Free J by Howard Jacobson

isn’t. It’s a change not to feel
invaded
. It’s nice to be left alone to think my own thoughts.’
    ‘Thoughts! Should you be having
thoughts
at such a time?’
    ‘Feelings, then. You know what I mean – not having to go along with what someone else wants. Not having to be issuing periodic bulletins of praise and satisfaction. But what are yours?’
    ‘What are my thoughts and feelings?’
    ‘Yes. What do you want?’
    ‘Ah, now you’re asking.’
    ‘You won’t tell me?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Don’t know whether you’ll tell me?’
    ‘Don’t know what I want.’
    But he made her a lovespoon in which the two of them could be recognised, entwined, inseparable, carved from a single piece of wood.
    In return for which she made him a pair of exquisitely comical purple pansies, a paper likeness of his face in one, hers in another. She arranged them in a vase on his dressing table, so that they stared at each other unremittingly.
    ‘When you dust them, do it lightly,’ she advised.
    ‘I will sigh the dust away.’ He pursed his lips and let out the softest emission of air, as though blowing a kiss to a butterfly.
    ‘I love you,’ she told him.
    Why not, he thought. Why ever not? ‘I love you,’ he said.
    As he’d told her, he wasn’t planning to be somewhere else.
    He should not have judged his parents their sin. When the love thing is upon you there’s no one who can break you up. And he wasn’t even absolutely sure the love thing was upon him – yet.
     
v
     
    She moved in. Or at least she moved her person in. He cleared space for her to make her flowers in his workshop but she couldn’t function in the noise and dust his lathe threw out. So she kept her studio, along with the majority of her possessions, in Paradise Valley. There was an argument on the side of sensible precaution for this anyway, though Ez said she wouldn’t take it personally if Ailinn moved out. ‘Follow your heart,’ she said. But Ailinn thought it was still early for that. She’d been alive long enough to know that hearts were fickle.
    Didn’t her own jump?
    She wanted her mail to go on being delivered to Paradise Valley as well. She had her own letter-box neurosis which she didn’t want to clash with Kevern’s. She feared letters being lost, postmen being careless about their delivery, just tossing them over the wall into Kevern’s little garden, or not pushing them properly through the flap. She wasn’t waiting for any communication in particular but believed something, that should have reached her in an envelope, was missing from her life: a greeting, an offer she couldn’t have said what of, an advantage or an explanation – even terrible news, but terrible news, too, needed to be faced and not forever dreaded – and the idea that she would not discover it when it came, that Kevern would treat it as junk, or that it would blow away, be blown about the world unknown to her, and leave her waiting, never knowing, was one she found deranging. As a little girl she’d read in comics about a time when people wrote to one another by phone but wrote such horrid things that the practice had to be discouraged. She was glad, at least, that she didn’t have to ‘angst’, as they called it in those comics, about losing phone letters as well. So for the time being, at least, her postal address remained Beck House, Paradise Valley.
    If she didn’t return to collect what was waiting for her for more than two or three days at a time, however, the weight of expectation and dread oppressed her more than she could bear.
    Most mornings, after breakfast, she accompanied Kevern to his workroom, kissed him, breathed in the lovely fresh smell of sawdust – it reminded her of the circus, she said – and either went back to bed with a book or walked down into the valley, singing to herself, alone. But occasionally they would leave the cottage together in order to wander the cliffs or just sit side by side on his bench. She