Ah, but had she gone that far they would have had her run over a second and, if need be, a third time.
Were they that ruthless? Ruthless was not the word Esme Nussbaum would have picked. They were acting out of the best motives. They wanted a harmonious society. Their mistake was not to see that she wanted a harmonious society too. The difference was that they saw harmony as something you attained by leaving things out — contrariety and contradiction, argument, variety — and she saw it as something you achieved by keeping everything in.
Though she had limited access to information that others didn’t, she had done no original research into the terrible events which those who did not see as she saw wanted to disown. Research, she thought, had not been necessary. She knew the events to have been terrible simply by their effects. Had they been of less consequence then the aftermath would have been of less consequence too. But the aftermath, of which she too, lying here smashed into tiny pieces, was the bloody proof, brooked no controversy. They could mow her down as often as they liked — and she bore them no malice for it; on the contrary she owed this long reflective holiday to them — but the truth remained the truth. Anger and unhappiness seeped out from under every doorway of every house in every town and every village in the country. Housewives threw open their windows each morning to let out the fumes of unmotivated domestic fury that had built up overnight. Men spat bile into their beer glasses, abused strangers, beat their own children, committed acts of medieval violence on their wives, or on women who weren’t their wives, that no amount of sexual frustration or jealousy could explain.
Now that she had the leisure to think, Esme Nussbaum was no longer looking for explanations. You only need an explanation where there’s a mystery, and there was no mystery. How could it have worked out otherwise? You can’t have a poisoned stomach and a sweet breath. You can’t lop off a limb and expect you will be whole. You can’t rob and not make someone the poorer, and when it’s yourself that you rob then it’s yourself you impoverish.
Of the thoughts that flew at her, as the weeks passed, this last was the most persistent, skimming her cheek with its quilled wing, as though it wanted to scratch her into waking — we are the poorer by what we took away.
But she was in no rush to come out of her coma where it was warm and silent — she only saw words, she didn’t hear them — and declare what she knew. She had no more reports to write just yet. It was good to look at the world slowly and evenly. You don’t need to have your eyes open to see things.
ii
Her father blamed her.
‘She couldn’t have been looking where she was going,’ he said.
‘Esme always looks where she’s going,’ his wife replied.
‘Then if it wasn’t an accident. .’
‘It wasn’t an accident.’
‘OK, if you say so, it wasn’t an accident. In that case someone must have had it in for her.’
‘You don’t say.’
‘The question is—’
‘I don’t want to hear that question.’
‘The question is what had she done wrong.’
‘Your own daughter! How dare you?’
He gave a foolish, thwarted laugh, that was more like a belch. He was a near-sighted, jeering man with a hiatus hernia. ‘It feels as though something’s balled-up in my chest all the time,’ he complained to his doctor who recommended Mylanta or Lanzaprozole or Maldroxal Plus or Basaljel or Ranitidine. He took them all but felt no better.
‘It’s your opinions,’ his wife told him, watching in distaste as he banged at his thorax in the vain hope of dislodging whatever was stuck inside him. ‘It’s your hateful nature paying you back. To speak like that, about your own daughter!’
‘People don’t have it in for you for no reason,’ he persisted.
‘Not another word,’ his wife said. ‘Not another word or I swear I’ll cut your chest open with a breadknife.’
The Nussbaums had been having this argument all their married lives. Their mangled daughter was just another opportunity for them to rehearse it all again, their understanding of the universe, what they did or did not believe. What Compton Nussbaum believed was that what happened happened for the best of reasons, there was no effect that didn’t have a cause, what people suffered they had brought upon themselves. What Rhoda Nussbaum believed was that she was married to a pig.
‘Have you never been sorry for anyone?’ she asked him.
‘What good would my sorrow do them?’
‘That’s not an answer to my question. Do you never feel another person’s pain?’
‘I feel satisfied when I see justice done.’
‘What about injustice? What about cruelty?’
He banged his chest. ‘Sentimentality.’
‘So if I go out and get raped. .?’
‘It will be your own fault.’
‘How so? For being a woman?’
‘Well I won’t be going out and getting raped, will I?’
More’s the pity, she thought.
You don’t see your daughter lying as good as dead and blame her for it, Rhoda Nussbaum believed. If I were to kill my husband for what he has just said I would be cleared by any court in the country. The only argument she could see for not killing her husband was that she’d be proving him right — yes, people do get what they deserve.
He’d been a civil servant. ‘Servant gets it,’ Rhoda Nussbaum would say when he refused to hear a word against those who employed him. He was proud when his daughter gained early promotion at Ofnow, but turned against her when she turned against it.
‘I’m only asking questions,’ she would cry in her own defence.
‘Then don’t,’ was his fatherly reply.
She should have found a man and left home for him. But the men she met were like her father. ‘Then don’t,’ they’d say. And the one thing they didn’t say no about, she did.
Her mother encouraged her. ‘They’re all no good,’ she said. ‘Stay here with me.’
That suited her. She liked her mother and could see that she was lonely. It helped, too, that she was not sentimental about men.
Her father thought she was a lesbian. Many men thought the same. There was something uncanny about her, the seriousness with which she took her work, her obduracy, her pedantry, the size of her vocabulary, the lack of bounce in her hair, the flat shoes she wore, her failure often to get a joke, her unwillingness to play along, her way of overdoing sympathy as though understanding beat snogging. But only her father hated her in his heart. Her being a lesbian was a denial of him. And also, by his own remorseless logic, meant that he was being punished. He didn’t know what for, but you don’t get a lesbian for a daughter unless you’ve done something very wrong indeed.
He’d have preferred it had she not come out of the coma.
‘You will not tell her she only got what she deserved,’ his wife said on the eve of their daughter’s removal from the hospital. ‘If you want to live an hour longer you will not say it’s your own stupid fault.’
He stood at the front door, waiting for the ambulance to arrive. A ball of something even more indigestible than usual was lodged inside his chest.
‘Welcome home,’ he belched when she was stretchered in. She raised her hand slightly and gave him a faint wave.
I’m doing well, he thought. I’m handling this OK.
Esme thought the same. Not about him, about her. I’m being good. But she knew she’d never be able to keep it up. She’d have to tell him soon enough how wrong he had always been about everything.