He had his theories about the underlying causes but knew to keep them under his hat.
Home for Gutkind was a small end-of-terrace house in St Eber, an inland town built around the county’s most important china-clay pit. A white dust had long ago settled on every building in St Eber, giving it, though entirely flat and shapeless, an Alpine aspect that the few visitors to the area had always found attractive. Gutkind’s cat Luther, who had been spayed and so had little else to do — ‘Like me,’ Gutkind sometimes thought — rolled around in this dust from morning to night, going from garden to garden to find more. He would be waiting for the detective inspector when he arrived home, his coat powdered as though with icing sugar, his eyelashes as pale as an albino’s, even his tongue white. Gutkind, who had no one else to love, sat him on a newspaper in the kitchen and brushed him down roughly, though he knew that he would be out rolling in someone’s garden again as soon as he had eaten. As with the cat, so with the man. Gutkind showered twice a day, more often than that at weekends when he was home, watching the particles almost reconstitute themselves into clay as they vanished in a grubby whirlpool down the plughole. It was a form of recycling, Gutkind thought, the clay that had coated his hair and skin returning to its original constituency underground. Otherwise he was not a recycling man. Too many of society’s ills were the result of the wrong sort of people with the wrong sort of beliefs finding ways of recycling themselves, no matter how much effort went into their disposal.
Disposal? Detective Inspector Gutkind was not a brute but he believed in calling a spade a spade.
And he was not, in the privacy of his own home, however dusty, a man to say he was sorry.
He had no wife. He had had a wife once, but she had left him soon after they were married. The china clay was one reason she left him, and Gutkind had no desire to move (having to shower so many times a day confirmed his sense of what was wrong with the world), but the other reason she left him was his sense of what was wrong with the world. She discovered for herself what many of her friends had told her — though she hadn’t listened at the time — that life with a man who saw conspiracies everywhere was insupportable. ‘It’s your friends who have put you up to this,’ he said as he watched her packing her bags. She shook her head. ‘It’s your family, then.’ ‘Why can’t it just be me, Eugene?’ she asked. ‘Why can’t it be my decision?’ But he was unable to understand what she was getting at.
Returning home after interviewing Kevern Cohen — yet another person who showed him scant respect — Detective Inspector Gutkind showered, brushed down his cat, showered again, and heated up a tin of beans. He felt more than usually miffed. If I could put my finger on something, he told himself, just something, I would feel a damned sight better. But whether he meant put his finger on the motivation of a crime, the name of a criminal, why everything was so twisted from its purpose, why his life was so dusty and lonely, why he hated his cat, he couldn’t have said.
He had to have someone to blame. He was not unusual in that. What divided Homo sapiens from brute creation was the need to apportion responsibility. If a lion went hungry or a chimpanzee could not find a mate, it was no one’s fault. But from the dawn of time man had been blaming the climate, the terrain, fate, the gods, some other tribe or just some other person. To be a man, as distinct from being a chimpanzee, was to be forever at the mercy of a supernatural entity, a force, a being or a collection of beings, whose only function was to make your life on earth unbearable. And wasn’t this the secret of man’s success: that in chasing dissatisfaction down to its malignant cause he had hit upon the principle, first of religion and then of progress? What was evolution — what was revolution — but the logic of blame in action? What was the pursuit of justice but punishment of the blameworthy?
And who were the most blameworthy of all? Those whom you had loved.
When the sentimental blaming mood was on him — and tonight it roared in his ears the way the sea beside which you had once walked with a lover roared in a treasured seashell — he would climb the stairs to his attic, open an old wardrobe in which he stored clothes he no longer wore but for some reason could not bear to throw away, and pull out a faded periodical or two from the dozen or so which hung there on newspaper sticks, exactly as they had once hung in metropolitan cafés of the sort sophisticated town-bred men and women once patronised in order to drink coffee, eat pastries, and stay up to date with prejudiced opinion. Given that Gutkind kept these periodicals because they contained extended ruminations penned by his great-grandfather, Clarence Worthing, they were, strictly speaking, heirlooms, and exceeded the number of heirlooms — though no one knew exactly what that number was — any one person was permitted to keep. Not being a law exactly, this was not rigorously policed; everyone kept more than they admitted they kept, but, as a detective inspector, Gutkind knew he was taking a bit of a risk and indeed much relished taking it.
He had always dipped intermittently into these publications, enjoying picking up his great-grandfather’s thoughts at random, not least because Clarence Worthing had been a cut above the rest of the family, a self-taught thinker and self-bred dandy who had moved in circles of society unimaginable to Eugene Gutkind. He had never met his great-grandfather but had heard tell of him from his grandmother, Clarence Worthing’s daughter, something of a lady herself, and a bohemian to boot, who revelled in the fact that she had hardly ever seen her father, so tied up was he in his affairs — in all senses of the word, if Eugene knew what she meant — a whirl of feckless forgetfulness which she put down to his having been rejected as a young man by the only woman he had ever truly loved — a woman who was not her mother. Eugene marvelled that she was not hurt by this. You could not be hurt by such a man, she told him, so stylish was he even when he let you down. Gutkind yearned to have let someone down stylishly. Taking out the newspapers he bathed in the glorious retrospective reflection of his great-grandfather’s irresponsibility. . and pain. By means of Clarence Worthing, Gutkind too became a person to be reckoned with — a man with a tragic past and a liquid way with words and women.
Over and above this he liked reading the Worthing papers for the clarity of their reasoning and on that account read them, again and again, chronologically and therefore, he surmised, systematically. One train of thought in particular engrossed his attention because it seemed to explain something that was crying out for explanation. And tonight Gutkind was of a mood to peruse it again. In the course of it — an extended essay entitled When Blood Is Thicker Than Water — his great-grandfather sought to lay the blame for everything he thought wrong with the world, from the moral, political, ethical and even theological points of view, on ‘those’ who cultivated a double allegiance which was plain for everybody to see but which good manners forced society to turn a blind eye to. In fact, the phrase ‘double allegiance’ let them off too easily, he argued, for the question had to be asked whether they considered they owed any sort of genuine allegiance to this, or any country in which they’d found themselves, at all.
Or any sort of allegiance to him, Gutkind surmised. He didn’t mind that his great-grandfather’s reasoning reeked of the ad feminam. How else do you measure a great wrong unless you have been on the receiving end of it? If his great-grandfather proceeded from a position of profound personal disappointment — betrayal even — that made his arguments only the more persuasive to Detective Inspector Gutkind.