Howard Jacobson: J

‘The risk,’ she said, reading his thoughts, ‘was that you would express your refusal so vehemently that there would be no going back from it.’

‘And then?’

‘And then we would lose the future I wanted for us.’

‘The future you wanted for us, or others wanted for us?’

‘Both.’

‘But the future you wanted for us was once the future I wanted for us, and that didn’t include — Ailinn, as I recall it positively excluded — a child.’

She hung her head. ‘It did.’

‘So what changed?’

‘ I changed.’ It wasn’t a good enough answer. She heard its inadequacy hang in the air between them, the way a lie can be detected on a phone line, in a crackle of silence.

‘This baby,’ he said — and in that phrase she heard his final disowning of it — ‘it isn’t just any baby, is it?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘You do. It isn’t just a future for you and me, is it? It’s the future.’

‘Is that so terrible?’

‘Yes, if that means what I think it means.’

‘Well it’s your choice of words, Kevern.’

‘But not my choice of future.’

‘And what’s your choice of future? To die out?’

‘I’ve died out.’

That was the moment, with a clarity and sadness that all but made her poor arrhythmic heart stop, when she saw her life without him. ‘Well I haven’t,’ she said.

There was, to the dismay of both of them, vigour in it.

Kevern remembered the box his father had made him promise he would open only in the event of his being about to be a father himself. He was sure he knew what it would contain. The word DON’T. But he didn’t open it to find out.

iii

They did have one last conversation. He begged for it. A final night wrapped around each other.

‘It promised so much,’ he said, waiting for the dawn to break. ‘We promised each other so much.’

She’d been over it and over it with him. Didn’t this promise so much?

She could have killed him — would have killed him had she not cared deeply for him — so perverse were the words he chose. What was she offering him if not a future? What was she carrying if not promise?

‘What was our promise?’ she asked him. Not looking any longer for a fight. Just wanting to hear him say it. One more time. What would it have been?

‘The promise of not knowing what it would be,’ he said.

‘Kevern, that’s just a riddle.’

‘Ah, then. .’

They said nothing for another hour, simply held on to each other. But she was not prepared to give up without a fight, no matter that the fight was lost. She had told him all there was to know, all that she knew anyway. But she still wanted him to see he didn’t have to commit as she was committed. Couldn’t he come along for the ride? Be her consort? Look on from the sidelines. .

‘At the misery you’re preparing for our child?’

She wouldn’t let him get away with that. ‘You can’t have it both ways,’ she said. ‘You can’t disown the child and call it yours.’

Was she right? He lay, listening to the quivering of her atria. Would she bequeath the child her troubled heart, he wondered. If she did, she did. Better that than what he had to bequeath.

‘I’m simply saying you could stay out of whatever you want to stay out of.’

All of it, he thought. But he said, more gently, ‘That being?’

‘The politics.’

‘The politics?’

‘The journey. .’

‘Oh come on, Ailinn. I never expected that of you. Journey , for Christ’s sake.’

‘Then what word would you use?’

‘I wouldn’t. But I’ll give you “mission” if you must have a word. A misguided mission to change what can never change. And actually, you know, it’s even worse than that. It’s a mission to repeat what should never be repeated.’

‘And why are you so sure it will be repeated?’

‘Because that’s the law of it. Your heart, my love, is a live, tumultuous thing. Most human hearts are stone. And the immutable law I speak of is engraved on all of them.’

‘You let them win once you decide it’s immutable.’

‘They have won already. They won a long time ago.’

‘We could do so much to change this.’

‘I don’t want to change this. I want it to go on being. It’s the only vengeance we have left — our refusal to stay around. Hand them the victory, I say, and let them see how empty it is.’

‘And that’s the future you say you promised me?’

‘I thought it was the future we promised each other.’

‘Don’t you see how empty that would be for us too?’

He thought about it. For a long time, stretched out beside her, lying on her shoulder, bringing her on to his, kissing her face, her ears, her eyes, he thought about it. It was morning when he spoke. ‘At least it would have been an emptiness of our deciding,’ he said.

She was back in Paradise Valley by the time he rose. He breathed gently on the vase of paper flowers she had brought him as her moving-in present, barely daring to touch them, then he walked out on to the cliffs. He looked down into the great mouth of the blowhole. It was sucking so hard he needed to stand back from the edge. He felt it could reach up and gulp him down whole, like Hedra Deitch subjecting him to one of her snogging kisses.

But he didn’t have to submit, even to Hedra. A life was owned by the person who lived it, he believed. What happened didn’t always happen because you wanted it to, but what you made of it was your responsibility. Help there was little and gods there were none. We are the authors of our own consequences, if not always of our own actions.

The credo of a serious man. You could be too serious, he didn’t doubt that. But his birthright was his birthright. No one can make me, he thought, feeling the spray on his cheeks.

Though even that turned out not to be entirely true. Distinct from the sucking of the sea and the screaming of the gulls he heard his mother calling to him. Her old, frayed, faint, reproachful cry.

‘Key-vern. . Key-vern. .’

He put his ear to the wind. He had always been a good boy. When your mother called. .

‘Key-vern,’ she called again.

He smiled to hear her voice.

‘What is it, Ma?’

‘ ump,’ he heard her say.

Not feeling he should make her say it twice, he put his fingers to his lips, as though blowing her a kiss, and umped.

Ailinn felt her heart crash into her chest. Esme Nussbaum heard it from the other end of the room and turned to look. She scowled.

They both knew.

‘This is not a good way to start,’ Ailinn said, ‘with anger between us.’

‘On the contrary,’ Esme said, ‘this is the best possible way to start.’