Nutshell (11 page)

Elodie eludes me, like a half-remembered song—an unfinished melody indeed. When she squeezed by us in the hall, when she was still, in our thoughts, my father's girl, I listened out for the alluring creak of leather. But no, today she's dressed in softer style, more colourfully, I think. She would have cut a figure at the poetry event tonight. When she was wailing in distress her voice was pure. But her account of the visit to the mortuary, clutching at her fiancé's wrist, was a reminder, as each growling sentence trailed away, of the guttural urbane, her tasty fry-up. Now, as my mother extends an arm across the kitchen table to enfold the visitor's hand in hers, I hear in the vowels the duck's quack restored. Elodie's relaxing into my mother's confidence as she, the poet, praises my father's poems. It's the sonnets she loves most.

“He wrote them in a conversational style, but dense with meaning, and so musical.”

Her use of tense is correct but offensive. She speaks as if the death of John Cairncross has been fully confirmed, absorbed, publicly acknowledged, historically beyond grief like the Sack of Rome. Trudy will mind more than I do. I've been conditioned to believe his poetry was a dud. Today, everything is up for revaluation.

Her voice grave with insincerity, Trudy says, “It will be a long time before we have the full measure of him as a poet.”

“Oh yes, oh yes! But we already know something. Beyond Hughes. Up there with Fenton, Heaney and Plath.”

“Names to conjure with,” says Claude.

This is my Elodie problem. What is she doing here? She dances like a wild Corybant, in and out of focus. Overpraising my father may be a style of comforting my mother. If so, that's poorly conceived. Or sorrow distorts her judgement. That's forgivable. Or her self-importance is bound up with her patron's. That's not. Or she's come to find out who killed her lover. That's interesting.

Should I like her or distrust her?

My mother loves her and won't let go of her hand. “You'll know this better than I do. Talent on that scale comes at a cost. Not only to himself. Kind to everyone who isn't close. Strangers too. And people saying, ‘Almost as kind as Heaney.' Not that I ever knew or read him. But just below the surface John was in agony—”

“No!”

“Self-doubt. Constant mental pain. Lashing out at those he loved. But cruellest to himself. Then the poem gets written at last—”

“And then the sun comes out.” Claude has caught his sister-in-law's drift.

She says loudly over him, “That conversational style? One long bloody battle to wrench it from his soul—”

“Oh!”

“Personal life wrecked. And now—”

She chokes up on the tiny word that contains the fateful present. On such a day of revaluation I could be wrong. But I always thought my father composed fast, with reproachable ease. It was held against him in the review he once read aloud to prove his indifference. I heard him say it to my mother during one of his sad visits: if it doesn't come at once, it shouldn't come. There's a special grace in facility. All art aspires to the condition of Mozart's. Then he laughed at his own presumption. Trudy won't remember. And she'll never know that even as she lied about my father's mental health, his poetry raised her diction. Lashing out? Wrench? Soul? Borrowed clothes!

But they've made an impression. Cold mother, she knows what she's about.

Elodie whispers, “I never knew.”

Then, another silence. Trudy waits intensely, like an angler whose fly is sweetly placed. Claude starts a word, a mere vowel, severed, I'd guess, by her glance.

Our visitor begins dramatically. “All John's instructions are engraved on my heart. When to break a line. ‘Never randomly. Stay at the helm. Make sense, a unit of sense. Decide, decide, decide.' And know your scansion so you ‘disrupt the beat knowingly.' Then, ‘Form isn't a cage. It's an old friend you can only pretend to leave.' And feelings. He'd say, ‘Don't unpack your heart. One detail tells the truth.' Also, ‘Write for the voice, not the page, write for the untidy evening in the parish hall.' He made us read James Fenton on the genius of the trochee. Afterwards, he set the assignment for the week ahead—a poem in four stanzas of trochaic tetrameters catalectic. We laughed at this gobbledygook. He had us singing an example, a nursery rhyme. ‘Boys and girls come out to play.' Then he recited from memory Auden's ‘Autumn Song.' ‘Now the leaves are falling fast, / Nurse's flowers will not last.' Why is the missing syllable at the end of the line so effective? We couldn't answer him. Then what about a poem with the weak syllable restored? ‘Wendy speeded my undressing, / Wendy is the sheet's caressing.' He knew the whole of Betjeman's ‘Indoor Games near Newbury' and made us giggle. So, for that assignment, I wrote the first of my owl poems—in that same metre of ‘Autumn Song.'

“He made us learn our own strongest poems by heart. So we'd be bold at our first reading, stand on stage without our pages. The idea made me nearly faint with fear. Listen, now I'm slipping into trochees!”

Talk of scansion is of interest only to me. I sense my mother's impatience. This has gone on too long. If I had breath to hold, I'd hold it now.

“He bought us drinks, lent us money we never gave back, heard us out on boyfriend-girlfriend trouble, fights with parents, so-called writer's block. He stood bail for one drunken would-be poet in our group. He wrote letters to get us grants, or humble jobs on literary pages. We loved the poets he loved, his opinions became our own. We listened to his radio talks, we went to the readings he sent us to. And we went to his own. We knew his poems, his anecdotes, his catchphrases. We thought we knew him. It never crossed our minds that John, the grown-up, the high priest, had problems too. Or that he doubted his poetry just as we did ours. We mostly worried about sex and money. Nothing like his agony. If only we'd known.”

The fly was taken, the shortening line was taut and trembling, and now the catch is in the keep-net. I feel my mother relax.

That mysterious particle, my father, is gaining mass, growing in seriousness and integrity. I'm caught between pride and guilt.

In a brave, kind voice Trudy says, “It would have made no difference. You mustn't blame yourself. We knew everything, Claude and I. We tried everything.”

Claude, stirred by the sound of his name, clears his throat. “Beyond help. His own worst enemy.”

“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 banister. 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.

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 rib cage, 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.

Later, I'm woken by voices. I'm on a slope, which suggests my mother is sitting up in bed propped by pillows. The traffic outside is not yet at its usual density. My guess is 6 a.m. My first concern is that we might be due a matutinal visit to the Wall of Death. But no, they aren't even touching. Conversation only. They've had pleasure enough to last till noon at least, which opens an opportunity now for rancour, or reason, or even regret. They've chosen the first. My mother is speaking in the flat tone she reserves for her resentments. The first complete sentence I understand is this:

“If you weren't in my life, John would be alive today.”

Claude considers. “Likewise if you weren't in mine.”

A silence follows this blocking move. Trudy tries again. “You turned silly games into something else, bringing that stuff into the house.”

“The stuff you made him drink.”

“If you hadn't—”

“Listen. Dearest.”

The endearment is mostly menace. He draws breath and considers yet again. He knows he must be kind. But kindness without desire, without promise of erotic reward, is difficult for him. The strain is in his throat. “It's
fine
. Not a criminal matter. We're on course. That girl's going to say all the right things.”

“Thanks to me.”

“Thanks to you is right. Death certificate, fine. Will, fine. Crem and all the trimmings, fine. Baby and house sale, fine—”

“But four and a half million—”

“Is
fine
. In case of worst case, the plan-B plan—fine.”

Only syntax might make one think that I'm for sale. But I'll be free at the point of delivery. Or worthless.

Trudy repeats with contempt, “Four and a half million.”

“Fast. No questions.”

A lovers' catechism, which they may have been round before. I'm not always listening. She says, “Why the hurry?” He says, “In case things go wrong.” She says, “Why should I trust you?” He says, “No choice.”

Have the house-sale papers come already? Has she signed? I don't know. Sometimes I doze and don't hear everything. And I don't care. Having nothing myself, property is not my concern. Skyscrapers, tin shacks, and all the bridges and temples in between. Keep them. My interest is strictly postpartum, the departing hoof mark in the rock, the bleeding lamb drifting skyward. Always up. Hot air without a balloon. Take me with you, chuck the ballast. Give me my
go
, my afterlife, paradise on earth, even a hell, a thirteenth floor. I can take it. I believe in life after birth, though I know that separating hope from fact is hard. Something short of eternity will do. Three score and ten? Wrap them up, I'll take them. On hope—I've been hearing about the latest slaughters in pursuit of dreams of the life beyond. Mayhem in this world, bliss in the next. Fresh-bearded young men with beautiful skin and long guns on Boulevard Voltaire gazing into the beautiful, disbelieving eyes of their own generation. It wasn't hatred that killed the innocents but faith, that famished ghost, still revered, even in the mildest quarters. Long ago, someone pronounced groundless certainty a virtue. Now, the politest people say it is. I've heard their Sunday-morning broadcasts from cathedral precincts. Europe's most virtuous spectres, religion and, when it faltered, godless utopias bursting with scientific proofs, together they scorched the earth from the tenth to the twentieth centuries. Here they come again, risen in the East, pursuing their millennium, teaching toddlers to slit the throats of teddy bears. And here I am with my home-grown faith in the life beyond. I know it's more than a radio programme. The voices I hear are not, or not only, in my head. I believe my time will come. I'm virtuous too.

The morning is without event. Trudy and Claude's exchange of muted acrimony falters then yields to hours of sleep, after which she leaves him in bed and takes a shower. In the thrumming warmth of speeding droplets and the sound of my mother's tuneful humming, I experience an unaccountable mood of joy and excitement. I can't help myself, I can't hold the happiness back. Are these borrowed hormones? It hardly matters. I see the world as golden, even though the shade is no more than a name. I know it's along the scale near yellow, also just a word. But golden sounds right, I sense it, I taste it where hot water cascades across the back of my skull. I don't remember such carefree delight. I'm ready, I'm coming, the world will catch me, tend to me because it can't resist me. Wine by the glass rather than the placenta, books direct by lamplight, music by Bach, walks along the shore, kissing by moonlight. Everything I've learned so far says all these delights are inexpensive, achievable, ahead of me. Even when the roaring water ceases, when we step into colder air and I'm shaken to a blur by Trudy's towel, I have the impression of singing in my head. Choirs of angels!

Another hot day, another floating confection, so I dream, of printed cotton, yesterday's sandals, no scent because her soap, if it's the bar Claude gave her, is perfumed with gardenia and patchouli. She doesn't braid today. Instead, two plastic devices, highly coloured, I'm sure, attached above her ears hold her hair back on each side. I feel my spirits begin to droop as we descend the familiar stairs. Just now, to have forgotten my father for minutes on end! We enter a clean kitchen, whose unnatural order is my mother's night tribute to him. Her exequy. The acoustic is altered, the floor no longer sticks to her sandals. The flies have moved to other heavens. As she goes towards the coffee machine she must be thinking, as I am, that Elodie will have finished her interview. The officers of the law will be confirming or abandoning their first impressions. In effect, for now, for us, both are true at once. Ahead of us the path seems to fork, but it's forked already. In any event, there will be a visit.

She reaches up to a cupboard for the tin of ground coffee and the filter papers, runs the cold-water tap, fills a jug, fetches a spoon. Most of the cups are clean. She sets out two. There's pathos in this familiar routine, in the sounds of homely objects touching surfaces. And in the little sigh she makes when she turns or slightly bends our unwieldy form. It's already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present spooling away from us, the soft tumble of unremarkable thoughts, the long-neglected miracle of existence. When she's no longer twenty-eight and pregnant and beautiful, or even free, she won't remember the way she set down the spoon and the sound it made on slate, the frock she wore today, the touch of her sandal's thong between her toes, the summer's warmth, the white noise of the city beyond the house walls, a short burst of birdsong by a closed window. All gone, already.

But today is special. If she forgets the present it's because her heart is in the future, the one that's closing in. She's thinking of the lies she'll have to tell, how they need to cohere, and be consistent with Claude's. This is pressure, this is the feeling she used to have before an exam. A little chill in the gut, some weakness below the knees, a tendency to yawn. She must remember her lines. Cost of failure being higher, more interesting than any routine school test. She could try an old assurance from childhood—
no one will actually die
. That won't do. I feel for her. I love her.

Now I'm feeling protective. I can't quite dispel the worthless notion that the very beautiful should live by other codes. For such a face as I've imagined for her there should be special respect. Prison for her would be an outrage. Against nature. There's already nostalgia in this domestic moment. It's a treasure, a gem for the memory store. I've got her to myself, here in the ordered kitchen, in sunshine and peace, while Claude sleeps away the morning. We should be close, she and I, closer than lovers. There's something we should be whispering to each other.

Perhaps it's goodbye.