Nutshell

by Ian Mcewan

  “Depression’s a brute.” Claude surprises me with this insight. “All the good things in life vanish from your—”

  My mother cuts in. Her voice is hard. She’s had enough. “I know you’re younger than me. But do I really have to spell it out for you? Company in debt. Personally in debt. Unhappy with his work. Child on the way he didn’t want. Wife fucking his brother. Chronic skin complaint. And depression. Is that clear? You think it isn’t bad enough without your theatrics, without your poetry readings and prizes and telling me it doesn’t make sense? You got into his bed. Count yourself lucky.”

  Trudy in turn is cut off. By a shriek and the smack of a chair tipping backwards to the floor.

  I note at this point that my father has receded. Like a particle in physics, he escapes definition in his flight from us: the assertive, successful poet-teacher-publisher, calmly intent on repossessing his house, his father’s house; or the hapless, put-upon cuckold, the unworldly fool cramped by debt and misery and lack of talent. The more we hear of one, the less we believe of the other.

  Elodie’s first uttered sound is both a word and a sob. “Never!”

  A silence, through which I sense Claude, then my mother, reaching for their drinks.

  “I didn’t know what he was going to say last night. All untrue! He wanted you back. He was trying to make you jealous. He was never going to throw you out.”

  Her voice dips as she bends to right the chair. “That’s why I’m here. To tell you, and you better get this right. Nothing! Nothing happened between us. John Cairncross was my editor and friend and teacher. He helped me become a writer. Is that clear?”

  I’m heartlessly suspicious, but they believe her. That she was not my father’s lover should be a deliverance for them, but I think it raises other possibilities. An inconvenient woman bearing witness to all the reasons my father had to live. How unfortunate.

  “Sit down,” Trudy says quietly. “I believe you. No more shouting, please.”

  Claude refills the glasses. The Pouilly-Fumé seems to me too thin, too piercing. Too young, perhaps, not right for the occasion. Summer-evening heat aside, a muscular Pomerol might suit us better when strong emotions are on display. If only there was a cellar, if I could go down there now, into the dusty gloom to pull a bottle off the racks. Stand quietly with it a moment, squint at its label, nod wisely to myself as I bring it up. Adult life, a faraway oasis. Not even a mirage.

  I imagine my mother’s bare arms folded on the table, eyes steady and clear. No one could guess at her torment. John loved only her. His invocation of Dubrovnik was sincere, his declaration of hatred, his dreams of strangling her, his love for Elodie—all hopeful lies. But she mustn’t go down, she must be staunch. She’s putting herself in a mode, a mood, of serious probing, seemingly not unfriendly.

  “You identified the body.”

  Elodie is also calmer. “They tried to get hold of you. No reply. They had his phone, they saw his calls to me. About the reading tonight—nothing else. I asked my fiancé to go with me, I was so scared.”

  “How did he look?”

  “She means John,” Claude says.

  “I was surprised. He looked peaceful. Except…” She draws a sharp, inward sigh. “Except his mouth. It was so long, so wide, stretched almost ear to ear, like an insane smile. It was closed though. I was glad about that.”

  Around me, in the walls and through the crimson chambers that lie beyond them, I feel my mother tremble. One more physical detail like this will undo her.

  FIFTEEN

  Early in my conscious life one of my fingers, not then subject to my influence, brushed past a shrimp-like protuberance between my legs. And though shrimp and fingertip lay at differing distances from my brain, they felt each other simultaneously, a diverting issue in neuroscience known as the binding problem. Days later it happened again on another finger. Some developmental time passed and I grasped the implications. Biology is destiny, and destiny is digital, and in this case binary. It was bleakly simple. The strangely essential matter at the heart of every birth was now settled. Either—or. Nothing else. No one exclaims at the moment of one’s dazzling coming-out, It’s a person! Instead: It’s a girl, It’s a boy. Pink or blue—a minimal improvement on Henry Ford’s offer of cars of any colour so long as they were black. Only two sexes. I was disappointed. If human bodies, minds, fates are so complex, if we are free like no other mammal, why limit the range? I seethed, and then, like everyone else, I settled down and made the best of my inheritance. For sure, complexity would come upon me in time. Until then, my plan was to arrive as a freeborn Englishman, a creature of the post English-as-well-as-Scottish-and-French Enlightenment. My selfhood would be sculpted by pleasure, conflict, experience, ideas and my own judgement, as rocks and trees are shaped by rain, wind and time. Besides, in my confinement I had other concerns: my drink problem, family worries, an uncertain future in which I faced a possible jail sentence or a life in “care” in the careless lap of Leviathan, fostered up to the thirteenth floor.

  But lately, as I track my mother’s shifting relation to her crime, I’ve remembered rumours of a new dispensation in the matter of blue and pink. Be careful what you wish for. Here’s a new politics in university life. The digression may seem unimportant, but I intend to apply as soon as I can. Physics, Gaelic, anything. So I’m bound to take an interest. A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. They’re on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority’s blessing, its validation of their chosen identities. The decline of the West in new guise perhaps. Or the exaltation and liberation of the self. A social-media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options—neutrois, two spirit, bigender…any colour you like, Mr. Ford. Biology is not destiny after all, and there’s cause for celebration. A shrimp is neither limiting nor stable. I declare my undeniable feeling for who I am. If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black. And vice versa. I may announce myself as disabled, or disabled in context. If my identity is that of a believer, I’m easily wounded, my flesh torn to bleeding by any questioning of my faith. Offended, I enter a state of grace. Should inconvenient opinions hover near me like fallen angels or evil djinn (a mile being too near), I’ll be in need of the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies. Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing on my face, my brain, like unwholesome dogs.

  I’ll feel, therefore I’ll be. Let poverty go begging and climate change braise in hell. Social justice can drown in ink. I’ll be an activist of the emotions, a loud, campaigning spirit fighting with tears and sighs to shape institutions around my vulnerable self. My identity will be my precious, my only true possession, my access to the only truth. The world must love, nourish and protect it as I do. If my college does not bless me, validate me and give me what I clearly need, I’ll press my face into the vice chancellor’s lapels and weep. Then demand his resignation.

  The womb, or this womb, isn’t such a bad place, a little like the grave, “fine and private” in one of my father’s favourite poems. I’ll make a version of a womb for my student days, set aside the Enlightenments of Rosbifs, Jocks and Frogs. Away with the real, with dull facts and hated pretence of objectivity. Feeling is queen. Unless she identifies as king.

  I know. Sarcasm ill suits the unborn. And why digress? Because my mother is in step with new times. She may not know it, but she marches with a movement. Her status as a murderer is a fact, an item in the world outside herself. But that’s old thinking. She affirms, she identifies as innocent. Even as she strains to clean up traces in the kitchen, she feels blameless and therefore is—almost. Her grief, her tears, are proof of probity. She’s beginning to convince herself with her story of depression and suicide. She can almost believe the sham evidence in the car. Only persuade herself and she’ll deceive with ease and consistency. Lies will be her truth. But her construction is new and fra
il. My father’s ghastly smile could upend it, that knowing grin coldly stretched across a corpse’s face. That’s why it’s needed, Elodie’s validation of my mother’s innocent self. And why she leans forward now, taking me with her, listening tenderly to the poet’s halting words. For Elodie will soon be in interview with the police. Her beliefs, which will direct her memory and order her account, must be properly shaped.

  Claude, unlike Trudy, owns his crime. This is a Renaissance man, a Machiavel, an old-school villain who believes he can get away with murder. The world doesn’t come to him through a haze of the subjective; it comes refracted by stupidity and greed, bent as through glass or water, but etched on a screen before the inner eye, a lie as sharp and bright as truth. Claude doesn’t know he’s stupid. If you’re stupid, how can you tell? He may blunder through an undergrowth of clichés, but he understands what he did and why. He’ll flourish, without a backward glance, unless caught and punished, and then he’ll never blame himself, only his bad luck among random events. He can claim his inheritance, his tenure among the rational. Enemies of the Enlightenment will say he’s the embodiment of its spirit. Nonsense!

  But I know what they mean.

  SIXTEEN

  Elodie eludes me, like a half-remembered song—an unfinished melody indeed. When she squeezed by us in the hall, when she was still, in our thoughts, my father’s girl, I listened out for the alluring creak of leather. But no, today she’s dressed in softer style, more colourfully, I think. She would have cut a figure at the poetry event tonight. When she was wailing in distress her voice was pure. But her account of the visit to the mortuary, clutching at her fiancé’s wrist, was a reminder, as each growling sentence trailed away, of the guttural urbane, her tasty fry-up. Now, as my mother extends an arm across the kitchen table to enfold the visitor’s hand in hers, I hear in the vowels the duck’s quack restored. Elodie’s relaxing into my mother’s confidence as she, the poet, praises my father’s poems. It’s the sonnets she loves most.

  “He wrote them in a conversational style, but dense with meaning, and so musical.”

  Her use of tense is correct but offensive. She speaks as if the death of John Cairncross has been fully confirmed, absorbed, publicly acknowledged, historically beyond grief like the Sack of Rome. Trudy will mind more than I do. I’ve been conditioned to believe his poetry was a dud. Today, everything is up for revaluation.

  Her voice grave with insincerity, Trudy says, “It will be a long time before we have the full measure of him as a poet.”

  “Oh yes, oh yes! But we already know something. Beyond Hughes. Up there with Fenton, Heaney and Plath.”

  “Names to conjure with,” says Claude.

  This is my Elodie problem. What is she doing here? She dances like a wild Corybant, in and out of focus. Overpraising my father may be a style of comforting my mother. If so, that’s poorly conceived. Or sorrow distorts her judgement. That’s forgivable. Or her self-importance is bound up with her patron’s. That’s not. Or she’s come to find out who killed her lover. That’s interesting.

  Should I like her or distrust her?

  My mother loves her and won’t let go of her hand. “You’ll know this better than I do. Talent on that scale comes at a cost. Not only to himself. Kind to everyone who isn’t close. Strangers too. And people saying, ‘Almost as kind as Heaney.’ Not that I ever knew or read him. But just below the surface John was in agony—”

  “No!”

  “Self-doubt. Constant mental pain. Lashing out at those he loved. But cruellest to himself. Then the poem gets written at last—”

  “And then the sun comes out.” Claude has caught his sister-in-law’s drift.

  She says loudly over him, “That conversational style? One long bloody battle to wrench it from his soul—”

  “Oh!”

  “Personal life wrecked. And now—”

  She chokes up on the tiny word that contains the fateful present. On such a day of revaluation I could be wrong. But I always thought my father composed fast, with reproachable ease. It was held against him in the review he once read aloud to prove his indifference. I heard him say it to my mother during one of his sad visits: if it doesn’t come at once, it shouldn’t come. There’s a special grace in facility. All art aspires to the condition of Mozart’s. Then he laughed at his own presumption. Trudy won’t remember. And she’ll never know that even as she lied about my father’s mental health, his poetry raised her diction. Lashing out? Wrench? Soul? Borrowed clothes!

  But they’ve made an impression. Cold mother, she knows what she’s about.

  Elodie whispers, “I never knew.”

  Then, another silence. Trudy waits intensely, like an angler whose fly is sweetly placed. Claude starts a word, a mere vowel, severed, I’d guess, by her glance.

  Our visitor begins dramatically. “All John’s instructions are engraved on my heart. When to break a line. ‘Never randomly. Stay at the helm. Make sense, a unit of sense. Decide, decide, decide.’ And know your scansion so you ‘disrupt the beat knowingly.’ Then, ‘Form isn’t a cage. It’s an old friend you can only pretend to leave.’ And feelings. He’d say, ‘Don’t unpack your heart. One detail tells the truth.’ Also, ‘Write for the voice, not the page, write for the untidy evening in the parish hall.’ He made us read James Fenton on the genius of the trochee. Afterwards, he set the assignment for the week ahead—a poem in four stanzas of trochaic tetrameters catalectic. We laughed at this gobbledygook. He had us singing an example, a nursery rhyme. ‘Boys and girls come out to play.’ Then he recited from memory Auden’s ‘Autumn Song.’ ‘Now the leaves are falling fast, / Nurse’s flowers will not last.’ Why is the missing syllable at the end of the line so effective? We couldn’t answer him. Then what about a poem with the weak syllable restored? ‘Wendy speeded my undressing, / Wendy is the sheet’s caressing.’ He knew the whole of Betjeman’s ‘Indoor Games near Newbury’ and made us giggle. So, for that assignment, I wrote the first of my owl poems—in that same metre of ‘Autumn Song.’

  “He made us learn our own strongest poems by heart. So we’d be bold at our first reading, stand on stage without our pages. The idea made me nearly faint with fear. Listen, now I’m slipping into trochees!”

  Talk of scansion is of interest only to me. I sense my mother’s impatience. This has gone on too long. If I had breath to hold, I’d hold it now.

  “He bought us drinks, lent us money we never gave back, heard us out on boyfriend-girlfriend trouble, fights with parents, so-called writer’s block. He stood bail for one drunken would-be poet in our group. He wrote letters to get us grants, or humble jobs on literary pages. We loved the poets he loved, his opinions became our own. We listened to his radio talks, we went to the readings he sent us to. And we went to his own. We knew his poems, his anecdotes, his catchphrases. We thought we knew him. It never crossed our minds that John, the grown-up, the high priest, had problems too. Or that he doubted his poetry just as we did ours. We mostly worried about sex and money. Nothing like his agony. If only we’d known.”

  The fly was taken, the shortening line was taut and trembling, and now the catch is in the keep-net. I feel my mother relax.

  That mysterious particle, my father, is gaining mass, growing in seriousness and integrity. I’m caught between pride and guilt.

  In a brave, kind voice Trudy says, “It would have made no difference. You mustn’t blame yourself. We knew everything, Claude and I. We tried everything.”

  Claude, stirred by the sound of his name, clears his throat. “Beyond help. His own worst enemy.”

  “Before you go,” says Trudy, “there’s a little something I want you to have.”

  We climb the stairs to the hall and then to the first floor, my mother and I moving lugubriously, Elodie close behind. The purpose must surely be to let Claude gather up whatever he must dispose of. Now we’re standing in the library. I hear the young poet’s intake of breath as she looks around at three walls of poetry.

  “I�
�m sorry it smells so musty in here.”

  Already. The books, the library air itself, in mourning.

  “I’d like you to take one.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t. Shouldn’t you keep it all together?”

  “I want you to. So would he.”

  And so we wait while she decides.

  Elodie is embarrassed and therefore quick. She returns to show her choice.

  “John’s put his name in it. Peter Porter. The Cost of Seriousness. It’s got ‘An Exequy.’ Tetrameters again. The most beautiful.”

  “Ah yes. He came to dinner once. I think.”

  On that last word the doorbell sounds. Louder, longer than usual. My mother tenses, her heart begins to pound. What is it she dreads?

  “I know you’ll have a lot of visitors. Thank you so—”

  “Shush!”

  We go quietly onto the landing. Trudy leans cautiously over the banister. Careful now. Distantly we hear Claude talking on the videophone, then his footsteps ascending from the kitchen.

  “Oh hell,” my mother whispers.

  “Are you all right? Do you need to sit down?”

  “I think I do.”

  We retreat, the better to be concealed from the front door’s line of sight. Elodie helps my mother into the cracked leather armchair in which she used to daydream while her husband recited to her.

  We hear the front door open, the murmur of voices, the door closing. Then only one set of footsteps coming back along the hall. Of course, the Danish takeaway, the open sandwiches, my dream of herring about to be fulfilled, in part.

  All this Trudy recognises too. “I’ll see you out.”

  Downstairs, at the door, just as Elodie is leaving, she turns to say to Trudy, “I’m due at the police station tomorrow morning, nine o’clock.”

  “I’m so sorry. It’s going to be hard for you. Just tell them everything you know.”