‘I’d like you not to worry about anything.’
Ailinn wondered why she’d made a joke. Was it Kevern’s doing? ‘If it’s all illusion,’ she continued in a different vein, ‘why has it caused so much misery?’
‘I’ve had a long time to think about this,’ Esme said, pausing. .
‘And?’
Ailinn marvelled at her own impatience. She had lived in ignorance of just about everything for a quarter of a century; now she needed answers to questions she could never have imagined she would ask, and she needed them at once. The pity of it was that the person in the best position to answer those questions seemed to have all the time in the world. In fact Ailinn was wrong about this. Esme, too, was a cauldron of impatience, but did not want to frighten Ailinn off with her intensity. So both women sat with frayed nerves, listening to the clocks furiously ticking in their brains.
‘We are dead matter,’ Esme continued at last, ‘indeed I was very nearly dead matter myself when I realised this — we are dead matter until we distinguish ourselves from what’s not dead. I was alive, I told myself as I was lying there. Very nearly dead, but alive. And it made me more alive to realise that. I wasn’t the me I’d been, but nor was I the me they wanted me to be, which was no me at all. Only when we have a different state to strive against do we have reason to strive at all. And different people the same. I am me because I am not her, or you. If we were all red earthworms there’d be no point in life. Identity is just the name we give to the act of making ourselves distinct.’
‘So you’re saying it’s irrelevant what our identities really are? As long as we assume one and fight against someone else’s.’
‘I’d say so, yes. Pretty much.’
‘Isn’t that a bit arbitrary?’
‘Perhaps. But isn’t everything? It’s just chance that we’re born to who we’re born to. There’s no design.’
‘So why fight for who we are?’
‘For the sake of the fight itself.’
‘Then isn’t that a bit violent, as well as arbitrary?’
‘Life is violent. I had to fight death to be alive.’
‘But if “who we are” is arbitrary, and if we fight for whatever cause we just happen to be to born to, for no other reason than the fight itself, then it didn’t have to be me you picked for this. .’
‘I didn’t pick you, Ailinn.’
‘All right. Describe it how you like. But if there is no identifiable me then it doesn’t matter whether I am it or not. I don’t have to be the real deal because there is no real deal. You could have hit on anyone.’
Esme bit her lip. ‘You’ll do it better,’ she said.
They fell silent. Something crawled across Ailinn’s feet. She wondered if it was Esme’s red earthworm, that made life meaningless. She shuddered. Esme offered to go inside and fetch her a shawl. Ailinn shook her head. She could have been shaking Esme off her.
‘If you’re asking me to do this without Kevern,’ she said suddenly, ‘I’m afraid I can’t. No, it’s feeble of me to put it like that. If you’re asking me to do this without Kevern, I’m afraid I won’t.’
Esme felt as though all her splintered bones had been crushed a second time. She remembered what it took to distinguish herself from the dead.
‘In that case we will have to make sure you do it with him,’ she said.
TWO. Shake Hands With Your Uncle Max
i
IT WAS HEDRA Deitch who was the first to congratulate him.
‘On?’
‘Don’t be like that,’ Hedra said, wrinkling up her nose.
Kevern had dropped into her souvenir shop to see if her stock of lovespoons needed replenishing. She didn’t sell many. Painted earthenware garden statuary, pressed-flower pictures, and Port Reuben tea towels and coffee mugs accounted for most of her trade. ‘Cheap and cheerful, like me,’ was how she described her business. But she thought a small selection of Kevern’s lovespoons lent her shop a more upmarket feel, and she welcomed the opportunity his visits gave her to be suggestive with him. He wasn’t like the other men in the village. You had to work a bit harder with him. She had snogged him once that she could remember, at the end of a wild night in the pub, when they were both drunk. She had done it to enrage Pascoe but she had enjoyed it too, after a fashion. He had a softer mouth than she expected. No biting. And no slapping. On his part, that is. So she was glad enough to return to Pascoe’s rough indifferent gnawing later.
But Kevern was one of those men who got under your skin by not adequately taking you in. So he remained a challenge to her.
It was Ailinn’s idea that Kevern do something practical such as checking on his outlets, no matter that there was no pressing financial reason to do so. He had not been down into the village, not seen a living soul since she’d told him the first part of what she had to tell him, and that was two weeks ago. He had gone into a decline, rapid even for a man who declined easily. He agreed to Ailinn’s suggestion only because he knew it would make her, at least, feel better. He wasn’t expecting to feel better himself. He didn’t want to feel better. He owed it to what he’d been told to feel worse. That was what living a serious life meant, wasn’t it, honouring the gravity of things by not pretending they were light? Rozenwyn Feigenblat had told him he was an ethicist, not an artist. He agreed with her. An artist owed a duty to nothing except his own irresponsibility. It was OK for an artist to frolic in the water, no matter how bloody the waves or how high the tide rose. An ethicist had an obligation to drown.
Just go for the walk, Ailinn had said. Just go for the exercise. See someone who isn’t me. ‘There isn’t someone who isn’t you,’ he’d said. Whereupon she’d pushed him out of the cottage.
He meant what he’d said. There wasn’t anyone who wasn’t her, and if there were he didn’t want to see them. And even she, since she’d become the bearer of bad news, was not always a welcome sight to him now.
But most of all he hadn’t gone out because he hadn’t wanted to be seen.
Was that because he believed he suddenly looked different? No. He trusted he looked exactly the same: the man he had always been, in decline as he had always been. The difference today was that he understood what they’d seen when they’d looked at him in the past.
He exchanged stiff greetings with people he barely knew. He had lived here all his life, in a village of fewer than two thousand souls, and yet there were still people who were lifetime residents themselves whose names he didn’t know. His parents had taught him well in one regard. Remain a stranger to the place, they had said. Say nothing. Ask for nothing. Explain yourself to no one. But they had also cautioned him to go unnoticed, and in that he could scarcely have fared worse. Everyone knew who he was — Kevern ‘Coco’ Cohen, the man with the sour expression who sat on his own bench above the blowhole, saying nothing, asking for nothing, explaining himself to no one.
And now here was Hedra Deitch, coming out from behind her counter to look him up and down, surveying him in that hungry way of hers, wondering if he’d do for whatever her itchy nature needed at that moment, something or other that her shot-beast of a husband couldn’t provide. Shame he wasn’t an artist. He’d have provided it and painted her later.
But why the congratulations? Was she being sarcastic, welcoming him to a knowledge of himself the whole village had possessed for years? Was she applauding his cottoning on finally — Kevern, the last to know about Kevern?
‘Don’t be like what?’ he said.
She put one hand on her hip, as though to answer his coquettishness. ‘Don’t be pretending you aren’t proud.’