Howard Jacobson - J

‘Isn’t that just because these communities were cut off from the rest of the country for so long?’ I said. ‘I feel they look at me like that too. They say you have to have lived here for ten generations before they begin to relax with you.’

‘I don’t want them to relax with me. I’m not looking for friendship,’ she said. ‘It’s the sense you get that someone’s always on your heels. Not following you — just there . Waiting for you to give yourself away.’

I noted that for later speculation. Give yourself away , eh, young lady. So what are you concealing?

Petroc Rothschild must have asked himself the same question because he did not take at all kindly to her, barking when she changed her position too abruptly, and growling most of the time she talked. But then he’d never been overfond of Kevern either.

I enquired whether what she was describing was a recent phenomenon.

‘Being here is a recent phenomenon — for me.’

‘Of course, of course. I meant did you notice it at once or are you just noticing it now? Has there been a change.’

‘I haven’t been here long enough to make such fine distinctions,’ she reminded me, somewhat sternly, which made me somewhat excited. I like sternness in a woman. Hence Demelza. ‘But if you ask me to think about it,’ she went on, ‘then no, I have not just begun to notice a sense of — I don’t know what to call it — intrusiveness . Take us’ — she put her hand on Kevern’s — ‘we didn’t just meet, we were bundled into each other’s arms. Not that I’m complaining about that.’

‘I should hope not,’ Kevern said, kissing her.

Sweet, but I was more interested, I have to say, in Ailinn’s sense of being, as she put it, ‘bundled’. Professionally interested.

‘So who bundled you?’ I asked, but casually, as though I were merely making polite conversation.

‘God knows. Some busybody? The village matchmaker? Nobody I’d ever seen before, or since. I don’t know if you’ve seen him again, Kevern.’

He hadn’t.

I asked Kevern if he too felt he’d been pushed into meeting Ailinn. He couldn’t of course say yes. He had to say he saw her and was smitten. But yes, now we came to mention it, there had been someone hanging around, egging him on. For which, accompanied by another burning look deep into Ailinn’s eyes, he was immeasurably grateful.

Petroc growled so loudly that Ailinn started.

‘He doesn’t mean you any harm,’ I assured her.

‘I think he does,’ she said.

‘You don’t like dogs?’

‘No, not as a rule. We are as one on this.’

‘You and the dog?’

‘Me and Kevern.’

I told Kevern that I hadn’t on his previous visits noticed he was a dog hater, though I kept to myself my conviction that Petroc hated him.

‘I’m not. Just not a dog lover. Or at least not inside the house.’

‘Are dogs different inside to out?’

‘No but I am.’

Concerned that his curtness of manner might offend me — unless she was concerned it might offend Petroc — Ailinn explained him. ‘He doesn’t like things moving around his legs,’ she laughed. ‘Not indoors, anyway.’

‘That will make it difficult with children,’ I observed.

‘Impossible,’ they said with some vehemence together. ‘Quite impossible.’

I am not without subtlety when it comes to reading behind the words people speak. Why the vehemence, I wondered.

‘You don’t want children?’ I asked, casually. I had the feeling they had not talked it over. But I could have been mistaken.

Kevern, anyway, shook his head. ‘I am content to be the end of my line,’ he said.

‘In this, too,’ Ailinn added, ‘we are as one.’

I didn’t, for what it’s worth, believe her. Methinks the lady doth protest too much, methought.

Wherever they were on this subject, I considered it worth noting in my report that Kevern ‘Coco’ Cohen and Ailinn Solomons shared a detestation of dogs.

I would have bet good money against the powers that be knowing that .

i

SOMEBODY HAD SEEN Kevern kissing Lowenna Morgenstern in the car park on bonfire night.

‘That shouldn’t make me a suspect,’ Kevern told Detective Inspector Gutkind. ‘If there’s a jealous homicidal maniac on the loose that should make me a potential victim.’

‘Unless the jealous homicidal maniac on the loose is you.’

‘I’m not on the loose.’

‘But you have been on the loose, haven’t you? No ties, no responsibilities, free to kiss whoever you like.’

Kevern had never before been presented with such a dashing portrait of his life.

‘I’m a bachelor, if that’s what you mean. Though I am in a serious relationship at the moment.’

‘At the moment? How long have you been in this serious relationship?’

‘Three months.’

‘And that amounts to serious for you?’

‘Sacred.’

‘Were you in a sacred relationship with Mrs Morgenstern?’

‘I don’t think a single kiss constitutes a relationship.’

‘What would you say it constitutes?’

‘A passing thrill.’

‘You were aware she was married when you kissed her?’

‘I was.’

The policeman waited. ‘. . And you had no qualms about that?’

‘Not my business. She felt like a kiss, I felt like a kiss.’

‘You don’t respect marriage?’

‘I think it was more that Mrs Morgenstern didn’t respect hers. I didn’t see it as my job to remember her vows for her.’

‘So knowing she wasn’t happily married, you took advantage.’

‘I don’t think, Detective Inspector Grossman—’

‘Gutkind.’

‘I don’t think, Detective Inspector Gutkind, that you can call it taking advantage. You could just as easily say she was taking advantage of my loneliness. But no one was taking advantage of anyone. As I have said — she’d had a few too many tequilas, I’d had a few too many sweet ciders—’

‘Sweet cider!’ Detective Inspector Gutkind pulled a face.

‘And maybe the odd half of lager shandy. I’m sorry if lager shandy disgusts you too.’

‘Go on.’

‘There’s nowhere to go. That’s it. She was drunk, I was not entirely sober, she felt like a kiss, I felt like a kiss. .’

‘And whatever you feel like doing, you do?’

Kevern laughed. If only, he thought. ‘I think you have a somewhat false picture of me,’ he said. ‘The clue is in the sweet cider. I am not a man who has a relaxed attitude to pleasure. As a matter of fact, I am not a man who has a relaxed attitude to anything. I have a very unrelaxed attitude, for example, to your being in my house.’

It occurred to him that the picture he was painting was more likely to incriminate him than otherwise. A difficult and lonely neurotic, who laughed where laughter was inappropriate, drank pussy drinks, and was prone to introspection and self-disgust — didn’t all murderers fit that bill? And now he was telling the policeman that his presence, here, on the sofa in Kevern’s cottage, made him uneasy. Why didn’t he just confess to the crime?

‘Why do you have an unrelaxed attitude to me being here?’ the policeman asked.

‘Why do you think? No one likes to be questioned by the police. No one likes to be under suspicion.’

‘But you specifically mentioned your house . What is it about being questioned specifically in your house that upsets you?’

‘I’m a very private man.’

‘But not so private that you draw the line at kissing other men’s wives?’

‘I never brought her here.’

‘Because?’