Nutshell

by Ian Mcewan

  I attend to and sift the descending footsteps. Chief Inspector Allison is light-boned, even bird-like, for all her seniority. There are handshakes. From the sergeant’s wooden “how d’you do” I recognise the older man from yesterday’s visit. What’s blocked his promotion? Class, education, IQ, scandal—the last, I hope, for which he might take the blame and doesn’t need my pity.

  The agile chief inspector sits at the kitchen table and invites us all to do the same, as if the house were hers. I think I imagine my mother thinking that she might more easily mislead a man. Allison spreads a folder, and clicks repeatedly the spring-loaded button of her pen as she speaks. She tells us that the first thing to say—then pauses with great intensity of effect to look, I’m certain, deeply into Trudy and Claude’s eyes—is how deeply sorry she is at this loss of a dear husband, dear brother, dear friend. No dear father. I’m fighting a familiar, rising chill of exclusion. But the voice is warm, larger than her frame, relaxed in the burden of office. Her mild cockney is the very register of urban poise and won’t be easily challenged. Not by my mother’s expensively constrained vowels. No pulling that old trick. History has moved on. One day most British statesmen will speak like the chief inspector. I wonder if she has a gun. Too grand. Like the queen not carrying money. Shooting people is for sergeants and below.

  Allison explains that this is an informal conversation to help her form a fuller understanding of the tragic events. Trudy and Claude are under no obligation to answer questions. But she’s wrong. They feel they are. To refuse will appear suspicious. But if the chief inspector is one move ahead, she may think that compliance is even more suspect. Those with nothing to hide would insist on a lawyer as a precaution against police error or unlawful intrusion.

  As we settle round the table I note and resent the absence of polite queries about me. When’s it due? Boy or girl?

  Instead, the chief inspector wastes no time. “You might show me around when we’re done talking.”

  More statement than request. Claude is eager, too eager, to comply. “Oh yes. Yes!”

  A search warrant would be the alternative. But there’s nothing upstairs of interest to the police beyond the squalor.

  The chief inspector says to Trudy, “Your husband came here yesterday about ten a.m.?”

  “That’s right.” Her tone is impassive, an example to Claude.

  “And there was tension.”

  “Of course.”

  “Why of course?”

  “I’ve been living with his brother in what John thought was his house.”

  “Whose house is it?”

  “It’s the marital home.”

  “The marriage was over?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mind if I ask? Did he think it was over?”

  Trudy hesitates. There may be a right and wrong answer.

  “He wanted me back but he wanted his women friends.”

  “Know any names?”

  “No.”

  “But he told you about them.”

  “No.”

  “But you knew somehow.”

  “Of course I knew.”

  Trudy allows herself a little contempt. As if to say, I’m the real woman here. But she’s ignored Claude’s coaching. She was to speak the truth, adding and subtracting only what was agreed. I hear my uncle stir in his chair.

  Without pause, Allison changes the subject. “You had a coffee.”

  “Yes.

  “All three. Round this table?”

  “All three.” This is Claude, worried perhaps that his silence is giving a poor impression.

  “Anything else?”

  “What?”

  “With the coffee. Did you offer him anything else?”

  “No.” My mother sounds cautious.

  “And what was in the coffee?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Milk? Sugar?”

  “He always had it black.” Her pulse rate has risen.

  But Clare Allison’s manner is impenetrably neutral. She turns to Claude. “So you lent him money.”

  “Yes.”

  “How much?”

  “Five thousand.” Claude and Trudy answer in ragged chorus.

  “A cheque?”

  “Cash, actually. It’s how he wanted it.”

  “Have you been to this juice bar on Judd Street?”

  Claude’s answer is as quick as the question. “Once or twice. It was John who told us about it.”

  “You weren’t there yesterday, I suppose.”

  “No.”

  “You never borrowed his black hat with the wide brim?”

  “Never. Not my sort of thing.”

  This may be the wrong answer, but there’s not time to work it out. The questions have acquired new weight. Trudy’s heart is beating faster. I wouldn’t trust her to speak. But she does, in a constricted voice.

  “Birthday present from me. He loved that hat.”

  The chief inspector is already moving on to something different, but she turns back. “It’s all we can see of him on the CCTV. Sent it off for a DNA match.”

  “We haven’t offered you any tea or coffee,” Trudy says in her altered voice.

  The chief inspector must have refused both for herself and the still-silent sergeant with a shake of the head. “That’s most of it these days,” she says in a tone of nostalgia. “Science and computer screens. Now, where was—ah yes. There was tension. But I see in the notes there was a row.”

  Claude will be making the same racing calculations as me. His own hair will be found in the hat. The correct answer was yes, he borrowed it a while ago.

  “Yes,” Trudy says. “One of many.”

  “Would you mind telling me the—”

  “He wanted me to move out. I said I’d go in my own time.”

  “When he drove off what was his state of mind?”

  “Not good. He was a mess. Confused. He didn’t really want me to go. He wanted me back. Tried to make me jealous, pretending that Elodie was his lover. She put us right. There was no affair.”

  Too much detail. She’s trying to regain control. But talking too fast. She needs to take a breath.

  Clare Allison is silent while we wait to know the next direction she’ll take. But she stays with this and puts the matter as delicately as she can. “That’s not my information.”

  A moment of numbness, as if sound itself has been murdered. The space around me shrinks as Trudy seems to deflate. Her spine slumps like an old woman’s. I’m just a little proud of myself. I always had my suspicions. How eagerly they believed Elodie. Now they know: nurse’s flowers will certainly not last. But I should be cautious too. The chief inspector might have her own reason to lie. She’s clicking her ballpoint pen, ready to move on.

  My mother says in a small voice, “Well, I suppose I was the more deceived.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Cairncross. But my sources are good. Let’s just say that this is a complicated young woman.”

  I could explore the theory that it’s no bad thing for Trudy to be the injured party, to have corroboration for the story of her faithless husband. But I’m stunned; we’re both stunned. My father, that uncertain principle, spins yet further away from me just as the chief inspector comes at my mother with another question. She answers in the same small voice, with the added tremor of a punished little girl.

  “Any violence?”

  “No.”

  “Threats?”

  “No.”

  “None from you.”

  “No.”

  “What about his depression? What can you tell me?”

  It’s kindly said and must be a trap. But Trudy doesn’t pause. Too distraught to coin new lies, too persuaded of her truth, she falls back on all she said before, in the same unlikely language. Constant mental pain…lashed out at those he loved…wrenched the poems from his soul. A vivid image comes to me of a parade of exhausted soldiers with ruined plumage. A sepia memory of a podcast, the Napoleonic Wars in many episodes.
Back when my mother and I were at ease. Oh, that Boney had stayed within his borders, I remember thinking, and gone on writing good laws for France.

  Claude joins in. “His own worst enemy.”

  The altered acoustic tells me that the chief inspector has turned to look directly at him. “Any other enemies, apart from himself?”

  The tone is unassuming. At best, the form of the question’s lighthearted, at worst, fertile with sinister intent.

  “I wouldn’t know. We were never close.”

  “Tell me,” she says, her voice now warmer. “About your childhood together. That is, if you want to.”

  He does. “I was younger by three years. He was good at everything. Sports, studying, girls. He thought I was an insignificant scab. When I grew up I did the only thing he couldn’t. Make money.”

  “Property.”

  “That sort of thing.”

  The chief inspector turns back to Trudy. “Is this house for sale?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “I’d heard it was.”

  Trudy doesn’t respond. Her first good move in several minutes.

  I’m wondering if the chief inspector is in uniform. She must be. Her peaked hat will be by her elbow on the table, like a giant beak. I see her as free of mammalian sympathies, narrow-faced, thin-lipped, tight-buttoned. Surely her head nods pigeon-like when she walks. The sergeant thinks she’s a stickler. Bound for promotion out of his league. She’ll fly. Either she’s decided for John Cairncross’s suicide or she has reason to believe that a late third-term gravid is good cover for a crime. Everything the chief inspector says, the least remark, is open to interpretation. The only power we have is to project. She may, like Claude, be clever or stupid or both at once. We just don’t know. Our ignorance is her perfect hand. My guess is that she suspects little, knows nothing. That her superiors are watching. That she must be delicate because this conversation is irregular and could compromise due process. That she’ll choose what’s appropriate over what’s true. That her career is her egg and she’ll sit on it, warm it, and wait.

  But I’ve been wrong before.

  NINETEEN

  What next? Clare Allison wishes to look around. A bad idea. But to withdraw permission now, when, for all we know, things are going badly, will make them worse. The sergeant goes first up the wooden stairs, followed by Claude, the chief inspector, then my mother and me. On the ground floor the chief inspector says that if we wouldn’t mind, she’d like to go to the top and “work down.” Trudy doesn’t care to climb more stairs. The others continue up while we go into the sitting room to sit and think.

  I dispatch my light-footed thoughts ahead of them, first to the library. Plaster dust, a smell of death, but relative order. The floor above, bedroom and bathroom, chaos of an intimate kind, the bed itself a tangle of lust and broken sleep, the floor strewn or piled with Trudy’s discarded clothes, the bathroom likewise with lidless pots, unguents, and dirty underwear. I wonder what disorder tells suspicious eyes. It can’t be morally neutral. A contempt for things, for order, cleanliness, must lie on a spectrum with scorn for laws, values, for life itself. What is a criminal but a disordered spirit? However, excessive order in a bedroom might be suspicious too. The chief inspector, bright-eyed as a robin, will take it in at a glance and come away. But below the level of conscious thought, disgust might bend her judgement.

  There are rooms above the second floor but I’ve never been so far. I bring my thoughts to ground and, like a dutiful child, attend to my mother’s state. Her heart rate has settled. She seems almost calm. Perhaps fatalistic. Her engorged bladder presses against my head. But she can’t be troubled to move. She’s making her calculations, thinking perhaps of their plan. But she should ask herself where her interests lie. Disassociate from Claude. Land him in it somehow. No point in both doing time. Then she and I could languish here. She won’t want to give me away when she’s alone in a big house. In which case I promise to forgive her. Or deal with her later.

  But there’s no time for schemes. I hear them coming back down. They pass by the open sitting-room door on their way to the front entrance. The chief inspector surely can’t leave without a respectful goodbye to the bereaved wife. In fact Claude has opened the front door and is showing Allison where his brother was parked, how the car failed to start at first, how, despite the row, they had waved when the engine turned and the car reversed into the road. A lesson in truth-telling.

  Then Claude and the police are before us.

  “Trudy—may I call you Trudy? Such a terrible time and you’ve been so helpful. So hospitable. I can’t—” The chief inspector breaks off, her attention distracted. “Were these your husband’s?”

  She’s looking at the cardboard boxes my father carried in and left under the bay window. My mother gets to her feet. If there’s to be trouble she’d better use her height. And width.

  “He was moving back in. Leaving Shoreditch.”

  “May I see?”

  “Just books. But go ahead.”

  There’s a gasp from the sergeant as he goes down on his knees to open the boxes. I’d say the chief inspector is squatting on her haunches, not a robin now, but a giant duck. It’s wrong of me to dislike her. She’s the rule of law and I count myself already in the court of Hobbes. The state must have its monopoly of violence. But the chief inspector’s manner irritates me, the way she riffles through my father’s possessions, his favourite books, while seeming to talk to herself, knowing we’ve no choice but to listen.

  “Beats me. Very, very sad…right on the slip road…”

  Of course, this is a performance, a prelude. And sure enough. She stands. I think she’s looking at Trudy. Perhaps at me.

  “But the real mystery is this. Not a single print on that glycol bottle. Nothing on the cup. Just heard from forensics. Not a trace. So strange.”

  “Ah!” says Claude, but Trudy cuts across him. I should warn her. She mustn’t be too eager. Her explanation comes out too fast. “Gloves. Skin complaint. He was so ashamed of his hands.”

  “Ah, the gloves!” the chief inspector exclaims. “You’re right. Clean forgot!” She’s unfolding a sheet of paper. “These?”

  My mother steps forward to look. It must be a printout of a photograph. “Yes.”

  “Didn’t have another pair?”

  “Not like these. I used to tell him he didn’t need them. No one really minded.”

  “Wore them all the time?”

  “No. But a lot, especially when he was feeling down.”

  The chief inspector is leaving and that’s a relief. We’re all following her out into the hall.

  “Here’s a funny thing. Forensics again. Phoned through this morning and it went right out of my mind. Should have told you. So much else going on. Cuts to front-line services. Local crime wave. Anyway. Forefinger and thumb of the right glove. You’d never guess. A nest of tiny spiders. Scores of them. And Trudy, you’ll be pleased to know this—babies all doing well. Crawling already!”

  The front door is opened, probably by the sergeant. The chief inspector steps outside. As she walks away her voice recedes and merges with the sound of passing traffic. “Can’t for the life of me remember the Latin name. Long time since a hand was in that glove.”

  The sergeant lays a hand on my mother’s arm and speaks at last, saying softly in parting, “Back tomorrow morning. Clear up a last few things.”

  TWENTY

  At last the moment is on us. There are decisions to take, urgent, irreversible, self-damning. But first, Trudy needs two minutes of solitude. We hurry down to the basement, to the facility the humorous Scots call the cludgie. There, as the pressure on my skull is relieved and my mother squats some seconds longer than is necessary, sighing to herself, my thoughts clarify. Or take a new direction. I thought the murderers should escape, for the sake of my liberty. This may be too narrow a view, too self-interested. There are other considerations. Hatred of my uncle may exceed love for my mother. Punishing him may be
nobler than saving her. But it might be possible to achieve both.

  These concerns remain with me as we return to the kitchen. It appears that after the police left, Claude discovered that he needed a Scotch. Hearing it poured from the bottle as we enter, a seductive sound, Trudy finds she needs one too. A big one. With tap water, half and half. Silently, my uncle complies. Silently, they stand facing each other by the sink. Not the moment for toasts. They’re contemplating each other’s errors, or even their own. Or deciding what to do. This is the emergency they dreaded and planned for. They knock back their measures and without speaking settle for another. Our lives are about to change. Chief Inspector Allison looms above us, a capricious, smiling god. We won’t know, until it’s too late, why she didn’t make the arrests just then, why she’s left us alone. Rolling up the case, waiting for the DNA on the hat, moving on? Mother and uncle must consider that any choice they make now could be just the one she has in mind for them, and she’s waiting. Just as possible, this, their mysterious plan, won’t have occurred to her and they could be one step ahead. One good reason to act boldly. Instead, for now, they prefer a drink. Perhaps whatever they do obliges Clare Allison, including an interlude with a single malt. But no, their only chance is to make the radical choice—and now.

  Trudy raises an arm to forestall a third. Claude is more steadfast. He’s in strict pursuit of mental clarity. We listen to him pour—he’s having it neat, and long—then we listen to him swallow hard, that familiar sound. They might be wondering how they can avoid a row just when they need a common purpose. From far away comes the sound of a siren, an ambulance, merely, but it speaks to their fears. The latticework of the state lies invisibly across the city. Hard to escape it. It’s a prompt, for at last there’s speech, a useful statement of the obvious.

  “This is bad.” My mother’s voice is croaky and low.

  “Where are the passports?”

  “I’ve got them. And the cash?”

  “In my case.”

  But they don’t move and the asymmetry of the exchange—Trudy’s evasive reply—doesn’t provoke my uncle. He’s well into his third as Trudy’s first reaches me. Hardly sensual, but it speaks or sinks to the occasion, to a sense of an ending with no beginning in sight. I conjure an old military road through a cold glen, a whiff of wet stone and peat, the sound of steel and patient trudging on loose rock, and the weight of bitter injustice. So far from the south-facing slopes, the dusty bloom on swelling purple clusters framing receding hills and their overlapping shades of ever paler indigo. I’d rather be there. But I’m conceding—the Scotch, my first, sets something free. A harsh liberation—the open gate leads to struggle and fear of what the mind might devise. It’s happening now to me. I’m asked, I’m asking myself, what it is that I most want now. Anything I want. Realism not a limiting factor. Cut the ropes, set the mind free. I can answer without thinking—I’m going through the open gate.