Howard Jacobson - J

That thought, too, brought her still closer to Ailinn. They were both who they were, directly or indirectly, as the consequence of foul play. So while she wanted something ‘from’ Ailinn that Ailinn herself as yet knew nothing of, she wanted something ‘for’ her, too, that had nothing to do with her ambitious scheme to restore the nation’s equilibrium of hate. Esme considered it a stroke of remarkably good fortune — particularly when she became privy to Ailinn’s feelings for Kevern Cohen, and witnessed their evident reciprocity when she saw them together — that her professional scheme and her private hopes coincided perfectly in so far as they bore on Ailinn’s happiness.

How long it was going to take before either could be realised depended, she understood — for all her impatience — on feelings and events beyond her control. It was not all in her hands, as it was not all in Ailinn’s. But when the girl returned from her trip away with Kevern only to discover his cottage had been broken into — an action Esme very much deplored — and Kevern, as a consequence, began to say reckless things and make wild plans, Esme knew she had to intervene. ‘It’s now or never,’ she told herself, although the time was still not right, at least as far as the clearing of Kevern was concerned. ‘What you don’t do yourself, is rarely done well,’ was what she also told herself. But she couldn’t be everywhere at once. She couldn’t have researched Kevern ‘Coco’ Cohen as thoroughly as she had researched Ailinn Solomons. And besides. .

Well, if she understood the logic of matrilineality adequately, the clearing of Kevern was of less consequence than the clearing of Ailinn. She wasn’t saying Kevern was immaterial to her plans — far from it — but she could afford a degree of blurring around Kevern that she couldn’t around Ailinn.

ii

Saturday 30th

Well what was I supposed to say? That I liked the stuff? Thank you, Kevern, I can’t wait to show it to my students as an example of that deviant, flagitious, vitiated modernism (as I’ve said, nobody dares go near the word ‘degenerate’) they’ve read about in their textbooks. . He wouldn’t exactly have thanked me for that, would he? No son wants to hear his mother described as deviant.

Which brings me to the real problem I was faced with when he bounded in ( bounded in for him), looking as pleased as punch and flaunting that odious sketchbook — that he didn’t know how much he was giving away about himself and I didn’t know whether to tell him. ‘If you’re the son of that mother, fellow-me-lad,’ I wanted to say, ‘you’re in a spot of bother.’ Or not. This is the thing: never having been adequately apprised of what I’m looking for, I’m not only in the dark as to whether or not I’ve found it, I’m in the dark as to the value, good or bad, of what I’ve found. As to that — the latter — I have my own views. I like the man, as I’ve made abundantly clear, but that doesn’t mean I have to like what it would now appear I must call his antecedents. The other way of putting this is that I detest the sin but love the sinner. But I am going too fast even for my own brain.

Why, I have to ask myself — taking a pause — am I not more étonné by what I have discovered? Did I suspect all along? Did I know all along? Well, whether I knew at the beginning or not I’d have had to be some sort of nincompoop not to have had a pretty good idea more recently that something of this sort was in the wind. The strange behaviour of a certain detective inspector was clue enough, and then the strange behaviour around him — their getting me to call him off, for example — was surely a clincher. I just didn’t know what it clinched. And I still don’t know what’s to be done with what I now know, that’s if I now know anything. There’s a lot of knowing and not knowing here — knowing what you don’t know and not knowing what you do — but then that’s the secret service for you. Ha! Which is not to say I am amused. I am worried for him. My man Kevern, I mean, not the detective inspector about whom I have no worries whatsoever. And I must say I am the smallest bit worried for myself. Hurt might be a better word. Just because it’s been my job to suss him out doesn’t mean it’s been his job to string me along. For how many months have I been declaring him clean? And all that time he’s been posing as my friend, even bringing his poor girlfriend round to meet us. Does she know? That’s supposing, of course, that he himself has known any more than I have. Does he even know who or what he is? The innocent way he presented his mother’s wretched work — unaware that he was as good as handing himself in — doesn’t suggest duplicity. Had he known what he was about, or had any inkling what it was necessary to conceal, he’d have gone out into his garden in the dead of night, dug a hole as deep as hell, and dropped those sketches of hers down it. Alternatively, given where he lives, he should have thrown them into the sea the minute he found them.

And here’s another question I’m bound to ask myself: was there always a suspicion that these works existed, and that eventually it would be they — this little nothing of a notebook, this handful of neurotic prints and drawings done by a deranged, unhappy woman — that gave him away? Was that why I — a professor of the Benign Visual Arts — was given him to watch? Because the crime, if a crime is quite what it is fair to call it, was always going to show itself first and foremost aesthetically? I’m flattered, if that’s the case, though there might be those who wonder why it took me so long. To which my answer is — Art Appreciation is a slow business.

‘It’s the look of him we want you to engage with,’ was what I was told at the beginning. Words to that effect, anyway. ‘How he dresses, how he decorates his home, his taste in personal and domestic decoration.’ I had to report back pretty soon that he had forcefully resisted every hint I’d dropped about visiting him in his ‘home’ — ugh, that word! ‘I make a point of not entertaining,’ he told me. ‘I can’t cope with it. It makes me anxious. But let me take you and Demelza out for dinner.’ I could, I suppose, have dropped round on spec, but wouldn’t that have aroused suspicion? You don’t just find yourself on the cliffs of Port Reuben with time on your hands. A shame, as I said in my report at the time. I like to read a man’s soul in his kitchen. And I doubt anyone would have done it better. Though after what I have just seen I’m more than a little relieved that I never did get to see what hangs on his walls. What if his house is festooned with more examples of his mother’s sclerotic primitivism? I could not have let things lie at that. There are mistakes of taste you can let go — I’d have winked at the odd porcelain shepherdess or picturesque rendition of the Damascus Gate at sunset, believe me — but an unambiguous depravity of taste has to be reported. There’s a box for that very thing on my forms. Tick the following: ersatz Negroid art; obsession with the fractured body as reflection of tormented mind; excessive devotion to biblical themes not rendered pietistically; asymmetry, violent oppositions of colour or form, counterpart shapes, dread, menace, anxiety, expressive dualities, basket-case subject matter, and more in a similar vein. You see my problem — if his walls are decorated by his mother I’d have had to tick the lot.

And that’s before we get to the father whom he once described to me as a glassblower in wood, but that might just have been to put me off the scent. What if his candlesticks were ironically discoordinated — a veritable attack on Hellenistic proportion — to their very wicks and tails? Is there not even, now I put my mind to it, a grotesquerie of misshapen elaboration in the figures with which Kevern himself decorates his lovespoons?