Howard Jacobson: J

She looked around anxiously — Kevern couldn’t tell whether to get a second look at the man or to be certain he had gone for good. In deference to her anxiety he made light of his own. (He too had been spooked by what had just occurred.) ‘You know these village nosey parkers. He’s probably an amateur archivist.’

‘You have archives here?’

‘Well, no, not officially, but we have the occasional crazy who enjoys hoarding rumours and going through people’s rubbish bins. I have one as a neighbour, as it happens.’

‘And you let him go through yours?’

‘Oh, I have no rubbish.’

He enjoyed the sensation of her looking through him. He wanted her to know that any secrets he had, she was welcome to.

‘Well I don’t think our man was an archivist,’ she said. ‘He looked too interested in himself. I’d say he was an auctioneer of pigs.’

Kevern smiled at her.

‘Which doesn’t explain. .’

‘No, it doesn’t. .’

She was a fine-looking girl, delicately strung, easy to hurt despite the dangerous thicket of her hair. He thought he detected in himself an instinct to protect her. Absurdly, he imagined rolling her in his rug. Though what good that would have done her, he couldn’t have said.

‘You don’t have an “up there” accent,’ he said.

‘And you don’t have a “down here” one.’

They felt bonded in not sounding as though they were from either place.

Emboldened by this, he pointed to her bruise. ‘Who did that to you?’

She ignored the question, going behind the stall to rearrange the flowers. Then she looked him directly in the eyes and shrugged. It was a gesture he understood. Who’d done that to her? It didn’t matter: they all had.

Years before, he’d been a choirboy at the church and, because he had a flutey tenor voice ideally suited to Bach’s Evangelist, still sang there every Christmas when they performed the expurgated version of the St Matthew Passion . He didn’t normally attend fetes — he was not a festive man — but several people from the church had urged him to attend. ‘Why?’ he’d asked. ‘Just come along, Kevern,’ they’d said, ‘it will do you good.’ And more flyers publicising the event were popped through his letter box than he could recall receiving for similar events.

On the morning of the fete, the vicar, Golvan Shlagman, even rang to make sure he was coming. Kevern said he was undecided. He had work to do. All work and no play, the Reverend Shlagman quipped. He hoped Kevern would try his best. It wouldn’t be the same without his presence. Kevern didn’t see why. Why was his presence a matter of significance suddenly? ‘We can’t do without the Evangelist,’ the vicar laughed, though no Mass or Passion was being sung.

Thinking about it later, Kevern thought Shlagman’s laughter had been only just the sane side of hysterical.

Had he hysterically laughed Ailinn into coming to the fete, too?

Seeing as they mistrusted strangers equally, didn’t speak in the accents of where they resided, and knew a pig auctioneer when they saw one, he asked her out.

She took a minute or two to decide. He, too, was a stranger, she seemed to be reminding him.

He understood. ‘A little walk, that’s all,’ he said. ‘Nowhere far.’

On their first date he kissed the bruise under her eye.

He was not a man who raised his arm to women and hadn’t been stirred to anger when Ailinn called him thick-headed. He only nodded and smiled lugubriously — it was that dopey-eyed, lugubrious smile that had earned him the nickname Coco, after a once famous clown who sometimes reappeared, accompanied by apologies for the cruelty visited on him, in children’s picture books. She was right, when all was said and done. He was a lolloping unfunny clown with a big mouth who didn’t deserve her love. And now — she made no attempt to stop him getting up and leaving — he’d lost it.

He reproached himself for being too easily put off. It didn’t have anything to do with Ailinn; he lacked the trick of intimacy, that was all. On the other hand, the thickness of her ankles relative to the slenderness of her frame — especially the right one, around which she wore a flowery, child-of-nature anklet — did upset him, and on top of that, like every other village girl, no matter that she came from a village at the other end of the country, she smelt of fish.

But then there were other girls in the village, and although they had always treated him with that degree of watchfulness they reserved for people to whom they weren’t related, their availability took the edge off his desolation. He was alone, but on any evening he could drop by the Friendly Fisherman and fall into conversation with one or other of them. And at least at the bar the smell of beer took away the smell of fish.

He sat on his bench absent-mindedly, watching the seals flop, enjoying the spray on his face, thinking about everything and nothing, exclaiming ‘ esus Christ!’ to himself from time to time, until the sun sank beneath its own watery weight into the sea. It became immediately chilly. Feeling the cold, he rose from the bench and decided to try his luck. Company was company. He called by the cottage first and peered in through the letter box. All was almost well. He was still in, still reading his mail in his carpet slippers, still watching television. And his rug was still rumpled. But his utility phone was flashing vermilion, which meant somebody had rung him. Perhaps Ailinn saying she was sorry, though she had done nothing to say sorry for.

After the falling-out, the saying sorry. That was the way. They had all been taught it at school. Always say sorry.

If it was she who had rung him, should he ring her back? He didn’t know.

In agitation, because the knowledge that he’d been rung — no matter by whom — distressed him, he let himself in, discovered the caller had left no message — though he thought he detected the breath of someone as agitated as himself — and locked up again. Fifteen minutes later he was in the Friendly Fisherman, ordering a sweet cider.

iv

The inn was more than usually noisy and querulous. That fractiousness which was being reported as on the increase throughout the country was no less on the increase here. There’d been an incident earlier in the village hall and some of the bad feeling had spilled out into the inn from that. It was Thursday, Weight Watchers day, and one of the village women, Tryfena Heilbron, had refused to accept that she’d put on a pound since the last time she’d been weighed. Words had been exchanged and Tryfena had lifted the scales and dashed them to the ground. ‘Next time bring scales that work,’ she’d shouted at the weigher who shouted back that it was no surprise to her that Tryfena’s husband preferred the company of sweeter-tempered, not to say more sylphlike, women.

By the time news of the altercation reached the Friendly Fisherman the men were involved. Breoc Heilbron the haulier, a dangerous brute of a man even when sober, was drunkenly defending the honour of a wife he didn’t scruple at other times to abuse. It struck Kevern Cohen as a sign of the times that men who would once have steered clear of Breoc Heilbron’s temper were prepared tonight to needle him, not only man to man, by impugning his capacity to hold his drink, but by referring to his wife’s notorious temper and even to her weight. Was he imagining it or did he actually hear someone describe her as a heifer? That heifer, Tryfena Heilbron.

That was how people had begun to talk of one another. That heifer, Tryfena Heilbron. That lump of lard, Morvoren Steinberg.