He kept his eyes averted from Rhoda’s, showing her his long, brittle hands. The hands he hadn’t employed to help a child. What did he want her to do — kiss them or break them off at the wrists?
‘And now you think it’s my duty to let you replace her with me,’ she said. She was on her feet, dressed and ready to leave, feeling sick but strong, with her school bag under arm. ‘Well you’ve got another think coming.’
She was relieved to make it out safely on to the street.
ii
She didn’t repeat a word to anyone of what she’d been told. There was no point. For one thing, to have spoken of it would have compromised her — what was she doing talking to her teacher about his murderous, obsessional love life in a hotel room? — and for another she didn’t expect to be believed. She wasn’t sure how much of it she believed herself. He could have made the whole thing up to impress her, or made the second half up to exact an imaginary revenge. You can murder in your thoughts, she knew that. And even if she’d been believed — what then? Where was the crime? What law do you break by walking away? She didn’t know much about what had gone on when she was ten, but she’d heard adults talking and knew the slate had been wiped clean. So long as you joined in the chorus of saying sorry, you were in the clear. The past was the past and brought automatic absolution.
As for him, she hoped fervently that he would quit the school, but he didn’t. He didn’t ask her to go to a hotel with him again either. He just did what he was good at and looked away.
If her presence made him anxious, he concealed it well. She, however, grew morose and began to do badly at school. No one knew why, but she lost interest in her studies and left before she had achieved what had been expected of her. Whereas he appeared, if anything, to prosper. Good divinity teachers were hard to come by.
Not long afterwards, at a concert given by Necessary Opposites, she met Compton who repelled her. The degree to which he made her flesh creep excited her. He was opposite to everyone she cared about, opposite to everything she admired and loved. It was marry him or kill him. And, in anticipation of her daughter’s thinking, she saw that it would have been literal-minded of her to kill him.
She didn’t tell Compton about her affair with a murderer or a liar or both. She didn’t want his hands on her experience, she didn’t want to hear him say that the murdered girl got what was owing to her. She was angry enough. Nor did she tell Esme when she was of an age to understand. In Esme’s case it wasn’t necessary; she picked up the essentials without words needing to be exchanged. There was certainly some rage in her that Rhoda proudly believed was her doing. She’d instilled an appetite for justice that was like a hunger in her own belly. Esme, she was confident, would fight the good fight for her. Esme would show courage where she hadn’t. Esme would make someone pay.
NINE. The Celestial Bandleader
i
ESME NUSSBAUM NEVER did go back to her old office. But fragments of it came to her. She hadn’t been as alone as she’d thought. They were slow and watchful, but first one and then another of her ex-colleagues took up the challenge implicit in the report she had produced before her accident. She was right. Something had to be done to curtail the quarrelsomeness that was poisoning the family, the workplace, the schoolyard, and society at large. It would be a while before they would catch up with her more recent thinking, but within five years it had become acceptable to admit there was a problem to be solved. Five years after that, though still shaky on her legs, she was leading a team charged with putting back what had been taken away.
At the first meeting she addressed as head of the Commission for Restitution she spelled out the problems that lay ahead.
‘We cannot any longer go on deploying euphemisms,’ she declared. ‘We have to call a spade a spade. If we are to put back what has been taken away we must restore its human name. These were people. How do you put back people who, in whatever circumstances or for whatever motives, were annihilated?’
She thought the question was rhetorical but a couple of hands went up.
‘I am not,’ she said, ‘looking for immediate answers. We have research to do. But I will take a couple of suggestions to kick us off.’
The first was to go looking in other countries where comparable destruction had either not taken place at all, or had been partial. The second was to come up with an alternative necessary opposite — some other ethnic or religious group that could stand in as hate object for that which had been obliterated. ‘Couldn’t something be done with the Chinese?’ someone asked.
In answer to the first, Esme doubted whether, even if such people could be found, they’d be reckless enough to quit the places of safety in which they’d settled. And supposing that some were game, they were sure to be adventurers and chancers, misfits and counterfeiters and opportunists, the last people she thought suitable to fill the void that had been left. What no one wanted were more riots within a generation.