Howard Jacobson - J

Ranajay was beside himself with distress. ‘My fault, my fault. I shouldn’t have brought you to this part,’ he said.

‘There is no reason why you shouldn’t have brought us here,’ Ailinn assured him. She felt she had spent the entire day making life easier for men. ‘We asked you to.’

He inclined his head. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I am sure your husband is mistaken. There is no one left from here. They went away a long time ago. Before memory.’

Shut up, she wanted to scream. Shut up now!

But it pleased her that he had called Kevern her husband. Husband — she liked the ring of it. Husband, I come . Who was it who said that? How she would have felt to hear herself called Kevern’s wife she wasn’t sure. But OK, she thought, no matter that he had been half-crazed the entire time they’d been away. Yes, on the whole, OK. There were worse men out there.

They never did get her phone fixed. It would take three to five working days for the parts to arrive. And they weren’t intending to stay around that long. She’d buy another.

They drove home to Port Reuben later that afternoon in careful, contemplative silence, neither wanting to discomfort the other with so much as a word or a thought. Every subject seemed fraught. They were both greatly on edge, but were still unprepared for what they found on their return. Someone had been inside the cottage.

‘I knew it,’ Kevern said before he had even turned the key in the door. ‘I have known it the whole time we were away.’

‘Are you absolutely certain?’ Ailinn asked.

It was late and they were tired. The moon was full and a full moon plays tricks with people’s senses. He could have been mistaken.

They had to shout over the roaring of the blowhole. No, he wasn’t mistaken. He had looked through his letter box and what he had seen he had seen.

His silk runner had been interfered with.

How did he know that?

It was straight.

i

HAD WHOEVER IT was who straightened Kevern ‘Coco’ Cohen’s silk runner been looking for something in particular, something corroborative of Kevern’s guilt — no matter, for the time being, what the crime — it was unlikely to have been a little book written by his maternal grandmother, Jenna Hannaford, about which Kevern himself knew nothing. It would not anyway have been found. Jenna’s daughter, Kevern’s mother, destroyed it when she read it, recognising it to be the work of a crazy person. In that she would have met no resistance from its author. A Crazy Person’s History of Defilement, for Use in Schools was Jenna Hannaford’s own title.

‘If you think any school is going to teach that, you’re crazy,’ her husband told her.

She smiled sweetly at him. She was an elegant woman with a long neck and a mass of yellow hair which she put up carelessly, piling it on top of her head like a bird’s nest. He was short, suffered from over-curvature of the thoracic vertebrae and had no hair at all. But it wasn’t all beauty and beast. She suffered from depression, had trouble buttoning her clothes because her fingers trembled, and dyed her hair. ‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ she asked.

‘Then why are you writing it?’

‘Because I’m crazy.’

‘Just don’t let anyone see it.’

‘Of course I won’t. Do you think I’m crazy?’

Just don’t let anyone was her husband’s perpetual refrain. Just don’t let anyone see, just don’t let anyone hear, just don’t let anyone know. He told her not to go out. It was just better that nobody knew she was there, or at least, since everybody did know she was there, just better that nobody saw her. He wasn’t afraid she’d run off with someone with a straight back. He was just afraid.

‘You worry too much about me, Myron,’ she told him.

‘I can’t worry too much about you.’

‘What will be will be,’ she said.

She never finished her Crazy Person’s History of Defilement . Work in progress was how she described it to herself. By that she meant she never expected it to be finished because the subject she was addressing would never be finished. But the other reason she didn’t finish it was that she disappeared. Walked out one blowy September afternoon with her head held high, after warning her daughter Sibella not to expect too much happiness and telling her husband to cut down on his smoking, and was never seen again.

Off the cliffs into the sea? An accident? A leap?

Who knew?

Myron Hannaford never forgave himself. He believed in God but only to have someone to castigate himself to. ‘I should have worried about her more,’ he told Him.

Sibella kept her mother’s papers in a little suitcase under her bed, not daring to read through them in case her mother returned and discovered they’d been tampered with. After her father died she was cared for by the boy she’d been brought up with — a relation ten years her senior, she wasn’t sure from which side of the family, who longer ago than she could remember had come to live with them by the sea for his health’s sake (though he wasn’t allowed to go out and breathe the sea air), a gangling, morose, pale-faced fellow with a talent for woodwork (he took over Sibella’s father’s lathe as automatically as he took over her) and a secret love of syncopated music. When she was old enough, they married. It was never really discussed; it was simply assumed that that was what they would do. Who else was there for either of them?

And in most regards it made no material difference to the life they’d been living before they married.

She had already, in line with ISHMAEL, changed her name from Hannaford to Cronfeld, and as her cousin Howel had changed his to Cohen she didn’t feel she had to make too big a change a second time.

On the eve of the wedding Sibella crept out of the cottage with her crazy mother’s papers and threw them into the sea.

Because she was a little crazy herself she no sooner threw them into the sea than she knew she shouldn’t have. What if a page was washed back up into the village on the tide and found by a fisherman? What if it was swept up into the blowhole and spewed out, paragraph by paragraph, for walkers to find? She scrambled down the rocks to see what she could rescue, then remembered she couldn’t swim. There was nothing she could do but hope. As far as she knew, no page ever was recovered from the water in Port Reuben. But from that time forward she lived in a sort of half-absent dread of something turning up, still just about legible, on a roller heading for the West Australian coast or on an ice floe in the South Atlantic, the precise consequences of which for her family could not be foreseen, but without question they would be disastrous.

If you want something to be destroyed for ever, her mother had warned her when she was small, you have to set fire to it and watch it burn away to nothing. It was a frightening time, the little girl knew, though she didn’t understand what made it so. Her father had never been more agitated. He wouldn’t allow the radio to be played and if anyone knocked on their door they didn’t open it. Once, when they heard people coming, he held her to him and put his hand over her mouth. ‘If you aren’t quiet,’ he told her, when the visitors had gone, ‘we’ll have to put you in a drawer.’