by Ian Mcewan
“It’s no bad thing,” says Claude, “that he’s keen to move back here. Put up a show of resistance, then let him come.”
“Oh yes,” she says, cold and satirical. “And make him a welcome smoothie.”
“I didn’t say that. But.”
But I think he almost did.
They pause for thought. My mother reaches for her wine. Her epiglottis stickily rises and falls as she drinks, and the fluid sluices down through her natural alleys, passing—as so much does—near the soles of my feet, curving inwards, heading my way. How can I dislike her?
She sets down her glass and says, “We can’t have him dying here.”
She speaks so easily of his death.
“You’re right. Shoreditch is better. You could visit him.”
“And take round a bottle of vintage antifreeze for old times’ sake!”
“You take a picnic. Smoked salmon, coleslaw, chocolate fingers. And…the business.”
“Haaargh!” Hard to render the sound of my mother’s explosive scepticism. “I dump him, throw him out of his house, take a lover. Then bring him a picnic!”
Even I appreciate my uncle’s umbrage at “take a lover”—as in, one of nameless many, of many yet to come. And it’s the “take,” it’s the “a.” Poor fellow. He’s only trying to help. He’s sitting across from a beautiful young woman with golden braids, in bikini top and cut-offs in a sweltering kitchen, and she’s a swollen, gorgeous fruit, a prize he can’t bear to lose.
“No,” he says with great care. The affront to his self-regard has pitched his voice higher. “It’s a reconciliation. You’re making amends. Asking him back. Getting together. Peace offering sort of thing, moment to celebrate, spread out the tablecloth. Get happy!”
Her silence is his reward. She’s thinking. As am I. Same old question. Just how stupid is Claude really?
Encouraged, he adds, “Fruit salad’s an option.”
There’s poetry in his blandness, a form of nihilism enlivening the commonplace. Or, conversely, the ordinary disarming the vilest notion. Only he could top this, and he does after a thoughtful five seconds.
“Ice cream being out of the question.”
Plain sense. Worth saying. Who would or could make ice cream out of antifreeze?
Trudy sighs. She says in a whisper, “You know, Claude, I loved him once.”
Is he seeing her as I imagine her? The green gaze is glazing over and, yet again, an early tear is smoothly traversing her cheekbone. Her skin is damply pink, fine hairs have sprung free of her braids and are backlit into brilliant filaments by the ceiling lights.
“We were too young when we met. I mean, we met too soon. On an athletic track. He was throwing the javelin for his club and broke some local record. It made my knees go weak to watch him, the way he ran with that spear. Like a Greek god. A week later he took me to Dubrovnik. We didn’t even have a balcony. They say it’s a beautiful city.”
I hear the uneasy creak of a kitchen chair. Claude sees the room-service trays piled outside the door, the cloying bedroom’s disordered sheets, the nineteen-year-old near-naked at a painted plywood dressing table, her perfect back, a wash-thinned hotel towel across her lap—a parting nod at decency. John Cairncross is jealously excluded, primly out of shot, but huge, and naked too.
Careless of her lover’s silence, Trudy hurries on a rising note, before her tightening throat can silence her. “Trying for a baby all those years. Then just as, just as…”
Just as! Worthless adverbial trinket! By the time she tired of my father and his poetry, I was too well lodged to be unhoused. She cries now for John as she did for Hector the cat. Perhaps my mother’s nature won’t stretch to a second killing.
“Erm,” Claude says at last, offering his crumb. “Spilt milk and all.”
Milk, repellent to the blood-fed unborn, especially after wine, but my future all the same.
He waits patiently to present his idea of a picnic. It can’t help, to hear his rival wept for. Or perhaps it concentrates the mind. He drums his fingers lightly on the table, one of the things he does. When standing he rattles his house keys in his trouser pocket, or unproductively clears his throat. These empty gestures, devoid of self-awareness, are sinister. There’s a whiff of sulphur about Claude. But for the moment we’re as one, for I’m waiting too, troubled by a sickly fascination to know his scheme, as one might the ending of a play. He can hardly expound while she’s weeping.
A minute later she blows her nose and says in a croaky voice, “Anyway, I hate him now.”
“He made you very unhappy.”
She nods and blows her nose again. Now we listen while he presents his verbal brochure. His delivery is that of the doorstep evangelist helping her towards a better life. Essential, he tells us, that my mother and I make at least one visit to Shoreditch before the last, fatal call. Hopeless to conceal from forensics that she was ever there. Helpful to establish that she and John were on terms again.
This, he says, must look like suicide, like Cairncross made a cocktail for himself to improve the poison’s taste. Therefore, on her final visit she’ll leave behind the original empty bottles of glycol and shop-bought smoothie. These vessels must show no trace of her fingerprints. She’ll need to wax her fingertips. He has just the stuff. Bloody good too. Before she leaves John’s flat, she’ll put the picnic remains inside the fridge. Any containers or wrapping must also be free of her prints. It should seem as though he ate alone. As beneficiary of his will, she’ll be investigated, a conspiracy suspected. So all traces of Claude, in bedroom and bathroom especially, must be eradicated, cleaned to extinction, every last hair and flake of skin. And, I sense her thinking, every no-longer thrashing tail, every stilled head of every last sperm. That may take some time.
Claude continues. No concealing the phone calls she has made to him. The phone company will have a record.
“But remember. I’m just a friend.”
It costs him to say these last words, especially when my mother repeats them as in a catechism. Words, as I’m beginning to appreciate, can make things true.
“You’re just my friend.”
“Yes. Called round from time to time. For a chat. Brother-in-law. Helping you out. Nothing more.”
His account has been neutrally rendered, as though he daily murders brothers, husbands for a living, an honest high-street butcher by trade whose bloody apron mixes in the family wash with the sheets and towels.
Trudy starts to say, “But listen—” when Claude cuts her off with a sudden remembered thought.
“Did you see? A house in our street, same side, same size, same condition? On the market for eight million!”
My mother absorbs this in silence. It’s the “our” she’s taking in.
There it is. We’ve made another million by not killing my father sooner. How true it is: we make our own luck. But. (As Claude would say.) I don’t know much yet about murder. Still, his scheme is more baker than butcher. Half-baked. The absence of prints on the glycol bottle will be suspicious. When my father starts to feel ill, what stops him calling the emergency services? They’ll pump his stomach. He’ll be fine. Then what?
“I don’t care about house prices,” Trudy says. “That’s for later. The bigger question is this. Where’s your risk, what’s your exposure here when you’re wanting a share of the money? If something goes wrong and I go down, where will you be once I’ve scrubbed you out of my bedroom?”
I’m surprised by her bluntness. And then I experience not quite joy, but its expectation, a cool uncoiling in my gut. A falling out among villains, the already useless plot ruined, my father saved.
“Trudy, I’ll be with you at every step.”
“You’ll be safe at home. Alibis in place. Perfect deniability.”
She’s been thinking about this. Thinking without my knowing. She’s a tigress.
Claude says. “The thing is—”
“What I want,” my mother says with a vehemence that hardens the wall
s around me, “is you tied into this, and I mean totally. If I fail, you fail. If I—”
The doorbell rings once, twice, three times, and we freeze. No one, in my experience, has ever come to the front door so late. Claude’s plan is so hopeless it’s failed already, for here are the police. No one else rings a bell with such dogged insistence. The kitchen was bugged long ago, they’ve heard it all. Trudy will have her way—we’ll all go down together. Babies Behind Bars was a too-long radio documentary I listened to one afternoon. Convicted murderers in the States, nursing mothers, were allowed to raise their infants in their cells. This was presented as an enlightened development. But I remember thinking, These babies have done nothing wrong. Set them free! Ah well. Only in America.
“I’ll go.”
He gets up and crosses the room to the video entryphone on the wall by the kitchen door. He peers at the screen.
“It’s your husband,” he says dully.
“Jesus.” My mother pauses to think. “No use pretending I’m not here. You better hide somewhere. In the laundry room. He never—”
“There’s someone with him. A woman. A young woman. Rather pretty, I’d say.”
Another silence. The bell rings again. Longer.
My mother’s voice is even, though strained. “In that case, go and let them in. But Claude, darling. Kindly put that glycol bottle away.”
SEVEN
Certain artists in print or paint flourish, like babies-to-be, in confined spaces. Their narrow subjects may confound or disappoint some. Courtship among the eighteenth-century gentry, life beneath the sail, talking rabbits, sculpted hares, fat people in oils, dog portraits, horse portraits, portraits of aristocrats, reclining nudes, Nativities by the million, and Crucifixions, Assumptions, bowls of fruit, flowers in vases. And Dutch bread and cheese with or without a knife on the side. Some give themselves in prose merely to the self. In science too, one dedicates his life to an Albanian snail, another to a virus. Darwin gave eight years to barnacles. And in wise later life, to earthworms. The Higgs boson, a tiny thing, perhaps not even a thing, was the lifetime’s pursuit of thousands. To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavour, is just a speck in the universe of possible things. And even this universe may be a speck in a multitude of actual and possible universes.
So why not be an owl poet?
I know them by their footfalls. First down the open stairs to the kitchen comes Claude, then my father, followed by his newly signed-up friend, in high heels, boots perhaps, not ideal for stalking through woodland habitats. By nocturnal association I dress her in tight-fitting black leather jacket and jeans, let her be young, pale, pretty, her own woman. My placenta, like branching radio antennae, finely attuned, is receiving signals that my mother instantly detests her. Unreasonable thoughts are disrupting Trudy’s pulse, a new and ominous drumbeat rising as though from a distant jungle village speaks of possession, anger, jealousy. There could be trouble ahead.
I feel obliged for my father’s sake to defend our visitor: her subject is not so limited, owls being larger than bosons or barnacles, with two hundred species and wide folklorique resonance. Mostly of ill-omen. Unlike Trudy, with her visceral certainties, I quiver with doubts. Either my father, being neither sap nor saint, has come to present his lover, put my mother in her place (which is in his past) and show indifference to his brother’s infamy. Or he’s even more the sap, too much the saint, dropping in chastely with one of his authors as a form of social protection, in hopes of being in Trudy’s presence for as long as she’ll tolerate him. Or something beyond both, too opaque to determine. Simpler, for now at least, to follow my mother’s lead and assume that this friend is my father’s mistress.
No child, still less a foetus, has ever mastered the art of small talk, or would ever want to. It’s an adult device, a covenant with boredom and deceit. In this case mostly the latter. After a tentative scrape of chairs, the offer of wine, the pull of a cork, a comment from Claude about the heat draws my father’s neutral hum of assent. A fitful exchange between the brothers projects the lie that our visitors happened to be passing. Trudy remains silent, even when the poet is introduced as Elodie. No one comments on the elegant social geometry of a married couple and their lovers around a table, raising a glass, a tableau vivant of brittle modern life.
My father appears unfazed to find his brother in his kitchen, opening the wine, playing the host. So John Cairncross was never the dupe, the unknowing cuckold. My underestimated father blandly sips and asks Trudy how she’s feeling. Not too tired, he hopes. Which may or may not be a gentle dig, a sexual allusion. That plaintive tone of his has vanished. Distance or irony has replaced it. Only satisfied desire could have freed him. Trudy and Claude must wonder why their murderee is here, what he wants, but it wouldn’t be right to ask.
Instead, Claude asks Elodie if she lives nearby. No, she doesn’t. She lives in Devon, in a studio, on a farm, near a river, by which she might be letting Trudy know that here in London she’ll be overnighting between John’s Shoreditch sheets. She’s staking a claim. I like the sound of her voice, the human approximation, I would say, of the oboe, slightly cracked, with a quack on the vowels. And towards the end of her phrases, she speaks through a gargling, growling sound that American linguists have dubbed “vocal fry.” Spreading through the Western world, much discussed on the radio, of unknown aetiology, signifying, it’s thought, sophistication, found mostly in young, educated women. A pleasing puzzle. With such a voice she might hold her own against my mother.
Nothing in my father’s manner suggests that only this afternoon his brother fronted him five thousand pounds in cash. No gratitude, same old fraternal contempt. That must stir Claude’s ancient hatred. And in me, something more hypothetical, a potential grudge. Even as I cast my father as a lovelorn fool, I always assumed that if matters became intolerable with Claude, and if I failed to unite my parents, I might live with my father, at least for a while. Until I got on my feet. But I don’t think this poet would take me on—tight black jeans and leather jacket is not maternity wear. That’s part of her allure. In my narrow view, my father would be better single. Pale beauty and an assured duck’s voice are not my allies. But there may be nothing between them, and I like her.
Claude has just said, “A studio? On a farm? How marvellous.” Elodie is describing in her urban growl an A-frame cabin on the banks of a dark and rushing river that foams round granite boulders, a dodgy footbridge to the other side, a copse of beeches and birch, a bright clearing spangled with anemones and celandines, bluebells and spurge.
“Perfect for a nature poet,” Claude says.
So true and dull is this that Elodie falters. He presses in. “How far is it all from London?”
By “all” he refers to the pointless river and rocks and trees and flowers. Deflated, she can barely fry her words. “About two hundred miles.”
She’s guessed that he’ll ask her about the nearest railway station and how long the journey takes, information he’ll soon forget. But he asks, she answers, and we three listen, not stupefied or even mildly bored. Each of us, from each different point of view, is gripped by what’s not being said. The lovers, if Elodie is one, the two parties external to the marriage, are the dual charge that will blast this household apart. And blow me upwards, hellwards, to my thirteenth floor.
In a gentle tone of rescue, John Cairncross mentions that he likes the wine, a prompt to Claude to refill the glasses. While he obliges there settles over us a silence. I conjure a taut piano wire waiting for its sudden felt hammer. Trudy is about to speak. I know from the syncopated trip of her heartbeat, just before her first word.
“These owls. Are they real or do they, like, stand for something?”
“Oh no,” Elodie says in a rush. “They’re real. I write from life. But the reader, you know, imports the symbols, the associations. I can’t keep them out. That’s how poetry works.”<
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“I always think of owls,” says Claude, “as wise.”
The poet pauses, tasting the air for sarcasm. She’s getting his measure and says evenly, “There you are then. Nothing I can do about that.”
“Owls are vicious,” Trudy says.
Elodie: “Like robins are. Like nature is.”
Trudy: “Inedible, apparently.”
Elodie: “And the broody owl is poisonous.”
Trudy: “Yes, the broody one can kill you.”
Elodie: “I don’t think so. She just makes you sick.”
Trudy: “I mean, if she gets her claws into your face.”
Elodie: “Never happens. She’s too shy.”
Trudy: “Not when provoked.”
The exchange is relaxed, the tone inconsequential. Small talk or a trade in threat and insult—I lack the social experience to know. If I’m drunk then Trudy must be too, but there’s nothing in her manner to suggest it. Loathing for Elodie, now framed as a rival, may be an elixir of sobriety.
John Cairncross seems content to pass his wife on to Claude Cairncross. This puts the steel in my mother, who believes the discarding and passing on is hers to decide. She may deny my father Elodie. She may deny him life itself. But I may be wrong. My father reciting in the library, appearing to prize every second in my mother’s presence, allowing her to shove him into the street. (Just go!) I can’t trust my judgement. Nothing fits.
But no time to think now. He’s on his feet, looming over us, wine in hand, swaying barely at all, ready to make a speech. Quiet, everyone.
“Trudy, Claude, Elodie, I might be brief, I might not. Who cares? I want to say this. When love dies and a marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It’s the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation. So, against that headwind of forgetfulness I want to place my little candle of truth and see how far it throws its light. Almost ten years ago, on the Dalmatian coast, in a cheap hotel without sight of the Adriatic, in a room an eighth the size of this, in a bed barely three feet across, Trudy and I tumbled into love, into ecstasy and trust, joy and peace without horizon, without time, beyond words. We turned our backs on the world to invent and build our own. We thrilled each other with pretended violence, and we cosseted and babied each other too, gave each other nicknames, had a private language. We were beyond embarrassment. We gave and received and permitted everything. We were heroic. We believed we stood on a summit no one else, not in life, not in all poetry, had ever climbed. Our love was so fine and grand, it seemed to us a universal principle. It was a system of ethics, a means of relating to others that was so fundamental that the world had overlooked it somehow. When we lay on the narrow bed face to face, looked deep into each other’s eyes and talked, we brought our selves into being. She took my hands and kissed them and for the first time in my life I wasn’t ashamed of them. Our families, which we described to each other in detail, at last made sense to us. We loved them urgently, despite all the difficulties of the past. Same with our best, most important friends. We could redeem everyone we knew. Our love was for the good of the world. Trudy and I had never talked or listened with such attention. Our lovemaking was an extension of our talking, our talking of our lovemaking.