J (43 page)

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.’

‘So you’re saying it’s irrelevant what our identities really are? As long as we assume one and fight against someone else’s.’

‘I’d say so, yes. Pretty much.’

‘Isn’t that a bit arbitrary?’

‘Perhaps. But isn’t everything? It’s just chance that we’re born to who we’re born to. There’s no design.’

‘So why fight for who we are?’

‘For the sake of the fight itself.’

‘Then isn’t that a bit violent, as well as arbitrary?’

‘Life is violent. I had to fight death to be alive.’

‘But if “who we are” is arbitrary, and if we fight for whatever cause we just happen to be to born to, for no other reason than the fight itself, then it didn’t have to be me you picked for this . . .’

‘I didn’t pick you, Ailinn.’

‘All right. Describe it how you like. But if there is no identifiable me then it doesn’t matter whether I am it or not. I don’t have to be the real deal because there is no real deal. You could have hit on anyone.’

Esme bit her lip. ‘You’ll do it better,’ she said.

They fell silent. Something crawled across Ailinn’s feet. She wondered if it was Esme’s red earthworm, that made life meaningless. She shuddered. Esme offered to go inside and fetch her a shawl. Ailinn shook her head. She could have been shaking Esme off her.

‘If you’re asking me to do this without Kevern,’ she said suddenly, ‘I’m afraid I can’t. No, it’s feeble of me to put it like that. If you’re asking me to do this without Kevern, I’m afraid I
won’t
.’

Esme felt as though all her splintered bones had been crushed a second time. She remembered what it took to distinguish herself from the dead.

‘In that case we will have to make sure you do it with him,’ she said.

IT WAS HEDRA
Deitch who was the first to congratulate him.

‘On?’

‘Don’t be like that,’ Hedra said, wrinkling up her nose.

Kevern had dropped into her souvenir shop to see if her stock of lovespoons needed replenishing. She didn’t sell many. Painted earthenware garden statuary, pressed-flower pictures, and Port Reuben tea towels and coffee mugs accounted for most of her trade. ‘Cheap and cheerful, like me,’ was how she described her business. But she thought a small selection of Kevern’s lovespoons lent her shop a more upmarket feel, and she welcomed the opportunity his visits gave her to be suggestive with him. He wasn’t like the other men in the village. You had to work a bit harder with him. She had snogged him once that she could remember, at the end of a wild night in the pub, when they were both drunk. She had done it to enrage Pascoe but she had enjoyed it too, after a fashion. He had a softer mouth than she expected. No biting. And no slapping. On his part, that is. So she was glad enough to return to Pascoe’s rough indifferent gnawing later.

But Kevern was one of those men who got under your skin by not adequately taking you in. So he remained a challenge to her.

It was Ailinn’s idea that Kevern do something practical such as checking on his outlets, no matter that there was no pressing financial reason to do so. He had not been down into the village, not seen a living soul since she’d told him the first part of what she had to tell him, and that was two weeks ago. He had gone into a decline, rapid even for a man who declined easily. He agreed to Ailinn’s suggestion only because he knew it would make her, at least, feel better. He wasn’t expecting to feel better himself. He didn’t want to feel better. He owed it to what he’d been told to feel worse. That was what living a serious life meant, wasn’t it, honouring the gravity of things by not pretending they were light? Rozenwyn Feigenblat had told him he was an ethicist, not an artist. He agreed with her. An artist owed a duty to nothing except his own irresponsibility. It was OK for an artist to frolic in the water, no matter how bloody the waves or how high the tide rose. An ethicist had an obligation to drown.

Just go for the walk, Ailinn had said. Just go for the exercise. See someone who isn’t me. ‘There isn’t someone who isn’t you,’ he’d said. Whereupon she’d pushed him out of the cottage.

He meant what he’d said. There wasn’t anyone who wasn’t her, and if there were he didn’t want to see them. And even she, since she’d become the bearer of bad news, was not always a welcome sight to him now.

But most of all he hadn’t gone out because he hadn’t wanted to be seen.

Was that because he believed he suddenly looked different? No. He trusted he looked exactly the same: the man he had always been, in decline as he had always been. The difference today was that he understood what they’d seen when they’d looked at him in the past.

He exchanged stiff greetings with people he barely knew. He had lived here all his life, in a village of fewer than two thousand souls, and yet there were still people who were lifetime residents themselves whose names he didn’t know. His parents had taught him well in one regard. Remain a stranger to the place, they had said. Say nothing. Ask for nothing. Explain yourself to no one. But they had also cautioned him to go unnoticed, and in that he could scarcely have fared worse. Everyone knew who he was – Kevern ‘Coco’ Cohen, the man with the sour expression who sat on his own bench above the blowhole, saying nothing, asking for nothing, explaining himself to no one.

And now here was Hedra Deitch, coming out from behind her counter to look him up and down, surveying him in that hungry way of hers, wondering if he’d do for whatever her itchy nature needed at that moment, something or other that her shot-beast of a husband couldn’t provide. Shame he wasn’t an artist. He’d have provided it and painted her later.

But why the congratulations? Was she being sarcastic, welcoming him to a knowledge of himself the whole village had possessed for years? Was she applauding his cottoning on finally – Kevern, the last to know about Kevern?

‘Don’t be like what?’ he said.

She put one hand on her hip, as though to answer his coquettishness. ‘Don’t be pretending you aren’t proud.’

He was not a man who ever asked people what they meant. He would rather puzzle over their words for months, and still not get to the bottom of their meaning, than ask them for a simple explanation. Did he not want to know or could he not bear to appear uncomprehending? This was a time to wonder whether he’d ever in his whole life understood a word that had been said to him. Clearly he hadn’t ever understood his parents. Could it be that he had missed the point of what Ailinn had been saying to him too?

If only . . .

But when the news was bad . . . then he understood.

And Hedra? He prepared his face to pretend to get her meaning – a half-smile and a philosophic widening of the eyes that would cover every eventuality: from a declaration of undying to love to news that she had a terminal disease.

‘I’m not pretending anything,’ he said. ‘And I’m certainly not pretending I’m not proud. I have nothing to be proud about.’

She moved a step closer. Was she about to kiss him?
Then be proud of this, my lover
. . .

Funny how often, for a man who didn’t consider himself lovable, he thought a woman was about to kiss him. Was it hope? Was it dread? Or did he think of himself as the unsmiling princess, waiting to be kissed back into warm life by a frog?

‘I don’t reckon your missus would be pleased to hear you got nothing to be proud about,’ Hedra said.

He increased his half-smile to a three-quarter smile and opened his eyes a little wider. ‘My missus . . .? What’s Ailinn got to do with this?’

It was then she made a cradling motion with her arms, beaming like the Virgin Mary, rocking a little one to sleep.