J

by Howard Jacobson

  Kevern didn’t miss out on wondering about that too. Was it worse than the letters intimated? Was ‘cousins’ a euphemism?

  Such easy-goingness as Port Reuben and the surrounding villages exercised in the matter of consanguinity was not shared by the rest of the country. Blood needed to be thinned not thickened if there was to be none of that dense, overpopulated insalubriousness that had been the cause of discord. The county was allowed to make an exception of itself only because the authorities didn’t take it seriously. A cordon sanitaire could easily be drawn across the neck of the county, cutting it off from the rest of the country; and the existence of an imaginary version of that line – beyond which few aphids (as tourists and even visitors on business were contemptuously known) had ever wanted to stray – already prevented any serious cross-pollution. It was in the overheated towns and cities, where people talked as well as bred too much, that cousins needed to be kept apart. And it hadn’t escaped the attention of Ofnow that in acknowledging and encouraging nationality-based group aptitude – popular entertainment and athletics in this corner, plumbing in that – it ran the risk of allowing steam to build up in the enclaves once again. But that didn’t apply to Bethesda. The Bethesdans could mate with their own animals as far as the authorities were concerned.

  In this, as in so many other matters, Kevern Cohen was not able to be as insouciant as his neighbours. Learning that his parents had been first cousins – if not closer – shook him profoundly. It had nothing to do with legalities: he didn’t know whether they’d done wrong in the eyes of the law or not. But their hiding away suggested that they felt they had. And to him it was an animal wrongness: first cousins! – it was too hot, like rutting. They’d run away to breed, and he was the thing they’d bred. Engendered in the steaming straw of their cow-house. Inbred.

  He wondered if it explained the oddity of his nature. Was that the reason he had never married and had children of his own? Was he possessed of some genetic knowledge that would ensure his contaminated line would die out?

  They’d always been too much of another time for him to feel close to them in the way other sons were close to their parents, so he found it difficult to attribute sins of the flesh to them. What they’d done they’d done. What he couldn’t forgive them for was not taking their secret to the grave. Why had they left incriminating documents behind? Shouldn’t they have kept him in the dark about what they’d done, as they’d kept him in the dark about almost everything else in their past – where they’d come from, what sort of family theirs was, who they were? There were few other papers for him to sort through. Most of the evidential story of their life, other than a number of nondescript notebooks and scrawled-over writing pads he kept for no other reason than that they had kept them, and a locked box which Kevern gave his oath he would open only when it looked likely that he would be a father himself – not before, and certainly not after – had been scrupulously destroyed. So he had to assume that they had deliberately not burned or shredded the handful of letters they had written to each other that proved how closely they were related. But to what end? Did they suppose they were helping him to live a better life? Or were the letters left where he could easily find them in order to give him a reason not to go on living at all? Was it their gift of death to him, like a single silver bullet or a suicide pill?

  So much for their delicacy! They had brought him up unable to utter the most commonplace of oaths, a man of refined feeling, a fist of prickles as spiny as a hedgehog, and all along he’d been abnormally sired, a monstrosity, a freak. No wonder he couldn’t tell anyone else to kiss his arse or eat shit. He had eaten shit himself.

  He made a further unwelcome discovery going through his parents’ papers. It wasn’t they who had run to this extremity of the country to escape scandal. They had grown up here. Again he was having to read between the lines, but it seemed it was their parents, at least on his mother’s side, who had bolted. Why that was he couldn’t tell. Were they cousins too?

  So what, by the infernal laws of genetic mathematics, did that make him? A monstrosity, four or even sixteen times over?

  iii

  It was Ailinn’s adoptive mother’s opinion that Ailinn had been abused when she was a little girl. Nothing else quite accounted for her bouts of morose absentness.

  Ailinn shook her head. ‘I’d remember it, Mother,’ she said.

  It didn’t come naturally to her to call her mother-who-wasn’t ‘Mother’. And she could see that her mother-who-wasn’t didn’t care for it either. But she tried. They both did.

  ‘You say you’d remember it, but that depends how old you were when it happened.’

  ‘Believe me, it didn’t happen.’

  ‘I believe you that you don’t remember, but there’s a mechanism in the human heart that helps us to forget.’

  ‘Then mightn’t that be because we’re meant to forget,’ Ailinn replied, ‘because it doesn’t matter?’

  ‘That’s a terrible thing to say.’

  Was it? Ailinn didn’t think so. What you don’t remember might as well not have happened. Remember everything and you have no future. Unless what you remember is mostly pleasant, and it didn’t occur to Ailinn to imagine memory as pleasant.

  Her own memory went back a long way. She heard the distant reverberations, like echoes trapped in a steel coffin. She just didn’t know what it was she was remembering.

  ‘So at the end of your life,’ her mother went on, ‘when you have little or no memory left . . .’

  ‘That’s right, you might as well not have lived it.’

  ‘God help you for saying such a thing. I hope for your sake you won’t be feeling that way when you’re old.’

  Ailinn laughed. ‘It could be a blessing,’ she said.

  But even she knew her cynicism was bravado. Deep within her was a hunger for life to start, to aim herself towards a time when she would not regret having lived. She would outpace memory if she could.

  They were at home, drinking tea and dunking biscuits at a scrubbed pine table, looking out over a ploughed field. A crow with a crazed orange eye was hopping with malign purpose from rut to rut. What sort of memory did he have, Ailinn wondered. How many thousands of crows past had it taken to teach him what he knew? And of them, of any of them – what knowledge did he have? Of his own past, even – just yesterday, for example – how much did he know?

  Ailinn was nineteen. She had lived in this house how many years now . . .? Twelve, thirteen? It should no longer, whatever the exact computation, have felt foreign to her. But its dry formality: the teapot with its woolly hat, the floral china tea set, the biscuits carefully arranged on the plate, three ginger, three chocolate digestive, the silver tongs for the sugar cubes, the perfectly ploughed field which, by screwing up one eye, she could move from the horizontal to the vertical plane, as though its parallel furrows were a ladder to the heavens, even her weary-eyed, unsmiling adoptive mother who had never quite become her mother proper – all this was to her the setting for some other nineteen-year-old’s life. As for where hers was, that she didn’t yet know.

  She was artistic. A further reason to think she’d been abused. She drew in pastels: the rising field, the scrubbed table, her would-be mother (not her would-be father who found her skills uncanny and disconcerting), the demoniacal crows – great luminous, visionary canvases which her teachers admired for their ethereal, other-worldly atmosphere, though one of them feared her work was a little too reminiscent of Kokoschka’s dreamscapes. ‘Where do you go to in your head, Ailinn?’ he asked her.

  ‘I don’t go anywhere,’ she said, ‘I just draw what I see.’

  She knew she was lying. She did go somewhere. She didn’t have a name for it, that was all.

  And she didn’t know why she went there or what it was a memory or a foreboding, or just an idle fantasy, of.

  The paper flowers were a sort of peace offering to her adoptive mother. Something nice to show how much she loved her, how grateful she was, how prote
cted and at home she felt. But even the paper flowers looked as though they’d been picked from some other planet.

  iv

  Kevern had wondered, when he’d first discovered his depraved inheritance, whether it would put him off sex. That it should put him off sex, he didn’t doubt. But would it?

  The answer was no. Or at least not entirely. He knew he had to take precautions. He couldn’t bring into the world a being who might show recessive symptoms of a kind which he – so far, at least – had not. And this meant not only being particular when it came to contraception, but going about coitus gently and considerately. Restoring to the act, maybe, something of the sacred. As it happened, such conscientiousness was not difficult for him: it accorded well with his precise, reluctant nature. He had not been put on earth to fling his seed around.

  Ailinn didn’t mind that he didn’t pile-drive himself into her. It made a change.

  ‘Sleepin’ with you is like sleepin’ with a woman,’ she told him.

  Though a clean enunciator out of bed, she made a habit of dropping her gs when verbalising sex. Sleepin’, screwin’, fuckin’, even makin’ love. He didn’t know why. To rough herself up a bit, perhaps. Or perhaps to rough up him.

  ‘Is that northern speech?’ he had asked her.

  ‘Nah. It’s my speech.’ With which she made a triumphant, tarty little fist.

  So yes, it was her way of communalising their sex, taking what was special out of it, making it less fragile, putting them both on a more ordinary footing with each other.

  Did she find him overscrupulous? Would she have liked him to swear? (Pog mo hoin?)

  He unwound himself and sat up. They were in his bed. She had invited him to hers, an altogether more sweetly smelling chamber now that she had got rid of all the spiders and repainted it, with giant paper sunflowers everywhere, but he was uneasy about staying away from his cottage all night. And besides, he lived alone and she didn’t.

  ‘So “sleepin’” with me is like “sleepin’” with a woman . . . I’m guessing you mean that as a compliment, though to me, of course, it isn’t. Unless you prefer sleeping with women.’

  ‘Never done it,’ she said.

  ‘So how do you know it’s like sleeping with me?’

  ‘Because sleepin’ with you isn’t like sleepin’ with other men.’

  Men! Couldn’t she have spared him that?

  ‘How isn’t it like sleeping with other men?’

  ‘Well you don’t seem as though you want to hurt me, for a start.’

  ‘Why would I hurt you? Do you want me to hurt you?’

  ‘No I do not.’

  ‘Then what’s the nature of your discontent?’

  She slipped out of bed, as though she needed to be upright when he questioned her as hard as this. He tried not to look at her feet.

  ‘I’m not discontented at all,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to describe what I feel. It’s as if you don’t care, or at least your first care isn’t, whether I feel you’ve entered me.’

  ‘Oh! Would you like me to signal when I have? I could wave a handkerchief.’

  He made jokes, she noticed, when he was hurt.

  ‘No, I don’t mean that way. I’m really not complaining. It’s lovely. I’m not putting this very well but I don’t think you care whether you make a difference to me, sexually – inside – or not. Most men make a song and dance about it. “Can you feel that? Do you like that?” They want to be sure the conquest of your body is complete. They would like to hear you surrender. It’s as though you don’t mind whether I notice you’re visiting or not.’

  ‘Visiting?’

  She took a moment . . . ‘Yes, visiting. It’s as though you’re on a tourist visa. Just popping in to take a look around.’

  ‘That’s not how it feels to me. I’m not planning being somewhere else. You need to know that.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘But it doesn’t sound very nice for you.’

  ‘Well it is and it isn’t. It’s a change not to feel invaded. It’s nice to be left alone to think my own thoughts.’

  ‘Thoughts! Should you be having thoughts at such a time?’

  ‘Feelings, then. You know what I mean – not having to go along with what someone else wants. Not having to be issuing periodic bulletins of praise and satisfaction. But what are yours?’

  ‘What are my thoughts and feelings?’

  ‘Yes. What do you want?’

  ‘Ah, now you’re asking.’

  ‘You won’t tell me?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Don’t know whether you’ll tell me?’

  ‘Don’t know what I want.’

  But he made her a lovespoon in which the two of them could be recognised, entwined, inseparable, carved from a single piece of wood.

  In return for which she made him a pair of exquisitely comical purple pansies, a paper likeness of his face in one, hers in another. She arranged them in a vase on his dressing table, so that they stared at each other unremittingly.

  ‘When you dust them, do it lightly,’ she advised.

  ‘I will sigh the dust away.’ He pursed his lips and let out the softest emission of air, as though blowing a kiss to a butterfly.

  ‘I love you,’ she told him.

  Why not, he thought. Why ever not? ‘I love you,’ he said.

  As he’d told her, he wasn’t planning to be somewhere else.

  He should not have judged his parents their sin. When the love thing is upon you there’s no one who can break you up. And he wasn’t even absolutely sure the love thing was upon him – yet.

  v

  She moved in. Or at least she moved her person in. He cleared space for her to make her flowers in his workshop but she couldn’t function in the noise and dust his lathe threw out. So she kept her studio, along with the majority of her possessions, in Paradise Valley. There was an argument on the side of sensible precaution for this anyway, though Ez said she wouldn’t take it personally if Ailinn moved out. ‘Follow your heart,’ she said. But Ailinn thought it was still early for that. She’d been alive long enough to know that hearts were fickle.

  Didn’t her own jump?

  She wanted her mail to go on being delivered to Paradise Valley as well. She had her own letter-box neurosis which she didn’t want to clash with Kevern’s. She feared letters being lost, postmen being careless about their delivery, just tossing them over the wall into Kevern’s little garden, or not pushing them properly through the flap. She wasn’t waiting for any communication in particular but believed something, that should have reached her in an envelope, was missing from her life: a greeting, an offer she couldn’t have said what of, an advantage or an explanation – even terrible news, but terrible news, too, needed to be faced and not forever dreaded – and the idea that she would not discover it when it came, that Kevern would treat it as junk, or that it would blow away, be blown about the world unknown to her, and leave her waiting, never knowing, was one she found deranging. As a little girl she’d read in comics about a time when people wrote to one another by phone but wrote such horrid things that the practice had to be discouraged. She was glad, at least, that she didn’t have to ‘angst’, as they called it in those comics, about losing phone letters as well. So for the time being, at least, her postal address remained Beck House, Paradise Valley.

  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 full-length 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.’