J (30 page)

‘I wished I didn’t have to go to her “family events” or meet her “people” – I never felt at home with them. Was that because they looked down on me? I didn’t know. But I always felt they tolerated me, that was all. And if I dared to say a word against them she’d fly at me in a rage. Once she broke two of my teeth. Yet for all the specialness of her “people”, for all the superiority of their suffering over anyone else’s, she would still affect the airs and graces of a woman who had just taken tea with royalty. These attempts to hide who she was and where she’d come from – her family had sold hats on a street market! – shocked me. And she did it so badly. People laughed at her behind their hands and she didn’t notice. No doubt they were laughing at me too. I know what you must be thinking – why did I stay? I was obsessed by her, that’s why.The more I hated her the more fascinated I became. I can’t explain that. Was she my cruel mistress or my lapdog? I tell you, though you are too young to understand obsession, I was obsessed by the oily sallowness of her skin, her heavy breasts, her swampy lips, the little panting cries she made when I entered her – forgive me – the extravagant way she moved her hands, making up stories, telling lies, transparent fantasies, trying to impress whoever she needed to impress – a room of thirty people or just me, it didn’t matter – but it sickened me too.’

He paused as though remembering his manners. Was there perhaps something she wanted to say at this point?

There wasn’t. Rhoda thought he was probably right – she didn’t have quite the years yet for this.

He took that to be permission to go on.

‘There was something ancient about her. I don’t mean in
appearance. I mean in what she represented. She went too far back. History should have finished with the likes of her by now. Sometimes when I was making love to her – forgive me, please forgive me, but I have to explain – I felt I was in a sarcophagus making love to a mummy. I thought she would come apart in my hands, under my kisses and caresses, like parchment. Can you be oily
and
dry? Can you be soft
and
brittle? Well she could. That was her power over me. And then she would stir, sit up like someone risen from the dead – Cleopatra herself – and shake her jewellery in my face. That jewellery! She would put those hands up to my cheeks and look at me with longing – or was it loathing? – and I’d hear the jewellery clinking and I wanted to tear it off her. Christ, how badly I wanted to do that! Rip it from her throat and drag it out of her ears. All that false beauty, the impossible way she spoke, her contempt for her marriage, her raving about her precious daughters, her people’s tragic past, her pseudo-religiousness, the art she didn’t care about – it’s a miracle I never did strangle her.’

Rhoda finally found some words. ‘So you got someone else to strangle her for you?’

He took a moment to reply. Measuring the silence. ‘I let the gallery be burned.’

‘With her in it?’

‘With the child in it.There were living quarters there. She liked staying there sometimes. It was a treat for her. She could play at shop. Her mother even let her talk to clients sometimes, about the art. She thought it was a great joke. “Out of the mouths of babes,” she’d say.’

Rhoda retreated into silence again.
Let the gallery be burned
, did he say?
Let
? She didn’t want to know whether that meant he had invited arsonists in or had actually started the fire himself and then failed to put it out. Whatever else, she didn’t want to picture him putting a match to the building, knowing there was a child inside. A child who, had she lived, would have been about the age she was now. She didn’t want to show her fear.

‘It was strange, you know,’ he went on, in a different tone altogether now, almost matter-of-fact, ‘it was as though it wasn’t me doing it. Or if it was me it was me doing it at some other time. Any time in the last, I don’t know, two, three thousand years I could have done the same – seen the flames, shaken my head and walked away.’

Very well, he was mad. That somehow made her feel better and even, strangely, less frightened. She had her sanity to defeat him with.

‘What do you mean you could have done it two thousand years ago? Are you telling me you’re some sort of a vampire?’

‘I’m telling you my actions weren’t mine alone. I was just repeating what had been done countless times before, and I don’t doubt for the same reasons. Would you understand me if I said I’d been culturally primed to do it?’

She brought her hand to her mouth and laughed bitterly up her sleeve, the way everyone did at school when an elder made a preposterous statement. ‘Would you understand me if I said I’d been culturally primed to refuse to do my homework?’ she gathered the boldness to ask.

He smiled at her smartness. ‘Yes, I’d understand and say I hope that’s the worst thing you will ever be culturally primed to do.’

‘No you wouldn’t. You’d say I was letting myself off.’

‘It was a necessity,’ he said. ‘There are such things. It’s you or them. You can’t both breathe the same air. Some people are too different.
I am who I am because I am not them
, you tell yourself. That’s what you fall in love with at first – this clean break with yourself. Because if you are not them, they are not you. But then you realise it isn’t anything about them that you love, it’s the prospect of your own annihilation. They say before the executed die they fall in love with their executioner. Maybe had she not told me our affair was over, that she’d found a man more suitable to her needs – a financier, I supposed, or a painter, one of her own, anyway – I’d have accepted death at her hands
as my consummation. But her timing was wrong. She missed her chance. The world changed while she wasn’t looking. One day the streets were quiet, the next the mob was out, shouting, burning, killing. I see from your expression that you know nothing of any mob. You were too young then and you’ve been well schooled since. But trust me, the gentlest people were suddenly behaving like animals. Was I part of it? Yes and no. I felt what they felt, they felt what I felt, though I believed then and believe now that I acted alone and for my own motives. But the violence didn’t surprise me. You’d think the sight of people behaving so unlike themselves would surprise you but it doesn’t. Violence quickly comes to look quite normal. Perhaps what I saw was a reflection of the violence in my heart. Perhaps I saw it as more violent than it was because I wanted it to be so. But I couldn’t have made up the things that happened. I didn’t join in. I even risked my own skin to get to her, to plead with her.
Give me another chance.
That’s what she had reduced me to.
Give me another chance! I’ll do whatever you like. I’ll change
. As though I could ever change into anything she wanted for more than fifteen minutes. As though I could ever be anything but a convenience to her. I ran to the house but found it closed up. Good, I thought, at least they’ve got away. But then it occurred to me that they might be at the gallery, which at least had shutters. That was two miles away. I ran the whole distance. The shutters weren’t down. The crowds had not got that far yet, though the usual boycotters were outside, noisier and more menacing than ever. With the strength that comes from desperation I pushed my way through them and hammered on the window. Little Jesse appeared. Even at that age she was her mother all over again. Same mournful eyes, same heavy cheeks, same rude flirtatiousness. Same indifference to danger. She was even wearing her mother’s high-heeled shoes. “Mum’s out,” she mouthed. I told her to let me in. I’d wait. She said, “Mum doesn’t want to see you any more.” “What about you?” I shouted.
“Don’t you want to see me any more?” She shrugged. Easy come, easy go. I might as well have been a servant or the gardener. A person of no consequence though I’d petted and played with her and bought her presents she didn’t need. She eyed me sardonically. Her mother’s child.
Don’t be pathetic
, I could see she was thinking. I asked who was in the gallery with her. She said no one. She could have been lying but I chose to see her being left alone as proof of her mother’s callousness, and as a sign. Nine years old and left to fend for herself. What does that tell you? So should I have cared for her more than her faithless, so-called doting mother did? Whether I could have done anything I don’t know. I could have tried to spirit her away. I could have tried to reason with the crowd –
There’s only a child in there
. Only an insolent, superior little girl, but a child nonetheless. Unlikely to have made any difference but I could have tried. But the shouts and smell of smoke had a powerful effect on me. I don’t say they excited me, but they gave a sort of universality to what I was feeling.
I am who I am because I am not them
– well, I was not alone in feeling that. We were all who we were because we were not them. So why did that translate into hate? I don’t know, but when everyone’s feeling the same thing it can appear to be reasonableness. Can you understand that? What everyone’s doing becomes a common duty. Besides, it wasn’t for me to play God. These people had their own God, I thought – let
Him
look after her. So I did nothing when she turned her back on me. Didn’t bang on the window. Didn’t call her. Didn’t warn her. I stood outside for a short while, staring at the inflammatory words painted on the window –
GALILEE GALLERIES
– as though in a trance. Could have been thirty seconds, could have been thirty minutes, then I walked away.’

He kept his eyes averted from Rhoda’s, showing her his long, brittle hands. The hands he hadn’t employed to help a child. What did he want her to do – kiss them or break them off at the wrists?

‘And now you think it’s my duty to let you replace her with me,’ she said. She was on her feet, dressed and ready to leave, feeling sick but strong, with her school bag under arm. ‘Well you’ve got another think coming.’

She was relieved to make it out safely on to the street.

ii

She didn’t repeat a word to anyone of what she’d been told. There was no point. For one thing, to have spoken of it would have compromised her – what was she doing talking to her teacher about his murderous, obsessional love life in a hotel room? – and for another she didn’t expect to be believed. She wasn’t sure how much of it she believed herself. He could have made the whole thing up to impress her, or made the second half up to exact an imaginary revenge. You can murder in your thoughts, she knew that. And even if she’d been believed – what then? Where was the crime? What law do you break by walking away? She didn’t know much about what had gone on when she was ten, but she’d heard adults talking and knew the slate had been wiped clean. So long as you joined in the chorus of saying sorry, you were in the clear. The past was the past and brought automatic absolution.

As for him, she hoped fervently that he would quit the school, but he didn’t. He didn’t ask her to go to a hotel with him again either. He just did what he was good at and looked away.

If her presence made him anxious, he concealed it well. She, however, grew morose and began to do badly at school. No one knew why, but she lost interest in her studies and left before she had achieved what had been expected of her. Whereas he appeared, if anything, to prosper. Good divinity teachers were hard to come by.

Not long afterwards, at a concert given by Necessary Opposites, she met Compton who repelled her. The degree to which he made her flesh creep excited her. He was opposite to everyone
she cared about, opposite to everything she admired and loved. It was marry him or kill him. And, in anticipation of her daughter’s thinking, she saw that it would have been literal-minded of her to kill him.

She didn’t tell Compton about her affair with a murderer or a liar or both. She didn’t want his hands on her experience, she didn’t want to hear him say that the murdered girl got what was owing to her. She was angry enough. Nor did she tell Esme when she was of an age to understand. In Esme’s case it wasn’t necessary; she picked up the essentials without words needing to be exchanged. There was certainly some rage in her that Rhoda proudly believed was her doing. She’d instilled an appetite for justice that was like a hunger in her own belly. Esme, she was confident, would fight the good fight for her. Esme would show courage where she hadn’t. Esme would make someone pay.

NINE

The Celestial Bandleader

i

E
SME NUSSBAUM NEVER
did go back to her old office. But fragments of it came to her. She hadn’t been as alone as she’d thought. They were slow and watchful, but first one and then another of her ex-colleagues took up the challenge implicit in the report she had produced before her accident. She was right. Something had to be done to curtail the quarrelsomeness that was poisoning the family, the workplace, the schoolyard, and society at large. It would be a while before they would catch up with her more recent thinking, but within five years it had become acceptable to admit there was a problem to be solved. Five years after that, though still shaky on her legs, she was leading a team charged with putting back what had been taken away.

At the first meeting she addressed as head of the Commission for Restitution she spelled out the problems that lay ahead.

‘We cannot any longer go on deploying euphemisms,’ she declared. ‘We have to call a spade a spade. If we are to put back what has been taken away we must restore its human name. These were people. How do you put back people who, in whatever circumstances or for whatever motives, were annihilated?’

She thought the question was rhetorical but a couple of hands went up.

‘I am not,’ she said, ‘looking for immediate answers. We have
research to do. But I will take a couple of suggestions to kick us off.’

The first was to go looking in other countries where comparable destruction had either not taken place at all, or had been partial. The second was to come up with an alternative necessary opposite – some other ethnic or religious group that could stand in as hate object for that which had been obliterated. ‘Couldn’t something be done with the Chinese?’ someone asked.