Nutshell

by Ian Mcewan

  In conclusion, she said, these disasters are the work of our twin natures. Clever and infantile. We’ve built a world too complicated and dangerous for our quarrelsome natures to manage. In such hopelessness, the general vote will be for the supernatural. It’s dusk in the second Age of Reason. We were wonderful, but now we are doomed. Twenty minutes. Click.

  Anxiously, I finger my cord. It serves for worry beads. Wait, I thought. While it lies ahead of me, what’s wrong with infantile? I’ve heard enough of such talks to have learned to summon the counterarguments. Pessimism is too easy, even delicious, the badge and plume of intellectuals everywhere. It absolves the thinking classes of solutions. We excite ourselves with dark thoughts in plays, poems, novels, movies. And now in commentaries. Why trust this account when humanity has never been so rich, so healthy, so long-lived? When fewer die in wars and childbirth than ever before—and more knowledge, more truth by way of science, was never so available to us all? When tender sympathies—for children, animals, alien religions, unknown, distant foreigners—swell daily? When hundreds of millions have been raised from wretched subsistence? When, in the West, even the middling poor recline in armchairs, charmed by music as they steer themselves down smooth highways at four times the speed of a galloping horse? When smallpox, polio, cholera, measles, high infant mortality, illiteracy, public executions and routine state torture have been banished from so many countries? Not so long ago, all these curses were everywhere. When solar panels and wind farms and nuclear energy and inventions not yet known will deliver us from the sewage of carbon dioxide, and GM crops will save us from the ravages of chemical farming and the poorest from starvation? When the worldwide migration to the cities will return vast tracts of land to wilderness, will lower birth rates, and rescue women from ignorant village patriarchs? What of the commonplace miracles that would make a manual labourer the envy of Caesar Augustus: pain-free dentistry, electric light, instant contact with people we love, with the best music the world has known, with the cuisine of a dozen cultures? We’re bloated with privileges and delights, as well as complaints, and the rest who are not will be soon. As for the Russians, the same was said of Catholic Spain. We expected their armies on our beaches. Like most things, it didn’t happen. The matter was settled by some fireships and a useful storm that drove their fleet round the top of Scotland. We’ll always be troubled by how things are—that’s how it stands with the difficult gift of consciousness.

  Just one hymn to the golden world I’m about to possess. In my confinement I’ve become a connoisseur of collective dreams. Who knows what’s true? I can hardly collect the evidence for myself. Every proposition is matched or cancelled by another. Like everyone else, I’ll take what I want, whatever suits me.

  But these reflections have been distracting me and I’ve missed the first words of the exchange I’ve stayed awake to hear. The aubade. The alarm was minutes from sounding, Claude murmured something, my mother replied, then he spoke again. I come round, I press my ear to the wall. I feel a disturbance in the mattress. The night has been warm. Claude must be sitting up, pulling off the T-shirt he wears to bed. I hear him say he’s meeting his brother this afternoon. He’s mentioned this brother before. I should have paid more attention. But the context has generally bored me—money, accounts, taxes, debts.

  Claude says, “All his hopes are on this poet he’s signing up.”

  Poet? Very few people in the world sign up a poet. I only know of one. His brother?

  My mother says, “Ah yes, this woman. Forgotten her name. Writes about owls.”

  “Owls! A hot topic is owls! But I should see him tonight.”

  She says slowly, “I don’t think you should. Not now.”

  “Or he’ll come round here again. I don’t want him bothering you. But.”

  My mother says, “Nor do I. But this has to be done my way. Slowly.”

  There’s a silence. Claude takes his phone from the bedside table and pre-emptively turns off the alarm.

  Finally he says, “If I lend my brother money it’ll be good cover.”

  “But not too much. We won’t exactly be getting it back.”

  They laugh. Then Claude and his whistling make for the bathroom, my mother turns on her side and goes back to sleep, and I’m left in the dark to confront the outrageous fact and consider my stupidity.

  FOUR

  When I hear the friendly drone of passing cars and a slight breeze stirs what I believe are horse chestnut leaves, when a portable radio below me tinnily rasps and a penumbral coral glow, a prolonged tropical dusk, dully illuminates my inland sea and its trillion drifting fragments, then I know that my mother is sunbathing on the balcony outside my father’s library. I know too that the ornate cast-iron railing of oak leaf and acorn design is held together by historical layers of black paint and should not be leaned on. The cantilevered shelf of crumbling concrete where my mother sits has been declared unsafe, even by builders with no interest in the repairs. The balcony’s narrow width permits a deck chair to be placed obliquely, almost parallel to the house. Trudy is barefoot, in bikini top, and brief denim shorts that barely allow for me. Pink-framed, heart-shaped sunglasses and a straw hat top this confection. I know this because my uncle—my uncle!—asked her on the phone to tell him what she was wearing. Flirtatiously, she obliged.

  A few minutes ago the radio told us it was four o’clock. We’re sharing a glass, perhaps a bottle, of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc. Not my first choice, and for the same grape and a less grassy taste, I would have gone for a Sancerre, preferably from Chavignol. A degree of flinty mineral definition would have mitigated the blunt assault of direct sunlight and oven blast of heat reflected off the cracked facade of our house.

  But we’re in New Zealand, it’s in us, and I’m happier than I’ve been for two days. Trudy cools our wine with plastic cubes of frozen ethanol. I’ve nothing against that. I’m offered my first intimation of colour and shape, for my mother’s midriff is angled towards the sun, so I can make out, as in the reddish blur of a photographic darkroom, my hands in front of my face and the cord amply tangled around belly and knees. I see that my fingernails need clipping, though I’m not expected for two weeks. I’d like to think that her purpose out here is to generate vitamin D for my bone growth, that she has turned down the radio the better to contemplate my existence, that the hand caressing the place where she believes my head to be is an expression of tenderness. But she may be working on her tan and too hot to listen to the radio drama about the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, and is merely soothing with her fingertips the bloated discomfort of late pregnancy. In short, I am uncertain of her love.

  Wine after three glasses solves nothing and the pain of recent discovery remains. Still, I’m feeling a friendly touch of disassociation: I’m already some useful steps removed and see myself revealed some fifteen feet below me, like a fallen climber spreadeagled and supine on a rock. I can begin to comprehend my situation, I can think as well as feel. An unassuming New World white can do this much. So. My mother has preferred my father’s brother, cheated her husband, ruined her son. My uncle has stolen his brother’s wife, deceived his nephew’s father, grossly insulted his sister-in-law’s son. My father by nature is defenceless, as I am by circumstance. My uncle—a quarter of my genome, of my father’s a half, but no more like my father than I to Virgil or Montaigne. What despicable part of myself is Claude and how will I know? I could be my own brother and deceive myself as he deceived his. When I’m born and allowed at last to be alone, there’s a quarter I’ll want to take a kitchen knife to. But the one who holds the knife will also be my uncle, quartering in my genome. Then we’ll see how the knife won’t move. And this perception too is somewhat his. And this.

  My affair with Trudy isn’t going well. I thought I could take her love for granted. But I’ve heard biologists debating at dawn. Pregnant mothers must fight the tenants of their wombs. Nature, a mother herself, ordains a struggle for resources that may be needed to nurture my future sibl
ing rivals. My health derives from Trudy, but she must preserve herself against me. So why would she worry about my feelings? If it’s in her interests and those of some unconceived squit that I should be undernourished, why trouble herself if a tryst with my uncle upsets me? The biologists also suggest that my father’s wisest move is to trick another man into raising his child while he—my father!—distributes his likeness among other women. So bleak, so loveless. We’re alone then, all of us, even me, each treading a deserted highway, toting in a bundle on a shouldered stick the schemes, the flow charts, for unconscious advancement.

  Too much to bear, too grim to be true. Why would the world configure itself so harshly? Among much else, people are sociable and kind. Ripeness isn’t everything. My mother is more than my landlord. My father longs not for the widest dissemination of his selfhood, but for his wife and, surely, his only son. I don’t believe the sages of the life sciences. He must love me, wants to move back in, will care for me—given the chance. And she’s never caused me to miss a meal, and until this afternoon has decently refused a third glass on my account. It’s not her love that’s failing. It’s mine. It’s my resentment that falls between us. I refuse to say I hate her. But to abandon a poet, any poet, for Claude!

  That’s hard, and what’s also hard is that the poet is so soft. John Cairncross, ousted from his family home, his grandfather’s purchase, for a philosophy of “personal growth”—a phrase as paradoxical as “easy listening.” To be apart so they can be together, turn their backs so they might embrace, stop loving so they can fall in love. He bought it. What a sap! Between his weakness and her deceit was the fetid crack that spontaneously generated a maggot-uncle. And I squat here sealed in my private life, in a lingering, sultry dusk, impatiently dreaming.

  What I could do if instead I was at my peak. Let’s say twenty-eight years from now. Jeans faded and tight, abs tight and ridged, moving sleekly like a panther, temporarily immortal. Fetching my ancient father in a taxi from Shoreditch to install him, deaf to Trudy’s matronly protests, in his library, in his bed. Catching old Uncle Maggot by the neck to toss him into the leafy gutter of Hamilton Terrace. Hushing my mother with a careless kiss to her nape.

  But here’s life’s most limiting truth—it’s always now, always here, never then and there. And now we are frying in a London heatwave, here on an unsound balcony. I listen to her refill the glass, the plop of plastic cubes, her soft sigh, more anxious than content. A fourth glass then. She must think I’m old enough to take it. And I am. We’re getting drunk because even now her lover is conferring with his brother in the windowless office of the Cairncross Press.

  To divert myself I send my thoughts ahead to spy on them. Purely an exercise of the imagination. Nothing here is real.

  The soft loan is laid out on the crowded desk.

  “John, she truly loves you but she’s asked me as trusted family member to ask you to stay away for just a little while. Best hope for your marriage. Erm. It’ll come out right in the end. I should’ve guessed your rent was in arrears. But. Please say yes, take the cash, let her have her space.”

  It sits between them on the desk, five thousand pounds in filthy fifties, five odorous heaps of red scrip. To each side are poetry books and typescripts loosely piled, sharpened pencils, and two glass ashtrays, well filled, a bottle of Scotch, a gentle Tomintoul with an inch remaining, a crystal tumbler, a dead fly on its back inside, several aspirins lying on an unused tissue. Squalid marks of honest toil.

  My guess is this. My father has never understood his younger brother. Never thought it worth the sweat. And John doesn’t like a confrontation. His gaze won’t meet the money on the desk. It wouldn’t occur to him to explain that returning home to be with wife and child is all he wants.

  Instead he says, “This came in yesterday. Would you like to hear a poem about an owl?”

  Just the kind of irrelevant whimsy that Claude hated as a child. He shakes his head, no please spare me, but it’s too late.

  My father has a single sheet of typescript in his scaly hand.

  “Blood-wise fatal bellman,” he starts. He likes a trochaic trimeter.

  “You don’t want it then,” his brother sulkily interrupts. “Fine by me.” And with banker’s wormy fingers collates the piles, soft-drops the edges against the surface of the desk, from nowhere takes a rubber band and in two seconds he’s returned the cash to an inside pocket of his silver-buttoned blazer, and stands, looking hot and sick.

  My father, unrushed, reads the second line. “We quaintly thrill to a shrieking cruelty.” Then he stops and mildly says, “Do you have to go?”

  No close observer could decode the sibling shorthand, the time-bound sadness of this exchange. The rates, the rules, were set too long ago to be revised. Claude’s relative wealth must go unrecognised. He remains the younger brother, inadequate, strangled, furious. My father is puzzled by his closest living relative, but only faintly. He won’t move off his ground and from it sounds mocking. But he isn’t. It’s worse than mockery: he doesn’t care, and hardly knows he doesn’t care. About rent, or money or Claude’s offer. But because he’s a considerate man he stands politely to see his visitor out, and when that’s done and he’s sitting at his desk again, the cash that was there is forgotten, and so is Claude. The pencil’s back in my father’s hand, a cigarette’s in the other. He’ll go on with the only work that matters, proofing poems for the printers, and won’t look up until it’s six and time for a whisky and water. First he’ll tip the fly from the tumbler.

  As though from a long journey, I return to the womb. Nothing has changed on the balcony, except I find myself a tad drunker. As if to welcome me back, Trudy drains the bottle into her glass. The cubes have lost their cool, the wine is almost warm, but she’s right, better to finish it now. It won’t keep. The breeze still stirs the chestnut trees, the afternoon traffic is picking up. As the sun descends, it feels warmer. But I don’t mind the heat. As the last of the Sauvignon Blanc arrives I set myself to reconsider. I’ve been away, I escaped over the wire without ladder or rope, free as a bird, leaving behind my now and my here. My limiting truth was untrue: I can be gone any time I like, throw Claude out the house, visit my father in his office, be a loving, invisible snooper. Are movies as good as this? I’ll find out. One could make a living devising such excursions. But the actual, the circumscribed real, is absorbing too and I’m impatient for Claude to return and tell us what really happened. My version is certain to be wrong.

  My mother is also anxious to know. If she wasn’t drinking for two, if I wasn’t sharing the load, she’d be on the floor. After twenty minutes we go indoors and make our way across the library, then upstairs towards the bedroom. One should be careful, going barefoot through this house. My mother yelps as something crunches underfoot, we pitch and yaw as she lunges at the banister. Then we’re steady while she pauses to inspect her sole. Her curse is muttered calmly, so there must be blood, but not too much. She hobbles through the bedroom, leaving a trail perhaps on what I know to be a filthy off-white carpet strewn with discarded clothes and shoes and suitcases half unpacked from journeys that pre-date my time.

  We reach the echoey bathroom, a large and filthy shambles, from what I’ve heard. She pulls open a drawer, impatiently stirs its rattling, rustling contents, tries another, and in the third locates the plaster for her cut. She sits on the edge of the bath and rests her poor foot across her knee. Little grunts and gasps of exasperation suggest her cut’s in a place that’s hard to reach. If only I could kneel before her and help. Even though she’s young and slim, it’s not easy leaning forwards with my impeding bulk. Better then, she decides, more stable, to clear a space and sit down on the hard tiled floor. But that’s not easy either. It’s all my fault.

  This is where we are and what we’re doing when we hear Claude’s voice, a shout from down the stairs.

  “Trudy! Oh my God. Trudy!”