Nutshell

by Ian Mcewan

  But of course, to kill the brain is to kill the will to kill the brain. As soon as I start to fade, my fists go limp and life returns. Immediately, I hear signs of robust life—intimate sounds, as through the walls of a cheap hotel. Then louder, louder. It’s my mother. There she goes, launched on one of her perilous thrills.

  But my own prison wall of death’s too high. I’ve fallen back, into the exercise yard of dumb existence.

  Finally, Claude withdraws his revolting weight—I salute his crude brevity—and my space is restored, though I’ve pins and needles in my legs. Now I’m recovering, while Trudy lies back, limp with exhaustion and all the usual regrets.

  *

  It’s not the theme parks of Paradiso and Inferno that I dread most—the heavenly rides, the hellish crowds—and I could live with the insult of eternal oblivion. I don’t even mind not knowing which it will be. What I fear is missing out. Healthy desire or mere greed, I want my life first, my due, my infinitesimal slice of endless time and one reliable chance of a consciousness. I’m owed a handful of decades to try my luck on a freewheeling planet. That’s the ride for me—the Wall of Life. I want my go. I want to become. Put another way, there’s a book I want to read, not yet published, not yet written, though a start’s been made. I want to read to the end of My History of the Twenty-First Century. I want to be there, on the last page, in my early eighties, frail but sprightly, dancing a jig on the evening of December 31, 2099.

  It might end before that date and so it’s a thriller of sorts, violent, sensational, highly commercial. A compendium of dreams, with elements of horror. But it’s bound to be a love story too, and a heroic tale of brilliant invention. For a taste, look at the prequel, the hundred years before. A grim read, at least until halfway, but compelling. A few redeeming chapters on, say, Einstein and Stravinsky. In the new book, one of many unresolved plot lines is this: will its nine billion heroes scrape through without a nuclear exchange? Think of it as a contact sport. Line up the teams. India versus Pakistan, Iran versus Saudi Arabia, Israel versus Iran, USA versus China, Russia versus USA and NATO, North Korea versus the rest. To raise the chances of a score, add more teams: the non-state players will arrive.

  How determined are our heroes to overheat their hearth? A cosy 1.6 degrees, the projection or hope of a sceptical few, will open up the tundra to mountains of wheat, Baltic beachside tavernas, lurid butterflies in the Northwest Territories. At the darker end of pessimism, a wind-torn four degrees allows for flood-and-drought calamity and all of turmoil’s dark political weather. More narrative tension in subplots of local interest: Will the Middle East remain in frenzy, will it empty into Europe and alter it for good? Might Islam dip a feverish extremity in the cooling pond of reformation? Might Israel concede an inch or two of desert to those it displaced? Europa’s secular dreams of union may dissolve before the old hatreds, small-scale nationalism, financial disaster, discord. Or she might hold her course. I need to know. Will the USA decline quietly? Unlikely. Will China grow a conscience, will Russia? Will global finance and corporations? Then, bring on the seductive human constants: all of sex and art, wine and science, cathedrals, landscape, the higher pursuit of meaning. Finally, the private ocean of desires—mine, to be barefoot on a beach round an open fire, grilled fish, juice of lemons, music, the company of friends, someone, not Trudy, to love me. My birthright in a book.

  So I’m ashamed of the attempt, relieved to have failed. Claude (now loudly humming in the echoing bathroom) must be reached by other means.

  Barely fifteen minutes have passed since he undressed my mother. I sense we’re entering a new phase of the evening. Over the sound of running taps he calls out that he’s hungry. With the degrading episode behind her and her pulse settling, I believe my mother will be returning to her theme of innocence. To her, Claude’s talk of dinner will seem misplaced. Even callous. She sits up, pulls on her dress, finds her knickers in the bedclothes, steps into her sandals and goes to her dressing-table mirror. She begins to braid the hair that, untended, hangs in blonde curls her husband once celebrated in a poem. This gives her time to recover and to think. She’ll use the bathroom when Claude has left it. The idea of being near him repels her now.

  Disgust restores to her a notion of purity and purpose. Hours ago she was in charge. She could be so again, as long as she resists another sickly, submissive swoon. She’s fine for now, she’s refreshed, sated, immune, but it waits for her, the little beastie could swell once more into a beast, distort her thoughts, drag her down—and she’ll be Claude’s. To take charge, however…I think of her musing as she tilts her lovely face before the mirror to twist another strand. To give orders as she did this morning in the kitchen, devise the next step, will be to own the offence. If only she could settle down to the blameless grief of the stricken widow.

  For now, there are practical tasks. All tainted utensils, plastic cups, the blender itself to be disposed of far from home. The kitchen to be scoured of traces. Only the coffee cups to remain in place on the table, unwashed. These dull chores will keep the horror at a distance for an hour. Perhaps this is why she puts a reassuring hand on the knoll that contains me, near the small of my back. A gesture of loving hope for our future. How could she think of giving me away? She’ll need me. I’ll brighten the penumbra of innocence and pathos she’ll want around her. Mother and child—a great religion has spun its best stories around this potent symbol. Sitting on her knee, pointing skywards, I’ll render her immune to prosecution. On the other hand—how I hate that phrase—no preparations have been made for my arrival, no clothes, no furniture, no compulsive nest-making. I’ve never knowingly been in a shop with my mother. The loving future is a fantasy.

  Claude emerges from the bathroom and goes towards the phone. Food is on his mind, an Indian takeaway, so he murmurs. She steps round him and sets about her own ablutions. When we emerge he’s still on the phone. He’s abandoned Indian for Danish—open sandwiches, pickled herring, baked meats. He’s over-ordering, a natural impulse after a murder. By the time he’s finished, Trudy is ready, braided, washed, clean underwear, new frock, shoes in place of sandals, a dab of scent. She’s taking charge.

  “There’s an old canvas bag in the cupboard under the stairs.”

  “I’m eating first. I’m starved.”

  “Go now. They could be back at any time.”

  “I’ll do this my way.”

  “You’ll do as you’re—”

  Was she really going to say “told”? What a distance she’s travelled, treating him like a child, when just now she was his pet. He might have ignored her. There might have been a row. But what he’s doing now is picking up the phone. It’s not the Danish people confirming his order, it’s not even the same phone. My mother has gone to stand behind him to look. It’s not the landline, but the video entryphone. They’re staring at the screen, in wonder. The voice comes through, distorted, bereft of lower registers, a thin, penetrating plea.

  “Please. I need to see you now!”

  “Oh God,” my mother says in plain disgust. “Not now.”

  But Claude, still irritated by being ordered around, has reason to assert his autonomy. He presses the button, replaces the phone, and there’s a moment’s silence. They have nothing to say to each other. Or too much.

  Then we all go downstairs to greet the owl poet.

  FOURTEEN

  While we descend the stairs I have time to reflect further on my fortunate lack of resolve, on the self-strangler’s self-defeating loop. Some endeavours are doomed at their inception, not by cowardice but by their very nature. Franz Reichelt, the Flying Tailor, fatally leapt from the Eiffel Tower in 1912 wearing a baggy parachute suit, certain his invention could save the lives of aviators. For forty seconds he paused before the jump. When at last he tilted forward and stepped into the void, the updraught wrapped the fabric tightly round his body and he fell just as a stone would fall. The facts, the mathematics, were against him. At the foot of the tower he made a shallow
grave in the frozen Parisian ground fifteen centimetres deep.

  Which brings me, at Trudy’s slow U-turn on the first landing, via death, to the matter of revenge. It’s coming clearer, and I’m relieved. Revenge: the impulse is instinctive, powerful—and forgivable. Insulted, duped, maimed, no one can resist the allure of vengeful brooding. And here, far out at this extreme, a loved one murdered, the fantasies are incandescent. We’re social, we once kept each other at bay by violence or its threat, like dogs in a pack. We’re born to this delectable anticipation. What’s an imagination for but to play out and linger on and repeat the bloody possibilities? Revenge may be exacted a hundred times over in one sleepless night. The impulse, the dreaming intention, is human, normal, and we should forgive ourselves.

  But the raised hand, the actual violent enactment, is cursed. The maths says so. There’ll be no reversion to the status quo ante, no balm, no sweet relief, or none that lasts. Only a second crime. Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves, Confucius said. Revenge unstitches a civilisation. It’s a reversion to constant, visceral fear. Look at the miserable Albanians, chronically cowed by kanun, their idiot cult of blood feuds.

  So even as we reach the landing outside my precious father’s library, I’ve absolved myself, not of thoughts, but of actions, of avenging his death in this life or in the postnatal next. And I’m absolving myself of cowardice. Claude’s elimination won’t restore my father. I’m extending Reichelt’s forty-second hesitation into a lifetime. No to impetuous action. If I’d succeeded with the cord, then it, not Claude, would have been the cause for any pathologist to note. An unhappy accident, he’d record, and not unusual. There’d be some undeserved relief for my mother and uncle.

  If the stairs allow such room for thought it’s because Trudy is taking them at the pace of the slowest loris. For once, her hand holds the banister tightly. She takes one step at a time, pauses on some, considers, sighs. I know how things stand. The visitor will hold up the essential housework. The police could return. Trudy’s in no mood for a battle of jealous possession. There’s an issue of precedence. She’s been usurped at the identification of the body—that rankles. Elodie is merely a recent lover. Or not so recent. She might have preceded the move to Shoreditch. Another raw wound to dress. But why call round here? Not to receive or give comfort. She might know or possess some damning tidbit. She could throw Trudy and Claude to the dogs. Or it’s blackmail. Funeral arrangements to discuss. None of that. No, no! For my mother, so much effortful negation. How wearying, on top of all else (a hangover, a murder, enervating sex, advanced pregnancy), for my mother to be obliged to exert her will and extend fulsome hatred to a guest.

  But she’s determined. Her braids tightly conceal her thoughts from all but me, while her underwear—cotton, not silk, I sense—and a short summer print dress, correctly loose but not voluminous, are freshly in place. Her bare, pink arms and legs, her purple-painted toenails, her full, unarguable beauty are on intimidating display. Her aspect is of a ship of the line, fully though reluctantly rigged, gun hatches lowered. A woman-of-war, of which I’m the bow’s proud figurehead. She descends in floating but intermittent movements. She’ll rise to whatever comes at her.

  By the time we reach the hallway it’s already started. And badly. The front door has opened and closed. Elodie is in, and in Claude’s arms.

  “Yes, yes. There, there,” he murmurs into her succession of teary, broken sentences.

  “I shouldn’t. It’s wrong. But I. Oh I’m sorry. What it must be. For you. I can’t. Your brother. I can’t help it.”

  My mother stays at the foot of the stairs, stiffening with distrust, not only of the visitor. So, it’s bardic distress.

  Elodie is not yet aware of us. Her face must be towards the door. The news she wants to deliver comes in staccato sobs. “Tomorrow night. Fifty poets. From all over the. Oh, we loved him! Reading in Bethnal. Green Library. Or outside. Candles. One poem each. We so want you to be.”

  She stops to blow her nose. To do so, she disengages from Claude and sees Trudy.

  “Fifty poets,” he helplessly repeats. What notion could be more repugnant to him? “That’s a lot.”

  Her sobs are almost under control, but the pathos of her own words brings them on again. “Oh. Hello, Trudy. I’m so, so sorry. If you or. Could say a few. But we’d understand. If you. If you couldn’t. How hard it.”

  We lose her to her grief, which rises in pitch to a kind of cooing. She tries to apologise and at last we hear, “Compared to what you. So sorry! Not my place.”

  She’s right, as Trudy sees it. Usurped again. Out-griefed, out-wailed, she remains, unmoved, by the stairs. Here in the hallway, where the remains of a stench must still linger, we’re held in social limbo. We listen to Elodie and the seconds go by. What now? Claude has the answer.

  “We’ll go down. There’s Pouilly-Fumé in the fridge.”

  “I don’t. I just came to.”

  “This way.”

  As Claude guides her past my mother, a look must surely pass between them—that is, her flashed rebuke must meet his bland shrug. The two women don’t embrace or even touch or speak when they’re inches apart. Trudy lets them get ahead before she follows, down into the kitchen, where the two accusers, Glycol and Judd Street Smoothie, hide in forensic smears among the chaos.

  “If you’d like,” my mother says as she sets foot on the sticky floorboards, “I’m sure Claude will make you a sandwich.”

  This innocent offer conceals many barbs: it’s inappropriate to the occasion; Claude has never made a sandwich in his life; there’s no bread in the house, nothing to set between two slabs but the dust of salted nuts. And who could safely eat a sandwich from such a kitchen? Pointedly, she doesn’t propose making it herself; pointedly, she casts Elodie and Claude together, distinct from herself. It’s an accusation, a rejection, a cold withdrawal bundled into a hospitable gesture. Even as I disapprove, I’m impressed. Such refinements can’t be learned from podcasts.

  Trudy’s hostility has a beneficial effect on Elodie’s syntax. “I couldn’t eat a thing, thank you.”

  “You could drink a thing,” says Claude.

  “I could.”

  There follows the familiar suite of sounds—the fridge door, a careless chink of corkscrew against bottle, the cork’s sonorous withdrawal, last night’s glasses sluiced under the tap. Pouilly. Just across the river from Sancerre. Why not? It’s almost seven thirty. The little grapes with their misty grey bloom should suit us well on another hot and airless London evening. But I want more. It seems to me that Trudy and I have not eaten in a week. Stirred by Claude’s phone order, I crave as accompaniment an overlooked, old-fashioned dish, harengs pommes à l’huile. Slippery smoked herring, waxy new potatoes, the first pressing of the finest olives, onion, chopped parsley—I pine for such an entrée. How elegantly a Pouilly-Fumé would set it off. But how to persuade my mother? I could as easily slit my uncle’s throat. The graceful country of my third choice has never seemed so far away.

  All of us are at the table now. Claude pours, glasses are raised in sombre tribute to the dead.

  Into the silence, Elodie says in an awed whisper, “But suicide. It just seems so…so unlike him.”

  “Oh well,” says Trudy, and lets that hang. She’s seen an opportunity. “How long have you known him?”

  “Two years. When he taught—”

  “Then you wouldn’t know about the depressions.”

  My mother’s quiet voice pushes against my heart. What solace for her, to have faith in a coherent tale of mental illness and suicide.

  “My brother wasn’t exactly one for the primrose path.”

  Claude, I begin to understand, is not a liar of the first rank.

  “I didn’t know,” Elodie says in a small voice. “He was always so generous. Especially to us, you know, younger generation who—”

  “A whole other side.” Trudy sets this down firmly. “I’m glad his students never saw it.”

/>   “Even as a child,” says Claude. “He once took a hammer to our—”

  “This isn’t the time for that story.” Trudy has made it more interesting by cutting it short.

  “You’re right,” he says. “We loved him anyway.”

  I feel my mother’s hand go up to her face to cover it or brush away a tear. “But he’d never get treatment. He couldn’t accept that he was ill.”

  There’s protest, or complaint, in Elodie’s voice that my mother and uncle won’t like. “It doesn’t make any sense. He was on his way to Luton, to pay the printer. In cash. He was so happy to be settling a debt. And he was reading tonight. King’s College Poetry Society. Three of us were like, you know, the supporting band.”

  “He loved his poems,” Claude says.

  Elodie’s tone rises with her anguish. “Why would he pull over and…? Just like that. When he’d finished his book. And been shortlisted for the Auden Prize.”