J by Howard Jacobson Page B

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