Nutshell (7 page)

There was a time when Claude's exit line might have made me smile. But lately, don't ask why, I've no taste for comedy, no inclination to exercise, even if I had the space, no delight in fire or earth, in words that once revealed a golden world of majestical stars, the beauty of poetic apprehension, the infinite joy of reason. These admirable radio talks and bulletins, the excellent podcasts that moved me, seem at best hot air, at worst a vaporous stench. The brave polity I'm soon to join, the noble congregation of humanity, its customs, gods and angels, its fiery ideas and brilliant ferment, no longer thrill me. A weight bears down heavily on the canopy that wraps my little frame. There's hardly enough of me to form one small animal, still less to express a man. My disposition is to stillborn sterility, then to dust.

These lowering, high-flown thoughts, which I long to declaim alone somewhere, return to oppress me as Claude disappears up the stairs and my parents sit in silence. We hear the front door open and close. I strain without success for the sound of Claude opening the door of his brother's car. Trudy leans forward again and John takes her hand. The faintest rise in our blood pressure suggests a squeeze of his psoriatic fingers against her palm. She says his name quietly, with a falling tone of fond reproach. He says nothing, but my best guess is he's shaking his head, compressing his lips into a thin smile, as if to say, Well, well. Look what's come of us.

She says warmly, “You were right, it's the end. But we can do this gently.”

“Yes, it's best,” my father agrees in his pleasant, rumbling voice. “But Trudy. Just for old times. Shall I say a poem for you?”

Her emphatic, childlike shake of the head gently rocks me on my bearings, but I know as well as she does that, for John Cairncross, in poetry no means yes.

“Please John, for heaven's sake, don't.”

But he's already drawing breath. I've heard this one, but it meant less then.

“Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part…”

Unnecessary, I think, for him to be speaking certain phrases with such relish. “You get no more of me,” “so cleanly I myself can free,” not “one jot of former love retain.” And at the end, when Passion is on his deathbed, and there's a chance against the odds he might recover if only Trudy wished it, my father denies it all with a clever, sarcastic lilt.

But she doesn't wish it either and talks over the last few words. “I don't want to hear another poem for the rest of my life.”

“You won't,” my father says affably. “Not with Claude.”

In this sensible exchange between the parties, no provision is made for me. Another man's suspicions would be stirred by his ex-wife's failure to negotiate the monthly payments that must be due to the mother of his child. Another woman, if she didn't have schemes in hand, would surely demand it. But I'm old enough to take responsibility for myself and try to be the master of my fate. Like the miser's cat, I retain a secret scrap of sustenance, my one morsel of agency. I've used it in the small hours to inflict insomnia and summon a radio talk. Two sharp, well-spaced blows against the wall, using my heel rather than my near-boneless toes. I feel it as a lonely pulse of longing, just to hear myself referred to.

“Ah,” my mother sighs. “He's kicking.”

“Then I should be going,” my father murmurs. “Shall we say two weeks for you to clear out?”

I wave to him, as it were, and what do I get? Then, therefore, in which case, and so—he's
going
.

“Two months. But hang on a minute till Claude gets back.”

“Only if he's quick.”

An airplane a few thousand feet above our heads makes an airy downward glissando towards Heathrow, a threatening sound, I always think. John Cairncross may be considering one last poem. He could wheel out, as he used to before journeys, “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.” Those soothing tetrameters, that mature, comforting tone, would make me nostalgic for the sad old days of his visits. But instead he drums his fingers on the table, clears his throat, and simply waits.

Trudy says, “We had smoothies this morning from Judd Street. But I don't think we left you any.”

With these words the affair begins at last.

A toneless voice, that comes as though from the wings of a theatre, in a doomed production of a terrible play, says from the head of the stairs, “No, I put aside a cup for him. He was the one who told us about that place. Remember?”

He descends as he speaks. Hard to believe that this too-well-timed entrance, these clumsy, improbable lines were rehearsed in the small hours by drunks.

The Styrofoam container with its plastic lid and straw is in the fridge, which opens and closes now. Claude sets it down before my father with a breathy, maternal “There.”

“Thanks. But I'm not sure I can face it.”

An early mistake. Why let the contemptible brother rather than the sensuous wife bring the man his drink? They'll need to keep him talking and then let's hope he'll change his mind.
Let's
? This is how it is, how stories work, when we know of murders from their inception. We can't help siding with the perpetrators and their schemes, we wave from the quayside as their little ship of bad intent departs. Bon voyage! It's not easy, it's an achievement, to kill someone and go free. The datum of success is “the perfect murder.” And perfection is hardly human. On board, things will go wrong, someone will trip on an uncoiled rope, the vessel will drift too far west of south. Hard work, and all at sea.

Claude takes a seat at the table, draws a busy breath, plays his best card. Small talk. Or what he considers small talk to be.

“These migrants, eh? What a business. And don't they envy us from Calais! The Jungle! Thank God for the English Channel.”

My father can't resist. “Ah, England, bound in with the triumphant sea, whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege.”

These words raise his mood. I think I hear him draw the cup towards him. Then he says, “But I say, invite 'em all in. Come on! An Afghan restaurant in St. John's Wood.”

“And a mosque,” says Claude. “Or three. And wife-beaters and girl-abusers by the thousand.”

“Did I ever tell you about the Goharshad mosque in Iran? I saw it once at dawn. Stood there amazed. In tears. You can't imagine the colours, Claude. Cobalt, turquoise, aubergine, saffron, the palest green, crystal white and everything in between.”

I've never heard him call his brother by his name. A strange elation has seized my father. Showing off to my mother, letting her know by comparison what she'll be missing.

Or freeing himself from the clammy musings of his brother, who now says in a tone of cautious compromise, “Never considered Iran. But Sharm el-Sheikh, the Plaza hotel. Lovely. All the trimmings. Almost too hot for the beach.”

“I'm with John,” my mother says. “Syrians, Eritreans, Iraqis. Even Macedonians. We need their youth. And darling, will you bring me a glass of water.”

Claude is instantly at the kitchen sink. From there he says, “Need? I don't
need
to be hacked to pieces in the street. Like Woolwich.” He comes back to the table with two glasses. One is for himself. I think I see where this is heading.

He continues, “Haven't been down the Tube since seven-seven.”

In the voice he uses to talk past Claude, my father says, “I saw it calculated once. If sex between the races goes on as now, in five thousand years everyone on earth will be the same pale coffee colour.”

“I'll drink to that,” my mother says.

“I'm not against it really,” Claude says. “So cheers.”

“To the end of race,” my father agreeably proposes. But I don't think he's raised his cup. Instead, he turns to the matters in hand. “If you don't mind, I'll pop round with Elodie on Friday. She wants to measure up for curtains.”

I picture a hayloft, off which a hundred-kilo sack of grain is tossed to the granary floor. Then another, and a third. Such are the thuds of my mother's heart.

“That's fine, of course,” she says in a reasonable voice. “We could give you lunch.”

“Thanks, but we've a crowded day. And now I should be going. The traffic's heavy.”

The scrape of a chair—and how loud, despite the greasy tiles, they sound down here, like the bark of a dog. John Cairncross rises to his feet. He assumes again a friendly tone. “Trudy, it's been—”

But she's standing too and thinking fast. I feel it in her sinews, in the stiffening drapes of her omentum. She has one last throw and everything rests on an easiness of manner. She cuts him off in a rush of sincerity. “John, before you go I want to tell you this. I know I can be difficult, sometimes even a bitch. More than half the blame for all this is mine. I know that. And I'm sorry the house is a tip. But what you said last night. About Dubrovnik.”

“Ah,” my father affirms. “Dubrovnik.” But he's already several feet away.

“What you said was right. You brought it all back to me and it pierced my heart. It was a masterpiece, John, what we created. What's happened since doesn't lessen it. You were so wise to say that. It was beautiful. Nothing that happens in the future can wash it away. And even though it's only water in my glass, I want to raise it to you, to us, and thank you for reminding me. It doesn't matter whether love endures. What matters is that it exists. So. To love. Our love. As it was. And to Elodie.”

Trudy lifts the glass to her lips. The rise and fall of her epiglottis and her snaky peristalsis briefly deafen me. In all the time I've known her, I've never heard my mother make a speech. Not her way. But curiously evocative. Of what? A nervous schoolgirl, the new head girl making an impression with defiant tremor, emphatic platitudes, before headmaster, staff and the whole school.

A toast to love and therefore death, to Eros and Thanatos. It appears to be a given of intellectual life, that when two notions are sufficiently far apart or opposed, they are said to be profoundly linked. Since death is opposed to everything in life, various couplings are proposed. Art and death. Nature and death. Worryingly, birth and death. And joyously iterated, love and death. On this last and from where I am, no two notions could be more mutually irrelevant. The dead love no one, nothing. As soon as I'm out and about I might try my hand at a monograph. The world cries out for fresh-faced empiricists.

When my father speaks, he sounds closer. He's coming back to the table.

“Well,” he says, most genially, “that's the spirit.”

I swear the deathly, loving cup is in his hand.

Again, with both heels I kick and kick against his fate.

“Oh, oh, little mole,” my mother calls out in a sweet, maternal voice. “He's waking up.”

“You failed to mention my brother,” John Cairncross says. It's in his manly poet's nature to amplify another's toast. “To our future loves, Claude and Elodie.”

“To us all then,” says Claude.

A silence. My mother's glass is already empty.

Then comes my father's drawn-out sigh of satisfaction. Exaggerated to a degree, merely out of politeness. “More sugary than usual. But not bad at all.”

The Styrofoam cup he sets upon the table makes a hollow sound.

It comes back to me, as bright as a cartoon light bulb. A programme on pet care laid out the dangers while Trudy was brushing her teeth one rainy morning after breakfast: unlucky the dog that licks the sweet green liquid off a garage floor. Dead within hours. Just as Claude told it. Chemistry without mercy, purpose or regrets. My mother's electric toothbrush drowned out the rest. We're bound by the same rules that dog our pets. The great chain of non-being is round our necks too.

“Well,” my father says, meaning more than he can know, “I'll be going.”

Claude and Trudy stand. This is the reckless thrill of the poisoner's art. The substance ingested, the act not yet complete. Within two miles of here are many hospitals, many stomach pumps. But the line of criminality has been crossed. No calling in the deed. They can only stand back and wait for the antithesis, for the antifreeze to leave him cold.

Claude says, “Is this your hat?”

“Oh yes! I'll take that.”

Is this the last time I hear my father's voice?

We're moving towards the stairs, then up them, the poet leading the way. I have lungs but no air to shout a warning or weep with shame at my impotence. I'm still a creature of the sea, not a human like the others. Now we're passing through the shambles of the hall. The front door is opening. My father turns to give my mother a peck upon the cheek and throw an affectionate punch at his brother's shoulder. Perhaps for the first time in his life.

As he goes out he calls over his shoulder, “Let's hope that bloody car starts.”

A pale, thin plant seeded by drunks in the small hours struggles for the remote sunlight of success. Here's the plan. A man is found lifeless at his steering wheel. On the floor of his car by the rear seat, almost out of sight, is a Styrofoam cup bearing the logo of a business in Judd Street, near Camden Town Hall. In the cup, the remains of a pureed fruit drink, laced with glycol. Near the cup, an empty bottle of the same lethal substance. Near the bottle, a discarded receipt for the drink bearing that day's date. Concealed under the driver's seat, a few bank statements, some for a small publishing house, others for a personal account. Both show overdrafts in the low tens of thousands. On one of the statements is scrawled, in the handwriting of the deceased, the word “Enough!” (Trudy's “thing.”) By the bank statements, a pair of gloves the dead man wore now and then to conceal his psoriasis. They partly conceal a balled-up newspaper page bearing a hostile review of a recent volume of poems. On the front passenger seat, a black hat.

The Metropolitan Police are understaffed, overstretched. The younger detectives, so the older complain, investigate at their screens, reluctant to waste shoe leather. When there are other, gory cases to pursue, a conclusion in this is conveniently at hand. The means unusual but not rare, easily available, palatable, fatal in large doses, and a well-known resource for crime writers. Enquiries suggest that as well as debts, the marriage was in trouble, the wife now living with the brother of the dead man, who had been depressed for months. Psoriasis undermined his confidence. The gloves he wore to conceal it explain the absence of fingerprints on the cup and the antifreeze bottle. CCTV images show him at Smoothie Heaven wearing his hat. He was on his way to the home in St. John's Wood that morning. Apparently, he couldn't face becoming a father, or the collapse of his business or his failure as a poet, or his loneliness in Shoreditch, where he was living in rented accommodation. After a row with his wife he left in distress. The wife blames herself. The interview with her had to be suspended a few times. The brother of the dead man was also present and did his best to be helpful.

Is reality so easily, so minutely arranged in advance? My mother, Claude and I are waiting tensely at the open front door. Between the conception of a deed and its acting out lies a tangle of hideous contingencies. At the first touch, the engine turns but does not start. No surprise. This vehicle belongs to a dreaming sonneteer. On the second attempt, the same wheezing failure, and so too on the third. The starter motor is sounding like an old man grown too feeble to clear his throat. If John Cairncross dies on our hands, we'll all go down. Likewise if he survives on our hands. He pauses before trying again, gathering his luck. The fourth is weaker than the third. I conjure a view of him through the car's windscreen, mimicking for us a quizzical shrug, his form almost obliterated by reflections of summer clouds.

“Oh dear,” says Claude, a man of the world. “He's going to flood the carb.”

My mother's viscera orchestrate her desperate hopes. But on the fifth, a transformation. With slow heaving and comical popping sounds, the engine internally combusts. Trudy and Claude's straggling plant grows a hopeful bud. As the car reverses into the road my mother has a fit of coughing from what I take to be a cloud of blue exhaust blowing our way. We come inside, and the door is slammed shut.

We're not returning to the kitchen, but climbing the stairs. Nothing is said, but the quality of silence—creamily thick—suggests that more than fatigue and drink are drawing us towards the bedroom. Misery on misery. This is savage injustice.

Five minutes later. This is the bedroom and it's already started. Claude crouches by my mother and might already be naked. I hear his breath on her neck. He's undressing her, to date a peak of sensual generosity unscaled by him.

“Careful,” Trudy says. “Those buttons are pearls.”

He grunts in reply. His fingers are inexpert, working solely for his own needs. Something of his or hers lands on the bedroom floor. A shoe, or trousers with heavy belt. She's writhing strangely. Impatience. He issues a command in the form of a second grunt. I'm cowering. This is ugly, sure to go wrong, too late in my term. I've been saying this for weeks. I'll suffer.

Obediently, Trudy's on all fours. It's
a posteriori
, doggy style, but not for my sake. Like a mating toad, he clasps himself against her back. On her, now in her, and deep. So little of my treacherous mother separates me from the would-be murderer of my father. Nothing is the same this Saturday noon in St. John's Wood. This is not the usual brief and frantic encounter that might threaten the integrity of a brand-new skull. Rather, a glutinous drowning, like something pedantic crawling through a swamp. Mucous membranes slide past each other with a faint creak on the turn. Hours of scheming have accidentally delivered the conspirators into the art of deliberative lovemaking. But nothing passes between them. Mechanically they churn in slow motion, a blind industrial process at half power. All they want is release, to clock out, taste a few seconds' respite from themselves. When it comes, in close succession, my mother gasps in horror. At what she must return to, and might yet see. Her lover emits his third grunt of the shift. They fall apart to lie on their backs on the sheets. Then we all sleep.

On and on through the afternoon, and it's on this long flat stretch of time that I have my first dream, in full colour and rich visual depth. The line, the stated border, between dreaming and waking is vague. No fences or fire break in the trees. Only vacant sentry huts mark the crossing. I begin indistinctly in this new land, as a tyro must, with a formless mass or mess of wavering, ill-lit shapes, people and places dissolving, indistinct voices in vaulted spaces singing or speaking. As I pass through, I feel the pain of unnamed, unreachable remorse, a sense of having left someone or something behind in a betrayal of duty or love. Then it comes beautifully clear. A cold mist on the day of my desertion, a three-day journey on horseback, long rows of the sullen English poor in the rutted lanes, giant elms looming over flooded meadows by the Thames, and at last the familiar thrill and din of the city. In the streets the odour of human waste as solid as house walls, yielding around a narrow corner to the aroma of roasted meat and rosemary and a drab entranceway I pass through to see a young man of my age in the dark-beamed gloom at a table pouring wine from an earthenware jug, a handsome man, leaning in across a smeared oak table, holding me with a tale he has in mind, something he has written or I have, and wants an opinion, or to give one, a correction, a point of fact. Or he wants me to tell him how to go on. This blurring of identity is one aspect of the love I feel for him, which almost smothers the guilt I want to leave behind. Outside in the street a bell tolls. We crowd outside to wait for the funeral cortège. We know this is an important death. The procession doesn't appear, but the bell keeps ringing.

It's my mother who hears the doorbell. Before I've drifted upwards from the novelty of dream logic, she's in her dressing gown and we're descending the stairs. As we reach the last run, she gives a cry of surprise. I would guess the midden has been cleared while we slept. The bell sounds again, loud, hard, angry. Trudy is opening the door as she shouts, “For God's sake! Are you drunk? I'm going as fast as—”

She falters. If she has faith in herself she shouldn't be astonished to see what dread has already let me see: a policeman, no, two, removing their hats.

A kind, fatherly voice says, “Are you Mrs. Cairncross, wife of John?”

She nods.

“Sergeant Crowley. I'm afraid we have some very bad news. May we come in?”

“Oh God,” my mother remembers to say.

They follow us into the sitting room, rarely used and almost clean. If the hallway hadn't been cleared, I think my mother would have been an immediate suspect. Police work is intuitive. What remains, possibly, is a lingering smell, easily confused with exotic cooking.

A second voice, younger, with brotherly solicitude, says, “We'd like you to be sitting down.”

The sergeant breaks the news. Mr. Cairncross's car was reported on the hard shoulder of the M1 north-bound, twenty miles from London. His door was open, and not far off, on a grassy embankment, he lay facedown. An ambulance came, resuscitation was attempted during the race to hospital, but he died along the way.

A sob, like an air bubble in deep water, rises through my mother's body, rises through me, to burst into the faces of the attentive police.

“Oh God!” she shouts. “We had the most awful row this morning.” She hunches forward. I feel her put her hands to her face and start to shiver.

“I should tell you this,” the same policeman continues. He pauses delicately, mindful of the double respect owed to the heavily pregnant bereaved. “We tried to contact you this afternoon. A friend of his identified the body. I'm afraid our first impression is suicide.”

When my mother straightens her spine and lets out a cry, I'm overcome by love for her, for all that's lost—Dubrovnik, poetry, daily life. She loved him once, as he her. Summoning this fact, erasing others, lifts her performance.

“I should have…I should have kept him here. Oh my God, it's all my fault.”

How clever, hiding in plain sight, behind the truth.

The sergeant says, “People often say that. But you mustn't, you shouldn't. It's wrong to go blaming yourself.”

A deep inhalation and sigh. She seems about to speak, stops, sighs again, gathers herself. “I ought to explain. Things weren't going well between us. He was seeing someone, he moved out. And I started a…His brother moved in with me. John took it badly. That's why I'm saying…”

She's got in first with Claude, told them what they were bound to discover. If, in flagrant mood, she were to say now, “I killed him,” she'd be safe.

I hear the rasp of Velcro, the flip of notebook page, the scratch of pencil. She tells them in dulled voice all that she'd rehearsed, returning at the end to her own culpability. She should never have let him drive away in such a state.

The younger man says reverentially, “Mrs. Cairncross. You weren't to know.”

Then she changes tack, almost sounds cross. “I don't think I'm taking this in. I'm not even sure I believe you.”

“That's understandable.” This is the paternal sergeant. With polite coughs, he and his colleague stand, ready to leave. “Is there someone you can call? Someone who can be with you?”

My mother considers her reply. She's bent over again, face in hands. She speaks through her fingers in a flat voice. “My brother-in-law's here now. He's upstairs asleep.”

The guardians of the rule of law might be exchanging a lewd glance. Any token of their scepticism would help me.

“When the time's right we'd like a word with him as well,” the younger one says.

“This news is going to kill him.”

“I expect you'd like to be alone together now.”

There it is again, the slender lifeline of insinuation to support my cowardly hope that the Force—Leviathan, not I—will take revenge.

I need a moment alone, beyond the reach of voices. I've been too absorbed, too impressed by Trudy's art to peer into the pit of my own grief. And beyond it, the mystery of how love for my mother swells in proportion to my hatred. She's made herself my only parent. I won't survive without her, without the enveloping green gaze to smile into, the loving voice pouring sweets in my ear, the cool hands tending my private parts.

The constabulary leave. My mother mounts the stairs with a plodding tread. Hand firmly on the banister. One-two and pause, one-two and pause. She's making a repeated humming sound on a fading note, a moan of pity or sadness exhaled through her nostrils.
Nnng…nnng
. I know her. Something's building, a prelude to a reckoning. She devised a plot, pure artifice, a malign fairy tale. Now her fanciful story is deserting her, crossing the border as I did this afternoon, but in reverse, past the watchless guard huts, to rise against her, and side with the socially real, the dull quotidian of the working-day world, of human contacts, appointments, obligations, video cameras, computers with inhuman memories. In short, consequences. The tale has turned tail.

Hammered by drink and lost sleep, bearing me upwards, she continues towards the bedroom.
It was never meant to work
, she's telling herself.
It was just my foolish spite. I'm only guilty of a mistake.

The next step is close, but she won't take it yet.