Nutshell(3)
One hot, restless night last week, when I thought both were long asleep, my mother said suddenly into the darkness, two hours before dawn by the clock downstairs in my father’s study, ‘We can’t do it.’
And straight away Claude said flatly, ‘We can.’ And then, after a moment’s reflection, ‘We can.’
TWO
NOW, TO MY father, John Cairncross, a big man, my genome’s other half, whose helical twists of fate concern me greatly. It’s in me alone that my parents forever mingle, sweetly, sourly, along separate sugar-phosphate backbones, the recipe for my essential self. I also blend John and Trudy in my daydreams – like every child of estranged parents, I long to remarry them, this base pair, and so unite my circumstances to my genome.
My father comes by the house from time to time and I’m overjoyed. Sometimes he brings her smoothies from his favourite place on Judd Street. He has a weakness for these glutinous confections that are supposed to extend his life. I don’t know why he visits us, for he always leaves in mists of sadness. Various of my conjectures have proved wrong in the past, but I’ve listened carefully and for now I’m assuming the following: that he knows nothing of Claude, remains moonishly in love with my mother, hopes to be back with her one day soon, still believes in the story she has given him that the separation is to give them each ‘time and space to grow’ and renew their bonds. That he is a poet without recognition and yet he persists. That he owns and runs an impoverished publishing house and has seen into print the first collections of successful poets, household names, and even one Nobel laureate. When their reputations swell, they move away like grown children to larger houses. That he accepts the disloyalty of poets as a fact of life and, like a saint, delights in the plaudits that vindicate the Cairncross Press. That he’s saddened rather than embittered by his own failure in verse. He once read aloud to Trudy and me a dismissive review of his poetry. It said that his work was outdated, stiffly formal, too ‘beautiful’. But he lives by poetry, still recites it to my mother, teaches it, reviews it, conspires in the advancement of younger poets, sits on prize committees, promotes poetry in schools, writes essays on poetry for small magazines, has talked about it on the radio. Trudy and I heard him once in the small hours. He has less money than Trudy and far less than Claude. He knows by heart a thousand poems.
This is my collection of facts and postulates. Hunched over them like a patient philatelist, I’ve added some recent items to my set. He suffers from a skin complaint, psoriasis, which has rendered his hands scaly, hard and red. Trudy hates the look and feel of them and tells him he should wear gloves. He refuses. He has a six-month lease on three mean rooms in Shoreditch, is in debt, is overweight and should exercise more. Just yesterday I acquired – still with the stamps – a Penny Black: the house my mother lives in and I in her, the house where Claude visits nightly, is a Georgian pile on boastful Hamilton Terrace and was my father’s childhood home. In his late twenties, just as he was growing his first beard, and not long after he married my mother, he inherited the family mansion. His dear mother was long dead. All the sources agree, the house is filthy. Only clichés serve it well: peeling, crumbling, dilapidated. Frost has sometimes glazed and stiffened the curtains in winter; in heavy rains the drains, like dependable banks, return their deposit with interest; in summer, like bad banks, they stink. But look, here in my tweezers is the rarest piece of all, the British Guiana: even in such a rotten state, these six thousand aching square feet will buy you seven million pounds.
Most men, most people, would never permit a spouse to eject them from under their childhood eaves. John Cairncross is different. Here are my reasonable inferences. Born under an obliging star, eager to please, too kind, too earnest, he has nothing of the ambitious poet’s quiet greed. He really believes that to write a poem in praise of my mother (her eyes, her hair, her lips) and come by to read it aloud will soften her, make him welcome in his own house. But she knows that her eyes are nothing ‘like the Galway turf’, by which he intended ‘very green’, and since she has no Irish blood, the line is anaemic. Whenever she and I listen, I sense in her slowing heart a retinal crust of boredom that blinds her to the pathos of the scene – a large, large-hearted man pleading his cause without hope, in the unmodish form of a sonnet.
A thousand may be hyperbole. Many of the poems my father knows are long, like those famed creations of bank employees The Cremation of Sam McGee and The Waste Land. Trudy continues to tolerate the occasional recitation. For her, a monologue is better than an exchange, preferable to another turn round the unweeded garden of their marriage. Perhaps she indulges him out of guilt, what little remains. My father speaking poetry to her was once, apparently, a ritual of their love. Strange, that she can’t bear to tell him what he must suspect, what she’s bound to reveal. That she no longer loves him. That she has a lover.
On the radio today, a woman recounted hitting a dog, a golden retriever, with her car on a lonely road at night. She crouched in her headlights by its side, holding the dying creature’s paw through its spasms of frightful pain. Large brown forgiving eyes stared into hers all the while. She took in her free hand a rock and dashed it several times against the poor dog’s skull. To dispatch John Cairncross would take only one blow, one coup de vérité. Instead, as he begins to recite, Trudy will assume her bland, listening look. I, however, attend closely.