J (9 page)

FOUR

R.I.P. Lowenna Morgenstern

i

A
ILINN KNEW EVEN
less about
her
family.

Kevern thought that Ez, the fraught, angular woman with the tight frizzy hair who had brought her down to share the cottage in Paradise Valley, was her aunt, but she wasn’t.

‘No relative,’ Ailinn explained. ‘Not even a friend really. No, that’s unfair. She
is
a friend. But a very recent one. I only met her a few months before I came away, in a reading group.’

Reading groups were licensed. Because they were allowed access to books not otherwise available (not banned, just not available), readers had to demonstrate exceptionality of need – either specific scholastic need or, if it could be well argued for (and mere curiosity wasn’t an argument), general educational need. Kevern was impressed that Ailinn had been able to demonstrate one or the other. But she told him she had simply been able to pull a few strings, her adoptive mother being a teacher.

Books apart, this account of her relations with Ez explained to Kevern why she had made so little ceremony of introducing them. It was as though she had never been introduced to her herself. He was amazed by how anxious she could be one minute, and how devil-may-care the next. ‘And you threw in your lot with a woman you’d met in a reading group, just like that?’

‘Well, I’d hardly call it throwing in my lot. She offered me a room in a cottage she hadn’t ever seen herself, for as long or as
short a time as I wanted it, in return for my company, and some help painting and gardening, and I could find no reason to say no. Why not? I liked her. We had a shared interest in reading. And there was nothing up there to keep me. And I reckoned I could sell my flowers just as well down here . . . probably better, as you get more tourists than we do, and . . . and of course there was you . . .’

‘You knew about me?’

‘My heart knew about you.’

Her arrhythmic heart.

He couldn’t tell how deep her teasing went. Did she truly think they were destined for each other? He would once have laughed at such an idea, but not now. Now, he too (so he hoped to God she wasn’t playing with his feelings) wanted to think they had all along been on converging trajectories. But no doubt, and with more reason, his parents had thought the same.

She had no memory of her parents – her actual parents – which made Kevern feel more protective of her still.

‘No letters? No photographs?’

She shook her head.

‘And you didn’t ask?’

‘Who would I have asked?’

‘Whoever was caring for you.’

She looked surprised by the idea that anyone had cared for her. He picked that up – perhaps because he wanted to think that no one had cared for her until he came along. ‘Someone must have been looking after you,’ he said.

‘Well I suppose the staff at the orphanage to begin with, though I have no memory of them either. Just a smell, like a hospital, of disinfectant. I was brought up by a smell. And after that Mairead, the local schoolteacher, and her husband Hendrie.’

‘And what did they smell of ?’

She thought about it. ‘Stale Sunday afternoons.’

‘They’d been friends of your parents?’

She shook her head. ‘Didn’t know my parents. No one seems to have known them. Mairead told me when I was old enough to understand that she and Hendrie were unable to have children of their own and had been in touch with an orphanage outside Mernoc – a small town miles from anywhere except a prison and a convent – about adoption. When they were invited to visit, they saw me. They chose me like a stray puppy.’

She normally liked to say ‘like an orange’, but there was something about Kevern that made her think of strays.

‘I can understand why,’ he said, losing his fingers in the tangle of her hair.

She raised her face to him, like one of her own flowers. ‘Why?’

‘You know why.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Because to see you is to see no one else.’ He meant it.

‘Then it’s a pity you didn’t choose me first.’

‘Why – were they unkind to you?’

‘No, not at all. Just remote.’

‘Are they still alive?’

‘No. Or at least Mairead isn’t. Hendrie is in a care home. He has no knowledge of the world around him. Not that he ever had a lot.’

‘You didn’t like him?’

‘Not a great deal. He was a largely silent man who fished and played dominoes. I think he hit Mairead.’

‘And you?’

‘Occasionally. It wasn’t personal. Just something men did. Do. Towards the end, before they put him in a home, it got worse. He started to make remarks like “I owe you nothing”, and “You don’t belong here”, and would throw things at me. But his mind was going then.’

‘And you never found out where you
did
belong?’

‘I belonged in the Mernoc orphanage.’

‘I mean who put you there?’

She shrugged, showing him that his questioning had begun to weary her.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. Adding, ‘But you belong here now.’

ii

As a matter of course, she woke badly. Her eyes puffed, her hair matted, her skin twice its age. Where had she been?

She wished she knew.

At first Kevern thought it was his fault. He’d been tossing and turning, perhaps, or snoring, or crying out in the night, stopping her sleeping. But she told him she had always been like this – not morning grumpiness but a sort of species desolation, as though opening her eyes on a world in which no one of her sort existed.

He pulled a face. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘You’re not yet the world I wake up to,’ she said. ‘It takes me a while to realise you’re there.’

‘So why such desolation?’ he wanted to know. ‘Where do you return from when you wake?’

‘If only I could tell you. If only I knew myself.’

Mernoc, Kevern guessed. He saw an icy orphanage, miles from nowhere. And Ailinn standing at the window, barefooted, staring into nothing, waiting for somebody to find her.

Pure melodrama. But much of life for Kevern was.

And thinking of her waiting to be found, while he was waiting to find, gave a beautiful symmetry to the love he felt for her.

What she’d told him awakened his pity and pity gave him a better reason to be in love than he’d ever had before. There was rapture and then there was responsibility. Each imposed an obligation of seriousness. But together they made the serious sacred.

He couldn’t rescue her from her dreams, but he could make waking better for her. The minute he sensed her stir he would get out of bed and open the windows, so that she would wake to light, the smell of the sea, and the cries of the gulls. But sometimes the
light was too harsh and the smell of the sea too pungent and the cries of the gulls a mockery. ‘They sound the way I feel,’ she’d say.

Did that mean that gulls, too, suffered species desolation?

So he had to make a quick decision every morning: whether to open the curtains or keep them closed.

But when the sea was rough they could still hear the blowhole like a giant mouth sucking in and then expelling water. On wild days they would even see the spittle.

‘Reminds me of a whale exhaling air,’ she said once. ‘Do you remember that passage in
Moby-Dick
describing whale-jets “up-playing and sparkling in the noonday air”?’

He didn’t.

‘But you’ve read the book?’

He had. Years ago.
Moby-Dick
was one of the classic novels that had not been encouraged to drift out of print – though most editions were in graphic form – the grounds for its remaining available being the interest felt in it by fishing communities, its remoteness otherwise from the nation’s calamitous recent history, and the fact that it was from its opening sentence – ‘Call me Ishmael’ – that the colossal social experiment undertaken to restore stability borrowed its name.

OPERATION ISHMAEL.

‘We should read it together,’ she suggested when Kevern told her he could remember little of it beyond Ahab and the whale and of course
OPERATION ISHMAEL
. ‘It’s my most favourite book in the world,’ she told him. ‘It’s the story of my life.’

‘You’ve been hunting a great white whale? Could that have been me, perhaps?’

She kissed him absent-mindedly, as though he were a child that needed humouring. Her brow was furrowed. ‘It wasn’t Ahab I identified with, you fool,’ she said. ‘That’s a man thing. I took the side of the whale.’

‘Don’t worry, men do the same. The whale is more noble than the whaler.’

‘But I bet you don’t wake to the knowledge that you’re the whale.’

‘Are you telling me you do? Is that where you’ve been all night, swimming away from the madness of Ahab? No wonder you look exhausted.’

‘I don’t know what I’ve been doing all night, but it’s a pretty good description of what I do all day.’

How serious was she?

‘All day? Truly?’

She paused. ‘Well what am I signing up for if I say “truly”? If you’re asking me if I actually hear the oars of the longboats coming after me, then no. But when people describe having the wind at their back it’s a sensation of freedom I don’t recognise. An unthreatening, invigorating space behind me? – no, I don’t ever have the luxury of that. There might be nothing there when I turn around, but it isn’t a beneficent nothing. Nothing good propels me. But I call it a good day when I turn around and at least don’t see anything bad.’

He couldn’t stop himself taking this personally. Wasn’t he the wind at her back? Wasn’t he a beneficent force? ‘I can’t bear to think,’ he said, ‘that you get no relief from this.’

‘Oh, I get relief. I get relief with you. But that’s the most dangerous time because it means I’ve forgotten to be on guard. You remember that description of the nursing whales, “serenely revelling in dalliance and delight”?’

He didn’t. He wondered whether she was intending to quote the entire novel to him in small gobbets. Something – and this he did remember – that his father had done when he was small. Not
Moby-Dick
– other, darker, more sardonic books. Until his mother had intervened. ‘What are you trying to do to the boy?’ he had heard her ask. ‘Make him you?’ Shortly after which his father locked his books away.

‘Well, whenever I feel anything of that sort,’ she went on, ‘whenever I feel calm, at rest, loving and being loved – as I do now – I feel I must be in danger. In my universe I don’t know how else to account for being loved. Don’t kiss me, I used to say to Mairead when she tucked me up in bed at night. I won’t be
able to sleep. If you kiss me something terrible will follow. Hendrie wanted to send me to a psychiatrist. Or better still, back to the children’s home. Mairead said no. She believed the children’s home was to blame. She was convinced that something terrible must have been done to me there.’

‘And had it, do you think?’

‘Oh God, you and my mother. Something terrible’s been done to everybody everywhere. Where’s the point of hunting down the specifics? Anyway, I think you can tell when a terror has an origin in a particular event. You might not have a name for it but you can date it. A five-year terror, a ten-year terror . . . This is a thousand-year terror.’

He wondered if she overdid the retrospective panic. If she overdramatised herself. Like him. ‘A thousand years is a long time to have been hunted by a one-legged nut, Ailinn.’

‘You can make fun of me if you like. I know how crazy it must sound. But it’s as though it’s not just me, as I am now, or as I was the day before yesterday, who’s always running. It’s an earlier me. Don’t laugh. You’re just as barmy in your own way. But it feels like a sort of predestiny – as though I was born in flight. Which I suppose I could have been. It’s a pity my real parents aren’t around to ask.’

Yes, she overwrote her story. But he loved her. Maybe overloved her. ‘We could try to find them,’ he said.

‘Don’t be banal,’ she came back sharply, thinking she would have to watch his solicitousness.

He shrank from her asperity. But he had one more question.What he feared when he knelt to check his letter box for the umpteenth time had no features. No person rose up before him. He could weigh the reason for his precautions but he could not picture it. She, though, had Ahab. Was that a way of speaking or did she actually see the man? ‘Is he Ahab in the flesh that’s coming for you—’

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Did I say he was “coming for me”? Sounds a bit like waiting for Mairead and Hendrie, doesn’t it? Was I waiting
for them to “come for me”? You must think my psychology is pathetic, alternating hopes and terrors based on puns—’

‘I don’t,’ he said, afraid that they had begun to judge each other. ‘Your psychology is your psychology, therefore I love it. But all I was going to ask was whether Ahab is a generalised idea for you or you actually picture him coming at you with his lampoon.’

‘
Lampoon
?’

‘Slip of the tongue. You’ve been making me nervous.
Harpoon
.’

She stared at him. ‘You call that a slip?’

‘Why, what would you call it?’

‘A searchlight into your soul.’

He looked annoyed. ‘I let you off your pun,’ he said.

She kissed him. ‘Yes, you did. But we aren’t in a competition, are we, and I’m not making fun of you. It’s just that this slip is so you.’

‘How so?’

‘Well, it’s your fear of mockery, isn’t it. Your fear of anyone knowing you well enough to poke fun at you.’

She had him here. He had only to deny the justice of the charge to prove it. Touchy? Me?

She had him another way too. Wasn’t he her mentor in the matter of a sense of humour? Hadn’t he, when she’d been upset with him for teasing her about her thick ankles, lectured her about the nature of a joke? So how much easier-going was he when the joke was on him?

They were in this together, it seemed to her. Skin as fine as parchment, the pair of them. Pride a pin could prick. Hearts that burst when either looked with love at the other.

He could see what she was thinking but decided to be flattered that she offered to penetrate him so deeply. It proved she found him interesting and cared about him.

He excused himself to take a shower. Though he showered frequently, the sounds he made the moment he turned on the water – groans of release (or was it remission?), sighs of deliverance,
gaspings deep enough, she feared, to shake his heart out of his chest – suggested it was either the first shower he had ever experienced or the last he would ever enjoy. She had wondered, at the beginning, whether it were some private sexual ritual, demeaning to her, but later she would sometimes shower with him and he made exactly the same noises then. She couldn’t explain it to herself. A shower was just a shower. Why the magnitude of his surrender to it? It could have been his death, so thunderous were his exhalations. Or it could have been his birth.