Nutshell(4)

We generally go to his poetry library on the first floor. A mantelpiece clock with rackety balance wheel makes the only sound as he takes his usual chair. Here, in the presence of a poet, I permit my conjectures to flourish. If my father looks towards the ceiling to compose his thoughts, he’ll see deterioration in the Adam-style designs. Damage has spread plaster dust like icing sugar across the spines of famous books. My mother wipes her chair with her hand before she sits. Without flourish, my father draws breath and begins. He recites fluently, with feeling. Most of the modern poems leave me cold. Too much about the self, too glassily cool with regard to others, too many gripes in too short a line. But as warm as the embrace of brothers are John Keats and Wilfred Owen. I feel their breath upon my lips. Their kiss. Who would not wish to have written Candied apple, quince, and plum and gourd, or The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall?

I picture her from across the library through his adoring eyes. She sits within a big leather armchair that dates from Freud’s Vienna. Her lithe bare legs are partly, prettily tucked beneath her. One elbow is bent against the arm rest to support her drooping head, the fingers of her free hand drum lightly on her ankle. The late afternoon is hot, the windows are open, the traffic of St John’s Wood pleasantly hums. Her expression is pensive, her lower lip looks heavy. She moistens it with a spotless tongue. A few blonde ringlets lie damply on her neck. Her cotton dress, loosely cut to contain me, is pale green, paler than her eyes. The steady work of pregnancy goes on and she is weary, agreeably so. John Cairncross sees the summer’s flush on her cheeks, the lovely line of neck and shoulder and swollen breasts, the hopeful knoll that is me, the sunless pallor of her calves, the unwrinkled sole of one exposed foot, its line of diminishing, innocent toes like children in a family photo. Everything about her, he thinks, brought to perfection by her condition.

He can’t see that she’s waiting for him to leave. That it’s perverse of her to insist on him living elsewhere, in this, our third trimester. Can he really be so complicit in his annihilation? Such a big fellow, six foot three I’ve heard, a giant with thick black hair on mighty arms, a giant fool to believe it’s wise to grant his wife the ‘space’ she says she needs. Space! She should come in here, where lately I can barely crook a finger. In my mother’s usage, space, her need for it, is a misshapen metaphor, if not a synonym. For being selfish, devious, cruel. But wait, I love her, she’s my divinity and I need her. I take it back! I spoke in anguish. I’m as deluded as my father. And it’s true. Her beauty and remoteness and resolve are one.

Above her, as I see it, the library’s decomposing ceiling releases a sudden cloud of spinning particles that glimmer as they drift across a bar of sunlight. And how she glimmers against the cracked brown leather of the chair where Hitler or Trotsky or Stalin might have sprawled in their Viennese days, when they were but embryos of their future selves. I concede. I’m hers. If she commanded it, I too would go to Shoreditch, and nurse myself in exile. No need for an umbilical cord. My father and I are joined in hopeless love.

Against all the signs – her terse responses, her yawns, her general inattention – he lingers into the early evening, in hopes, perhaps, of dinner. But my mother is waiting for Claude. At last she drives her husband away by declaring her need to rest. She’ll see him to the door. Who could ignore the sorrow in his voice as he makes his tentative goodbyes. It pains me to think he would endure any humiliation in order to spend some minutes longer in her presence. Nothing, save his nature, prevents him doing what others might do – precede her to the master bedroom, to the room where he and I were conceived, sprawl on the bed or in the tub among bold clouds of steam, then invite his friends round, pour wine, be master of his house. Instead, he hopes to succeed by kindness and self-effacing sensitivity to her needs. I hope to be wrong, but I think he’ll doubly fail, for she’ll go on despising him for being weak, and he’ll suffer even more than he should. His visits don’t end, they fade. He leaves behind in the library a field of resonating sadness, an imagined shape, a disappointed hologram still in possession of his chair.

Now we’re approaching the front door as she sees him off the premises. These various depredations have been much discussed. I know that one hinge of this door has parted with the woodwork. Dry rot has turned the architrave to compacted dust. Some floor tiles have gone, others are cracked – Georgian, in a once colourful diamond pattern, impossible to replace. Concealing those absences and cracks, plastic bags of empty bottles and rotting food. Spilling underfoot, these are the very emblems of household squalor: the detritus of ashtrays, paper plates with loathsome wounds of ketchup, teetering teabags like tiny sacks of grain that mice or elves might hoard. The cleaning lady left in sadness long before my time. Trudy knows it’s not a gravid woman’s lot, to heave garbage to the high-lidded wheelie bins. She could easily ask my father to clean the hall, but she doesn’t. Household duties might confer household rights. And she may be at work on a clever story of his desertion. Claude remains in this respect a visitor, an outsider, but I’ve heard him say that to tidy one corner of the house would be to foreground the chaos in the rest. Despite the heatwave I’m well protected against the stench. My mother complains about it most days, but languidly. It’s only one aspect of domestic decay.

She may think that a blob of curd on his shoe, or the sight of a cobalt-furred orange by the skirting will shorten my father’s goodbyes. She’s wrong. The door is open, he straddles the threshold and she and I are just inside the hall. Claude is due in fifteen minutes. He sometimes comes early. So Trudy is agitated but determined to appear sleepy. She’s standing on eggshells. A square of greasy paper that once wrapped a slab of unsalted butter is caught under her sandal and has oiled her toes. This she will soon relate to Claude in humorous terms.