‘What do you mean whoever he was?’
This time it was Kroplik who rose from the bench.
‘He was an aphid,’ he said, wagging a finger. ‘Don’t you forget that. An upcountry man with no business to be here, hump or no hump. And aphids in those days had to watch their step. Not like now when they’ve got the run of the place. And then there was all that other stuff going on. All the killing. All the rumours. Eyes everywhere. But they’d not have allowed anyone to harm him here, I can tell you that. Not a hunchback. Harm a hair on the head of a hunchback and you bring curses on your own head. Villagers don’t forget a lesson like that. So they let him be. I’d say you’re lucky to be here, Mister Master Cohen.’
‘What the hell does that mean?’
‘It means whatever you wants it to mean.’
‘I’m lucky to be here?’
‘Damn lucky, I’d say.’
‘I was born here, Mr Kroplik.’
‘That’s the luck I’m talking about.’
Saying which, he slung his raincoat over his shoulder, wished Kevern Cohen good day and made his way into the village where a taxi was waiting outside the Friendly Fisherman to take him to his appointment in St Eber with, as it happened, a mutual friend. Detective Inspector Gutkind.
Or Eugene, as Kroplik now felt at liberty to call him.
iv
This conversation so disturbed Kevern’s thoughts throughout the day that he almost forgot he had an evening class to give at the academy. He considered ringing and cancelling but his professional conscientiousness wouldn’t let him do it. He called a taxi which got him there shaken but just in time. There was relief in that. It meant he wouldn’t be waylaid by Everett who had been quizzing him with more than usual insistence of late, and with more than usual intrusiveness. Why so interested in Ailinn?
It was good to talk to his class about wood. It took his mind off policemen and hunchbacks. ‘In wood,’ he said, in conclusion, ‘is redemption.’ Which some of his students thought was taking it a bit far. But it was true for him.
Despite the lateness of the hour he decided to sit in the library for a while. Anything rather than go back to his violated cottage and find Ailinn not there.
Rozenwyn Feigenblat, the very model of a provincial college librarian in a white lacy blouse and long black skirt and boots — she looked, he always thought, as though she’d ridden to work from somewhere far away, side-saddle while not taking her eyes off a book — greeted him with her accustomed ironic warmth. She liked him, he thought. He liked her. There was something of the centaur’s wife about her, not half-horse, half-woman exactly, but half belonging to the world of action and half to the world of thought. A rider below the neck, she was a reader, oval-faced and small-eyed, concentrated and inquisitive, above it. She wore her fair hair in a pigtail which hung, tied with rubber bands, somehow sarcastically, over her left shoulder. He wondered if she unwound it when she rode.
He had nearly kissed her once, not a snog, he doubted Rozenwyn Feigenblat was a snogger, but much as he had kissed Lowenna Morgenstern, out of liking, out of a passing pang of fondness, and because it seemed a shame not to. But something in the way she responded to his cautious advance — a look of near regret, as though she pitied him her unavailability — warned him off. Otherwise engaged, her look said. Would have, maybe, some other time, who knows, but just at this moment. . can’t. And now he gave off the same message. Have Ailinn, so unavailable. Only he didn’t have Ailinn, did he?
He sensed a moment of danger. ‘You don’t normally come in here at this time,’ she said. Her little darting eyes had fires in them. Had her circumstances suddenly changed?
‘No,’ he said, ‘but I need an hour of quiet.’
‘An hour I can’t give you. I close in half.’
A moment of danger, all right.
‘So what can I read in half an hour?’
‘You want a short story?’
‘I am sick of stories. Can you do short and factual?’
She put her finger to her chin, parodying thought. ‘How about. . How about. . Beauty and Morality. .’
‘Everett’s latest? I’d hardly call that factual.’
‘No, but it’s short.’
‘Not what I’m in the mood for.’
‘Is it the beauty or the morality that’s putting you off?’
‘Beauty never puts me off.’
‘So morality does?’
‘No. It must be the conjunction I don’t buy.’
‘Then you don’t buy Everett.’
She gave a little tug to her pigtail, as though it were a coded signal for gossip about those senior to them to begin.
‘Everett’s fine,’ Kevern was careful to say, ‘when not in art-exultation mode.’
‘You don’t believe any of that?’
‘I don’t believe many things about art.’
‘But you’re an artist. .’ She almost crooned the word.
Careful, Kevern thought.
‘I carve lovespoons,’ he said. ‘If that makes me an artist then I’m an artist. That’s the beginning and the end of it.’
‘You have no philosophy?’
‘To be an artist is to have the freedom to think anything, and that includes thinking one would rather not think.’
‘If you really believe an artist has the freedom to think anything, that must include the freedom to think evil.’
Kevern laughed, as though at his own limitations. ‘In principle, yes. But not much in the way of evil thinking goes into carving lovespoons, I have to tell you.’
‘You’ve never made an evil lovespoon?’
He thought about it. ‘I suppose I’ve made what you could call erotic lovespoons. But celebrating the body is hardly evil.’
‘What about a lovespoon that shows the erotic cruelties the body is capable of. People kill for love — are you unable to conceive a lovespoon depicting that?’
‘I can conceive one, yes. But I wouldn’t make it.’
‘Why not, if an artist is free to think anything?’
‘Because that freedom includes the freedom to resist evil.’
‘And the freedom to embrace it?’
‘Yes, of course. Only why would one embrace evil of the sort you describe?’
She had been leaning against her desk, her booted ankles crossed. Now she straightened up and laughed. ‘If you don’t know that then you’re not really an artist,’ she said. ‘I’d say you’re an ethicist.’
‘No, that’s Everett. Beauty and morality.’
‘Oh, he doesn’t believe that. He’s a lubricious little devil.’
‘Everett?’
‘He tried to push his hand up my skirt once, right here in the library.’
Well it is that kind of a skirt, Kevern thought, trying not to show where his mind had wandered. ‘Expressing his freedom to think evil, do you suppose?’ he finally got around to saying.
She laughed her dangerous librarian’s laugh. ‘You’re not wide of the mark. He likes to play with the idea of wrongdoing. It thrills him. He’d be another de Sade if he had the balls. They all would. There isn’t a painter or a potter in this place that doesn’t long to do something wicked. But none of them has the balls. In another age they’d have joined illegal organisations, worn uniforms and beaten people with their brushes. Now there’s nothing for them to do but say sorry. So they have to content themselves with screwing students and assaulting librarians.’