My hand is forced. I will away to beauty. .
No, not Rozenwyn Feigenblat. The beauty of natural things — tidal flats, sunsets, unsullied by all the subtle demonism of life and thought. .
iv
Ailinn Solomons, looking at the moon, and listening to her jumping heart, wondered at what was happening to her. She had returned, briefly — she didn’t want to leave Kevern on his own for too long — to Paradise Valley where there were still things to find out, sort out, have out, and was sitting on a cold mossy bench, hugging herself against the chill damp, listening to Ez clattering about rather obviously in the kitchen. ‘Do I feel any different?’ she asked herself. Ez had been lending her books relevant to that question, or at least fragments of books, dog-eared, singed, defaced, some of them crayoned over as if by a class of three-year-old delinquents. Although they purported to have been written — whenever it was they were written — from the inside, by those in the know, or at least by those who knew others in the know, each work, no matter how little of it there was, contradicted the one before. It was her forebears’ austerity of conscience, according to one writer, that had always troubled humanity and explained the hostility they encountered wherever they went. They demanded too much. They set too high a standard. A second writer understood their defining characteristic as a near irresponsible love of the material world, and it was this that had landed them in hot water. Offered the spirit, they chose matter. Offered emotion, they chose reason. This one said they were deeply pious; that one found them profoundly sacrilegious. They were devoted to charity, yet they amassed wealth regardless of how they came by it. When they weren’t consumed by self-regard they suffered a bruising sense of worthlessness. They saw the universe as a reflection of the God that loved them above all people, but moved through it like strangers. When she came to the alienation they felt in nature she recognised herself at last. She had never been comfortable on a garden seat in her life. She disliked the damp newsprint smell of vegetation, detested snails and worms, felt threatened by the icy indifference of the moon, and feared the irregular rhythm of her heart which also, surely, was a thing of nature. So while she didn’t feel any different after reading all Esme had given her to read, she at least understood why she felt the same.
Esme called out to her from the kitchen. She had, since morning, been making chicken soup to an ancient recipe she’d found in a cookery book that must have been as old as creation and wondered whether Ailinn wanted to eat it inside or out. Ailinn didn’t want to eat it at all, so reverentially had Esme prepared it, with so much sacrificial ardour had she dismembered the chicken, so full of spiritual intention was her dicing of the carrots, so soulfully did she look at her through the steam rising from the pan, but decided that as she had to eat it somewhere she would eat it out. Compound the discomfort.
They ate silently for a short while, balancing the soup plates on their knees. Esme sneaked looks at her.
‘Are you enjoying it, my love?
My love!
‘Am I meant to?’
‘Well I’ve made it for you in the hope you will.’
‘No, I mean is it part of my preparation?’
Esme winced.
‘Will it count against me,’ Ailinn continued, ‘if I don’t? Will it prove I’m a fake?’
‘Well I won’t tell,’ Esme said.
‘Forgive me, I am not able to finish it,’ Ailinn said at last, putting the plate on the ground between her ugly feet. ‘There is something more pressing than soup.’
Esme started in alarm. It irritated Ailinn how easily she could worry her. She had only to express the slightest disquiet for Esme’s entire system of defences to be activated. She’s too close to me, she thought. There’s more of her inside my skin than there is of me.
‘What is it that’s more pressing?’ Esme asked. She could have been asking how long Ailinn had known she only had an hour to live.
‘Matrilineality,’ Ailinn said.
‘Could you explain that?’
‘Matrilineality? After all you’ve said to me on the subject! My love’ — take that, Ailinn thought — ‘it’s you who are the authority.’
‘No, I meant could you explain what bothers you about it.’
So, Ailinn, shivering under the cold moon, did.
If fathers bore so little responsibility for the defining characteristics of their progeny, as Esme said they did, in what sense were they their progeny at all? There seemed to be a carelessness here that belied the otherwise strict code of kinship into which Ailinn had now been drawn. Had it really mattered not at all what sort of seed her father had put into her mother, and her grandfather into her grandmother? Was it merely incidental? She felt the pull of contradictory impulses: pleased to be incontrovertibly what she was, but disappointed she had got there, so to speak, so easily, with so few caveats as to fathers. In an odd way it devalued her new-found affiliation. ‘I would want a child of mine to be validated on both sides,’ she told Esme.
‘I want that for you too,’ Esme assured her.
Fearing that Esme intended to embrace her, Ailinn moved her chair away, pretending she was trying to make herself more comfortable.
‘But. .?’
‘But we don’t always get what we want.’
‘You moved heaven and earth to keep us together, Ez,’ she reminded her. ‘You wouldn’t let me walk away from him. “Ring him, ring him,” you urged me. My soulmate, you had the nerve to call him when you knew nothing of my soul. And when I told you he was walking away from me you turned as white as your blouse. What’s changed?’
Esme Nussbaum was relieved that Ailinn couldn’t see her blush. ‘Nothing’s changed. I care about your happiness as much as I ever did. More. But you’ve taken what I’ve had to tell you remarkably well — far better, truly, than I dared to hope you would. I couldn’t imagine you ever dealing with this on your own, yet you have.’
‘Not have, am. . I’m a work in progress, Ez.’
‘I understand. .’
‘And I’m not on my own.’
‘Are you saying that Kevern is with you on this every inch of the way?’
‘I never said I was with me on this every inch of the way. I haven’t chosen this, remember. And I haven’t seen through to the end of all it means. You have to face the fact that I probably never will. I can’t give you a guarantee for life.’
‘I know that and I’m not pressuring you. If you and Kevern can work this out together there’s nothing I’d like more.’
‘Matrilineality notwithstanding?’
‘Matrilineality is not my invention. It just happens to be the way it works.’
‘And the way it works makes Kevern redundant?’
‘Not at all. The future I envisage requires mothers and fathers.’
‘For the look of the thing.’
This time Esme would not be denied. She leaned across and stroked the girl’s arm. ‘Ailinn, this is all about the “look” of the thing. You are no different today from who you were a year ago, a month ago even. What’s changed is how you appear. How you appear to yourself and how you will appear to the world. It’s all illusion. Identity is nothing but illusion.’
‘I shouldn’t worry in that case that I don’t like chicken soup?’