What you’re doing here.’

‘On earth?’

‘In Port Reuben.’

‘All the time.’

‘Would you want to find out?’

He got up from the bed and moved towards her. He wanted to feel her nakedness pressed into his, the lovely resilience of her buttocks.

‘There’s a lot I want to find out,’ he said. ‘But then again there isn’t. Mysteries are always so banal when they’re solved. You’re better off living in uncertainty.’

‘You say that, but you couldn’t bear not knowing who broke in here and straightened your rug.’

‘No. And now I never will find out.’ This was a silent allusion, that Ailinn was quick to pick up, to the murder of Detective Inspector Gutkind, the gory details of which were the talk of Port Reuben and beyond. Neither spoke about it. Kevern was happy to have him out of their lives, but he didn’t want to put that relief in so many words to Ailinn. He didn’t suppose she’d wonder if he’d done it, but then again there was no reason to plant further anxiety. Who knows what anyone will do in the end? Who would have thought he’d kiss Lowenna Morgenstern? Who would have thought his mother had a secret life? And now Ailinn . . .

‘Certainty might be banal, but better that, any time, than the immeasurable stress of uncertainty,’ Ailinn said, reading his mind.

‘So you’re pleased to know now how you came to be in an orphanage? You don’t wish that Ez had never told you?’

‘Hardly “pleased”, but yes, I believe I am better off for knowing, banal though you consider it all to be.’

‘I didn’t say that what happened to you was banal.’

‘Don’t apologise. I’m not offended. It
is
banal. But I would rather know it than not.’

‘And you’d rather know that Ez was instrumental in our meeting?’

‘Rather it had happened some other way, but rather know than not know that it happened the way it did.’

‘We should drink to Ez, then.’

Was he being sarcastic, or just slow to take the measure of what she was trying to tell him?

He went downstairs to open a bottle and returned with two full glasses.

‘To Ez,’ he said.

She still couldn’t decide. Sarcastic, or unfeeling, or stupid?

And then he noticed that Ailinn’s eyes were red. Not with weeping, more with the strain of looking.