Nutshell(35)

‘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 banisters. 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.’

‘I will. Thank you. Thank you for this book.’

They embrace and kiss, and she’s gone. My guess is that she’s got what she came for.

We return to the kitchen. I’m feeling strange. Famished. Exhausted. Desperate. My worry is that Trudy will tell Claude that she can’t face eating. Not after the doorbell. Fear is an emetic. I’ll die unborn, a meagre death. But she and I and hunger are one system, and sure enough, the tinfoil boxes are ripped apart. She and Claude eat fast, standing by the kitchen table, where yesterday’s coffee cups might still be.

He says through stuffed mouth, ‘All packed and ready to go?’

Pickled herring, gherkin, a slice of lemon on pumpernickel bread. They don’t take long to reach me. Soon I’m whipped into alertness by a keen essence saltier than blood, by the tang of sea spray off the wide, open ocean road where lonely herring shoals skim northwards through clean black icy water. It keeps coming, a chilling Arctic breeze pouring over my face, as though I stood boldly in the prow of a fearless ship heading into glacial freedom. That is, Trudy eats one open sandwich after another, on and on until she takes a first bite of her last and throws it down. She’s reeling, she needs a chair.

She groans. ‘That was good! Look, tears. I’m crying with pleasure.’

‘I’ll be off,’ Claude says. ‘And you can cry alone.’

For a long time I’ve been almost too big for this place. Now I’m too big. My limbs are folded hard against my chest, my head is wedged into my only exit. I wear my mother like a tight-fitting cap. My back aches, I’m out of shape, my nails need cutting, I’m beat, lingering in that dusk where torpor doesn’t cancel thought but frees it. Hunger, then sleep. One need fulfilled, another takes its place. Ad infinitum, until the needs become mere whims, luxuries. Something in this goes near the heart of our condition. But that’s for others. I’m pickled, the herrings are bearing me away, I’m on the shoulders of the giant shoal, heading north, and when I’m there I’ll hear the music not of seals and groaning ice, but of vanishing evidence, of running taps, the popping of foaming suds, I’ll hear the midnight chime of pots, and chairs upended on the kitchen table to reveal the floor and its scattered burden of food crumbs, human hair and mouse shit. Yes, I was there when he tempted her again to bed, called her his mouse, pinched her nipples hard, filled her cheeks with his lying breath and cliché-bloated tongue.

And I did nothing.





SEVENTEEN


I WAKE INTO near silence to find myself horizontal. As always, I listen carefully. Beyond the patient tread of Trudy’s heart, beyond her breathing sighs and faintest creak of ribcage, are the murmurs and trickles of a body maintained by hidden networks of care and regulation, like a well-run city in the dead of night. Beyond the walls, the rhythmic commotion of my uncle’s snoring, quieter than usual. Beyond the room, no sound of traffic. In another time I would have turned as best I could and sunk back into dreamlessness. Now, one splinter, one pointed truth from the day before, punctures the delicate tissue of sleep. Then everything, everyone, the small, willing cast, slips in through the tear. Who’s first? My smiling father, the new and difficult rumour of his decency and talent. The mother I’m bound to, and bound to love and loathe. Priapic, satanic Claude. Elodie, scanning poet, untrustworthy dactyl. And cowardly me, self-absolved of revenge, of everything but thought. These five figures turn before me, playing their parts in events exactly as they were, and then as they might have been and might yet be. I’ve no authority to direct the action. I can only watch. Hours pass.