by Ian Mcewan
Trudy lifts the glass to her lips. The rise and fall of her epiglottis and her snaky peristalsis briefly deafen me. In all the time I’ve known her, I’ve never heard my mother make a speech. Not her way. But curiously evocative. Of what? A nervous schoolgirl, the new head girl making an impression with defiant tremor, emphatic platitudes, before headmaster, staff and the whole school.
A toast to love and therefore death, to Eros and Thanatos. It appears to be a given of intellectual life, that when two notions are sufficiently far apart or opposed, they are said to be profoundly linked. Since death is opposed to everything in life, various couplings are proposed. Art and death. Nature and death. Worryingly, birth and death. And joyously iterated, love and death. On this last and from where I am, no two notions could be more mutually irrelevant. The dead love no one, nothing. As soon as I’m out and about I might try my hand at a monograph. The world cries out for fresh-faced empiricists.
When my father speaks, he sounds closer. He’s coming back to the table.
“Well,” he says, most genially, “that’s the spirit.”
I swear the deathly, loving cup is in his hand.
Again, with both heels I kick and kick against his fate.
“Oh, oh, little mole,” my mother calls out in a sweet, maternal voice. “He’s waking up.”
“You failed to mention my brother,” John Cairncross says. It’s in his manly poet’s nature to amplify another’s toast. “To our future loves, Claude and Elodie.”
“To us all then,” says Claude.
A silence. My mother’s glass is already empty.
Then comes my father’s drawn-out sigh of satisfaction. Exaggerated to a degree, merely out of politeness. “More sugary than usual. But not bad at all.”
The Styrofoam cup he sets upon the table makes a hollow sound.
It comes back to me, as bright as a cartoon light bulb. A programme on pet care laid out the dangers while Trudy was brushing her teeth one rainy morning after breakfast: unlucky the dog that licks the sweet green liquid off a garage floor. Dead within hours. Just as Claude told it. Chemistry without mercy, purpose or regrets. My mother’s electric toothbrush drowned out the rest. We’re bound by the same rules that dog our pets. The great chain of non-being is round our necks too.
“Well,” my father says, meaning more than he can know, “I’ll be going.”
Claude and Trudy stand. This is the reckless thrill of the poisoner’s art. The substance ingested, the act not yet complete. Within two miles of here are many hospitals, many stomach pumps. But the line of criminality has been crossed. No calling in the deed. They can only stand back and wait for the antithesis, for the antifreeze to leave him cold.
Claude says, “Is this your hat?”
“Oh yes! I’ll take that.”
Is this the last time I hear my father’s voice?
We’re moving towards the stairs, then up them, the poet leading the way. I have lungs but no air to shout a warning or weep with shame at my impotence. I’m still a creature of the sea, not a human like the others. Now we’re passing through the shambles of the hall. The front door is opening. My father turns to give my mother a peck upon the cheek and throw an affectionate punch at his brother’s shoulder. Perhaps for the first time in his life.
As he goes out he calls over his shoulder, “Let’s hope that bloody car starts.”
ELEVEN
A pale, thin plant seeded by drunks in the small hours struggles for the remote sunlight of success. Here’s the plan. A man is found lifeless at his steering wheel. On the floor of his car by the rear seat, almost out of sight, is a Styrofoam cup bearing the logo of a business in Judd Street, near Camden Town Hall. In the cup, the remains of a pureed fruit drink, laced with glycol. Near the cup, an empty bottle of the same lethal substance. Near the bottle, a discarded receipt for the drink bearing that day’s date. Concealed under the driver’s seat, a few bank statements, some for a small publishing house, others for a personal account. Both show overdrafts in the low tens of thousands. On one of the statements is scrawled, in the handwriting of the deceased, the word “Enough!” (Trudy’s “thing.”) By the bank statements, a pair of gloves the dead man wore now and then to conceal his psoriasis. They partly conceal a balled-up newspaper page bearing a hostile review of a recent volume of poems. On the front passenger seat, a black hat.
The Metropolitan Police are understaffed, overstretched. The younger detectives, so the older complain, investigate at their screens, reluctant to waste shoe leather. When there are other, gory cases to pursue, a conclusion in this is conveniently at hand. The means unusual but not rare, easily available, palatable, fatal in large doses, and a well-known resource for crime writers. Enquiries suggest that as well as debts, the marriage was in trouble, the wife now living with the brother of the dead man, who had been depressed for months. Psoriasis undermined his confidence. The gloves he wore to conceal it explain the absence of fingerprints on the cup and the antifreeze bottle. CCTV images show him at Smoothie Heaven wearing his hat. He was on his way to the home in St. John’s Wood that morning. Apparently, he couldn’t face becoming a father, or the collapse of his business or his failure as a poet, or his loneliness in Shoreditch, where he was living in rented accommodation. After a row with his wife he left in distress. The wife blames herself. The interview with her had to be suspended a few times. The brother of the dead man was also present and did his best to be helpful.
Is reality so easily, so minutely arranged in advance? My mother, Claude and I are waiting tensely at the open front door. Between the conception of a deed and its acting out lies a tangle of hideous contingencies. At the first touch, the engine turns but does not start. No surprise. This vehicle belongs to a dreaming sonneteer. On the second attempt, the same wheezing failure, and so too on the third. The starter motor is sounding like an old man grown too feeble to clear his throat. If John Cairncross dies on our hands, we’ll all go down. Likewise if he survives on our hands. He pauses before trying again, gathering his luck. The fourth is weaker than the third. I conjure a view of him through the car’s windscreen, mimicking for us a quizzical shrug, his form almost obliterated by reflections of summer clouds.
“Oh dear,” says Claude, a man of the world. “He’s going to flood the carb.”
My mother’s viscera orchestrate her desperate hopes. But on the fifth, a transformation. With slow heaving and comical popping sounds, the engine internally combusts. Trudy and Claude’s straggling plant grows a hopeful bud. As the car reverses into the road my mother has a fit of coughing from what I take to be a cloud of blue exhaust blowing our way. We come inside, and the door is slammed shut.
We’re not returning to the kitchen, but climbing the stairs. Nothing is said, but the quality of silence—creamily thick—suggests that more than fatigue and drink are drawing us towards the bedroom. Misery on misery. This is savage injustice.
Five minutes later. This is the bedroom and it’s already started. Claude crouches by my mother and might already be naked. I hear his breath on her neck. He’s undressing her, to date a peak of sensual generosity unscaled by him.
“Careful,” Trudy says. “Those buttons are pearls.”
He grunts in reply. His fingers are inexpert, working solely for his own needs. Something of his or hers lands on the bedroom floor. A shoe, or trousers with heavy belt. She’s writhing strangely. Impatience. He issues a command in the form of a second grunt. I’m cowering. This is ugly, sure to go wrong, too late in my term. I’ve been saying this for weeks. I’ll suffer.
Obediently, Trudy’s on all fours. It’s a posteriori, doggy style, but not for my sake. Like a mating toad, he clasps himself against her back. On her, now in her, and deep. So little of my treacherous mother separates me from the would-be murderer of my father. Nothing is the same this Saturday noon in St. John’s Wood. This is not the usual brief and frantic encounter that might threaten the integrity of a brand-new skull. Rather, a glutinous drowning, like something pedantic
crawling through a swamp. Mucous membranes slide past each other with a faint creak on the turn. Hours of scheming have accidentally delivered the conspirators into the art of deliberative lovemaking. But nothing passes between them. Mechanically they churn in slow motion, a blind industrial process at half power. All they want is release, to clock out, taste a few seconds’ respite from themselves. When it comes, in close succession, my mother gasps in horror. At what she must return to, and might yet see. Her lover emits his third grunt of the shift. They fall apart to lie on their backs on the sheets. Then we all sleep.
On and on through the afternoon, and it’s on this long flat stretch of time that I have my first dream, in full colour and rich visual depth. The line, the stated border, between dreaming and waking is vague. No fences or fire break in the trees. Only vacant sentry huts mark the crossing. I begin indistinctly in this new land, as a tyro must, with a formless mass or mess of wavering, ill-lit shapes, people and places dissolving, indistinct voices in vaulted spaces singing or speaking. As I pass through, I feel the pain of unnamed, unreachable remorse, a sense of having left someone or something behind in a betrayal of duty or love. Then it comes beautifully clear. A cold mist on the day of my desertion, a three-day journey on horseback, long rows of the sullen English poor in the rutted lanes, giant elms looming over flooded meadows by the Thames, and at last the familiar thrill and din of the city. In the streets the odour of human waste as solid as house walls, yielding around a narrow corner to the aroma of roasted meat and rosemary and a drab entranceway I pass through to see a young man of my age in the dark-beamed gloom at a table pouring wine from an earthenware jug, a handsome man, leaning in across a smeared oak table, holding me with a tale he has in mind, something he has written or I have, and wants an opinion, or to give one, a correction, a point of fact. Or he wants me to tell him how to go on. This blurring of identity is one aspect of the love I feel for him, which almost smothers the guilt I want to leave behind. Outside in the street a bell tolls. We crowd outside to wait for the funeral cortège. We know this is an important death. The procession doesn’t appear, but the bell keeps ringing.
*
It’s my mother who hears the doorbell. Before I’ve drifted upwards from the novelty of dream logic, she’s in her dressing gown and we’re descending the stairs. As we reach the last run, she gives a cry of surprise. I would guess the midden has been cleared while we slept. The bell sounds again, loud, hard, angry. Trudy is opening the door as she shouts, “For God’s sake! Are you drunk? I’m going as fast as—”
She falters. If she has faith in herself she shouldn’t be astonished to see what dread has already let me see: a policeman, no, two, removing their hats.
A kind, fatherly voice says, “Are you Mrs. Cairncross, wife of John?”
She nods.
“Sergeant Crowley. I’m afraid we have some very bad news. May we come in?”
“Oh God,” my mother remembers to say.
They follow us into the sitting room, rarely used and almost clean. If the hallway hadn’t been cleared, I think my mother would have been an immediate suspect. Police work is intuitive. What remains, possibly, is a lingering smell, easily confused with exotic cooking.
A second voice, younger, with brotherly solicitude, says, “We’d like you to be sitting down.”
The sergeant breaks the news. Mr. Cairncross’s car was reported on the hard shoulder of the M1 north-bound, twenty miles from London. His door was open, and not far off, on a grassy embankment, he lay facedown. An ambulance came, resuscitation was attempted during the race to hospital, but he died along the way.
A sob, like an air bubble in deep water, rises through my mother’s body, rises through me, to burst into the faces of the attentive police.
“Oh God!” she shouts. “We had the most awful row this morning.” She hunches forward. I feel her put her hands to her face and start to shiver.
“I should tell you this,” the same policeman continues. He pauses delicately, mindful of the double respect owed to the heavily pregnant bereaved. “We tried to contact you this afternoon. A friend of his identified the body. I’m afraid our first impression is suicide.”
When my mother straightens her spine and lets out a cry, I’m overcome by love for her, for all that’s lost—Dubrovnik, poetry, daily life. She loved him once, as he her. Summoning this fact, erasing others, lifts her performance.
“I should have…I should have kept him here. Oh my God, it’s all my fault.”
How clever, hiding in plain sight, behind the truth.
The sergeant says, “People often say that. But you mustn’t, you shouldn’t. It’s wrong to go blaming yourself.”
A deep inhalation and sigh. She seems about to speak, stops, sighs again, gathers herself. “I ought to explain. Things weren’t going well between us. He was seeing someone, he moved out. And I started a…His brother moved in with me. John took it badly. That’s why I’m saying…”
She’s got in first with Claude, told them what they were bound to discover. If, in flagrant mood, she were to say now, “I killed him,” she’d be safe.
I hear the rasp of Velcro, the flip of notebook page, the scratch of pencil. She tells them in dulled voice all that she’d rehearsed, returning at the end to her own culpability. She should never have let him drive away in such a state.
The younger man says reverentially, “Mrs. Cairncross. You weren’t to know.”
Then she changes tack, almost sounds cross. “I don’t think I’m taking this in. I’m not even sure I believe you.”
“That’s understandable.” This is the paternal sergeant. With polite coughs, he and his colleague stand, ready to leave. “Is there someone you can call? Someone who can be with you?”
My mother considers her reply. She’s bent over again, face in hands. She speaks through her fingers in a flat voice. “My brother-in-law’s here now. He’s upstairs asleep.”
The guardians of the rule of law might be exchanging a lewd glance. Any token of their scepticism would help me.
“When the time’s right we’d like a word with him as well,” the younger one says.
“This news is going to kill him.”
“I expect you’d like to be alone together now.”
There it is again, the slender lifeline of insinuation to support my cowardly hope that the Force—Leviathan, not I—will take revenge.
I need a moment alone, beyond the reach of voices. I’ve been too absorbed, too impressed by Trudy’s art to peer into the pit of my own grief. And beyond it, the mystery of how love for my mother swells in proportion to my hatred. She’s made herself my only parent. I won’t survive without her, without the enveloping green gaze to smile into, the loving voice pouring sweets in my ear, the cool hands tending my private parts.
The constabulary leave. My mother mounts the stairs with a plodding tread. Hand firmly on the banister. One-two and pause, one-two and pause. She’s making a repeated humming sound on a fading note, a moan of pity or sadness exhaled through her nostrils. Nnng…nnng. I know her. Something’s building, a prelude to a reckoning. She devised a plot, pure artifice, a malign fairy tale. Now her fanciful story is deserting her, crossing the border as I did this afternoon, but in reverse, past the watchless guard huts, to rise against her, and side with the socially real, the dull quotidian of the working-day world, of human contacts, appointments, obligations, video cameras, computers with inhuman memories. In short, consequences. The tale has turned tail.
Hammered by drink and lost sleep, bearing me upwards, she continues towards the bedroom. It was never meant to work, she’s telling herself. It was just my foolish spite. I’m only guilty of a mistake.
The next step is close, but she won’t take it yet.
TWELVE
We are advancing on slumbering Claude, a hump, a bell-curve of sound baffled by bedclothes. On the exhalation, a long, constipated groan, its approaching terminus frilled with electric sibilants. Then an extended pause which, if you l
oved him, might alarm you. Has he breathed his last? If you don’t, there’s hope he has. But finally, a shorter, greedy intake, scarred with the rattle of wind-dried mucus and, at the breezy summit, the soft palate’s triumphant purr. The rising volume announces we are very close. Trudy says his name. I feel her hand extend towards him while he’s on a downward plunge through the sibilants. She’s impatient, she needs to share their success, and her touch on his shoulder isn’t gentle. He coughs into half-life, like his brother’s car, and takes some seconds to find the words to pose his question.
“What the fuck?”
“He’s dead.”
“Who?”
“Jesus! Wake up.”
Drawn from the deepest phase of sleep, he has to sit on the edge of the bed, so the complaining mattress says, and wait for his neural circuitry to restore him to the story of his life. I’m young enough not to take such wiring for granted. So, where was he? Ah, yes, attempting to murder his brother. Truly dead? Finally, he’s Claude again.
“Well blow me down!”
Now he feels like getting up. It’s 6 p.m., he notes. Enlivened, he stands, stretches his arms athletically with a creak of bone and gristle, then moves between bedroom and bathroom cheerily whistling, with full vibrato. From the light music I’ve heard I know this to be the theme tune from Exodus. Grandiose, in a corrupted romantic style, to my newly formed ear, redemptive orchestral poetry to Claude’s. He’s happy. Meanwhile, Trudy sits in silence on the bed. It’s brewing. At last, in dulled monotone she tells him of the visit, the kindness of the police, the discovery of the body, the early presumption as to cause of death. To each of these, delivered as bad news, Claude chimes, “Marvellous.” He leans forward with a moan to tie his laces.
She says, “What did you do with the hat?”
She means my father’s fedora with the broad brim.
“Didn’t you see? I gave it to him.”
“What did he do with it?”
“He had it in his hand when he left. Don’t worry. You’re worried.”