Nutshell

by Ian Mcewan

  This is my collection of facts and postulates. Hunched over them like a patient philatelist, I’ve added some recent items to my set. He suffers from a skin complaint, psoriasis, which has rendered his hands scaly, hard and red. Trudy hates the look and feel of them and tells him he should wear gloves. He refuses. He has a six-month lease on three mean rooms in Shoreditch, is in debt, is overweight and should exercise more. Just yesterday I acquired—still with the stamps—a Penny Black: the house my mother lives in and I in her, the house where Claude visits nightly, is a Georgian pile on boastful Hamilton Terrace and was my father’s childhood home. In his late twenties, just as he was growing his first beard, and not long after he married my mother, he inherited the family mansion. His dear mother was long dead. All the sources agree, the house is filthy. Only clichés serve it well: peeling, crumbling, dilapidated. Frost has sometimes glazed and stiffened the curtains in winter; in heavy rains the drains, like dependable banks, return their deposit with interest; in summer, like bad banks, they stink. But look, here in my tweezers is the rarest piece of all, the British Guiana: even in such a rotten state, these six thousand aching square feet will buy you seven million pounds.

  Most men, most people, would never permit a spouse to eject them from under their childhood eaves. John Cairncross is different. Here are my reasonable inferences. Born under an obliging star, eager to please, too kind, too earnest, he has nothing of the ambitious poet’s quiet greed. He really believes that to write a poem in praise of my mother (her eyes, her hair, her lips) and come by to read it aloud will soften her, make him welcome in his own house. But she knows that her eyes are nothing “like the Galway turf,” by which he intended “very green,” and since she has no Irish blood, the line is anaemic. Whenever she and I listen, I sense in her slowing heart a retinal crust of boredom that blinds her to the pathos of the scene—a large, large-hearted man pleading his cause without hope, in the unmodish form of a sonnet.

  A thousand may be hyperbole. Many of the poems my father knows are long, like those famed creations of bank employees The Cremation of Sam McGee and The Waste Land. Trudy continues to tolerate the occasional recitation. For her, a monologue is better than an exchange, preferable to another turn round the unweeded garden of their marriage. Perhaps she indulges him out of guilt, what little remains. My father speaking poetry to her was once, apparently, a ritual of their love. Strange, that she can’t bear to tell him what he must suspect, what she’s bound to reveal. That she no longer loves him. That she has a lover.

  On the radio today, a woman recounted hitting a dog, a golden retriever, with her car on a lonely road at night. She crouched in her headlights by its side, holding the dying creature’s paw through its spasms of frightful pain. Large brown forgiving eyes stared into hers all the while. She took in her free hand a rock and dashed it several times against the poor dog’s skull. To dispatch John Cairncross would take only one blow, one coup de vérité. Instead, as he begins to recite, Trudy will assume her bland, listening look. I, however, attend closely.

  We generally go to his poetry library on the first floor. A mantelpiece clock with rackety balance wheel makes the only sound as he takes his usual chair. Here, in the presence of a poet, I permit my conjectures to flourish. If my father looks towards the ceiling to compose his thoughts, he’ll see deterioration in the Adam-style designs. Damage has spread plaster dust like icing sugar across the spines of famous books. My mother wipes her chair with her hand before she sits. Without flourish, my father draws breath and begins. He recites fluently, with feeling. Most of the modern poems leave me cold. Too much about the self, too glassily cool with regard to others, too many gripes in too short a line. But as warm as the embrace of brothers are John Keats and Wilfred Owen. I feel their breath upon my lips. Their kiss. Who would not wish to have written Candied apple, quince, and plum and gourd, or The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall?

  I picture her from across the library through his adoring eyes. She sits within a big leather armchair that dates from Freud’s Vienna. Her lithe bare legs are partly, prettily tucked beneath her. One elbow is bent against the arm rest to support her drooping head, the fingers of her free hand drum lightly on her ankle. The late afternoon is hot, the windows are open, the traffic of St. John’s Wood pleasantly hums. Her expression is pensive, her lower lip looks heavy. She moistens it with a spotless tongue. A few blonde ringlets lie damply on her neck. Her cotton dress, loosely cut to contain me, is pale green, paler than her eyes. The steady work of pregnancy goes on and she is weary, agreeably so. John Cairncross sees the summer’s flush on her cheeks, the lovely line of neck and shoulder and swollen breasts, the hopeful knoll that is me, the sunless pallor of her calves, the unwrinkled sole of one exposed foot, its line of diminishing, innocent toes like children in a family photo. Everything about her, he thinks, brought to perfection by her condition.

  He can’t see that she’s waiting for him to leave. That it’s perverse of her to insist on him living elsewhere, in this, our third trimester. Can he really be so complicit in his annihilation? Such a big fellow, six foot three I’ve heard, a giant with thick black hair on mighty arms, a giant fool to believe it’s wise to grant his wife the “space” she says she needs. Space! She should come in here, where lately I can barely crook a finger. In my mother’s usage, space, her need for it, is a misshapen metaphor, if not a synonym. For being selfish, devious, cruel. But wait, I love her, she’s my divinity and I need her. I take it back! I spoke in anguish. I’m as deluded as my father. And it’s true. Her beauty and remoteness and resolve are one.

  Above her, as I see it, the library’s decomposing ceiling releases a sudden cloud of spinning particles that glimmer as they drift across a bar of sunlight. And how she glimmers against the cracked brown leather of the chair where Hitler or Trotsky or Stalin might have sprawled in their Viennese days, when they were but embryos of their future selves. I concede. I’m hers. If she commanded it, I too would go to Shoreditch, and nurse myself in exile. No need for an umbilical cord. My father and I are joined in hopeless love.

  Against all the signs—her terse responses, her yawns, her general inattention—he lingers into the early evening, in hopes, perhaps, of dinner. But my mother is waiting for Claude. At last she drives her husband away by declaring her need to rest. She’ll see him to the door. Who could ignore the sorrow in his voice as he makes his tentative goodbyes. It pains me to think he would endure any humiliation in order to spend some minutes longer in her presence. Nothing, save his nature, prevents him doing what others might do—precede her to the master bedroom, to the room where he and I were conceived, sprawl on the bed or in the tub among bold clouds of steam, then invite his friends round, pour wine, be master of his house. Instead, he hopes to succeed by kindness and self-effacing sensitivity to her needs. I hope to be wrong, but I think he’ll doubly fail, for she’ll go on despising him for being weak, and he’ll suffer even more than he should. His visits don’t end, they fade. He leaves behind in the library a field of resonating sadness, an imagined shape, a disappointed hologram still in possession of his chair.

  Now we’re approaching the front door as she sees him off the premises. These various depredations have been much discussed. I know that one hinge of this door has parted with the woodwork. Dry rot has turned the architrave to compacted dust. Some floor tiles have gone, others are cracked—Georgian, in a once colourful diamond pattern, impossible to replace. Concealing those absences and cracks, plastic bags of empty bottles and rotting food. Spilling underfoot, these are the very emblems of household squalor: the detritus of ashtrays, paper plates with loathsome wounds of ketchup, teetering teabags like tiny sacks of grain that mice or elves might hoard. The cleaning lady left in sadness long before my time. Trudy knows it’s not a gravid woman’s lot, to heave garbage to the high-lidded wheelie bins. She could easily ask my father to clean the hall, but she doesn’t. Household duties might confer household rights. And she may be at work on a clever story o
f his desertion. Claude remains in this respect a visitor, an outsider, but I’ve heard him say that to tidy one corner of the house would be to foreground the chaos in the rest. Despite the heatwave I’m well protected against the stench. My mother complains about it most days, but languidly. It’s only one aspect of domestic decay.

  She may think that a blob of curd on his shoe or the sight of a cobalt-furred orange by the skirting will shorten my father’s goodbyes. She’s wrong. The door is open, he straddles the threshold and she and I are just inside the hall. Claude is due in fifteen minutes. He sometimes comes early. So Trudy is agitated but determined to appear sleepy. She’s standing on eggshells. A square of greasy paper that once wrapped a slab of unsalted butter is caught under her sandal and has oiled her toes. This she will soon relate to Claude in humorous terms.

  My father says, “Look, we really must talk.”

  “Yes, but not now.”

  “We keep putting it off.”

  “I can’t begin to tell you how tired I am. You’ve no idea what it’s like. I’ve simply got to lie down.”

  “Of course. That’s why I’m thinking of moving back in, so I can—”

  “Please John, not now. We’ve been through this. I need more time. Try to be considerate. I’m bearing your child, remember? This isn’t the time to be thinking of yourself.”

  “I don’t like you being alone here when I could—”

  “John!”

  I hear his sigh as he embraces her as closely as she’ll permit. Next, I feel her arm go out to take his wrist, carefully avoiding, I should think, his afflicted hands, turn him and gently propel him towards the street.

  “Darling, please, just go…”

  Later, while my mother reclines, angry and exhausted, I recede into primal speculation. What kind of being is this? Is big John Cairncross our envoy to the future, the form of a man to end wars, rapine and enslavement and stand equal and caring with the women of the world? Or will he be trampled into oblivion by brutes? We shall find out.

  THREE

  Who is this Claude, this fraud who’s wormed in between my family and my hopes? I heard it once and took note: the dull-brained yokel. My full prospects are dimmed. His existence denies my rightful claims to a happy life in the care of both parents. Unless I devise a plan. He has entranced my mother and banished my father. His interests can’t be mine. He’ll crush me. Unless, unless, unless—a wisp of a word, ghostly token of altered fate, bleating little iamb of hope, it drifts across my thoughts like a floater in the vitreous humour of an eye. Mere hope.

  And Claude, like a floater, is barely real. Not even a colourful chancer, no hint of the smiling rogue. Instead, dull to the point of brilliance, vapid beyond invention, his banality as finely wrought as the arabesques of the Blue Mosque. Here is a man who whistles continually, not songs but TV jingles, ringtones, who brightens a morning with Nokia’s mockery of Tárrega. Whose repeated remarks are a witless, thrustless dribble, whose impoverished sentences die like motherless chicks, cheaply fading. Who washes his private parts at the basin where my mother washes her face. Who knows only clothes and cars. And has told us a hundred times that he would never buy or even drive such, or such, or a hybrid or a…or…That he only buys his suits in this, no, that Mayfair street, his shirts in some other, and socks from, he can’t recall…If only…but. No one else ends a sentence on a “but.”

  That stale, uncertain voice. My entire life I’ve endured the twin torments of his whistling and his speaking. I’ve been spared the sight of him, but that will soon change. In the dim-lit gore of the delivery room (Trudy has decided that he, not my father, will be there), when I emerge to greet him at last, my questions will remain, whatever form he takes: What is my mother doing? What can she want? Has she conjured Claude to illustrate the enigma of the erotic?

  Not everyone knows what it is to have your father’s rival’s penis inches from your nose. By this late stage they should be refraining on my behalf. Courtesy, if not clinical judgement, demands it. I close my eyes, I grit my gums, I brace myself against the uterine walls. This turbulence would shake the wings off a Boeing. My mother goads her lover, whips him on with her fairground shrieks. Wall of Death! On each occasion, on every piston stroke, I dread that he’ll break through and shaft my soft-boned skull and seed my thoughts with his essence, with the teeming cream of his banality. Then, brain-damaged, I’ll think and speak like him. I’ll be the son of Claude.

  But rather trap me inside a wingless Boeing’s mid-Atlantic plunge than book me one more night of his foreplay. Here I am, in the front stalls, awkwardly seated upside down. This is a minimal production, bleakly modern, a two-hander. The lights are full on, and here comes Claude. It’s himself, not my mother, he intends to undress. He neatly folds his clothes across a chair. His nakedness is as unstartling as an accountant’s suit. He wanders about the bedroom, upstage, downstage, bare-skinned through the soft drizzle of his soliloquy. His aunt’s pink birthday soap that he must return to Curzon Street, a mostly forgotten dream he had, the price of diesel, it feels like Tuesday. But it’s not. Each brave new topic rises groaning to its feet, totters, then falls to the next. And my mother? On the bed, between the sheets, partly dressed, wholly attentive, with ready hums and sympathetic nods. Known only to me, under the bedclothes, a forefinger curls over her modest clitoral snood and rests a sweet half-inch inside her. This finger she gently rocks as she concedes everything and offers up her soul. I assume it’s delicious to do so. Yes, she murmurs through her sighs, she too had her doubts about the soap, yes, her dreams are also lost to her too soon, she too thinks it’s Tuesday. Nothing about diesel—a small mercy.

  His knees depress the unfaithful mattress that lately held my father. With able thumbs she hooks her panties clear. Enter Claude. Sometimes he’ll call her his mouse, which seems to please her, but no kisses, nothing touched or fondled, or murmured or promised, no licks of kindness, no playful daydreams. Only the accelerating creak of the bed, until at last my mother arrives to take her place on the Wall of Death and begins to scream. You might know this old-fashioned attraction of the funfair. As it turns and accelerates, centrifugal force pins you against the wall while the floor beneath you drops giddily away. Trudy spins faster, her face is a blur of strawberries and cream, and a green smear of angelica where her eyes once were. She screams louder, then, after her final rising-falling shout-and-shudder, I hear his abrupt, strangled grunt. The briefest pause. Exit Claude. The mattress dips again and his voice resumes, now from the bathroom—a reprise of Curzon Street or the day of the week, and some cheerful assays on the Nokia theme. One act, three minutes at most, no repeats. Often she joins him in the bathroom and, without touching, they expunge each other from their bodies with absolving hot water. Nothing tender, no fond dozing in a lovers’ tangled clasp. During this brisk ablution, minds swabbed clean by orgasm, they often turn to plotting, but in the room’s tiled echo, against running taps, their words are lost to me.

  Which is why I know so little of their plan. Only that it excites them, lowers their voices, even when they think they’re alone. Nor do I know Claude’s surname. By profession a property developer, though not as successful as most. The brief and profitable ownership of a tower block in Cardiff was one peak of his achievement. Wealthy? Inherited a seven-figure sum, now down, it seems, to his last quarter-million. He leaves our house around ten, returns after six. Here are two opposing propositions: the first, a firmer personality lurks inside a shell of blandness. To be this insipid is hardly plausible. Someone clever and dark and calculating is hiding in there. As a man he’s a piece of work, a self-constructed device, a tool for hard deception, scheming against Trudy even as he schemes beside her. The second, he’s as he appears, the cockle has no morsel, he’s as honest a schemer as she, only dimmer. For her part, she’d rather not doubt a man who hurls her over the gates of paradise in under three minutes. Whereas I keep an open mind.

  My hope of discovering more is to wait up all night to catch the
m in one more disinhibited aubade. Claude’s untypical “we can” first caused me to doubt his dullness. Five days have since passed—and nothing. I kick my mother awake but she won’t disturb her lover. Instead she clamps a podcast lecture to her ears and submits to the wonders of the Internet. She listens at random. I’ve heard it all. Maggot farming in Utah. Hiking across The Burren. Hitler’s last-chance offensive in the Ardennes. Sexual etiquette among the Yanomami. How Poggio Bracciolini rescued Lucretius from oblivion. The physics of tennis.

  I stay awake, I listen, I learn. Early this morning, less than an hour before dawn, there was heavier matter than usual. Through my mother’s bones I encountered a bad dream in the guise of a formal lecture. The state of the world. An expert in international relations, a reasonable woman with a rich deep voice, advised me that the world was not well. She considered two common states of mind: self-pity and aggression. Each one a poor choice for individuals. In combination, for groups or nations, a noxious brew that lately intoxicated the Russians in Ukraine, as it once had their friends, the Serbs in their part of the world. We were belittled, now we will prove ourselves. Now that the Russian state was the political arm of organised crime, another war in Europe no longer inconceivable. Dust down the tank divisions for Lithuania’s southern border, for the north German plain. The same potion inflames the barbaric fringes of Islam. The cup is drained, the same cry goes up: we’ve been humiliated, we’ll be avenged.

  The lecturer took a dim view of our species, of which psychopaths are a constant fraction, a human constant. Armed struggle, just or not, attracts them. They help to tip local struggles into bigger conflicts. Europe, according to her, in existential crisis, fractious and weak as varieties of self-loving nationalism sip that same tasty brew. Confusion about values, the bacillus of anti-Semitism incubating, immigrant populations languishing, angry and bored. Elsewhere, everywhere, novel inequalities of wealth, the super rich a master race apart. Ingenuity deployed by states for new forms of brilliant weaponry, by global corporations to dodge taxes, by righteous banks to stuff themselves with Christmas millions. China, too big to need friends or counsel, cynically probing its neighbours’ shores, building islands of tropical sand, planning for the war it knows must come. Muslim-majority countries plagued by religious puritanism, by sexual sickness, by smothered invention. The Middle East, fast-breeder for a possible world war. And foe-of-convenience, the United States, barely the hope of the world, guilty of torture, helpless before its sacred text conceived in an age of powdered wigs, a constitution as unchallengeable as the Koran. Its nervous population obese, fearful, tormented by inarticulate anger, contemptuous of governance, murdering sleep with every new handgun. Africa yet to learn democracy’s party trick—the peaceful transfer of power. Its children dying, thousands by the week, for want of easy things—clean water, mosquito nets, cheap drugs. Uniting and levelling all humanity, the dull old facts of altered climate, vanishing forests, creatures and polar ice. Profitable and poisonous agriculture obliterating biological beauty. Oceans turning to weak acid. Well above the horizon, approaching fast, the urinous tsunami of the burgeoning old, cancerous and demented, demanding care. And soon, with demographic transition, the reverse, populations in catastrophic decline. Free speech no longer free, liberal democracy no longer the obvious port of destiny, robots stealing jobs, liberty in close combat with security, socialism in disgrace, capitalism corrupt, destructive and in disgrace, no alternatives in sight.