Nutshell(14)

‘I don’t care about house prices,’ Trudy says. ‘That’s for later. The bigger question is this. Where’s your risk, what’s your exposure here when you’re wanting a share of the money? If something goes wrong and I go down, where will you be once I’ve scrubbed you out of my bedroom?’

I’m surprised by her bluntness. And then I experience not quite joy, but its expectation, a cool uncoiling in my gut. A falling out among villains, the already useless plot ruined, my father saved.

‘Trudy, I’ll be with you at every step.’

‘You’ll be safe at home. Alibis in place. Perfect deniability.’

She’s been thinking about this. Thinking without my knowing. She’s a tigress.

Claude says. ‘The thing is—’

‘What I want,’ my mother says with a vehemence that hardens the walls around me, ‘is you tied into this, and I mean totally. If I fail, you fail. If I—’

The doorbell rings once, twice, three times, and we freeze. No one, in my experience, has ever come to the front door so late. Claude’s plan is so hopeless it’s failed already, for here are the police. No one else rings a bell with such dogged insistence. The kitchen was bugged long ago, they’ve heard it all. Trudy will have her way – we’ll all go down together. Babies Behind Bars was a too-long radio documentary I listened to one afternoon. Convicted murderers in the States, nursing mothers, were allowed to raise their infants in their cells. This was presented as an enlightened development. But I remember thinking, These babies have done nothing wrong. Set them free! Ah well. Only in America.

‘I’ll go.’

He gets up and crosses the room to the video entryphone on the wall by the kitchen door. He peers at the screen.

‘It’s your husband,’ he says dully.

‘Jesus.’ My mother pauses to think. ‘No use pretending I’m not here. You better hide somewhere. In the laundry room. He never—’

‘There’s someone with him. A woman. A young woman. Rather pretty, I’d say.’

Another silence. The bell rings again. Longer.

My mother’s voice is even, though strained. ‘In that case, go and let them in. But Claude, darling. Kindly put that glycol bottle away.’





SEVEN


CERTAIN ARTISTS IN print or paint flourish, like babies-to-be, in confined spaces. Their narrow subjects may confound or disappoint some. Courtship among the eighteenth-century gentry, life beneath the sail, talking rabbits, sculpted hares, fat people in oils, dog portraits, horse portraits, portraits of aristocrats, reclining nudes, Nativities by the million, and Crucifixions, Assumptions, bowls of fruit, flowers in vases. And Dutch bread and cheese with or without a knife on the side. Some give themselves in prose merely to the self. In science too, one dedicates his life to an Albanian snail, another to a virus. Darwin gave eight years to barnacles. And in wise later life, to earthworms. The Higgs boson, a tiny thing, perhaps not even a thing, was the lifetime’s pursuit of thousands. To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavour, is just a speck in the universe of possible things. And even this universe may be a speck in a multitude of actual and possible universes.

So why not be an owl poet?

I know them by their footfalls. First down the open stairs to the kitchen comes Claude, then my father, followed by his newly signed-up friend, in high heels, boots perhaps, not ideal for stalking through woodland habitats. By nocturnal association I dress her in tight-fitting black leather jacket and jeans, let her be young, pale, pretty, her own woman. My placenta, like branching radio antennae, finely attuned, is receiving signals that my mother instantly detests her. Unreasonable thoughts are disrupting Trudy’s pulse, a new and ominous drumbeat rising as though from a distant jungle village speaks of possession, anger, jealousy. There could be trouble ahead.

I feel obliged for my father’s sake to defend our visitor: her subject is not so limited, owls being larger than bosons or barnacles, with two hundred species and wide folklorique resonance. Mostly of ill-omen. Unlike Trudy, with her visceral certainties, I quiver with doubts. Either my father, being neither sap nor saint, has come to present his lover, put my mother in her place (which is in his past) and show indifference to his brother’s infamy. Or he’s even more the sap, too much the saint, dropping in chastely with one of his authors as a form of social protection, in hopes of being in Trudy’s presence for as long as she’ll tolerate him. Or something beyond both, too opaque to determine. Simpler, for now at least, to follow my mother’s lead and assume that this friend is my father’s mistress.

No child, still less a foetus, has ever mastered the art of small talk, or would ever want to. It’s an adult device, a covenant with boredom and deceit. In this case mostly the latter. After a tentative scrape of chairs, the offer of wine, the pull of a cork, a comment from Claude about the heat draws my father’s neutral hum of assent. A fitful exchange between the brothers projects the lie that our visitors happened to be passing. Trudy remains silent, even when the poet is introduced as Elodie. No one comments on the elegant social geometry of a married couple and their lovers around a table, raising a glass, a tableau vivant of brittle modern life.

My father appears unfazed to find his brother in his kitchen, opening the wine, playing the host. So John Cairncross was never the dupe, the unknowing cuckold. My underestimated father blandly sips and asks Trudy how she’s feeling. Not too tired, he hopes. Which may or may not be a gentle dig, a sexual allusion. That plaintive tone of his has vanished. Distance or irony has replaced it. Only satisfied desire could have freed him. Trudy and Claude must wonder why their murderee is here, what he wants, but it wouldn’t be right to ask.