Nutshell(31)

By the time we reach the hallway it’s already started. And badly. The front door has opened and closed. Elodie is in, and in Claude’s arms.

‘Yes, yes. There, there,’ he murmurs into her succession of teary, broken sentences.

‘I shouldn’t. It’s wrong. But I. Oh I’m sorry. What it must be. For you. I can’t. Your brother. I can’t help it.’

My mother stays at the foot of the stairs, stiffening with distrust, not only of the visitor. So, it’s bardic distress.

Elodie is not yet aware of us. Her face must be towards the door. The news she wants to deliver comes in staccato sobs. ‘Tomorrow night. Fifty poets. From all over the. Oh, we loved him! Reading in Bethnal. Green library. Or outside. Candles. One poem each. We so want you to be.’

She stops to blow her nose. To do so, she disengages from Claude and sees Trudy.

‘Fifty poets,’ he helplessly repeats. What notion could be more repugnant to him? ‘That’s a lot.’

Her sobs are almost under control, but the pathos of her own words brings them on again. ‘Oh. Hello Trudy. I’m so, so sorry. If you or. Could say a few. But we’d understand. If you. If you couldn’t. How hard it.’

We lose her to her grief, which rises in pitch to a kind of cooing. She tries to apologise and at last we hear, ‘Compared to what you. So sorry! Not my place.’

She’s right, as Trudy sees it. Usurped again. Out-griefed, out-wailed, she remains, unmoved, by the stairs. Here in the hallway, where the remains of a stench must still linger, we’re held in social limbo. We listen to Elodie and the seconds go by. What now? Claude has the answer.

‘We’ll go down. There’s Pouilly-Fumé in the fridge.’

‘I don’t. I just came to.’

‘This way.’

As Claude guides her past my mother, a look must surely pass between them – that is, her flashed rebuke must meet his bland shrug. The two women don’t embrace or even touch or speak when they’re inches apart. Trudy lets them get ahead before she follows, down into the kitchen, where the two accusers, Glycol and Judd Street Smoothie, hide in forensic smears among the chaos.

‘If you’d like,’ my mother says as she sets foot on the sticky floorboards, ‘I’m sure Claude will make you a sandwich.’

This innocent offer conceals many barbs: it’s inappropriate to the occasion; Claude has never made a sandwich in his life; there’s no bread in the house; nothing to set between two slabs but the dust of salted nuts. And who could safely eat a sandwich from such a kitchen? Pointedly, she doesn’t propose making it herself; pointedly, she casts Elodie and Claude together, distinct from herself. It’s an accusation, a rejection, a cold withdrawal bundled into a hospitable gesture. Even as I disapprove, I’m impressed. Such refinements can’t be learned from podcasts.

Trudy’s hostility has a beneficial effect on Elodie’s syntax. ‘I couldn’t eat a thing, thank you.’

‘You could drink a thing,’ says Claude.

‘I could.’

There follows the familiar suite of sounds – the fridge door, a careless chink of corkscrew against bottle, the cork’s sonorous withdrawal, last night’s glasses sluiced under the tap. Pouilly. Just across the river from Sancerre. Why not? It’s almost seven thirty. The little grapes with their misty grey bloom should suit us well on another hot and airless London evening. But I want more. It seems to me that Trudy and I have not eaten in a week. Stirred by Claude’s phone order, I crave as accompaniment an overlooked, old-fashioned dish, harengs pommes à l’huile. Slippery smoked herring, waxy new potatoes, the first pressing of the finest olives, onion, chopped parsley – I pine for such an entrée. How elegantly a Pouilly-Fumé would set it off. But how to persuade my mother? I could as easily slit my uncle’s throat. The graceful country of my third choice has never seemed so far away.

All of us are at the table now. Claude pours, glasses are raised in sombre tribute to the dead.

Into the silence, Elodie says in an awed whisper, ‘But suicide. It just seems so … so unlike him.’

‘Oh well,’ says Trudy, and lets that hang. She’s seen an opportunity. ‘How long have you known him?’

‘Two years. When he taught—’

‘Then you wouldn’t know about the depressions.’

My mother’s quiet voice pushes against my heart. What solace for her, to have faith in a coherent tale of mental illness and suicide.

‘My brother wasn’t exactly one for the primrose path.’

Claude, I begin to understand, is not a liar of the first rank.

‘I didn’t know,’ Elodie says in a small voice. ‘He was always so generous. Especially to us, you know, younger generation who—’

‘A whole other side.’ Trudy sets this down firmly. ‘I’m glad his students never saw it.’

‘Even as a child,’ says Claude. ‘He once took a hammer to our—’

‘This isn’t the time for that story.’ Trudy has made it more interesting by cutting it short.

‘You’re right,’ he says. ‘We loved him anyway.’

I feel my mother’s hand go up to her face to cover it or brush away a tear. ‘But he’d never get treatment. He couldn’t accept that he was ill.’