Nutshell

by Ian Mcewan

  She sighs, thinks for a while. “The police were so nice.”

  “Bereaved wife and all.”

  “I don’t trust them.”

  “Just sit tight.”

  “They’ll be back.”

  “Sit…tight.”

  He delivers these two words with emphasis and a sinister break between them. Sinister, or fractious.

  Now he’s in the bathroom again, brushing his hair, no longer whistling. The air is changing.

  Trudy says, “They want to talk to you.”

  “Of course. His brother.”

  “I told them about us.”

  There’s a silence before he says, “Bit dumb.”

  Trudy clears her throat. Her tongue is dry. “No it isn’t.”

  “Let them find out. Or they’ll think you’re hiding something, trying to stay one step ahead.”

  “I told them John was depressed about us. One more reason for him to—”

  “OK, OK. Not bad. Might even be true. But.” He trails away, uncertain of what it is he thinks she should know.

  That John Cairncross might have killed himself for love of her, if she hadn’t killed him first—there’s both pathos and guilt in this recursive notion. I think she doesn’t like Claude’s casual, even dismissive tone. Just my guess. However close you get to others, you can never get inside them, even when you’re inside them. I think she’s feeling wounded. But she says nothing yet. We both know it will come soon.

  The old question arises. How stupid is Claude really? From the bathroom mirror he follows her thinking. He knows how to counter sentimentality in the matter of John Cairncross. He calls out, “They’ll be wanting to talk to that poet.”

  Summoning her is a balm. Every cell in Trudy’s body concedes the death her husband owed. She hates Elodie more than she loves John. Elodie will be suffering. Blood-borne well-being sweeps through me and I’m instantly high, thrown forwards by a surfer’s perfect breaking wave of forgiveness and love. A tall, sloping, smoothly tubular wave that could carry me to where I might start to think fondly of Claude. But I resist it. How diminishing, to accept at second hand my mother’s every rush of feeling and be bound tighter to her crime. But it’s hard to be separate from her when I need her. And with such churning of emotion, need translates to love, like milk to butter.

  She says in a sweet, reflective voice, “Oh yes, they’ll need to talk to Elodie.” Then she adds, “Claude, you know I love you.”

  But he doesn’t take this in. He’s heard it too often. Instead he says, “Wouldn’t mind being the proverbial fly on the wall.”

  Oh proverbial fly, oh wall, when will he learn to speak without torturing me? Speaking’s just a form of thinking and he must be as stupid as he appears.

  Emerging from the bathroom’s echo with a change of subject, he says lightly, “I might have found us a buyer. A long shot. But I’ll tell you later. Did the police leave their cards? I’d like to see their names.”

  She can’t remember and nor can I. Her mood is shifting again. I think she’s staring at him fixedly as she says simply, “He’s dead.”

  It is indeed a startling fact, barely believable, momentous, like a world war just declared, the prime minister speaking to the nation, families huddled together and the lights gone dim for reasons the authorities won’t disclose.

  Claude is standing close by her, his hand is on her thigh as he draws her to him. They kiss at length, in deep with their tongues and tangled breath.

  “As a doornail,” he murmurs into her mouth. His erection is hard against my back. Then, whispering, “We did it. Together. We’re brilliant together.”

  “Yes,” she says between the kisses. It’s hard to hear for the rustling of clothes. Her enthusiasm may not be equal to his.

  “I love you, Trudy.”

  “And I love you.”

  Something uncommitted about this “and.” When she advanced, he retreated, now the reverse. This is their dance.

  “Touch me.” Not quite a command, for his pleading voice is small. She tugs on the zip. Crime and sex, sex and guilt. More dualities. The sinuous movement of her fingers is conveying pleasure. But not enough. He’s pressing on her shoulders, she’s going down on her knees, lowering herself, taking “him,” as I’ve heard them say, into her mouth. I can’t imagine wanting such a thing for myself. But it’s a lifted burden to have Claude satisfied many kindly inches away. It bothers me that what she swallows will find its way to me as nutrient, and make me just a little like him. Why else did cannibals avoid eating morons?

  It’s over quickly, with barely a gasp. He steps back and secures his zip. My mother swallows twice. He’s offering nothing in return and I think she doesn’t want it. She steps past him, crosses the bedroom to the window and stands there, her back to the bed. I think of her gazing out towards the tower blocks. My unhappy dream of a future there is nearer now. She repeats quietly, more to herself, for he’s splashing once more in the bathroom, “He’s dead…dead.” She doesn’t seem convinced. And after several seconds, in a murmur, “Oh God.” Her legs are shaking. She’s about to cry, but no, this is too serious for tears. She has yet to comprehend her own news. The twinned facts are huge and she stands too close to see entirely the double horror: his death, and her part in it.

  I hate her and her remorse. How did she step from John to Claude, from poetry to dribbling cliché? Step down to the nasty sty to roll in filth with her idiot-lover, lie in shit and ecstasy, plan a house-theft, inflict monstrous pain and a humiliating death on a kindly man. And now gasp and shiver at what she did, as if the murderess were someone else—some sad sister fled from the locked ward with poison on the brain, and out of control, an ugly, chain-smoking sister with sinister compulsions, the long-time family shame, to be sighed for with “Oh God” and reverent whispering of my father’s name. There she goes, in seamless transit, on the very same day and without a blush, from slaughter to self-pity.

  Claude appears behind her. The hands on her shoulders again are those of a man newly freed by orgasm, a man eager for practicalities and worldly speculation not compatible with a mind-fogging erection.

  “You know what? I was reading the other day. And I’ve just realised. It’s what we should have used. Diphenhydramine. Kind of antihistamine. People are saying the Russians used it on that spy they locked in a sports bag. Poured it into his ear. Turned up the radiators before they left so the chemical dissolved in his tissues without a trace. Dumped the bag in the bath, didn’t want fluids dripping on the neighbours in the flat below—”

  “That’s enough.” She doesn’t say it sharply. More in resignation.

  “Dead right. Enough’s enough. We got there anyway.” He croons a snatch. “They said you’re screwed, your act’s too crude, but we came throuuugh.” The bedroom floorboards yield under my mother’s feet. He’s doing a little dance.

  She doesn’t turn but stands very still. She’s hating him as much as I just hated her. Now he’s at her side, sharing the view, trying to find her hand.

  “Point is this,” he says importantly. “They’ll interview us separately. We should be lining up our stories. So. He came round this morning. For coffee. Very depressed.”

  “I said we had a row.”

  “OK. When?”

  “Just as he was leaving.”

  “What about?”

  “He wanted me to move out.”

  “Good. So. He came round this morning. For coffee. Very depressed and—”

  She sighs, as I would. “Look. Tell everything as it was, minus the smoothies, plus the row. It doesn’t need a rehearsal.”

  “OK. This evening. This evening, I’ll do the cups, the lot. Across three locations. Another thing. He was wearing gloves the whole time.”

  “I know.”

  “And when you do the kitchen, not an atom of smoothie to—”

  “I know.”

  He leaves her side to take a turn, a shuffle about the room. He senses success, he’s restless, itchy, excited.
That she isn’t too boosts his impatience. There are things to do, and if not, things to plan. He wants to be out there. But where? He’s half humming, half singing something new. “My Blue Heaven.” “…and baby makes three.” I’m not reassured. He’s back by us, and she’s rigid by the window, but he doesn’t sense the danger.

  “On the sale,” he says, breaking off his song. “In my heart of hearts, I always thought we might need to take less than market price just in case we have to make a quick—”

  “Claude.”

  She mutters his name on two notes, the second lower than the first. A warning.

  But he pushes on. I’ve never known him happier, or less likeable. “This guy’s a builder, a developer. Doesn’t even need to look around. Square footage is all. Flats, see. And cash in—”

  She turns. “Are you not even aware?”

  “Of what?”

  “Are you really so incredibly stupid?”

  The very question. But Claude has switched moods too. He can sound dangerous.

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “It’s escaped your attention.”

  “Clearly.”

  “Today, just a few hours ago.”

  “Yes?”

  “I lost my husband—”

  “No!”

  “The man I once loved, and who loved me, and who shaped my life, gave meaning to it…” A clenching in the sinews of her throat prevents her saying more.

  But Claude is launched. “My darling little mouse, that’s terrible. Lost, you say. Where could you have put him? Where did you have him last? You must have put him down somewhere.”

  “Stop it!”

  “Lost! Let me think now. I know what! I’ve just remembered. You left him on the M1, by the edge of the road, lying on the grass with a gut full of poison. Fancy us forgetting that.”

  He might have gone on but Trudy swings back her arm and hits him in the face. Not a lady’s slap, but a clenched-fist blow that levers my head from its mooring.

  “You’re full of spite,” she says with surprising calm. “Because you were always jealous.”

  “Well, well,” says Claude, his voice only a little thickened. “The naked truth.”

  “You hated your brother because you could never be the man he was.”

  “While you loved him to the end.” Claude has reverted to fake wonderment. “Now what was that awfully clever thing someone was saying to me, was it last night or the night before? ‘I want him dead and it has to be tomorrow.’ Not the loving wife of my brother, who shaped her life.”

  “You got me drunk. That’s what you mostly do.”

  “And next morning who was that, proposing a toast to love, coaxing the man who shaped her life to raise a cup of venom? Surely not my brother’s loving wife. Oh no, not my own darling mouse.”

  I understand my mother, I know her heart. She’s dealing with the facts as she sees them. The crime, once a sequence of plans and their enactment, now in memory resembles an object, unmoveable, accusing, a cold stone statue in a clearing in a wood. A midwinter’s bitter midnight, a waning moon, and Trudy is hurrying away down a frosty woodland path. She turns to look back at the distant figure, partly obscured by bare boughs and skeins of mist, and she sees that the crime, the object of her thoughts, is not a crime at all. It’s a mistake. It always was. She suspected it all along. The further she removes herself, the clearer it becomes. She was merely wrong, not bad, and she’s no criminal. The crime must be elsewhere in the woods, and belong to someone else. No arguing with the facts that lead to Claude’s essential guilt. His sneering tone can’t protect him. It condemns him.

  And yet. And yet. And yet she violently wants him. Whenever he calls her his mouse, a curlicue of thrill, a cold contraction lodges in her perineum, an icy hook that tugs her downwards onto a narrow ledge and reminds her of the chasms she’s swooned into before, the Walls of Death she’s survived too often. His mouse! What humiliation. In the palm of his hand. Pet. Powerless. Fearful. Contemptible. Disposable. Oh to be his mouse! When she knows it’s madness. So hard to resist. Can she fight it?

  Is she a woman or a mouse?

  THIRTEEN

  A silence I can’t read follows Claude’s mockery. He may regret his sarcasm or resent being diverted from his breezy upland of elation. She may be resentful too, or wanting to resume as his mouse. I’m weighing these possibilities as he moves away from her. He sits on the end of the disordered bed, tapping on his phone. She remains at the window, her back to the room, facing her portion of London, its diminishing evening traffic, scattered birdsong, lozenges of summer cloud and chaos of roofs.

  When at last she speaks her tone is sulky and flat. “I’m not selling this house just so you can get rich.”

  His reply is immediate. It’s the same needling voice of derision. “No, no. We’ll be rich together. Or, if you like, poor in separate prisons.”

  It’s nicely put as a threat. Can she believe him, that he’d take them both down? Negative altruism. Cutting off your nose to spite another’s face. What should be her response? I have time to think because she’s yet to reply. A little shocked at this implied blackmail, I should say. Logically, she should suggest the same. In theory, they have equal power over each other. Leave this house. Never come back. Or I’ll bring the police down on us both. But even I know that love doesn’t steer by logic, nor is power distributed evenly. Lovers arrive at their first kisses with scars as well as longings. They’re not always looking for advantage. Some need shelter, others press only for the hyperreality of ecstasy, for which they’ll tell outrageous lies or make irrational sacrifice. But they rarely ask themselves what they need or want. Memories are poor for past failures. Childhoods shine through adult skin, helpfully or not. So do the laws of inheritance that bind a personality. The lovers don’t know there’s no free will. I haven’t heard enough radio drama to know more than that, though pop songs have taught me that they don’t feel in December what they felt in May, and that to have a womb may be incomprehensible to those who don’t and that the reverse is also true.

  Trudy turns to face the room. Her small, faraway voice chills me. “I’m frightened.”

  She already sees how their plans have gone wrong, despite signs of early success. She’s shivering. Asserting her innocence isn’t viable after all. The prospect of a fight with Claude has shown her how lonely her independence could be. His taste for sarcasm is new to her, it scares her, disorients her. And she wants him, even though his voice, his touch and his kisses are corrupted by what they’ve done. My father’s death won’t be confined, it’s cut loose from its mortuary slab or stainless-steel drawer and drifted in the evening air, across the North Circular, over those same north London roofs. It’s in the room now, in her hair, on her hands, and on Claude’s face—an illuminated mask that gapes without expression at the phone in his hand.

  “Listen to this,” he says in a Sunday-breakfast sort of way. “From a local paper. Tomorrow’s. Body of a man seen by hard shoulder of M1 between junctions et cetera and et cetera. Twelve hundred calls from passing motorists to emergency services et cetera. Man pronounced dead on arrival at hospital, confirms police spokeswoman et cetera. Not yet named…And here’s the thing. ‘Police are not treating the death as a criminal matter at this stage.’ ”

  “At this stage,” she murmurs. Then her voice picks up. “But you don’t understand what I’m trying to—”

  “Which is?”

  “He’s dead. Dead! It’s so…And…” Now she’s starting to cry. “And it hurts.”

  Claude is merely reasonable. “What I understand is you wanted him dead and now—”

  “Oh John!” she cries.

  “So we’ll stick our courage to the screwing whatever. And get on with—”

  “We’ve…done a…terrible thing,” she says, oblivious to the break she’s making with innocence.

  “Ordinary people wouldn’t have the guts to do what we’ve done. So, here’s another one. Luton Herald and Post. ‘Yeste
rday morning—’ ”

  “Don’t! Please don’t.”

  “All right, all right. Same stuff anyway.”

  Now she’s indignant. “They write ‘dead man’ and it’s nothing to them. Just words. Typing. They’ve no idea what it means.”

  “But they’re right. I happen to know this. Around the world a hundred and five people die every minute. Not far off two a second. Just to give you some perspective.”

  Two seconds’ pause as she takes this in. Then she begins to laugh, an unwanted, mirthless laugh that turns to sobbing, through which she manages to say at last, “I hate you.”

  He’s come close, his hand is on her arm, he murmurs into her ear. “Hate? Don’t get me excited all over again.”

  But she has. Through his kisses and her tears she says, “Please. No. Claude.”

  She doesn’t turn or push him away. His fingers are below my head, moving slowly.

  “Oh no,” she whispers, moving closer to him. “Oh no.”

  Grief and sex? I can only theorise. Defences weak, soft tissues gone softer, emotional resilience yielding to childish trust in salty abandonment. I hope never to find out.

  He has pulled her towards the bed, removed her sandals, her cotton summer dress and called her his mouse again, though only once. He pushes her onto her back. Consent has rough edges. Does a grieving woman grant it when she raises her buttocks so her panties are pulled free? I’d say no. She has rolled onto her side—the only initiative she takes. Meanwhile, I’m working on a plan, a gesture of last resort. My last shot.

  He’s kneeling by her, probably naked. At such a time, what could be worse? He swiftly presents the answer: the high medical risk, at this stage of pregnancy, of the missionary position. With a muttered command—how he charms—he turns her on her back, parts her legs with an indifferent backhand swipe, and gets ready, so the mattress tells me, to lower his bulk onto mine.

  My plan? Claude is tunnelling towards me and I must be quick. We’re swaying, creaking, under great pressure. A high-pitched electronic sound wails in my ears, my eyes bulge and smart. I need the use of my arms, my hands, but there’s so little room. I’ll say it fast: I’m going to kill myself. An infant death, a homicide in effect, due to my uncle’s reckless assault on a gravid woman well advanced in her third trimester. His arrest, trial, sentence, imprisonment. My father’s death half avenged. Half, because murderers don’t hang in gentle Britain. I’ll give Claude a proper lesson in the art of negative altruism. To take my life I’ll need the cord, three turns around my neck of the mortal coil. I hear from far off my mother’s sighs. The fiction of my father’s suicide will be the inspiration for my own attempt. Life imitating art. To be stillborn—a tranquil term purged of tragedy—has a simple allure. Now here’s the thudding against my skull. Claude is gaining speed, now at a gallop, hoarsely breathing. My world is shaking, but my noose is in place, both hands are gripping, I’m pulling down hard, back bent, with a bell-ringer’s devotion. How easy. A slippery tightening against the common carotid, vital channel beloved of slit-throats. I can do it. Harder! A sensation of giddy toppling, of sound becoming taste, touch becoming sound. A rising blackness, blacker than I’ve ever seen, and my mother murmuring her farewells.