J (38 page)

It’s a good job I am civilised. I count to a hundred. I pat Petroc, pat a couple of students in the same spirit, take out my sketches of St Mordechai’s Mount and remember when my mind was last given over to the contemplation of unsullied loveliness. I have an idea for a new series of watercolours – Eden. The Garden before the introduction of the snake. Just Demelza and I doing as we are told, unaware of our nakedness, alone under the trees, except maybe for Petroc. Speaking of whom, should I not have smelt a rat when he was snarling around Kevern ‘Coco’ Cohen’s feet smelling something worse? ‘Petroc!’ Demelza used to cry, calling him off. ‘Down, Petroc. Naughty boy. Down! I’m so sorry, Mr Cohen.’ Mr Cohen!
I’m so sorry, Mr Cohen
. I bet she was. Poor Petroc. Disparaged for expressing his nature and keeping us safe from harm.

I wouldn’t put it past him – the snake, not the dog – to have made her offerings of lovespoons. Portraits. Full-length. Top to toe. The pair of them entwined in lime wood. Not exactly likenesses. He doesn’t do likenesses. A likeness is not primitive enough for his depraved aesthetic. They prefer a touch of the ape to show through. But likeness enough to be compromisingly recognisable. Probably shown them to our students, too, while lecturing on the intricacy of their carving –
intricate
all right! – hoping they would make out Demelza despite the monkey features and scoff at me. Where did they do it? Here, when I was teaching? Or did she go over there on days when she said she needed to do some shopping? On the floor of his workshop, would it have been? On a bed of sawdust? If only I’d been less trusting. I should have smelt her hair when she returned. Should have gone searching for
shavings in her underwear drawer. Or better still should have had my way with that wild-haired piece of his while he was otherwise engaged. It must be assumed – forgive the fancy talk: I’m preparing my defence – I must assume that she too is to be numbered among the degenerates, though the flowers she made were beautiful enough. Veering on the odd, as you’d expect, even the macabre, but still close enough to nature to be lovely. So what would she have been like, that bird-woman of his with the hawk face? Sharp claws she’ll have, I bet. A tongue wet with blood and little nibbly teeth. Mandibles – is that the word?
Rotten juice and mandibles
– who said that?
The shitty magma of rotten juice and mandibles
. . . blah, blah, blah . . . ring a bell? . . .
the passion of the termite
. . .

. . . it must, methinks, have been one of those resurrected samizdat pamphlets from before
WHAT HAPPENED
that did the rounds of the country’s common rooms not all that long ago, probably as a medical corrective to our periodic recrudescences of unseemly guilt. All very well saying sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry – I have always been at the forefront of the apologising party myself, so long as we aren’t apologising for anything we have actually done – but a little puncturing of the windpipe of our dutifulness is no bad thing, as many of us felt, hence the reappearance of these short samizdatty things, if that’s the right expression, inflammatory trifles, anyway, from those on the front line and who knew the problem of termite infestation for themselves, that brightened our lives for a while before we grew dutiful again.

When a thing is heartfelt it stays with you. ‘
Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet’ . . . ‘Où sont les neiges d’antan
’ . . . You don’t forget sentiments like those. They express the quintessence of regret. But quintessence of scorn can melt your bones as well. Like those lines about shitty magma . . . the termites being everywhere, selling everything, keeping everything, destroying everything, weaving their web, was it, yes,
weaving their web in the shadows
. . . then eliminating, dissuading, pursuing whoever might cause them the least little bit of umbrage – that’s the phrase – to a final bloody course of reckoning, tee-dum tee-dum . . .
The least little bit of umbrage
. Can there be a more telling description of the
disproportionality of Kevern ‘Co-co-cocksucking’ Cohen and his kind, can there be a better atomisation of their crazed thin-skinned sensitivity, than that?
The least little bit of umbrage.
That imagined sliver of a slight in retaliation for which they’d have shaken the whole planet to its foundations . . . if we’d let them.

It would come as no surprise to learn the snake believes he’s been caused the least little bit of umbrage by me, though where and how I can’t imagine, and deny all charge and knowledge, but believes it anyway, I bet he does, in return for which he deposits his slime in my sweet, gullible and far too forgiving, not to say slime-receptive, Demelza. He will treat you as he’s treated me, I tell her. They are incapable of gratitude . . . But she denies all knowledge of him. You think I’d want to be with another man after you, she says. You think I’m that big a fool? But my mind races with suspicions of them both and that’s enough for me. On my hands and knees I pursue the spattered trail of rotten juices to my bed.

That I have no recourse, short of a private feud which, as the older and more easily hurt party, I am sure to lose, has been made plain to me in a communication from up there. They don’t exactly confirm my suspicions as to Demelza (though they blaze them forth as to everything else), but the warning is unequivocal: stay away. It’s actually even blunter than that. You have made a balls-up, move aside. No mention of Mrs Snake but I take the injunction to include her. Stay well clear of them both. Pretty much what I told Detective Inspector Gutkind. So you could say that in death he must be enjoying his revenge. As for when I will be enjoying mine, God alone knows. I am not, anyway, to have the consolation of confronting either of them. Not a cold word into his ear, not a warm whisper into hers; no bite from those mandala mandibles; no last sniff of her paper flowers.

My hand is forced. I will away to beauty . . .

No, not Rozenwyn Feigenblat. The beauty of natural things – tidal flats, sunsets, unsullied by all the subtle demonism of life and thought . . .

iv

Ailinn Solomons, looking at the moon, and listening to her jumping heart, wondered at what was happening to her. She had returned, briefly – she didn’t want to leave Kevern on his own for too long – to Paradise Valley where there were still things to find out, sort out, have out, and was sitting on a cold mossy bench, hugging herself against the chill damp, listening to Ez clattering about rather obviously in the kitchen. ‘Do I feel any different?’ she asked herself. Ez had been lending her books relevant to that question, or at least fragments of books, dog-eared, singed, defaced, some of them crayoned over as if by a class of three-year-old delinquents. Although they purported to have been written – whenever it was they were written – from the inside, by those in the know, or at least by those who knew others in the know, each work, no matter how little of it there was, contradicted the one before. It was her forebears’ austerity of conscience, according to one writer, that had always troubled humanity and explained the hostility they encountered wherever they went. They demanded too much. They set too high a standard. A second writer understood their defining characteristic as a near irresponsible love of the material world, and it was this that had landed them in hot water. Offered the spirit, they chose matter. Offered emotion, they chose reason.This one said they were deeply pious; that one found them profoundly sacrilegious. They were devoted to charity, yet they amassed wealth regardless of how they came by it. When they weren’t consumed by self-regard they suffered a bruising sense of worthlessness. They saw the universe as a reflection of the God that loved them above all people, but moved through it like strangers. When she came to the alienation they felt in nature she recognised herself at last. She had never been comfortable on a garden seat in her life. She disliked the damp newsprint smell of vegetation, detested snails and worms, felt threatened by the icy indifference of the moon, and feared the irregular rhythm of her heart which also, surely, was a thing of nature. So while she
didn’t feel any different after reading all Esme had given her to read, she at least understood why she felt the same.

Esme called out to her from the kitchen. She had, since morning, been making chicken soup to an ancient recipe she’d found in a cookery book that must have been as old as creation and wondered whether Ailinn wanted to eat it inside or out. Ailinn didn’t want to eat it at all, so reverentially had Esme prepared it, with so much sacrificial ardour had she dismembered the chicken, so full of spiritual intention was her dicing of the carrots, so soulfully did she look at her through the steam rising from the pan, but decided that as she had to eat it somewhere she would eat it out. Compound the discomfort.

They ate silently for a short while, balancing the soup plates on their knees. Esme sneaked looks at her.

‘Are you enjoying it, my love?

My love
!

‘Am I meant to?’

‘Well I’ve made it for you in the hope you will.’

‘No, I mean is it part of my preparation?’

Esme winced.

‘Will it count against me,’ Ailinn continued, ‘if I don’t? Will it prove I’m a fake?’

‘Well I won’t tell,’ Esme said.

‘Forgive me, I am not able to finish it,’ Ailinn said at last, putting the plate on the ground between her ugly feet.‘There is something more pressing than soup.’

Esme started in alarm. It irritated Ailinn how easily she could worry her. She had only to express the slightest disquiet for Esme’s entire system of defences to be activated. She’s too close to me, she thought. There’s more of her inside my skin than there is of me.

‘What is it that’s more pressing?’ Esme asked. She could have been asking how long Ailinn had known she only had an hour to live.

‘Matrilineality,’ Ailinn said.

‘Could you explain that?’

‘Matrilineality? After all you’ve said to me on the subject! My love’ – take that, Ailinn thought – ‘it’s you who are the authority.’

‘No, I meant could you explain what bothers you about it.’

So, Ailinn, shivering under the cold moon, did.

If fathers bore so little responsibility for the defining characteristics of their progeny, as Esme said they did, in what sense were they their progeny at all? There seemed to be a carelessness here that belied the otherwise strict code of kinship into which Ailinn had now been drawn. Had it really mattered not at all what sort of seed her father had put into her mother, and her grandfather into her grandmother? Was it merely incidental? She felt the pull of contradictory impulses: pleased to be incontrovertibly what she was, but disappointed she had got there, so to speak, so easily, with so few caveats as to fathers. In an odd way it devalued her new-found affiliation. ‘I would want a child of mine to be validated on both sides,’ she told Esme.

‘I want that for you too,’ Esme assured her.

Fearing that Esme intended to embrace her, Ailinn moved her chair away, pretending she was trying to make herself more comfortable.

‘But . . . ?’

‘But we don’t always get what we want.’

‘You moved heaven and earth to keep us together, Ez,’ she reminded her. ‘You wouldn’t let me walk away from him. “Ring him, ring him,” you urged me. My soulmate, you had the nerve to call him when you knew nothing of my soul. And when I told you he was walking away from me you turned as white as your blouse. What’s changed?’

Esme Nussbaum was relieved that Ailinn couldn’t see her blush. ‘Nothing’s changed. I care about your happiness as much as I ever did. More. But you’ve taken what I’ve had to tell you remarkably well – far better, truly, than I dared to hope you would. I couldn’t imagine you ever dealing with this on your own, yet you have.’

‘Not have,
am
. . . I’m a work in progress, Ez.’

‘I understand . . .’

‘And I’m not on my own.’

‘Are you saying that Kevern is with you on this every inch of the way?’

‘I never said
I
was with me on this every inch of the way. I haven’t chosen this, remember. And I haven’t seen through to the end of all it means.You have to face the fact that I probably never will. I can’t give you a guarantee for life.’

‘I know that and I’m not pressuring you. If you and Kevern can work this out together there’s nothing I’d like more.’

‘Matrilineality notwithstanding?’

‘Matrilineality is not my invention. It just happens to be the way it works.’

‘And the way it works makes Kevern redundant?’

‘Not at all. The future I envisage requires mothers and fathers.’

‘For the look of the thing.’

This time Esme would not be denied. She leaned across and stroked the girl’s arm. ‘Ailinn, this is all about the “look” of the thing. You are no different today from who you were a year ago, a month ago even. What’s changed is how you appear. How you appear to yourself and how you will appear to the world. It’s all illusion. Identity is nothing but illusion.’

‘I shouldn’t worry in that case that I don’t like chicken soup?’

‘I’d like you not to worry about anything.’

Ailinn wondered why she’d made a joke.Was it Kevern’s doing? ‘If it’s all illusion,’ she continued in a different vein, ‘why has it caused so much misery?’

‘I’ve had a long time to think about this,’ Esme said, pausing . . .

‘And?’

Ailinn marvelled at her own impatience. She had lived in ignorance of just about everything for a quarter of a century; now she needed answers to questions she could never have imagined she would ask, and she needed them at once. The pity of it was
that the person in the best position to answer those questions seemed to have all the time in the world. In fact Ailinn was wrong about this. Esme, too, was a cauldron of impatience, but did not want to frighten Ailinn off with her intensity. So both women sat with frayed nerves, listening to the clocks furiously ticking in their brains.

‘We are dead matter,’ Esme continued at last, ‘indeed I was very nearly dead matter myself when I realised this – we are dead matter until we distinguish ourselves from what’s not dead. I was alive, I told myself as I was lying there.Very nearly dead, but alive. And it made me more alive to realise that. I wasn’t the me I’d been, but nor was I the me they wanted me to be, which was no me at all. Only when we have a different state to strive against do we have reason to strive at all. And different people the same. I am me because I am not her, or you. If we were all red earthworms there’d be no point in life. Identity is just the name we give to the act of making ourselves distinct.’