J (37 page)

‘Will you walk with me?’ he asked, in his gentlest voice. She was right, he knew she was right, morbidity was his nature. So what was new?

‘Of course I will,’ she said, putting an arm around him. Not everyone was his enemy, she wanted him to know. But the gesture made them both feel isolated. They had each other, but who else did they have?

It was only when they were on the bench that she realised he hadn’t double-locked and double-checked that he’d locked the door of his cottage. Had he kicked the Chinese runner? She didn’t think he had. She should have been pleased but she wasn’t. What was he without his rituals?

There was rain in the air. That squeezed sliver of light had been an illusory promise. Below them, the blowhole was clearing its throat in readiness for a day of tumult. A couple of gulls threw themselves like rags into the wind.

‘What now?’ he said suddenly.

‘Do you want to go back in?’

‘No, I meant what are we going to do with the rest of our lives?’

She knew but couldn’t tell him. ‘We can do whatever you’d like to do,’ she lied.

‘Well we can’t just carry on as though nothing’s happened.’

‘Why not? How much has changed really?’

‘Everything,’ he said. ‘Absolutely everything.’

‘You’ll feel differently in a few days. You’ll get back into the swing of things.’

‘What swing of things? I never was in the swing of things. I was waiting. Just waiting. I didn’t know what I was waiting to happen or find out, but I now see that the waiting made for a life of sorts.’

‘
Of sorts
! With me? Is that the best you can say of our time together –
a life of sorts
?’

He put his arm around her waist but didn’t pull her to him. ‘Not you. Of course not you. I don’t mean that. We are fine. We are wonderful. But the me that isn’t us, that wasn’t us, when all is said and done, before I met you – before the pig auctioneer – that solitary me . . . where do I go with it from here? I waited and I waited, scratching away at bits of wood, and now I know what I was waiting for and it’s . . .’

‘It’s what?’

He didn’t know. Above him the raggedy gulls screamed desolately. Was it all just thwarted greed or did they hate it here as much as he did? He looked up to the sky and cupped his ears as though the birds might tell him what to do with himself from this moment on.

‘Nothing,’ he said at last. ‘What it is is nothing. In fact it’s worse than nothing.’

‘You could try feeling pride,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Pride. You could decide to wear it as a badge of honour.’

‘What do you suggest I do? Change my name back?’

‘That’s a black joke, Kevern,’ she said.

He agreed. ‘The blackest.’

‘Then why did you make it?’

He shrugged. ‘Why did you speak of pride and honour? Where’s the honour, please tell me? You might as well ask this ant which I am about to tread on to view all the previous years of his ant life with pride.’

‘It’s not to his shame that you stamp on him.’

‘I disagree with you. It is his shame, his fault, for being an ant. We have to take responsibility for our fate. Even an ant. What happens to him is his disgrace.’

She was shocked to hear him speak like this. It felt like a blasphemy to her. Perhaps he needed to blaspheme. Perhaps that was his way of working the shock of it all out of his system. Nonetheless she couldn’t let his blasphemies go unchecked. ‘You aren’t saying what you really mean,’ she said. ‘You can’t honestly think that your mother’s and father’s life was a disgrace.’

‘They were in hiding for the whole of it.Yes, it was a disgrace.’

‘And what about those who had nowhere to hide? Their parents and grandparents? Mine?’

‘The trodden generations? A disgrace.’

‘Then it’s up to you to restore respect.’

‘Me? I am the greatest disgrace of all.’

ii

Esme Nussbaum sits at the window of her room and watches rain drip from the ferns. Even when it’s not raining anywhere else it
rains in Paradise Valley and even when it doesn’t rain in Paradise Valley the ferns go on dripping.

There is nothing more I can do, she tells herself. It’s no longer in my hands. But it’s in her brain, and with that she wills them on, the harbingers of her bright new equilibrium of hate.

Senior officials from Ofnow are on the phone to her every day. They want to know how it’s proceeding. The population is still tearing itself apart – why, in her very neck of the woods there has been another brutal murder, a double murder, a policeman and his cat, for God’s sake: what maniac would kill a cat? – so they need good news. She tells them this thing must run its course. Yes, she has other irons in the fire, but this is the best bet and, trust her, she won’t take her eye off it for a moment. But she has to remind them that the complex structure of conflict that was Rome wasn’t built in a day and that there’ll be no immediate visible effect even if all does go well. They don’t agree with her. They think the country will feel a different place the minute it learns that
WHAT HAPPENED
,
IF IT HAPPENED
was only, after all, a partial solution. They don’t expect a uniformity of response. After years of saying sorry there’s no knowing how the public will react but, by Esme’s own analysis, the news itself – a few well-judged publicity photographs, the odd teaser interview, not giving too much away, in celebrity and gossip magazines – should begin to restore the necessary balance of societal antagonism. ‘Just give us some tidbits we can definitively leak,’ they tell her, meaning that the wedding, the conception, and the birth can wait. The child of course is crucial –
For unto us a child is given
– but even the promise of it should suffice for the moment.

I’m on it, Esme tells them.

There is one among the importunates whose excitement at the prospect of a cultural rebirth – musicals with wit, reject-rock, hellishly sardonic comedies, an end to ballads – is so intense he can barely express it in coherent sentences. So frequently does he call her that Esme is beginning to wonder whether he isn’t himself
one her scouts had missed. I have to tell you, she tells him, that reigniting popular culture is not high among my objectives. He baulks at ‘popular’. The serious theatre, too, needs a shot in the arm, he reminds her. Imagine hearing complex, warring sentences on the stage again. Imagine paradox and bitterness and laceration. Art as endless disputation, bravura blasphemy – Oh, the bliss of it, Ms Nussbaum! Alternatively, imagine the
Herzschmerz
of a violin and piano sonata, played as only they can play it, as though for the final time. She warns him against premature recidivism.You know about things you shouldn’t know about, she says sternly, and you make unwarrantable assumptions about my politics. I have no desire to restore a status quo from which so many suffered. To regret
WHAT HAPPENED
is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Something needed to happen, even if what did exceeded decency and proportionality. But nor must we force those who have been providentially spared back into demeaning stereotypical patterns.
Herzschmerz
indeed! I repeat, I am indifferent to the entertainment implications of this project. Not dismissive, just not engaged. My concern is not bebop but the physics of societal mistrust. You cannot have a one-sided coin. If what I am seeking comes about, we will once again enjoy the stability of knowing who we’re not.

Her importuner laughs, optimistic despite what she has said to him, imagining he has heard irony. But he is wrong. Irony is not something Esme Nussbaum does.

It has occurred to her, of course, to worry for Ailinn should things not come about as she intends or, indeed, should it come about too well. What if the years of saying sorry have bred an antagonism even deeper than before? Could Ailinn find herself the object of violent suspicion long before the desired equilibrium has time to take hold?

But Esme is in the grip of a passion to do good, and all other concerns, including Ailinn’s safety, are subjugated to the more immediate task of bringing that good about.

There is still some way to go. The problem is Kevern. Not the
facts about the bloodline. The facts are fine. So easy of confirmation, in fact, it is a wonder the Cohens were able to go on living for so long in Port Reuben unmolested. The problem is the flakiness. She isn’t any longer sure that he is suitable. She puts this down to poor preparation. Those who have been making him their study have not done their job well.They have not adequately assessed his character. They have been looking through him, or past him, not
at
him. But it’s her fault too. When she came down to Paradise Valley it was with a view to scrutinising them both. So what went wrong? Ailinn went wrong. Or rather Ailinn went too right. Esme wonders if her vile father had her number after all. Was she indeed a lesbian? She didn’t think so, but without question she’d found the girl engrossing. And while she was engrossed in the one she failed to keep tabs on the other. Perhaps Kevern had been exercising the same magic. Perhaps he too had blinded those charged exclusively with watching him. Is that their inherited gift, Esme catches herself asking. Are they charmers? Do they beguile? She stills her thoughts. If she’s not careful she’ll be understanding too well why
WHAT HAPPENED
happened.

Kevern is not her last throw of the dice. Neither, come to that, is Ailinn. Little by little, fragile shoots of hopefulness have shown themselves in remote corners of the country. Nothing showy, naturally, no salt-rose or topaz, but here and there, a violet by a mossy stone, a dark thing between the shadow and the soul, wasting its sweetness on the desert air. And these will certainly be significant when it comes to procreative negotiations further down the line. But they are not her first choice. Ailinn and Kevern remain her first choice.

There is another consideration when it comes to Kevern. Esme has given voice to this more than once, in private while watching the ferns drip and when irked by all the problems associated with his character. Who needs the little prick, she has wondered, surprised by her own violence. Expletives came to her often when she lay in her coma, but they haven’t visited her much since.

What she means by this is that while Ailinn must be the real McCoy, and must, short of a miracle, have a father for the child, it might not be absolutely essential to that child’s being the real McCoy that the father is the real McCoy as well. She has been hampered by having no one to ask and very few intact books to consult but she has beavered away and believes she can now confirm Ailinn’s grandmother’s understanding of the law of matrilineality: yes, it is indeed the case, as Rebecca thought when she defied her husband, that the McCoys, as it amuses her to call them while she bites her fingernails, look only to the mother for transmission of authenticity. Thus, though there’s no knowing who Ailinn’s father was, and though her grandfather Fridleif was unacceptable in every possible regard, the fact that she is in direct, unbroken line of matrilineal descent from her grandmother, who appears to have ticked all the boxes herself, is sufficient to make her what Esme wants her to be. That being the case, who needs that little prick Kevern Cohen?

No, no one
needs
him. That’s the point to which Esme’s rough scholarship has brought her. But still and all it will be better in every way if he can be roped in. His presence as Ailinn’s agitated, unsmiling consort will help Esme to the composite effect she is looking for. Kevern does not, she is confident, photograph well. There are many aspects of character the camera can lie about, but stand-offishness is not one of them. A man so aloof that he accepts no kinship with the human race looks exactly that when he’s photographed – an unquiet thing, displaced and determined to stay that way. Furthermore, if she can sell him the whole box of tricks, or at least keep the pairing to the degree that he will buy into engagement, marriage and the rest of it, she will be able to arrange them a traditional wedding – she will officiate herself if she has to – whose antiquated self-absorption will enrage as many as it pleases. Including, she has no doubt, Kevern Cohen. He will not behave well at his own wedding. She has come across the ritual of the bridegroom breaking a glass. Kevern, she is confident,
will stamp it to smithereens. He will make a sardonic speech, compromising his love for Ailinn (she doesn’t doubt its genuineness) with savage jokes that no one will enjoy. Yes, the more she thinks about his studied prickliness, the more she wants to keep him. Ailinn is a woman of immense charm. What no one wants is for people to fall in love with her to the degree that no equilibrium of hate is re-established. Kevern, on the other hand, even should he somehow succeed in not being wholly detestable, will not inspire devotion. In Kevern the people will have no difficulty recognising their own antithesis.

iii

Black Friday

Demelza has left me. My mistake – though in the course of our final argument she told me I had made more mistakes than she could count – was to leave my diary where she could find it. Unless my mistake was to confide quite so many sexual secrets to its pages.

Wrong again, she said, when I confessed to that. Your mistake was to have
had
so many sexual secrets.

She says there’s no other man. Do I believe her? No, I do not. My money’s on Kevern ‘Coco’ Cohen. I can’t say I ever did care much for him but now I know him for what he is I suspect he has been scheming to squirm his way between Demelza’s legs all along. The metaphor of the reptile, by the way, is not mine. There was man, there was woman and then there was the all-knowing snake. I can’t be blamed for the theology of that parable when it was they who told it about themselves. Enter knowledge into the paradisal world of love and innocence – in other words enter them with their obscene obsession for knowing everything – and that’s happiness gone for ever. No wonder they shunned the human form and painted abstract robotical horrors.

Well, we thought we’d scorched that particular snake, but here it is again writhing between my wife’s legs. And the crazy thing is that I’ve been instrumental in its rebirth. Had I seen what he was about years
ago, before the Wise Ones rewrote the manual, I could have penned a damning report and that would have been that. There were enough clues, God knows. The never saying sorry. The never being out of the library. The furtive tap-turning and hand washing – what was he trying to wash off, I’d ask Demelza. Now it’s clear: his own snake slime. Slime that is now inside my wife. No wonder she was evasive when I tried to talk to her about him. And no wonder, come to think of it, she suffered Credibility Fatigue. I know now just what was fatiguing her.