Rupert Thomson - The Insult

I couldn’t get over the feeling that I’d been robbed, somehow, or cheated. Partly it was Kroner himself: the joy he took in the child, the holy face he had when he looked down at her, the lightness in his step — I was sickened by it just as I’d been sickened by the flowers. There were days when he seemed to be looking at me with a kind of crafty pleasure, as if he’d slipped something past me. He’d married me. I’d had his child. He’d got his own way all along, and I was too exhausted to do anything about it.

I was just settling into my chair on the back porch one morning when I heard the sound of an engine in low gear. I couldn’t think who might be visiting — I didn’t have many friends — and though I didn’t feel like company, I was curious to see whose car appeared in the clearing. It was Karl’s, but Eva was driving and she was alone. I watched her open the door. She was wearing a loose blue dress and a pair of bedroom slippers. As she turned towards the house, I saw the bruising on her cheek and around her eye, and then I knew why she had come.

We sat on the porch all morning drinking sweet black coffee. I smoked one of her cigarettes, my first for more than a year, which made the world glass over. She noticed the cushions I’d arranged beneath me.

‘Does it still hurt?’

I nodded.

‘After I had Thomas,’ she said, ‘they sewed me up too tight. They had to cut me open again.’

‘Eva.’

‘Sorry.’ She threw her cigarette into the yard.

She told me Karl had started drinking in the mornings. He had a few before he went out, and by the time he came home at night he was so loud the roof seemed to jump right off the house. The children were frightened. Even the guests were frightened. She tried to smile, but it hurt. I watched her carefully. Her left eye looked like the letter e if you typed it on the hotel typewriter and then went back and typed another e on top of it. She was still talking about Karl. She wondered if I could speak to him. He was my brother, after all. She couldn’t think who else to ask.

I didn’t think it was right of Karl, hitting her like that, but at the same time, knowing him as I did, I could see how she might have driven him to it. Her hair was dry and split, and her skin was turning spongy. There was a slackness about her, a lack of energy, that I knew would infuriate him. He would want to take hold of her and shake her. Wring her out.

‘There’s no point me talking to him,’ I said.

‘Why not?’

‘He doesn’t listen to me. He never has.’

Sighing, Eva lit another cigarette. She looked greedy when she smoked; it was the way her lips reached out for the filter, as if they couldn’t wait to draw the smoke from it.

‘What about your husband?’ she said.

That evening I spoke to Kroner. He knew Karl through his father and the wine business. I persuaded him to have a drink with Karl, though I told him I didn’t think it would do much good.

‘Just try,’ I said. ‘For Eva’s sake.’

Three nights later the door burst open and Kroner stood in the middle of the room, his face more grazed than usual, his clothes dishevelled. He was shouting.

‘He broke my tooth. He broke my fucking tooth.’

The baby started crying.

Kroner touched one hand against his mouth, then took it away and looked at it. ‘Your family,’ he shouted. ‘Your fucking family —’

‘My father’s in the next room —’

‘You, your brother, your crazy fucking child …’ He was circling the room, first one way, then the other. He kept touching his mouth and looking at his hand. There wasn’t much to see. ‘I don’t know why I got into this. I don’t have the first idea …’

I looked at the baby’s hard, curved tongue. I thought of feeding her, but her blunt gums hurt my breasts.

‘I don’t — I just don’t have the first fucking idea —’

‘Nor do I,’ I said in a quiet voice.

He heard me, though, and suddenly his hands flew up into the air and his face creased above his eyebrows, through his chin. ‘Don’t say that, Edith.’

I stared at the window. It had begun to rain.

‘I didn’t mean it,’ Kroner was saying. ‘He hit me, that’s all. Your brother.’

‘Let’s have a look at it.’

He knelt on the floor and lifted his lip. He showed me the tooth.

‘It’s chipped,’ I told him, ‘nothing more. It’ll give you character.’

He looked up at me and the way he looked then, just for a moment, even with the child crying and the rain crawling down the window, I knew why I’d allowed it all to happen.

Winter lasted longer than usual that year, and even in April we had sleet driving almost horizontally across the land, the wind tearing out of the north-east and cutting through your clothes as if they weren’t there. One morning that month I came back from the village to find both Kroner and Mazey gone. They rarely went anywhere together; I couldn’t think where they might be. But the moment I noticed tyre tracks in the yard I guessed.

It was afternoon before Kroner returned, and he returned alone. He was trying to keep his eyes steady as he stepped down out of the truck and saw me waiting outside the back door. He did a poor imitation of a man with right on his side.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I did it.’

‘Did what?’

‘The boy …’ He stood in the mud, one hand outstretched, as if the truth was self-evident.

It was — but I wasn’t about to put it into words for him. I shifted his child higher in my arms. The inside of my head was scorched, charred; I couldn’t have spoken if I’d wanted to.

‘I thought we agreed,’ he said, taking one step towards me. And then, bristling, ‘I’ve done you a favour and that’s all the thanks I get?’

I turned and ran into the barn and snatched a skinning knife down from the wall. Then out into the yard again, the child still in my arms.

Kroner was standing where I’d left him, but all his righteousness, and all the indignation that had followed it, had fled. Just those small, square hands spread in the air and his chin at an angle, justifying. Like most men, he could be hypnotised by sudden, unexpected movement.

My head was black inside, all black. I held the knife just below my jaw, which was the same height as Kroner’s heart.

‘Give me the keys to the truck.’

His Adam’s apple plunged, then climbed again. ‘Not with the child here, Edith. Not with the —’

‘Give me the keys.’

He reached into his pocket. Took the keys out, handed them to me. His eyes were still running backwards and forwards between the aimed blade and my face.

I pushed the child at him and left.

I drove the forty-five kilometres with the knife lying beside me on the seat. It was a cold day, with snow at the edges of the road. Everything was grey: the sky, the trees, the fields. I saw a fire burning in the land behind a house. I couldn’t believe how orange it was; it was the only real colour anywhere.

Kroner had talked to me the week before, when Mazey and my father were asleep. I was tired that night; I couldn’t remember much of what he’d said. He never could say things straight out, anyway. He had to come at you round corners. The long and the short of it was, he’d tried to love the boy; he’d tried, and failed. I thought he should try harder.

Kroner shook his head. ‘He doesn’t belong with us, not now we’ve got a child of our own.’

‘Where do you think he belongs? With the Poppels?’ I laughed scornfully.

‘We’ve got our own family now. It’s just not natural.’

‘Nobody said it was natural. It’s how it is, that’s all.’

Kroner shook his head again. I hadn’t listened. I hadn’t understood. And so he’d been forced to act without me, on my behalf.