But no. Whatever she was doing, right, wrong, feeble, gullible, treasonable, Kevern’s way was plain bad. Bad for him. Bad for his mental state. Bad for them. Bad for their future together. Bad. ‘This is unhealthy,’ she said at last.
‘It’s a bit late for health.’
‘You are also not being honest with yourself. You say you need to understand how others see you, but your curiosity isn’t dispassionate. It isn’t divided equally between those who don’t like you and those who do. You’re only really intrigued by those who don’t.’
‘Hardly surprising is it, given what I’ve just discovered, if it’s those who don’t like me I’m interested in right now. My friends I can think about later.’
Friends? Did he have friends? His recent conversation with Rozenwyn Feigenblat — not a word of which he’d mentioned to Ailinn — came back to him. She saw him as friendless — worse than that, she saw him as courting friendlessness. And now here was Ailinn saying the same. Why was his nature quite so pervious to women?
‘It’s not right now I’m talking about,’ she persisted. ‘You’ve always paid more attention to your enemies.’
‘Ailinn, I didn’t know I had enemies until five minutes ago.’
‘That’s ridiculous. Who do you lock your door against? Who are you frightened of being invaded by? You have lived in a world of enemies all your life.’
‘You can talk, you and Ahab.’
She waved Ahab away. ‘Now he’s found me I’ll deal with him,’ she said.
‘It’s as easy as that?’
‘No. But it’s good to confront him now he’s out of the shadows. It’s good to turn and face him. Look him in the eyes. Your point — know your enemy. OK, Ahab — do your worst. And it turns out he isn’t even called Ahab.’
‘No, he’s called Ferdie — who frankly I find more frightening.’
‘That’s because you want to go on being frightened. You know no other way.’
‘Are you calling me a coward?’
‘No. I’m sure it takes bravery to live with fear as you do.’
‘That’s patronising. I don’t “bravely” live with fear. It’s not something I choose. I have no choice.’
‘You do — you have the choice not to wallow. .’
‘You think this is wallowing?’
She did, yes she did, but declined to answer. She dropped her head between her fists, and this time beat the cymbals against her ears.
He wondered if he ought to get dressed. The first squeeze of narrow light was showing out to sea. He wasn’t ready for day, but if it had to come he should go and greet it. The cliffs would be a good place to be, on his bench, side by side with Ailinn, looking out to the dead, consoling sea. It wouldn’t change anything but weather was preferable to the cottage, and the great sea justified his fears. The world was terrifying.
‘Will you walk with me?’ he asked, in his gentlest voice. She was right, he knew she was right, morbidity was his nature. So what was new?
‘Of course I will,’ she said, putting an arm around him. Not everyone was his enemy, she wanted him to know. But the gesture made them both feel isolated. They had each other, but who else did they have?
It was only when they were on the bench that she realised he hadn’t double-locked and double-checked that he’d locked the door of his cottage. Had he kicked the Chinese runner? She didn’t think he had. She should have been pleased but she wasn’t. What was he without his rituals?
There was rain in the air. That squeezed sliver of light had been an illusory promise. Below them, the blowhole was clearing its throat in readiness for a day of tumult. A couple of gulls threw themselves like rags into the wind.
‘What now?’ he said suddenly.
‘Do you want to go back in?’
‘No, I meant what are we going to do with the rest of our lives?’
She knew but couldn’t tell him. ‘We can do whatever you’d like to do,’ she lied.
‘Well we can’t just carry on as though nothing’s happened.’
‘Why not? How much has changed really?’
‘Everything,’ he said. ‘Absolutely everything.’
‘You’ll feel differently in a few days. You’ll get back into the swing of things.’
‘What swing of things? I never was in the swing of things. I was waiting. Just waiting. I didn’t know what I was waiting to happen or find out, but I now see that the waiting made for a life of sorts.’
‘Of sorts! With me? Is that the best you can say of our time together — a life of sorts?’
He put his arm around her waist but didn’t pull her to him. ‘Not you. Of course not you. I don’t mean that. We are fine. We are wonderful. But the me that isn’t us, that wasn’t us, when all is said and done, before I met you — before the pig auctioneer — that solitary me. . where do I go with it from here? I waited and I waited, scratching away at bits of wood, and now I know what I was waiting for and it’s. .’
‘It’s what?’
He didn’t know. Above him the raggedy gulls screamed desolately. Was it all just thwarted greed or did they hate it here as much as he did? He looked up to the sky and cupped his ears as though the birds might tell him what to do with himself from this moment on.
‘Nothing,’ he said at last. ‘What it is is nothing. In fact it’s worse than nothing.’
‘You could try feeling pride,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Pride. You could decide to wear it as a badge of honour.’
‘What do you suggest I do? Change my name back?’
‘That’s a black joke, Kevern,’ she said.
He agreed. ‘The blackest.’
‘Then why did you make it?’
He shrugged. ‘Why did you speak of pride and honour? Where’s the honour, please tell me? You might as well ask this ant which I am about to tread on to view all the previous years of his ant life with pride.’
‘It’s not to his shame that you stamp on him.’
‘I disagree with you. It is his shame, his fault, for being an ant. We have to take responsibility for our fate. Even an ant. What happens to him is his disgrace.’
She was shocked to hear him speak like this. It felt like a blasphemy to her. Perhaps he needed to blaspheme. Perhaps that was his way of working the shock of it all out of his system. Nonetheless she couldn’t let his blasphemies go unchecked. ‘You aren’t saying what you really mean,’ she said. ‘You can’t honestly think that your mother’s and father’s life was a disgrace.’
‘They were in hiding for the whole of it. Yes, it was a disgrace.’
‘And what about those who had nowhere to hide? Their parents and grandparents? Mine?’
‘The trodden generations? A disgrace.’
‘Then it’s up to you to restore respect.’
‘Me? I am the greatest disgrace of all.’
ii
Esme Nussbaum sits at the window of her room and watches rain drip from the ferns. Even when it’s not raining anywhere else it rains in Paradise Valley and even when it doesn’t rain in Paradise Valley the ferns go on dripping.
There is nothing more I can do, she tells herself. It’s no longer in my hands. But it’s in her brain, and with that she wills them on, the harbingers of her bright new equilibrium of hate.
Senior officials from Ofnow are on the phone to her every day. They want to know how it’s proceeding. The population is still tearing itself apart — why, in her very neck of the woods there has been another brutal murder, a double murder, a policeman and his cat, for God’s sake: what maniac would kill a cat? — so they need good news. She tells them this thing must run its course. Yes, she has other irons in the fire, but this is the best bet and, trust her, she won’t take her eye off it for a moment. But she has to remind them that the complex structure of conflict that was Rome wasn’t built in a day and that there’ll be no immediate visible effect even if all does go well. They don’t agree with her. They think the country will feel a different place the minute it learns that WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED was only, after all, a partial solution. They don’t expect a uniformity of response. After years of saying sorry there’s no knowing how the public will react but, by Esme’s own analysis, the news itself — a few well-judged publicity photographs, the odd teaser interview, not giving too much away, in celebrity and gossip magazines — should begin to restore the necessary balance of societal antagonism. ‘Just give us some tidbits we can definitively leak,’ they tell her, meaning that the wedding, the conception, and the birth can wait. The child of course is crucial — For unto us a child is given — but even the promise of it should suffice for the moment.