‘Oh, there’s always time,’ Rozenwyn Feigenblat bolshily remarked once, when we happened to fall into conversation on this very subject.
I took that to mean that as librarian she knew how much sitting about staring into space we professors and painters are capable of. But then a librarian is not an artist; in her capacity as a filer and notator she will not have grasped the contribution that apparent indolence makes to the creative act.
For an artist, my dear, I wanted to say, to be unoccupied is sacred. What might look like doing nothing is in fact the long wait for beauty to find us. But I could see how that might be misinterpreted. ‘If you mean that we sometimes appear bored,’ I began instead. .
She shook her pretty head. ‘I’m not talking about boredom,’ she said. ‘I’m talking about mischief.’
She made it sound like pranks.
‘Sexual mischief?’ I asked, not wanting to sound too curious.
‘Intellectual mischief.’
Not being sure I could trust myself longer in her alluring presence, I let it go at that. Though she left me feeling she had more to say.
What she also left me feeling was that someone should be keeping an eye on her. A position for which, were it vacant, I’d think hard about applying.
But back to Kevern Cohen. What it came down to for me, at least, was that the only reliable way of uncovering Kevern Cohen’s intentions vis-à-vis his new sweetheart — short of asking him outright, and I wasn’t prepared to do that — was to observe him at close quarters. To which end I invited the lovebirds over for dinner. It would be on his day for visiting the college and I suggested, since he’d mentioned her, that he bring Ailinn down with him, which he was wary of doing to begin with — wariness being his first response to everything — but on discussing it with her he changed his mind. No doubt she wanted to meet his friends, of whom he has few and I can just about be counted one. A half-friend, say. A well-wisher, anyway. An extravagantly beautiful woman, Ailinn, with a tumult of dark hair, like charred straw, and darting, watchful, hawk-like features. She called to mind a seirene, one of those bird women who are painted attacking Odysseus and his crew on vases I have inspected in the National Museum. I am not thinking of the most familiar image, which shows a seirene swooping head first at the ship, her talons at the ready, but rather one of the more serenely musical temptresses, striking her drum or plucking at her harp, surprised, if anything, that Odysseus should want to resist. As Kevern plainly didn’t.
‘Besotted’ was the word my wife and I hit on quite separately, though Demelza did accuse me of stealing it from her.
Ailinn brought us a delicate bouquet of her paper flowers. ‘Kitsch, I know,’ she said, ‘but I make them and could find no fresh flowers in the shops.’
I appreciated the thought and the apology. It must have been difficult for her, taste-wise, visiting the house of a professor of the Benign Visual Arts. I told her they were lovely and pretended to smell them. ‘Haven’t seen you so skittish in a long while,’ Demelza said to me as we were making coffee in the kitchen. ‘A pretty face and you go as soppy as Petroc.’
Petroc was our Labrador. Petroc Rothschild. .
Not really, that was just our little off-colour joke. .
‘I am happy for them in their happiness,’ was my reply. She pinched my arm. I let out a little cry. ‘What’s that for?’ ‘You know what that’s for. Being happy for them in their happiness. Liar! Why don’t you just lick her face?’ ‘Bitch!’ I said. ‘Prick!’ was her retort.
That night, over an acrimonious nightcap of Benedictine and brandy, we discussed divorce. Discussion had always been something we were good at. You could say it was the glue of our conjugality.
Before they left, Ailinn did say one thing that struck me as surprising. ‘Sometimes,’ she mused, in answer to my asking how she found it down here, ‘this part of the country seems full of eyes.’
‘Eyes?’
‘Watching eyes.’
‘Really?’ I said, opening my face to her. ‘How do you mean?’
Kevern, too, appeared taken aback by her words. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Something about the way they look at you here. It’s not disapproval exactly. It’s not even suspicion. It’s more as though they’re waiting for you to make a mistake or show your real nature.’
‘Isn’t that just because these communities were cut off from the rest of the country for so long?’ I said. ‘I feel they look at me like that too. They say you have to have lived here for ten generations before they begin to relax with you.’
‘I don’t want them to relax with me. I’m not looking for friendship,’ she said. ‘It’s the sense you get that someone’s always on your heels. Not following you — just there. Waiting for you to give yourself away.’
I noted that for later speculation. Give yourself away, eh, young lady. So what are you concealing?
Petroc Rothschild must have asked himself the same question because he did not take at all kindly to her, barking when she changed her position too abruptly, and growling most of the time she talked. But then he’d never been overfond of Kevern either.
I enquired whether what she was describing was a recent phenomenon.
‘Being here is a recent phenomenon — for me.’
‘Of course, of course. I meant did you notice it at once or are you just noticing it now? Has there been a change.’
‘I haven’t been here long enough to make such fine distinctions,’ she reminded me, somewhat sternly, which made me somewhat excited. I like sternness in a woman. Hence Demelza. ‘But if you ask me to think about it,’ she went on, ‘then no, I have not just begun to notice a sense of — I don’t know what to call it — intrusiveness. Take us’ — she put her hand on Kevern’s — ‘we didn’t just meet, we were bundled into each other’s arms. Not that I’m complaining about that.’
‘I should hope not,’ Kevern said, kissing her.
Sweet, but I was more interested, I have to say, in Ailinn’s sense of being, as she put it, ‘bundled’. Professionally interested.
‘So who bundled you?’ I asked, but casually, as though I were merely making polite conversation.
‘God knows. Some busybody? The village matchmaker? Nobody I’d ever seen before, or since. I don’t know if you’ve seen him again, Kevern.’
He hadn’t.
I asked Kevern if he too felt he’d been pushed into meeting Ailinn. He couldn’t of course say yes. He had to say he saw her and was smitten. But yes, now we came to mention it, there had been someone hanging around, egging him on. For which, accompanied by another burning look deep into Ailinn’s eyes, he was immeasurably grateful.
Petroc growled so loudly that Ailinn started.
‘He doesn’t mean you any harm,’ I assured her.
‘I think he does,’ she said.
‘You don’t like dogs?’
‘No, not as a rule. We are as one on this.’
‘You and the dog?’
‘Me and Kevern.’
I told Kevern that I hadn’t on his previous visits noticed he was a dog hater, though I kept to myself my conviction that Petroc hated him.