Howard Jacobson: J

Just go for the walk, Ailinn had said. Just go for the exercise. See someone who isn’t me. ‘There isn’t someone who isn’t you,’ he’d said. Whereupon she’d pushed him out of the cottage.

He meant what he’d said. There wasn’t anyone who wasn’t her, and if there were he didn’t want to see them. And even she, since she’d become the bearer of bad news, was not always a welcome sight to him now.

But most of all he hadn’t gone out because he hadn’t wanted to be seen.

Was that because he believed he suddenly looked different? No. He trusted he looked exactly the same: the man he had always been, in decline as he had always been. The difference today was that he understood what they’d seen when they’d looked at him in the past.

He exchanged stiff greetings with people he barely knew. He had lived here all his life, in a village of fewer than two thousand souls, and yet there were still people who were lifetime residents themselves whose names he didn’t know. His parents had taught him well in one regard. Remain a stranger to the place, they had said. Say nothing. Ask for nothing. Explain yourself to no one. But they had also cautioned him to go unnoticed, and in that he could scarcely have fared worse. Everyone knew who he was — Kevern ‘Coco’ Cohen, the man with the sour expression who sat on his own bench above the blowhole, saying nothing, asking for nothing, explaining himself to no one.

And now here was Hedra Deitch, coming out from behind her counter to look him up and down, surveying him in that hungry way of hers, wondering if he’d do for whatever her itchy nature needed at that moment, something or other that her shot-beast of a husband couldn’t provide. Shame he wasn’t an artist. He’d have provided it and painted her later.

But why the congratulations? Was she being sarcastic, welcoming him to a knowledge of himself the whole village had possessed for years? Was she applauding his cottoning on finally — Kevern, the last to know about Kevern?

‘Don’t be like what?’ he said.

She put one hand on her hip, as though to answer his coquettishness. ‘Don’t be pretending you aren’t proud.’

He was not a man who ever asked people what they meant. He would rather puzzle over their words for months, and still not get to the bottom of their meaning, than ask them for a simple explanation. Did he not want to know or could he not bear to appear uncomprehending? This was a time to wonder whether he’d ever in his whole life understood a word that had been said to him. Clearly he hadn’t ever understood his parents. Could it be that he had missed the point of what Ailinn had been saying to him too?

If only. .

But when the news was bad. . then he understood.

And Hedra? He prepared his face to pretend to get her meaning — a half-smile and a philosophic widening of the eyes that would cover every eventuality: from a declaration of undying to love to news that she had a terminal disease.

‘I’m not pretending anything,’ he said. ‘And I’m certainly not pretending I’m not proud. I have nothing to be proud about.’

She moved a step closer. Was she about to kiss him? Then be proud of this, my lover . .

Funny how often, for a man who didn’t consider himself lovable, he thought a woman was about to kiss him. Was it hope? Was it dread? Or did he think of himself as the unsmiling princess, waiting to be kissed back into warm life by a frog?

‘I don’t reckon your missus would be pleased to hear you got nothing to be proud about,’ Hedra said.

He increased his half-smile to a three-quarter smile and opened his eyes a little wider. ‘My missus. .? What’s Ailinn got to do with this?’

It was then she made a cradling motion with her arms, beaming like the Virgin Mary, rocking a little one to sleep.

‘Come on!’ she taunted him. ‘You don’t have to be coy with me. I know you’re proud. Daddy!’

There, in the middle of the shop, with people watching, he snogged her brutally.

ii

Ailinn barely recognised him when he returned.

‘My God, what’s happened?’ she said.

He felt that his face had grown to twice its length. He couldn’t bear the weight of his jaw or control the movement of his tongue. He pointed to it. I have no words, the gesture meant. There are no words. .

She put her arms around him and he remained enfolded in them. But he was unresponsive. This wasn’t the first time she had held him, drained of life, but never before had she felt she couldn’t at least thaw him back to something like good humour.

She made him tea which he drank without waiting for it to cool, almost in a single gulp.

‘You are carrying our baby,’ he finally said.

Now it was she who couldn’t speak.

He waited for her to drink her tea. She could take all the time she liked. Time was not their problem. Then, looking beyond her, he repeated his words, without anger, without feeling. ‘You are carrying our baby.’

‘How do you know?’

‘It’s the talk of the village.’

She didn’t believe that. The village had better things to talk about.

‘What do you mean?’ she asked. ‘What do you actually mean?’

‘I mean that it’s known in the village that you are carrying our baby. I presume it’s ours.’

‘That’s a low blow,’ she said quietly.

‘Yes. It’s a low blow.’

Among the thousand things that hurt her at this moment was the knowledge that he wasn’t looking for reassurance and so there was nothing she could reassure him with — not tenderness, not devotion, nothing. Yes, it was his baby, and that only made it worse. There would not now be a moment when suspicion could dissolve in mutual delight. That joy was lost to them.

‘It isn’t just,’ he said, ‘that the village knows before I do.’

‘I understand. I’m sorry. I have told no one.’

‘No one?’

‘I have told no one in the village.’

‘Which means you have told someone?’

‘Yes.’

It wasn’t necessary for either of them to speak the person’s name.

‘And it isn’t just that either,’ he said. ‘Though that is no small thing.’

‘I know. I am so very sorry.’

He was listening to the logic of his thoughts, not the progress of her apology.

‘We had an understanding.’

‘I know we did, darling.’

‘We had an understanding that no child would “come along” to surprise either of us. We both, I thought, were taking the necessary precautions.’

She wondered whether she should remind him that accidents happen, that no precaution was ever foolproof, but she couldn’t bear even to essay a lie. ‘We were,’ she said.

‘And then you weren’t. .’

She could find no extenuating explanation. ‘. . And then I wasn’t.’

‘Did you think I would come round eventually ?’

She heard the banality, heard how insulting to him it was to think it, but yes, she had thought precisely that. He would come round . . At the far reaches of sanity she still thought it.

‘I hoped.’

‘And you didn’t discuss it with me why . .?’

She said nothing.

‘Given your hope for me eventually,’ he persisted, ‘why didn’t you at least try me initially?’

There was no way back from this. ‘I couldn’t risk it.’

‘Couldn’t risk my saying no?’

‘Exactly.’

‘The risk being?’

In a gesture of desperation, she ran her hand through her hair. He could hear it crackle. He used to love stirring up an electrical storm in her hair. Combing it through with his fingers and watching the sparks fly. Now it was a site of desolation. Her desperation was more than he could bear. He thought his chest would break apart — not for himself, for her. For himself he felt only sullen anger. It was dark, where he was. A black corner of stoppered fury. But it was worse for her. He was that kind of a man: he thought everything was worse for a woman. Especially a woman he loved. Was that a form of contempt? He didn’t know. He simply thought the pain for her was greater, perhaps because for her there was still hope mixed up in it. And there wasn’t for him. He had flattened out; there was nothing now he could reasonably hope for. Only her to be all right, not to suffer, and she was distraught beyond the point of help.