Howard Jacobson: J

Alone again, Ailinn Solomons looked at her feet.

ii

A score or so years before the events related above, Esme Nussbaum, an intelligent and enthusiastic thirty-two-year-old researcher employed by Ofnow, the non-statutory monitor of the Public Mood, prepared a short paper on the continuance of low- and medium-level violence in those very areas of the country where its reduction, if not its cessation, was most to have been expected, given the money and energy expended on uprooting it.

‘Much has been done, and much continues to be done,’ she wrote, ‘to soothe the native aggressiveness of a people who have fought a thousand wars and won most of them, especially in those twisted knarls and narrow crevices of the country where, though the spires of churches soar above the hedgerows, the sweeter breath of human kindness has, historically, been rarely felt. But some qualities are proving to be ineradicable. The higher the spire, it would seem, the lower the passions it goes on engendering. The populace weeps to sentimental ballads, gorges on stories of adversity overcome, and professes to believe ardently in the virtues of marriage and family life, but not only does the old brutishness retain a pertinacious hold equally on rural communities as on our urban conurbations, evidence suggests the emergence of a new and vicious quarrelsomeness in the home, in the workplace, on our roads and even on our playing fields.’

‘You have an unfortunate tendency to overwrite,’ her supervisor said when he had read the whole report. ‘May I suggest you read fewer novels.’

Esme Nussbaum lowered her head.

‘I must also enquire: are you an atheist?’

‘I believe I am not obliged to say,’ Esme Nussbaum replied.

‘Are you a lesbian?’

Again Esme protested her right to privacy and silence.

‘A feminist?’

Silence once more.

‘I don’t ask,’ Luther Rabinowitz said at last, ‘because I have an objection to atheism, lesbianism or feminism. This is a prejudice-free workplace. We are the servants of a prejudice-free society. But certain kinds of hypersensitivity, while entirely acceptable and laudable in themselves, may sometimes distort findings such as you have presented to me. You are obviously yourself prejudiced against the church; and those things you call “vicious” and “brutish”, others could as soon interpret as expressions of natural vigour and vitality. To still be harping on about WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED, as though it happened, if it happened, yesterday, is to sap the country of its essential life force.’

Esme Nussbaum looked around her while Rabinowitz spoke. Behind his head a flamingo pink LED scroll repeated the advice Ofnow had been dispensing to the country for the last quarter of a century or more. ‘Smile at your neighbour, cherish your spouse, listen to ballads, go to musicals, use your telephone, converse, explain, listen, agree, apologise. Talk is better than silence, the sung word is better than the written, but nothing is better than love.’

‘I fully understand the points you are making,’ Esme Nussbaum replied in a quiet voice, once she was certain her supervisor had finished speaking, ‘and I am saying no more than that we are not healed as effectively as we delude ourselves we are. My concern is that, if we are not forewarned, we will find ourselves repeating the mistakes that led to WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED, in the first place. Only this time it will not be on others that we vent our anger and mistrust.’

Luther Rabinowitz made a pyramid of his fingers. This was to suggest infinite patience. ‘You go too far,’ he said, ‘in describing as “mistakes” actions which our grandparents might or might not have taken. You go too far, as well, in speaking of them venting their “anger” and “mistrust” on “others”. It should not be necessary to remind someone in your position that in understanding the past, as in protecting the present, we do not speak of “us” and “them”. There was no “we” and there were no “others”. It was a time of disorder, that is all we know of it.’

‘In which, if we are honest with ourselves,’ Esme dared to interject, ‘no section of society can claim to have acquitted itself well. I make no accusations. Whether it was done ill, or done well, what was done was done. Then was then. No more needs to be said — on this we agree. And just as there is no blame to be apportioned, so there are no amends to be made, were amends appropriate and were there any way of making them. But what is the past for if not to learn from it—’

‘The past exists in order that we forget it.’

‘If I may add one word to that—’

Luther Rabinowitz collapsed his pyramid. ‘I will consider your report,’ he said, dismissing her.

The next day, turning up for work as usual, she was knocked down by a motorcyclist who had mounted the pavement in what passers-by described as a ‘vicious rage’.

Coincidences happen.

iii

Ailinn, anyway — whatever the state of things in the rest of the country, and others were now openly saying what Esme Nussbaum had said in her long-suppressed report — had sported a bruise under her right eye when Kevern saw her for the first time, standing behind a long trestle table on which were laid out for sale jams, marmalades, little cakes, pickles, hand-thrown pots and paper flowers.

‘Fine-looking girl, that one,’ a person Kevern didn’t know whispered in his ear.

‘Which one?’ asked Kevern, not wanting to be rude, but not particularly wanting to be polite either.

‘Her. With all the hair and the purple eye.’

Had Kevern been in the mood for conversation he might have answered that there was more than one among the women selling preserves and flowers who had a purple eye. But yes, the black hair — thick and seemingly warm enough to be the nest of some fabulous and he liked to think dangerous creature — struck him forcibly. ‘Aha, I see her,’ he said, meaning ‘Leave me alone.’

Impervious, the stranger continued. ‘She’ll say she walked into a door. The usual excuse. Needs looking after, in my humble opinion.’

He was dressed like a country auctioneer — of pigs, Kevern thought. He had a pleated, squeeze-box neck, which rippled over the collar of his tweed hacking jacket, and the blotched skin of someone who’d spent too much time in the vicinity of mulch, manure and, yes, money.

‘Aha,’ Kevern said again, looking away. He hoped his unfriendly demeanour would make it clear he didn’t welcome confidentiality, but he mustn’t have made it clear enough because the man slipped an arm through his and offered to introduce him.

‘No, no, that’s not necessary,’ Kevern said firmly. He started from all strangers instinctively, but this one’s insinuating manner frightened and angered him.

The introduction was effected notwithstanding. Kevern was not sure how.

‘Ailinn Solomons, Kevern Cohen. Kevern Cohen. . but you know each other now.’

They shook hands and the go-between vanished.

‘A friend of yours?’ Kevern asked the girl.

‘Never seen him in my life. I can’t imagine how he knows my name.’

‘I ask myself the same question.’

They exchanged concerned looks.

‘But you’re from here, aren’t you?’ the girl said.

‘Yes. But I too have never seen him in my life. You obviously are not from here.’

‘It shows?’

‘It shows in that we have never before met. So you’re from where. .?’

She flung a thumb over her left shoulder, as though telling him to scoot.

‘You want me to go?’

‘No, sorry, I was showing you where I’m from. If that’s north, I’m from up there. Forgive me, I’m nervous. I’ve been spooked by what’s just taken place. I haven’t been here long enough for people to know my name.’