Authors: Howard Jacobson
He had his theories about the underlying causes but knew to keep them under his hat.
Home for Gutkind was a small end-of-terrace house in St Eber, an inland town built around the county’s most important chinaclay pit. A white dust had long ago settled on every building in St Eber, giving it, though entirely flat and shapeless, an Alpine aspect that the few visitors to the area had always found attractive. Gutkind’s cat Luther, who had been spayed and so had little else to do – ‘Like me,’ Gutkind sometimes thought – rolled around
in this dust from morning to night, going from garden to garden to find more. He would be waiting for the detective inspector when he arrived home, his coat powdered as though with icing sugar, his eyelashes as pale as an albino’s, even his tongue white. Gutkind, who had no one else to love, sat him on a newspaper in the kitchen and brushed him down roughly, though he knew that he would be out rolling in someone’s garden again as soon as he had eaten. As with the cat, so with the man. Gutkind showered twice a day, more often than that at weekends when he was home, watching the particles almost reconstitute themselves into clay as they vanished in a grubby whirlpool down the plughole. It was a form of recycling, Gutkind thought, the clay that had coated his hair and skin returning to its original constituency underground. Otherwise he was not a recycling man. Too many of society’s ills were the result of the wrong sort of people with the wrong sort of beliefs finding ways of recycling themselves, no matter how much effort went into their disposal.
Disposal
? Detective Inspector Gutkind was not a brute but he believed in calling a spade a spade.
And he was not, in the privacy of his own home, however dusty, a man to say he was sorry.
He had no wife. He had had a wife once, but she had left him soon after they were married. The china clay was one reason she left him, and Gutkind had no desire to move (having to shower so many times a day confirmed his sense of what was wrong with the world), but the other reason she left him was his sense of what was wrong with the world. She discovered for herself what many of her friends had told her – though she hadn’t listened at the time – that life with a man who saw conspiracies everywhere was insupportable. ‘It’s your friends who have put you up to this,’ he said as he watched her packing her bags. She shook her head. ‘It’s your family, then.’ ‘Why can’t it just be
me
, Eugene?’ she asked. ‘Why can’t it be
my
decision?’ But he was unable to understand what she was getting at.
Returning home after interviewing Kevern Cohen – yet another person who showed him scant respect – Detective Inspector Gutkind showered, brushed down his cat, showered again, and heated up a tin of beans. He felt more than usually miffed. If I could put my finger on something, he told himself, just
something
, I would feel a damned sight better. But whether he meant put his finger on the motivation of a crime, the name of a criminal, why everything was so twisted from its purpose, why his life was so dusty and lonely, why he hated his cat, he couldn’t have said.
He had to have someone to blame. He was not unusual in that. What divided
Homo sapiens
from brute creation was the need to apportion responsibility. If a lion went hungry or a chimpanzee could not find a mate, it was no one’s fault. But from the dawn of time man had been blaming the climate, the terrain, fate, the gods, some other tribe or just some other person. To be a man, as distinct from being a chimpanzee, was to be forever at the mercy of a supernatural entity, a force, a being or a collection of beings, whose only function was to make your life on earth unbearable. And wasn’t this the secret of man’s success: that in chasing dissatisfaction down to its malignant cause he had hit upon the principle, first of religion and then of progress? What was evolution – what was revolution – but the logic of blame in action? What was the pursuit of justice but punishment of the blameworthy?
And who were the most blameworthy of all? Those whom you had loved.
When the sentimental blaming mood was on him – and tonight it roared in his ears the way the sea beside which you had once walked with a lover roared in a treasured seashell – he would climb the stairs to his attic, open an old wardrobe in which he stored clothes he no longer wore but for some reason could not bear to throw away, and pull out a faded periodical or two from the dozen or so which hung there on newspaper sticks, exactly as they had once hung in metropolitan cafés of the sort sophisticated
town-bred men and women once patronised in order to drink coffee, eat pastries, and stay up to date with prejudiced opinion. Given that Gutkind kept these periodicals because they contained extended ruminations penned by his great-grandfather, Clarence Worthing, they were, strictly speaking, heirlooms, and exceeded the number of heirlooms – though no one knew exactly what that number was – any one person was permitted to keep. Not being a law exactly, this was not rigorously policed; everyone kept more than they admitted they kept, but, as a detective inspector, Gutkind knew he was taking a bit of a risk and indeed much relished taking it.
He had always dipped intermittently into these publications, enjoying picking up his great-grandfather’s thoughts at random, not least because Clarence Worthing had been a cut above the rest of the family, a self-taught thinker and self-bred dandy who had moved in circles of society unimaginable to Eugene Gutkind. He had never met his great-grandfather but had heard tell of him from his grandmother, Clarence Worthing’s daughter, something of a lady herself, and a bohemian to boot, who revelled in the fact that she had hardly ever seen her father, so tied up was he in his affairs – in all senses of the word, if Eugene knew what she meant – a whirl of feckless forgetfulness which she put down to his having been rejected as a young man by the only woman he had ever truly loved – a woman who was not her mother. Eugene marvelled that she was not hurt by this. You could not be hurt by such a man, she told him, so stylish was he even when he let you down. Gutkind yearned to have let someone down stylishly. Taking out the newspapers he bathed in the glorious retrospective reflection of his great-grandfather’s irresponsibility . . . and pain. By means of Clarence Worthing, Gutkind too became a person to be reckoned with – a man with a tragic past and a liquid way with words and women.
Over and above this he liked reading the Worthing papers for the clarity of their reasoning and on that account read them, again
and again, chronologically and therefore, he surmised, systematically. One train of thought in particular engrossed his attention because it seemed to explain something that was crying out for explanation. And tonight Gutkind was of a mood to peruse it again. In the course of it – an extended essay entitled
When Blood Is Thicker Than Water
– his great-grandfather sought to lay the blame for everything he thought wrong with the world, from the moral, political, ethical and even theological points of view, on ‘those’ who cultivated a double allegiance which was plain for everybody to see but which good manners forced society to turn a blind eye to. In fact, the phrase ‘double allegiance’ let them off too easily, he argued, for the question had to be asked whether they considered they owed any sort of genuine allegiance to this, or any country in which they’d found themselves, at all.
Or any sort of allegiance to
him
, Gutkind surmised. He didn’t mind that his great-grandfather’s reasoning reeked of the ad feminam. How else do you measure a great wrong unless you have been on the receiving end of it? If his great-grandfather proceeded from a position of profound personal disappointment – betrayal even – that made his arguments only the more persuasive to Detective Inspector Gutkind.
‘Observe their cohabiting customs,’ Gutkind’s great-grandfather wrote, ‘observe them as a scientist might observe the mating habits of white mice, and you will see that however far outside the swarm they wander to satisfy their appetites, for purposes of procreation they invariably regroup. They choose their mistresses and lovers from those for whom they feel neither respect nor compassion and their wives and husbands from their own ranks. As is often reported by innocents who encounter them without knowing by what rules they live, they can be companionable, amusing, even adorable, and in some circumstances, especially where reciprocal favours are looked for, munificent. But this to them is no more than play, the exercise of their undeniable powers and charm for the mere sadistic fun of it. Thereafter their loyalty
is solely to each other. Let one of their number suffer and their vengefulness knows no limits; let one of their number perish and they will make the planet quake for it. To some, this is taken to be the proof of the steadfastness of their tribal life, the respect and affection they have been brought up, over many generations, to show to one another. But it is in fact a manifestation of a sense of superiority that values the life of anyone not belonging to their “tribe” at less than nothing. Only witness, in that country which they call their ancestral home (but which few of them except the most desperate appear to be in any hurry to repair to), a recent exchange of prisoners with one of their many enemies in which, for the sake of a single one of their own – just
one
– they willingly handed over in excess of seven hundred! The mathematics make a telling point. Never, in the history of humanity, has one people held all others in such contempt, or been more convinced that the world can, and will, be organised for their benefit alone. It has been said that were the earth to be laid waste, so long as not a single hair of one of theirs was harmed, they would connive in that destruction. That is not a justification for
their
destruction, though others argue persuasively for it. But it does invite us to ask how much longer we can tolerate their uncurbed presence.’
Gutkind so admired the adamantine and yet heartfelt quality of his great-grandfather’s prose that he was at a loss to understand why there had been no published collection of his articles or, come to that, why he had not cut a dash in parliamentary politics. Had his notorious social life taken up too much of his time, or were his words too prophetic for the age he lived in? Gutkind knew for himself what it was to be unappreciated and felt for his great-grandfather’s sorrows a scalding agony which there was no warrant to suppose Clarence Worthing ever felt himself.
Part of what Gutkind admired about Worthing’s work was its conscientious refinement of argument from one article to the next. The refusal of all talk of destruction with which one essay ended, for example, was picked up again in the next with an
allusion to ‘self-destruction’, that being the course on which ‘the arrogant, the forward and the vain’, as he called them, appeared, paradoxically, to be hell-bent. ‘Some worm of divisiveness in their own souls has impelled them – throughout history, as though they knew history itself was against them – to the brink of self-destruction. Imaginatively, the story of their annihilation engrosses them; let them enjoy a period of peace and they conjure war, let them enjoy a period of regard and they conjure hate. They dream of their decimation as hungry men dream of banquets. What their heated brains cannot conceive, their inhuman behaviour invites. “Kill us, kill us! Prove us right!” Time and again they have been saved, not by their own resolution, but by the world taking them at their own low self-valuation and endeavouring to deliver them the consummation they devoutly wish. Only then are they able to come together as a people, mend their divisions, and celebrate their escape as one more proof of the divine protection to which their specialness entitles them. But it is a dangerous game and will backfire on them one day.’
Gutkind heard in this a personal plea by his great-grandfather, to one he had loved without reciprocation, to beware the dragon’s teeth she and hers had sowed. He even wondered if it was a coded message. A last-minute warning to her, perhaps, to escape (he had even used that word), to gather up her things and leave, or to go into hiding, before the first shots were fired.
How many messages of this sort, he asked himself, had been sent in this fashion. Not just by Clarence Worthing but by others who had lost their hearts to apparently charming and companionable men and women who proved, when things turned seriious, to have been merely trifling with their affections and who, without once looking back, beat a speedy retreat to the bosoms of their own? How much ‘saving’, for the sake of brief but never to be forgotten embraces, had been going on? Like all theorists of betrayal and conspiracy, Gutkind was a hyperbolist. From the single example of his great-grandfather he extrapolated a whole
underground of the hurt, scheming tirelessly, not to say paradoxically, to give another chance to those they knew – knew from their own experience – did not deserve it.
This seemed so plausible to the detective that he began to question whether
WHAT HAPPENED
had in the end claimed any victims at all. Had it remained an undescribed crime all these years because it was an unsolved crime, and had it been unsolved because it was uncommitted? That made a great deal of sense to him. It explained why the world was not the happier place it should have been, and no doubt would have been, had what was meant to happen happened.
In the early days of Gutkind’s courtship his wife-to-be had sent him a graphic letter, imprinted with her lipstick kisses, describing her desires. ‘Read and burn’, she wrote at the bottom.
Now that he understood these essays of his great-grandfather’s as personal missives to a woman he’d loved, he imagined him advising the same precaution. Read and burn.
But this didn’t take from the truth of Clarence Worthing’s analysis. If anything – since it was designed to win assent even from those it might have hurt, since it was intended to prepare, alert and warn, not rabble-rouse – it made the analysis more compelling. The empathetic Gutkind did figuratively as he was told. He read and burned.
ii
Tonight, he spread out a few more pages of the silver-tongued Clarence Worthing on the kitchen table, blowing on them reverently, a paragraph at a time, to keep them free of dust. How he admired the undeviating strength of his resolution, not compromised by passion but stiffened by it. How wonderful it must have been to know where the wrongness at the heart of life was to be located and what it looked like. Here were no abstractions; here
was flesh and blood. His great-grandfather wrote as though the enemy were in the other room, perhaps falsely playing with his children as he wrote, perhaps seducing his wife as he had once been seduced himself. Gutkind felt that he could touch them. Put his arms around them, submit his cheek to their false kisses. He closed his eyes and believed that he could smell them. It was a kind of love. A hatred born of pure fascination. His noble-hearted ancestor had been their friend. He had allowed them into his heart. He had been betrayed by them. Gutkind felt his own heart swell. He almost swooned with this love which was indistinguishable from hate. He closed his eyes and made a perfect pink circle of his lips. Womanly, he felt. Kiss me!