‘Keep them hidden, is what you’re saying?’
Zermansky made a pair of scales with his hands, weighing ‘hiding’ against. . well, whatever he was weighing it against. Keeping them as something between a son and his mother.
Kevern was irked and puzzled. ‘Anyone would think,’ he said, ‘that these little sketches could get me into trouble.’
Professor Edward Everett Phineas Zermansky threw him a weak smile. For the first time he understood to a certainty why he’d been asked to keep an eye on Kevern ‘Coco’ Cohen.
v
Coira grew up in St Brigid’s Convent and Orphanage, ignorant of how she’d got there and knowing nothing of her mother and father. It was thought by many of the nuns that she had the ideal temperament to be a nun herself. She loved the ceremonials of the place — the sweet companionship, the daily round of repeated activity, the quiet of the church, the statuary, the incense, the music, the rhapsody. Convent orphanages were good for this. Over the years, as in many countries that had seen civil strife, children of other, not to say competing, faiths were secreted with the nuns of St Brigid’s and countless convents like it, and there, without theological turbulence, willingly embraced beliefs alien to their own — that’s when they knew what their own were. Occasionally some were delivered into the care of the nuns at an advanced enough age to notice the difference between the rituals of worship here and at home, but practised a gentle and compliant apostasy, relieved to be somewhere peaceful, away from rage and oppression, and grateful to feel accepted into a community. It could be confusing sometimes: the kind consideration they encountered from the nuns contrasting with the violence of the sermons to which they were subjected, in which many couldn’t fail to recognise themselves as the children of Satan, doomed to be swallowed by the fires of hell for all eternity. But at least in St Brigid’s no one tried to beat the wickedness out of those orphans who had been born into evil — the worst they did was to pray for their deliverance — and in Coira’s case they had no knowledge of what she had been born into anyway. Whether she would finally take vows herself she wasn’t sure, but she worked contentedly with the nuns she loved in a lay capacity until her sixteenth birthday when, with understandable reluctance, they handed over the letters her mother had left her. She locked herself away with them for many weeks, asked questions to which no one had an answer, requested the key for the convent library but found nothing there that helped shed light on why she had been abandoned, or what had happened to her mother or her grandparents. Her father she traced to his island parish, but decided, on the strength of sitting unknown through a sermon he gave on the subject of family love, that she had nothing to love him for. As she understood it, he had been instrumental in having her baptised and since, had she not been baptised, her mother would never have deposited her like unwanted luggage, he alone bore the blame. She had the wrong end of the stick, but her mistake was perfectly explicable. There was no one at the convent orphanage able to explain the ins and outs of matrilineality to her.
It was only after this that she became difficult to control, suffering bouts of anger and depression, making unconvincing attempts to end her life, resorting to petty thieving, staying away for days at a time and sleeping with local boys. Her natural sweetness of temper always won the nuns round in the end, however, and no moral disaster ensued. Soon she was back to her old self, not quite as cheerful as before, and no longer talking of taking vows, but reconciled, it seemed, to a life of only occasionally fractious usefulness. But in her thirty-ninth year, just as her hair began to turn grey and her existence seemed to be moving into a blessedly placid phase, she fell pregnant with a child whose father she either wouldn’t or couldn’t name. The nuns didn’t judge her. Some felt that her failings were their failings, others that her mother’s sins, whatever they had been, were bound to be visited on her in the end. She went away to have the baby and then returned with it, one early morning, as her gift to the nuns. They found the bundled child before morning prayers, in a basket outside the chapel with an identifying label tied around her wrist. This, Sister Agatha, who was old enough to remember the depositing of Coira herself, took to be a bitterly ironic reference to that event, a perpetuation of rejection. A bundle of letters tied with pink ribbon was in the basket together with a note asking that they keep them for the girl and give them to her only in the event of her asking for them, but whatever happened no earlier than her twenty-fifth birthday.
‘Why would she ask for letters she doesn’t know exist?’ Sister Perpetua wondered.
Sister Agatha shrugged. ‘Why anything?’ she said.
In fealty to the memory of her own mother, Coira too disappeared from the face of the earth.
vi
‘And thus does THE GREAT PISSASTROPHE,’ Kevern mused gravely to Ailinn as they lay entwined like a pair of foundlings in each other’s arms, ‘claim another victim.’
She drew him close to her. ‘It’s more complicated than that,’ she said.
He stroked her hair, pulling it back from her forehead. He loved the broad, clear expanse of her brow. Broad brow: capacious intelligence. Broad brow: magnanimity. Broad brow: intuition, compassion, sense of humour, sense of tragedy, vulnerability. He could stroke her brow for hours at a time. How glad he was to be soothing it again. How he’d missed it in the weeks he hadn’t seen her. Broad brow: sorrow, longing, fidelity.
She hadn’t told him everything. In truth — or rather not in truth — she hadn’t told him very much. Not to start with. Long ago, in the mayhem of civil conflict her grandmother had abandoned a baby — what happened thereafter was a common tale of history repeating itself, one generation after another passing down its inheritance of shame.
He understood that, he the grandson of a displaced hunchback.
‘But you have nothing to be ashamed of,’ he said.
She wasn’t so sure. ‘It’s not a pretty story,’ she said.
He couldn’t resist saying that she, though, was a pretty story in herself.
She shook her hair, as if to shake away the thoughtless compliment.
‘It’s hard to imagine what they must have gone through, those women, abandoning a child. Only think how desperate they must have been.’
‘You are a child of sorrows,’ he told her.
He turned his head momentarily to hide his tears from her.
They irritated her. They flowed too soon. Wait till he heard all she had to tell him. What would gush from his eyes then?
She knew him well enough to follow his emotional reasoning. He would be blaming himself for all that had befallen her, and not just her but her mother, and her mother’s mother before her. Somehow or other he would be sheeting it all back to himself. His fault, everything his fault. Greedy for a share in her suffering which was no suffering when all was said and done. What had she been through? Nothing. It was those before her who had been in hell. And if it was wrong for her to appropriate what was theirs, how much more wrong was it for him. How ghoulish!
Everyone wants a piece of me, she thought, meaning Ez as well. They are thirsty so they drink of me.
Well, she had reason to be furious with Ez. Meddling on such a scale! Kevern, on the other hand, was only letting his sympathy for her overflow. Her irritation with him had its cause in her, not him, in her apprehension, in her dread of telling him all she had to tell him.
She submitted her brow to his stroking. She would have disappeared into him if she could have. Found safety inside his skin, turned back into the ribs from which irresponsible theological fantasy taught that she’d been fashioned.