by Ian Mcewan
The person the poem addressed I think of as the world I’m about to meet. Already, I love it too hard. I don’t know what it will make of me, whether it will care for me or even notice me. From here it seems unkind, careless of life, of lives. The news is brutal, unreal, a nightmare we can’t wake from. I listen with my mother, rapt and glum. Enslaved teenage girls, prayed over then raped. Barrels used as bombs over cities, children used as bombs in marketplaces. We heard from Austria about a locked roadside truck and seventy-one migrants left to panic, suffocate and rot. Only the brave would send their imaginations inside the final moments. These are new times. Perhaps they’re ancient. But also, that poem makes me think of you and your speech last night and how you won’t or can’t return my love. From where I am, you and my mother and the world are all one. Hyperbole, I know. The world is also full of wonders, which is why I’m foolishly in love with it. And I love and admire you both. What I’m saying is, I’m fearful of rejection.
So say it again to me, this poem, with your dying breath and I’ll say it back to you. Let it be the last thing you ever hear. Then you’ll know what I mean. Or take the kinder course, live rather than die, accept your son, hold me in your arms, claim me for your own. In return I’ll give you some advice. Don’t come down the stairs. Call out a carefree goodbye, get in your car and go. Or if you must come down, decline the fruit drink, stay only long enough to say your farewells. I’ll explain later. Until then, I remain your obedient son…
*
We’re sitting at the kitchen table, attending in silence to the intermittent thumps of my father’s footfalls above as he brings in boxes of books and leaves them in the sitting room. Murderers before the deed find small talk a burden. Dry mouth, thready pulse, whirling thoughts. Even Claude is stumped. He and Trudy drink more black coffee. At each mouthful they put their cups down without a sound. They’re not using saucers. There’s a clock I haven’t noticed before, ticking in thoughtful iambs. Along the street, a delivery van’s pop music approaches and recedes with a faint Doppler effect, the cheerless band lifting and dipping a microtone but staying in tune with itself. There’s a message in there for me, just out of reach. The painkillers are coming on, but the gain is mere clarity where numbness would suit me better. They’ve been through it twice and everything is in order. The cups, the potion, the “thing,” something from the bank, the hat and gloves and receipt, the plastic bag. I’m baffled. I should have listened last night. I won’t know if the plan is going well or about to unravel.
“I could go up and help him,” Claude says at last. “You know, many hands make—”
“OK, OK. Wait.” My mother can’t bear to hear the rest. She and I have much in common.
We hear the front door close, and seconds later those same shoes—old-style leather soles—making the sound on the stairs they made last night when he came down with his lover and settled his fate. He whistles tunelessly as he comes, more Schoenberg than Schubert, a projection of ease rather than the thing itself. Nervous then, despite the lordly speech. No easy matter, to evict your brother and the woman you hate who bears your child from the house you love. He’s nearer now. Again, my ear is stuck to the gluey wall. There’s no inflection or pause or swallowed word I’d care to miss.
My informal family dispenses with greetings.
“I was hoping to see your suitcase by the door.” He says it humorously and, as usual, ignores his brother.
“Not a chance,” my mother smoothly says. “Sit down and have a coffee.”
He sits. A pouring sound, a teaspoon clinks.
Then my father. “A contractor’s coming to remove the appalling mess that’s in the hall.”
“It’s not a mess. It’s a statement.”
“Of what?”
“Protest.”
“Oh yes?”
“At your neglect.”
“Hah!”
“Of me. And our baby.”
This could be in the noble cause of realism, of the plausible. An oily welcome might raise his guard. And recalling him to his paternal duty—brava!
“They’ll be here at twelve. Pest control are coming too. They’ll be fumigating the place.”
“Not while we’re here they won’t.”
“That’s up to you. They start at midday.”
“They’ll have to wait a month or two.”
“I’ve paid them double to ignore you. And they have a key.”
“Oh,” says Trudy, with an appearance of true regret. “I’m sorry you’ve wasted so much money. A poet’s money at that.”
Claude leaps in, too soon for Trudy. “I’ve made this delicious—”
“Dearest, everyone needs more coffee.”
The man who obliterates my mother between the sheets obeys like a dog. Sex, I begin to understand, is its own mountain kingdom, secret and intact. In the valley below we know only rumours.
As Claude stoops over the machine on the far side of the room, my mother says pleasantly to her husband, “While we’re on it, I hear your brother was very kind to you. Five thousand pounds! Lucky boy. Did you thank him?”
“He’ll get it back, if that’s what you mean.”
“Like the last lot.”
“He’ll get that too.”
“I hate to think of you spending it all on fumigators.”
My father laughs in genuine delight. “Trudy! I can almost remember why I loved you. By the way, you’re looking beautiful.”
“A little unkempt,” she says. “But thank you.” Theatrically, she lowers her voice, as though to exclude Claude. “After you left we partied. All night long.”
“Celebrating your eviction.”
“You could say that.”
We lean forward, she and I, me feet first, and my impression is that she’s put her hand on his. He’s closer now to the sweet disorder of her braids, the wide green look, the pink-perfect skin perfumed with the scent he bought her long ago in the Dubrovnik duty-free. How she thinks ahead.
“We had a glass or two and we talked. We decided. You’re right. Time to go our separate ways. Claude’s place is nice and St. John’s Wood is a dump compared to Primrose Hill. And I’m so happy about your new friend. Threnody.”
“Elodie. She’s lovely. We had a terrible fight when we got in last night.”
“But you looked so happy together.” I note the lift in my mother’s tone.
“She’s decided that I’m still in love with you.”
This too has an effect on Trudy. “But you said it yourself. We hate each other.”
“Quite. She thinks I protest too much.”
“John! Should I phone her? Tell her how much I loathe you?”
His laugh sounds uncertain. “Now there’s the path to perdition!”
I’m recalled to my mission: the sacred, imagined duty of the child of separated parents is to unite them. Perdition. A poet’s word. Lost and damned. I’m a fool to let my hopes rise a point or two, like a futures market after a rout and before the next. My parents are merely playing, tickling each other’s parts. Elodie is mistaken. What stands between the married pair is no more than protective irony.
Here’s Claude bearing a tray, something heavy or sulky in his offer.
“More coffee?”
“God, no,” my father says in the simple, dismissive tone he reserves for his brother.
“We’ve also got some nice—”
“Darling, I’ll have another cup. A big one. Your bro,” my mother says to my uncle, “is in the doghouse with Threnody.”
“A threnody,” my father defines for her with exaggerated care, “is a song for the dead.”
“Like ‘Candle in the Wind,’ ” says Claude, coming to life.
“For God’s sake.”
“Anyway,” Trudy says, retreating some steps back through their exchange. “This is the marital home. I’ll move out when I’m ready and it won’t be this week.”
“Come on. You know the fumigator was just a tease. But you can’t deny it.
The place is a shithole.”
“Press me too hard, John, and I might decide to stay. See you in court.”
“Point taken. But you won’t mind if we remove the crap in the hall.”
“I do mind a bit.” Then, after a moment’s contemplation, she nods her assent.
I hear Claude pick up the plastic bag. His cheeriness wouldn’t convince the dimmest child. “If you’ll excuse me. Stuff to do. No rest for the wicked!”
TEN
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.”