Nutshell(32)

There’s protest, or complaint, in Elodie’s voice that my mother and uncle won’t like. ‘It doesn’t make any sense. He was on his way to Luton, to pay the printer. In cash. He was so happy to be settling a debt. And he was reading tonight. King’s College Poetry Society. Three of us were like, you know, the supporting band.’

‘He loved his poems,’ Claude says.

Elodie’s tone rises with her anguish. ‘Why would he pull over and …? Just like that. When he’d finished his book. And been shortlisted for the Auden Prize.’

‘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.