But that was selfish of her. She should have been holding him. The helpmeet cradling her husband from all harm. She remembered a simple poem she had liked at school — Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be. Only it wasn’t the best she was asking him to grow old along with her in, was it? It was the worst. Not for her, for him. For him, not for her, she was full of dread.
‘So was Ez aware of your history all along?’ he wondered.
‘That depends on what you mean by “all along”. From the beginning of our friendship, or just before, yes, it would seem so. I’m only just getting to the bottom of it. But don’t blame her.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Leave it to me to do any necessary blaming. It won’t help if you crowd me into anger.’
‘I understand,’ he said. ‘But you can’t expect me not to be curious. Did she befriend you in order to find the kindest way to tell you what she knew?’
‘Something like that.’
‘So how did she come to be in possession of those letters anyway? Is she some sort of social worker?’
Crowding, Ailinn, thought. Crowding.
‘In a manner of speaking, yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose she is.’
‘You are convinced she meant well, at least?’
She hesitated. Now it was her turn to avert her head. ‘It’s all more complicated even than I’ve told you,’ she whispered, not looking at him.
In her chest, her heart was leaping like a frightened animal.
ELEVEN. Degenerates
i
ESME NUSSBAUM WAS also enthralled, the first time she clapped eyes on Ailinn in the book group, by the smooth beauty of her brow.
Esme was not, as her father thought, a lesbian. His crude mistake was to suppose that everyone was sexually distinct — a choice for which, if you made it wrongly in his view, you would pay — whereas many people, Esme thought, are neither one thing nor another, by and large indifferent to the whole business of sex and gender. She numbered herself among the latter. She fell in love with people’s natures not their bodies and wanted nothing in return.
Ailinn called out something in her at once which she was happy to recognise as motherly. The girl needed, if not looking after exactly, then direction. Esme was convinced she would have felt this, and acted on it, person to person, even had she not set out to meet her armed with a set of very particular intentions as to the direction in which she wanted — no, not wanted, needed — Ailinn to go.
She was surprised by the girl’s beauty. It wasn’t that she really expected to meet someone with drooping eyes and puffy lips and large ears like the handles of a coffee cup but it had been hard for her to dispel all expectations of ugliness or, alternatively, all expectations of exoticism. But other than in the profusion of her hair, Ailinn answered to none of the descriptions with which, over the years, Esme Nussbaum had conscientiously made herself familiar. Even the girl’s lovely forehead — which certainly did not overhang — wasn’t of a different ethnic order of foreheads.
Nonetheless, she found herself, throughout their early meetings, looking out for evidence of peculiarity — not in the pejorative sense, but with regard to unaccustomed and specific habits of utterance and thought. That she found none she attributed at first to the time Ailinn and indeed her mother had spent among the nuns. It was more than sixty years ago that Coira had been dropped off at the convent orphanage, and whatever characteristics of race or belief she’d inherited from her own mother would over that period have been eradicated in her daughter. Ailinn had been swept clean. Esme had read about the eternal reluctance of families such as Rebecca’s to entrust their offspring to the care of convent orphanages and other religious charities in times of trouble, for fear that in the event of their ever being reunited with their relations they would be radically changed in outlook and theology. She didn’t doubt that had Rebecca ever again encountered her daughter or her granddaughter she would have been struck — she could not with confidence say ‘disturbed’ — by the change. But as she got to know Ailinn better she didn’t feel competent to distinguish what was natural to her from what had been acquired. And by the time the two moved to Paradise Valley she found herself thinking of Ailinn as essentially unexceptional — unusual for her beauty and the sweetness of her disposition, yes, and for her stubbornness, and maybe even her occasional moroseness, but racially — or did she mean religiously? or did she mean culturally? a young woman like any other, a young woman, indeed, in many ways similar to the woman she had been herself, at least before the motorcyclist rode into her and broke every bone in her body.
That thought, too, brought her still closer to Ailinn. They were both who they were, directly or indirectly, as the consequence of foul play. So while she wanted something ‘from’ Ailinn that Ailinn herself as yet knew nothing of, she wanted something ‘for’ her, too, that had nothing to do with her ambitious scheme to restore the nation’s equilibrium of hate. Esme considered it a stroke of remarkably good fortune — particularly when she became privy to Ailinn’s feelings for Kevern Cohen, and witnessed their evident reciprocity when she saw them together — that her professional scheme and her private hopes coincided perfectly in so far as they bore on Ailinn’s happiness.
How long it was going to take before either could be realised depended, she understood — for all her impatience — on feelings and events beyond her control. It was not all in her hands, as it was not all in Ailinn’s. But when the girl returned from her trip away with Kevern only to discover his cottage had been broken into — an action Esme very much deplored — and Kevern, as a consequence, began to say reckless things and make wild plans, Esme knew she had to intervene. ‘It’s now or never,’ she told herself, although the time was still not right, at least as far as the clearing of Kevern was concerned. ‘What you don’t do yourself, is rarely done well,’ was what she also told herself. But she couldn’t be everywhere at once. She couldn’t have researched Kevern ‘Coco’ Cohen as thoroughly as she had researched Ailinn Solomons. And besides. .
Well, if she understood the logic of matrilineality adequately, the clearing of Kevern was of less consequence than the clearing of Ailinn. She wasn’t saying Kevern was immaterial to her plans — far from it — but she could afford a degree of blurring around Kevern that she couldn’t around Ailinn.
ii
Saturday 30th
Well what was I supposed to say? That I liked the stuff? Thank you, Kevern, I can’t wait to show it to my students as an example of that deviant, flagitious, vitiated modernism (as I’ve said, nobody dares go near the word ‘degenerate’) they’ve read about in their textbooks. . He wouldn’t exactly have thanked me for that, would he? No son wants to hear his mother described as deviant.
Which brings me to the real problem I was faced with when he bounded in (bounded in for him), looking as pleased as punch and flaunting that odious sketchbook — that he didn’t know how much he was giving away about himself and I didn’t know whether to tell him. ‘If you’re the son of that mother, fellow-me-lad,’ I wanted to say, ‘you’re in a spot of bother.’ Or not. This is the thing: never having been adequately apprised of what I’m looking for, I’m not only in the dark as to whether or not I’ve found it, I’m in the dark as to the value, good or bad, of what I’ve found. As to that — the latter — I have my own views. I like the man, as I’ve made abundantly clear, but that doesn’t mean I have to like what it would now appear I must call his antecedents. The other way of putting this is that I detest the sin but love the sinner. But I am going too fast even for my own brain.