Howard Jacobson - J

Just thinking about all this sends me into a moral tailspin. I love the man. Like the man, at least. All right, all right — I don’t mind the man. It’s possible, then, that I’d have not minded one or two of his confrères. But I am reminded that on grounds of their aesthetic I’d have been tempted to pick up a stone myself had I been alive at the time. I don’t say to throw it, just pick it up. But who’s to say that the action would not have been enough to encourage me to do something worse. Having said that, I trust that my love of beauty would eventually have won out, stopped my hand and bade me turn my back.

PS And now here’s more news. Detective Inspector Gutkind has been found with his throat cut in his own ‘home’. His cat too. Both of them shrouded in white dust. Sounds like something Kevern Cohen’s mother might have drawn. Speaking of whom — the son not the mother — isn’t he now likely to be a prime suspect?

Not too good for me, all this. Not a good reflection on my acuity.

iii

She was impressed by how well Ailinn took what she had to tell her — or at least that much of it which, initially, was all she dared tell her. She read the letters that had come down to her, not with calm exactly, but with the fatalism of someone who expected nothing better and had half-dreaded something worse, and this omened well, Esme thought, for how she would deal with further revelations. But Ailinn was a slow burner. ‘And your role in this?’ she asked after a period of reflection.

‘That of a well-wisher.’

‘Please don’t treat me like a fool.’

‘You think I intend harm to you?’

‘I don’t know what you intend. But you have deceived me so far, so why shouldn’t I think you will deceive me more? Who are you and what do you want?’

‘You know who I am.’

‘No I don’t. I thought you were someone I just happened to meet at a book group and who needed a friend. But there was obviously no “just happened” about it. Don’t look at me in that bruised way, Ez. You have lied to me all along. Are you a policewoman?’

‘Do I look like a policewoman?’

‘What do looks have to do with it? You looked like my friend.’

‘I am your friend.’

‘But it’s clear from the way you say it that our friendship was a happy accident. What are you actually?’

‘I’m your guardian angel.’

‘There is no such thing. And even if there were, you aren’t it. Why do you know so much about me? Why have you made a project of my life? Nothing better to do with your own?’

‘That’s cruel, Ailinn.’

‘Yes it is. But what you’ve been doing is cruel. Did you think I’d be grateful when I discovered you’d been digging the dirt on me?’

‘It isn’t dirt.’

‘That’s a matter of opinion. But you can hardly deny you’ve been digging.’

‘I stumbled upon you, Ailinn, that’s all.’

‘ Stumbled ?’

For a horrible moment Esme wondered if Ailinn intended to jeer at the way she walked. But that wasn’t what had struck the girl. ‘Stumbled upon me in the course of what line of work, Ez?’

‘You could say I’ve been trying to right the wrongs done to your family.’

‘Was that your ambition after you met me or before? It makes a difference. Did you know of me before you knew of my “family”, as you laughingly call it, or were you aware of “family” before you’d heard of me?’

Esme Nussbaum made a gesture suggestive of weighing with her hands. On the one hand this, on the other hand that. .

It was not a gesture that satisfied Ailinn. ‘There is something you aren’t telling me. You aren’t my mother, by any chance, are you?’

Esme experienced a momentary pang. It would have been no terrible thing, would it, being Ailinn’s mother? ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m not your mother. I would not have abandoned you had I been.’

Ailinn was not going to show she’d heard that. ‘Did you know my mother?’

‘I did not. I know none of your family. I only know of them. And what I know I’ve passed on to you. There’s nothing else.’

She felt a fraud as she said these words. It wasn’t that she knew more so much as that she knew less — next to nothing if truth were told. What had she exhumed other than the dry bones of a story of desperation and deceit that Ailinn might with reason have preferred to leave buried? It wasn’t all that long ago she’d been scrutinising the girl’s features for telltale signs of genetic depravity. Viewed from one angle she was no better than a specimen collector. Ailinn had reason to be angry without knowing the half of what Esme was about.

‘So the point of all this is what?’ Ailinn asked. ‘Am I the inheritor of a fortune of which you believe yourself entitled to a sizeable percentage? Are you some sort of bounty hunter?’

Esme wondered if she dared risk saying, ‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’ But while she thought about it Ailinn read her silence. She was on the edge of the bed, swinging her ugly feet. ‘Does this have to do with Kevern?’ she asked. ‘Is there something you require of both of us?’

‘Oh, require . .’

‘Expect, hope for, want. . Choose the verb that best applies. You brought us together, didn’t you? That’s the short of it. You promoted his cause with me from the very start. You looked worried every time we were on the point of breaking up. OK, I accept you’re not my mother. I think I’d know if you were. But it wouldn’t surprise me, given your concern for his welfare — I assume it was because you wanted him to be happy that you did your best to keep us together — it really wouldn’t surprise me now if you turned out to be his.’

Esme did not this time experience a momentary maternal pang. ‘It’s a funny idea,’ she said, ‘but no, I am not Kevern’s mother. I am of the wrong — how can I best put this: persuasion, denomination, credo? — to be Kevern’s mother.’

Ailinn stared.

‘So you knew Kevern’s mother?’

‘Trust me. I did not.’

‘But you know her “persuasion”? Does that mean you know something about Kevern’s that he doesn’t?’

‘Trust me,’ Esme repeated, taking the girl’s hands between hers. ‘Trust me on the generalities. The details I’ll give you later. Kevern’s mother was who he thought she was. Maybe not “what” he thought she was, but certainly “who”. And I don’t qualify. I’m not his fairy godmother, either, though I think fairy godmothers are not bound by the laws of matrilineality. But you’re right that I wanted you for him. I wanted you for each other. I still want you for each other.’

‘Why? Would you like us to have a baby for you or something?’

The question surprised Esme into giving an answer that surprised her even more. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘as a matter of fact I would.’

She was always going to have to come out with it, but not in that way, not quite so abruptly and callously. Not yet.

Ailinn caught her breath. ‘If you’ve been wanting Kevern’s baby so badly you could always have slept with him, you know. I’m not saying I wouldn’t have minded but I think I’d have preferred it to this.’

‘I haven’t been wanting Kevern’s baby.’

‘So it’s mine you want?’

Whereupon, because she had nowhere else conversationally to go, and it had to be told sometime, Esme told her that she wanted Ailinn and Kevern to renew the future of their people.

iv

‘How would you feel,’ Ailinn asked him, ‘if you found out we are not together by an act of our wills alone?’

‘Is anybody?’

She didn’t want him to go philosophical on her. ‘What if you didn’t choose me?’ she said. ‘What if I didn’t choose you?’