Nutshell (10 page)

“Please. I need to see you now!”

“Oh God,” my mother says in plain disgust. “Not now.”

But Claude, still irritated by being ordered around, has reason to assert his autonomy. He presses the button, replaces the phone, and there's a moment's silence. They have nothing to say to each other. Or too much.

Then we all go downstairs to greet the owl poet.

While we descend the stairs I have time to reflect further on my fortunate lack of resolve, on the self-strangler's self-defeating loop. Some endeavours are doomed at their inception, not by cowardice but by their very nature. Franz Reichelt, the Flying Tailor, fatally leapt from the Eiffel Tower in 1912 wearing a baggy parachute suit, certain his invention could save the lives of aviators. For forty seconds he paused before the jump. When at last he tilted forward and stepped into the void, the updraught wrapped the fabric tightly round his body and he fell just as a stone would fall. The facts, the mathematics, were against him. At the foot of the tower he made a shallow grave in the frozen Parisian ground fifteen centimetres deep.

Which brings me, at Trudy's slow U-turn on the first landing, via death, to the matter of revenge. It's coming clearer, and I'm relieved. Revenge: the impulse is instinctive, powerful—and forgivable. Insulted, duped, maimed, no one can resist the allure of vengeful brooding. And here, far out at this extreme, a loved one murdered, the fantasies are incandescent. We're social, we once kept each other at bay by violence or its threat, like dogs in a pack. We're born to this delectable anticipation. What's an imagination for but to play out and linger on and repeat the bloody possibilities? Revenge may be exacted a hundred times over in one sleepless night. The impulse, the dreaming intention, is human, normal, and we should forgive ourselves.

But the raised hand, the actual violent enactment, is cursed. The maths says so. There'll be no reversion to the status quo ante, no balm, no sweet relief, or none that lasts. Only a second crime. Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves, Confucius said. Revenge unstitches a civilisation. It's a reversion to constant, visceral fear. Look at the miserable Albanians, chronically cowed by
kanun
, their idiot cult of blood feuds.

So even as we reach the landing outside my precious father's library, I've absolved myself, not of thoughts, but of actions, of avenging his death in this life or in the postnatal next. And I'm absolving myself of cowardice. Claude's elimination won't restore my father. I'm extending Reichelt's forty-second hesitation into a lifetime. No to impetuous action. If I'd succeeded with the cord, then it, not Claude, would have been the cause for any pathologist to note. An unhappy accident, he'd record, and not unusual. There'd be some undeserved relief for my mother and uncle.

If the stairs allow such room for thought it's because Trudy is taking them at the pace of the slowest loris. For once, her hand holds the banister tightly. She takes one step at a time, pauses on some, considers, sighs. I know how things stand. The visitor will hold up the essential housework. The police could return. Trudy's in no mood for a battle of jealous possession. There's an issue of precedence. She's been usurped at the identification of the body—that rankles. Elodie is merely a recent lover. Or not so recent. She might have preceded the move to Shoreditch. Another raw wound to dress. But why call round here? Not to receive or give comfort. She might know or possess some damning tidbit. She could throw Trudy and Claude to the dogs. Or it's blackmail. Funeral arrangements to discuss. None of that. No, no! For my mother, so much effortful negation. How wearying, on top of all else (a hangover, a murder, enervating sex, advanced pregnancy), for my mother to be obliged to exert her will and extend fulsome hatred to a guest.

But she's determined. Her braids tightly conceal her thoughts from all but me, while her underwear—cotton, not silk, I sense—and a short summer print dress, correctly loose but not voluminous, are freshly in place. Her bare, pink arms and legs, her purple-painted toenails, her full, unarguable beauty are on intimidating display. Her aspect is of a ship of the line, fully though reluctantly rigged, gun hatches lowered. A woman-of-war, of which I'm the bow's proud figurehead. She descends in floating but intermittent movements. She'll rise to whatever comes at her.

By the time we reach the hallway it's already started. And badly. The front door has opened and closed. Elodie is in, and in Claude's arms.

“Yes, yes. There, there,” he murmurs into her succession of teary, broken sentences.

“I shouldn't. It's wrong. But I. Oh I'm sorry. What it must be. For you. I can't. Your brother. I can't help it.”

My mother stays at the foot of the stairs, stiffening with distrust, not only of the visitor. So, it's bardic distress.

Elodie is not yet aware of us. Her face must be towards the door. The news she wants to deliver comes in staccato sobs. “Tomorrow night. Fifty poets. From all over the. Oh, we loved him! Reading in Bethnal. Green Library. Or outside. Candles. One poem each. We so want you to be.”

She stops to blow her nose. To do so, she disengages from Claude and sees Trudy.

“Fifty poets,” he helplessly repeats. What notion could be more repugnant to him? “That's a lot.”

Her sobs are almost under control, but the pathos of her own words brings them on again. “Oh. Hello, Trudy. I'm so, so sorry. If you or. Could say a few. But we'd understand. If you. If you couldn't. How hard it.”

We lose her to her grief, which rises in pitch to a kind of cooing. She tries to apologise and at last we hear, “Compared to what you. So sorry! Not my place.”

She's right, as Trudy sees it. Usurped again. Out-griefed, out-wailed, she remains, unmoved, by the stairs. Here in the hallway, where the remains of a stench must still linger, we're held in social limbo. We listen to Elodie and the seconds go by. What now? Claude has the answer.

“We'll go down. There's Pouilly-Fumé in the fridge.”

“I don't. I just came to.”

“This way.”

As Claude guides her past my mother, a look must surely pass between them—that is, her flashed rebuke must meet his bland shrug. The two women don't embrace or even touch or speak when they're inches apart. Trudy lets them get ahead before she follows, down into the kitchen, where the two accusers, Glycol and Judd Street Smoothie, hide in forensic smears among the chaos.

“If you'd like,” my mother says as she sets foot on the sticky floorboards, “I'm sure Claude will make you a sandwich.”

This innocent offer conceals many barbs: it's inappropriate to the occasion; Claude has never made a sandwich in his life; there's no bread in the house, nothing to set between two slabs but the dust of salted nuts. And who could safely eat a sandwich from such a kitchen? Pointedly, she doesn't propose making it herself; pointedly, she casts Elodie and Claude together, distinct from herself. It's an accusation, a rejection, a cold withdrawal bundled into a hospitable gesture. Even as I disapprove, I'm impressed. Such refinements can't be learned from podcasts.

Trudy's hostility has a beneficial effect on Elodie's syntax. “I couldn't eat a thing, thank you.”

“You could drink a thing,” says Claude.

“I could.”

There follows the familiar suite of sounds—the fridge door, a careless chink of corkscrew against bottle, the cork's sonorous withdrawal, last night's glasses sluiced under the tap. Pouilly. Just across the river from Sancerre. Why not? It's almost seven thirty. The little grapes with their misty grey bloom should suit us well on another hot and airless London evening. But I want more. It seems to me that Trudy and I have not eaten in a week. Stirred by Claude's phone order, I crave as accompaniment an overlooked, old-fashioned dish,
harengs pommes à l'huile
. Slippery smoked herring, waxy new potatoes, the first pressing of the finest olives, onion, chopped parsley—I pine for such an entrée. How elegantly a Pouilly-Fumé would set it off. But how to persuade my mother? I could as easily slit my uncle's throat. The graceful country of my third choice has never seemed so far away.

All of us are at the table now. Claude pours, glasses are raised in sombre tribute to the dead.

Into the silence, Elodie says in an awed whisper, “But suicide. It just seems so…so unlike him.”

“Oh well,” says Trudy, and lets that hang. She's seen an opportunity. “How long have you known him?”

“Two years. When he taught—”

“Then you wouldn't know about the depressions.”

My mother's quiet voice pushes against my heart. What solace for her, to have faith in a coherent tale of mental illness and suicide.

“My brother wasn't exactly one for the primrose path.”

Claude, I begin to understand, is not a liar of the first rank.

“I didn't know,” Elodie says in a small voice. “He was always so generous. Especially to us, you know, younger generation who—”

“A whole other side.” Trudy sets this down firmly. “I'm glad his students never saw it.”

“Even as a child,” says Claude. “He once took a hammer to our—”

“This isn't the time for that story.” Trudy has made it more interesting by cutting it short.

“You're right,” he says. “We loved him anyway.”

I feel my mother's hand go up to her face to cover it or brush away a tear. “But he'd never get treatment. He couldn't accept that he was ill.”

There's protest, or complaint, in Elodie's voice that my mother and uncle won't like. “It doesn't make any sense. He was on his way to Luton, to pay the printer. In cash. He was so happy to be settling a debt. And he was reading tonight. King's College Poetry Society. Three of us were like, you know, the supporting band.”

“He loved his poems,” Claude says.

Elodie's tone rises with her anguish. “Why would he pull over and…? Just like that. When he'd finished his book. And been shortlisted for the Auden Prize.”

“Depression's a brute.” Claude surprises me with this insight. “All the good things in life vanish from your—”

My mother cuts in. Her voice is hard. She's had enough. “I know you're younger than me. But do I really have to spell it out for you? Company in debt. Personally in debt. Unhappy with his work. Child on the way he didn't want. Wife fucking his brother. Chronic skin complaint. And depression. Is that clear? You think it isn't bad enough without your theatrics, without your poetry readings and prizes and telling
me
it doesn't make sense? You got into his bed. Count yourself lucky.”

Trudy in turn is cut off. By a shriek and the smack of a chair tipping backwards to the floor.

I note at this point that my father has receded. Like a particle in physics, he escapes definition in his flight from us: the assertive, successful poet-teacher-publisher, calmly intent on repossessing his house, his father's house; or the hapless, put-upon cuckold, the unworldly fool cramped by debt and misery and lack of talent. The more we hear of one, the less we believe of the other.

Elodie's first uttered sound is both a word and a sob. “Never!”

A silence, through which I sense Claude, then my mother, reaching for their drinks.

“I didn't know what he was going to say last night. All untrue! He wanted you back. He was trying to make you jealous. He was never going to throw you out.”

Her voice dips as she bends to right the chair. “That's why I'm here. To tell you, and you better get this right. Nothing! Nothing happened between us. John Cairncross was my editor and friend and teacher. He helped me become a writer. Is that clear?”

I'm heartlessly suspicious, but they believe her. That she was not my father's lover should be a deliverance for them, but I think it raises other possibilities. An inconvenient woman bearing witness to all the reasons my father had to live. How unfortunate.

“Sit down,” Trudy says quietly. “I believe you. No more shouting, please.”

Claude refills the glasses. The Pouilly-Fumé seems to me too thin, too piercing. Too young, perhaps, not right for the occasion. Summer-evening heat aside, a muscular Pomerol might suit us better when strong emotions are on display. If only there was a cellar, if I could go down there now, into the dusty gloom to pull a bottle off the racks. Stand quietly with it a moment, squint at its label, nod wisely to myself as I bring it up. Adult life, a faraway oasis. Not even a mirage.

I imagine my mother's bare arms folded on the table, eyes steady and clear. No one could guess at her torment. John loved only her. His invocation of Dubrovnik was sincere, his declaration of hatred, his dreams of strangling her, his love for Elodie—all hopeful lies. But she mustn't go down, she must be staunch. She's putting herself in a mode, a mood, of serious probing, seemingly not unfriendly.

“You identified the body.”

Elodie is also calmer. “They tried to get hold of you. No reply. They had his phone, they saw his calls to me. About the reading tonight—nothing else. I asked my fiancé to go with me, I was so scared.”

“How did he look?”

“She means John,” Claude says.

“I was surprised. He looked peaceful. Except…” She draws a sharp, inward sigh. “Except his mouth. It was so long, so wide, stretched almost ear to ear, like an insane smile. It was closed though. I was glad about that.”

Around me, in the walls and through the crimson chambers that lie beyond them, I feel my mother tremble. One more physical detail like this will undo her.

Early in my conscious life one of my fingers, not then subject to my influence, brushed past a shrimp-like protuberance between my legs. And though shrimp and fingertip lay at differing distances from my brain, they felt each other simultaneously, a diverting issue in neuroscience known as the binding problem. Days later it happened again on another finger. Some developmental time passed and I grasped the implications. Biology is destiny, and destiny is digital, and in this case binary. It was bleakly simple. The strangely essential matter at the heart of every birth was now settled. Either—or. Nothing else. No one exclaims at the moment of one's dazzling coming-out,
It's a person!
Instead:
It's a girl
,
It's a boy
. Pink or blue—a minimal improvement on Henry Ford's offer of cars of any colour so long as they were black. Only two sexes. I was disappointed. If human bodies, minds, fates are so complex, if we are free like no other mammal, why limit the range? I seethed, and then, like everyone else, I settled down and made the best of my inheritance. For sure, complexity would come upon me in time. Until then, my plan was to arrive as a freeborn Englishman, a creature of the post English-as-well-as-Scottish-and-French Enlightenment. My selfhood would be sculpted by pleasure, conflict, experience, ideas and my own judgement, as rocks and trees are shaped by rain, wind and time. Besides, in my confinement I had other concerns: my drink problem, family worries, an uncertain future in which I faced a possible jail sentence or a life in “care” in the careless lap of Leviathan, fostered up to the thirteenth floor.

But lately, as I track my mother's shifting relation to her crime, I've remembered rumours of a new dispensation in the matter of blue and pink. Be careful what you wish for. Here's a new politics in university life. The digression may seem unimportant, but I intend to apply as soon as I can. Physics, Gaelic, anything. So I'm bound to take an interest. A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. They're on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority's blessing, its validation of their chosen
identities
. The decline of the West in new guise perhaps. Or the exaltation and liberation of the self. A social-media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options—neutrois, two spirit, bigender…any colour you like, Mr. Ford. Biology is not destiny after all, and there's cause for celebration. A shrimp is neither limiting nor stable. I declare my undeniable feeling for who I am. If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black. And vice versa. I may announce myself as disabled, or disabled in context. If my identity is that of a believer, I'm easily wounded, my flesh torn to bleeding by any questioning of my faith. Offended, I enter a state of grace. Should inconvenient opinions hover near me like fallen angels or evil djinn (a mile being too near), I'll be in need of the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies. Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing on my face, my brain, like unwholesome dogs.

I'll feel, therefore I'll be. Let poverty go begging and climate change braise in hell. Social justice can drown in ink. I'll be an activist of the emotions, a loud, campaigning spirit fighting with tears and sighs to shape institutions around my vulnerable self. My identity will be my precious, my only true possession, my access to the only truth. The world must love, nourish and protect it as I do. If my college does not bless me, validate me and give me what I clearly need, I'll press my face into the vice chancellor's lapels and weep. Then demand his resignation.

The womb, or this womb, isn't such a bad place, a little like the grave, “fine and private” in one of my father's favourite poems. I'll make a version of a womb for my student days, set aside the Enlightenments of Rosbifs, Jocks and Frogs. Away with the real, with dull facts and hated pretence of objectivity. Feeling is queen. Unless she identifies as king.

I know. Sarcasm ill suits the unborn. And why digress? Because my mother is in step with new times. She may not know it, but she marches with a movement. Her status as a murderer is a fact, an item in the world outside herself. But that's old thinking. She affirms, she identifies as innocent. Even as she strains to clean up traces in the kitchen, she feels blameless and therefore is—almost. Her grief, her tears, are proof of probity. She's beginning to convince herself with her story of depression and suicide. She can almost believe the sham evidence in the car. Only persuade herself and she'll deceive with ease and consistency. Lies will be
her
truth. But her construction is new and frail. My father's ghastly smile could upend it, that knowing grin coldly stretched across a corpse's face. That's why it's needed, Elodie's validation of my mother's innocent self. And why she leans forward now, taking me with her, listening tenderly to the poet's halting words. For Elodie will soon be in interview with the police. Her beliefs, which will direct her memory and order her account, must be properly shaped.

Claude, unlike Trudy, owns his crime. This is a Renaissance man, a Machiavel, an old-school villain who believes he can get away with murder. The world doesn't come to him through a haze of the subjective; it comes refracted by stupidity and greed, bent as through glass or water, but etched on a screen before the inner eye, a lie as sharp and bright as truth. Claude doesn't know he's stupid. If you're stupid, how can you tell? He may blunder through an undergrowth of clichés, but he understands what he did and why. He'll flourish, without a backward glance, unless caught and punished, and then he'll never blame himself, only his bad luck among random events. He can claim his inheritance, his tenure among the rational. Enemies of the Enlightenment will say he's the embodiment of its spirit. Nonsense!

But I know what they mean.