J (8 page)

If she didn’t return to collect what was waiting for her for more than two or three days at a time, however, the weight of expectation and dread oppressed her more than she could bear.

Most mornings, after breakfast, she accompanied Kevern to his workroom, kissed him, breathed in the lovely fresh smell of sawdust – it reminded her of the circus, she said – and either went back to bed with a book or walked down into the valley, singing to herself, alone. But occasionally they would leave the cottage together in order to wander the cliffs or just sit side by side on his bench. She had made the mistake, the first time, of straightening his rug after he’d rumpled it. She saw him wince and then, without saying anything, rumple it again. Thereafter she simply stood by, expressionless, her arms beside her sides, as he locked up, confirmed that he had locked up, knelt to look inside the letter box, stood up, knelt down again to confirm that what he had seen he had seen, put his hand inside the flap, took it out, and then put it back again, looked one more time, then put his keys in his pocket. Sometimes he would send her on ahead so that he could do all this again.

‘Don’t ask,’ he said.

And she tried not to. But she loved him and wanted to relieve him of some of the stress he was obviously under.

‘Couldn’t I?’ she asked once, meaning couldn’t she make sure
for
him that everything was OK. Share the burden, whatever it
was. Pour the tea, rumple the runner, double-lock and then double-lock again, kneel down and lift the flap of the letter box, peer through (check to see if there was anything for her while she was at it). . . she knew the routine well enough by now.

‘Unthinkable,’ he said.

‘Just try thinking it.’

He shook his head, not liking her suddenly, not wanting to look at her. She knew. And was glad she was wearing trousers so he could not see her ankles.

But that night, in bed, after exhaustively locking the house from the inside, he tried explaining why she couldn’t help him.

‘If anything happens it has to be my responsibility. I want at least to know I did all I could. If it happens because of something I have omitted to do, I will never forgive myself. So I make sure.’

‘Happens to the house?’

‘Happens to the house, happens to me, happens to you . . .’

‘But what can happen?’

He stared at her. ‘
What can happen
. What
can’t
happen.’ Neither was a question. Both were statements of incontrovertible fact.

They were lying on what she took to be a reproduction Biedermeier bed. He hung his clothes, as now she hung hers, in a fine mahogany wardrobe, two doors on either side of a fulllength bevelled mirror, also imitation Biedermeier. It was far too big for the cottage, some of the beam had had to be cut away to make room for it, and she did wonder how anyone had ever succeeded in getting it upstairs. She knew about Biedermeier – it had come back into style. Everyone wanted reproduction Biedermeier. There was a small factory knocking it out in Kildromy, not far from where she grew up. Kildromy-Biedermeier – there was a growing market for it. But she did wonder whether Kevern’s furniture wasn’t reproduction at all. It looked at once far grander and more worn than anything that came out of Kildromy. Could it be the real thing? Everyone cheated a bit, keeping a few more family treasures than they knew they should.
And this the authorities turned a blind eye to. But if these pieces were genuine, Kevern was cheating on a grand scale. She tried asking him about it. ‘This Kildromy-Biedermeier?’ He stared at her, lost for words. Then he gathered his wits. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Kildromy. Spot on.’

So he was lying. She didn’t judge him. If anything, it thrilled her to be a silent party to such delinquency. But it explained why he went to such lengths to protect his privacy. No one was ever going to come to so remote a place, so difficult of access, to steal a wardrobe; but what if it wasn’t thieves he feared but, she joked to herself, the Biedermeier police?

Once, although she hadn’t mentioned her suspicions, he explained that property wasn’t the reason he was careful.

‘
Careful
!’

‘Why, what word would you use?’

‘Obsessive? Compulsive? Disordered?’

He smiled. He was smiling a lot so she shouldn’t take fright. He liked her teasing and didn’t want it to stop.

‘Well, whatever the word, I do what I do because I hate the idea of . . . what was that other word you used once, to describe my lack of sexual attack? –
invasion
.’

‘I didn’t accuse you of lacking sexual attack.’

‘OK.’

‘I truly didn’t. I love the way it is between us.’

‘OK. Invasion, anyway, is a good word to describe what I fear. People thinking they can just burst in here, while I’m out or even while I’m in.’

‘I understand that,’ she said. ‘I am the same.’

‘Are you?’

‘I always locked my bedroom door when I was a little girl. Every time the wind blew or a tree scratched at my window I thought someone was trying to get in. To get
back
in, actually. To reclaim their space.’

‘I don’t follow. Why
their
space?’

‘I can’t explain. That was just how I felt. That I had wrongly taken possession of what wasn’t mine.’

There was something temporary about her, Kevern thought. Of no fixed abode. Tomorrow she could be gone.

A great wave of protectiveness – that protectiveness he knew he would feel for her when he first saw her and imagined rolling her in his rug – crashed over him. Unless it was possessiveness. Protectiveness, possessiveness – what difference? He wanted her protected because he wanted her to stay his. ‘Well you don’t have to feel that here,’ he said.

‘And I don’t,’ she said.

He kissed her brow. ‘Good. I want you to feel safe here. I want you to feel it’s yours.’

‘Given the precautions you take,’ she laughed, ‘I couldn’t feel safer. It’s a nice sensation – being barred and gated.’

But she didn’t tell him there was safe and
safe
.That all the barring and gating couldn’t secure her peace of mind. That she kept seeing the pig auctioneer, for example, who had known both their names.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll keep battening down the hatches.’

She laughed. ‘There’s a contradiction,’ she said, ‘in your saying you want me to think of your home as mine, when you protect it so fiercely.’

‘I’m not protecting it
from
you. I’m protecting it
for
you.’

This time she kissed him. ‘That’s gallant of you.’

‘I don’t say it to be gallant.’

‘You like me being here?’

‘I love you being here.’

‘But?’

‘There is no but. It’s not you I’m guarding against. I’ve invited you in. It’s the uninvited I dread. My parents were so terrified of people poking about in their lives that they jumped out of their skins whenever they heard footsteps outside. My father shooed away walkers who came anywhere near the cottage. He’d have cleared them off the cliffs if he could have. I’m the same.’

‘Anyone would think you have something to hide,’ she said skittishly, rubbing her hands down his chest.

He laughed. ‘I do. You.’

‘But you’re not hiding me. People know.’

‘Oh, I’m not hiding you from people.’

‘Then what?’

He thought about it. ‘Danger.’

‘What kind of danger?’

‘Oh, the usual. Death. Disease. Disappointment.’

She hugged her knees like a little girl on an awfully big adventure. In an older man’s bed. ‘The three Ds,’ she said with a little shiver, as though the awfully big adventure might just be a little too big for her.

‘Four, actually. Disgust.’

‘Whose disgust?’

‘I don’t know, just disgust.’

‘You fear I will disgust you?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘You fear you will disgust me?’

‘I didn’t say that either.’

‘Then what are you saying? Disgust isn’t an entity that might creep in through your letter box. It isn’t out there, like some virus, to shut your doors and windows against.’

Wasn’t it?

It was anyway, he acknowledged, a strange word to have hit on. It answered to nothing he felt, or feared he might feel, for Ailinn. Or
from
Ailinn, come to that. So why had he used it?

He decided to make fun of himself. ‘You know me,’ he said. ‘I fear everything. Abstract nouns particularly. Disgust, despair, vehemence, vicissitude, ambidexterity. And I’m not just worried that they’ll come in through my letter box, but underneath the doors,
and
down the chimney,
and
out of the taps and electricity sockets,
and
in on the bottom of your shoes . . . Where
are
your shoes?’

She shook her head a dozen times, blinding him with her hair,
then threw her arms around him. ‘You are the strangest man,’ she said. ‘I love you.’

‘
I’m
strange! Who is it round here who thinks trees are tapping at the window to reclaim what’s rightfully theirs?’

‘Then we make a good pair of crazies,’ she laughed, kissing his face before he could tell her he had never felt more whatever the opposite of disgust was for anyone in his life.

vi

Disgust.

His parents had once warned him against expressing it. He remembered the occasion. A girl he hadn’t liked had tried to kiss him on the way home from school. It was the style then among the boys to put their fingers down their throats when anything like that happened. Girls, it was important for them to pretend, made them sick, so they put on a dumb show of vomiting whenever one came near. Kevern was still doing it when he encountered his father standing at the door of his workshop, looking for him. He thought his father might be impressed by this expression of his son’s burgeoning manliness. Finger down the throat, ‘Ugh, ugh . . .’
Ecce homo!

When he explained why he was doing what he was doing his father slapped him across the face.

‘Don’t you ever!’ he said.

He thought at first that he meant don’t you ever kiss a girl. But it was the finger down the throat, the simulating of disgust he was never to repeat.

His mother, too, when she was told of it, repeated the warning. ‘Disgust is hateful,’ she said. ‘Don’t go near it. Your grandmother, God rest her soul, said that to me and I’m repeating it to you.’

‘I bet she didn’t say don’t put your fingers down your throat,’ Kevern said, still smarting from his father’s blow.

‘I’ll tell you precisely what she said. She said, “Disgust destroys you – avoid it at all costs.”’

‘I bet you’re making that up.’

‘I am not making it up. Those were her exact words. “Disgust destroys you.”’

‘Was this your mother or dad’s?’ He didn’t know why he asked that. Maybe to catch her out in a lie.

‘Mine. But it doesn’t matter who said it.’

Already she had exceeded her normal allowance of words to him.

Kevern had never met his grandparents on either side nor seen a photograph of them. They were rarely talked about. Now, at least, he had ‘disgust’ to go on. One of his grandmothers was a woman who had strong feelings about disgust. It wasn’t much but it was better than nothing. At the time he wasn’t in the mood to be taught a lesson from beyond the grave. But later he felt it filled the family canvas out a little.
Disgust destroys you
– he could start to picture her.

Thinking about it as he lay in Ailinn’s arms, trying to understand why the word had popped out of his mouth unbidden, Kevern wondered whether what had disgusted his grandmother – and in all likelihood disgusted every member of the family – was the incestuous union her child had made. He saw her putting her fingers down her throat. Unless – he had no dates, dates had been expunged in his family – that union didn’t come about until after she’d died. In which case could it have been the incestuous union she had made herself ?

Self-disgust, was it?

Well, she had reason.

But if his own mother’s account was accurate, his grandmother had said it was disgust that destroyed, not incest. Why inveigh against the judgement and not the crime? And why the fervency of the warning? What did she know of what disgust wrought?

Could it have been that she wasn’t a woman who
felt
disgust in all its destructive potency but a woman who
inspired
it? And who therefore knew its consequences from the standpoint of the victim?

Do not under any circumstances visit on others what you would not under any circumstances have them visit on you – was that the lesson his parents had wanted to inculcate in him? The reason you would not want it visited on you being that it was murderous.

This then, by such a reading, was his grandmother’s lesson: Be careful not to be on disgust’s receiving end. For whoever feels disgusted by you will destroy you.

Had he wanted to destroy the girl whose attempt to kiss him had been so upsetting that he had to pretend it turned his stomach? Maybe he had.

Kevern ‘Coco’ Cohen got out of bed and religiously blew the dust off Ailinn’s paper flowers.

How many men were there? Six hundred, seven hundred, more? She thought she ought to count. The numbers might matter one day. One at a time the men were led, each with his hands tied behind his back, into the marketplace of Medina, and there, one at a time, each with his hands tied behind his back, they were decapitated in the most matter-of-fact way –
glory be to—! –
their headless bodies tipped into a great trench that had been dug specially to accommodate them. What were the dimensions of the trench? She thought she ought to estimate it as accurately as she could. The dimensions might matter one day. The women, she noted coldly, were to be spared, some for slavery, some for concubinage. She had no preference. ‘I will choose tomorrow,’ she thought, ‘when it is too late.’ Grief the same. ‘I will sorrow tomorrow,’ she thought ‘when it is too late.’ But then what did she have to grieve for? History unmade itself as she watched. Nothing unjust or untoward had happened. It was all just another fantasy, another lie, another Masada complex. As it would be in Maidenek. As it would be in Magdeburg. She looked on in indifference as the trench overflowed with the blood that was nobody’s.