Howard Jacobson - J

i

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, chilled by Ashbrittle’s faded faith, Kevern — half hoping she would say no — suggested they leave and drive to the Necropolis. The Necropolis was his father’s name for the capital.

‘Another of his jokes?’ Ailinn wondered.

‘You could say that, but he might have been in dead earnest.’

‘Well I wouldn’t know,’ Ailinn said, looking straight ahead.

She meant about jokes — since that had been Kevern’s first assessment of her: that she didn’t get them. But she meant about fathers too.

Neither had visited the Necropolis before. Singly, they wouldn’t have dared. It had a bad reputation. Outside the capital people survived the failure of the banks with surprising fortitude; they even took a grim satisfaction in returning to old frugal ways which proved their moral superiority to those who had lived the high life in the capital for so long, washing oysters down with champagne and living in mansions that had their own swimming pools. It was a sweet revenge. In time the Necropolis recovered, to a degree, but its self-esteem, as a great centre of finance and indulgence, had been damaged. WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED — or, as his father called it, THE GREAT PISSASTROPHE — for the most part happened there, and while no one was blaming anyone, a sort of slinking seediness replaced the old strutting glamour. In the Necropolis the divorce rates were higher than anywhere else. So were domestic shootings. Men urinated openly in the streets. Women brawled with one another, used the vilest language, got drunk and thought nothing of throwing up where the men had urinated. You could have your pockets picked in broad daylight. Put up too fierce a struggle and you might have your throat cut. Might . It wasn’t a daily occurrence, but people in the country were pleased to report that it wasn’t unheard of.

Not allowed to remember the glory that had been, the Necropolis put up a cocksure front, belied by the failure of the once great stores and hotels to live up to the past sumptuousness which their premises still evoked. The shops with the grandest windows were not bursting with expensive items. You could get tables at the best restaurants on the day you wanted them. And there was a thriving black-market trade in memorabilia of better times — even, one might say, in memory itself.

Had they not been in love and on an adventure, each emboldening the other, Ailinn and Kevern would not have gone there.

Kevern’s father must have warned him against going to the Necropolis a hundred times over the years, but when he tried to recall his actual words Kevern couldn’t find any; he could only see the prematurely old man opening and closing his mouth, dressed in his oriental brocade dressing gown, arthritic and embittered, his back to the fire — a fire that was lit in all weathers — angrily smoking a cigarette through a long amber Bakelite cigarette holder, listening with one ear to the footsteps of walkers (snoopers, he called them) passing the cottage to get to the cliffs. Except for when he wore a carpenter’s apron in his workshop, he dressed, in Kevern’s recollection of him, no other way. Always his brocade dressing gown. Had he just arrived and was waiting for the rest of his clothes to follow, or was everything packed in readiness for departure? Had he for the space of one day in all the years he’d lived in the cottage made peace with the idea that it was his home?

His mother the same, though she didn’t dress as though to face down a firing squad. They could have been master and servant, so fatalistically elegant was he, so like an item of her own luggage, a bundle of rags — the bare necessity to keep out the cold — was she.

Whether she had formed an independent view of the Necropolis, or ever been there herself, Kevern didn’t know. She didn’t talk to him about things like that. The past wasn’t only another country, it was another life. But he thought he recalled her seconding her husband, saying, in her weary voice, as though to herself — because who else listened — ‘Your father is right, don’t go there.’

Kevern suddenly felt guilty realising that he too left his mother out of everything. He put his hand on Ailinn’s knee as though in that way, from one woman to another, he could make it up to her — the mother he had trouble remembering.

Ailinn took her hand off the wheel and put it on his. ‘Use both hands,’ he said, frightened she meant to play pat-a-cake with him while she was driving. ‘Please.’

‘Well I’m looking forward to this,’ she said, hiding her apprehension.

‘Me too. I’m looking forward to my first Lebanese.’

‘Or an Indian.’

‘Or a Chinese.’

‘And I can see if I can get my phone fixed,’ she said.

‘I didn’t know anything was wrong with your phone.’

‘It rings sometimes and when I answer there’s no one there. And occasionally I hear an odd clicking when I’m on the phone to you.’

‘How come you’ve only just mentioned this?’

‘I didn’t want to worry you.’

‘You think someone’s listening in?’

‘Who would want to do that?’

‘Search me. . Gutkind?’

‘Why would he want to listen in to my conversations?’

‘Who knows? Maybe he wants to be sure you’re not in any danger from me — the lady killer.’

They both laughed.

Kevern didn’t mention his crazy thought. That the person bugging her phone might have been his dead father, making sure she was the right woman for his son.

‘Is there such a thing as retinal hysteria?’ Kevern asked as they approached the city.

Ailinn remembered an old English novel she’d read about a newly and unhappily married Puritan girl visiting Rome for the first time, the stupendous fragmentariness of the pagan/papal city — they were one and the same thing for her — passing in fleshly and yet funereal procession across her vision, throbbing and glowing, as though her retina were afflicted. So yes, Ailinn thought, a person’s excited emotional state could affect the way he saw. But why was Kevern’s emotional state excited or, more to the point, what did he think he was seeing?

‘Zebra stripes,’ he said. ‘And leopard spots. And peacock feathers. Have we taken a wrong turn and driven into the jungle?’

‘You don’t think you could be hung-over?’

‘You were with me last night. What did I drink?’

‘A migraine then?’

‘I don’t get them. I feel fine. I am just blinded by colour.’

She had been too busy concentrating on the roads, which she feared would be more frightening than any she was used to, to notice what he had begun to notice as they approached the Necropolis. But he was right. The Necropolitans were dressed as though for a children’s garden party. The moratorium on the wearing of black clothes, declared in the aftermath of THE GREAT PISSASTROPHE in order to discourage all outward show of national mourning (for who was there to mourn?) was honoured now only in the breach, they thought. Neither Ailinn nor Kevern thought twice about wearing black. But the Necropolis appeared to be obeying it to the letter still, as though seeing in the prohibition an opportunity for making or at least for seeming merry. What neither Kevern nor Ailinn had anticipated was the difference this abjuration of black would make to the look of everything. It was as though the spirit of serious industry itself had been syphoned out of the city.

But it wasn’t just the vibrant colours of the clothes people wore that struck them, but the outlandishness of the designs. The further in they drove the more vintage-clothes stalls they passed, until the city began to resemble a medieval funfair or tourney, on either side of the road stalls and pavilions under flapping striped tarpaulins piled high with fancy dress. Kevern rubbed his eyes. ‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘I’ve had a policeman snooping around my house in the hope of uncovering a single family keepsake, and here they go about in their great-grandparents’ underthings as bold as brass.’