R.I.P. Lowenna Morgenstern
i
AILINN KNEW EVEN less about her family.
Kevern thought that Ez, the fraught, angular woman with the tight frizzy hair who had brought her down to share the cottage in Paradise Valley, was her aunt, but she wasn’t.
‘No relative,’ Ailinn explained. ‘Not even a friend really. No, that’s unfair. She is a friend. But a very recent one. I only met her a few months before I came away, in a reading group.’
Reading groups were licensed. Because they were allowed access to books not otherwise available (not banned, just not available), readers had to demonstrate exceptionality of need – either specific scholastic need or, if it could be well argued for (and mere curiosity wasn’t an argument), general educational need. Kevern was impressed that Ailinn had been able to demonstrate one or the other. But she told him she had simply been able to pull a few strings, her adoptive mother being a teacher.
Books apart, this account of her relations with Ez explained to Kevern why she had made so little ceremony of introducing them. It was as though she had never been introduced to her herself. He was amazed by how anxious she could be one minute, and how devil-may-care the next. ‘And you threw in your lot with a woman you’d met in a reading group, just like that?’
‘Well, I’d hardly call it throwing in my lot. She offered me a room in a cottage she hadn’t ever seen herself, for as long or as short a time as I wanted it, in return for my company, and some help painting and gardening, and I could find no reason to say no. Why not? I liked her. We had a shared interest in reading. And there was nothing up there to keep me. And I reckoned I could sell my flowers just as well down here . . . probably better, as you get more tourists than we do, and . . . and of course there was you . . .’
‘You knew about me?’
‘My heart knew about you.’
Her arrhythmic heart.
He couldn’t tell how deep her teasing went. Did she truly think they were destined for each other? He would once have laughed at such an idea, but not now. Now, he too (so he hoped to God she wasn’t playing with his feelings) wanted to think they had all along been on converging trajectories. But no doubt, and with more reason, his parents had thought the same.
She had no memory of her parents – her actual parents – which made Kevern feel more protective of her still.
‘No letters? No photographs?’
She shook her head.
‘And you didn’t ask?’
‘Who would I have asked?’
‘Whoever was caring for you.’
She looked surprised by the idea that anyone had cared for her. He picked that up – perhaps because he wanted to think that no one had cared for her until he came along. ‘Someone must have been looking after you,’ he said.
‘Well I suppose the staff at the orphanage to begin with, though I have no memory of them either. Just a smell, like a hospital, of disinfectant. I was brought up by a smell. And after that Mairead, the local schoolteacher, and her husband Hendrie.’
‘And what did they smell of ?’
She thought about it. ‘Stale Sunday afternoons.’
‘They’d been friends of your parents?’
She shook her head. ‘Didn’t know my parents. No one seems to have known them. Mairead told me when I was old enough to understand that she and Hendrie were unable to have children of their own and had been in touch with an orphanage outside Mernoc – a small town miles from anywhere except a prison and a convent – about adoption. When they were invited to visit, they saw me. They chose me like a stray puppy.’
She normally liked to say ‘like an orange’, but there was something about Kevern that made her think of strays.
‘I can understand why,’ he said, losing his fingers in the tangle of her hair.
She raised her face to him, like one of her own flowers. ‘Why?’
‘You know why.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Because to see you is to see no one else.’ He meant it.
‘Then it’s a pity you didn’t choose me first.’
‘Why – were they unkind to you?’
‘No, not at all. Just remote.’
‘Are they still alive?’
‘No. Or at least Mairead isn’t. Hendrie is in a care home. He has no knowledge of the world around him. Not that he ever had a lot.’
‘You didn’t like him?’
‘Not a great deal. He was a largely silent man who fished and played dominoes. I think he hit Mairead.’
‘And you?’
‘Occasionally. It wasn’t personal. Just something men did. Do. Towards the end, before they put him in a home, it got worse. He started to make remarks like “I owe you nothing”, and “You don’t belong here”, and would throw things at me. But his mind was going then.’
‘And you never found out where you did belong?’
‘I belonged in the Mernoc orphanage.’
‘I mean who put you there?’
She shrugged, showing him that his questioning had begun to weary her.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. Adding, ‘But you belong here now.’
ii
As a matter of course, she woke badly. Her eyes puffed, her hair matted, her skin twice its age. Where had she been?
She wished she knew.
At first Kevern thought it was his fault. He’d been tossing and turning, perhaps, or snoring, or crying out in the night, stopping her sleeping. But she told him she had always been like this – not morning grumpiness but a sort of species desolation, as though opening her eyes on a world in which no one of her sort existed.
He pulled a face. ‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘You’re not yet the world I wake up to,’ she said. ‘It takes me a while to realise you’re there.’
‘So why such desolation?’ he wanted to know. ‘Where do you return from when you wake?’
‘If only I could tell you. If only I knew myself.’
Mernoc, Kevern guessed. He saw an icy orphanage, miles from nowhere. And Ailinn standing at the window, barefooted, staring into nothing, waiting for somebody to find her.
Pure melodrama. But much of life for Kevern was.
And thinking of her waiting to be found, while he was waiting to find, gave a beautiful symmetry to the love he felt for her.
What she’d told him awakened his pity and pity gave him a better reason to be in love than he’d ever had before. There was rapture and then there was responsibility. Each imposed an obligation of seriousness. But together they made the serious sacred.
He couldn’t rescue her from her dreams, but he could make waking better for her. The minute he sensed her stir he would get out of bed and open the windows, so that she would wake to light, the smell of the sea, and the cries of the gulls. But sometimes the light was too harsh and the smell of the sea too pungent and the cries of the gulls a mockery. ‘They sound the way I feel,’ she’d say.
Did that mean that gulls, too, suffered species desolation?
So he had to make a quick decision every morning: whether to open the curtains or keep them closed.
But when the sea was rough they could still hear the blowhole like a giant mouth sucking in and then expelling water. On wild days they would even see the spittle.
‘Reminds me of a whale exhaling air,’ she said once. ‘Do you remember that passage in Moby-Dick describing whale-jets “up-playing and sparkling in the noonday air”?’
He didn’t.
‘But you’ve read the book?’
He had. Years ago. Moby-Dick was one of the classic novels that had not been encouraged to drift out of print – though most editions were in graphic form – the grounds for its remaining available being the interest felt in it by fishing communities, its remoteness otherwise from the nation’s calamitous recent history, and the fact that it was from its opening sentence – ‘Call me Ishmael’ – that the colossal social experiment undertaken to restore stability borrowed its name.
OPERATION ISHMAEL.
‘We should read it together,’ she suggested when Kevern told her he could remember little of it beyond Ahab and the whale and of course OPERATION ISHMAEL. ‘It’s my most favourite book in the world,’ she told him. ‘It’s the story of my life.’
‘You’ve been hunting a great white whale? Could that have been me, perhaps?’
She kissed him absent-mindedly, as though he were a child that needed humouring. Her brow was furrowed. ‘It wasn’t Ahab I identified with, you fool,’ she said. ‘That’s a man thing. I took the side of the whale.’
‘Don’t worry, men do the same. The whale is more noble than the whaler.’
‘But I bet you don’t wake to the knowledge that you’re the whale.’
‘Are you telling me you do? Is that where you’ve been all night, swimming away from the madness of Ahab? No wonder you look exhausted.’
‘I don’t know what I’ve been doing all night, but it’s a pretty good description of what I do all day.’
How serious was she?
‘All day? Truly?’
She paused. ‘Well what am I signing up for if I say “truly”? If you’re asking me if I actually hear the oars of the longboats coming after me, then no. But when people describe having the wind at their back it’s a sensation of freedom I don’t recognise. An unthreatening, invigorating space behind me? – no, I don’t ever have the luxury of that. There might be nothing there when I turn around, but it isn’t a beneficent nothing. Nothing good propels me. But I call it a good day when I turn around and at least don’t see anything bad.’
He couldn’t stop himself taking this personally. Wasn’t he the wind at her back? Wasn’t he a beneficent force? ‘I can’t bear to think,’ he said, ‘that you get no relief from this.’
‘Oh, I get relief. I get relief with you. But that’s the most dangerous time because it means I’ve forgotten to be on guard. You remember that description of the nursing whales, “serenely revelling in dalliance and delight”?’
He didn’t. He wondered whether she was intending to quote the entire novel to him in small gobbets. Something – and this he did remember – that his father had done when he was small. Not Moby-Dick – other, darker, more sardonic books. Until his mother had intervened. ‘What are you trying to do to the boy?’ he had heard her ask. ‘Make him you?’ Shortly after which his father locked his books away.
‘Well, whenever I feel anything of that sort,’ she went on, ‘whenever I feel calm, at rest, loving and being loved – as I do now – I feel I must be in danger. In my universe I don’t know how else to account for being loved. Don’t kiss me, I used to say to Mairead when she tucked me up in bed at night. I won’t be able to sleep. If you kiss me something terrible will follow. Hendrie wanted to send me to a psychiatrist. Or better still, back to the children’s home. Mairead said no. She believed the children’s home was to blame. She was convinced that something terrible must have been done to me there.’
‘And had it, do you think?’
‘Oh God, you and my mother. Something terrible’s been done to everybody everywhere. Where’s the point of hunting down the specifics? Anyway, I think you can tell when a terror has an origin in a particular event. You might not have a name for it but you can date it. A five-year terror, a ten-year terror . . . This is a thousand-year terror.’
He wondered if she overdid the retrospective panic. If she overdramatised herself. Like him. ‘A thousand years is a long time to have been hunted by a one-legged nut, Ailinn.’
‘You can make fun of me if you like. I know how crazy it must sound. But it’s as though it’s not just me, as I am now, or as I was the day before yesterday, who’s always running. It’s an earlier me. Don’t laugh. You’re just as barmy in your own way. But it feels like a sort of predestiny – as though I was born in flight. Which I suppose I could have been. It’s a pity my real parents aren’t around to ask.’
Yes, she overwrote her story. But he loved her. Maybe overloved her. ‘We could try to find them,’ he said.
‘Don’t be banal,’ she came back sharply, thinking she would have to watch his solicitousness.
He shrank from her asperity. But he had one more question.What he feared when he knelt to check his letter box for the umpteenth time had no features. No person rose up before him. He could weigh the reason for his precautions but he could not picture it. She, though, had Ahab. Was that a way of speaking or did she actually see the man? ‘Is he Ahab in the flesh that’s coming for you—’
‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Did I say he was “coming for me”? Sounds a bit like waiting for Mairead and Hendrie, doesn’t it? Was I waiting for them to “come for me”? You must think my psychology is pathetic, alternating hopes and terrors based on puns—’
‘I don’t,’ he said, afraid that they had begun to judge each other. ‘Your psychology is your psychology, therefore I love it. But all I was going to ask was whether Ahab is a generalised idea for you or you actually picture him coming at you with his lampoon.’
‘Lampoon?’
‘Slip of the tongue. You’ve been making me nervous. Harpoon.’
She stared at him. ‘You call that a slip?’
‘Why, what would you call it?’
‘A searchlight into your soul.’
He looked annoyed. ‘I let you off your pun,’ he said.
She kissed him. ‘Yes, you did. But we aren’t in a competition, are we, and I’m not making fun of you. It’s just that this slip is so you.’
‘How so?’
‘Well, it’s your fear of mockery, isn’t it. Your fear of anyone knowing you well enough to poke fun at you.’
She had him here. He had only to deny the justice of the charge to prove it. Touchy? Me?
She had him another way too. Wasn’t he her mentor in the matter of a sense of humour? Hadn’t he, when she’d been upset with him for teasing her about her thick ankles, lectured her about the nature of a joke? So how much easier-going was he when the joke was on him?
They were in this together, it seemed to her. Skin as fine as parchment, the pair of them. Pride a pin could prick. Hearts that burst when either looked with love at the other.
He could see what she was thinking but decided to be flattered that she offered to penetrate him so deeply. It proved she found him interesting and cared about him.
He excused himself to take a shower. Though he showered frequently, the sounds he made the moment he turned on the water – groans of release (or was it remission?), sighs of deliverance, gaspings deep enough, she feared, to shake his heart out of his chest – suggested it was either the first shower he had ever experienced or the last he would ever enjoy. She had wondered, at the beginning, whether it were some private sexual ritual, demeaning to her, but later she would sometimes shower with him and he made exactly the same noises then. She couldn’t explain it to herself. A shower was just a shower. Why the magnitude of his surrender to it? It could have been his death, so thunderous were his exhalations. Or it could have been his birth.
She was relieved when he stepped back out into the bedroom, dripping like a seal. He appeared exhausted.
‘There will be more, you know,’ she said.
‘More what?’
‘More showers.’
He expected her to say ‘More life’.
‘You never know what there will be more of,’ he said, ‘but that’s certainly more than enough about me and who I am and what I’m in flight from. We began this conversation discussing whales and you – the least whale-like creature I have ever seen.’
‘Despite my thick ankles?’
‘Whales don’t have thick ankles. As didn’t Ahab, as I recall.’
‘Well he certainly didn’t have two.’
If he hadn’t loved her before . . .
Best to leave it at that, anyway, they both thought. But he wanted to be sure that she felt safe with him. Still dripping, he pulled her down into the bed and drew the duvet over them.
Gently, protectively.
But were they overdoing this, he wondered.
She’d have answered yes had he asked her.
iii
It was in his lampoon-fearing nature to wonder whether they would be the talk of the village – the slightly odd woodturner who by and large kept himself to himself, and the tangle-haired flower girl from up north who was several years his junior. But the village wasn’t exercised by pairings-off, even when the parties weren’t as free to do as they pleased as these two were. People who have lived for aeons within sound of crashing seas, and sight of screaming seabirds spearing mackerel, take sex for granted. It’s townspeople who find it disarranging.
And besides, the village had something else to yack about: a double murder. Lowenna Morgenstern and Ythel Weinstock found lying side by side in the back of Ythel Weinstock’s caravan in pools of each other’s blood. By itself, the blood of one would not have found its way, in such quantities, on to the body of the other. So there’d been doubly foul play: not just the murders but this ghoulish intermixing of bodily fluids which was taken by the police to be a commentary on the other sort of fluidal intermingling in which Morgenstern and Weinstock had no doubt been frenetically engaged at the moment their assailant struck.
‘Caught in the act’ was the phrase going round the village. And no one doubted that it was Lowenna’s husband, Ade, who’d caught them. But where was Ade Morgenstern? He hadn’t been seen in the village for months, having stormed out of the surgery to which he’d accompanied his wife to have a minor ailment looked at, which ailment, in his view, didn’t necessitate the removal of her brassiere. He hadn’t seen the brassiere coming off, he had only heard the doctor unhooking it. But his wife had beautiful breasts, as many in the village could testify, and he was a jealous man.
‘Breathe in,’ he heard the doctor order her. ‘And out.’ And a moment later, ‘Open.’
He was not in the waiting room when his wife emerged fully clothed from her consultation.
Hedra Deitch was less bothered by the question of who was guilty of the crime than its timing. ‘If you gotta go, that’s as good a moment as any, if you want my view, and that Ythel was a bit of all right,’ she told drinkers at the bar of the Friendly Fisherman. ‘Rumpy pumpy feels like dying anyway when you’ve got a husband like mine.’
Pascoe Deitch ignored the insult. ‘She always was a screamer,’ he put in.
His wife kicked his shin. ‘How come you’re an expert?’
‘When it comes to Lowenna Morgenstern everyone’s an expert.’
Hedra kicked his other shin. ‘Was an expert. Who you going to be expert about next?’
Pascoe’s expertise, universal or not, caught the attention of the police. Not that he was a suspect. He lacked the energy to be a criminal just as, for all his bravado, his wife believed him to lack the energy to be unfaithful. He masturbated in corners, in front of her, thinking, he told her, about other women – that was the sum of his disloyalty.
‘You could feel this one comin’,’ he told Detective Inspector Gutkind.
‘You knew there were family troubles?’
‘Everybody knew. But no more than usual. We all have family troubles.’
‘So in what sense did you feel this one coming?’
‘Something had to give. It was like before a storm. It gave you a headache.’
‘Was it something in the marriage that had to give? Did the murdered woman have a lover?’
‘Well who else was that lying with her in those pools of blood?’
‘You tell me.’
Pascoe shrugged the shrug of popular surmise.
‘And did the husband know as much as you know?’ Gutkind asked.
‘He knew she put it about.’
‘Was he a violent man?’
‘Ythel?’
‘Ade.’
‘The place is full of violent men. Violent women, too.’
‘Are you saying there are many people who might have done this?’
‘When a storm’s comin’ a storm’s comin’.’
‘But what motive would anyone else have had?’
‘What motive do you need? What motive does the thunder have?’
The policeman scratched his head.‘If this murder was as motiveless as thunder I’m left with a long list of suspects.’
Pascoe nodded. ‘That’s pretty much the way of it.’
That night he went alone to a barn dance in Port Abraham. His wife was wrong in assuming he was too lazy to be unfaithful to her.
iv
Densdell Kroplik generously offered to sell the police multiple copies of his Brief History of Port Reuben at half price on the assumption that it would help with their enquiries. Yes, he told Detective Inspector Gutkind, there were violent undercurrents in their society, but these appeared exceptional only in the context of that unwonted and, quite frankly, inappropriate gentleness that had descended on Port Reuben after WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED – see pp. 35–37 of his Brief History. Why Port Reuben had had to pay the price – bowing and scraping and saying sorry – for an event in which it had played no significant role, Densdell Kroplik didn’t see. Nothing had happened, if it happened, here. WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED, happened in the cities. And yet the villagers and their children and their children’s children were expected to share in the universal hand-wringing and namechanging. In his view, if anyone was interested in hearing it, the Lowenna Morgenstern case came as a welcome return to form. In a village with Port Reuben’s proud warrior history, people were supposed to kill one another . . . Where there was a compelling argument to do so, he added, in response to Detective Inspector Gutkind’s raised eyebrow.
‘And what, in your view, constitutes a compelling argument?’ the policeman asked.
‘Well there you’ll have to ask the murderer,’ Densdell Kroplik replied.
‘And what’s this about a proud warrior history?’ Gutkind pressed. ‘There haven’t been warriors in these parts for many a year.’
Densdell Kroplik wasn’t going to argue with that.‘The Passing of the Warrior’ was the title of his first chapter. But that didn’t mean the village didn’t have a more recent reputation to live up to. It was its touchy individualism, its fierce wariness, that had gone on lending the place its character and kept it inviolate. Densdell Kroplik’s position when it came to outsiders, the hated aphids, was more than a little paradoxical. He needed visitors to buy his pamphlet but on balance he would rather there were no visitors. He wanted to sing to them of the glories of Port Reuben, in its glory days called Ludgvennok, but didn’t want them to be so far entranced by his account that they never left. The exhilaration of living in Ludgvennok, which it pained him to call Port Reuben, walled in by cliffs and protected by the sea, enjoying the company of rough-mannered men and wild women, lay, the way he saw it, in its chaste unapproachability. This quality forcibly struck the composer Richard Wagner – if you’ve heard of him, Detective Inspector – in the course of a short visit he made to Ludgvennok as it was then. In those days husbands and lovers, farmers and fishermen, wreckers and smugglers, settled their grievances, eye to eye, as they had done for time immemorial, without recourse to the law or any other outside interference. Sitting at a window in a hostelry on this very spot, Wagner watched the men of Ludgvennok front up to one another like stags, heard the bacchante women wail, saw the blood flow, and composed until his fingers ached. ‘I feel more alive here than I have felt anywhere,’ he wrote in a letter to Mathilde Wesendonck. ‘I wish you could be with me.’*
Der Strandryuber von Ludgvennok, the opera Wagner subsequently wrote about the village (and dedicated to Mathilde, who had by that time given him his marching orders), was rarely performed; this Densdell Kroplik ascribed not to any fault in the composition but to the lily-livered hypocrisy of the age.
‘All very laudable,’ Detective Inspector Gutkind conceded. As it happened, he had not only heard of Wagner, a composer beloved of his great-grandfather, but kept a small cache of Wagner memorabilia secreted in his wardrobe in fealty to that passion. He could even hum some of the tunes from his operas and went so far as to hum a few bars of the Siegfried Idyll to show Kroplik that he too was a man of culture. Nonetheless, ‘All very laudable but I have a particularly savage double murder on my hands, not a few high-spirited drunks kicking nine bells out of another,’ was what he said.
* Liebling,
The days go by without my hearing from you and I wonder what I have done to deserve your cruelty. Everything I see, I see only that I might relate it to you. Had I only known how wonderful I was going to find Ludgvennok I would not have allowed you to persuade me to come on my own. When I think of all I have written about the regeneration of the human race, and all I have done to further its ennoblement, it cheers me to find a people here who live up to everything I have ever understood by nobility of character. It can sometimes, of course, be as much a matter of what one doesn’t find as what one does, that renders a place and a people congenial. Whether by deliberate intention or some lucky chance, Ludgvennok appears to have been released from the influence of those whose rapacity of ambition and disagreeableness of appearance has made life such a trial in the European cities where I have spent my life. Even the ear declares itself to be in a paradise to be free, from the moment one wakes to the moment one lies down – without you, alas, my darling – of that repulsive jumbled blabber, that yodelling cackle, in which elsewhere the ----s make the insistence of their presence felt. Here it is almost as though one has returned to a time of purity, when mankind was able to rejoice in its connection with its natural soil, unspoiled by the jargon of a race that has no passion – no Leidenschaft, there is no other word – for the land, for art, for the heroical, or for the rest of humanity.
My darling, I do so wish you could be here with me.
Your R
‘Your point being?’ Densdell Kroplik wanted to know. He was irked that the detective inspector had heard of Wagner, let alone that he could hum him. He wanted Wagner for himself.
He was sitting in his favourite chair by the fire. In all weathers a fire burned in the Friendly Fisherman. And on most evenings Densdell Kroplik, steam rising from his thighs, sat by it in a heavy seaman’s sweater warming and rubbing his hands. He cultivated a take it or leave it air. He knew what was what. It was up to you whether you wanted to learn from him or not.
‘My point being that it gets me nowhere to be told Port Reuben is back to doing what it has always done best.’
Densdell Kroplik shrugged. ‘It might,’ he said, ‘if you understood more about the passion for justice and honour that has always burned in the hearts of the men of these parts.’
‘I doubt that a passion for justice and honour had anything to do with the murder of Lowenna Morgenstern andYthel Weinstock.’
Densdell Kroplik pointed a red, fire-warmed finger at the policeman. ‘Is that something you can be sure of ?’ he said. ‘There was a famous five-way murder here about a hundred years ago. Two local women, their husbands, and a lover. Whose lover was he? No one was quite sure. Am I hinting at pederasty? I might be. All that was certain was that he was an aphid – which makes pederasty the more likely. Buggers, the lot of them. From the north or the east of the country, it doesn’t matter which. Somewhere that wasn’t here. A pact was what the coroner decided it had been, a love pact born of hopeless entanglement. They’d gone up on to the cliff, taken off their clothes, watched the sun go down and swallowed pills. What do you think of that?’
‘What I think is that it doesn’t help me with my case,’ Gutkind said. ‘A pact is suicide, not murder.’
‘Unless,’ Kroplik went on, ‘unless the villagers, motivated by justifiable disapproval and an understandable hatred of outsiders, had taken it upon themselves to do away with all five offenders. In which case it wasn’t a mass suicide but a mob attack in the name of justice and honour.’
‘And it’s your theory that the whole village could have done away with Lowenna Morgenstern and Ythel Weinstock?’
‘Did I say that? I’m just a barber with an interest in local history. All I know, from reading what I have read and from using these’ – he made a two-pronged fork of his fingers and pointed to his all-seeing eyes – ‘is that people have been subdued here for a long time. They have a proud history of torrid engagement with one another which has been denied expression. There’s no knowing what people might do – singly or in a group – when their natures rebel against repression.’
‘Well you might call it torrid engagement, I call it crime.’
‘Then that’s the difference between us,’ Densdell Kroplik laughed.
After which, to show he was a man who could be trusted, he gave the policeman a free haircut, humming all the while Brünnhilde’s final plea to Wotan to let her sleep protected by flame from the attentions of any old mortal aphid.
v
Kevern Cohen stayed aloof from the malicious speculations. He had flirted with Lowenna Morgenstern occasionally, when they had both had too much to drink, and more recently he had kissed her in the village car park on bonfire night. He was no snogger. If he kissed a woman it was because he was aroused by the softness of her lips, not because he wanted to wound them. Breaking skin was not, for Kevern, the way he expressed desire.
Lowenna Morgenstern had a wonderful mouth for kissing, deep and mysterious, the musky taste of wood-fire on her busy tongue.
‘Kissing you is like kissing flame,’ he had said, bending over her. ‘You should have been a poet, you,’ she told him, biting his neck until the blood trickled on to his shirt collar.
And now someone had killed her. The man found dead beside her could just as easily have been him.
Ailinn picked up on his sombre mood. ‘Did you know these people well?’ she asked.
‘Depends what you mean by well,’ he said. ‘I knew her to say hello to. Yythel I’d heard of but never met. He was a pub singer. Not from here. Lowenna was reputed to have a taste for musical talent. Her husband Ade is the church organist. A discontented, jeering man. A hundred years ago he and his brothers would have stood on the cliffs with lamps and lured ships on to the rocks. Then he’d have laughed as they looted the wreckage. If he killed his wife he was just carrying on the family tradition.’
‘But then if he did,’ Ailinn said, ‘he’s only wrecked himself.’
‘Don’t we all,’ Kevern said.
She stopped to look at him. They were walking arm in arm in the valley in their wellingtons, splashing in puddles. The trickle of water called the River Jordan had swollen to the dimensions of a stream. The trees dripped. It would have been the height of fancy to think of it as nature weeping, but Kevern thought it anyway.
‘What do you mean don’t we all?’
‘Did I say that?’
‘You did.’
‘Then I don’t know. I suppose I was feeling the tragedy of what’s occurred.’
‘But it’s not your tragedy.’
‘Well it is in a sense. It’s my village.’
‘Your village! That’s not how you normally talk about it.’
‘No, you’re right, I don’t. Maybe I’m just being ghoulish – wanting to be part of the excitement.’
‘I’m surprised it still excites you. Don’t you have a lot of this sort of thing down here?’
‘Murders, no. Well, a few. But nothing quite as bloody as this.’
‘We have them too . . .’ She pointed, comically, over her shoulder as she had done the day he met her. As though she were throwing salt. ‘. . . Up there, if that’s north. People are unhappy.’
‘I suppose that was all I meant by saying don’t we all. That we all end up unhappy. You say yourself you walk in fear of unhappiness every hour.’
‘Unhappiness? I walk in fear of being hunted to my death.’
‘Well then . . .’
‘Well then nothing. It’s not the same. The whales know who’s coming after them, but they still quietly feed their young. You have to risk it. I am still determined to be happy.’
‘I was only quoting your own words back to you. People are unhappy.’
She put her hands to his face and pulled at his lips, trying to force his melancholy mouth into a smile. ‘But we’re not, are we? Us? You and me?’
He let her fashion a smile out of him. His eyes burned with love for her. Part protective love, part desire. She could look dark and fierce sometimes, like a bird of prey, a hunter herself, but at others she appeared as helpless as a little girl, the foundling picked out of a children’s home in the back of beyond.
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘We’re not unhappy. Not you and me. We are different.’
Yes, they were overdoing this.
Later that week he was asked how well he’d known Lowenna Morgenstern.