J (26 page)

‘She?’

‘Ha. I’m glad it stings. Yes, she.’

I was the one now who needed to rearrange his features. ‘Shows the importance of this,’ I said.

‘Importance my arse. If importance was the measure they’d have let me get on with it. All it shows is that the nancy boy has friends in high places.’

‘Nancy boy?’

‘You should see his furniture.’

‘If he was a nancy boy you wouldn’t suspect him of doing away with Lowenna Morgenstern?’

‘I don’t. Though he does admit to kissing her.’

‘There you are then,’ I said.

‘There I am then what? A kiss doesn’t prove you’re straight.’

‘I agree. Nor does it prove you’re a killer.’

‘Of course he’s not a killer. He hasn’t got the courage. Or the strength. His crime is hoarding stuff.’

‘What stuff?’ I asked. This made me anxious. I should have known about stuff.

‘I’ve just told you. Nancy-boy stuff. Furniture, books, records, pillowcases, tablecloths. You should see his towels. Silk-edged! You should see his bed. If you’ve been looking after him properly you will have seen his bed. You haven’t? There you are then. Some of us aren’t doing our jobs.’

‘One can do one’s job and not be officious,’ I answered him, officiously.

‘And one can do one’s job and not be efficient. He’s not right. You should know that. He’s not right and his place is not right. And all this pretending to have a girlfriend. If you ask me, his girlfriend is not right either.’

‘Not being right,’ I reminded him, ‘is not your province.’

‘I know that. Except that I have to clean up the consequences of couples being wrong. But if those whose province it is insist on keeping their eyes in their backsides . . .’

‘We go at a different pace, that’s all. We have truth to sieve through. We can’t just go on hunches.’

‘Well, he’s yours again now,’ he said with displeasure, ‘whatever you go on.’

‘There’s just one more thing,’ I said. He turned his face from me. He didn’t care what other things there were. But I had to get an acknowledgement from him. ‘Whatever you saw in his cottage must remain between you and him,’ I said. ‘It’s not public information. And you have to stay away from him. They don’t want him frightened.’

‘What – afraid he’ll run away?’ He tried to find a laugh but failed.

‘He needs not to be startled,’ I said. ‘That’s all. They aren’t playing about with this one. They want him where they can keep an eye on him.’

‘So, it’s as I’ve been saying all along – he’s not right.’

What I said next I said only to appear I knew more than he did. ‘On the contrary – he might be only too right.’

But as soon as I said it I realised I knew more than I knew I knew.

HE SLEPT BADLY.
Knowing someone had been lying on his bed – perhaps even
in
his bed – took from his already small capacity to rest.

But the real reason he slept badly was that Ailinn wasn’t beside him. How quickly he’d come to rely on her being there! How safe, without his realising it, she’d made him feel!

Safety, he thought, could creep up on you as exactly as fear could.

Women sometimes talked of resisting love because it weakened them. Had it weakened him, he wondered, by insinuating safety into his life and seducing him into taking his eye off danger?

He shouldn’t have asked her to move in with him in the first place, but nor should he have asked her to leave. He shouldn’t have been short with her. It wasn’t her fault that he’d deep-kissed Lowenna Morgenstern and brought Detective Inspector Gutkind into his cottage. Except that he knew Lowenna Morgenstern wasn’t to blame either. It was Gutkind who had straightened his rug, he had no doubt of that. It was Gutkind who’d let himself in – while he, Kevern, was away from home, telling strangers to fuck off and hearing voices in Cohentown – Gutkind who’d gone searching through his things. But he wasn’t searching for a blood-stained shirt. That, too, Kevern knew for sure. Gutkind didn’t take him for a murderer. So what
did
Gutkind take him for?

And never mind Gutkind, who was nobody, nothing, just an accident of history – what
was
there to unearth?

He lay on his Ailinnless bed looking up at the ceiling with its low, weevilled beams, and watched the question refuse to take definite form. Like one of those humming patterns in the wallpaper that disturb the nights of feverish children, it twisted and writhed, now coming away from the wallpaper altogether, coming at him, making him wonder if it was truly outside himself at all or merely mimicked in visual form the fragmented evasions of his mind. There were some questions you couldn’t ask, even of yourself. There were some questions you couldn’t begin to mould from the black chaos of ignorance, for fear of what definition would bring. Because – because once you’d framed the question you’d given a half-shape to the answer. Better it stay amorphous on the ceiling, as much a musical sound as a drawn or sculpted form. As much a lost note from an electronic sonata, a jammed keyboard, as a moving blob of paint.

But tonight, without Ailinn to soothe him into forgetfulness, he couldn’t leave it alone. Why, he compelled himself to ask, why this apprehension? Why the years of compulsive letter-box peering? Why the lock-checking?

He knew the psychology. It was displacement, all of it. It stood for something else. But wasn’t it also simply a way of practising? A way of accustoming himself, at the very least, to what was not and never would be under his control?

Was that then all that he’d been waiting for – proof positive that he couldn’t affect, for well or ill, his own outcome?

But did even that explain the persistence of the apprehension? Never mind whether there was or wasn’t something that required an answer, why always this
apprehension
that there was? He felt he needed to hold his head to keep it steady. A clamp would have been a good thing. A brain vice.
Always
was the word that kept slipping in and out.
Always
, because the question itself pre-dated his having to ask it. Why have I
always
been apprehensive? What do I think I’ve done that cries out for reparation? What do I fear I might do again?

He felt he let his mother and father down enunciating it in the silence of this bedroom which had once been their bedroom. Crude of him. Overwrought. Pusillanimous. And maybe even dangerous. Could this have been the very question, maybe the only question, they had all along been educating him never to ask? Could this have been what they who wanted to get in and take a look around had been waiting for all this time, could this have been what Gutkind had been hoping to lay hands on – the question, or rather the capitulation to the need to ask it?
What do I fear I have done
was like a confession of guilt. And it gave away his location. ‘Hey! you who have always suspected someone of something, cast your gaze this way, the someone is me and I am over here. Here, here, come!’

Come and do what?

Take me away
.

Another of his father’s crazed songs came back to him. Something about them carrying him off, ha, ha! All Kevern could remember was that ‘haha’ and his mother putting her hands to her ears and shouting ‘Shut up, Howel!’ Which just made him sing it the more, laughing the laughter of the insanely unamused.

Ha, ha . . .

Whatever Kevern imagined they were expecting to find it was not
A Crazy Person’s History of Defilement, for Use in Schools.
When he counted off incriminating evidence on his fingers his grandmother’s researches didn’t figure. Expunged, the lot of it. For the good of the family. And that meant expunged from Kevern’s knowledge too. Generation after generation, expunging this, expunging that. Truth to tell, he had little left to hide. The first thing he had done on discovering that his rug had been straightened was to rush upstairs to see if any of his father’s possessions had been touched – the Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller records, the books of poetry, the videos of those fast-talking fatalistic comedians his father had loved (never laughing at them, just nodding his head as though at the wisdom of Plato), the small packets of letters – but rationally he knew these would be of interest to no one, except in so far as his keeping them demonstrated a sentimental hankering for heritage. But the silk runner and the Biedermeier furniture already told that story loud and clear. And anyway, a small fine for clinging on to the past couldn’t have been all Gutkind wanted to lay on him.

So why were they sacrosanct to Kevern? And what
did
Gutkind want to lay on him?

‘What do I fear I have done?’ Kevern lay there repeating to himself. It was the wrong question. ‘What do
we
fear
we
have done?’ he should have asked – more than
asked
, demanded to be told – remembering his father’s breakdown, a nervous collapse for which he wouldn’t hear of being treated, in the first place because he didn’t want doctors poking around – a terror that was itself, Kevern thought at the time, a symptom of the breakdown – and secondly because he thought there was nothing any doctor could do as he had inherited the propensity from his own father. ‘Let’s just hope,’ he recalled the old man saying from his bed, ‘that it will die out with me and we haven’t passed it on to you.’

Kevern didn’t understand. Hadn’t his grandfather, of whom he knew next to nothing, suffered his breakdown after the disappearance of his wife, Kevern’s grandmother Jenna, of whom Kevern also knew next to nothing except that one elusive fact – that she’d gone out of the cottage and never returned? Who wouldn’t suffer a breakdown after that? In which case there was no genetic disposition to this illness in the family, unless there was a genetic disposition on the part of the womenfolk to disappear.

‘A witty distinction,’ his father acknowledged, ‘but that’s your mother’s father you’re thinking of, so there’s nothing genetically I could have inherited from him anyway.’

‘What propensity then do you think you inherited from your own?’ Kevern asked.

‘The propensity to terror, but not, I am ashamed to say, the propensity to courage in the face of it. Nor, come to that, though this is not something I would wish you to have known about me before – but now it doesn’t matter, now nothing matters – the propensity to loyalty.’

Kevern asked him what he meant, but he would say no more.

A disloyal coward, then. Well Kevern could enter sympathetically into that. How much loyalty would he show, if ever put to the test? How much resolution in the face of fear, pain, suspicion? When he locked and double-locked his door, wasn’t he double-locking himself against faint-heartedness? But it hardly helped to know this. Whatever evidence Gutkind had been hunting for, it surely wasn’t evidence of Kevern’s inherited feebleness of character.

Then he remembered that just before he died his father grabbed his sleeve and, knocking over the candle that provided the only light he could bear, begged distractedly for his dog.

‘You have no dog,’ Kevern said.

‘You don’t have to lie to me,’ his father said.

Kevern wondered if that meant his father wanted him to lie to him. But he couldn’t produce a dog. He could tell him his dog had died, but where would be the kindness in that? ‘You have had no dog for a long time,’ he decided to say instead.

His father nodded, seeming to remember. ‘Mr Bo
angles’ – he summoned the strength to cross the
, as though for the final time – ‘grieved for his dog for twenty years. I’ve grieved longer.’