J

by Howard Jacobson

  Over and above this he liked reading the Worthing papers for the clarity of their reasoning and on that account read them, again and again, chronologically and therefore, he surmised, systematically. One train of thought in particular engrossed his attention because it seemed to explain something that was crying out for explanation. And tonight Gutkind was of a mood to peruse it again. In the course of it – an extended essay entitled When Blood Is Thicker Than Water – his great-grandfather sought to lay the blame for everything he thought wrong with the world, from the moral, political, ethical and even theological points of view, on ‘those’ who cultivated a double allegiance which was plain for everybody to see but which good manners forced society to turn a blind eye to. In fact, the phrase ‘double allegiance’ let them off too easily, he argued, for the question had to be asked whether they considered they owed any sort of genuine allegiance to this, or any country in which they’d found themselves, at all.

  Or any sort of allegiance to him, Gutkind surmised. He didn’t mind that his great-grandfather’s reasoning reeked of the ad feminam. How else do you measure a great wrong unless you have been on the receiving end of it? If his great-grandfather proceeded from a position of profound personal disappointment – betrayal even – that made his arguments only the more persuasive to Detective Inspector Gutkind.

  ‘Observe their cohabiting customs,’ Gutkind’s great-grandfather wrote, ‘observe them as a scientist might observe the mating habits of white mice, and you will see that however far outside the swarm they wander to satisfy their appetites, for purposes of procreation they invariably regroup. They choose their mistresses and lovers from those for whom they feel neither respect nor compassion and their wives and husbands from their own ranks. As is often reported by innocents who encounter them without knowing by what rules they live, they can be companionable, amusing, even adorable, and in some circumstances, especially where reciprocal favours are looked for, munificent. But this to them is no more than play, the exercise of their undeniable powers and charm for the mere sadistic fun of it. Thereafter their loyalty is solely to each other. Let one of their number suffer and their vengefulness knows no limits; let one of their number perish and they will make the planet quake for it. To some, this is taken to be the proof of the steadfastness of their tribal life, the respect and affection they have been brought up, over many generations, to show to one another. But it is in fact a manifestation of a sense of superiority that values the life of anyone not belonging to their “tribe” at less than nothing. Only witness, in that country which they call their ancestral home (but which few of them except the most desperate appear to be in any hurry to repair to), a recent exchange of prisoners with one of their many enemies in which, for the sake of a single one of their own – just one – they willingly handed over in excess of seven hundred! The mathematics make a telling point. Never, in the history of humanity, has one people held all others in such contempt, or been more convinced that the world can, and will, be organised for their benefit alone. It has been said that were the earth to be laid waste, so long as not a single hair of one of theirs was harmed, they would connive in that destruction. That is not a justification for their destruction, though others argue persuasively for it. But it does invite us to ask how much longer we can tolerate their uncurbed presence.’

  Gutkind so admired the adamantine and yet heartfelt quality of his great-grandfather’s prose that he was at a loss to understand why there had been no published collection of his articles or, come to that, why he had not cut a dash in parliamentary politics. Had his notorious social life taken up too much of his time, or were his words too prophetic for the age he lived in? Gutkind knew for himself what it was to be unappreciated and felt for his great-grandfather’s sorrows a scalding agony which there was no warrant to suppose Clarence Worthing ever felt himself.

  Part of what Gutkind admired about Worthing’s work was its conscientious refinement of argument from one article to the next. The refusal of all talk of destruction with which one essay ended, for example, was picked up again in the next with an allusion to ‘self-destruction’, that being the course on which ‘the arrogant, the forward and the vain’, as he called them, appeared, paradoxically, to be hell-bent. ‘Some worm of divisiveness in their own souls has impelled them – throughout history, as though they knew history itself was against them – to the brink of self-destruction. Imaginatively, the story of their annihilation engrosses them; let them enjoy a period of peace and they conjure war, let them enjoy a period of regard and they conjure hate. They dream of their decimation as hungry men dream of banquets. What their heated brains cannot conceive, their inhuman behaviour invites. “Kill us, kill us! Prove us right!” Time and again they have been saved, not by their own resolution, but by the world taking them at their own low self-valuation and endeavouring to deliver them the consummation they devoutly wish. Only then are they able to come together as a people, mend their divisions, and celebrate their escape as one more proof of the divine protection to which their specialness entitles them. But it is a dangerous game and will backfire on them one day.’

  Gutkind heard in this a personal plea by his great-grandfather, to one he had loved without reciprocation, to beware the dragon’s teeth she and hers had sowed. He even wondered if it was a coded message. A last-minute warning to her, perhaps, to escape (he had even used that word), to gather up her things and leave, or to go into hiding, before the first shots were fired.

  How many messages of this sort, he asked himself, had been sent in this fashion. Not just by Clarence Worthing but by others who had lost their hearts to apparently charming and companionable men and women who proved, when things turned serious, to have been merely trifling with their affections and who, without once looking back, beat a speedy retreat to the bosoms of their own? How much ‘saving’, for the sake of brief but never to be forgotten embraces, had been going on? Like all theorists of betrayal and conspiracy, Gutkind was a hyperbolist. From the single example of his great-grandfather he extrapolated a whole underground of the hurt, scheming tirelessly, not to say paradoxically, to give another chance to those they knew – knew from their own experience – did not deserve it.

  This seemed so plausible to the detective that he began to question whether WHAT HAPPENED had in the end claimed any victims at all. Had it remained an undescribed crime all these years because it was an unsolved crime, and had it been unsolved because it was uncommitted? That made a great deal of sense to him. It explained why the world was not the happier place it should have been, and no doubt would have been, had what was meant to happen happened.

  In the early days of Gutkind’s courtship his wife-to-be had sent him a graphic letter, imprinted with her lipstick kisses, describing her desires. ‘Read and burn’, she wrote at the bottom.

  Now that he understood these essays of his great-grandfather’s as personal missives to a woman he’d loved, he imagined him advising the same precaution. Read and burn.

  But this didn’t take from the truth of Clarence Worthing’s analysis. If anything – since it was designed to win assent even from those it might have hurt, since it was intended to prepare, alert and warn, not rabble-rouse – it made the analysis more compelling. The empathetic Gutkind did figuratively as he was told. He read and burned.

  ii

  Tonight, he spread out a few more pages of the silver-tongued Clarence Worthing on the kitchen table, blowing on them reverently, a paragraph at a time, to keep them free of dust. How he admired the undeviating strength of his resolution, not compromised by passion but stiffened by it. How wonderful it must have been to know where the wrongness at the heart of life was to be located and what it looked like. Here were no abstractions; here was flesh and blood. His great-grandfather wrote as though the enemy were in the other room, perhaps falsely playing with his children as he wrote, perhaps seducing his wife as he had once been seduced himself. Gutkind felt that he could touch them. Put his arms around them, submit his cheek to the
ir false kisses. He closed his eyes and believed that he could smell them. It was a kind of love. A hatred born of pure fascination. His noble-hearted ancestor had been their friend. He had allowed them into his heart. He had been betrayed by them. Gutkind felt his own heart swell. He almost swooned with this love which was indistinguishable from hate. He closed his eyes and made a perfect pink circle of his lips. Womanly, he felt. Kiss me!

  But when he opened his eyes again there was no one there. Only Luther, rolling in the white dust. He felt as though that very dust obscured his vision, fell like a veil over his face, through which he could make out nothing distinct, no person or group of persons, just his own causeless dissatisfaction.

  But he needed features and so he conjured them, not from the family journals but from his own immediate experience of what the features of aloof, cold-blooded superiority looked like. Those features belonged to Kevern ‘Coco’ Cohen.

  EIGHT

  Little St Alured

  i

  AILINN DROVE ADVENTUROUSLY but sweetly, ignoring the routine rage of other drivers. They honked her if she didn’t pull over to let them pass, and they honked her when she did; she was too fast for some and too slow for others; she lingered too long at traffic lights or she set off too early for those running the lights in opposing directions. A cyclist hammered on the roof of the car, then seeing she was a woman blew her an enraged kiss.

  ‘I’d have turned back by now,’ Kevern admitted. ‘I’d have killed or been killed.’

  ‘You get used to this as a woman,’ Ailinn said.

  ‘You’re not turning this into a gender issue?’

  ‘I don’t have to. How many women have wound down their windows to scream at me? How many women have shown me the finger?’

  ‘I haven’t been counting.’

  ‘You don’t need to count. Would that cyclist have blown a kiss at you?’

  ‘All right, I accept what you are saying. But he was young. Any crisis in society manifests itself in the behaviour of young men. So let’s go home.’

  She wouldn’t hear of it. Home was no better, remember. At home men weren’t just showing women the finger, they were killing them, and Kevern, or had he forgotten, was suspected of killing a woman himself.

  ‘And a man,’ he reminded her. ‘Indeed a couple of men. Don’t minimise my offence.’

  ‘I don’t. But your behaviour doesn’t constitute a crisis.’

  Kevern tightened his seat belt. ‘You’ll tell me it’s a tautology,’ he said, ‘but the behaviour of men is the proof we’re in crisis.’

  ‘That’s a tautology,’ she said, finally getting on to the motorway.

  She drove at her usual speed, confidently, with a narrowed concentration as though driving through a tunnel. Kevern spoke not one word. After about an hour and a half, as much from a charitable impulse as anything else, she left the motorway again and followed the signs to the small cathedral city of Ashbrittle, at one time home to more ecclesiastical dignitaries than any other town in the country, and for that reason a magnet for Christian tourists. But that was before WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED happened. Subsequently, though the church insisted it had not been specifically instrumental in those events, it had allowed its head to drop. Too much saying sorry, Kevern thought, as he realised where she’d driven them.

  ‘This do?’ she asked.

  Kevern wound down his window then wound it up again. ‘You can smell the disuse,’ he said.

  ‘Shall we drive straight out again?’

  ‘No, let’s stay. I need to rest my eyes.’

  ‘You haven’t been driving.’

  ‘That’s what you think.’

  They found a motherly bed and breakfast a mile or two outside the town, away from the smell of disuse, and went immediately to bed. Pencil sketches of details of gravestones, lychgates and stoups, arches and columns seen from unexpected angles, hung above their bed. ‘Soft clerical porn,’ Kevern called it. ‘The kitsch to which religion, when no one any longer believes in it, is reduced.’

  Ailinn thought he was making too much of it. They were just pictures. Something had to go on the walls. And how would he have felt had they shown the Saviour bleeding on the cross. He said that would have depended on who’d painted it.

  ‘Let’s have a break from judgement,’ Ailinn suggested. At least on their first night away. ‘We’re supposed to be on holiday. Let’s just enjoy the relief of not being in Port Reuben. And not being looked at every minute of every day.’

  He agreed. ‘Or interrogated.’

  ‘Well that’s your own fault for kissing married women.’

  ‘You sound like Detective Inspector Gutkind.’

  ‘Did he ask about me?’

  ‘No. Should he?’

  ‘I suppose not. But you’d think I’d be material to his assessment of your character, or at least your circumstances.’

  ‘He was more interested in assessing my furniture.’

  She laughed a small laugh then remembered something. ‘I was questioned by the police once. Not since I’ve been with you. Before I left home. I thought they were more interested in my belongings too.’

  ‘What were you questioned about?’

  ‘That was never entirely clear. A burglary, I think. Not for kissing someone in a car park, that I can say. But mainly they wanted the chance to get a look at where I lived. They wondered if I’d held on to any family photographs or letters from before I was adopted. I told them I didn’t have any family photographs or letters from before I was adopted for the reason that I had no family. And besides, I knew the law. They said everyone broke the law a bit. I told them I didn’t. I told them that if they wanted to know more about me they should try the children’s home in Mernoc. And then be so kind as to let me know what they’d found out.’

  ‘And did they?’

  ‘Let me know?’

  ‘Find anything out.’

  ‘No idea.’

  She shuddered in his arms, her heart aflutter – ‘Someone dear to me has just died,’ she said, and then when Kevern sat up in alarm she laughed to reassure him. ‘A silly superstition from my part of the world.’

  But he was a superstitious man himself. Only a fool, he thought, wasn’t. What if her heart had fluttered out of time – an anticipatory flutter – because the someone close to her who had died was him.

  A moment later there was a knock on their door. Their hearts leapt together. Who knew they were here?

  They needn’t have been alarmed: it was only the motherly proprietor wondering if they wanted a hot-water bottle.

  They said no.

  They had each other.

  ii

  Ashbrittle was deserted when they went strolling after breakfast. But somehow aflutter too, like Ailinn’s heart, as though with affrighted ghosts.

  They stared about them. Soul-departed terrace after soul-departed terrace, mocking the moderate, clerical sociability for the expression of which they’d been lovingly designed. Expectant, calling-card residences at which no one called. The stone a melancholy, rusted yellow. The brass doorbells black from never being pushed. A light rain seemed not so much to fall from the sky as rise from the cracked paving stones. A couple of shops selling local-history pamphlets (no one wanted a complete book), pewter goblets, silver spoons featuring the diocesian crest and of course postcards of the cathedral were open, but many more were boarded up. The river had a film of grease on it, like gravy left to go cold. The Bishop’s Barn, a one time favourite with tourists, was closed for renovation, but the sign saying so was in need of renovation itself. Graffiti was scrawled on its strong yet quiet Jacobean door. Kevern couldn’t read the words or decipher the symbols but to him all graffiti was the language of alienated hate, even when it was urging ‘Love’.

  They walked in silence under High Street Gate which housed a library, also indefinitely closed for renovation, and found Cathedral Close. ‘I have a soft spot for cathedral closes,’ Ailinn said, looking around. ‘I always feel pe
ople must be living such good lives in them.’

  ‘Well maybe they are,’ Kevern said. ‘That’s if anyone is living here at all. It feels as if they’ve all gone. A plague-bell tolled and they all ran for it. Unless they’re on their knees in their cellars, saying sorry.’

  Ailinn stopped and told him to be quiet. She could hear music coming from the grandest of the houses. She wanted it to be Bach or Handel but it was only a utility-console ballad wondering where we would be without love.

  ‘In the shit,’ Kevern said. To himself. He wasn’t going to use language like that to the woman he loved.

  She took his arm and moved him on in what, as a devotee of cathedral closes, she knew to be the direction of the main entrance to the cathedral itself. Her early years had been spent in an orphanage that was an adjunct to a monastery. She knew her way around church architecture.