J by Howard Jacobson Read Free Book Online Page A

true.You were hopeful when you met him.You said you thought you might just have met your soulmate.’
    ‘I did not!’
    ‘Well you said you thought you’d met someone you could possibly get on with.’
    ‘I think that’s rather different.’
    Brittle-boned and careful with herself, a woman who seemed to Ailinn to quiver with mutuality, Ez leaned in very close. ‘Not for you it isn’t,’ she said, as though the strain for Ailinn of being Ailinn was sometimes more than she could bear for her. ‘A manhas to be your soulmate before you’ll give him the time of day.’
    Ailinn raised an eyebrow. She and Ez were not well enough acquainted, she thought, to be having this conversation. She wasn’t sure they were well enough acquainted for Ez to be bringing her tea in bed, fluffing up her pillows and patting her hand either, but she put that down to the older woman’s loneliness. And consideration, of course. But offering to know so much about the kind of person Ailinn was, her ways with men, what made her happy, when she was and wasn’t herself , the errands on which she sent her soul, for God’s sake – all that seemed to her, however kindly it was meant, to be a presumption too far.
    She wasn’t angry. Ez didn’t strike her as someone who would go through her clothes, or read her letters, or otherwise poke about in her life. She was pretty sure she wouldn’t, for example, dream of ringing Kevern to tell him what she’d just told Ailinn. And besides, an older woman could be permitted a few liberties a younger one could not. Wasn’t that their unspoken contract – that Ez needed the company of someone who could be almost as a child to her, and Ailinn . . . well she surely didn’t need another mother, but all right, someone who could be what she’d never had, an older sister, an aunt, a good friend? Yet even allowing for all that, there was an anxious soulfulness about Ez, a taut emotional avidity that made Ailinn the smallest bit uncomfortable. Why was she sitting on the end of the bed, her body twisted towards Ailinn as though in an act of imploration, her eyes moist with womanto-woman understanding, the phone in her hand? What in the end did it matter to Ez whether or not she left the village woodturner a message?
    She knew she was lucky to be with someone who cared about her happiness. She wasn’t used to it. Her mother by adoption meant well by her but lost interest quickly. She would have had no attitude, or at least expressed no opinion, in the matter of Kevern Cohen. She never spoke of Ailinn’s future, a job, possible husbands, children. It was as though she’d given Ailinn a life byrescuing her from the orphanage and that was that. Satisfying her conscience, it felt like, needing to perform a charitable act, and once performed, her responsibility was at an end.What, if anything, followed, was of no consequence or interest to her. So there were levels of concern Ailinn accepted she had still to learn about. Maybe her mother was the way she was with her because Ailinn made her so. Maybe she lacked a talent for being liked. She certainly lacked the talent for being liked by herself. In which case she was grateful to Ez.
    And in which case shouldn’t she make an effort with the clumsy man who at first had treated her with such gentleness, smiling softly into her face, inclining his head to kiss the bruise under her eye? He was sufficiently unlike the others, anyway, to be worth persisting with.
    To hell with it, she thought – though she didn’t tell Ez she’d changed her mind; she didn’t want her to think it had been her doing – to hell with it , and instead of putting down the phone this time when no one answered, she chanced her arm.
    Hello. It’s Ailinn. You remember? Thick ankles – ring a bell? To be brief about it, because she was sure his time was valuable, she wanted him to know she had inspected herself front on and sideways in the mirror, and OK – she was too thick. And not just