J

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘And?’

  Ailinn marvelled at her own impatience. She had lived in ignorance of just about everything for a quarter of a century; now she needed answers to questions she could never have imagined she would ask, and she needed them at once. The pity of it was that the person in the best position to answer those questions seemed to have all the time in the world. In fact Ailinn was wrong about this. Esme, too, was a cauldron of impatience, but did not want to frighten Ailinn off with her intensity. So both women sat with frayed nerves, listening to the clocks furiously ticking in their brains.

  ‘We are dead matter,’ Esme continued at last, ‘indeed I was very nearly dead matter myself when I realised this – we are dead matter until we distinguish ourselves from what’s not dead. I was alive, I told myself as I was lying there. Very nearly dead, but alive. And it made me more alive to realise that. I wasn’t the me I’d been, but nor was I the me they wanted me to be, which was no me at all. Only when we have a different state to strive against do we have reason to strive at all. And different people the same. I am me because I am not her, or you. If we were all red earthworms there’d be no point in life. Identity is just the name we give to the act of making ourselves distinct.’

  ‘So you’re saying it’s irrelevant what our identities really are? As long as we assume one and fight against someone else’s.’

  ‘I’d say so, yes. Pretty much.’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit arbitrary?’

  ‘Perhaps. But isn’t everything? It’s just chance that we’re born to who we’re born to. There’s no design.’

  ‘So why fight for who we are?’

  ‘For the sake of the fight itself.’

  ‘Then isn’t that a bit violent, as well as arbitrary?’

  ‘Life is violent. I had to fight death to be alive.’

  ‘But if “who we are” is arbitrary, and if we fight for whatever cause we just happen to be to born to, for no other reason than the fight itself, then it didn’t have to be me you picked for this . . .’

  ‘I didn’t pick you, Ailinn.’

  ‘All right. Describe it how you like. But if there is no identifiable me then it doesn’t matter whether I am it or not. I don’t have to be the real deal because there is no real deal. You could have hit on anyone.’

  Esme bit her lip. ‘You’ll do it better,’ she said.

  They fell silent. Something crawled across Ailinn’s feet. She wondered if it was Esme’s red earthworm, that made life meaningless. She shuddered. Esme offered to go inside and fetch her a shawl. Ailinn shook her head. She could have been shaking Esme off her.

  ‘If you’re asking me to do this without Kevern,’ she said suddenly, ‘I’m afraid I can’t. No, it’s feeble of me to put it like that. If you’re asking me to do this without Kevern, I’m afraid I won’t.’

  Esme felt as though all her splintered bones had been crushed a second time. She remembered what it took to distinguish herself from the dead.

  ‘In that case we will have to make sure you do it with him,’ she said.

  TWO

  Shake Hands With Your Uncle Max

  i

  IT WAS HEDRA Deitch who was the first to congratulate him.

  ‘On?’

  ‘Don’t be like that,’ Hedra said, wrinkling up her nose.

  Kevern had dropped into her souvenir shop to see if her stock of lovespoons needed replenishing. She didn’t sell many. Painted earthenware garden statuary, pressed-flower pictures, and Port Reuben tea towels and coffee mugs accounted for most of her trade. ‘Cheap and cheerful, like me,’ was how she described her business. But she thought a small selection of Kevern’s lovespoons lent her shop a more upmarket feel, and she welcomed the opportunity his visits gave her to be suggestive with him. He wasn’t like the other men in the village. You had to work a bit harder with him. She had snogged him once that she could remember, at the end of a wild night in the pub, when they were both drunk. She had done it to enrage Pascoe but she had enjoyed it too, after a fashion. He had a softer mouth than she expected. No biting. And no slapping. On his part, that is. So she was glad enough to return to Pascoe’s rough indifferent gnawing later.

  But Kevern was one of those men who got under your skin by not adequately taking you in. So he remained a challenge to her.

  It was Ailinn’s idea that Kevern do something practical such as checking on his outlets, no matter that there was no pressing financial reason to do so. He had not been down into the village, not seen a living soul since she’d told him the first part of what she had to tell him, and that was two weeks ago. He had gone into a decline, rapid even for a man who declined easily. He agreed to Ailinn’s suggestion only because he knew it would make her, at least, feel better. He wasn’t expecting to feel better himself. He didn’t want to feel better. He owed it to what he’d been told to feel worse. That was what living a serious life meant, wasn’t it, honouring the gravity of things by not pretending they were light? Rozenwyn Feigenblat had told him he was an ethicist, not an artist. He agreed with her. An artist owed a duty to nothing except his own irresponsibility. It was OK for an artist to frolic in the water, no matter how bloody the waves or how high the tide rose. An ethicist had an obligation to drown.

  Just go for the walk, Ailinn had said. Just go for the exercise. See someone who isn’t me. ‘There isn’t someone who isn’t you,’ he’d said. Whereupon she’d pushed him out of the cottage.

  He meant what he’d said. There wasn’t anyone who wasn’t her, and if there were he didn’t want to see them. And even she, since she’d become the bearer of bad news, was not always a welcome sight to him now.

  But most of all he hadn’t gone out because he hadn’t wanted to be seen.

  Was that because he believed he suddenly looked different? No. He trusted he looked exactly the same: the man he had always been, in decline as he had always been. The difference today was that he understood what they’d seen when they’d looked at him in the past.

  He exchanged stiff greetings with people he barely knew. He had lived here all his life, in a village of fewer than two thousand souls, and yet there were still people who were lifetime residents themselves whose names he didn’t know. His parents had taught him well in one regard. Remain a stranger to the place, they had said. Say nothing. Ask for nothing. Explain yourself to no one. But they had also cautioned him to go unnoticed, and in that he could scarcely have fared worse. Everyone knew who he was – Kevern ‘Coco’ Cohen, the man with the sour expression who sat on his own bench above the blowhole, saying nothing, asking for nothing, explaining himself to no one.

  And now here was Hedra Deitch, coming out from behind her counter to look him up and down, surveying him in that hungry way of hers, wondering if he’d do for whatever her itchy nature needed at that moment, something or other that her shot-beast of a husband couldn’t provide. Shame he wasn’t an artist. He’d have provided it and painted her later.

  But why the congratulations? Was she being sarcastic, welcoming him to a knowledge of himself the whole village had possessed for years? Was she applauding his cottoning on finally – Kevern, the last to know about Kevern?

  ‘Don’t be like what?’ he said.

  She put one hand on her hip, as though to answer his coquettishness. ‘Don’t be pretending you aren’t proud.’

  He was not a man who ever asked people what they meant. He would rather puzzle over their words for months, and still not get to the bottom of their meaning, than ask them for a simple explanation. Did he not want to know or could he not bear to appear uncomprehending? This was a time to wonder whether he’d ever in his whole life understood a word that had been said to him. Clearly he hadn’t ever understood his parents. Could it be that he had missed the point of what Ailinn had been saying to him too?

  If only . . .

  But when the news was bad . . . then he understood.

  And Hedra? He prepared his face to pretend to get her meaning – a half-smile and a philosophic widening of the
eyes that would cover every eventuality: from a declaration of undying to love to news that she had a terminal disease.

  ‘I’m not pretending anything,’ he said. ‘And I’m certainly not pretending I’m not proud. I have nothing to be proud about.’

  She moved a step closer. Was she about to kiss him? Then be proud of this, my lover . . .

  Funny how often, for a man who didn’t consider himself lovable, he thought a woman was about to kiss him. Was it hope? Was it dread? Or did he think of himself as the unsmiling princess, waiting to be kissed back into warm life by a frog?

  ‘I don’t reckon your missus would be pleased to hear you got nothing to be proud about,’ Hedra said.

  He increased his half-smile to a three-quarter smile and opened his eyes a little wider. ‘My missus . . .? What’s Ailinn got to do with this?’

  It was then she made a cradling motion with her arms, beaming like the Virgin Mary, rocking a little one to sleep.

  ‘Come on!’ she taunted him. ‘You don’t have to be coy with me. I know you’re proud. Daddy!’

  There, in the middle of the shop, with people watching, he snogged her brutally.

  ii

  Ailinn barely recognised him when he returned.

  ‘My God, what’s happened?’ she said.

  He felt that his face had grown to twice its length. He couldn’t bear the weight of his jaw or control the movement of his tongue. He pointed to it. I have no words, the gesture meant. There are no words . . .

  She put her arms around him and he remained enfolded in them. But he was unresponsive. This wasn’t the first time she had held him, drained of life, but never before had she felt she couldn’t at least thaw him back to something like good humour.

  She made him tea which he drank without waiting for it to cool, almost in a single gulp.

  ‘You are carrying our baby,’ he finally said.

  Now it was she who couldn’t speak.

  He waited for her to drink her tea. She could take all the time she liked. Time was not their problem. Then, looking beyond her, he repeated his words, without anger, without feeling. ‘You are carrying our baby.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It’s the talk of the village.’

  She didn’t believe that. The village had better things to talk about.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked. ‘What do you actually mean?’

  ‘I mean that it’s known in the village that you are carrying our baby. I presume it’s ours.’

  ‘That’s a low blow,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Yes. It’s a low blow.’

  Among the thousand things that hurt her at this moment was the knowledge that he wasn’t looking for reassurance and so there was nothing she could reassure him with – not tenderness, not devotion, nothing. Yes, it was his baby, and that only made it worse. There would not now be a moment when suspicion could dissolve in mutual delight. That joy was lost to them.

  ‘It isn’t just,’ he said, ‘that the village knows before I do.’

  ‘I understand. I’m sorry. I have told no one.’

  ‘No one?’

  ‘I have told no one in the village.’

  ‘Which means you have told someone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It wasn’t necessary for either of them to speak the person’s name.

  ‘And it isn’t just that either,’ he said. ‘Though that is no small thing.’

  ‘I know. I am so very sorry.’

  He was listening to the logic of his thoughts, not the progress of her apology.

  ‘We had an understanding.’

  ‘I know we did, darling.’

  ‘We had an understanding that no child would “come along” to surprise either of us. We both, I thought, were taking the necessary precautions.’

  She wondered whether she should remind him that accidents happen, that no precaution was ever foolproof, but she couldn’t bear even to essay a lie. ‘We were,’ she said.

  ‘And then you weren’t . . .’

  She could find no extenuating explanation. ‘. . . And then I wasn’t.’

  ‘Did you think I would come round eventually?’

  She heard the banality, heard how insulting to him it was to think it, but yes, she had thought precisely that. He would come round . . . At the far reaches of sanity she still thought it.

  ‘I hoped.’

  ‘And you didn’t discuss it with me why . . .?’

  She said nothing.

  ‘Given your hope for me eventually,’ he persisted, ‘why didn’t you at least try me initially?’

  There was no way back from this. ‘I couldn’t risk it.’

  ‘Couldn’t risk my saying no?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘The risk being?’

  In a gesture of desperation, she ran her hand through her hair. He could hear it crackle. He used to love stirring up an electrical storm in her hair. Combing it through with his fingers and watching the sparks fly. Now it was a site of desolation. Her desperation was more than he could bear. He thought his chest would break apart – not for himself, for her. For himself he felt only sullen anger. It was dark, where he was. A black corner of stoppered fury. But it was worse for her. He was that kind of a man: he thought everything was worse for a woman. Especially a woman he loved. Was that a form of contempt? He didn’t know. He simply thought the pain for her was greater, perhaps because for her there was still hope mixed up in it. And there wasn’t for him. He had flattened out; there was nothing now he could reasonably hope for. Only her to be all right, not to suffer, and she was distraught beyond the point of help.

  ‘The risk,’ she said, reading his thoughts, ‘was that you would express your refusal so vehemently that there would be no going back from it.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then we would lose the future I wanted for us.’

  ‘The future you wanted for us, or others wanted for us?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘But the future you wanted for us was once the future I wanted for us, and that didn’t include – Ailinn, as I recall it positively excluded – a child.’

  She hung her head. ‘It did.’

  ‘So what changed?’

  ‘I changed.’ It wasn’t a good enough answer. She heard its inadequacy hang in the air between them, the way a lie can be detected on a phone line, in a crackle of silence.

  ‘This baby,’ he said – and in that phrase she heard his final disowning of it – ‘it isn’t just any baby, is it?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘You do. It isn’t just a future for you and me, is it? It’s the future.’

  ‘Is that so terrible?’

  ‘Yes, if that means what I think it means.’

  ‘Well it’s your choice of words, Kevern.’

  ‘But not my choice of future.’

  ‘And what’s your choice of future? To die out?’

  ‘I’ve died out.’

  That was the moment, with a clarity and sadness that all but made her poor arrhythmic heart stop, when she saw her life without him. ‘Well I haven’t,’ she said.

  There was, to the dismay of both of them, vigour in it.

  Kevern remembered the box his father had made him promise he would open only in the event of his being about to be a father himself. He was sure he knew what it would contain. The word DON’T. But he didn’t open it to find out.

  iii

  They did have one last conversation. He begged for it. A final night wrapped around each other.

  ‘It promised so much,’ he said, waiting for the dawn to break. ‘We promised each other so much.’

  She’d been over it and over it with him. Didn’t this promise so much?

  She could have killed him – would have killed him had she not cared deeply for him – so perverse were the words he chose. What was she offering him if not a future? What was she carrying if not promise?

  ‘What was our promise?’ she asked him
. Not looking any longer for a fight. Just wanting to hear him say it. One more time. What would it have been?

  ‘The promise of not knowing what it would be,’ he said.

  ‘Kevern, that’s just a riddle.’

  ‘Ah, then . . .’

  They said nothing for another hour, simply held on to each other. But she was not prepared to give up without a fight, no matter that the fight was lost. She had told him all there was to know, all that she knew anyway. But she still wanted him to see he didn’t have to commit as she was committed. Couldn’t he come along for the ride? Be her consort? Look on from the sidelines . . .

  ‘At the misery you’re preparing for our child?’

  She wouldn’t let him get away with that. ‘You can’t have it both ways,’ she said. ‘You can’t disown the child and call it yours.’

  Was she right? He lay, listening to the quivering of her atria. Would she bequeath the child her troubled heart, he wondered. If she did, she did. Better that than what he had to bequeath.

  ‘I’m simply saying you could stay out of whatever you want to stay out of.’

  All of it, he thought. But he said, more gently, ‘That being?’

  ‘The politics.’

  ‘The politics?’

  ‘The journey . . .’

  ‘Oh come on, Ailinn. I never expected that of you. Journey, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘Then what word would you use?’

  ‘I wouldn’t. But I’ll give you “mission” if you must have a word. A misguided mission to change what can never change. And actually, you know, it’s even worse than that. It’s a mission to repeat what should never be repeated.’

  ‘And why are you so sure it will be repeated?’

  ‘Because that’s the law of it. Your heart, my love, is a live, tumultuous thing. Most human hearts are stone. And the immutable law I speak of is engraved on all of them.’

  ‘You let them win once you decide it’s immutable.’

  ‘They have won already. They won a long time ago.’