The Chimes at Midnight
i
HE SLEPT BADLY. Knowing someone had been lying on his bed – perhaps even in his bed – took from his already small capacity to rest.
But the real reason he slept badly was that Ailinn wasn’t beside him. How quickly he’d come to rely on her being there! How safe, without his realising it, she’d made him feel!
Safety, he thought, could creep up on you as exactly as fear could.
Women sometimes talked of resisting love because it weakened them. Had it weakened him, he wondered, by insinuating safety into his life and seducing him into taking his eye off danger?
He shouldn’t have asked her to move in with him in the first place, but nor should he have asked her to leave. He shouldn’t have been short with her. It wasn’t her fault that he’d deep-kissed Lowenna Morgenstern and brought Detective Inspector Gutkind into his cottage. Except that he knew Lowenna Morgenstern wasn’t to blame either. It was Gutkind who had straightened his rug, he had no doubt of that. It was Gutkind who’d let himself in – while he, Kevern, was away from home, telling strangers to fuck off and hearing voices in Cohentown – Gutkind who’d gone searching through his things. But he wasn’t searching for a bloodstained shirt. That, too, Kevern knew for sure. Gutkind didn’t take him for a murderer. So what did Gutkind take him for?
And never mind Gutkind, who was nobody, nothing, just an accident of history – what was there to unearth?
He lay on his Ailinnless bed looking up at the ceiling with its low, weevilled beams, and watched the question refuse to take definite form. Like one of those humming patterns in the wallpaper that disturb the nights of feverish children, it twisted and writhed, now coming away from the wallpaper altogether, coming at him, making him wonder if it was truly outside himself at all or merely mimicked in visual form the fragmented evasions of his mind. There were some questions you couldn’t ask, even of yourself. There were some questions you couldn’t begin to mould from the black chaos of ignorance, for fear of what definition would bring. Because – because once you’d framed the question you’d given a half-shape to the answer. Better it stay amorphous on the ceiling, as much a musical sound as a drawn or sculpted form. As much a lost note from an electronic sonata, a jammed keyboard, as a moving blob of paint.
But tonight, without Ailinn to soothe him into forgetfulness, he couldn’t leave it alone. Why, he compelled himself to ask, why this apprehension? Why the years of compulsive letter-box peering? Why the lock-checking?
He knew the psychology. It was displacement, all of it. It stood for something else. But wasn’t it also simply a way of practising? A way of accustoming himself, at the very least, to what was not and never would be under his control?
Was that then all that he’d been waiting for – proof positive that he couldn’t affect, for well or ill, his own outcome?
But did even that explain the persistence of the apprehension? Never mind whether there was or wasn’t something that required an answer, why always this apprehension that there was? He felt he needed to hold his head to keep it steady. A clamp would have been a good thing. A brain vice. Always was the word that kept slipping in and out. Always, because the question itself pre-dated his having to ask it. Why have I always been apprehensive? What do I think I’ve done that cries out for reparation? What do I fear I might do again?
He felt he let his mother and father down enunciating it in the silence of this bedroom which had once been their bedroom. Crude of him. Overwrought. Pusillanimous. And maybe even dangerous. Could this have been the very question, maybe the only question, they had all along been educating him never to ask? Could this have been what they who wanted to get in and take a look around had been waiting for all this time, could this have been what Gutkind had been hoping to lay hands on – the question, or rather the capitulation to the need to ask it? What do I fear I have done was like a confession of guilt. And it gave away his location. ‘Hey! you who have always suspected someone of something, cast your gaze this way, the someone is me and I am over here. Here, here, come!’
Come and do what?
Take me away.
Another of his father’s crazed songs came back to him. Something about them carrying him off, ha, ha! All Kevern could remember was that ‘haha’ and his mother putting her hands to her ears and shouting ‘Shut up, Howel!’ Which just made him sing it the more, laughing the laughter of the insanely unamused.
Ha, ha . . .
ii
Whatever Kevern imagined they were expecting to find it was not A Crazy Person’s History of Defilement, for Use in Schools. When he counted off incriminating evidence on his fingers his grandmother’s researches didn’t figure. Expunged, the lot of it. For the good of the family. And that meant expunged from Kevern’s knowledge too. Generation after generation, expunging this, expunging that. Truth to tell, he had little left to hide. The first thing he had done on discovering that his rug had been straightened was to rush upstairs to see if any of his father’s possessions had been touched – the Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller records, the books of poetry, the videos of those fast-talking fatalistic comedians his father had loved (never laughing at them, just nodding his head as though at the wisdom of Plato), the small packets of letters – but rationally he knew these would be of interest to no one, except in so far as his keeping them demonstrated a sentimental hankering for heritage. But the silk runner and the Biedermeier furniture already told that story loud and clear. And anyway, a small fine for clinging on to the past couldn’t have been all Gutkind wanted to lay on him.
So why were they sacrosanct to Kevern? And what did Gutkind want to lay on him?
‘What do I fear I have done?’ Kevern lay there repeating to himself. It was the wrong question. ‘What do we fear we have done?’ he should have asked – more than asked, demanded to be told – remembering his father’s breakdown, a nervous collapse for which he wouldn’t hear of being treated, in the first place because he didn’t want doctors poking around – a terror that was itself, Kevern thought at the time, a symptom of the breakdown – and secondly because he thought there was nothing any doctor could do as he had inherited the propensity from his own father. ‘Let’s just hope,’ he recalled the old man saying from his bed, ‘that it will die out with me and we haven’t passed it on to you.’
Kevern didn’t understand. Hadn’t his grandfather, of whom he knew next to nothing, suffered his breakdown after the disappearance of his wife, Kevern’s grandmother Jenna, of whom Kevern also knew next to nothing except that one elusive fact – that she’d gone out of the cottage and never returned? Who wouldn’t suffer a breakdown after that? In which case there was no genetic disposition to this illness in the family, unless there was a genetic disposition on the part of the womenfolk to disappear.
‘A witty distinction,’ his father acknowledged, ‘but that’s your mother’s father you’re thinking of, so there’s nothing genetically I could have inherited from him anyway.’
‘What propensity then do you think you inherited from your own?’ Kevern asked.
‘The propensity to terror, but not, I am ashamed to say, the propensity to courage in the face of it. Nor, come to that, though this is not something I would wish you to have known about me before – but now it doesn’t matter, now nothing matters – the propensity to loyalty.’
Kevern asked him what he meant, but he would say no more.
A disloyal coward, then.Well Kevern could enter sympathetically into that. How much loyalty would he show, if ever put to the test? How much resolution in the face of fear, pain, suspicion? When he locked and double-locked his door, wasn’t he doublelocking himself against faint-heartedness? But it hardly helped to know this. Whatever evidence Gutkind had been hunting for, it surely wasn’t evidence of Kevern’s inherited feebleness of character.
Then he remembered that just before he died his father grabbed his sleeve and, knocking over the candle that provided the only light he could bear, begged distractedly for his dog.
‘You have no dog,’ Kevern said.
‘You don’t have to lie to me,’ his father said.
Kevern wondered if that meant his father wanted him to lie to him. But he couldn’t produce a dog. He could tell him his dog had died, but where would be the kindness in that? ‘You have had no dog for a long time,’ he decided to say instead.
His father nodded, seeming to remember. ‘Mr Bo Jangles’ – he summoned the strength to cross the J, as though for the final time – ‘grieved for his dog for twenty years. I’ve grieved longer.’
Kevern took the hand he hadn’t loved. ‘Well, he was a fine dog,’ he said.
‘Not for the dog, you fool!’
Kevern didn’t ask ‘Then for whom?’ It was possible he didn’t want to know.
‘Forgive me,’ his father said after a pause that Kevern thought would be his last.
‘I have nothing to forgive you for,’ Kevern said. ‘You have cared for me.’
‘Not you.’
‘You have, you cared for me. You and Mam.’
The old man took his hand from Kevern’s grasp and waved it across his face, as though to shoo away flies. ‘Not you forgive me. He forgive me.’
‘The dog?’
‘What dog? Why do you keep going on about a dog when I’m talking about my brother?’
This was the first time Kevern had heard mention of a brother. Presumably he too, like the dog, was the invention of delirium.
‘I’m sure he had nothing to forgive you for, either.’
‘What do you know!’ Another assault on the invisible flies, then something like a laugh from far away. ‘Ha! It’ll have to be you, then. You’re the only one left, so it’ll have to be you. Like the song. ‘It had to be you’ . . . You forgive me. You do it for him.’
‘Can I do that?’
‘There’s no one else.’
‘Then I forgive you,’ Kevern said.
They were so secretive a family it didn’t occur to him to ask what his father needed to be forgiven for. He didn’t think it was any of his business. More to the point, he didn’t want it to be any of his business. The aesthete in him shrank from such melodrama. He made small, finely crafted objects. A candlestick was the biggest thing to come off his lathe. And even his candlesticks had narrow waists and attenuated necks. If he hung his clothes in a Biedermeier wardrobe it was only in deference to his father’s bulking sense of private tragedy. Biedermeier was where he came from, that was all. But where he came from kept rearing up at him, never to be satisfied until it had ripped open his throat. More melodrama. See, he jeered at himself, you are no better than your father. You can go on making all the intricately entangled lovespoons you like, your own entanglements remain gross. Ailinn? No, of course not Ailinn. But hadn’t his treatment of her been gross? Shutting her out of his life like a dog?
He hadn’t asked his father, ever, about anything because he hadn’t ever wanted to hear the answer. But you don’t always have to ask to know. And Kevern knew the answer in the way he knew so many things. He knew it and he didn’t know it.
His father, then no more than a boy, he couldn’t have been, closing the door on a brother, refusing to assist him, refusing his cries for help, leaving him out in the cold like a dog, letting whoever was after him have him, never mind who or why, he knew who and why – this, from innumerable clues, from an accumulation of half-expressed regrets and barely smothered confessions, from a history of hysterical injunctions and prohibitions, from asides and songs and sorrows, from skeletal dances and stillborn jests, from what he knew generally of the human heart and what he knew specifically of his father’s shrivelled soul, from logical deduction and common sense and experience, from the frightened life they’d lived in their fortress cottage ever since he could remember, and from what he suspected too well he would do if ever put to the same test – all this Kevern saw and didn’t see.
iii
He was out early the morning after these recollections, sitting on his bench chewing over his father’s plea, feeling the spittle from the blowhole on his face – submitting to nature’s insults – when Densdell Kroplik found him. Kevern had heard the footsteps and hoped they were Ailinn’s. Ailinn, with one of her paper flowers in her hair and another in her hand, come to receive his apology and plant a kiss on his brow. Ailinn, the light of his life.
He needed to be embraced. But not by Densdell Kroplik.
‘A penny for them,’ Kroplik said, employing his civil voice.
He was a strange sight up here against the sky, as though Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Mists had suddenly turned around and shown himself. He was not wearing a frockcoat, though, but a smart, tweed, countryman’s suit, with a raincoat over his arm. A miracle that anyone so businesslike could emerge from Kroplik’s cowshed. It was this that made Kevern wonder if he were seeing things.
A raincoat and no rucksack, as though he’d come down out of the morning mist to meet his solicitor. Even the angry ruddiness of his cheeks was damped down, Kevern noted. Did that mean he could turn it on and off at will – his raging rusticity?
‘So what business are you on, looking such a dandy?’ Kevern asked.
Kroplik tapped his nose.
It was that gesture, more than anything else – denoting a man who had a hundred secrets of his own and was privy to a thousand more – that inveigled Kevern, who had hardly slept, into confidentiality. Who could say: maybe Kroplik knew something about what was going on.
‘I’ve been away for a few days,’ Kevern confided.
‘Anywhere interesting?’
Kevern waved that part of the conversation away. ‘While I was gone my cottage was broken into.’
‘Not guilty,’ Kroplik said.
‘I would never have thought you were. I just wondered if you’d heard anything on the grapevine.’
‘I’m not on the grapevine.’
Kevern had a go at an affable grin. It was that or push the swine into the sea. ‘I’ve yet to hear of anything happening in this village that you haven’t heard of first.’
Densdell Kroplik inclined his head before the compliment. ‘I’m the village historian,’ he said, ‘not the village gossip. Ask me something that occurred here a hundred years ago and I’ll tell you. Ask me what occurred yesterday and your guess is as good as mine. I don’t deal in yesterday.’
Kevern was grateful that, as befitted his suit and his unruddied cheeks, Densdell Kroplik, though as awkward as ever, was not playing the local this morning. But he still regretted what he said next even as he was saying it. ‘That you know of – did my father have anything to hide?’
The historian rubbed both his eyes, as though before a spectacle that amazed him. It was a morning of miracles for both of them. He asked Kevern if he minded his joining him on the bench. He pretended to need time to catch the breath of his astonishment. ‘Other than his being an aphid, you mean?’
‘Yes, other than that.’
He scratched his head under his hat. ‘Well he had you,’ he finally answered.
‘I assume that’s a joke,’ Kevern said, smothering the action of putting two fingers to his lips with a cough.
‘Joke or not, many a child born round here is a clue to a secret people would rather didn’t get out.’
‘I’m guessing you’re not telling me I’m someone else’s child?’
‘You wouldn’t be the first. It’s always hard to prove whose child anyone is, and usually unwise to try.’
My fault, Kevern thought. My own stupid fault. ‘So is this a general supposition or do you know something specific?’
Densdell Kroplik put a hand on Kevern’s knee. That Kevern could recall, no other man had ever done that. Not even his father. He found it hard to believe it could presage anything but an appalling revelation.
‘No, nothing specific,’ Kroplik said, noticing that Kevern shrank from his touch, ‘though there was a story circulating some years ago – tell me to stop if this is painful – that your mother used to get free meat.’
‘What the hell does that mean?’
‘What it sounds. A certain butcher from these parts was said to enjoy her company on and off. They’d go for walks together. Up around here.’
‘I’m a historian.’
‘But not of gossip, you said.’
‘Give it enough time, brother, and gossip’s history.’
‘And he’d give her free meat, this butcher?’
‘That’s my understanding.’
‘Free meat!’
‘Would you have rather she’d paid?’
Kevern rose from the bench. ‘OK, enough,’ he said.
Kroplik shrugged his shoulders. This wasn’t his doing. Kevern had started it. ‘I know how you feel,’ he said. ‘My mother was a slut too.’
‘OK, I said that’ll do!’ Kevern repeated.
‘Keep your shirt on. It’s just a word. Mine ran off with a tin miner from St Abraham.’ St Abraham! – he spat the words on to the ground. ‘Used to be Laxobre. Lovely name that. Flinty. Like licking a stone. What lunatic would change Laxobre to St Poxy Abraham? Axe-wielding men lived in Laxobre. Not that that excuses them stealing my mother.’ He paused to wipe his mouth. ‘Anyway the butcher wouldn’t have been your father. I don’t as a rule do births and deaths, but for you I’d hazard a guess he came into the picture after you were born.’
Kevern wasn’t sure it made it any better to imagine his mother – his mother! that bundle of old rags! – getting free meat from the butcher while he was at school. Did the other kids know? Did his father?
‘I don’t question your historiographical accuracy,’ he said,‘but—’
‘My what?’
‘Don’t play the village clown with me. You know what well enough. But this is fantastical. You must have seen my mother.’
‘Walking out with the butcher?’
‘No. You must have seen what she looked like.’
‘Well I only saw her when she was getting on a bit. So that tells me nothing. She might have been a good-looking woman when she was younger.Your grandmother was a beauty, everyone said. Stuck-up, but beautiful.’
‘I wouldn’t know about that. She died before my time.’
‘And mine. But you can take it from me she was. I saw a painting of her once. Done from photographs or memory, in my humble opinion. Too proud to pose for anybody, that one. Too private.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I don’t. But the painting was called something like So Lovely Yet So Cold, or So Near Yet So Far. Which I reckon is a clue.’
‘Where is this painting?’ ‘Search me. Behind a bar some place. I might have its whereabouts written down, but I wouldn’t swear to it. Her husband now—’
‘Her husband what?’
‘No one wanted to paint him. Nothing beautiful about a hunchback.’
Kevern needed to resume his position on the bench. Was this to be one of those mornings after which a man’s life is never the same again? Like the morning you meet the woman you love? Like the morning you forget to lock your door?
‘You’re going to have to slow down,’ he said. ‘You’re going to have to ease me into this more gently.You’re telling me my mother took free meat from a butcher in return for sexual favours.You’re telling me my grandmother was reputed to be a beautiful, standoffish woman which you can confirm because you’ve seen a portrait of her hanging above a bar you can’t remember where. And now my grandfather was a hunchback. How much of this are you making up?’
For some reason Densdell Kroplik, raincoat or no raincoat, made the decision to revert to being the evil, inconsistently incoherent genius of Port Reuben. ‘I never zeed ’im with my own eyes, Mister Master Cohen,’ he said. ‘So I can only goes on what I’ve picked up here and yonder. But yes. Nowadays they’d as like as not throw stones at your grand-daddy but in them days they’d ’ave respected him. Hellfellen, the giant, was a hunchback. Charged people to feel his hump. It was a way of taxing travellers. If you wanted to get in or out of Ludgvennok you had to pay to feel him, which you gladly did anyways ’cos a hump brings you good luck. I doubt if your grand-daddy did any of that. Kept himself to himself, I’d say. And kept his wife to himself too, if he knew what was good for him. But everyone understood it was lucky to have a hunchback in the village. He might ’ave frightened the kids, but a talisman’s a talisman. They’d ’ave given him no trouble whoever he was.’
‘What do you mean whoever he was?’
This time it was Kroplik who rose from the bench.
‘He was an aphid,’ he said, wagging a finger. ‘Don’t you forget that. An upcountry man with no business to be here, hump or no hump. And aphids in those days had to watch their step. Not like now when they’ve got the run of the place. And then there was all that other stuff going on. All the killing. All the rumours. Eyes everywhere. But they’d not have allowed anyone to harm him here, I can tell you that. Not a hunchback. Harm a hair on the head of a hunchback and you bring curses on your own head. Villagers don’t forget a lesson like that. So they let him be. I’d say you’re lucky to be here, Mister Master Cohen.’
‘What the hell does that mean?’
‘It means whatever you wants it to mean.’
‘I’m lucky to be here?’
‘Damn lucky, I’d say.’
‘I was born here, Mr Kroplik.’
‘That’s the luck I’m talking about.’
Saying which, he slung his raincoat over his shoulder, wished Kevern Cohen good day and made his way into the village where a taxi was waiting outside the Friendly Fisherman to take him to his appointment in St Eber with, as it happened, a mutual friend. Detective Inspector Gutkind.
Or Eugene, as Kroplik now felt at liberty to call him.
This conversation so disturbed Kevern’s thoughts throughout the day that he almost forgot he had an evening class to give at the academy. He considered ringing and cancelling but his professional conscientiousness wouldn’t let him do it. He called a taxi which got him there shaken but just in time. There was relief in that. It meant he wouldn’t be waylaid by Everett who had been quizzing him with more than usual insistence of late, and with more than usual intrusiveness. Why so interested in Ailinn?
It was good to talk to his class about wood. It took his mind off policemen and hunchbacks. ‘In wood,’ he said, in conclusion, ‘is redemption.’ Which some of his students thought was taking it a bit far. But it was true for him.
Despite the lateness of the hour he decided to sit in the library for a while. Anything rather than go back to his violated cottage and find Ailinn not there.
Rozenwyn Feigenblat, the very model of a provincial college librarian in a white lacy blouse and long black skirt and boots – she looked, he always thought, as though she’d ridden to work from somewhere far away, side-saddle while not taking her eyes off a book – greeted him with her accustomed ironic warmth. She liked him, he thought. He liked her.There was something of the centaur’s wife about her, not half-horse, half-woman exactly, but half belonging to the world of action and half to the world of thought. A rider below the neck, she was a reader, oval-faced and small-eyed, concentrated and inquisitive, above it. She wore her fair hair in a pigtail which hung, tied with rubber bands, somehow sarcastically, over her left shoulder. He wondered if she unwound it when she rode.
He had nearly kissed her once, not a snog, he doubted Rozenwyn Feigenblat was a snogger, but much as he had kissed Lowenna Morgenstern, out of liking, out of a passing pang of fondness, and because it seemed a shame not to. But something in the way she responded to his cautious advance – a look of near regret, as though she pitied him her unavailability – warned him off. Otherwise engaged, her look said. Would have, maybe, some other time, who knows, but just at this moment . . . can’t. And now he gave off the same message. Have Ailinn, so unavailable. Only he didn’t have Ailinn, did he?
He sensed a moment of danger. ‘You don’t normally come in here at this time,’ she said. Her little darting eyes had fires in them. Had her circumstances suddenly changed?
‘No,’ he said, ‘but I need an hour of quiet.’
‘An hour I can’t give you. I close in half.’
A moment of danger, all right.
‘So what can I read in half an hour?’
‘You want a short story?’
‘I am sick of stories. Can you do short and factual?’
She put her finger to her chin, parodying thought. ‘How about . . . How about . . . Beauty and Morality . . .’
‘Everett’s latest? I’d hardly call that factual.’
‘No, but it’s short.’
‘Not what I’m in the mood for.’
‘Is it the beauty or the morality that’s putting you off ?’
‘Beauty never puts me off.’
‘So morality does?’
‘No. It must be the conjunction I don’t buy.’
‘Then you don’t buy Everett.’
She gave a little tug to her pigtail, as though it were a coded signal for gossip about those senior to them to begin.
‘Everett’s fine,’ Kevern was careful to say, ‘when not in artexultation mode.’
‘You don’t believe any of that?’
‘I don’t believe many things about art.’
‘But you’re an artist . . .’ She almost crooned the word.
Careful, Kevern thought.
‘I carve lovespoons,’ he said. ‘If that makes me an artist then I’m an artist. That’s the beginning and the end of it.’
‘To be an artist is to have the freedom to think anything, and that includes thinking one would rather not think.’
‘If you really believe an artist has the freedom to think anything, that must include the freedom to think evil.’
Kevern laughed, as though at his own limitations. ‘In principle, yes. But not much in the way of evil thinking goes into carving lovespoons, I have to tell you.’
‘You’ve never made an evil lovespoon?’
He thought about it. ‘I suppose I’ve made what you could call erotic lovespoons. But celebrating the body is hardly evil.’
‘What about a lovespoon that shows the erotic cruelties the body is capable of. People kill for love – are you unable to conceive a lovespoon depicting that?’
‘I can conceive one, yes. But I wouldn’t make it.’
‘Why not, if an artist is free to think anything?’
‘Because that freedom includes the freedom to resist evil.’
‘And the freedom to embrace it?’
‘Yes, of course. Only why would one embrace evil of the sort you describe?’
She had been leaning against her desk, her booted ankles crossed. Now she straightened up and laughed. ‘If you don’t know that then you’re not really an artist,’ she said. ‘I’d say you’re an ethicist.’
‘No, that’s Everett. Beauty and morality.’
‘Oh, he doesn’t believe that. He’s a lubricious little devil.’
‘Everett?’
‘He tried to push his hand up my skirt once, right here in the library.’
Well it is that kind of a skirt, Kevern thought, trying not to show where his mind had wandered. ‘Expressing his freedom to think evil, do you suppose?’ he finally got around to saying.
She laughed her dangerous librarian’s laugh. ‘You’re not wide of the mark. He likes to play with the idea of wrongdoing. It thrills him. He’d be another de Sade if he had the balls. They all would. There isn’t a painter or a potter in this place that doesn’t long to do something wicked. But none of them has the balls. In another age they’d have joined illegal organisations, worn uniforms and beaten people with their brushes. Now there’s nothing for them to do but say sorry. So they have to content themselves with screwing students and assaulting librarians.’
Kevern thought he ought to stick up for his profession. ‘Opportunities for doing evil have always been limited in Bethesda,’ he said.
She snorted. ‘Don’t you believe it. There was a time when this institution was happy to consort with the Devil.’
‘I didn’t think we went back to the Middle Ages.’
‘Shows how wrong you can be. Look there . . .’
She pointed to a blown-up photograph that hung above the Local Topography shelves, alongside a couple of wishy-washy studies of St Mordechai’s Mount at low tide by Professor Edward Everett Phineas Zermansky, FRSA. It was a famous, oftenreproduced photograph showing about twenty quaintly old-fashioned ice-cream vans lined up, like elephants at a circus, looking at St Mordechai’s Mount themselves. Kevern had glanced at it several times without ever knowing what he was looking at. The photograph was renowned for the cute symmetry of its composition, he guessed, and for the idea of long-ago seaside idylls it evoked.
He wondered what Rozenwyn wanted him to see.
‘That was taken before they were decommissioned,’ she said. ‘A month later those vans were going round the country painted with the slogan “Leave Now or Face Arrest”. Bethesda Academy did the artwork.’
‘Ice-cream vans?’
‘Yes.’
‘Telling people to leave?’
‘Yes.’
‘Which people?’
‘Come on, Kevern. You know which people.’
He shook his head, as though it were a kaleidoscope, to rearrange the patterns.
‘But why ice-cream vans, for Christ’s sake?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine. Not to frighten the children? Because they had macabre imaginations?’
‘They weren’t, I assume, selling ice cream?’
‘You assume right. But here’s the strangest thing . . .’
He waited.
‘. . . they kept the chimes.’
‘Beethoven’s Fifth? “Für Elise?” “Greensleeves”?’
‘Exactly. And some forgotten favourites of the period. “Whistle While You Work” . . . “You Are My Sunshine”.’
Something twitched, like curtains opening furtively, at the furthest corners of Kevern’s mind. He stared at her in perplexity. ‘When was this?’
‘Well it wasn’t the Middle Ages, Kevern.’
‘No, but when?’ He tapped his forehead.
‘You’re too young,’ she said, understanding his meaning.
‘You Are My Sunshine’ . . . He began to hum it for her. If he was too young, how come he knew it? Then he remembered the blind soul singer and his father’s final bitter laughter, directed he hadn’t known where. If I don’t sit down, he thought, I will topple over.
‘Are you all right?’ Rozenwyn asked.
He nodded. ‘And you know this for sure?’ he asked stupidly, gripping the table behind him, so that his hands were close to hers.
She patted the wrist nearer to her. ‘I’m a librarian,’ she said. ‘A librarian knows where to look.’
But he wanted her to be exaggerating, at least. ‘Still and all,’ he said, ‘painting a few vans is not exactly a criminal act, is it? And it was just a warning. I can imagine the Everetts of the day believing they were acting humanely.’
‘I don’t doubt it. We always think what we’re doing is humane, even when we’re secretly relishing the evil of it. But all the warning did was soften the populace up for what came next. As did the defamations and the boycotts in which this institution also played a noble part. Let’s not be modest. We did more than paint the vans. We provided them with the fuel. There is this malignancy out there, we said. And left it to others to operate.’
Kevern looked around. Was Rozenwyn Feigenblat at liberty, he wondered, to be talking like this? He was his father’s child. He had been brought up not to show too much expression in a public place. You never knew who was watching.
But he was a man not a boy and needed to show Rozenwyn he had some fight in him. ‘You have to make allowances for this being an academic institution,’ he said with heavy irony.
She rolled her eyes. ‘They wouldn’t welcome your making allowances for them,’ she said. ‘They don’t like you.’
‘Don’t they? I didn’t know that. Why don’t they like me?’
‘Uniquely malevolent.’
‘Uniquely malevolent! Me?’
‘I’m being facetious,’ she said. ‘Uniquely malevolent is a quotation from then. I use it now for anyone or anything not approved of by junior academics. The actual reason they don’t like you is that they have to dislike somebody or they have no occupation. And of course because you hold different views.’
‘I don’t hold views.’
‘There you are then. They are nothing but views.Views I have to listen to them expounding for hours at a time. They think that’s my job – answering their requests for books that an idiot would know there’s no point consulting, books with unacceptable arguments torn out of them, books that have already silenced argument, cult books, propaganda, justification manuals . . . and then agreeing with their ill-informed conclusions.’
You have nothing to say on the subject, Kevern reminded himself. You are the grandson of a hunchback. You are lucky to have been born here. You Are My Sunshine.
‘You’re probably more Everett’s man than I realise,’ Rozenwyn said, noting Kevern’s reserve. ‘But you tell me when there has ever been a reign of terror that wasn’t instigated by intellectuals and presided over by someone possessed of the madness of the artist.’
‘You have done a lot of thinking,’ Kevern said.
‘For a woman, do you mean?’
‘Of course not.’
‘For a librarian then?’
‘No, I don’t mean that either.’
But he wondered if he did.
‘It’s a great intellectual privilege to work in a library,’ she reminded him. ‘The Argentinian writer Borges was a librarian. The English poet Philip Larkin was a librarian.’
Kevern hadn’t heard of either of them.
‘All human life is here,’ she went on. ‘The best of it and the worst of it, mainly the worst. Books do that, they bring out the bad in readers if there’s bad already in them.’
‘And if there isn’t?’
She smiled at him and stroked her pigtail. ‘Then they bring out the good. As in me, I hope. I’ve been able to read a lot here.’
‘You should write a book about it yourself,’ he said.
‘What for? So they can tear the pages out? I am content to know what I know.’
‘So why are you telling me?’
She regarded him archly. ‘To pass the time.’
He consulted his watch. ‘I should be going then,’ he said.
‘Why don’t you look at people when you’re talking to them?’ she asked suddenly, as though reverting to a conversation they’d been having earlier.
‘I didn’t know I didn’t look at people.’ He was lying. Ailinn too would comment on his apparent rudeness. ‘But if I don’t, it’s shyness.’
‘Your colleagues think of you as unapproachable,’ she went on. ‘They think you look down on them. They call you arrogant.’
‘I’m sorry to hear it. I carve lovespoons. I have nothing to be arrogant about.’
‘There you go . . . the simple carpenter. That’s the arrogance they mistrust.’
‘I can’t do anything about it,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if they hate me . . .’
‘I didn’t say “hate”. I said they mistrusted you.’
‘For being “uniquely malevolent” . . .’
She laughed. ‘No, for being uniquely arrogant.’
He smiled at her. ‘That’s all right then. As long I’m uniquely something.’
‘Well you could do worse. You could be like them. You could read books with pages torn out of them and think you’ve stumbled upon truth. You could subscribe to a belief system . . .’
‘Beliefs kill,’ he said.
‘Yes, like beauty.’
Their eyes met. She tossed her pigtail from her shoulder – as she must do when she mounts her horse, he thought, or when she climbs into bed. She put a hand out as though to touch his shirt. He thought she meant to move in to kiss him.
‘This is the wrong thing to do,’ he said.
‘I know,’ she said in a soft, mocking voice. ‘That’s why I’m doing it.’
But she was only seeing what sort of an ethicist he was.
‘He’s more naive than he ought to be,’ she wrote the following morning in her report, ‘and more fragile. We ought to get a move on.’
They arrived to music, laboured to music, trooped to the crematoria to music. ‘Brüder! zur Sonne, zur Freiheit,’ they were made to sing. ‘Brothers! to the sun, to freedom.’ ‘Brüder! zum Lichte empor’ – ‘Brothers! to the light.’ Followed, maybe, by the Blue Danube in all its loveliness, or a song from Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, not that any of them cared where he was from. Music that ennobles the spirit revealing its ultimate sardonic nature, its knowledge of its own untruth, because ultimately there is no ennobled nature. What was the logic? To pacify or to jeer? Why ice-cream vans, the arrival of which, playing the ‘Marseillaise’ or ‘Für Elise’ or ‘Whistle While You Work’, excited the eager anticipation of the children? To pacify or to jeer? Or both? Between themselves, the parents cannot agree on the function or the message. The vans, for now, are better than the trains, some say. Shame there isn’t actually any ice cream for the children, but be grateful and sing along. Others believe the vans are just the start of it. We have heard the chimes at midnight, they believe.