Nutshell

by Ian Mcewan

  “When that week was over and we came back and set up together here in my house, the love went on, months then years. It seemed that nothing could ever get in its way. So before I go any further, I’m raising my glass to that love. May it never be denied, forgotten, distorted or rejected as illusion. To our love. It happened. It was true.”

  I hear a shuffle and murmur of reluctant accord and, closer by, I hear my mother swallow hard before she pretends to drink the toast. I think she’s taken against “my house.”

  “Now,” my father continues, lowering his voice, as though entering a funeral parlour, “that love has run its course. It never collapsed into mere routine or a hedge against old age. It died quickly, tragically, as love on a grand scale must. The curtain’s come down. It’s over, and I’m glad. Trudy’s glad. Everyone who knows us is glad and relieved. We trusted each other, now we don’t. We loved each other, now I detest her as much as she detests me. Trudy, my sweet, I can hardly stand the sight of you. There have been times when I could have strangled you. I’ve had dreams, happy dreams, in which I see my thumbs tightening against your carotid arteries. I know you feel the same about me. But that’s no cause for regret. Let’s rejoice instead. These are just the dark feelings we need to set ourselves free, to be reborn into new life and new love. Elodie and I have found that love and we are bound by it for the rest of our lives.”

  “Wait,” Elodie says. I think she fears my father’s taste for indiscretion.

  But he won’t take an interruption. “Trudy and Claude, I’m happy for you. You came together at the perfect moment. No one will deny it, you truly deserve each other.”

  This is a curse, though my father sounds impenetrably sincere. To be tied to a man as vapid but sexually vigorous as Claude is a complex fate. His brother knows it. But shush. He’s still talking.

  “There are arrangements to make. There’ll be arguments and stress. But the overall scheme is simple, and for that we’re blessed. Claude, you have your nice big place in Primrose Hill, and Trudy, you can move there. I’ll be moving some stuff back in here tomorrow. As soon as you’ve gone and the decorators have done their work, Elodie will move in with me. I suggest we don’t see each other for a year or so, and then think again. The divorce should be straightforward. The important thing to remember at all times is to be rational and civil and to remember how lucky we are to have found love again. OK? Good. No, no, don’t get up. We’ll see ourselves out. Trudy, if you’re here, I’ll see you tomorrow around ten. I won’t stay long—I’ve got to get straight up to St. Albans. And by the way, I’ve found my key.”

  There’s the sound of a chair as Elodie stands. “Wait, I mean, may I say something now?”

  My father is genial and firm. “Not remotely appropriate.”

  “But—”

  “C’mon. Time to go. Thanks for the wine.”

  A moment of throat-clearing, then their footsteps recede across the kitchen and up the stairs.

  My mother and her lover sit in silence as we listen to them go. We hear the front door close upstairs with a punctuating, final sound. A full stop. Trudy and Claude are stunned. I’m in turmoil. What was I in my father’s peroration? Dead. Head-first in a burial mound within his hated ex-wife’s gut. Not even a mention, not in an aside, not even dismissed as an irrelevance. A year “or so” must pass before my saviour sees me. He paid tribute to honest memory and he forgot me. In a rush towards his own rebirth, he discarded mine. Fathers and sons. I heard it once and won’t forget. What links them in nature? An instant of blind rut.

  Try this. He moved to Shoreditch to sample a tryst with Elodie. He vacated the Terrace so Claude could move in and give John good cause to throw Trudy out. The anxious visits, the earnest poetry, even the lost key were feints, lulling her into greater security with Claude, drawing them together.

  Claude is pouring more wine. In the circumstances it’s a comfort, how he reaches with dull precision for his most vacuous thought.

  “Fancy that.”

  Trudy doesn’t speak for half a minute. When she does, her words are slurred but her resolve is clear.

  “I want him dead. And it has to be tomorrow.”

  EIGHT

  Outside these warm, living walls an icy tale slides towards its hideous conclusion. The midsummer clouds are thick, there’s no moon, not the faintest breeze. But my mother and uncle are talking up a winter storm. The cork is drawn from one more bottle, then, too soon, another. I’m washed far downstream of drunkenness, my senses blur their words but I hear in them the form of my ruin. Shadow figures on a bloody screen are arguing in hopeless struggle with their fate. The voices rise and fall. When they don’t accuse or wrangle, they conspire. What’s said hangs in the air, like a Beijing smog.

  It will end badly, and the house feels the ruin too. In high summer, the February gale twists and breaks the icicles hanging from the gutters, scours the unpointed brickwork of the gable ends, rips the slates—those blank slates—from the pitching roofs. This chill works its fingers past the rotted putty of the unwashed panes, it backs up through the kitchen drains. I’m shivering in here. But it won’t end, the bad will be endless, until ending badly will seem a blessing. Nothing will be forgotten, nothing flushed away. Foul matter lingers in unseen bends beyond the plumber’s reach, it hangs in the wardrobes with Trudy’s winter coats. This too solid stench feeds the timid mice behind the skirting and swells them to rats. We hear their gnawing and mutinous curses, but no one is surprised. At intervals, my mother and I retire so she may squat and copiously piss and groan. Against my skull I feel her bladder shrink, and I’m relieved. Back to the table, to more scheming and long harangues. It was my uncle cursing, not the rats. That gnawing was my mother at the salted nuts. Incessantly, she eats for me.

  In here, I dream of my entitlement—security, weightless peace, no tasks, no crime or guilt. I’m thinking about what should have been mine in my confinement. Two opposing notions haunt me. I heard about them in a podcast my mother left running while talking on the phone. We were on the couch in my father’s library, windows wide open to another sultry midday. Boredom, said this Monsieur Barthes, is not far from bliss; one regards boredom from the shores of pleasure. Exactly so. The condition of the modern foetus. Just think: nothing to do but be and grow, where growing is hardly a conscious act. The joy of pure existence, the tedium of undifferentiated days. Extended bliss is boredom of the existential kind. This confinement shouldn’t be a prison. In here I’m owed the privilege and luxury of solitude. I speak as an innocent, but I conjure an orgasm prolonged into eternity—there’s boredom for you, in the realm of the sublime.

  This was my patrimony, until my mother wished my father dead. Now I live inside a story and fret about its outcome. Where’s boredom or bliss in that?

  My uncle rises from the kitchen table, lurches towards the wall to turn off the lights and reveal the dawn. If he’d been my father, he might have recited an aubade. But now there’s only a practical concern—it’s time for bed. What deliverance, that they’re too drunk for sex. Trudy stands, together we sway. If I could be upright for one minute I’d feel less sick. How I miss my spacious days of ocean-tumbling.

  With one foot on the first tread, she halts to gauge the climb ahead. It rises severely and recedes, as though to the moon. I feel her grip the banister on my account. I still love her, I’d like her to know, but if she falls backwards, I die. Now we’re going mostly up. Mostly, Claude is ahead of us. We should be roped. Grip tighter, Mother! It’s an effort and no one speaks. After many minutes, many sighs and moans, we gain the second-floor landing, and the rest, the last twelve feet, though level, is also tough.

  She sits on her side of the bed to remove a sandal, topples sideways with it in her hand, and falls asleep. Claude shakes her awake. Together they fumble in the bathroom, through the spilling drawers, in search of two grams each of paracetamol, a means to hold a hangover at bay.

  Claude notes, “Tomorrow’s a busy day.”

  He mea
ns today. My father is due at ten, now it’s almost six. Finally, we’re all in bed. My mother complains that the world, her world, spins when she closes her eyes. I thought Claude might be more stoical, made, as he might say, of sterner stuff. Not so. Within minutes he’s hurried next door to fall to his knees and embrace the lavatory bowl.

  “Lift the seat,” Trudy shouts.

  Silence, then it comes, in hard-won dribbles. But he’s loud. A long shout truncated, as though a football fan has been stabbed in the back midchant.

  By seven they’re asleep. Not me. My thoughts turn with my mother’s world. My father’s rejection of me, his possible fate, my responsibility for it, then my own fate, my inability to warn or act. And my bedfellows. Too damaged to make the attempt? Or worse, to do it badly, be caught and sent down. Hence the spectral prison that’s lately haunted me. To start life in a cell, bliss unknown, boredom a fought-for privilege. And if they succeed—then it’s the Vale of Swat. I see no scheme, no plausible route to any conceivable happiness. I wish never to be born…

  *

  I overslept. I’m woken by a shout and a violent, arrhythmic jigging. My mother on the Wall of Death. Not so. Or not that one. This is her descending the stairs too fast, her careless hand barely trailing the banister. Here’s how it could end, the loose carpet rod or curling threadbare carpet edge, the head-first downward pitch, then my private gloom lost to eternal darkness. I’ve nothing to hold on to but hope. The shout was from my uncle. He calls out again.

  “I’ve been out for the drink. We’ve got twenty minutes. Make the coffee. I’ll do the rest.”

  His dim Shoreditch plans have been ditched by my mother’s lust for speed. John Cairncross is not her fool after all. He’ll kick her out, and soon. She must act today. No time to tend her plaits. She’s given hospitality to her husband’s lover—dumped before she could dump, as they say on the afternoon agony-aunt shows. (Teenagers phone in with problems that would stump a Plato or a Kant.) Trudy’s anger is oceanic—vast and deep, it’s her medium, her selfhood. I know it in her altered blood as it washes through me, in the granular discomfort where cells are bothered and compressed, the platelets cracked and chipped. My heart is struggling with my mother’s angry blood.

  We’re safely on the ground floor, among the busy morning hum of flies that cruise the hallway’s garbage. To them the untied plastic bags rise like shining residential towers with rooftop gardens. The flies go there to graze and vomit at their ease. Their general bloated laziness invokes a society of mellow recreation, communal purpose, mutual tolerance. This somnolent, non-chordate crew is at one with the world, it loves rich life in all its putrefaction. Whereas we’re a lower form, fearful and in constant discord. We’ve got the jitters, we’re going too fast.

  Trudy’s trailing hand grips the newel post and we swing through a speedy U-turn. Ten steps and we’re at the head of the kitchen stairs. No handrail to guide us down. It fell off the wall, I heard, in a burst of dust and horsehair, before my time, if this is my time. Only irregular holes remain. The treads are bare pine, with slick and greasy knots, palimpsests of forgotten spills, downtrodden meat and fat, and molten butter sliding off the toast my father used to carry to the library without a plate. Again, she’s going at speed, and this could be it, the headlong launch. Hardly has the thought illuminated my fears when I sense a backwards-sliding foot, a forward lurch, an urge to flight, countered at once by a panicky tightening of the muscles in her lower back and from behind my shoulder I hear a wrenching sound of tendons stretching and testing their anchors on the bone.

  “My back,” she growls. “My fucking back.”

  But it’s worth her pain, for she’s steadied herself and takes the remaining steps with care. Claude, busy by the kitchen sink, pauses to make a sympathetic sound, then continues with his tasks. Time waits for no man, as he might say.

  She’s at his side. “My head,” she whispers.

  “And mine.” Then he shows her. “I think it’s his favourite. Bananas, pineapple, apple, mint, wheat germ.”

  “Tropical Dawn?”

  “Yup. And here’s the business. Enough to fell ten ox.”

  “Oxen.”

  He pours the two liquids into the blender and activates it.

  When the din has ceased she says, “Put it in the fridge. I’ll make the coffee. Hide those paper cups. Don’t touch them without your gloves.”

  We’re at the coffee machine. She’s found the filters, she’s spooning in the grains, tipping in the water. Doing well.

  “Wash some mugs,” she calls. “And set them out. Get the stuff ready for the car. John’s gloves are in the outhouse. They’ll need dusting down. And there’s a plastic bag somewhere.”

  “All right, all right.” Out of bed long before her, Claude sounds testy as she takes control. I struggle to follow their exchange.

  “My thing and the bank statement are on the table.”

  “I know.”

  “Don’t forget the receipt.”

  “I won’t.

  “Screw it up a bit.”

  “I have.”

  “With your gloves. Not his.”

  “Yes!”

  “You wore the hat in Judd Street?”

  “Of course.”

  “Put it where he’ll see it.”

  “I have.”

  But he’s at the sink, rinsing crusty cups, doing as he’s told. She’s impervious to his tone and adds, “We should tidy this place up.”

  He grunts. A hopeless notion. Good wife Trudy wants to greet her husband with a tidy kitchen.

  But surely none of this can work. Elodie knows that my father is expected here. Perhaps half a dozen friends know too. London, north to east, will point a finger across the corpse. Here’s a pretty folie à deux. Could my mother, who’s never had a job, launch herself as a murderer? A tough profession, not only in the planning and execution, but in the aftermath, when the career would properly begin. Consider, I want to say to her, even before the ethics, the inconvenience: imprisonment or guilt or both, extended hours, weekends too, and all through every night, for life. No pay, no perks, no pension but remorse. She’s making a mistake.

  But the lovers are locked in, as only lovers can be. Being busy about the kitchen keeps them steady. They clear from the table last night’s debris, sweep up or sweep aside food scraps on the floor, then down more painkillers with a slug of coffee. That’s all the breakfast I’m getting. They agree that around the kitchen sink there’s nothing to be done. My mother mutters instructions, or guidelines. Claude remains terse. Each time, he cuts her off. He may be having second thoughts.

  “Cheerful, OK? Like we thought through what he said last night and decided—”

  “Right.”

  After minutes of silence: “Don’t go offering too soon. We need—”

  “I won’t.”

  And again: “Two empty glasses to show that we’ve had some ourselves already. And the Smoothie Heaven cup—”

  “It’s done. They’re behind you.”

  On his final word we’re startled by my father’s voice from the top of the kitchen stairs. Of course, he has his key. He’s in the house.

  He calls down. “Just unloading the car. Then I’ll be with you.”

  His tone is gruff, competent. Unearthly love has made him worldly.

  Claude whispers, “What if he locks it?”

  I’m close to my mother’s heart and know its rhythms and sudden turns. And now! It accelerates at her husband’s voice, and there’s an added sound, a disturbance in the chambers, like the distant rattling of maracas, or gravel shuffled softly in a tin. From down here I’d say it’s a semilunar valve whose cusps are snapping shut too hard and sticking. Or it could be her teeth.

  But to the world my mother appears serene. She remains the liege and mistress of her voice, which is even and doesn’t stoop to whispers.

  “He’s a poet. He never locks the car. When I give you the sign, go out there with the stuff.”

  N
INE

  Dear Father,

  Before you die, I’d like a word. We haven’t much time. Far less than you think, so forgive me for coming to the point. I need to tap your memory. There was a morning in your library, a Sunday of unusual summer rain when the air for once was clean of dust. The windows were open, we heard the pattering on the leaves. You and my mother almost resembled a happy couple. There was a poem you recited then, too good for one of yours, I think you’d be the first to concede. Short, dense, bitter to the point of resignation, difficult to understand. The sort that hits you, hurts you, before you’ve followed exactly what was said. It addressed a careless, indifferent reader, a lost lover, a real person, I should think. In fourteen lines it talked of hopeless attachment, wretched preoccupation, longing unresolved and unacknowledged. It summoned a rival, mighty in talent or social rank or both, and it bowed in self-effacement. Eventually, time would have its revenge, but no one would care or even remember, unless they chanced to read these lines.