Howard Jacobson - J

He was relieved to find his utility phone flashing. If it was trouble, bring it on, he thought. If it was Ailinn, please let her say she was coming over. It had been weeks since he’d seen her. He had not rung her because he was frightened to encounter a hostile voice. ‘You threw me out. Drop dead!’ She’d have been within her rights to say that and more, then slam the phone down. He’d offered her his bed, his home, his loyalty. You can’t do that and then ask someone to leave, no matter how distraught you feel or how temporary you want their absence to be. A life companion is a life companion. It wasn’t her fault his cottage had been broken into and his Chinese runner straightened. And if he’d meant it when he’d told her that the little he had was hers, then it was her house that had been broken into, her Chinese runner that had been straightened, too. He had to stop thinking of himself as a man alone, unless that was now what, thanks to his own stupidity, he had once again become. Only this time it would not be the same as before. There was no same as before, not after Ailinn. After Ailinn, nothing.

He wondered whether he should leave the utility phone to flash. All day and all night if necessary. Not rush to find out. Delay the disappointment. Though it was still morning he knew that if he went to bed he would immediately drop into sleep. Anticipation keeps some men awake. It poleaxed Kevern. He thought of it as a gift. When the terrible time came — it didn’t matter which — he would deal with it by passing out. He had warned Ailinn what he would do.

‘Good to know I can count on you,’ she said.

‘Under no circumstances think you can count on me,’ he said, just in case she intended her comment as a joke. ‘I’m not man enough.’

‘I won’t make that mistake,’ she said.

‘I am not your rock.’

‘I understand.’

‘Should anything happen to you I will fall immediately into the deepest sleep known to man. I might never wake up from it. I’d hope never to wake up from it. That’s how impossible I would find life without you. See it as the proof of my devotion. But understand I’d be no use when it comes to getting help or, if you’re beyond help, gathering your friends, organising your funeral, arranging the flowers.’

‘You’d let me just lie there on your floor.’

‘ Our floor — yes.’

‘And what if anything happens to you?’

‘I’m not asking you to do any better.’

‘I can leave you on our floor?’

‘You can leave me anywhere. Dead or dying I won’t know anything about it.’

‘So ours is a fair-weather love?’

‘That makes it sound selfish, but yes if you mean that when we prosper we prosper and when we don’t—’

She got the picture. ‘—we don’t.’

It must have been with this conversation in mind that she framed her message — the message to which, when the moment came to run from it, he knew he had to listen.

‘It’s me,’ she said. ‘I’ve been going mad here. Why haven’t you rung me? We need to speak urgently. Don’t go comatose on me. It’s not the something terrible you’ve told me you won’t be man enough to cope with. Or at least I don’t think it is.’

ii

A brief nod to the work done in past times by St Brigid’s Roman Catholic Convent and Orphanage, Mernoc, is in order here, if only to correct the misconception that every Roman Catholic orphanage was just a workhouse under another name. ‘I am not disposed to maintain that the being born in a workhouse is in itself the most fortunate and enviable circumstance that can possibly befall a human being,’ wrote that once popular English humanitarian, Charles Dickens, and under his influence a sentimental predisposition against such charitable institutions was, for a century or more, and not just in his own country, the norm. Whatever the justice of this negative view of the workhouse, St Brigid’s conformed to another pattern entirely. Children placed in its care were viewed as gifts from God himself, little angels with damaged wings, no less, whose physical and spiritual well-being was the first and last concern of all members of the community, from the lowliest novitiate to the Mother Superior herself.

The reputation of St Brigid’s must have reached the ears of Rebecca Macshuibhne, though it was on the mainland, some thirty miles south of the island on which she now lived, and for all that her husband, Fridleif, had taught her to think ill of Roman Catholics. Before she met Fridleif she had made no distinction between Catholicism and Congregationalism. In her home Christianity was Christianity. Such ignorance of fine and not-so-fine distinctions was not intended to be contemptuous. It was just that Jesus was understood to be central to all Christian faiths and wasn’t central, except in a negative sense, to hers. Not an immoveable aversion, however, as was attested to by her subsequent marriage to the Rev. Fridleif Macshuibhne, her eager assumption of her pastoral duties as his wife, and the baptism of their daughter Coira.

That this solemn rite, which her grandparents Wolfie and Bella Lestchinsky made no effort to attend, constituted Coira’s once-and-for-all initiation into the care of Christ, neither Rebecca nor Fridleif thought to question. They had promised on the child’s behalf to reject the Devil and all rebellion against God, to renounce deceit, to submit to Christ as Lord.

The deed was done, the child was a Christian.

And there the matter would have rested had not the final letter Rebecca sent to her parents been returned to her in that chilling fashion.

Rebecca could not stop looking at the stamp.

‘It won’t tell you any more than it already has,’ Fridleif said.

‘What do you think it means?’

He showed her his clear, Arctic eyes. ‘It’s possible,’ he said, ‘that it was they who returned it.’

‘With an official stamp, Fridleif?’

He took the envelope from her and held it to the light.

‘I’ve done that a thousand times,’ she said. ‘And anyway, why would they send my letter back? They never did before. Not replying is one thing — and I know it hurt you, Fridleif, as it hurt me — but returning my letter unopened is something else again. That’s not their way. We don’t behave like that in my family.’

Her husband looked at her in a manner she found provoking. But theirs was a proudly peaceable marriage and she wanted it to remain that way. ‘It’s too much of a coincidence,’ she went on, ‘that this should happen when there’s so much trouble down there. I’m frightened.’

He touched her hand. ‘The Lord will protect them.’

She had heard her father invoke the name of the Lord in the face of danger often enough. But with him the invocation had been ironical, angry, disappointed. The Lord should protect them but wouldn’t. Hadn’t. And wouldn’t ever. Which her father took to be a personal affront to him. And yet his had never been a counsel of despair. There was something out there in which he believed, an idea that answered to the name of the Lord no matter that the Lord himself did scant justice to it. Reason. Human resourcefulness. Intelligence.

Of what use to them their intelligence was now, however, she couldn’t imagine.

Seeing her eyes fill with tears, Fridleif stretched out his other hand to her. ‘Look,’ he said in his gentlest voice, ‘we don’t really know how bad it is down there. These things get blown out of all proportion.’

‘These things ?’

‘Rumours, I mean. That’s all we have to go on.’

He seemed insubstantial to her, all of a sudden. He was a feathery man — that had been his charm. He had flitted into her life, a creature of light and optimism, so unlike her father. His translucent faith a wonderful release to her after the weighty, frightened sonorousness of her parents and their friends. But it was as though he had never before been tested in her presence, and now that he had — well, he was failing. You have God but you have no gravitas, Rebecca thought.