Howard Jacobson - J

‘Despite my thick ankles?’

‘Whales don’t have thick ankles. As didn’t Ahab, as I recall.’

‘Well he certainly didn’t have two.’

If he hadn’t loved her before. .

Best to leave it at that, anyway, they both thought. But he wanted to be sure that she felt safe with him. Still dripping, he pulled her down into the bed and drew the duvet over them.

Gently, protectively.

But were they overdoing this, he wondered.

She’d have answered yes had he asked her.

iii

It was in his lampoon-fearing nature to wonder whether they would be the talk of the village — the slightly odd woodturner who by and large kept himself to himself, and the tangle-haired flower girl from up north who was several years his junior. But the village wasn’t exercised by pairings-off, even when the parties weren’t as free to do as they pleased as these two were. People who have lived for aeons within sound of crashing seas, and sight of screaming seabirds spearing mackerel, take sex for granted. It’s townspeople who find it disarranging.

And besides, the village had something else to yack about: a double murder. Lowenna Morgenstern and Ythel Weinstock found lying side by side in the back of Ythel Weinstock’s caravan in pools of each other’s blood. By itself, the blood of one would not have found its way, in such quantities, on to the body of the other. So there’d been doubly foul play: not just the murders but this ghoulish intermixing of bodily fluids which was taken by the police to be a commentary on the other sort of fluidal intermingling in which Morgenstern and Weinstock had no doubt been frenetically engaged at the moment their assailant struck.

‘Caught in the act’ was the phrase going round the village. And no one doubted that it was Lowenna’s husband, Ade, who’d caught them. But where was Ade Morgenstern? He hadn’t been seen in the village for months, having stormed out of the surgery to which he’d accompanied his wife to have a minor ailment looked at, which ailment, in his view, didn’t necessitate the removal of her brassiere. He hadn’t seen the brassiere coming off, he had only heard the doctor unhooking it. But his wife had beautiful breasts, as many in the village could testify, and he was a jealous man.

‘Breathe in,’ he heard the doctor order her. ‘And out.’ And a moment later, ‘Open.’

He was not in the waiting room when his wife emerged fully clothed from her consultation.

Hedra Deitch was less bothered by the question of who was guilty of the crime than its timing. ‘If you gotta go, that’s as good a moment as any, if you want my view, and that Ythel was a bit of all right,’ she told drinkers at the bar of the Friendly Fisherman. ‘Rumpy pumpy feels like dying anyway when you’ve got a husband like mine.’

Pascoe Deitch ignored the insult. ‘She always was a screamer,’ he put in.

His wife kicked his shin. ‘How come you’re an expert?’

‘When it comes to Lowenna Morgenstern everyone’s an expert.’

Hedra kicked his other shin. ‘ Was an expert. Who you going to be expert about next?’

Pascoe’s expertise, universal or not, caught the attention of the police. Not that he was a suspect. He lacked the energy to be a criminal just as, for all his bravado, his wife believed him to lack the energy to be unfaithful. He masturbated in corners, in front of her, thinking, he told her, about other women — that was the sum of his disloyalty.

‘You could feel this one comin’,’ he told Detective Inspector Gutkind.

‘You knew there were family troubles?’

‘Everybody knew. But no more than usual. We all have family troubles.’

‘So in what sense did you feel this one coming?’

‘Something had to give. It was like before a storm. It gave you a headache.’

‘Was it something in the marriage that had to give? Did the murdered woman have a lover?’

‘Well who else was that lying with her in those pools of blood?’

‘You tell me.’

Pascoe shrugged the shrug of popular surmise.

‘And did the husband know as much as you know?’ Gutkind asked.

‘He knew she put it about.’

‘Was he a violent man?’

‘Ythel?’

‘Ade.’

‘The place is full of violent men. Violent women, too.’

‘Are you saying there are many people who might have done this?’

‘When a storm’s comin’ a storm’s comin’.’

‘But what motive would anyone else have had?’

‘What motive do you need? What motive does the thunder have?’

The policeman scratched his head. ‘If this murder was as motiveless as thunder I’m left with a long list of suspects.’

Pascoe nodded. ‘That’s pretty much the way of it.’

That night he went alone to a barn dance in Port Abraham. His wife was wrong in assuming he was too lazy to be unfaithful to her.

iv

Densdell Kroplik generously offered to sell the police multiple copies of his Brief History of Port Reuben at half price on the assumption that it would help with their enquiries. Yes, he told Detective Inspector Gutkind, there were violent undercurrents in their society, but these appeared exceptional only in the context of that unwonted and, quite frankly, inappropriate gentleness that had descended on Port Reuben after WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED — see pp. 35–37 of his Brief History . Why Port Reuben had had to pay the price — bowing and scraping and saying sorry — for an event in which it had played no significant role, Densdell Kroplik didn’t see. Nothing had happened, if it happened, here . WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED, happened in the cities. And yet the villagers and their children and their children’s children were expected to share in the universal hand-wringing and name-changing. In his view, if anyone was interested in hearing it, the Lowenna Morgenstern case came as a welcome return to form. In a village with Port Reuben’s proud warrior history, people were supposed to kill one another. . Where there was a compelling argument to do so, he added, in response to Detective Inspector Gutkind’s raised eyebrow.

‘And what, in your view, constitutes a compelling argument?’ the policeman asked.

‘Well there you’ll have to ask the murderer,’ Densdell Kroplik replied.

‘And what’s this about a proud warrior history?’ Gutkind pressed. ‘There haven’t been warriors in these parts for many a year.’

Densdell Kroplik wasn’t going to argue with that. ‘The Passing of the Warrior’ was the title of his first chapter. But that didn’t mean the village didn’t have a more recent reputation to live up to. It was its touchy individualism, its fierce wariness, that had gone on lending the place its character and kept it inviolate. Densdell Kroplik’s position when it came to outsiders, the hated aphids, was more than a little paradoxical. He needed visitors to buy his pamphlet but on balance he would rather there were no visitors. He wanted to sing to them of the glories of Port Reuben, in its glory days called Ludgvennok, but didn’t want them to be so far entranced by his account that they never left. The exhilaration of living in Ludgvennok, which it pained him to call Port Reuben, walled in by cliffs and protected by the sea, enjoying the company of rough-mannered men and wild women, lay, the way he saw it, in its chaste unapproachability. This quality forcibly struck the composer Richard Wagner — if you’ve heard of him, Detective Inspector — in the course of a short visit he made to Ludgvennok as it was then. In those days husbands and lovers, farmers and fishermen, wreckers and smugglers, settled their grievances, eye to eye, as they had done for time immemorial, without recourse to the law or any other outside interference. Sitting at a window in a hostelry on this very spot, Wagner watched the men of Ludgvennok front up to one another like stags, heard the bacchante women wail, saw the blood flow, and composed until his fingers ached. ‘I feel more alive here than I have felt anywhere,’ he wrote in a letter to Mathilde Wesendonck. ‘I wish you could be with me.’ 1