So he was lying. She didn’t judge him. If anything, it thrilled her to be a silent party to such delinquency. But it explained why he went to such lengths to protect his privacy. No one was ever going to come to so remote a place, so difficult of access, to steal a wardrobe; but what if it wasn’t thieves he feared but, she joked to herself, the Biedermeier police?
Once, although she hadn’t mentioned her suspicions, he explained that property wasn’t the reason he was careful.
‘Careful!’
‘Why, what word would you use?’
‘Obsessive? Compulsive? Disordered?’
He smiled. He was smiling a lot so she shouldn’t take fright. He liked her teasing and didn’t want it to stop.
‘Well, whatever the word, I do what I do because I hate the idea of. . what was that other word you used once, to describe my lack of sexual attack? — invasion.’
‘I didn’t accuse you of lacking sexual attack.’
‘OK.’
‘I truly didn’t. I love the way it is between us.’
‘OK. Invasion, anyway, is a good word to describe what I fear. People thinking they can just burst in here, while I’m out or even while I’m in.’
‘I understand that,’ she said. ‘I am the same.’
‘Are you?’
‘I always locked my bedroom door when I was a little girl. Every time the wind blew or a tree scratched at my window I thought someone was trying to get in. To get back in, actually. To reclaim their space.’
‘I don’t follow. Why their space?’
‘I can’t explain. That was just how I felt. That I had wrongly taken possession of what wasn’t mine.’
There was something temporary about her, Kevern thought. Of no fixed abode. Tomorrow she could be gone.
A great wave of protectiveness — that protectiveness he knew he would feel for her when he first saw her and imagined rolling her in his rug — crashed over him. Unless it was possessiveness. Protectiveness, possessiveness — what difference? He wanted her protected because he wanted her to stay his. ‘Well you don’t have to feel that here,’ he said.
‘And I don’t,’ she said.
He kissed her brow. ‘Good. I want you to feel safe here. I want you to feel it’s yours.’
‘Given the precautions you take,’ she laughed, ‘I couldn’t feel safer. It’s a nice sensation — being barred and gated.’
But she didn’t tell him there was safe and safe. That all the barring and gating couldn’t secure her peace of mind. That she kept seeing the pig auctioneer, for example, who had known both their names.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll keep battening down the hatches.’
She laughed. ‘There’s a contradiction,’ she said, ‘in your saying you want me to think of your home as mine, when you protect it so fiercely.’
‘I’m not protecting it from you. I’m protecting it for you.’
This time she kissed him. ‘That’s gallant of you.’
‘I don’t say it to be gallant.’
‘You like me being here?’
‘I love you being here.’
‘But?’
‘There is no but. It’s not you I’m guarding against. I’ve invited you in. It’s the uninvited I dread. My parents were so terrified of people poking about in their lives that they jumped out of their skins whenever they heard footsteps outside. My father shooed away walkers who came anywhere near the cottage. He’d have cleared them off the cliffs if he could have. I’m the same.’
‘Anyone would think you have something to hide,’ she said skittishly, rubbing her hands down his chest.
He laughed. ‘I do. You.’
‘But you’re not hiding me. People know.’
‘Oh, I’m not hiding you from people.’
‘Then what?’
He thought about it. ‘Danger.’
‘What kind of danger?’
‘Oh, the usual. Death. Disease. Disappointment.’
She hugged her knees like a little girl on an awfully big adventure. In an older man’s bed. ‘The three Ds,’ she said with a little shiver, as though the awfully big adventure might just be a little too big for her.
‘Four, actually. Disgust.’
‘Whose disgust?’
‘I don’t know, just disgust.’
‘You fear I will disgust you?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘You fear you will disgust me?’
‘I didn’t say that either.’
‘Then what are you saying? Disgust isn’t an entity that might creep in through your letter box. It isn’t out there, like some virus, to shut your doors and windows against.’
Wasn’t it?
It was anyway, he acknowledged, a strange word to have hit on. It answered to nothing he felt, or feared he might feel, for Ailinn. Or from Ailinn, come to that. So why had he used it?
He decided to make fun of himself. ‘You know me,’ he said. ‘I fear everything. Abstract nouns particularly. Disgust, despair, vehemence, vicissitude, ambidexterity. And I’m not just worried that they’ll come in through my letter box, but underneath the doors, and down the chimney, and out of the taps and electricity sockets, and in on the bottom of your shoes. . Where are your shoes?’
She shook her head a dozen times, blinding him with her hair, then threw her arms around him. ‘You are the strangest man,’ she said. ‘I love you.’
‘I’m strange! Who is it round here who thinks trees are tapping at the window to reclaim what’s rightfully theirs?’
‘Then we make a good pair of crazies,’ she laughed, kissing his face before he could tell her he had never felt more whatever the opposite of disgust was for anyone in his life.
vi
Disgust.
His parents had once warned him against expressing it. He remembered the occasion. A girl he hadn’t liked had tried to kiss him on the way home from school. It was the style then among the boys to put their fingers down their throats when anything like that happened. Girls, it was important for them to pretend, made them sick, so they put on a dumb show of vomiting whenever one came near. Kevern was still doing it when he encountered his father standing at the door of his workshop, looking for him. He thought his father might be impressed by this expression of his son’s burgeoning manliness. Finger down the throat, ‘Ugh, ugh. .’ Ecce homo!
When he explained why he was doing what he was doing his father slapped him across the face.
‘Don’t you ever!’ he said.
He thought at first that he meant don’t you ever kiss a girl. But it was the finger down the throat, the simulating of disgust he was never to repeat.
His mother, too, when she was told of it, repeated the warning. ‘Disgust is hateful,’ she said. ‘Don’t go near it. Your grandmother, God rest her soul, said that to me and I’m repeating it to you.’