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‘We could do so much to change this.’
‘I don’t want to change this. I want it to go on being. It’s the only vengeance we have left – our refusal to stay around. Hand them the victory, I say, and let them see how empty it is.’
‘And that’s the future you say you promised me?’
‘I thought it was the future we promised each other.’
‘Don’t you see how empty that would be for us too?’
He thought about it. For a long time, stretched out beside her, lying on her shoulder, bringing her on to his, kissing her face, her ears, her eyes, he thought about it. It was morning when he spoke. ‘At least it would have been an emptiness of our deciding,’ he said.
She was back in Paradise Valley by the time he rose. He breathed gently on the vase of paper flowers she had brought him as her moving-in present, barely daring to touch them, then he walked out on to the cliffs. He looked down into the great mouth of the blowhole. It was sucking so hard he needed to stand back from the edge. He felt it could reach up and gulp him down whole, like Hedra Deitch subjecting him to one of her snogging kisses.
But he didn’t have to submit, even to Hedra. A life was owned by the person who lived it, he believed. What happened didn’t always happen because you wanted it to, but what you made of it was your responsibility. Help there was little and gods there were none. We are the authors of our own consequences, if not always of our own actions.
The credo of a serious man. You could be too serious, he didn’t doubt that. But his birthright was his birthright. No one can make me, he thought, feeling the spray on his cheeks.
Though even that turned out not to be entirely true. Distinct from the sucking of the sea and the screaming of the gulls he heard his mother calling to him. Her old, frayed, faint, reproachful cry.
‘Key-vern . . . Key-vern . . .’
He put his ear to the wind. He had always been a good boy. When your mother called . . .
‘Key-vern,’ she called again.
He smiled to hear her voice.
‘What is it, Ma?’
‘ump,’ he heard her say.
Not feeling he should make her say it twice, he put his fingers to his lips, as though blowing her a kiss, and umped.
Ailinn felt her heart crash into her chest. Esme Nussbaum heard it from the other end of the room and turned to look. She scowled.
They both knew.
‘This is not a good way to start,’ Ailinn said, ‘with anger between us.’
‘On the contrary,’ Esme said, ‘this is the best possible way to start.’
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Published by Jonathan Cape 2014
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Copyright © Howard Jacobson 2014
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First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
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‘Shake Hands With Your Uncle Max’ by Allan Sherman and Lou Busch,
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