Howard Jacobson: J

What she means by this is that while Ailinn must be the real McCoy, and must, short of a miracle, have a father for the child, it might not be absolutely essential to that child’s being the real McCoy that the father is the real McCoy as well. She has been hampered by having no one to ask and very few intact books to consult but she has beavered away and believes she can now confirm Ailinn’s grandmother’s understanding of the law of matrilineality: yes, it is indeed the case, as Rebecca thought when she defied her husband, that the McCoys, as it amuses her to call them while she bites her fingernails, look only to the mother for transmission of authenticity. Thus, though there’s no knowing who Ailinn’s father was, and though her grandfather Fridleif was unacceptable in every possible regard, the fact that she is in direct, unbroken line of matrilineal descent from her grandmother, who appears to have ticked all the boxes herself, is sufficient to make her what Esme wants her to be. That being the case, who needs that little prick Kevern Cohen?

No, no one needs him. That’s the point to which Esme’s rough scholarship has brought her. But still and all it will be better in every way if he can be roped in. His presence as Ailinn’s agitated, unsmiling consort will help Esme to the composite effect she is looking for. Kevern does not, she is confident, photograph well. There are many aspects of character the camera can lie about, but stand-offishness is not one of them. A man so aloof that he accepts no kinship with the human race looks exactly that when he’s photographed — an unquiet thing, displaced and determined to stay that way. Furthermore, if she can sell him the whole box of tricks, or at least keep the pairing to the degree that he will buy into engagement, marriage and the rest of it, she will be able to arrange them a traditional wedding — she will officiate herself if she has to — whose antiquated self-absorption will enrage as many as it pleases. Including, she has no doubt, Kevern Cohen. He will not behave well at his own wedding. She has come across the ritual of the bridegroom breaking a glass. Kevern, she is confident, will stamp it to smithereens. He will make a sardonic speech, compromising his love for Ailinn (she doesn’t doubt its genuineness) with savage jokes that no one will enjoy. Yes, the more she thinks about his studied prickliness, the more she wants to keep him. Ailinn is a woman of immense charm. What no one wants is for people to fall in love with her to the degree that no equilibrium of hate is re-established. Kevern, on the other hand, even should he somehow succeed in not being wholly detestable, will not inspire devotion. In Kevern the people will have no difficulty recognising their own antithesis.

iii

Black Friday

Demelza has left me. My mistake — though in the course of our final argument she told me I had made more mistakes than she could count — was to leave my diary where she could find it. Unless my mistake was to confide quite so many sexual secrets to its pages.

Wrong again, she said, when I confessed to that. Your mistake was to have had so many sexual secrets.

She says there’s no other man. Do I believe her? No, I do not. My money’s on Kevern ‘Coco’ Cohen. I can’t say I ever did care much for him but now I know him for what he is I suspect he has been scheming to squirm his way between Demelza’s legs all along. The metaphor of the reptile, by the way, is not mine. There was man, there was woman and then there was the all-knowing snake. I can’t be blamed for the theology of that parable when it was they who told it about themselves. Enter knowledge into the paradisal world of love and innocence — in other words enter them with their obscene obsession for knowing everything — and that’s happiness gone for ever. No wonder they shunned the human form and painted abstract robotical horrors.

Well, we thought we’d scorched that particular snake, but here it is again writhing between my wife’s legs. And the crazy thing is that I’ve been instrumental in its rebirth. Had I seen what he was about years ago, before the Wise Ones rewrote the manual, I could have penned a damning report and that would have been that. There were enough clues, God knows. The never saying sorry. The never being out of the library. The furtive tap-turning and hand washing — what was he trying to wash off, I’d ask Demelza. Now it’s clear: his own snake slime. Slime that is now inside my wife. No wonder she was evasive when I tried to talk to her about him. And no wonder, come to think of it, she suffered Credibility Fatigue. I know now just what was fatiguing her.

It’s a good job I am civilised. I count to a hundred. I pat Petroc, pat a couple of students in the same spirit, take out my sketches of St Mordechai’s Mount and remember when my mind was last given over to the contemplation of unsullied loveliness. I have an idea for a new series of watercolours — Eden. The Garden before the introduction of the snake. Just Demelza and I doing as we are told, unaware of our nakedness, alone under the trees, except maybe for Petroc. Speaking of whom, should I not have smelt a rat when he was snarling around Kevern ‘Coco’ Cohen’s feet smelling something worse? ‘Petroc!’ Demelza used to cry, calling him off. ‘Down, Petroc. Naughty boy. Down! I’m so sorry, Mr Cohen.’ Mr Cohen! I’m so sorry, Mr Cohen . I bet she was. Poor Petroc. Disparaged for expressing his nature and keeping us safe from harm.

I wouldn’t put it past him — the snake, not the dog — to have made her offerings of lovespoons. Portraits. Full-length. Top to toe. The pair of them entwined in lime wood. Not exactly likenesses. He doesn’t do likenesses. A likeness is not primitive enough for his depraved aesthetic. They prefer a touch of the ape to show through. But likeness enough to be compromisingly recognisable. Probably shown them to our students, too, while lecturing on the intricacy of their carving — intricate all right! — hoping they would make out Demelza despite the monkey features and scoff at me. Where did they do it? Here, when I was teaching? Or did she go over there on days when she said she needed to do some shopping? On the floor of his workshop, would it have been? On a bed of sawdust? If only I’d been less trusting. I should have smelt her hair when she returned. Should have gone searching for shavings in her underwear drawer. Or better still should have had my way with that wild-haired piece of his while he was otherwise engaged. It must be assumed — forgive the fancy talk: I’m preparing my defence — I must assume that she too is to be numbered among the degenerates, though the flowers she made were beautiful enough. Veering on the odd, as you’d expect, even the macabre, but still close enough to nature to be lovely. So what would she have been like, that bird-woman of his with the hawk face? Sharp claws she’ll have, I bet. A tongue wet with blood and little nibbly teeth. Mandibles — is that the word? Rotten juice and mandibles — who said that? The shitty magma of rotten juice and mandibles . . blah, blah, blah. . ring a bell?. . the passion of the termite . .

. . it must, methinks, have been one of those resurrected samizdat pamphlets from before WHAT HAPPENED that did the rounds of the country’s common rooms not all that long ago, probably as a medical corrective to our periodic recrudescences of unseemly guilt. All very well saying sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry — I have always been at the forefront of the apologising party myself, so long as we aren’t apologising for anything we have actually done — but a little puncturing of the windpipe of our dutifulness is no bad thing, as many of us felt, hence the reappearance of these short samizdatty things, if that’s the right expression, inflammatory trifles, anyway, from those on the front line and who knew the problem of termite infestation for themselves, that brightened our lives for a while before we grew dutiful again.