J (21 page)

He stood at the window, not wanting to look around, grinding his fists into his eyes.

‘Your feet,’ Ailinn said. ‘I’ve only just noticed.’

‘What?’

‘They’re too big.’

He stared at her.

‘I’m trying to cheer you up with a joke,’ she said.

She stood forlorn in the middle of the little sitting room, not knowing where to put herself, how to help, what to say. When Kevern was at a loss he joked, so she thought she should try the same. But the only effect of her joke was to remind him of something and send him flying up the stairs. She heard him banging about, like a wild animal trapped in someone’s loft. After ten minutes he came back down, looking ashen. ‘Have they been up there?’ she asked.

‘
They
?’

‘Anyone?’

He fell into an armchair and shrugged. ‘Must have been. Everything’s too neat.’

‘So nothing’s gone?’

‘Hard to say. My father’s records are still there. And I think all his books. That’s something. If they wanted to get me on an heirloom charge they’d have taken those. But who knows what they’ve read, or listened to, or photographed?’

She couldn’t help herself. ‘
They
?’

‘I think you should go,’ he said.

She went over to him and kissed the top of his head. ‘I can’t leave you alone in this state,’ she said.

‘I don’t know what you mean by “this state”. I am how I always am.’

‘Then I can’t leave you in that state. Come on – discuss it with me. What do you think’s happened?’

He sat forward and dropped his head between his knees. ‘Ahab’s been,’ he said.

One detail he didn’t mention: whoever had tidied up his runner had been for a lie-down in his bed.

ii

She didn’t want to leave him in any state but she had no choice. ‘I need to sleep this one out alone,’ he said.

She offered to take the couch but he begged her to go. ‘Just for tonight,’ he said. ‘This is my doing. I was the one who kissed Lowenna Morgenstern.’

‘One of the many.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘You think this is about her?’

‘No. But it’s still my fault.’

‘You aren’t going to do anything silly,’ she said.

‘Like what? Leave the country?’

She kissed his non-responding lips, noticing for the first time that there were dry serrations in them and that his breath was sour, then she walked back slowly, heavily, through the village to Paradise Valley. I feel a hundred, she thought. A drunken man called out to her. ‘I want to bite you,’ he said. She laughed. I’m a hundred and he wants to bite me. ‘You’ll break your teeth,’ she dared to call back. But he was too unsteady to take her up on the challenge. A couple snogged violently against a dry-stone wall. Making the beast. A good description of them. A thing of scales and claws. Prehistoric. Kevern and Lowenna, she thought. But she agreed with his assessment that this – supposing he had not imagined it all – was not about Lowenna. As she pushed open the first of the field gates to the Valley a cat ran across her feet. A bad omen according to her adoptive mother. When a cat ran across your feet someone was going on a long journey. And why was that bad? Because you would never see them again.

Her heart fluttered.

Did Kevern’s bitter gibe about leaving the country mean anything? Did any of his gibes mean anything? For their own good, people were discouraged from leaving the country – assuming they had any notion of what or where any other country was – but there was always a way if you were desperate, particularly if you lived by the sea and had the money to persuade one of the local fishermen to smuggle you out. You’d never be heard of again. In all likelihood the fisherman would throw you overboard once you were out of sight of the mainland. But at least you’d achieved what you wanted and got away. Why, though, would Kevern want that? He’d told her he loved her. He’d told her he’d never been – and had never in his life expected to be – so happy. So why? And if he wasn’t running from the police, who was he running from? Ahab, he’d said. Ahab! Ahab was hers. She felt possessive of him, and angry with Kevern. Before he met her, he had not been troubled by any Ahab. Lampoons, yes. Harpoons, no. What was he doing purloining her terror?

iii

She found Ez up, playing patience and listening to love ballads on the utility console.

‘Heavens,’ Ez said, ‘what brings you home?’

‘Trouble.’

‘Did the trip go badly?’

‘No, the trip went well. Or at least we went well. What we didn’t like we didn’t like together. It was what we found when we got back.’

Ez put away her cards. ‘I’ll make tea,’ she said, ‘unless you’d like something stiffer.’

‘Stiffer.’

The older woman poured them a brandy. Rather ceremoniously, Ailinn thought, as though this was a conversation she’d been expecting, was waiting for even, and the brandy had been bought for just such an event. Brandy – when did they ever drink brandy together?

‘So . . .?’

‘So . . .?’

‘So what was it exactly that you found when you got back?’

‘Somebody broke into Kevern’s cottage while we were away.’

‘Was there damage?’

‘No. They’d tidied it up.’

‘That’s an unusual break-in. Was much taken?’

‘As far as I could tell – as far as Kevern could tell – nothing.’

‘Could you have been mistaken?’

Ailinn was not prepared to tell Ez that Kevern’s rug had been straightened, because that would have necessitated her explaining why it was always left rumpled, and that would have been to betray her lover to her friend. She trusted Ez but that was not the point. You don’t trust anyone with another person’s secrets.

‘He’s very alert to the slightest change,’ she said. ‘He knows if anyone’s leaned on his gate or sniffed the scent out of one of his roses.’

‘Roses? You never said he was a gardener.’

‘He isn’t. I was being facetious. I’m sorry, I’m upset.’

‘Do you know what I think?’ Ez said. She was a
do you know what I think
kind of a woman. She assumed people went to her to hear homilies. As, indeed, they often did. ‘I think you were both tired after a long drive. And if Kevern is as sensitive to any vibration in the vicinity of his cottage as you say, he was probably anxious the whole time you were away and simply found what he’d feared finding.’

‘You are very sure of everything,’ Ailinn said. She felt she’d been forced to take a side and the only side she could take was Kevern’s.

Ez, she noticed, coloured. For all her intrusiveness, she tried to take a relaxed attitude to Ailinn’s worries, half listening, half humouring, in the way of an older person, a concerned relation or a teacher, who knew that things usually worked out tolerably well in the end. The better a friend you were, the more cheerful a front you presented, was Ez’s philosophy. A cup of tea, a moral lesson, a hug. She was doctorly, motherly, and even a touch professorial, at the same time. Ailinn had liked the contrarieties of her personality from the moment she met her in the reading group. She dressed modestly, in button-up cardigans and long skirts but liked hobbling about, for short periods, on high heels. Crimson high heels, as though she kept an alternative version of herself under her skirt. She had the quiet, respectful manner of a librarian, and no sense of humour to speak of, but if anything was said which she thought might be designed to amuse her she would choke with laughter, spluttering like a schoolgirl, or throwing back her head and showing how beautiful, before it lost its smoothness, the arc of her throat had once been. She was on her own now but she hadn’t always been, Ailinn surmised. There’d been some personal tragedy in her life. A man she’d loved had run away or died. She carried a torch for someone. She burned a little candle in her heart. That was what the crimson shoes were doing – keeping a spark alive. Ailinn even wondered if this
was his cottage, whoever he was, or whether they’d had their affair here, in this dripping corner of Paradise Valley where mushrooms would grow out of your shoes if you didn’t wear them for a day. Was that why she’d asked Ailinn along – so that she had reason to hold herself together, so that she wouldn’t give way to morbidity? In which case Ailinn’s falling in love with Kevern and all but moving out of the Valley was inconsiderate. Did that explain the unwonted attentiveness of Ez’s manner tonight, the way she appeared to be counting syllables and listening to pauses? Did she
want
to hear that something was amiss between them?

‘No, I’m not sure of anything,’ she said. ‘I was just looking at the situation from all angles.’

‘What if it’s the police?’ Ailinn wondered aloud. ‘What if they really do suspect him?’

‘But nothing was taken from the cottage, you say.’

‘Well that’s what Kevern said. But he didn’t exactly give himself time to check.’

‘You can usually tell.’

‘Can you?’

‘You can usually tell when something of your own, something that matters to you, has been taken. You just know.’

Ailinn looked at her. What a lot Ez suddenly
just knew
. She took another sip of the brandy. ‘What did you do, Ez?’ she asked. ‘What did you do before you became book-group police?’

Ez laughed – but not, on this occasion, like a young girl. ‘That’s an amusing concept,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you didn’t think I was policing any of the meetings you came to. I just chose the books.’

‘Exactly. You policed what we read. Were you a different kind of policeman before that?’

‘I was an administrator.’

‘Administering what?’

‘Oh, this and that. I kept an eye open.’

‘On whom?’

‘Good question. Other people who were keeping an eye open.’

Perhaps it was the brandy talking, but Ailinn suddenly propped her elbows on the table, supported her head in her hands and stared hard into her friend’s face. ‘What’s this all about, Ez?’ she asked.

‘
This
?’

‘Why did you bring me here? Why were Kevern and I thrown into one another’s arms? Why did you force me to ring him when we’d broken up? Why did someone break into his house while we were away?’

‘A: I brought you here because you were – because you are – my friend. B: I am not aware that you and Kevern were thrown into each other’s arms. I thought you said it was love at first sight. C: As for Kevern’s house – I have no idea why someone would have broken in, just as you have no idea whether anyone actually did.’

‘Then why are you annoyed with me?’

‘I am not in the slightest bit annoyed with you.’ She reached out to stroke Ailinn’s cheek. ‘I am concerned about you, that’s all.’

‘Then why are your hands cold?’

‘I didn’t know they were.’

‘And why are you concerned? You are never concerned for me. Not in this way. How many times have you told me I was someone in whom you had absolute faith? And what did that mean, anyway?’

Perhaps it was the brandy talking again, but she began to cry. Not a flood, just a trickle of soft tears that were gone almost as soon as they appeared.

‘You’re very tired. I think you should go to bed,’ Ez said.

‘Yes, I think so too. But I won’t sleep. I will lie there all night wondering.’

‘Wondering who broke in?’

‘Wondering whether he was serious when he spoke about leaving the country.’

‘Kevern said he was going to leave the country?’

‘Not exactly. But he allowed the idea to float before me, like a threat.’

‘We need to talk,’ Ez said. And this time had Ailinn felt her hands she would have discovered they weren’t just cold, they were frozen.

THREE

The Women’s Illness

Monday 25th

N
OT NORMALLY A
diary day, but there are things I have to get down before they escape me.

Bloody Gutkind!

Looking on the bright side, as it is my nature to do, the decline of Gutkind’s fortunes, following his most recent act of lumbering zealotry, must herald an improvement in mine. Funny how fate – the divine juggler – balances the fortunes of men with such precision, so that with each rise or fall we vacate space, not just for any old rival, but for someone we have a particular reason for hating. It was to yours truly, anyway, that the powers that be turned to minimise the damage Gutkind was causing. First of all the clown needed to be called off Kevern Cohen, and who better than me, given that I’d taught him briefly (Gutkind, that is) as a mature student, impossible as it is to believe that so unimaginative a man could ever have flirted with the idea of a second career in the Benign Visual Arts, though the Benign Visual Arts, I have to say, did not flirt back – who better, I repeat, than someone with my authority to remind him of the limits of his? Nothing too heavyhanded, just a quiet,
entre nous
suggestion – implicating no one higher up – that he back off. Why break a butterfly on a wheel and all that. Since you’re acquainted with him, Professor, you can intimate our disfavour, was the flavour (the flavour of their disfavour is nice, don’t you think?) of their communication to me. My knowing
Kevern as well, of course, gave me extra ammunition. ‘I’ve been watching Cohen for some time,’ I could get away with saying to Detective Inspector Gutkind, ‘and nothing I have seen suggests he would harm a hair of a woman’s head, let alone do what was done to poor Lowenna Morgenstern, so please don’t bother your own pretty little head about him any further. Kevern Cohen? Mr Lovespoon himself! Are you joking? A policeman of all people should know there are some men who are incapable of committing a murder because they know they’d never get the blood off their hands. Can you imagine our friend Kevern “Coco” Cohen scrubbing underneath his fingernails? He’d be there, crouched over himself, washing until Doomsday. Don’t make me laugh, Detective Inspector. The country’s crawling with ruffians. Go bag yourself one of those.’

How it was that Gutkind became first an acquaintance and subsequently a student of mine is a story in itself. We met through our wives, is the short of it. They had become friends in the course of attending Credibility Fatigue classes together. And that, too, is a story in itself. It’s always the women who go a little wobbly in the matter of
WHAT HAPPENED
– probably as a consequence of giving or anticipating giving birth, unless it’s a more generally diffused hormonal agitation – whereupon some stiffening of their resolve is called for. I can’t speak for Mrs Gutkind, who has since left her husband – for which, I have to say, no sane person could blame her – but my wife, Demelza, fell a while back into terribly depressed spirits, questioning the point of saying sorry all the time when by all official accounts (as indeed by mine) there was nothing really to say sorry for, questioning the way we lived our lives, questioning the powers that be, even questioning me, the person who puts food on her table. ‘Nothing makes any sense to me,’ she’d complain. ‘I feel a pall over everything, I feel the children are fed lies at school, I feel I was fed lies at school, I suspect you’re feeding lies to your students, we are supposed to have mended what went wrong, except that we are told nothing went wrong, but if it’s not safe to
go out on to the streets – not safe here, in fucking sleepy Bethesda! – it’s as though we’re all in a trance, like zombies, pretending, what are we pretending Phinny, what aren’t we saying, what aren’t you saying, what are these little jobs you say you have to do, other women . . . are you seeing other women? Except I don’t feel here’ – her hands upon her lovely breasts – ‘that you are seeing other women, it feels more as if you’ve taken to religion or are going out to drink with aliens or someone, is that what you’re doing, or are we the aliens, are we from another planet, Phinny, because increasingly I don’t feel I’m from this one . . .’ And more along such loopy lines.