The Insult

by Rupert Thomson

  The damage to the tree was old, though. When I bent down, I could see it clearly, a black oblong scar in the wood where the truck had caught it. I took Mazey’s hand and we began to scramble down the slope. The trees had healed. Otherwise everything was identical. It was even the same kind of day – halfway through autumn, leaves falling, blue sky high up between the branches …

  We reached the lake. There was nothing to mark the place; the shrine everyone had talked about had never been built. I bent down at the water’s edge, as I’d bent down twenty years before, and dipped my hand in it. I tasted the water. Not the slightest trace of sulphur. Had I imagined it that day? Or was it just that everything had rearranged itself for those few hours? Was it part of the pattern of surprise? I looked around, puzzled by how little I felt; I was almost disappointed. I noticed Mazey tasting the water, as I had done. He put the tips of his fingers in his mouth, then took them out again. His face didn’t alter.

  Suddenly I wasn’t sure why I’d brought him or what I wanted him to understand. At first, I just talked around it, anything I could think of. I told him a story I’d been told by Felix. It had happened early in the century, when the hotel was at the height of its popularity. A wealthy shipping magnate and his wife came to stay for a few days. One afternoon they went for an excursion on the lake. Their boat sank and everybody drowned. It was a tragedy, of course, but it was also a mystery: the bodies of the shipping magnate and his wife were never found. The company mounted a search with teams of expert divers, underwater specialists, but the lake defeated them. It was just too deep, too cold. The bodies simply disappeared.

  I pointed eastwards, out across the water. ‘They’re still down there somewhere.’

  The best part of the story was the end – and, knowing Felix, it was almost certainly untrue. Out boating on the lake once, while still a boy, he looked down into the water and saw something glinting. A long way down, it was. A long, long way. What did you see? I asked him, my eyes all wide. What was it? He claimed it was the diamond on the finger of the shipping magnate’s wife. I begged him to take me out on the lake. Begged him to show me the diamond ring on the dead woman’s hand. But Felix, in his later years, was frightened of deep water. Also, he wasn’t sure he could remember his precise position on the lake. And besides, he said, the sun would have to be shining at the right angle or you wouldn’t see a thing.

  I looked across at Mazey. Squatting on his heels, he was whittling another of his unidentifiable shapes. I wondered if he’d been listening. You never could tell with him. Sometimes he’d say something later, though – six months later, or a year – and you’d realise that he’d heard every word. I sat beside him, among the leaves, just watching him. The sun warmed my back. I was glad we’d come.

  Before we left, I took hold of his shoulder and looked into his eyes. I thought I’d found the words at last.

  ‘You see this place?’ I said. ‘Right here?’ I dipped my hand in the water, took it out and shook it. ‘This is where you became my son.’

  A cool spring day. Several years had passed. I must have been forty-two or thereabouts. Though I was still married to Peter Kroner, I saw less of him than I used to. His father had died, and he was running the vineyard now, as well as the quarry. Sometimes he’d go drinking, though, and when he came home he’d try and put his hands on me, sweet nothings catching on the tooth that Karl had broken for him, but deep down he knew it was no good and before too long he’d be swaying round the bedroom with his black hair sticking up and his face all red and he’d be calling me foul names.

  ‘Sticks and stones,’ I’d say. ‘Sticks and stones.’

  Karin had just celebrated her fifteenth birthday. I remembered what Karl had said about her inheriting my mother’s looks. The hotel phone was always ringing, and whenever we drove into the town together I could feel the eyes of men on her like postage stamps that were already licked and looking for an envelope. I thought there might be trouble and I mentioned it to Kroner, but he just looked at me in utter scorn and said, ‘What would you know about it?’ I noticed Mazey looking at her, too, with the same damp look, but I wasn’t going to mention it again.

  And then, a cool spring day – March, I think it was …

  As soon as I saw Karin from the window, standing in the car-park with her dress sticking to her and her hair pasted flat against her neck, I knew what had happened, I just knew, and I felt my heart sink down, like a cow or an ox when it’s been shot, the way their legs just crumple, go from under them.

  I walked down the stairs and out through the side entrance. The car-park was empty that day. We had no guests. I listened to my shoes on the gravel as I walked towards her. I could see Miss Poppel’s house, still unsold, the front garden piled with machinery, abandoned wind-chimes jangling. Further down the street the sun was out, but where we were, it was shadows and a chill wind.

  I said her name, but she didn’t look at me. I said her name again. This time she twitched as if I’d pulled on something that was attached to her. She was looking at the ground. Water dripped from the hem of her dress. It drew a black circle round her on the gravel. Seemed to be sealing her off.

  ‘What is it, Karin? What happened?’ Though I knew.

  Her head moved one way, then the other; she might have been disagreeing with what I’d said. Her eyes rolled upwards, skywards, then she turned and walked past me, back into the house. I followed her through the door and up the stairs. She was already half-undressed when I reached her bedroom. I saw a bruise on her thigh, just below her hip. There were other bruises on her elbow and her knee. On the inside of her upper arm there were four ghostly mauve-blue fingerprints. She bundled her clothes into a sodden ball and put them on the floor in the corner, then she climbed into bed and pulled the blanket up to her chin. She lay on her back, a chalkiness about her lips and her teeth moving behind them. It was three o’clock in the afternoon.

  I put my hand on her shoulder, and she flinched.

  ‘Tell me what happened,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t – don’t let him in here.’

  ‘Who? Mazey?’

  She closed her eyes tight shut.

  ‘Don’t let him in,’ she whispered.

  Outside her room, I stood with my hands wedged under my arms, uncertain what to do. She didn’t seem to be hurt, which was something; I didn’t want to involve the doctor. If it was Mazey who’d done it – and I was sure it was – I would take the necessary action myself. I didn’t want any strangers interfering. I didn’t want him taken away from me either; I couldn’t stand the thought of him in an institution. I went downstairs. I made Karin a glass of warm milk with sugar in it and I took it to her. She was sleeping, so I left it on the table beside her bed. Then I sat in the kitchen, waiting for Mazey to return.

  I saw him through the window as he came up out of the trees, his hair pale against the dark green of the foliage, his shoulders slightly rounded, his arms hanging loosely at his sides. There was nothing in his face to suggest that anything had happened – but then, I hadn’t expected there to be. He walked into the kitchen, stooped over the sink and, scooping a handful of water from the cold tap, brought it to his mouth. It was almost always the first thing he did when he got home, no matter how long he’d been away. It seemed odd to think of him as a creature of habit, but that was what he was.

  ‘Mazey?’

  He turned round.

  ‘You did something, didn’t you?’

  He stared at me, the tap still running behind him, the water dripping off his chin.

  ‘Do you know what you’ve done?’

  He began to shuffle on the floor. The first time he shuffled like that, it was like nothing I’d ever seen before. It reminded me of what a cat does when it covers up its mess.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I – I did something.’ He wasn’t confessing exactly, but it wasn’t a question either.

  ‘It was bad what you did, Mazey. It was really bad.’

  He turned back to th
e sink again. He cupped his hand under the running water and drank. But not because he was thirsty.

  ‘Mazey,’ and I took him by the arm, ‘you can’t do things like that. If you do things like that, people will come and take you away.’ I shook him hard. ‘You remember that place Kroner took you to? That place I had to come and fetch you from?’

  His grey eyes fixed on my face, and he nodded.

  ‘If you do things like that, they’ll take you back again and this time it’ll be for ever. I won’t be able to do a thing about it. Not a thing.’

  ‘You can fetch me.’

  I shook my head. ‘Not this time, Mazey.’

  ‘You can fetch me. With the knife.’ He was grinning.

  I couldn’t explain it to him. It was strange. He could operate my father’s lathe. He could even drive a truck. But there were things you couldn’t make him understand. Simple things, like the fact that we get older. Like the fact we die. Like God. And, who knows, maybe it was better that way, not understanding something that’s beyond our understanding anyway. He had his own way of thinking, which he sometimes made available to me. Sometimes.

  I did the only thing I could think of: I put him in the car and drove out to my father’s house. I told him to take his wind-chimes with him; I thought they might be some consolation.

  There were dark clouds to the west of us, a great curving bank of blackness in the sky, a kind of overhang, but the wind was coming out of the north and I thought the storm would pass us by. I drove over the bridge, loose boards drumming under the wheels. It was only four-thirty in the afternoon, but it felt later; I even had to switch the headlights on. We turned on to the track, two ruts with a strip of grass down the middle, grass that was long enough to brush against the underside of the car.

  I parked in the yard. From where I was sitting I could see my father in the barn. For almost three years he’d been working on a dovecote. It was going to be a replica of the Leaning Tower, in Italy. He’d got the idea from one of Axel’s magazines. He’d torn the page out and pinned it to the wall above his tool-rack. But every time he got the angle right, the tower fell over. And it didn’t even have any doves inside it yet. Sometimes he thought he should have been less ambitious – but it was for Karin; only something out of the ordinary would do. I decided not to tell him what Mazey had done, at least for the time being. It wouldn’t be hard. He’d never had too much curiosity, even about his own family; and now that he was in his late seventies and partly deaf, he had good reason to dispense with it altogether. I opened the door and got out of the car.

  When I drove away an hour later, Mazey wasn’t with me. I’d chained him to the truck, the truck that Axel had crashed in all those years ago (it was almost unrecognisable now, most of its paint stripped by the weather, and brambles coiling over the radiator grille and through the broken windscreen like snakes around a skull). Mazey didn’t seem to mind being made a prisoner. He didn’t seem to notice any loss of freedom. I’d hung his string of door-hinges from the roof of the goat shed. If he stood up, he could touch them. Or he could sit with his back against a tyre and whittle at his bits of wood. I told my father to put him in the barn if the temperature dropped – but I insisted on the chain at all times, as much for Mazey’s safety as for Karin’s. I wanted to keep him out of sight. There was no concealing the truth from Kroner and, when he found out, it was quite likely he would want to wreak some kind of vengeance.

  I pulled into the hotel car-park. Kroner’s van was there. I sat behind the wheel and stared at it. It had KRONER CONSTRUCTION painted on the side. A new business he’d started up, which tied in with the quarry. Suddenly I wanted to laugh. Those reliable blue letters. I didn’t know what I was going to say. I could’ve sat in the car all night and I still wouldn’t have known.

  I found him in the kitchen. He was wearing his work-boots and overalls. He said he’d been up to Karin’s room. The door was locked; she wouldn’t answer. He wanted to know what was wrong. I explained it as best I could. It was only a few words. I felt it should have taken longer, somehow, but I couldn’t think of anything else. I hadn’t been there when it happened. Nobody had told me much.

  He sat still for a moment, then he reached out slowly for the broom that was leaning against the wall. He stood up and began to break the kitchen windows, one by one. When he’d broken all the windows, he started on the crockery. Then it was the glasses, the vases, the new electric clock. There was a determined look on his face. Sometimes he blinked. At one point he turned and looked at me, as if trying to decide what I was made of, whether I would smash. Though he was breathing hard, his head was motionless; blood ran from several small cuts on his face and arms. I stepped backwards, towards the door. Still looking at me, he hurled the broom sideways. It landed among the saucepans, knocked them to the floor. There was a movement behind me, and Karin pushed past me, into the room. She went to her father and carefully laid her cheek against his chest. He looked down at her. He seemed surprised to see her there. It was almost as if he’d forgotten she existed. Then his eyes closed.

  ‘I’m all right,’ she murmured. ‘Really. I’m all right.’

  His chest heaved; tears poured down his face.

  She kept on murmuring to him. ‘I’m all right, Dad. I’m all right. Really …’

  Maybe she was. But he wasn’t. That evening, while I was taping newspaper over the broken windows, Karin ran into the kitchen.

  ‘It’s Dad,’ she panted. ‘Something’s happening to Dad.’

  She took me out to the front of the hotel. The light from the doorway made a kind of V-shape on the grass. Kroner was lying in the darkness just beyond it, his boots lit up, the rest of him invisible. I hurried over. His arms were at strange angles to his body, and they were bent at the elbows; he could have been practising semaphore, communicating with someone in the sky. I felt for the pulse in his wrist. It was faint, irregular, but it was there. I told Karin to stay with him, then I ran to the phone and called Holbek.

  In ten minutes the doctor was kneeling on the grass beside us. Kroner’s eyes were open, and saliva was spilling from one side of his mouth. The doctor examined him briefly, then asked if he could use the phone. As I followed him into the hallway to show him where it was, he turned to me.

  ‘He’s had a stroke. I’m going to call an ambulance.’

  When I saw Kroner the next morning, in the hospital, he looked as if he’d aged twenty years. I thought the shock must have done it, the way earthquakes are said to. His hair went white overnight. Close up, though, I realised I’d got it wrong; it was just that he was still covered with limestone dust from the quarry. His eyes were open, but he didn’t seem to know us. He was still very weak, the Sister said. We weren’t allowed to stay for long.

  The doctor told me that the stroke had been a major one. A blood vessel in Kroner’s brain had ruptured, resulting in a haemorrhage. It meant one side of his body would be paralysed. It also meant he’d lost the power of speech – temporarily, at least. He would be kept under observation for the next few days. Before too long, however, he’d be sent home, where he’d be in my charge. The doctor wanted to know if I understood the implications of this. I said I did (it was like Mazey, only worse; it was almost funny). According to the doctor, Kroner would have to begin again, from the beginning, like a child. To walk, to talk. To tie a shoelace. Drive a car. This would be more difficult, he thought, because they’d detected a stubborn streak in the patient, an unwillingness to return from where he was.

  ‘We can only do so much. In the end, it’s up to him.’

  Three weeks later Kroner had another stroke. It was less significant, the doctor said, but the date of his release was postponed indefinitely. He stayed in hospital all summer. Two or three afternoons a week I would drive down there, usually alone (the sight of Karin seemed to upset him; once he even wet himself). If the weather was fine, they lifted him into a bath chair and let me push him through the grounds. These days I hardly recognised him. The left half of
his face had slipped, and one of the nurses had put a side-parting in his hair and brushed it flat. He looked like a different person. Nobody I knew, though. Sometimes, as I wheeled him round, I found myself believing it: we were strangers, and I was just being neighbourly, doing a good deed. Other days I pitied him, the state he was in, but at the same time I could see the justice of it. What he’d done to Mazey, him and his people up at the quarry, while I was weighed down with his child – or afterwards, when the child was born and my mind was nothing but a misted-over pane of glass. Sometimes the men who seem the most respectable and decent are the worst. There are whole parts of them kept secret. But he’d drunk deep from his own medicine, and the taste of it had altered him for ever.

  I was on my way to visit him once when a hub-cap came loose and ran on ahead of the car. I watched it leave the road in a straight line, bouncing across uneven ground, confident but ludicrous. I thought no more about it until I parked outside the hospital. But then I saw the wheel, and I stood there in the sunshine, staring at it. You never know how strong somebody is, and if they’re against you, how long the struggle will last. Looking at the wheel, black instead of silver, blind, somehow, I knew it was over. Kroner had come to the end of the cruelty that was in him, and it hadn’t worked. There were straps to hold him upright in his chair. I remember fingering the leather that afternoon and thinking back: that drive across the county years before, the knife glinting on the seat beside me … There’d be no need for knives, not any more.

  I thought of Kroner’s love for me, which I’d spurned. I thought of how he’d lavished it on his little girl instead, his daughter. I thought of how my child had ruined his.

  And the truth was worse than any of us knew.

  It was while he was in the hospital that we found out she was pregnant.