J

by Howard Jacobson

  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.

  She was relieved when he stepped back out into the bedroom, dripping like a seal. He appeared exhausted.

  ‘There will be more, you know,’ she said.

  ‘More what?’

  ‘More showers.’

  He expected her to say ‘More life’.

  ‘You never know what there will be more of,’ he said, ‘but that’s certainly more than enough about me and who I am and what I’m in flight from. We began this conversation discussing whales and you – the least whale-like creature I have ever seen.’

  ‘Despite my thick ankles?’

  ‘Whales don’t have thick ankles. As didn’t Ahab, as I recall.’

  ‘Well he certainly didn’t have two.’

  If he hadn’t loved her before . . .

  Best to leave it at that, anyway, they both thought. But he wanted to be sure that she felt safe with him. Still dripping, he pulled her down into the bed and drew the duvet over them.

  Gently, protectively.

  But were they overdoing this, he wondered.

  She’d have answered yes had he asked her.

  iii

  It was in his lampoon-fearing nature to wonder whether they would be the talk of the village – the slightly odd woodturner who by and large kept himself to himself, and the tangle-haired flower girl from up north who was several years his junior. But the village wasn’t exercised by pairings-off, even when the parties weren’t as free to do as they pleased as these two were. People who have lived for aeons within sound of crashing seas, and sight of screaming seabirds spearing mackerel, take sex for granted. It’s townspeople who find it disarranging.

  And besides, the village had something else to yack about: a double murder. Lowenna Morgenstern and Ythel Weinstock found lying side by side in the back of Ythel Weinstock’s caravan in pools of each other’s blood. By itself, the blood of one would not have found its way, in such quantities, on to the body of the other. So there’d been doubly foul play: not just the murders but this ghoulish intermixing of bodily fluids which was taken by the police to be a commentary on the other sort of fluidal intermingling in which Morgenstern and Weinstock had no doubt been frenetically engaged at the moment their assailant struck.

  ‘Caught in the act’ was the phrase going round the village. And no one doubted that it was Lowenna’s husband, Ade, who’d caught them. But where was Ade Morgenstern? He hadn’t been seen in the village for months, having stormed out of the surgery to which he’d accompanied his wife to have a minor ailment looked at, which ailment, in his view, didn’t necessitate the removal of her brassiere. He hadn’t seen the brassiere coming off, he had only heard the doctor unhooking it. But his wife had beautiful breasts, as many in the village could testify, and he was a jealous man.

  ‘Breathe in,’ he heard the doctor order her. ‘And out.’ And a moment later, ‘Open.’

  He was not in the waiting room when his wife emerged fully clothed from her consultation.

  Hedra Deitch was less bothered by the question of who was guilty of the crime than its timing. ‘If you gotta go, that’s as good a moment as any, if you want my view, and that Ythel was a bit of all right,’ she told drinkers at the bar of the Friendly Fisherman. ‘Rumpy pumpy feels like dying anyway when you’ve got a husband like mine.’

  Pascoe Deitch ignored the insult. ‘She always was a screamer,’ he put in.

  His wife kicked his shin. ‘How come you’re an expert?’

  ‘When it comes to Lowenna Morgenstern everyone’s an expert.’

  Hedra kicked his other shin. ‘Was an expert. Who you going to be expert about next?’

  Pascoe’s expertise, universal or not, caught the attention of the police. Not that he was a suspect. He lacked the energy to be a criminal just as, for all his bravado, his wife believed him to lack the energy to be unfaithful. He masturbated in corners, in front of her, thinking, he told her, about other women – that was the sum of his disloyalty.

  ‘You could feel this one comin’,’ he told Detective Inspector Gutkind.

  ‘You knew there were family troubles?’

  ‘Everybody knew. But no more than usual. We all have family troubles.’

  ‘So in what sense did you feel this one coming?’

  ‘Something had to give. It was like before a storm. It gave you a headache.’

  ‘Was it something in the marriage that had to give? Did the murdered woman have a lover?’

  ‘Well who else was that lying with her in those pools of blood?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  Pascoe shrugged the shrug of popular surmise.

  ‘And did the husband know as much as you know?’ Gutkind asked.

  ‘He knew she put it about.’

  ‘Was he a violent man?’

  ‘Ythel?’

  ‘Ade.’

  ‘The place is full of violent men. Violent women, too.’

  ‘Are you saying there are many people who might have done this?’

  ‘When a storm’s comin’ a storm’s comin’.’

  ‘But what motive would anyone else have had?’

  ‘What motive do you need? What motive does the thunder have?’

  The policeman scratched his head. ‘If this murder was as motiveless as thunder I’m left with a long list of suspects.’

  Pascoe nodded. ‘That’s pretty much the way of it.’

  That night he went alone to a barn dance in Port Abraham. His wife was wrong in assuming he was too lazy to be unfaithful to her.

  iv

  Densdell Kroplik generously offered to sell the police multiple copies of his Brief History of Port Reuben at half price on the assumption that it would help with their enquiries. Yes, he told Detective Inspector Gutkind, there were violent undercurrents in their society, but these appeared exceptional only in the context of that unwonted and, quite frankly, inappropriate gentleness that had descended on Port Reuben after WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED – see pp. 35–37 of his Brief History. Why Port Reuben had had to pay the price – bowing and scraping and saying sorry – for an event in which it had played no significant role, Densdell Kroplik didn’t see. Nothing had happened, if it happened, here. WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED, happened in the cities. And yet the villagers and their children and their children’s children were expected to share in the universal hand-wringing and name-changing. In his view, if anyone was interested in hearing it, the Lowenna Morgenstern case came as a welcome return to form. In a village with Port Reuben’s proud warrior history, people were supposed to kill one another . . . Where there was a compelling argument to do so, he added, in response to Detective Inspector Gutkind’s raised eyebrow.

  ‘And what, in your view, constitutes a compelling argument?’ the policeman asked.

  ‘Well there you’ll have to ask the murderer,’ Densdell Kroplik replied.

  ‘And what’s this about a proud warrior history?’ Gutkind pressed. ‘There haven’t been warriors in these parts for many a year.’

  Densdell Kroplik wasn’t going to argue with that. ‘The Passing of the Warrior’ was the title of his first chapter. But that didn’t mean the village didn’t have a more recent reputation to live up to. It was its touchy individualism, its fierce wariness, that had gone on lending the place its character and kept it inviolate. Den
sdell Kroplik’s position when it came to outsiders, the hated aphids, was more than a little paradoxical. He needed visitors to buy his pamphlet but on balance he would rather there were no visitors. He wanted to sing to them of the glories of Port Reuben, in its glory days called Ludgvennok, but didn’t want them to be so far entranced by his account that they never left. The exhilaration of living in Ludgvennok, which it pained him to call Port Reuben, walled in by cliffs and protected by the sea, enjoying the company of rough-mannered men and wild women, lay, the way he saw it, in its chaste unapproachability. This quality forcibly struck the composer Richard Wagner – if you’ve heard of him, Detective Inspector – in the course of a short visit he made to Ludgvennok as it was then. In those days husbands and lovers, farmers and fishermen, wreckers and smugglers, settled their grievances, eye to eye, as they had done for time immemorial, without recourse to the law or any other outside interference. Sitting at a window in a hostelry on this very spot, Wagner watched the men of Ludgvennok front up to one another like stags, heard the bacchante women wail, saw the blood flow, and composed until his fingers ached. ‘I feel more alive here than I have felt anywhere,’ he wrote in a letter to Mathilde Wesendonck. ‘I wish you could be with me.’1

  Der Strandryuber von Ludgvennok, the opera Wagner subsequently wrote about the village (and dedicated to Mathilde, who had by that time given him his marching orders), was rarely performed; this Densdell Kroplik ascribed not to any fault in the composition but to the lily-livered hypocrisy of the age.

  ‘All very laudable,’ Detective Inspector Gutkind conceded. As it happened, he had not only heard of Wagner, a composer beloved of his great-grandfather, but kept a small cache of Wagner memorabilia secreted in his wardrobe in fealty to that passion. He could even hum some of the tunes from his operas and went so far as to hum a few bars of the Siegfried Idyll to show Kroplik that he too was a man of culture. Nonetheless, ‘All very laudable but I have a particularly savage double murder on my hands, not a few high-spirited drunks kicking nine bells out of another,’ was what he said.