J

by Howard Jacobson

  Could you call that an affair? Neither of them thought so but they went on doing it, intermittently, until they were too old to climb the cliffs.

  She had picked him out at the start of it because he was a butcher and she wanted someone to talk about blood to. Did he feel it polluted him?

  ‘Do I feel it what?’

  ‘What I want to know is whether butchers feel unclean. Do they fear they have dirty hands?’

  He took his own hands out of her shirt – was it a shirt? – and examined them. ‘Look for yourself,’ he said. ‘You have to wash a lot in my line of work.’

  ‘No, I mean morally unclean. Spiritually . . .’

  ‘Cutting chops?’

  ‘Slaughtering . . .’

  ‘I don’t slaughter. I’m more like an undertaker. The animals come to me already dead, but instead of burying them I cut them up and sell them to you.’

  Theirs was first and foremost a commercial relationship, he didn’t want her to forget. Though later, as a sign of his maturing fondness, he didn’t charge her.

  He reached for the worn handbag she carried everywhere with her, though she kept almost nothing in it. ‘Same with a tanner,’ he said. ‘Whoever treated the leather for this old thing didn’t actually skin the animal.’

  She didn’t like the way he handled her bag. ‘But you’re still a link in the chain,’ she said.

  He stared at her in bafflement. What did she mean? Who was she? What was he doing with her? She was small and round, with flickering blue eyes and discoloured ping-pong-ball cheeks, and wore old-fashioned clothes. She reminded him of Miss Klug, one of his old primary-school teachers, unless what she reminded him of was how Miss Klug had made him feel – embarrassed to be her favourite, but safe. He was nothing to write home about himself, as Sibella had reminded him, but his butcher’s brawn and innocent blue eyes had excited a few women over the years, and but for his being married and having four sons, he wouldn’t have been embarrassed to be seen with any of them. Sibella, though, was not a woman he wanted anyone to know about. Was she crazy?

  ‘A link in what chain?’ he asked.

  She laughed, reminding herself suddenly of her mother. ‘The defilement chain.’

  ‘I don’t know what that means.’

  ‘Do you feel that the part you play in killing animals – I know you don’t actually kill them – I take your point about undertakers and tanners – but do you feel that there’s blood on your hands and that people treat you differently because of it?’

  He wondered if that was the longest question he’d ever been asked. He flicked away an ant that was crawling up her leg. ‘Why would people treat me differently?’

  She remembered the Untouchables of India, photographs of whom her mother found in magazines and pasted into her crazy person’s history. Their lowly status, according to her mother, had many explanations but none so telling as their original association with blood. They were their society’s ritual murderers, and as such considered unclean. The Burakumin of Japan – information about whom her mother had also collected – the same. Butchers, undertakers, slaughtermen, spillers of blood, killers of gods. And the taboo against touching them could never be broken. They had death on them, and whoever had death on him was outcast. Illogical, because someone had to deal with the dead, the tasks they performed were indispensable and even sacred, but logic had nothing to do with defilement.

  ‘Because they can’t forgive the blood,’ Sibella said.

  Madron shook his head. ‘Well that’s what you say, but they forgive mine fine enough.’

  She shrugged but returned to the subject often. It almost became their love talk. Death, defilement, ritual murderers, sacred executioners.

  ‘Put another record on, girl,’ he would say to her.

  And she would try. Sometimes, lying with her head against his chest, listening to the hungry screeching of the seagulls, looking up at the undersides of their ugly, torpedo bodies, she would almost succeed.

  But she was never free of the sensation that she disgusted him. Which was strange because it was he – a man who dabbled in blood for a living – who was supposed to disgust her.

  She loved him, after a fashion, nonetheless. And missed him more intensely than she thought she would when he died, more intensely even than she missed her parents. Was that, she wondered, because in their agitated distance from her they had been half dead already. She could barely remember her mother’s disappearance. As for how her father died, she realised with shame that she didn’t know. Howel told her it had happened. That she did remember. ‘I’ll be looking after you now,’ he said.

  Poor Madron had a heart attack, that was all. One of those quiet ones in the bath. She hoped she hadn’t been instrumental in bringing it on. Not by making love, which between them had never been strenuous, but by making him feel dirty. Had she talked his heart into stopping?

  She would have liked to kiss his perplexed brow one more time but she understood she couldn’t see him. She suffered the terrible fate of all mistresses of married men in that she didn’t dare show her face at his funeral.

  ‘Don’t show your face.’ Where had she heard that before?

  It was on the seventh anniversary of his death – almost certainly not coincidentally – that she set fire to her fingers.

  TWO

  Friends

  i

  ‘WE SHOULD NEVER have gone away,’ Kevern said to Ailinn when they were inside.

  She felt he was blaming her, though the trip had been his idea.

  ‘Can you tell yet if anything’s been taken?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s not what’s been taken. I have nothing it would be worth anyone’s while to take. It’s what’s been seen that concerns me.’

  He stood at the window, not wanting to look around, grinding his fists into his eyes.

  ‘Your feet,’ Ailinn said. ‘I’ve only just noticed.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’re too big.’

  He stared at her.

  ‘I’m trying to cheer you up with a joke,’ she said.

  She stood forlorn in the middle of the little sitting room, not knowing where to put herself, how to help, what to say. When Kevern was at a loss he joked, so she thought she should try the same. But the only effect of her joke was to remind him of something and send him flying up the stairs. She heard him banging about, like a wild animal trapped in someone’s loft. After ten minutes he came back down, looking ashen. ‘Have they been up there?’ she asked.

  ‘They?’

  ‘Anyone?’

  He fell into an armchair and shrugged. ‘Must have been. Everything’s too neat.’

  ‘So nothing’s gone?’

  ‘Hard to say. My father’s records are still there. And I think all his books. That’s something. If they wanted to get me on an heirloom charge they’d have taken those. But who knows what they’ve read, or listened to, or photographed?’

  She couldn’t help herself. ‘They?’

  ‘I think you should go,’ he said.

  She went over to him and kissed the top of his head. ‘I can’t leave you alone in this state,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean by “this state”. I am how I always am.’

  ‘Then I can’t leave you in that state. Come on – discuss it with me. What do you think’s happened?’

  He sat forward and dropped his head between his knees. ‘Ahab’s been,’ he said.

  One detail he didn’t mention: whoever had tidied up his runner had been for a lie-down in his bed.

  ii

  She didn’t want to leave him in any state but she had no choice. ‘I need to sleep this one out alone,’ he said.

  She offered to take the couch but he begged her to go. ‘Just for tonight,’ he said. ‘This is my doing. I was the one who kissed Lowenna Morgenstern.’

  ‘One of the many.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘You think this is about her?’

  ‘
No. But it’s still my fault.’

  ‘You aren’t going to do anything silly,’ she said.

  ‘Like what? Leave the country?’

  She kissed his non-responding lips, noticing for the first time that there were dry serrations in them and that his breath was sour, then she walked back slowly, heavily, through the village to Paradise Valley. I feel a hundred, she thought. A drunken man called out to her. ‘I want to bite you,’ he said. She laughed. I’m a hundred and he wants to bite me. ‘You’ll break your teeth,’ she dared to call back. But he was too unsteady to take her up on the challenge. A couple snogged violently against a dry-stone wall. Making the beast. A good description of them. A thing of scales and claws. Prehistoric. Kevern and Lowenna, she thought. But she agreed with his assessment that this – supposing he had not imagined it all – was not about Lowenna. As she pushed open the first of the field gates to the Valley a cat ran across her feet. A bad omen according to her adoptive mother. When a cat ran across your feet someone was going on a long journey. And why was that bad? Because you would never see them again.

  Her heart fluttered.

  Did Kevern’s bitter gibe about leaving the country mean anything? Did any of his gibes mean anything? For their own good, people were discouraged from leaving the country – assuming they had any notion of what or where any other country was – but there was always a way if you were desperate, particularly if you lived by the sea and had the money to persuade one of the local fishermen to smuggle you out. You’d never be heard of again. In all likelihood the fisherman would throw you overboard once you were out of sight of the mainland. But at least you’d achieved what you wanted and got away. Why, though, would Kevern want that? He’d told her he loved her. He’d told her he’d never been – and had never in his life expected to be – so happy. So why? And if he wasn’t running from the police, who was he running from? Ahab, he’d said. Ahab! Ahab was hers. She felt possessive of him, and angry with Kevern. Before he met her, he had not been troubled by any Ahab. Lampoons, yes. Harpoons, no. What was he doing purloining her terror?

  iii

  She found Ez up, playing patience and listening to love ballads on the utility console.

  ‘Heavens,’ Ez said, ‘what brings you home?’

  ‘Trouble.’

  ‘Did the trip go badly?’

  ‘No, the trip went well. Or at least we went well. What we didn’t like we didn’t like together. It was what we found when we got back.’

  Ez put away her cards. ‘I’ll make tea,’ she said, ‘unless you’d like something stiffer.’

  ‘Stiffer.’

  The older woman poured them a brandy. Rather ceremoniously, Ailinn thought, as though this was a conversation she’d been expecting, was waiting for even, and the brandy had been bought for just such an event. Brandy – when did they ever drink brandy together?

  ‘So . . .?’

  ‘So . . .?’

  ‘So what was it exactly that you found when you got back?’

  ‘Somebody broke into Kevern’s cottage while we were away.’

  ‘Was there damage?’

  ‘No. They’d tidied it up.’

  ‘That’s an unusual break-in. Was much taken?’

  ‘As far as I could tell – as far as Kevern could tell – nothing.’

  ‘Could you have been mistaken?’

  Ailinn was not prepared to tell Ez that Kevern’s rug had been straightened, because that would have necessitated her explaining why it was always left rumpled, and that would have been to betray her lover to her friend. She trusted Ez but that was not the point. You don’t trust anyone with another person’s secrets.

  ‘He’s very alert to the slightest change,’ she said. ‘He knows if anyone’s leaned on his gate or sniffed the scent out of one of his roses.’

  ‘Roses? You never said he was a gardener.’

  ‘He isn’t. I was being facetious. I’m sorry, I’m upset.’

  ‘Do you know what I think?’ Ez said. She was a do you know what I think kind of a woman. She assumed people went to her to hear homilies. As, indeed, they often did. ‘I think you were both tired after a long drive. And if Kevern is as sensitive to any vibration in the vicinity of his cottage as you say, he was probably anxious the whole time you were away and simply found what he’d feared finding.’

  ‘You are very sure of everything,’ Ailinn said. She felt she’d been forced to take a side and the only side she could take was Kevern’s.

  Ez, she noticed, coloured. For all her intrusiveness, she tried to take a relaxed attitude to Ailinn’s worries, half listening, half humouring, in the way of an older person, a concerned relation or a teacher, who knew that things usually worked out tolerably well in the end. The better a friend you were, the more cheerful a front you presented, was Ez’s philosophy. A cup of tea, a moral lesson, a hug. She was doctorly, motherly, and even a touch professorial, at the same time. Ailinn had liked the contrarieties of her personality from the moment she met her in the reading group. She dressed modestly, in button-up cardigans and long skirts but liked hobbling about, for short periods, on high heels. Crimson high heels, as though she kept an alternative version of herself under her skirt. She had the quiet, respectful manner of a librarian, and no sense of humour to speak of, but if anything was said which she thought might be designed to amuse her she would choke with laughter, spluttering like a schoolgirl, or throwing back her head and showing how beautiful, before it lost its smoothness, the arc of her throat had once been. She was on her own now but she hadn’t always been, Ailinn surmised. There’d been some personal tragedy in her life. A man she’d loved had run away or died. She carried a torch for someone. She burned a little candle in her heart. That was what the crimson shoes were doing – keeping a spark alive. Ailinn even wondered if this was his cottage, whoever he was, or whether they’d had their affair here, in this dripping corner of Paradise Valley where mushrooms would grow out of your shoes if you didn’t wear them for a day. Was that why she’d asked Ailinn along – so that she had reason to hold herself together, so that she wouldn’t give way to morbidity? In which case Ailinn’s falling in love with Kevern and all but moving out of the Valley was inconsiderate. Did that explain the unwonted attentiveness of Ez’s manner tonight, the way she appeared to be counting syllables and listening to pauses? Did she want to hear that something was amiss between them?

  ‘No, I’m not sure of anything,’ she said. ‘I was just looking at the situation from all angles.’

  ‘What if it’s the police?’ Ailinn wondered aloud. ‘What if they really do suspect him?’

  ‘But nothing was taken from the cottage, you say.’

  ‘Well that’s what Kevern said. But he didn’t exactly give himself time to check.’

  ‘You can usually tell.’

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘You can usually tell when something of your own, something that matters to you, has been taken. You just know.’

  Ailinn looked at her. What a lot Ez suddenly just knew. She took another sip of the brandy. ‘What did you do, Ez?’ she asked. ‘What did you do before you became book-group police?’

  Ez laughed – but not, on this occasion, like a young girl. ‘That’s an amusing concept,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you didn’t think I was policing any of the meetings you came to. I just chose the books.’

  ‘Exactly. You policed what we read. Were you a different kind of policeman before that?’

  ‘I was an administrator.’

  ‘Administering what?’

  ‘Oh, this and that. I kept an eye open.’

  ‘On whom?’

  ‘Good question. Other people who were keeping an eye open.’

  Perhaps it was the brandy talking, but Ailinn suddenly propped her elbows on the table, supported her head in her hands and stared hard into her friend’s face. ‘What’s this all about, Ez?’ she asked.

  ‘This?’

  ‘Why did you bring me here? Why were Kevern and I thrown into one an
other’s arms? Why did you force me to ring him when we’d broken up? Why did someone break into his house while we were away?’

  ‘A: I brought you here because you were – because you are – my friend. B: I am not aware that you and Kevern were thrown into each other’s arms. I thought you said it was love at first sight. C: As for Kevern’s house – I have no idea why someone would have broken in, just as you have no idea whether anyone actually did.’

  ‘Then why are you annoyed with me?’

  ‘I am not in the slightest bit annoyed with you.’ She reached out to stroke Ailinn’s cheek. ‘I am concerned about you, that’s all.’

  ‘Then why are your hands cold?’

  ‘I didn’t know they were.’

  ‘And why are you concerned? You are never concerned for me. Not in this way. How many times have you told me I was someone in whom you had absolute faith? And what did that mean, anyway?’

  Perhaps it was the brandy talking again, but she began to cry. Not a flood, just a trickle of soft tears that were gone almost as soon as they appeared.

  ‘You’re very tired. I think you should go to bed,’ Ez said.

  ‘Yes, I think so too. But I won’t sleep. I will lie there all night wondering.’

  ‘Wondering who broke in?’

  ‘Wondering whether he was serious when he spoke about leaving the country.’

  ‘Kevern said he was going to leave the country?’

  ‘Not exactly. But he allowed the idea to float before me, like a threat.’

  ‘We need to talk,’ Ez said. And this time had Ailinn felt her hands she would have discovered they weren’t just cold, they were frozen.