J

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘Oh, there’s always time,’ Rozenwyn Feigenblat bolshily remarked once, when we happened to fall into conversation on this very subject.

  I took that to mean that as librarian she knew how much sitting about staring into space we professors and painters are capable of. But then a librarian is not an artist; in her capacity as a filer and notator she will not have grasped the contribution that apparent indolence makes to the creative act.

  For an artist, my dear, I wanted to say, to be unoccupied is sacred. What might look like doing nothing is in fact the long wait for beauty to find us. But I could see how that might be misinterpreted. ‘If you mean that we sometimes appear bored,’ I began instead . . .

  She shook her pretty head. ‘I’m not talking about boredom,’ she said. ‘I’m talking about mischief.’

  She made it sound like pranks.

  ‘Sexual mischief?’ I asked, not wanting to sound too curious.

  ‘Intellectual mischief.’

  Not being sure I could trust myself longer in her alluring presence, I let it go at that. Though she left me feeling she had more to say.

  What she also left me feeling was that someone should be keeping an eye on her. A position for which, were it vacant, I’d think hard about applying.

  But back to Kevern Cohen. What it came down to for me, at least, was that the only reliable way of uncovering Kevern Cohen’s intentions vis-à-vis his new sweetheart – short of asking him outright, and I wasn’t prepared to do that – was to observe him at close quarters. To which end I invited the lovebirds over for dinner. It would be on his day for visiting the college and I suggested, since he’d mentioned her, that he bring Ailinn down with him, which he was wary of doing to begin with – wariness being his first response to everything – but on discussing it with her he changed his mind. No doubt she wanted to meet his friends, of whom he has few and I can just about be counted one. A half-friend, say. A well-wisher, anyway. An extravagantly beautiful woman, Ailinn, with a tumult of dark hair, like charred straw, and darting, watchful, hawk-like features. She called to mind a seirene, one of those bird women who are painted attacking Odysseus and his crew on vases I have inspected in the National Museum. I am not thinking of the most familiar image, which shows a seirene swooping head first at the ship, her talons at the ready, but rather one of the more serenely musical temptresses, striking her drum or plucking at her harp, surprised, if anything, that Odysseus should want to resist. As Kevern plainly didn’t.

  ‘Besotted’ was the word my wife and I hit on quite separately, though Demelza did accuse me of stealing it from her.

  Ailinn brought us a delicate bouquet of her paper flowers. ‘Kitsch, I know,’ she said, ‘but I make them and could find no fresh flowers in the shops.’

  I appreciated the thought and the apology. It must have been difficult for her, taste-wise, visiting the house of a professor of the Benign Visual Arts. I told her they were lovely and pretended to smell them. ‘Haven’t seen you so skittish in a long while,’ Demelza said to me as we were making coffee in the kitchen. ‘A pretty face and you go as soppy as Petroc.’

  Petroc was our Labrador. Petroc Rothschild . . .

  Not really, that was just our little off-colour joke . . .

  ‘I am happy for them in their happiness,’ was my reply. She pinched my arm. I let out a little cry. ‘What’s that for?’ ‘You know what that’s for. Being happy for them in their happiness. Liar! Why don’t you just lick her face?’ ‘Bitch!’ I said. ‘Prick!’ was her retort.

  That night, over an acrimonious nightcap of Benedictine and brandy, we discussed divorce. Discussion had always been something we were good at. You could say it was the glue of our conjugality.

  Before they left, Ailinn did say one thing that struck me as surprising. ‘Sometimes,’ she mused, in answer to my asking how she found it down here, ‘this part of the country seems full of eyes.’

  ‘Eyes?’

  ‘Watching eyes.’

  ‘Really?’ I said, opening my face to her. ‘How do you mean?’

  Kevern, too, appeared taken aback by her words. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Something about the way they look at you here. It’s not disapproval exactly. It’s not even suspicion. It’s more as though they’re waiting for you to make a mistake or show your real nature.’

  ‘Isn’t that just because these communities were cut off from the rest of the country for so long?’ I said. ‘I feel they look at me like that too. They say you have to have lived here for ten generations before they begin to relax with you.’

  ‘I don’t want them to relax with me. I’m not looking for friendship,’ she said. ‘It’s the sense you get that someone’s always on your heels. Not following you – just there. Waiting for you to give yourself away.’

  I noted that for later speculation. Give yourself away, eh, young lady. So what are you concealing?

  Petroc Rothschild must have asked himself the same question because he did not take at all kindly to her, barking when she changed her position too abruptly, and growling most of the time she talked. But then he’d never been overfond of Kevern either.

  I enquired whether what she was describing was a recent phenomenon.

  ‘Being here is a recent phenomenon – for me.’

  ‘Of course, of course. I meant did you notice it at once or are you just noticing it now? Has there been a change.’

  ‘I haven’t been here long enough to make such fine distinctions,’ she reminded me, somewhat sternly, which made me somewhat excited. I like sternness in a woman. Hence Demelza. ‘But if you ask me to think about it,’ she went on, ‘then no, I have not just begun to notice a sense of – I don’t know what to call it – intrusiveness. Take us’ – she put her hand on Kevern’s – ‘we didn’t just meet, we were bundled into each other’s arms. Not that I’m complaining about that.’

  ‘I should hope not,’ Kevern said, kissing her.

  Sweet, but I was more interested, I have to say, in Ailinn’s sense of being, as she put it, ‘bundled’. Professionally interested.

  ‘So who bundled you?’ I asked, but casually, as though I were merely making polite conversation.

  ‘God knows. Some busybody? The village matchmaker? Nobody I’d ever seen before, or since. I don’t know if you’ve seen him again, Kevern.’

  He hadn’t.

  I asked Kevern if he too felt he’d been pushed into meeting Ailinn. He couldn’t of course say yes. He had to say he saw her and was smitten. But yes, now we came to mention it, there had been someone hanging around, egging him on. For which, accompanied by another burning look deep into Ailinn’s eyes, he was immeasurably grateful.

  Petroc growled so loudly that Ailinn started.

  ‘He doesn’t mean you any harm,’ I assured her.

  ‘I think he does,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t like dogs?’

  ‘No, not as a rule. We are as one on this.’

  ‘You and the dog?’

  ‘Me and Kevern.’

  I told Kevern that I hadn’t on his previous visits noticed he was a dog hater, though I kept to myself my conviction that Petroc hated him.

  ‘I’m not. Just not a dog lover. Or at least not inside the house.’

  ‘Are dogs different inside to out?’

  ‘No but I am.’

  Concerned that his curtness of manner might offend me – unless she was concerned it might offend Petroc – Ailinn explained him. ‘He doesn’t like things moving around his legs,’ she laughed. ‘Not indoors, anyway.’

  ‘That will make it difficult with children,’ I observed.

  ‘Impossible,’ they said with some vehemence together. ‘Quite impossible.’

  I am not without subtlety when it comes to reading behind the words people speak. Why the vehemence, I wondered.

  ‘You don’t want children?’ I asked, casually. I had the feeling they had not talked it over. But I could have been mistaken.

  Kevern, anyway, shook his head. ‘I am
content to be the end of my line,’ he said.

  ‘In this, too,’ Ailinn added, ‘we are as one.’

  I didn’t, for what it’s worth, believe her. Methinks the lady doth protest too much, methought.

  Wherever they were on this subject, I considered it worth noting in my report that Kevern ‘Coco’ Cohen and Ailinn Solomons shared a detestation of dogs.

  I would have bet good money against the powers that be knowing that.

  SIX

  An Inspector Calls

  i

  SOMEBODY HAD SEEN Kevern kissing Lowenna Morgenstern in the car park on bonfire night.

  ‘That shouldn’t make me a suspect,’ Kevern told Detective Inspector Gutkind. ‘If there’s a jealous homicidal maniac on the loose that should make me a potential victim.’

  ‘Unless the jealous homicidal maniac on the loose is you.’

  ‘I’m not on the loose.’

  ‘But you have been on the loose, haven’t you? No ties, no responsibilities, free to kiss whoever you like.’

  Kevern had never before been presented with such a dashing portrait of his life.

  ‘I’m a bachelor, if that’s what you mean. Though I am in a serious relationship at the moment.’

  ‘At the moment? How long have you been in this serious relationship?’

  ‘Three months.’

  ‘And that amounts to serious for you?’

  ‘Sacred.’

  ‘Were you in a sacred relationship with Mrs Morgenstern?’

  ‘I don’t think a single kiss constitutes a relationship.’

  ‘What would you say it constitutes?’

  ‘A passing thrill.’

  ‘You were aware she was married when you kissed her?’

  ‘I was.’

  The policeman waited. ‘. . . And you had no qualms about that?’

  ‘Not my business. She felt like a kiss, I felt like a kiss.’

  ‘You don’t respect marriage?’

  ‘I think it was more that Mrs Morgenstern didn’t respect hers. I didn’t see it as my job to remember her vows for her.’

  ‘So knowing she wasn’t happily married, you took advantage.’

  ‘I don’t think, Detective Inspector Grossman—’

  ‘Gutkind.’

  ‘I don’t think, Detective Inspector Gutkind, that you can call it taking advantage. You could just as easily say she was taking advantage of my loneliness. But no one was taking advantage of anyone. As I have said – she’d had a few too many tequilas, I’d had a few too many sweet ciders—’

  ‘Sweet cider!’ Detective Inspector Gutkind pulled a face.

  ‘And maybe the odd half of lager shandy. I’m sorry if lager shandy disgusts you too.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘There’s nowhere to go. That’s it. She was drunk, I was not entirely sober, she felt like a kiss, I felt like a kiss . . .’

  ‘And whatever you feel like doing, you do?’

  Kevern laughed. If only, he thought. ‘I think you have a somewhat false picture of me,’ he said. ‘The clue is in the sweet cider. I am not a man who has a relaxed attitude to pleasure. As a matter of fact, I am not a man who has a relaxed attitude to anything. I have a very unrelaxed attitude, for example, to your being in my house.’

  It occurred to him that the picture he was painting was more likely to incriminate him than otherwise. A difficult and lonely neurotic, who laughed where laughter was inappropriate, drank pussy drinks, and was prone to introspection and self-disgust – didn’t all murderers fit that bill? And now he was telling the policeman that his presence, here, on the sofa in Kevern’s cottage, made him uneasy. Why didn’t he just confess to the crime?

  ‘Why do you have an unrelaxed attitude to me being here?’ the policeman asked.

  ‘Why do you think? No one likes to be questioned by the police. No one likes to be under suspicion.’

  ‘But you specifically mentioned your house. What is it about being questioned specifically in your house that upsets you?’

  ‘I’m a very private man.’

  ‘But not so private that you draw the line at kissing other men’s wives?’

  ‘I never brought her here.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘I’m a very private man.’

  ‘And very unrelaxed about a number of things. Did you have an unrelaxed attitude to Mrs Morgenstern’s other lovers?’

  ‘I wasn’t aware of other lovers.’

  ‘You thought you were special, did you?’

  ‘No. She was known to be free and easy. Nor was I her lover. I didn’t think of myself that way.’

  ‘Was that because she repulsed you?’

  Kevern laughed. Had he been repulsed? He remembered the bite. It hadn’t felt like a repulse.

  ‘It was bonfire night. A few fireworks went off. So did we. It was fun while it lasted.’

  ‘Did you see her go home with Ythel Weinstock that night?’

  ‘I did not.’

  ‘Were you aware that Mrs Morgenstern and Ythel Weinstock were lovers?’

  ‘I was not.’

  ‘Were you aware that he hit her?’

  ‘How could I have been? I didn’t know they were intimate.’

  ‘Were you aware that her husband was hitting her?’

  ‘It’s something that happens in the village. I wasn’t aware of it but I am not surprised. Life in Port Reuben has always been harsh. But now on top of the old cruelties there’s frustration. Men are living at the edge of their nerves here. They don’t know what they’re for. They used to be wreckers, now they run gift shops and say they’re sorry. The women goad them. I read that the rest of the country is not much better.’

  Worse and worse: now he was painting himself as a moral zealot.

  He needn’t have worried. Detective Inspector Gutkind also had a dash of moral zealotry in his nature. He believed in conspiracies. It was not permitted to believe in conspiracies (no written law against, of course) but Gutkind couldn’t help himself. Conspiracy theorising ran in families and his father had believed in them to the point where he could see nothing else. Gutkind’s grandfather had also believed in conspiracies and had lost his job in the newly formed agency Ofnow attempting to root them out. That attempting to root out conspiracies had cost him his job proved there was a conspiracy against him. And behind him was Clarence Worthing, the Wagnerian, Gutkind’s great-grandfather who had tasted betrayal to the lees. He fed his resentments and suspicions to his son who fed them to his son who fed them, nicely incubated, to Gutkind. For as far back as the family went, somebody, some group, had been out to get them. Heirlooms in their own way, just as silk Chinese rugs were, romances of family persecution at the hands of conspirators were restricted. It didn’t do for any family to be harbouring too many, or indeed any one with too much fervour. Conspiracy theories had fed the suspicion that erupted into that for which society was still having to say sorry. And how could you say sorry when some of the reasoning behind WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED – that conspiracies were sucking the life blood from the nation – remained compelling?

  Detective Inspector Gutkind understood why there could be no going backwards in this – and was, anyway, unable to point the finger anywhere but at the odd individual malfeasant, and by its nature individual malfeasance could not amount to conspiracy – but he was a prisoner of his upbringing. He had a careworn build – dapper, the unobservant thought him – lean as though from fretting, with a round face, apoplectic eyes and an unexpectedly wet, cherubic mouth. Had there been a conspiracy to accuse Gutkind of the pederasty that exercised Densdell Kroplik, his mouth would surely have been the basis for it. He looked like someone who pressed his lips where they had no business being pressed.

  He smiled at Kevern and wondered if he might be allowed to remove his coat. Kevern could not conceal his awkwardness. It was bad enough that Gutkind was here at all, but a Gutkind without his coat, in his cottage, was more than his nerves could bear. ‘Of course,’ he said, taking th
e coat and then not knowing what to do with it, ‘that’s rude of me.’

  He was surprised to see that under his coat Gutkind wore not a jacket but a Fair Isle buttoned cardigan.

  Was this to relax the unwary, Kevern wondered. But if that was so, his eyes should have not have looked so combustible as they took in Kevern’s person and darted around Kevern’s room.

  ‘This Biedermeier?’ he asked, running his fingers over the elaborately carved back of the sofa.

  Kevern started. ‘Imitation,’ he said.

  ‘Made down here?’

  ‘Kildromy.’

  ‘That’s a long way to go for it.’

  ‘I like the best. I’m a woodworker myself. I appreciate good craftsmanship.’

  ‘It doesn’t really go with this cottage, though, does it,’ Gutkind went on.

  Kevern wanted to say that he didn’t think the policeman’s cardigan went with his job, but it didn’t seem a good idea to antagonise him further. ‘It goes with my temperament,’ he said.

  ‘And how would you describe that?’

  ‘My temperament? Heavy, ornate and unwelcoming.’

  ‘And out of place?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Would you call yourself a loner?’

  ‘I wouldn’t call myself anything. I’m a woodturner, as I think I’ve told you.’