But he needed features and so he conjured them, not from the family journals but from his own immediate experience of what the features of aloof, cold-blooded superiority looked like. Those features belonged to Kevern ‘Coco’ Cohen.
EIGHT. Little St Alured
i
AILINN DROVE ADVENTUROUSLY but sweetly, ignoring the routine rage of other drivers. They honked her if she didn’t pull over to let them pass, and they honked her when she did; she was too fast for some and too slow for others; she lingered too long at traffic lights or she set off too early for those running the lights in opposing directions. A cyclist hammered on the roof of the car, then seeing she was a woman blew her an enraged kiss.
‘I’d have turned back by now,’ Kevern admitted. ‘I’d have killed or been killed.’
‘You get used to this as a woman,’ Ailinn said.
‘You’re not turning this into a gender issue?’
‘I don’t have to. How many women have wound down their windows to scream at me? How many women have shown me the finger?’
‘I haven’t been counting.’
‘You don’t need to count. Would that cyclist have blown a kiss at you?’
‘All right, I accept what you are saying. But he was young. Any crisis in society manifests itself in the behaviour of young men. So let’s go home.’
She wouldn’t hear of it. Home was no better, remember. At home men weren’t just showing women the finger, they were killing them, and Kevern, or had he forgotten, was suspected of killing a woman himself.
‘And a man,’ he reminded her. ‘Indeed a couple of men. Don’t minimise my offence.’
‘I don’t. But your behaviour doesn’t constitute a crisis.’
Kevern tightened his seat belt. ‘You’ll tell me it’s a tautology,’ he said, ‘but the behaviour of men is the proof we’re in crisis.’
‘That’s a tautology,’ she said, finally getting on to the motorway.
She drove at her usual speed, confidently, with a narrowed concentration as though driving through a tunnel. Kevern spoke not one word. After about an hour and a half, as much from a charitable impulse as anything else, she left the motorway again and followed the signs to the small cathedral city of Ashbrittle, at one time home to more ecclesiastical dignitaries than any other town in the country, and for that reason a magnet for Christian tourists. But that was before WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED happened. Subsequently, though the church insisted it had not been specifically instrumental in those events, it had allowed its head to drop. Too much saying sorry, Kevern thought, as he realised where she’d driven them.
‘This do?’ she asked.
Kevern wound down his window then wound it up again. ‘You can smell the disuse,’ he said.
‘Shall we drive straight out again?’
‘No, let’s stay. I need to rest my eyes.’
‘You haven’t been driving.’
‘That’s what you think.’
They found a motherly bed and breakfast a mile or two outside the town, away from the smell of disuse, and went immediately to bed. Pencil sketches of details of gravestones, lychgates and stoups, arches and columns seen from unexpected angles, hung above their bed. ‘Soft clerical porn,’ Kevern called it. ‘The kitsch to which religion, when no one any longer believes in it, is reduced.’
Ailinn thought he was making too much of it. They were just pictures. Something had to go on the walls. And how would he have felt had they shown the Saviour bleeding on the cross. He said that would have depended on who’d painted it.
‘Let’s have a break from judgement,’ Ailinn suggested. At least on their first night away. ‘We’re supposed to be on holiday. Let’s just enjoy the relief of not being in Port Reuben. And not being looked at every minute of every day.’
He agreed. ‘Or interrogated.’
‘Well that’s your own fault for kissing married women.’
‘You sound like Detective Inspector Gutkind.’
‘Did he ask about me?’
‘No. Should he?’
‘I suppose not. But you’d think I’d be material to his assessment of your character, or at least your circumstances.’
‘He was more interested in assessing my furniture.’
She laughed a small laugh then remembered something. ‘I was questioned by the police once. Not since I’ve been with you. Before I left home. I thought they were more interested in my belongings too.’
‘What were you questioned about?’
‘That was never entirely clear. A burglary, I think. Not for kissing someone in a car park, that I can say. But mainly they wanted the chance to get a look at where I lived. They wondered if I’d held on to any family photographs or letters from before I was adopted. I told them I didn’t have any family photographs or letters from before I was adopted for the reason that I had no family. And besides, I knew the law. They said everyone broke the law a bit. I told them I didn’t. I told them that if they wanted to know more about me they should try the children’s home in Mernoc. And then be so kind as to let me know what they’d found out.’
‘And did they?’
‘Let me know?’
‘Find anything out.’
‘No idea.’
She shuddered in his arms, her heart aflutter — ‘Someone dear to me has just died,’ she said, and then when Kevern sat up in alarm she laughed to reassure him. ‘A silly superstition from my part of the world.’
But he was a superstitious man himself. Only a fool, he thought, wasn’t. What if her heart had fluttered out of time — an anticipatory flutter — because the someone close to her who had died was him.
A moment later there was a knock on their door. Their hearts leapt together. Who knew they were here?
They needn’t have been alarmed: it was only the motherly proprietor wondering if they wanted a hot-water bottle.
They said no.
They had each other.
ii
Ashbrittle was deserted when they went strolling after breakfast. But somehow aflutter too, like Ailinn’s heart, as though with affrighted ghosts.
They stared about them. Soul-departed terrace after soul-departed terrace, mocking the moderate, clerical sociability for the expression of which they’d been lovingly designed. Expectant, calling-card residences at which no one called. The stone a melancholy, rusted yellow. The brass doorbells black from never being pushed. A light rain seemed not so much to fall from the sky as rise from the cracked paving stones. A couple of shops selling local-history pamphlets (no one wanted a complete book), pewter goblets, silver spoons featuring the diocesian crest and of course postcards of the cathedral were open, but many more were boarded up. The river had a film of grease on it, like gravy left to go cold. The Bishop’s Barn, a one time favourite with tourists, was closed for renovation, but the sign saying so was in need of renovation itself. Graffiti was scrawled on its strong yet quiet Jacobean door. Kevern couldn’t read the words or decipher the symbols but to him all graffiti was the language of alienated hate, even when it was urging ‘Love’.
They walked in silence under High Street Gate which housed a library, also indefinitely closed for renovation, and found Cathedral Close. ‘I have a soft spot for cathedral closes,’ Ailinn said, looking around. ‘I always feel people must be living such good lives in them.’
‘Well maybe they are,’ Kevern said. ‘That’s if anyone is living here at all. It feels as if they’ve all gone. A plague-bell tolled and they all ran for it. Unless they’re on their knees in their cellars, saying sorry.’