He wondered if she overdid the retrospective panic. If she overdramatised herself. Like him. ‘A thousand years is a long time to have been hunted by a one-legged nut, Ailinn.’
‘You can make fun of me if you like. I know how crazy it must sound. But it’s as though it’s not just me, as I am now, or as I was the day before yesterday, who’s always running. It’s an earlier me. Don’t laugh. You’re just as barmy in your own way. But it feels like a sort of predestiny — as though I was born in flight. Which I suppose I could have been. It’s a pity my real parents aren’t around to ask.’
Yes, she overwrote her story. But he loved her. Maybe overloved her. ‘We could try to find them,’ he said.
‘Don’t be banal,’ she came back sharply, thinking she would have to watch his solicitousness.
He shrank from her asperity. But he had one more question. What he feared when he knelt to check his letter box for the umpteenth time had no features. No person rose up before him. He could weigh the reason for his precautions but he could not picture it. She, though, had Ahab. Was that a way of speaking or did she actually see the man? ‘Is he Ahab in the flesh that’s coming for you—’
‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Did I say he was “coming for me”? Sounds a bit like waiting for Mairead and Hendrie, doesn’t it? Was I waiting for them to “come for me”? You must think my psychology is pathetic, alternating hopes and terrors based on puns—’
‘I don’t,’ he said, afraid that they had begun to judge each other. ‘Your psychology is your psychology, therefore I love it. But all I was going to ask was whether Ahab is a generalised idea for you or you actually picture him coming at you with his lampoon.’
‘Lampoon?’
‘Slip of the tongue. You’ve been making me nervous. Harpoon.’
She stared at him. ‘You call that a slip?’
‘Why, what would you call it?’
‘A searchlight into your soul.’
He looked annoyed. ‘I let you off your pun,’ he said.
She kissed him. ‘Yes, you did. But we aren’t in a competition, are we, and I’m not making fun of you. It’s just that this slip is so you.’
‘How so?’
‘Well, it’s your fear of mockery, isn’t it. Your fear of anyone knowing you well enough to poke fun at you.’
She had him here. He had only to deny the justice of the charge to prove it. Touchy? Me?
She had him another way too. Wasn’t he her mentor in the matter of a sense of humour? Hadn’t he, when she’d been upset with him for teasing her about her thick ankles, lectured her about the nature of a joke? So how much easier-going was he when the joke was on him?
They were in this together, it seemed to her. Skin as fine as parchment, the pair of them. Pride a pin could prick. Hearts that burst when either looked with love at the other.
He could see what she was thinking but decided to be flattered that she offered to penetrate him so deeply. It proved she found him interesting and cared about him.
He excused himself to take a shower. Though he showered frequently, the sounds he made the moment he turned on the water — groans of release (or was it remission?), sighs of deliverance, gaspings deep enough, she feared, to shake his heart out of his chest — suggested it was either the first shower he had ever experienced or the last he would ever enjoy. She had wondered, at the beginning, whether it were some private sexual ritual, demeaning to her, but later she would sometimes shower with him and he made exactly the same noises then. She couldn’t explain it to herself. A shower was just a shower. Why the magnitude of his surrender to it? It could have been his death, so thunderous were his exhalations. Or it could have been his birth.
She was relieved when he stepped back out into the bedroom, dripping like a seal. He appeared exhausted.
‘There will be more, you know,’ she said.
‘More what?’
‘More showers.’
He expected her to say ‘More life’.
‘You never know what there will be more of,’ he said, ‘but that’s certainly more than enough about me and who I am and what I’m in flight from. We began this conversation discussing whales and you — the least whale-like creature I have ever seen.’
‘Despite my thick ankles?’
‘Whales don’t have thick ankles. As didn’t Ahab, as I recall.’
‘Well he certainly didn’t have two.’
If he hadn’t loved her before. .
Best to leave it at that, anyway, they both thought. But he wanted to be sure that she felt safe with him. Still dripping, he pulled her down into the bed and drew the duvet over them.
Gently, protectively.
But were they overdoing this, he wondered.
She’d have answered yes had he asked her.
iii
It was in his lampoon-fearing nature to wonder whether they would be the talk of the village — the slightly odd woodturner who by and large kept himself to himself, and the tangle-haired flower girl from up north who was several years his junior. But the village wasn’t exercised by pairings-off, even when the parties weren’t as free to do as they pleased as these two were. People who have lived for aeons within sound of crashing seas, and sight of screaming seabirds spearing mackerel, take sex for granted. It’s townspeople who find it disarranging.
And besides, the village had something else to yack about: a double murder. Lowenna Morgenstern and Ythel Weinstock found lying side by side in the back of Ythel Weinstock’s caravan in pools of each other’s blood. By itself, the blood of one would not have found its way, in such quantities, on to the body of the other. So there’d been doubly foul play: not just the murders but this ghoulish intermixing of bodily fluids which was taken by the police to be a commentary on the other sort of fluidal intermingling in which Morgenstern and Weinstock had no doubt been frenetically engaged at the moment their assailant struck.
‘Caught in the act’ was the phrase going round the village. And no one doubted that it was Lowenna’s husband, Ade, who’d caught them. But where was Ade Morgenstern? He hadn’t been seen in the village for months, having stormed out of the surgery to which he’d accompanied his wife to have a minor ailment looked at, which ailment, in his view, didn’t necessitate the removal of her brassiere. He hadn’t seen the brassiere coming off, he had only heard the doctor unhooking it. But his wife had beautiful breasts, as many in the village could testify, and he was a jealous man.
‘Breathe in,’ he heard the doctor order her. ‘And out.’ And a moment later, ‘Open.’
He was not in the waiting room when his wife emerged fully clothed from her consultation.
Hedra Deitch was less bothered by the question of who was guilty of the crime than its timing. ‘If you gotta go, that’s as good a moment as any, if you want my view, and that Ythel was a bit of all right,’ she told drinkers at the bar of the Friendly Fisherman. ‘Rumpy pumpy feels like dying anyway when you’ve got a husband like mine.’
Pascoe Deitch ignored the insult. ‘She always was a screamer,’ he put in.
His wife kicked his shin. ‘How come you’re an expert?’
‘When it comes to Lowenna Morgenstern everyone’s an expert.’
Hedra kicked his other shin. ‘Was an expert. Who you going to be expert about next?’
Pascoe’s expertise, universal or not, caught the attention of the police. Not that he was a suspect. He lacked the energy to be a criminal just as, for all his bravado, his wife believed him to lack the energy to be unfaithful. He masturbated in corners, in front of her, thinking, he told her, about other women — that was the sum of his disloyalty.