Free J by Howard Jacobson Page B

–
invasion
.’
    ‘I didn’t accuse you of lacking sexual attack.’
    ‘OK.’
    ‘I truly didn’t. I love the way it is between us.’
    ‘OK. Invasion, anyway, is a good word to describe what I fear. People thinking they can just burst in here, while I’m out or even while I’m in.’
    ‘I understand that,’ she said. ‘I am the same.’
    ‘Are you?’
    ‘I always locked my bedroom door when I was a little girl. Every time the wind blew or a tree scratched at my window I thought someone was trying to get in. To get
back
in, actually. To reclaim their space.’
    ‘I don’t follow. Why
their
space?’
    ‘I can’t explain. That was just how I felt. That I had wrongly taken possession of what wasn’t mine.’
    There was something temporary about her, Kevern thought. Of no fixed abode. Tomorrow she could be gone.
    A great wave of protectiveness – that protectiveness he knew he would feel for her when he first saw her and imagined rolling her in his rug – crashed over him. Unless it was possessiveness. Protectiveness, possessiveness – what difference? He wanted her protected because he wanted her to stay his. ‘Well you don’t have to feel that here,’ he said.
    ‘And I don’t,’ she said.
    He kissed her brow. ‘Good. I want you to feel safe here. I want you to feel it’s yours.’
    ‘Given the precautions you take,’ she laughed, ‘I couldn’t feel safer. It’s a nice sensation – being barred and gated.’
    But she didn’t tell him there was safe and
safe
. That all the barring and gating couldn’t secure her peace of mind. That she kept seeing the pig auctioneer, for example, who had known both their names.
    ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll keep battening down the hatches.’
    She laughed. ‘There’s a contradiction,’ she said, ‘in your saying you want me to think of your home as mine, when you protect it so fiercely.’
    ‘I’m not protecting it
from
you. I’m protecting it
for
you.’
    This time she kissed him. ‘That’s gallant of you.’
    ‘I don’t say it to be gallant.’
    ‘You like me being here?’
    ‘I love you being here.’
    ‘But?’
    ‘There is no but. It’s not you I’m guarding against. I’ve invited you in. It’s the uninvited I dread. My parents were so terrified of people poking about in their lives that they jumped out of their skins whenever they heard footsteps outside. My father shooed away walkers who came anywhere near the cottage. He’d have cleared them off the cliffs if he could have. I’m the same.’
    ‘Anyone would think you have something to hide,’ she said skittishly, rubbing her hands down his chest.
    He laughed. ‘I do. You.’
    ‘But you’re not hiding me. People know.’
    ‘Oh, I’m not hiding you from people.’
    ‘Then what?’
    He thought about it. ‘Danger.’
    ‘What kind of danger?’
    ‘Oh, the usual. Death. Disease. Disappointment.’
    She hugged her knees like a little girl on an awfully big adventure. In an older man’s bed. ‘The three Ds,’ she said with a little shiver, as though the awfully big adventure might just be a little too big for her.
    ‘Four, actually. Disgust.’
    ‘Whose disgust?’
    ‘I don’t know, just disgust.’
    ‘You fear I will disgust you?’
    ‘I didn’t say that.’
    ‘You fear you will disgust me?’
    ‘I didn’t say that either.’
    ‘Then what are you saying? Disgust isn’t an entity that might creep in through your letter box. It isn’t out there, like some virus, to shut your doors and windows against.’
    Wasn’t it?
    It was anyway, he acknowledged, a strange word to have hit on. It answered to nothing he felt, or feared he might feel, for Ailinn. Or
from
Ailinn, come to that. So why had he used it?
    He decided to make fun of himself. ‘You know me,’ he said. ‘I fear everything. Abstract nouns particularly. Disgust, despair, vehemence, vicissitude, ambidexterity. And I’m not just worried that they’ll come in through my letter box, but underneath