J (44 page)

‘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.

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.

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.’

‘We could do so much to change this.’

‘I don’t want to change this. I want it to go on being. It’s the only vengeance we have left – our refusal to stay around. Hand them the victory, I say, and let them see how empty it is.’

‘And that’s the future you say you promised me?’

‘I thought it was the future we promised each other.’

‘Don’t you see how empty that would be for us too?’

He thought about it. For a long time, stretched out beside her, lying on her shoulder, bringing her on to his, kissing her face, her ears, her eyes, he thought about it. It was morning when he spoke. ‘At least it would have been an emptiness of our deciding,’ he said.

She was back in Paradise Valley by the time he rose. He breathed gently on the vase of paper flowers she had brought him as her moving-in present, barely daring to touch them, then he walked out on to the cliffs. He looked down into the great mouth of the blowhole. It was sucking so hard he needed to stand back from the edge. He felt it could reach up and gulp him down whole, like Hedra Deitch subjecting him to one of her snogging kisses.

But he didn’t have to submit, even to Hedra. A life was owned by the person who lived it, he believed. What happened didn’t always happen because you wanted it to, but what you made of it was your responsibility. Help there was little and gods there were none. We are the authors of our own consequences, if not always of our own actions.

The credo of a serious man. You could be too serious, he didn’t doubt that. But his birthright was his birthright. No one can make me, he thought, feeling the spray on his cheeks.

Though even that turned out not to be entirely true. Distinct from the sucking of the sea and the screaming of the gulls he heard his mother calling to him. Her old, frayed, faint, reproachful cry.

‘Key-vern . . . Key-vern . . .’

He put his ear to the wind. He had always been a good boy. When your mother called . . .

‘Key-vern,’ she called again.

He smiled to hear her voice.

‘What is it, Ma?’

‘
ump,’ he heard her say.

Not feeling he should make her say it twice, he put his fingers to his lips, as though blowing her a kiss, and
umped.

Ailinn felt her heart crash into her chest. Esme Nussbaum heard it from the other end of the room and turned to look. She scowled.

They both knew.

‘This is not a good way to start,’ Ailinn said, ‘with anger between us.’

‘On the contrary,’ Esme said, ‘this is the best possible way to start.’

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Epub ISBN: 9781473512573

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Published by Jonathan Cape 2014

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Copyright © Howard Jacobson 2014

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