J

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘Another wild goose chase,’ she would say wearily to herself, after a trail of clues ended nowhere. Sociologically, it was interesting to discover how many misfits even the smallest hamlets yielded. How many runaway wives or husbands, how many defectors of one sort or the other – from responsibility, from debt, from the law, from careers, from gender – how many were judged, rightly or wrongly, to be foreigners, illegal immigrants, gypsies, visitors from another solar system even. Was there anyone, she sometimes wondered, who wasn’t alien to someone else? The surprise, given this degree of social mistrust, was that more hadn’t HAPPENED and indeed wasn’t HAPPENING now. But this just went to show how right she had been in her analysis: those who had been the object of WHAT HAPPENED weren’t just any old, interchangeable excuse for civil riot, they occupied a particular, even privileged, place in the nation’s taxonomy of fear and loathing.

  After several years of unrewarded endeavour, at the end of which Esme Nussbaum thought she had finally worn out what remained of her energies, an exciting piece of information came her way. The agent responsible for it was precisely one of those who knew nothing of what they were about and were therefore always more likely, in Esme’s view, to yield a result. She felt tentatively vindicated. It all came from one or two fairly innocuous questions being asked about boxes of letters found stored in a convent.

  A convent! Esme Nussbaum threw her head back and laughed, as she often did at things that weren’t funny, like a crazy woman. She found the idea of a convent so ludicrously incongruous she was certain it was going to yield something. Something big or something small she didn’t know, but something . . .

  She suddenly felt years younger.

  Barely two months later, she was to be seen extending her hand and flashing her brightest and most motherly smile. ‘Hello, I’m Ez,’ she said.

  ‘Hello, Ez,’ said Ailinn Solomons.

  TEN

  Lost and Found and Lost Again

  i

  THERE ARE TIMES in your life, he thought, when you need to see an animal. Not a dog or a cat – they carried too many associations of the humans whose feet they clung to. Something unconnected. Something wild. Seals, he decided were the thing. From his bench he could sometimes see them, their bald heads bobbing about in the ocean. Were there hunchback seals whose totemic disfigurement at one and the same time shamed their progeny and guaranteed them immunity. Immunity from what? From whatever vengeance seals meted out to one another for offences buried deep in seal history. Your colleagues detest you, the librarian had told him. In fact the word she’d used was ‘mistrust’, but to him that was just splitting hairs. Did seals detest?

  They weren’t out there, anyway. After an hour or more of looking, he gave up on them and returned reluctantly to his cottage. There was no explaining why he did that. He could have gone on watching. Or gone for a stiff, dizzying walk. Shaken stuff out of his head. Let the wind blow him about. If there were times in your life when you needed to see an animal, there were also times in your life when you needed to be an animal.

  There were no visitors. He had the cliffs to himself. He could have scampered, sniffed the ground, rubbed his nose in droppings, howled, screamed. Beyond a general impression of height and risk and isolation, he didn’t know the cliffs on which he’d so often walked. He sedulously avoided looking, as though ignorance of his surroundings, particularly an ignorance of what grew beneath his feet, was a metaphysical necessity to him. Now was his chance. But he didn’t take it. Instead, he let monotonous mortal habit claim him. And back down to his cottage he went.

  It wasn’t even as though he was in the mood for work. On some days his lathe answered every anxiety. The whirl of the spindle shut out his thoughts, all the concentrated frustration in his body vanished at the point where he held the handle of the chisel as gently as he might have held the fingers of a child. The wood curled beneath its blade, like the hair of that same child becoming unloosed from a bonnet. He favoured a light touch, not always knowing exactly what he wanted to make. Let it turn itself, he thought on good days, let it turn out as it chooses. If the bowl was waiting in the wood, then God was waiting in the bowl as surely as love had been waiting – a long, long time waiting – in the spoons he’d carved for Ailinn. But not today. No curls, no God, no Ailinn. It was like waiting for a storm to break.

  He was relieved to find his utility phone flashing. If it was trouble, bring it on, he thought. If it was Ailinn, please let her say she was coming over. It had been weeks since he’d seen her. He had not rung her because he was frightened to encounter a hostile voice. ‘You threw me out. Drop dead!’ She’d have been within her rights to say that and more, then slam the phone down. He’d offered her his bed, his home, his loyalty. You can’t do that and then ask someone to leave, no matter how distraught you feel or how temporary you want their absence to be. A life companion is a life companion. It wasn’t her fault his cottage had been broken into and his Chinese runner straightened. And if he’d meant it when he’d told her that the little he had was hers, then it was her house that had been broken into, her Chinese runner that had been straightened, too. He had to stop thinking of himself as a man alone, unless that was now what, thanks to his own stupidity, he had once again become. Only this time it would not be the same as before. There was no same as before, not after Ailinn. After Ailinn, nothing.

  He wondered whether he should leave the utility phone to flash. All day and all night if necessary. Not rush to find out. Delay the disappointment. Though it was still morning he knew that if he went to bed he would immediately drop into sleep. Anticipation keeps some men awake. It poleaxed Kevern. He thought of it as a gift. When the terrible time came – it didn’t matter which – he would deal with it by passing out. He had warned Ailinn what he would do.

  ‘Good to know I can count on you,’ she said.

  ‘Under no circumstances think you can count on me,’ he said, just in case she intended her comment as a joke. ‘I’m not man enough.’

  ‘I won’t make that mistake,’ she said.

  ‘I am not your rock.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Should anything happen to you I will fall immediately into the deepest sleep known to man. I might never wake up from it. I’d hope never to wake up from it. That’s how impossible I would find life without you. See it as the proof of my devotion. But understand I’d be no use when it comes to getting help or, if you’re beyond help, gathering your friends, organising your funeral, arranging the flowers.’

  ‘You’d let me just lie there on your floor.’

  ‘Our floor – yes.’

  ‘And what if anything happens to you?’

  ‘I’m not asking you to do any better.’

  ‘I can leave you on our floor?’

  ‘You can leave me anywhere. Dead or dying I won’t know anything about it.’

  ‘So ours is a fair-weather love?’

  ‘That makes it sound selfish, but yes if you mean that when we prosper we prosper and when we don’t—’

  She got the picture. ‘—we don’t.’

  It must have been with this conversation in mind that she framed her message – the message to which, when the moment came to run from it, he knew he had to listen.

  ‘It’s me,’ she said. ‘I’ve been going mad here. Why haven’t you rung me? We need to speak urgently. Don’t go comatose on me. It’s not the something terrible you’ve told me you won’t be man enough to cope with. Or at least I don’t think it is.’

  ii

  A brief nod to the work done in past times by St Brigid’s Roman Catholic Convent and Orphanage, Mernoc, is in order here, if only to correct the misconception that every Roman Catholic orphanage was just a workhouse under another name. ‘I am not disposed to maintain that the being born in a workhouse is in itself the most fortunate and enviable circumstance that can possibly befall a human being,’ wrote that once popular English humanitarian, Charles Dickens, and under his influence a sentimental predispositi
on against such charitable institutions was, for a century or more, and not just in his own country, the norm. Whatever the justice of this negative view of the workhouse, St Brigid’s conformed to another pattern entirely. Children placed in its care were viewed as gifts from God himself, little angels with damaged wings, no less, whose physical and spiritual well-being was the first and last concern of all members of the community, from the lowliest novitiate to the Mother Superior herself.

  The reputation of St Brigid’s must have reached the ears of Rebecca Macshuibhne, though it was on the mainland, some thirty miles south of the island on which she now lived, and for all that her husband, Fridleif, had taught her to think ill of Roman Catholics. Before she met Fridleif she had made no distinction between Catholicism and Congregationalism. In her home Christianity was Christianity. Such ignorance of fine and not-so-fine distinctions was not intended to be contemptuous. It was just that Jesus was understood to be central to all Christian faiths and wasn’t central, except in a negative sense, to hers. Not an immoveable aversion, however, as was attested to by her subsequent marriage to the Rev. Fridleif Macshuibhne, her eager assumption of her pastoral duties as his wife, and the baptism of their daughter Coira.

  That this solemn rite, which her grandparents Wolfie and Bella Lestchinsky made no effort to attend, constituted Coira’s once-and-for-all initiation into the care of Christ, neither Rebecca nor Fridleif thought to question. They had promised on the child’s behalf to reject the Devil and all rebellion against God, to renounce deceit, to submit to Christ as Lord.

  The deed was done, the child was a Christian.

  And there the matter would have rested had not the final letter Rebecca sent to her parents been returned to her in that chilling fashion.

  Rebecca could not stop looking at the stamp.

  ‘It won’t tell you any more than it already has,’ Fridleif said.

  ‘What do you think it means?’

  He showed her his clear, Arctic eyes. ‘It’s possible,’ he said, ‘that it was they who returned it.’

  ‘With an official stamp, Fridleif?’

  He took the envelope from her and held it to the light.

  ‘I’ve done that a thousand times,’ she said. ‘And anyway, why would they send my letter back? They never did before. Not replying is one thing – and I know it hurt you, Fridleif, as it hurt me – but returning my letter unopened is something else again. That’s not their way. We don’t behave like that in my family.’

  Her husband looked at her in a manner she found provoking. But theirs was a proudly peaceable marriage and she wanted it to remain that way. ‘It’s too much of a coincidence,’ she went on, ‘that this should happen when there’s so much trouble down there. I’m frightened.’

  He touched her hand. ‘The Lord will protect them.’

  She had heard her father invoke the name of the Lord in the face of danger often enough. But with him the invocation had been ironical, angry, disappointed. The Lord should protect them but wouldn’t. Hadn’t. And wouldn’t ever. Which her father took to be a personal affront to him. And yet his had never been a counsel of despair. There was something out there in which he believed, an idea that answered to the name of the Lord no matter that the Lord himself did scant justice to it. Reason. Human resourcefulness. Intelligence.

  Of what use to them their intelligence was now, however, she couldn’t imagine.

  Seeing her eyes fill with tears, Fridleif stretched out his other hand to her. ‘Look,’ he said in his gentlest voice, ‘we don’t really know how bad it is down there. These things get blown out of all proportion.’

  ‘These things?’

  ‘Rumours, I mean. That’s all we have to go on.’

  He seemed insubstantial to her, all of a sudden. He was a feathery man – that had been his charm. He had flitted into her life, a creature of light and optimism, so unlike her father. His translucent faith a wonderful release to her after the weighty, frightened sonorousness of her parents and their friends. But it was as though he had never before been tested in her presence, and now that he had – well, he was failing. You have God but you have no gravitas, Rebecca thought.

  ‘Then if rumours are all we have to go on,’ she replied at last, ‘I must see what’s happening with my own eyes.’

  He didn’t say anything, assuming that having spoken from her heart she wouldn’t think it necessary to act from it.

  But the next day she repeated her determination to find out for herself. He shook his head. ‘I can’t let you go,’ he said. ‘It’s too dangerous.’

  ‘Too dangerous? Yesterday you said it was blown out of all proportion.’

  ‘We don’t know what’s true or what isn’t, but I can’t let you put yourself in danger. You have a child. Our child. You have a husband. You have the people of Mernoc.’

  ‘I have a mother and father,’ she reminded him.

  ‘You could have fooled me,’ he said.

  ‘Say that again.’

  He knew not to say it again.

  ‘I will take Coira with me,’ she said. ‘If it turns out they’re all right they’ll be glad to see her. Grandchildren always do the trick.’

  ‘And if they’re not all right?’

  ‘Then we’ll come back.’

  ‘Rebecca, I can’t allow this,’ he said.

  She told him he had no choice. He told her he was Coira’s father. He couldn’t allow her to endanger the child. And as for grandchildren always doing the trick . . . he hesitated . . . not this grandchild.

  What Rebecca then said, what Rebecca then felt, was a surprise to her. ‘They won’t see Coira like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘As lost to them.’

  ‘How will they see her?’

  It was her turn now to hesitate. ‘As a little bit of both.’

  ‘She isn’t a little bit of both. She’s been baptised.’

  ‘You make that sound pretty final.’

  ‘It is pretty final.’

  ‘So I’ve been bypassed, have I?’

  ‘How can you ask that? You too have been baptised.’

  ‘That doesn’t change everything, Fridleif.’

  ‘Yes, it does. It changes everything. Otherwise it’s of no meaning.’

  ‘It doesn’t change what’s in me, my blood, my genes.’

  ‘Your blood?’

  ‘We didn’t start at the beginning, you know. By our law Coira remains within the fold. As do I, as the daughter of my mother.’

  Fridleif put his hands together and prayed silently. He had never expected to hear the phrase ‘our law’ on his wife’s lips. He felt as though she had struck him in the heart.

  Rebecca didn’t join him in prayer. She looked out of the window at the featureless grey sea.

  ‘I never thought we would fight over who our child belongs to,’ Fridleif said at last.

  ‘I’m not fighting. I know who she belongs to. She belongs to us. You and me.’

  ‘And to Christ.’

  She waved the idea away. If it had been beautiful to her once, it wasn’t beautiful to her now. ‘She belongs to us, Fridleif. Us! And I am half of us.’

  ‘I won’t allow you to take her away.’

  If it was a threat, it had no menace in it.

  The following morning she was gone. She and the child.

  But she made a concession to her husband, though she never told him of it. She decided against taking Coira with her. If her parents weren’t alive, she would be subjecting her to danger for no reason. If they were alive, God willing, she would make peace with them face to face herself, and then return with the child. Her reasoning was clear. If Coira was her daughter by blood, in direct line of descendancy from her mother and her grandparents and their grandparents before them, then she wasn’t safe. No one in whom the lust for murder had been aroused was going to stop to consider the finer points of lineage and conversion; no one was going to care that Coira had been baptised and was, in her father’s eyes, the c
hild of Christ. She had heard her parents make the argument again and again – ‘When they come to get you, Becky, they won’t be making subtle distinctions. They won’t spare you because you’ve changed your name and happen to think differently from us on a few points. They won’t release you with a kiss because you think it couldn’t ever happen here. It’s who you are by blood that interests them, nothing else.’ She had despaired of them. Well, for different reasons she was despairing now. But she couldn’t leave Coira with her father. Not after the words that had been exchanged. She had made great sacrifices for Fridleif. She had broken the hearts of her mother and father who in her own heart she did not expect ever to see again. She had given him everything else; she would not give him her child.

  It was at this point in her deliberations that she remembered what she’d heard of St Brigid’s Convent and Orphanage. Fridleif would never think of searching for her there. He would as soon go looking for his child in hell. In the anger that spilled from her she took pleasure from the thought that a Roman Catholic orphanage was an even greater anathema to him than her parents’ home.

  Though she would have liked to check the nuns out, there wasn’t any way she could do so without arousing their suspicions. They might recognise her as the wife of a minister, and she did not want them to connect Fridleif to the child. She pulled at the bell to the orphanage at an hour it was evident there were nuns about, and then fled. What the nuns found when they answered the door was a basket with a baby inside. ‘Moses’ they would have called her, had there not been a label tied around her neck identifying her as Coira. No surname. Rebecca would have liked to restore her own name to the child but – though she didn’t share her parents’ suspiciousness, especially of the conventual – didn’t think she dare risk it. Coira Lestchinsky! – maybe not. An accompanying note explained that the mother was suffering clinical depression and, though she loved the child with all her heart, did not feel capable of looking after her as she would have wished. She commended Coira, who had been baptised far from here, to the tender Christian mercies of the nuns. ‘Love her,’ she pleaded.