Rupert Thomson - The Insult

One day I was standing in the kitchen by myself when a cup dropped from my hands. It landed on the floor and didn’t break, it just rolled about, and suddenly I found that I was laughing. I didn’t know why I was laughing, but it was very funny and I couldn’t stop. I laughed so hard, my stomach ached, and I didn’t even know the cause of it. If anyone had seen me then, they would have thought I’d lost my mind. But maybe that wouldn’t have been such a surprise, not when you looked at the rest of the family.

The baby, a girl, was born in the early hours of a December morning. Outside, it was dark and cold, sleet falling silently, slanting behind the black glass of the bedroom window. It was an easy birth. The contractions started just after midnight. By dawn both mother and child were sleeping peacefully.

During the first few days Karin couldn’t seem to decide what she felt about the baby. One moment she’d be bending over it, holding it against her breast and soothing it, the way any mother would; then she’d remember who the father was and how the baby had been conceived, and she’d push it away. At the end of the month, when the time came for the baby to be christened, she told me I could call it whatever I liked. Call it whatever you like — this was exactly what I’d said to Kroner sixteen years before. Some families are condemned to repeat themselves, it seems, old tragedies giving birth to new ones. I suggested Nina, after my father’s mother. When Karin heard the name, she laughed harshly and said, ‘Why? Was she born of a halfwit, too?’ The next time I looked at her, her cheek had reddened where I’d slapped it.

She was still frightened of Mazey and what he might do. She wouldn’t eat at the same table or sleep under the same roof. Under no circumstances would she let him touch the baby. She carried on living at my father’s house, partly to avoid Mazey, but also, I thought, because she felt embarrassed and ashamed. Everyone in the village had heard that she’d had a baby, but no one knew who the father was. Rumours started flying. People don’t like to be left out, and that’s one way of getting revenge. There was a lot of mocking talk about a virgin birth. Not that my father noticed. He was almost eighty by then, so silent and so withdrawn that it seemed possible that Mazey’s inability to speak wasn’t a defect at all but a trait, inherited from him, along with a love of whittling. And besides, he’d always liked having Karin there. Apart from anything else, she could keep an eye on his progress with the dovecote. He was experimenting with lead weights, using them as ballast in the base of the tower. He only hoped he’d live long enough to finish it.

When she told him that the baby girl was going to be christened Nina, after his own mother, he turned away from her, his eyes watering, a man whose life had been empty of consideration for so long that he could now be moved by it. Of course he knew she wasn’t happy, but he chose to ignore it. He understood about forgetting; he’d done it himself half a century before. In the evenings they sat together on the porch, the sun setting behind the trees, bats flickering in the dark air of the yard. I don’t know what they talked about, or even if they talked at all, but they seemed to find solace in each other’s company. She wanted to distance herself from what had happened — her baby was reminder enough; she didn’t need any more reminding than that — and staying in the woods outside the village was distance of a sort, though Mazey would still appear from time to time. The house had been his home for most of his life, and was embedded in his memory. When he went walking, it was a station on his way, just as Miss Poppel’s garden used to be. So Karin lived in an almost permanent state of dread. If a twig snapped, for example, or the leaves rustled, or if there were footsteps on the track, she’d call her grandfather, or else she’d snatch her baby up and run back into the house. In her dreams the man with orange hair would come and take her away in his fast car. But the man with orange hair did not come. Jan Salenko came instead. Jan Salenko, the mechanic’s son.

Something I noticed early on was Mazey’s quiet obsession with the child. He had never showed much interest in Karin when she was born; he’d been too busy with his wind-chimes and his pen-knife. With Nina it was different. Whenever he found himself in the same room, which wasn’t often, his eyes didn’t stray from her, not for a moment. He didn’t try and touch her. If anything, he kept away, standing against the wall or over by the window. He seemed content just so long as he could watch. I wondered if there might be a part of him that understood he’d fathered her.

Once, while Karin was visiting the doctor, she left Nina in my care and I let Mazey pick her up. Perhaps it was a mistake, but somehow I couldn’t refuse him. He took the baby in his hands as if she was made of glass and held her in a shaft of sunlight. When Nina blinked, he touched her eyelashes gently with his fingers, and he had a way of clicking his tongue that seemed to fascinate her. Later, though, she started crying, and that frightened him. I didn’t see it in his eyes, but it was there, I felt it, his panic bent the air between us, and then I saw him put his hand over her face. If I hadn’t taken Nina away from him, he would’ve smothered her. I didn’t mention it to Karin when she came home.

There was another time. I was driving back towards the village one evening in April when I saw a girl running along the road ahead of me. She was wearing a nightdress and she had nothing on her feet. Only as I passed the girl did I realise she was my daughter. I stopped the car. Karin clung to the open window, panting.

‘Nina’s gone. He’s taken her.’

I reached across and pushed the door open. ‘Come on, get in. We can’t have people seeing you like this.’

She sat beside me in the car. Her face was orange in the light of the setting sun. Black, too, where she had tried to wipe away the tears. ‘If he does anything to her —’

‘He won’t do anything,’ I said. ‘He loves her.’ Though I remembered that huge hand of his descending, and all of a sudden I wasn’t sure.

‘Love? What does someone like him know about love?’

‘Haven’t you noticed the way he looks at her?’

Karin turned to me. ‘You never did care about me, did you? You always cared about him more.’ When I didn’t answer her, she said, ‘I think you wanted this to happen.’

I wasn’t certain what she meant by that. We crossed the narrow bridge into the village.

‘I think maybe you even planned it,’ she said.

I shook my head. ‘You’re all worked up about nothing.’

When we reached the hotel, Karin opened the door and ran into the house. There was no sign of Mazey in any of the rooms. Then, through the kitchen window, I heard a child’s laughter.

‘Did you hear that?’ I said.

Karin was already disappearing through the back door. I followed her across the car-park and down the steps to the pool. At first I couldn’t see anything. It was a cool evening, and steam rose off the water in white, swirling clouds. Then the shape of a man emerged: Mazey. He was holding Nina over the water. Dipping her feet in it, lifting her clear, then dipping her feet again. She was laughing.

I watched as Karin ran round the edge of the pool. Mazey was watching her as well, with Nina still suspended in mid-air. I thought for a moment that he might drop her in alarm. But then Karin snatched her from him and turned away, muttering into her hair. Mazey had surrendered the baby with such calmness, such a lack of comprehension that Karin appeared to be the one who was in the wrong. Her violence seemed exaggerated. Her relief, too. Suddenly, she annoyed me.