J

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘Why would she ask for letters she doesn’t know exist?’ Sister Perpetua wondered.

  Sister Agatha shrugged. ‘Why anything?’ she said.

  In fealty to the memory of her own mother, Coira too disappeared from the face of the earth.

  vi

  ‘And thus does THE GREAT PISSASTROPHE,’ Kevern mused gravely to Ailinn as they lay entwined like a pair of foundlings in each other’s arms, ‘claim another victim.’

  She drew him close to her. ‘It’s more complicated than that,’ she said.

  He stroked her hair, pulling it back from her forehead. He loved the broad, clear expanse of her brow. Broad brow: capacious intelligence. Broad brow: magnanimity. Broad brow: intuition, compassion, sense of humour, sense of tragedy, vulnerability. He could stroke her brow for hours at a time. How glad he was to be soothing it again. How he’d missed it in the weeks he hadn’t seen her. Broad brow: sorrow, longing, fidelity.

  She hadn’t told him everything. In truth – or rather not in truth – she hadn’t told him very much. Not to start with. Long ago, in the mayhem of civil conflict her grandmother had abandoned a baby – what happened thereafter was a common tale of history repeating itself, one generation after another passing down its inheritance of shame.

  He understood that, he the grandson of a displaced hunchback.

  ‘But you have nothing to be ashamed of,’ he said.

  She wasn’t so sure. ‘It’s not a pretty story,’ she said.

  He couldn’t resist saying that she, though, was a pretty story in herself.

  She shook her hair, as if to shake away the thoughtless compliment.

  ‘It’s hard to imagine what they must have gone through, those women, abandoning a child. Only think how desperate they must have been.’

  ‘You are a child of sorrows,’ he told her.

  He turned his head momentarily to hide his tears from her.

  They irritated her. They flowed too soon. Wait till he heard all she had to tell him. What would gush from his eyes then?

  She knew him well enough to follow his emotional reasoning. He would be blaming himself for all that had befallen her, and not just her but her mother, and her mother’s mother before her. Somehow or other he would be sheeting it all back to himself. His fault, everything his fault. Greedy for a share in her suffering which was no suffering when all was said and done. What had she been through? Nothing. It was those before her who had been in hell. And if it was wrong for her to appropriate what was theirs, how much more wrong was it for him. How ghoulish!

  Everyone wants a piece of me, she thought, meaning Ez as well. They are thirsty so they drink of me.

  Well, she had reason to be furious with Ez. Meddling on such a scale! Kevern, on the other hand, was only letting his sympathy for her overflow. Her irritation with him had its cause in her, not him, in her apprehension, in her dread of telling him all she had to tell him.

  She submitted her brow to his stroking. She would have disappeared into him if she could have. Found safety inside his skin, turned back into the ribs from which irresponsible theological fantasy taught that she’d been fashioned.

  But that was selfish of her. She should have been holding him. The helpmeet cradling her husband from all harm. She remembered a simple poem she had liked at school – Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be. Only it wasn’t the best she was asking him to grow old along with her in, was it? It was the worst. Not for her, for him. For him, not for her, she was full of dread.

  ‘So was Ez aware of your history all along?’ he wondered.

  ‘That depends on what you mean by “all along”. From the beginning of our friendship, or just before, yes, it would seem so. I’m only just getting to the bottom of it. But don’t blame her.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Leave it to me to do any necessary blaming. It won’t help if you crowd me into anger.’

  ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘But you can’t expect me not to be curious. Did she befriend you in order to find the kindest way to tell you what she knew?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘So how did she come to be in possession of those letters anyway? Is she some sort of social worker?’

  Crowding, Ailinn, thought. Crowding.

  ‘In a manner of speaking, yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose she is.’

  ‘You are convinced she meant well, at least?’

  She hesitated. Now it was her turn to avert her head. ‘It’s all more complicated even than I’ve told you,’ she whispered, not looking at him.

  In her chest, her heart was leaping like a frightened animal.

  ELEVEN

  Degenerates

  i

  ESME NUSSBAUM WAS also enthralled, the first time she clapped eyes on Ailinn in the book group, by the smooth beauty of her brow.

  Esme was not, as her father thought, a lesbian. His crude mistake was to suppose that everyone was sexually distinct – a choice for which, if you made it wrongly in his view, you would pay – whereas many people, Esme thought, are neither one thing nor another, by and large indifferent to the whole business of sex and gender. She numbered herself among the latter. She fell in love with people’s natures not their bodies and wanted nothing in return.

  Ailinn called out something in her at once which she was happy to recognise as motherly. The girl needed, if not looking after exactly, then direction. Esme was convinced she would have felt this, and acted on it, person to person, even had she not set out to meet her armed with a set of very particular intentions as to the direction in which she wanted – no, not wanted, needed – Ailinn to go.

  She was surprised by the girl’s beauty. It wasn’t that she really expected to meet someone with drooping eyes and puffy lips and large ears like the handles of a coffee cup but it had been hard for her to dispel all expectations of ugliness or, alternatively, all expectations of exoticism. But other than in the profusion of her hair, Ailinn answered to none of the descriptions with which, over the years, Esme Nussbaum had conscientiously made herself familiar. Even the girl’s lovely forehead – which certainly did not overhang – wasn’t of a different ethnic order of foreheads.

  Nonetheless, she found herself, throughout their early meetings, looking out for evidence of peculiarity – not in the pejorative sense, but with regard to unaccustomed and specific habits of utterance and thought. That she found none she attributed at first to the time Ailinn and indeed her mother had spent among the nuns. It was more than sixty years ago that Coira had been dropped off at the convent orphanage, and whatever characteristics of race or belief she’d inherited from her own mother would over that period have been eradicated in her daughter. Ailinn had been swept clean. Esme had read about the eternal reluctance of families such as Rebecca’s to entrust their offspring to the care of convent orphanages and other religious charities in times of trouble, for fear that in the event of their ever being reunited with their relations they would be radically changed in outlook and theology. She didn’t doubt that had Rebecca ever again encountered her daughter or her granddaughter she would have been struck – she could not with confidence say ‘disturbed’ – by the change. But as she got to know Ailinn better she didn’t feel competent to distinguish what was natural to her from what had been acquired. And by the time the two moved to Paradise Valley she found herself thinking of Ailinn as essentially unexceptional – unusual for her beauty and the sweetness of her disposition, yes, and for her stubbornness, and maybe even her occasional moroseness, but racially – or did she mean religiously? or did she mean culturally? a young woman like any other, a young woman, indeed, in many ways similar to the woman she had been herself, at least before the motorcyclist rode into her and broke every bone in her body.

  That thought, too, brought her still closer to Ailinn. They were both who they were, directly or indirectly, as the consequence of foul play. So while she wanted something ‘from’ Ailinn that Ailinn herself as yet knew nothing of, she wanted something ‘for
’ her, too, that had nothing to do with her ambitious scheme to restore the nation’s equilibrium of hate. Esme considered it a stroke of remarkably good fortune – particularly when she became privy to Ailinn’s feelings for Kevern Cohen, and witnessed their evident reciprocity when she saw them together – that her professional scheme and her private hopes coincided perfectly in so far as they bore on Ailinn’s happiness.

  How long it was going to take before either could be realised depended, she understood – for all her impatience – on feelings and events beyond her control. It was not all in her hands, as it was not all in Ailinn’s. But when the girl returned from her trip away with Kevern only to discover his cottage had been broken into – an action Esme very much deplored – and Kevern, as a consequence, began to say reckless things and make wild plans, Esme knew she had to intervene. ‘It’s now or never,’ she told herself, although the time was still not right, at least as far as the clearing of Kevern was concerned. ‘What you don’t do yourself, is rarely done well,’ was what she also told herself. But she couldn’t be everywhere at once. She couldn’t have researched Kevern ‘Coco’ Cohen as thoroughly as she had researched Ailinn Solomons. And besides . . .

  Well, if she understood the logic of matrilineality adequately, the clearing of Kevern was of less consequence than the clearing of Ailinn. She wasn’t saying Kevern was immaterial to her plans – far from it – but she could afford a degree of blurring around Kevern that she couldn’t around Ailinn.

  ii

  Saturday 30th

  Well what was I supposed to say? That I liked the stuff? Thank you, Kevern, I can’t wait to show it to my students as an example of that deviant, flagitious, vitiated modernism (as I’ve said, nobody dares go near the word ‘degenerate’) they’ve read about in their textbooks . . . He wouldn’t exactly have thanked me for that, would he? No son wants to hear his mother described as deviant.

  Which brings me to the real problem I was faced with when he bounded in (bounded in for him), looking as pleased as punch and flaunting that odious sketchbook – that he didn’t know how much he was giving away about himself and I didn’t know whether to tell him. ‘If you’re the son of that mother, fellow-me-lad,’ I wanted to say, ‘you’re in a spot of bother.’ Or not. This is the thing: never having been adequately apprised of what I’m looking for, I’m not only in the dark as to whether or not I’ve found it, I’m in the dark as to the value, good or bad, of what I’ve found. As to that – the latter – I have my own views. I like the man, as I’ve made abundantly clear, but that doesn’t mean I have to like what it would now appear I must call his antecedents. The other way of putting this is that I detest the sin but love the sinner. But I am going too fast even for my own brain.

  Why, I have to ask myself – taking a pause – am I not more étonné by what I have discovered? Did I suspect all along? Did I know all along? Well, whether I knew at the beginning or not I’d have had to be some sort of nincompoop not to have had a pretty good idea more recently that something of this sort was in the wind. The strange behaviour of a certain detective inspector was clue enough, and then the strange behaviour around him – their getting me to call him off, for example – was surely a clincher. I just didn’t know what it clinched. And I still don’t know what’s to be done with what I now know, that’s if I now know anything. There’s a lot of knowing and not knowing here – knowing what you don’t know and not knowing what you do – but then that’s the secret service for you. Ha! Which is not to say I am amused. I am worried for him. My man Kevern, I mean, not the detective inspector about whom I have no worries whatsoever. And I must say I am the smallest bit worried for myself. Hurt might be a better word. Just because it’s been my job to suss him out doesn’t mean it’s been his job to string me along. For how many months have I been declaring him clean? And all that time he’s been posing as my friend, even bringing his poor girlfriend round to meet us. Does she know? That’s supposing, of course, that he himself has known any more than I have. Does he even know who or what he is? The innocent way he presented his mother’s wretched work – unaware that he was as good as handing himself in – doesn’t suggest duplicity. Had he known what he was about, or had any inkling what it was necessary to conceal, he’d have gone out into his garden in the dead of night, dug a hole as deep as hell, and dropped those sketches of hers down it. Alternatively, given where he lives, he should have thrown them into the sea the minute he found them.

  And here’s another question I’m bound to ask myself: was there always a suspicion that these works existed, and that eventually it would be they – this little nothing of a notebook, this handful of neurotic prints and drawings done by a deranged, unhappy woman – that gave him away? Was that why I – a professor of the Benign Visual Arts – was given him to watch? Because the crime, if a crime is quite what it is fair to call it, was always going to show itself first and foremost aesthetically? I’m flattered, if that’s the case, though there might be those who wonder why it took me so long. To which my answer is – Art Appreciation is a slow business.

  ‘It’s the look of him we want you to engage with,’ was what I was told at the beginning. Words to that effect, anyway. ‘How he dresses, how he decorates his home, his taste in personal and domestic decoration.’ I had to report back pretty soon that he had forcefully resisted every hint I’d dropped about visiting him in his ‘home’ – ugh, that word! ‘I make a point of not entertaining,’ he told me. ‘I can’t cope with it. It makes me anxious. But let me take you and Demelza out for dinner.’ I could, I suppose, have dropped round on spec, but wouldn’t that have aroused suspicion? You don’t just find yourself on the cliffs of Port Reuben with time on your hands. A shame, as I said in my report at the time. I like to read a man’s soul in his kitchen. And I doubt anyone would have done it better. Though after what I have just seen I’m more than a little relieved that I never did get to see what hangs on his walls. What if his house is festooned with more examples of his mother’s sclerotic primitivism? I could not have let things lie at that. There are mistakes of taste you can let go – I’d have winked at the odd porcelain shepherdess or picturesque rendition of the Damascus Gate at sunset, believe me – but an unambiguous depravity of taste has to be reported. There’s a box for that very thing on my forms. Tick the following: ersatz Negroid art; obsession with the fractured body as reflection of tormented mind; excessive devotion to biblical themes not rendered pietistically; asymmetry, violent oppositions of colour or form, counterpart shapes, dread, menace, anxiety, expressive dualities, basket-case subject matter, and more in a similar vein. You see my problem – if his walls are decorated by his mother I’d have had to tick the lot.

  And that’s before we get to the father whom he once described to me as a glassblower in wood, but that might just have been to put me off the scent. What if his candlesticks were ironically discoordinated – a veritable attack on Hellenistic proportion – to their very wicks and tails? Is there not even, now I put my mind to it, a grotesquerie of misshapen elaboration in the figures with which Kevern himself decorates his lovespoons?

  Just thinking about all this sends me into a moral tailspin. I love the man. Like the man, at least. All right, all right – I don’t mind the man. It’s possible, then, that I’d have not minded one or two of his confrères. But I am reminded that on grounds of their aesthetic I’d have been tempted to pick up a stone myself had I been alive at the time. I don’t say to throw it, just pick it up. But who’s to say that the action would not have been enough to encourage me to do something worse. Having said that, I trust that my love of beauty would eventually have won out, stopped my hand and bade me turn my back.

  PS And now here’s more news. Detective Inspector Gutkind has been found with his throat cut in his own ‘home’. His cat too. Both of them shrouded in white dust. Sounds like something Kevern Cohen’s mother might have drawn. Speaking of whom – the son not the mother – isn’t he now likely to be a prime suspect?

 
Not too good for me, all this. Not a good reflection on my acuity.

  iii

  She was impressed by how well Ailinn took what she had to tell her – or at least that much of it which, initially, was all she dared tell her. She read the letters that had come down to her, not with calm exactly, but with the fatalism of someone who expected nothing better and had half-dreaded something worse, and this omened well, Esme thought, for how she would deal with further revelations. But Ailinn was a slow burner. ‘And your role in this?’ she asked after a period of reflection.

  ‘That of a well-wisher.’

  ‘Please don’t treat me like a fool.’

  ‘You think I intend harm to you?’

  ‘I don’t know what you intend. But you have deceived me so far, so why shouldn’t I think you will deceive me more? Who are you and what do you want?’

  ‘You know who I am.’

  ‘No I don’t. I thought you were someone I just happened to meet at a book group and who needed a friend. But there was obviously no “just happened” about it. Don’t look at me in that bruised way, Ez. You have lied to me all along. Are you a policewoman?’

  ‘Do I look like a policewoman?’

  ‘What do looks have to do with it? You looked like my friend.’

  ‘I am your friend.’

  ‘But it’s clear from the way you say it that our friendship was a happy accident. What are you actually?’

  ‘I’m your guardian angel.’

  ‘There is no such thing. And even if there were, you aren’t it. Why do you know so much about me? Why have you made a project of my life? Nothing better to do with your own?’