J (5 page)

‘You have an unfortunate tendency to overwrite,’ her supervisor said when he had read the whole report. ‘May I suggest you read fewer novels.’

Esme Nussbaum lowered her head.

‘I must also enquire: are you an atheist?’

‘I believe I am not obliged to say,’ Esme Nussbaum replied.

‘Are you a lesbian?’

Again Esme protested her right to privacy and silence.

‘A feminist?’

Silence once more.

‘I don’t ask,’ Luther Rabinowitz said at last, ‘because I have an objection to atheism, lesbianism or feminism. This is a prejudice-free workplace. We are the servants of a prejudice-free society. But certain kinds of hypersensitivity, while entirely acceptable and laudable in themselves, may sometimes distort findings such as you have presented to me. You are obviously yourself prejudiced against the church; and those things you call “vicious” and “brutish”, others could as soon interpret as expressions of natural vigour and vitality. To still be harping on about
WHAT HAPPENED
,
IF IT HAPPENED
, as though it happened, if it happened, yesterday, is to sap the country of its essential life force.’

Esme Nussbaum looked around her while Rabinowitz spoke. Behind his head a flamingo pink LED scroll repeated the advice Ofnow had been dispensing to the country for the last quarter of a century or more. ‘Smile at your neighbour, cherish your spouse, listen to ballads, go to musicals, use your telephone, converse, explain, listen, agree, apologise. Talk is better than silence, the sung word is better than the written, but nothing is better than love.’

‘I fully understand the points you are making,’ Esme Nussbaum replied in a quiet voice, once she was certain her supervisor had finished speaking, ‘and I am saying no more than that we are not healed as effectively as we delude ourselves we are. My concern is that, if we are not forewarned, we will find ourselves repeating the mistakes that led to
WHAT HAPPENED
,
IF IT HAPPENED
, in the first place. Only this time it will not be on others that we vent our anger and mistrust.’

Luther Rabinowitz made a pyramid of his fingers. This was to suggest infinite patience. ‘You go too far,’ he said, ‘in describing as “mistakes” actions which our grandparents might or might not have taken. You go too far, as well, in speaking of them venting their “anger” and “mistrust” on “others”. It should not be necessary to remind someone in your position that in understanding the past, as in protecting the present, we do not speak of “us” and “them”. There was no “we” and there were no “others”. It was a time of disorder, that is all we know of it.’

‘In which, if we are honest with ourselves,’ Esme dared to interject, ‘no section of society can claim to have acquitted itself well. I make no accusations. Whether it was done ill, or done well, what was done was done. Then was then. No more needs to be said – on this we agree. And just as there is no blame to be apportioned, so there are no amends to be made, were amends appropriate and were there any way of making them. But what is the past for if not to learn from it—’

‘The past exists in order that we forget it.’

‘If I may add one word to that—’

Luther Rabinowitz collapsed his pyramid. ‘I will consider your report,’ he said, dismissing her.

The next day, turning up for work as usual, she was knocked down by a motorcyclist who had mounted the pavement in what passers-by described as a ‘vicious rage’.

Coincidences happen.

Ailinn, anyway – whatever the state of things in the rest of the country, and others were now openly saying what Esme Nussbaum had said in her long-suppressed report – had sported a bruise under her right eye when Kevern saw her for the first time, standing behind a long trestle table on which were laid out for sale jams, marmalades, little cakes, pickles, hand-thrown pots and paper flowers.

‘Fine-looking girl, that one,’ a person Kevern didn’t know whispered in his ear.

‘Which one?’ asked Kevern, not wanting to be rude, but not particularly wanting to be polite either.

‘Her. With all the hair and the purple eye.’

Had Kevern been in the mood for conversation he might have answered that there was more than one among the women selling preserves and flowers who had a purple eye. But yes, the black hair – thick and seemingly warm enough to be the nest of some fabulous and he liked to think dangerous creature – struck him forcibly. ‘Aha, I see her,’ he said, meaning ‘Leave me alone.’

Impervious, the stranger continued. ‘She’ll say she walked into a door. The usual excuse. Needs looking after, in my humble opinion.’

He was dressed like a country auctioneer – of pigs, Kevern thought. He had a pleated, squeeze-box neck, which rippled over the collar of his tweed hacking jacket, and the blotched skin of someone who’d spent too much time in the vicinity of mulch, manure and, yes, money.

‘Aha,’ Kevern said again, looking away. He hoped his unfriendly demeanour would make it clear he didn’t welcome confidentiality, but he mustn’t have made it clear enough because the man slipped an arm through his and offered to introduce him.

‘No, no, that’s not necessary,’ Kevern said firmly. He started from all strangers instinctively, but this one’s insinuating manner frightened and angered him.

The introduction was effected notwithstanding. Kevern was not sure how.

‘Ailinn Solomons, Kevern Cohen. Kevern Cohen . . . but you know each other now.’

They shook hands and the go-between vanished.

‘A friend of yours?’ Kevern asked the girl.

‘Never seen him in my life. I can’t imagine how he knows my name.’

‘I ask myself the same question.’

They exchanged concerned looks.

‘But you’re from here, aren’t you?’ the girl said.

‘Yes. But I too have never seen him in my life. You obviously are
not
from here.’

‘It shows?’

‘It shows in that we have never before met. So you’re from where . . .?’

She flung a thumb over her left shoulder, as though telling him to scoot.

‘You want me to go?’

‘No, sorry, I was showing you where I’m from. If that’s north, I’m from up there. Forgive me, I’m nervous. I’ve been spooked by what’s just taken place. I haven’t been here long enough for people to know my name.’

She looked around anxiously – Kevern couldn’t tell whether to get a second look at the man or to be certain he had gone for good. In deference to her anxiety he made light of his own. (He too had been spooked by what had just occurred.) ‘You know these village nosey parkers. He’s probably an amateur archivist.’

‘You have archives here?’

‘Well, no, not officially, but we have the occasional crazy who enjoys hoarding rumours and going through people’s rubbish bins. I have one as a neighbour, as it happens.’

‘And you let him go through yours?’

‘Oh, I have no rubbish.’

He enjoyed the sensation of her looking through him. He wanted her to know that any secrets he had, she was welcome to.

‘Well I don’t think our man was an archivist,’ she said. ‘He looked too interested in himself. I’d say he was an auctioneer of pigs.’

Kevern smiled at her.

‘Which doesn’t explain . . .’

‘No, it doesn’t . . .’

She
was
a fine-looking girl, delicately strung, easy to hurt despite the dangerous thicket of her hair. He thought he detected in himself an instinct to protect her. Absurdly, he imagined rolling her in his rug. Though what good that would have done her, he couldn’t have said.

‘You don’t have an “up there” accent,’ he said.

‘And you don’t have a “down here” one.’

They felt bonded in not sounding as though they were from either place.

Emboldened by this, he pointed to her bruise. ‘Who did that to you?’

She ignored the question, going behind the stall to rearrange the flowers. Then she looked him directly in the eyes and shrugged. It was a gesture he understood. Who’d done that to her? It didn’t matter: they all had.

Years before, he’d been a choirboy at the church and, because he had a flutey tenor voice ideally suited to Bach’s Evangelist, still sang there every Christmas when they performed the expurgated version of the
St Matthew Passion
. He didn’t normally attend fetes – he was not a festive man – but several people from the church had urged him to attend. ‘Why?’ he’d asked. ‘Just come along, Kevern,’ they’d said, ‘it will do you good.’ And more flyers publicising the event were popped through his letter box than he could recall receiving for similar events.

On the morning of the fete, the vicar, Golvan Shlagman, even rang to make sure he was coming. Kevern said he was undecided. He had work to do. All work and no play, the Reverend Shlagman quipped. He hoped Kevern would try his best. It wouldn’t be the same without his presence. Kevern didn’t see why. Why was his presence a matter of significance suddenly? ‘We can’t do without the Evangelist,’ the vicar laughed, though no Mass or Passion was being sung.

Thinking about it later, Kevern thought Shlagman’s laughter had been only just the sane side of hysterical.

Had he hysterically laughed Ailinn into coming to the fete, too?

Seeing as they mistrusted strangers equally, didn’t speak in the accents of where they resided, and knew a pig auctioneer when they saw one, he asked her out.

She took a minute or two to decide. He, too, was a stranger, she seemed to be reminding him.

He understood. ‘A little walk, that’s all,’ he said. ‘Nowhere far.’

On their first date he kissed the bruise under her eye.

He was not a man who raised his arm to women and hadn’t been stirred to anger when Ailinn called him thick-headed. He only nodded and smiled lugubriously – it was that dopey-eyed, lugubrious smile that had earned him the nickname Coco, after a once famous clown who sometimes reappeared, accompanied by apologies for the cruelty visited on him, in children’s picture books. She was right, when all was said and done. He was a lolloping unfunny clown with a big mouth who didn’t deserve her love. And now – she made no attempt to stop him getting up and leaving – he’d lost it.

He reproached himself for being too easily put off. It didn’t have anything to do with Ailinn; he lacked the trick of intimacy, that was all. On the other hand, the thickness of her ankles relative to the slenderness of her frame – especially the right one, around which she wore a flowery, child-of-nature anklet – did upset him, and on top of that, like every other village girl, no matter that she came from a village at the other end of the country, she smelt of fish.

But then there
were
other girls in the village, and although they had always treated him with that degree of watchfulness they reserved for people to whom they weren’t related, their availability took the edge off his desolation. He was alone, but on any evening he could drop by the Friendly Fisherman and fall into conversation with one or other of them. And at least at the bar the smell of beer took away the smell of fish.

He sat on his bench absent-mindedly, watching the seals flop, enjoying the spray on his face, thinking about everything and nothing, exclaiming ‘
esus Christ!’ to himself from time to time, until the sun sank beneath its own watery weight into the sea. It became immediately chilly. Feeling the cold, he rose from the bench and decided to try his luck. Company was company. He called by the cottage first and peered in through the letter box. All was almost well. He was still in, still reading his mail in his carpet slippers, still watching television. And his rug was still rumpled. But his utility phone was flashing vermilion, which meant somebody had rung him. Perhaps Ailinn saying she was sorry, though she had done nothing to say sorry for.

After the falling-out, the saying sorry. That was the way. They had all been taught it at school. Always say sorry.

If it was she who had rung him, should he ring her back? He didn’t know.

In agitation, because the knowledge that he’d been rung – no matter by whom – distressed him, he let himself in, discovered the caller had left no message – though he thought he detected the breath of someone as agitated as himself – and locked up again. Fifteen minutes later he was in the Friendly Fisherman, ordering a sweet cider.

The inn was more than usually noisy and querulous. That fractiousness which was being reported as on the increase throughout the country was no less on the increase here. There’d been an incident earlier in the village hall and some of the bad feeling had spilled out into the inn from that. It was Thursday, Weight Watchers day, and one of the village women, Tryfena Heilbron, had refused to accept that she’d put on a pound since the last time she’d been weighed. Words had been exchanged and Tryfena had lifted the scales and dashed them to the ground. ‘Next time bring scales that work,’ she’d shouted at the weigher who shouted back that it was no surprise to her that Tryfena’s husband preferred the company of sweeter-tempered, not to say more sylphlike, women.