Howard Jacobson: J

Saying sorry, Grossenberger concluded, when he came to address the Bethesda Academy recently — an old man now, but still possessed of his silky powers of reasoning — releases us all from a recriminatory past into an unimpeachable future. We stood and applauded that, not least as it struck us that he was delivering a last eulogy to his own distinguished, emollient career. But if you ask me whether Kevern Cohen stood along with the rest of us, I have to say I don’t recall his being present.

I make nothing of it. He might indeed be a man who is so equable of temper that the idea of apology mystifies him. Or he might not yet have got past the ‘never forget’ stage in his own life. Let us hope that the latter is not the case and agree simply that he’s a queer one. ‘I find him weird,’ my wife said only the other day, after we’d had him over for dinner. ‘With those droopy eyes and all that hand washing and tap checking. It’s like having What’s-he-called over.’

‘Lady Macbeth?’

‘I said he .’

‘Pontius Pilate?’

‘Yes.’

‘As in that fine Dürer—’

‘Spare me the lecture, Phinny. Him, yes. But if he’s like this in our house, what must he be like in his own?’

‘Pontius Pilate?’

‘Kevern, you fool.’

‘Worse, I don’t doubt. Much worse.’

‘What I don’t understand is how he knows when to stop. While he was helping with the washing-up he kept wandering over to the stove to make sure the gas was off. “I’ve checked that,” I told him, but he said he feared he might have brushed against the taps when he was drying up and it was better to be safe than sorry. But at what point does he decide it’s safe?’

‘You should have asked him.’

‘I did. But his answer was unilluminating. “Never,” he said.’

‘Never?’

‘Never. Isn’t that terrible?’

‘Yes. But he has to stop sometimes. The man sleeps, for God’s sake.’

‘I asked him about that, too. Presumably you sleep, I said. So when do you call it a day? At what point are you able to close your eyes? And his answer to that was more unilluminating still. “When I can’t stand it any more,” he said. And how do you know when that is, I asked. “I just know,” he said.’

‘Maybe it’s when he gets tired. He has the air of a man who tires easily. Men do, you know.’

This irritated her. ‘And women don’t?’

Which irritated me. ‘Of course they do, but we aren’t talking about women,’ I snapped. ‘Or about you.’

We stared angrily into each other’s faces.

Why did she, I thought, have to bring her sex into everything?

Why did I, I saw her thinking, have to be so critical of her?

Why were her eyes, I thought, so quick to water up?

Why were mine, I knew she thought, so quickly fierce?

Why did I marry her, I wondered. What had I ever seen in that pallid skin and impertinently, stupidly, retroussé little nose? How could I stop myself, I wondered, from striking her?

Why did she accept me, the witterer I was, I heard her ask herself. How had she let those ugly crossed teeth of mine ever nibble at her breasts? Why had she ever allowed any part of me to come near any part of her? How much more would it take for her to strike me?

I slunk away.

She followed me into my studio.

I wondered if she was carrying a knife from the kitchen. The carver she’d recently had sharpened. I closed my eyes.

‘I’m sorry, Phinny,’ I heard her say.

I turned around abruptly. She started. Was she afraid of what I might be carrying? A trimming knife? My razor? A hammer?

‘Me too, Demelza,’ I said.

We were both sorry, and made love whimpering how sorry we were into each other’s ears. I kissed her lovely little nose. She gave me her breast to nibble. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry for what, exactly? Neither of us knew. But without doubt a baseless irascibility had begun to be a fact of our marriage. Had we fallen out of love? I didn’t think so. Friends of ours were reporting the same. A querulousness that appeared suddenly from nowhere and vanished just as inexplicably, though each time the period it took for lovingness to return extended itself a little more. We had a formulation for it: things just seemed to be getting on top of us. But why? Why, when we lacked for nothing, when beauty accompanied us wherever we went, when every source of discord had been removed?

It was shortly after this particular exchange of unpleasantries, anyway, that the file code for Kevern Cohen changed from grey to purple. Purple isn’t vermilion. We weren’t in danger territory. But others, I was now to understand, were reliant on what I knew as a sort of confirmation, let’s even say — to be plain about it — as a cognitive intensification, of what they knew or didn’t know themselves. Kevern Cohen was becoming a precious commodity.

i

IT WAS AILINN who had been ringing him. Against her own instincts. But in line with her companion’s, though her companion thought she could go a little further and actually leave a message. ‘Even just a hello,’ she said.

‘When you know me better, Ez,’ Ailinn told her, ‘you will discover I am not the sort of woman who leaves hellos on men’s phones. They pick up or they lose me.’

‘And when you know me better,’ Ez told her, ‘you will discover I am not the sort of woman to egg people on to do what they don’t want to do. But this is different. You aren’t yourself. I’ve never seen you so down in the mouth.’

‘That’s because you haven’t seen me often. Down in the mouth is not what I do, it’s who I am.’

‘That isn’t true. You were hopeful when you met him. You said you thought you might just have met your soulmate.’

‘I did not!’

‘Well you said you thought you’d met someone you could possibly get on with.’

‘I think that’s rather different.’

Brittle-boned and careful with herself, a woman who seemed to Ailinn to quiver with mutuality, Ez leaned in very close. ‘Not for you it isn’t,’ she said, as though the strain for Ailinn of being Ailinn was sometimes more than she could bear for her. ‘A man has to be your soulmate before you’ll give him the time of day.’

Ailinn raised an eyebrow. She and Ez were not well enough acquainted, she thought, to be having this conversation. She wasn’t sure they were well enough acquainted for Ez to be bringing her tea in bed, fluffing up her pillows and patting her hand either, but she put that down to the older woman’s loneliness. And consideration, of course. But offering to know so much about the kind of person Ailinn was, her ways with men, what made her happy, when she was and wasn’t herself , the errands on which she sent her soul, for God’s sake — all that seemed to her, however kindly it was meant, to be a presumption too far.

She wasn’t angry. Ez didn’t strike her as someone who would go through her clothes, or read her letters, or otherwise poke about in her life. She was pretty sure she wouldn’t, for example, dream of ringing Kevern to tell him what she’d just told Ailinn. And besides, an older woman could be permitted a few liberties a younger one could not. Wasn’t that their unspoken contract — that Ez needed the company of someone who could be almost as a child to her, and Ailinn. . well she surely didn’t need another mother, but all right, someone who could be what she’d never had, an older sister, an aunt, a good friend? Yet even allowing for all that, there was an anxious soulfulness about Ez, a taut emotional avidity that made Ailinn the smallest bit uncomfortable. Why was she sitting on the end of the bed, her body twisted towards Ailinn as though in an act of imploration, her eyes moist with woman-to-woman understanding, the phone in her hand? What in the end did it matter to Ez whether or not she left the village woodturner a message?