Nutshell

by Ian Mcewan

  “I will. Thank you. Thank you for this book.”

  They embrace and kiss, and she’s gone. My guess is that she’s got what she came for.

  We return to the kitchen. I’m feeling strange. Famished. Exhausted. Desperate. My worry is that Trudy will tell Claude that she can’t face eating. Not after the doorbell. Fear is an emetic. I’ll die unborn, a meagre death. But she and I and hunger are one system, and sure enough, the tinfoil boxes are ripped apart. She and Claude eat fast, standing by the kitchen table, where yesterday’s coffee cups might still be.

  He says through stuffed mouth, “All packed and ready to go?”

  Pickled herring, gherkin, a slice of lemon on pumpernickel bread. They don’t take long to reach me. Soon I’m whipped into alertness by a keen essence saltier than blood, by the tang of sea spray off the wide, open ocean road where lonely herring shoals skim northwards through clean black icy water. It keeps coming, a chilling Arctic breeze pouring over my face, as though I stood boldly in the prow of a fearless ship heading into glacial freedom. That is, Trudy eats one open sandwich after another, on and on until she takes a first bite of her last and throws it down. She’s reeling, she needs a chair.

  She groans. “That was good! Look, tears. I’m crying with pleasure.”

  “I’ll be off,” Claude says. “And you can cry alone.”

  For a long time I’ve been almost too big for this place. Now I’m too big. My limbs are folded hard against my chest, my head is wedged into my only exit. I wear my mother like a tight-fitting cap. My back aches, I’m out of shape, my nails need cutting, I’m beat, lingering in that dusk where torpor doesn’t cancel thought but frees it. Hunger, then sleep. One need fulfilled, another takes its place. Ad infinitum, until the needs become mere whims, luxuries. Something in this goes near the heart of our condition. But that’s for others. I’m pickled, the herrings are bearing me away, I’m on the shoulders of the giant shoal, heading north, and when I’m there I’ll hear the music not of seals and groaning ice, but of vanishing evidence, of running taps, the popping of foaming suds, I’ll hear the midnight chime of pots, and chairs upended on the kitchen table to reveal the floor and its scattered burden of food crumbs, human hair and mouse shit. Yes, I was there when he tempted her again to bed, called her his mouse, pinched her nipples hard, filled her cheeks with his lying breath and cliché-bloated tongue.

  And I did nothing.

  SEVENTEEN

  I wake into near silence to find myself horizontal. As always, I listen carefully. Beyond the patient tread of Trudy’s heart, beyond her breathing sighs and faintest creak of rib cage, are the murmurs and trickles of a body maintained by hidden networks of care and regulation, like a well-run city in the dead of night. Beyond the walls, the rhythmic commotion of my uncle’s snoring, quieter than usual. Beyond the room, no sound of traffic. In another time I would have turned as best I could and sunk back into dreamlessness. Now, one splinter, one pointed truth from the day before, punctures the delicate tissue of sleep. Then everything, everyone, the small, willing cast, slips in through the tear. Who’s first? My smiling father, the new and difficult rumour of his decency and talent. The mother I’m bound to, and bound to love and loathe. Priapic, satanic Claude. Elodie, scanning poet, untrustworthy dactyl. And cowardly me, self-absolved of revenge, of everything but thought. These five figures turn before me, playing their parts in events exactly as they were, and then as they might have been and might yet be. I’ve no authority to direct the action. I can only watch. Hours pass.

  Later, I’m woken by voices. I’m on a slope, which suggests my mother is sitting up in bed propped by pillows. The traffic outside is not yet at its usual density. My guess is 6 a.m. My first concern is that we might be due a matutinal visit to the Wall of Death. But no, they aren’t even touching. Conversation only. They’ve had pleasure enough to last till noon at least, which opens an opportunity now for rancour, or reason, or even regret. They’ve chosen the first. My mother is speaking in the flat tone she reserves for her resentments. The first complete sentence I understand is this:

  “If you weren’t in my life, John would be alive today.”

  Claude considers. “Likewise if you weren’t in mine.”

  A silence follows this blocking move. Trudy tries again. “You turned silly games into something else, bringing that stuff into the house.”

  “The stuff you made him drink.”

  “If you hadn’t—”

  “Listen. Dearest.”

  The endearment is mostly menace. He draws breath and considers yet again. He knows he must be kind. But kindness without desire, without promise of erotic reward, is difficult for him. The strain is in his throat. “It’s fine. Not a criminal matter. We’re on course. That girl’s going to say all the right things.”

  “Thanks to me.”

  “Thanks to you is right. Death certificate, fine. Will, fine. Crem and all the trimmings, fine. Baby and house sale, fine—”

  “But four and a half million—”

  “Is fine. In case of worst case, the plan-B plan—fine.”

  Only syntax might make one think that I’m for sale. But I’ll be free at the point of delivery. Or worthless.

  Trudy repeats with contempt, “Four and a half million.”

  “Fast. No questions.”

  A lovers’ catechism, which they may have been round before. I’m not always listening. She says, “Why the hurry?” He says, “In case things go wrong.” She says, “Why should I trust you?” He says, “No choice.”

  Have the house-sale papers come already? Has she signed? I don’t know. Sometimes I doze and don’t hear everything. And I don’t care. Having nothing myself, property is not my concern. Skyscrapers, tin shacks, and all the bridges and temples in between. Keep them. My interest is strictly postpartum, the departing hoof mark in the rock, the bleeding lamb drifting skyward. Always up. Hot air without a balloon. Take me with you, chuck the ballast. Give me my go, my afterlife, paradise on earth, even a hell, a thirteenth floor. I can take it. I believe in life after birth, though I know that separating hope from fact is hard. Something short of eternity will do. Three score and ten? Wrap them up, I’ll take them. On hope—I’ve been hearing about the latest slaughters in pursuit of dreams of the life beyond. Mayhem in this world, bliss in the next. Fresh-bearded young men with beautiful skin and long guns on Boulevard Voltaire gazing into the beautiful, disbelieving eyes of their own generation. It wasn’t hatred that killed the innocents but faith, that famished ghost, still revered, even in the mildest quarters. Long ago, someone pronounced groundless certainty a virtue. Now, the politest people say it is. I’ve heard their Sunday-morning broadcasts from cathedral precincts. Europe’s most virtuous spectres, religion and, when it faltered, godless utopias bursting with scientific proofs, together they scorched the earth from the tenth to the twentieth centuries. Here they come again, risen in the East, pursuing their millennium, teaching toddlers to slit the throats of teddy bears. And here I am with my home-grown faith in the life beyond. I know it’s more than a radio programme. The voices I hear are not, or not only, in my head. I believe my time will come. I’m virtuous too.

  *

  The morning is without event. Trudy and Claude’s exchange of muted acrimony falters then yields to hours of sleep, after which she leaves him in bed and takes a shower. In the thrumming warmth of speeding droplets and the sound of my mother’s tuneful humming, I experience an unaccountable mood of joy and excitement. I can’t help myself, I can’t hold the happiness back. Are these borrowed hormones? It hardly matters. I see the world as golden, even though the shade is no more than a name. I know it’s along the scale near yellow, also just a word. But golden sounds right, I sense it, I taste it where hot water cascades across the back of my skull. I don’t remember such carefree delight. I’m ready, I’m coming, the world will catch me, tend to me because it can’t resist me. Wine by the glass rather than the placenta, books direct by lamplight, music by Bach, walks along t
he shore, kissing by moonlight. Everything I’ve learned so far says all these delights are inexpensive, achievable, ahead of me. Even when the roaring water ceases, when we step into colder air and I’m shaken to a blur by Trudy’s towel, I have the impression of singing in my head. Choirs of angels!

  Another hot day, another floating confection, so I dream, of printed cotton, yesterday’s sandals, no scent because her soap, if it’s the bar Claude gave her, is perfumed with gardenia and patchouli. She doesn’t braid today. Instead, two plastic devices, highly coloured, I’m sure, attached above her ears hold her hair back on each side. I feel my spirits begin to droop as we descend the familiar stairs. Just now, to have forgotten my father for minutes on end! We enter a clean kitchen, whose unnatural order is my mother’s night tribute to him. Her exequy. The acoustic is altered, the floor no longer sticks to her sandals. The flies have moved to other heavens. As she goes towards the coffee machine she must be thinking, as I am, that Elodie will have finished her interview. The officers of the law will be confirming or abandoning their first impressions. In effect, for now, for us, both are true at once. Ahead of us the path seems to fork, but it’s forked already. In any event, there will be a visit.

  She reaches up to a cupboard for the tin of ground coffee and the filter papers, runs the cold-water tap, fills a jug, fetches a spoon. Most of the cups are clean. She sets out two. There’s pathos in this familiar routine, in the sounds of homely objects touching surfaces. And in the little sigh she makes when she turns or slightly bends our unwieldy form. It’s already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present spooling away from us, the soft tumble of unremarkable thoughts, the long-neglected miracle of existence. When she’s no longer twenty-eight and pregnant and beautiful, or even free, she won’t remember the way she set down the spoon and the sound it made on slate, the frock she wore today, the touch of her sandal’s thong between her toes, the summer’s warmth, the white noise of the city beyond the house walls, a short burst of birdsong by a closed window. All gone, already.

  But today is special. If she forgets the present it’s because her heart is in the future, the one that’s closing in. She’s thinking of the lies she’ll have to tell, how they need to cohere, and be consistent with Claude’s. This is pressure, this is the feeling she used to have before an exam. A little chill in the gut, some weakness below the knees, a tendency to yawn. She must remember her lines. Cost of failure being higher, more interesting than any routine school test. She could try an old assurance from childhood—no one will actually die. That won’t do. I feel for her. I love her.

  Now I’m feeling protective. I can’t quite dispel the worthless notion that the very beautiful should live by other codes. For such a face as I’ve imagined for her there should be special respect. Prison for her would be an outrage. Against nature. There’s already nostalgia in this domestic moment. It’s a treasure, a gem for the memory store. I’ve got her to myself, here in the ordered kitchen, in sunshine and peace, while Claude sleeps away the morning. We should be close, she and I, closer than lovers. There’s something we should be whispering to each other.

  Perhaps it’s goodbye.

  EIGHTEEN

  In the early afternoon the phone rings and the future introduces herself. Chief Inspector Clare Allison, now attached to the case. The voice sounds friendly, no hint of accusation. That may be a bad sign.

  We’re in the kitchen again, Claude has the phone. His first coffee of the day is in his other hand. Trudy stands close and we hear both sides. Case? The word packs a threat. Chief inspector? Also unhelpful.

  I gauge my uncle’s anxiety by his zeal to accommodate. “Oh yes. Yes! Of course. Please do.”

  Chief Inspector Allison intends to visit us. Normal practice would be for both to come to the station for a chat. Or to make statements, if appropriate. However, due to Trudy’s advanced condition, the family’s grief, the chief inspector and a sergeant will come by within the hour. She’d like to take a look at the site of the deceased’s last contacts.

  This last, innocent and reasonable to my ears, puts Claude into a frenzy of welcome. “Please come. Marvellous. Do. Take us as you find us. Can’t wait. You’ll—”

  She hangs up. He turns towards us, probably ashen, and says in a tone of disappointment, “Ah.”

  Trudy can’t resist mimicry. “All…fine, is it?”

  “What’s this case? It’s not a criminal matter.” He appeals to an imaginary audience, a council of elders. A jury.

  “I hate it,” my mother murmurs, more to herself. Or to me, I’d like to believe. “I hate it, I hate it.”

  “This is supposed to be for the coroner.” Claude walks away from us, aggrieved, takes a turn around the kitchen and comes back to us, outraged. Now his complaint is to Trudy. “This is not a police matter.”

  “Oh really?” she says. “Better phone the inspector and put her straight.”

  “That poet woman. I knew we couldn’t trust her.”

  We understand that somehow Elodie is my mother’s charge, that this is an accusation.

  “You fancied her.”

  “You said she’d be useful.”

  “You fancied her.”

  But the deadpan reiteration doesn’t needle him.

  “Who wouldn’t? Who cares?”

  “I do.”

  I ask myself once more what I gain by their falling out. It could bring them down. Then I’ll keep Trudy. I’ve heard her say that in prison nursing mothers have a better life. But I’ll lose my birthright, the dream of all humanity, my freedom. Whereas together, as a team, they might scrape through. Then give me away. No mother, but I’ll be free. So which? I’ve been round this before, always returning to the same hallowed place, the only principled decision. I’ll risk material comfort and take my chances in the wider world. I’ve been confined too long. My vote’s for liberty. The murderers must escape. This is a good moment then, before the Elodie argument goes too far, for me to give my mother another kick, distract her from squabbling with the interesting fact of my existence. Not once, not twice, but the magic number of all the best old stories. Three times, like Peter’s denial of Jesus.

  “Oh, oh, oh!” She almost sings it. Claude pulls out a chair for her and brings a glass of water.

  “You’re sweating.”

  “Well, I’m hot.”

  He tries the windows. They haven’t budged in years. He looks in the fridge for ice. The trays are empty in the recent cause of three rounds of gin and tonics. So he sits across from her and extends his cooling sympathies.

  “It’ll be all right.”

  “No, it won’t.”

  His silence agrees. I was considering a fourth strike, but Trudy’s mood is dangerous. She might go on the attack and invite a dangerous response.

  After a pause, in mollifying mode, he says, “We should run through it one last time.”

  “What about a lawyer?”

  “Bit late now.”

  “Tell them we won’t talk without one.”

  “Won’t look good when they’re only coming round for a chat.”

  “I hate this.”

  “We should run through it one last time.”

  But they don’t. Stupefied, they contemplate Chief Inspector Allison’s approach. By now, within the hour could mean within the minute. Knowing everything, almost everything, I’m party to the crime, safe, obviously, from questioning, but fearful. And curious, impatient to witness the inspector’s skills. An open mind could peel these two apart in minutes. Trudy betrayed by nerves, Claude by stupidity.

  I’m trying to place them, the morning coffee cups from my father’s visit. Transferred, I now think, to wait unwashed by the kitchen sink. DNA on one cup will prove my mother and uncle to be telling the truth. The Danish debris must be close by.

  “Quickly,” says Claude at last. “Let’s do this. Where did the row start?”

  “In the kitchen.”

  “No. On the do
orstep. What was it about?”

  “Money.”

  “No. Throwing you out. How long was he depressed?”

  “Years.”

  “Months. How much did I lend him?”

  “A thousand.”

  “Five. Christ. Trudy.”

  “I’m pregnant. It makes you dim.”

  “You said it yourself yesterday. Everything as it was, plus the depression, minus the smoothies, plus the row.”

  “Plus the gloves. Minus he was moving back in.”

  “God yes. Again. What was he depressed about?”

  “Us. Debts. Work. Baby.”

  “Good.”

  They go round a second time. By the third, it sounds better. What sickening complicity that I should wish them success.

  “So say it then.”

  “As it happened. Minus the smoothies, plus the row and gloves, minus the depression, plus he was moving back in.”

  “No. Fuck! Trudy. As was. Plus the depression, minus the smoothies, plus the row, plus the gloves, minus he was moving back in.”

  The doorbell rings and they freeze.

  “Tell them we’re not ready.”

  This is my mother’s idea of a joke. Or evidence of her terror.

  Muttering probable obscenities, Claude goes towards the videophone, changes his mind and makes for the stairs and the front door.

  Trudy and I take a nervous shuffle around the kitchen. She too is muttering as she works on her story. Usefully, each successive effort of memory removes her further from the actual events. She’s memorising her memories. The transcription errors will be in her favour. They’ll be a helpful cushion at first, on their way to becoming the truth. She could also tell herself—she didn’t buy the glycol, go to Judd Street, mix the drinks, plant stuff in the car, dump the blender. She cleaned up the kitchen—not against the law. Convinced, she’ll be liberated from conscious guile and may stand a chance. The effective lie, like the masterly golf swing, is free of self-awareness. I’ve listened to the sports commentaries.