‘Well, he’s yours again now,’ he said with displeasure, ‘whatever you go on.’
‘There’s just one more thing,’ I said. He turned his face from me. He didn’t care what other things there were. But I had to get an acknowledgement from him. ‘Whatever you saw in his cottage must remain between you and him,’ I said. ‘It’s not public information. And you have to stay away from him. They don’t want him frightened.’
‘What – afraid he’ll run away?’ He tried to find a laugh but failed.
‘He needs not to be startled,’ I said. ‘That’s all. They aren’t playing about with this one. They want him where they can keep an eye on him.’
‘So, it’s as I’ve been saying all along – he’s not right.’
What I said next I said only to appear I knew more than he did. ‘On the contrary – he might be only too right.’
But as soon as I said it I realised I knew more than I knew I knew.
FOUR
The Chimes at Midnight
i
HE SLEPT BADLY. Knowing someone had been lying on his bed – perhaps even in his bed – took from his already small capacity to rest.
But the real reason he slept badly was that Ailinn wasn’t beside him. How quickly he’d come to rely on her being there! How safe, without his realising it, she’d made him feel!
Safety, he thought, could creep up on you as exactly as fear could.
Women sometimes talked of resisting love because it weakened them. Had it weakened him, he wondered, by insinuating safety into his life and seducing him into taking his eye off danger?
He shouldn’t have asked her to move in with him in the first place, but nor should he have asked her to leave. He shouldn’t have been short with her. It wasn’t her fault that he’d deep-kissed Lowenna Morgenstern and brought Detective Inspector Gutkind into his cottage. Except that he knew Lowenna Morgenstern wasn’t to blame either. It was Gutkind who had straightened his rug, he had no doubt of that. It was Gutkind who’d let himself in – while he, Kevern, was away from home, telling strangers to fuck off and hearing voices in Cohentown – Gutkind who’d gone searching through his things. But he wasn’t searching for a blood-stained shirt. That, too, Kevern knew for sure. Gutkind didn’t take him for a murderer. So what did Gutkind take him for?
And never mind Gutkind, who was nobody, nothing, just an accident of history – what was there to unearth?
He lay on his Ailinnless bed looking up at the ceiling with its low, weevilled beams, and watched the question refuse to take definite form. Like one of those humming patterns in the wallpaper that disturb the nights of feverish children, it twisted and writhed, now coming away from the wallpaper altogether, coming at him, making him wonder if it was truly outside himself at all or merely mimicked in visual form the fragmented evasions of his mind. There were some questions you couldn’t ask, even of yourself. There were some questions you couldn’t begin to mould from the black chaos of ignorance, for fear of what definition would bring. Because – because once you’d framed the question you’d given a half-shape to the answer. Better it stay amorphous on the ceiling, as much a musical sound as a drawn or sculpted form. As much a lost note from an electronic sonata, a jammed keyboard, as a moving blob of paint.
But tonight, without Ailinn to soothe him into forgetfulness, he couldn’t leave it alone. Why, he compelled himself to ask, why this apprehension? Why the years of compulsive letter-box peering? Why the lock-checking?
He knew the psychology. It was displacement, all of it. It stood for something else. But wasn’t it also simply a way of practising? A way of accustoming himself, at the very least, to what was not and never would be under his control?
Was that then all that he’d been waiting for – proof positive that he couldn’t affect, for well or ill, his own outcome?
But did even that explain the persistence of the apprehension? Never mind whether there was or wasn’t something that required an answer, why always this apprehension that there was? He felt he needed to hold his head to keep it steady. A clamp would have been a good thing. A brain vice. Always was the word that kept slipping in and out. Always, because the question itself pre-dated his having to ask it. Why have I always been apprehensive? What do I think I’ve done that cries out for reparation? What do I fear I might do again?
He felt he let his mother and father down enunciating it in the silence of this bedroom which had once been their bedroom. Crude of him. Overwrought. Pusillanimous. And maybe even dangerous. Could this have been the very question, maybe the only question, they had all along been educating him never to ask? Could this have been what they who wanted to get in and take a look around had been waiting for all this time, could this have been what Gutkind had been hoping to lay hands on – the question, or rather the capitulation to the need to ask it? What do I fear I have done was like a confession of guilt. And it gave away his location. ‘Hey! you who have always suspected someone of something, cast your gaze this way, the someone is me and I am over here. Here, here, come!’
Come and do what?
Take me away.
Another of his father’s crazed songs came back to him. Something about them carrying him off, ha, ha! All Kevern could remember was that ‘haha’ and his mother putting her hands to her ears and shouting ‘Shut up, Howel!’ Which just made him sing it the more, laughing the laughter of the insanely unamused.
Ha, ha . . .
ii
Whatever Kevern imagined they were expecting to find it was not A Crazy Person’s History of Defilement, for Use in Schools. When he counted off incriminating evidence on his fingers his grandmother’s researches didn’t figure. Expunged, the lot of it. For the good of the family. And that meant expunged from Kevern’s knowledge too. Generation after generation, expunging this, expunging that. Truth to tell, he had little left to hide. The first thing he had done on discovering that his rug had been straightened was to rush upstairs to see if any of his father’s possessions had been touched – the Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller records, the books of poetry, the videos of those fast-talking fatalistic comedians his father had loved (never laughing at them, just nodding his head as though at the wisdom of Plato), the small packets of letters – but rationally he knew these would be of interest to no one, except in so far as his keeping them demonstrated a sentimental hankering for heritage. But the silk runner and the Biedermeier furniture already told that story loud and clear. And anyway, a small fine for clinging on to the past couldn’t have been all Gutkind wanted to lay on him.
So why were they sacrosanct to Kevern? And what did Gutkind want to lay on him?
‘What do I fear I have done?’ Kevern lay there repeating to himself. It was the wrong question. ‘What do we fear we have done?’ he should have asked – more than asked, demanded to be told – remembering his father’s breakdown, a nervous collapse for which he wouldn’t hear of being treated, in the first place because he didn’t want doctors poking around – a terror that was itself, Kevern thought at the time, a symptom of the breakdown – and secondly because he thought there was nothing any doctor could do as he had inherited the propensity from his own father. ‘Let’s just hope,’ he recalled the old man saying from his bed, ‘that it will die out with me and we haven’t passed it on to you.’
Kevern didn’t understand. Hadn’t his grandfather, of whom he knew next to nothing, suffered his breakdown after the disappearance of his wife, Kevern’s grandmother Jenna, of whom Kevern also knew next to nothing except that one elusive fact – that she’d gone out of the cottage and never returned? Who wouldn’t suffer a breakdown after that? In which case there was no genetic disposition to this illness in the family, unless there was a genetic disposition on the part of the womenfolk to disappear.
‘A witty distinction,’ his father acknowledged, ‘but that’s your mother’s father you’re thinking of, so there’s nothing genetically I could have inherited from him anyway.’
‘What propensity then do you
think you inherited from your own?’ Kevern asked.
‘The propensity to terror, but not, I am ashamed to say, the propensity to courage in the face of it. Nor, come to that, though this is not something I would wish you to have known about me before – but now it doesn’t matter, now nothing matters – the propensity to loyalty.’
Kevern asked him what he meant, but he would say no more.
A disloyal coward, then. Well Kevern could enter sympathetically into that. How much loyalty would he show, if ever put to the test? How much resolution in the face of fear, pain, suspicion? When he locked and double-locked his door, wasn’t he double-locking himself against faint-heartedness? But it hardly helped to know this. Whatever evidence Gutkind had been hunting for, it surely wasn’t evidence of Kevern’s inherited feebleness of character.
Then he remembered that just before he died his father grabbed his sleeve and, knocking over the candle that provided the only light he could bear, begged distractedly for his dog.
‘You have no dog,’ Kevern said.
‘You don’t have to lie to me,’ his father said.
Kevern wondered if that meant his father wanted him to lie to him. But he couldn’t produce a dog. He could tell him his dog had died, but where would be the kindness in that? ‘You have had no dog for a long time,’ he decided to say instead.
His father nodded, seeming to remember. ‘Mr Bo angles’ – he summoned the strength to cross the , as though for the final time – ‘grieved for his dog for twenty years. I’ve grieved longer.’
Kevern took the hand he hadn’t loved. ‘Well, he was a fine dog,’ he said.
‘Not for the dog, you fool!’
Kevern didn’t ask ‘Then for whom?’ It was possible he didn’t want to know.
‘Forgive me,’ his father said after a pause that Kevern thought would be his last.
‘I have nothing to forgive you for,’ Kevern said. ‘You have cared for me.’
‘Not you.’
‘You have, you cared for me. You and Mam.’
The old man took his hand from Kevern’s grasp and waved it across his face, as though to shoo away flies. ‘Not you forgive me. He forgive me.’
‘The dog?’
‘What dog? Why do you keep going on about a dog when I’m talking about my brother?’
This was the first time Kevern had heard mention of a brother. Presumably he too, like the dog, was the invention of delirium.
‘I’m sure he had nothing to forgive you for, either.’
‘What do you know!’ Another assault on the invisible flies, then something like a laugh from far away. ‘Ha! It’ll have to be you, then. You’re the only one left, so it’ll have to be you. Like the song. “It had to be you” . . . You forgive me. You do it for him.’
‘Can I do that?’
‘There’s no one else.’
‘Then I forgive you,’ Kevern said.
They were so secretive a family it didn’t occur to him to ask what his father needed to be forgiven for. He didn’t think it was any of his business. More to the point, he didn’t want it to be any of his business. The aesthete in him shrank from such melodrama. He made small, finely crafted objects. A candlestick was the biggest thing to come off his lathe. And even his candlesticks had narrow waists and attenuated necks. If he hung his clothes in a Biedermeier wardrobe it was only in deference to his father’s bulking sense of private tragedy. Biedermeier was where he came from, that was all. But where he came from kept rearing up at him, never to be satisfied until it had ripped open his throat. More melodrama. See, he eered at himself, you are no better than your father. You can go on making all the intricately entangled lovespoons you like, your own entanglements remain gross. Ailinn? No, of course not Ailinn. But hadn’t his treatment of her been gross? Shutting her out of his life like a dog?
He hadn’t asked his father, ever, about anything because he hadn’t ever wanted to hear the answer. But you don’t always have to ask to know. And Kevern knew the answer in the way he knew so many things. He knew it and he didn’t know it.
His father, then no more than a boy, he couldn’t have been, closing the door on a brother, refusing to assist him, refusing his cries for help, leaving him out in the cold like a dog, letting whoever was after him have him, never mind who or why, he knew who and why – this, from innumerable clues, from an accumulation of half-expressed regrets and barely smothered confessions, from a history of hysterical injunctions and prohibitions, from asides and songs and sorrows, from skeletal dances and stillborn ests, from what he knew generally of the human heart and what he knew specifically of his father’s shrivelled soul, from logical deduction and common sense and experience, from the frightened life they’d lived in their fortress cottage ever since he could remember, and from what he suspected too well he would do if ever put to the same test – all this Kevern saw and didn’t see.
iii
He was out early the morning after these recollections, sitting on his bench chewing over his father’s plea, feeling the spittle from the blowhole on his face – submitting to nature’s insults – when Densdell Kroplik found him. Kevern had heard the footsteps and hoped they were Ailinn’s. Ailinn, with one of her paper flowers in her hair and another in her hand, come to receive his apology and plant a kiss on his brow. Ailinn, the light of his life.
He needed to be embraced. But not by Densdell Kroplik.
‘A penny for them,’ Kroplik said, employing his civil voice.
He was a strange sight up here against the sky, as though Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Mists had suddenly turned around and shown himself. He was not wearing a frockcoat, though, but a smart, tweed, countryman’s suit, with a raincoat over his arm. A miracle that anyone so businesslike could emerge from Kroplik’s cowshed. It was this that made Kevern wonder if he were seeing things.
A raincoat and no rucksack, as though he’d come down out of the morning mist to meet his solicitor. Even the angry ruddiness of his cheeks was damped down, Kevern noted. Did that mean he could turn it on and off at will – his raging rusticity?
‘So what business are you on, looking such a dandy?’ Kevern asked.
Kroplik tapped his nose.
It was that gesture, more than anything else – denoting a man who had a hundred secrets of his own and was privy to a thousand more – that inveigled Kevern, who had hardly slept, into confidentiality. Who could say: maybe Kroplik knew something about what was going on.
‘I’ve been away for a few days,’ Kevern confided.
‘Anywhere interesting?’
Kevern waved that part of the conversation away. ‘While I was gone my cottage was broken into.’
‘Not guilty,’ Kroplik said.
‘I would never have thought you were. I just wondered if you’d heard anything on the grapevine.’
‘I’m not on the grapevine.’
Kevern had a go at an affable grin. It was that or push the swine into the sea. ‘I’ve yet to hear of anything happening in this village that you haven’t heard of first.’
Densdell Kroplik inclined his head before the compliment. ‘I’m the village historian,’ he said, ‘not the village gossip. Ask me something that occurred here a hundred years ago and I’ll tell you. Ask me what occurred yesterday and your guess is as good as mine. I don’t deal in yesterday.’
Kevern was grateful that, as befitted his suit and his unruddied cheeks, Densdell Kroplik, though as awkward as ever, was not playing the local this morning. But he still regretted what he said next even as he was saying it. ‘That you know of – did my father have anything to hide?’
The historian rubbed both his eyes, as though before a spectacle that amazed him. It was a morning of miracles for both of them. He asked Kevern if he minded his joining him on the bench. He pretended to need time to catch the breath of his astonishment. ‘Other than his being an aphid, you mean?’
‘Yes, other than that.’
He scratched his head under his hat. ‘Well
he had you,’ he finally answered.
‘I assume that’s a oke,’ Kevern said, smothering the action of putting two fingers to his lips with a cough.
‘Joke or not, many a child born round here is a clue to a secret people would rather didn’t get out.’
‘I’m guessing you’re not telling me I’m someone else’s child?’
‘You wouldn’t be the first. It’s always hard to prove whose child anyone is, and usually unwise to try.’
My fault, Kevern thought. My own stupid fault. ‘So is this a general supposition or do you know something specific?’
Densdell Kroplik put a hand on Kevern’s knee. That Kevern could recall, no other man had ever done that. Not even his father. He found it hard to believe it could presage anything but an appalling revelation.
‘No, nothing specific,’ Kroplik said, noticing that Kevern shrank from his touch, ‘though there was a story circulating some years ago – tell me to stop if this is painful – that your mother used to get free meat.’
‘What the hell does that mean?’
‘What it sounds. A certain butcher from these parts was said to enjoy her company on and off. They’d go for walks together. Up around here.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I’m a historian.’
‘But not of gossip, you said.’
‘Give it enough time, brother, and gossip’s history.’
‘And he’d give her free meat, this butcher?’
‘That’s my understanding.’
‘Free meat!’
‘Would you have rather she’d paid?’
Kevern rose from the bench. ‘OK, enough,’ he said.
Kroplik shrugged his shoulders. This wasn’t his doing. Kevern had started it. ‘I know how you feel,’ he said. ‘My mother was a slut too.’
‘OK, I said that’ll do!’ Kevern repeated.
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