Ian McEwan - Nutshell

‘That’s enough.’ She doesn’t say it sharply. More in resignation.

‘Dead right. Enough’s enough. We got there anyway.’ He croons a snatch. ‘They said you’re screwed, your act’s too crude, but we came throuuugh.’ The bedroom floorboards yield under my mother’s feet. He’s doing a little dance.

She doesn’t turn but stands very still. She’s hating him as much as I just hated her. Now he’s at her side, sharing the view, trying to find her hand.

‘Point is this,’ he says importantly. ‘They’ll interview us separately. We should be lining up our stories. So. He came round this morning. For coffee. Very depressed.’

‘I said we had a row.’

‘OK. When?’

‘Just as he was leaving.’

‘What about?’

‘He wanted me to move out.’

‘Good. So. He came round this morning. For coffee. Very depressed and—’

She sighs, as I would. ‘Look. Tell everything as it was, minus the smoothies, plus the row. It doesn’t need a rehearsal.’

‘OK. This evening. This evening, I’ll do the cups, the lot. Across three locations. Another thing. He was wearing gloves the whole time.’

‘I know.’

‘And when you do the kitchen, not an atom of smoothie to—’

‘I know .’

He leaves her side to take a turn, a shuffle about the room. He senses success, he’s restless, itchy, excited. That she isn’t too boosts his impatience. There are things to do, and if not, things to plan. He wants to be out there. But where? He’s half humming, half singing something new. ‘Baby, baby I love you …’ I’m not reassured. He’s back by us, and she’s rigid by the window, but he doesn’t sense the danger.

‘On the sale,’ he says, breaking off his song. ‘In my heart of hearts, I always thought we might need to take less than market price just in case we have to make a quick—’

‘Claude.’

She mutters his name on two notes, the second lower than the first. A warning.

But he pushes on. I’ve never known him happier, or less likeable. ‘This guy’s a builder, a developer. Doesn’t even need to look around. Square footage is all. Flats, see. And cash in—’

She turns. ‘Are you not even aware?’

‘Of what?’

‘Are you really so incredibly stupid?’

The very question. But Claude has switched moods too. He can sound dangerous.

‘Let’s hear it.’

‘It’s escaped your attention.’

‘Clearly.’

‘Today, just a few hours ago.’

‘Yes?’

‘I lost my husband—’

‘No!’

‘The man I once loved, and who loved me, and who shaped my life, gave meaning to it …’ A clenching in the sinews of her throat prevents her saying more.

But Claude is launched. ‘My darling little mouse, that’s terrible. Lost, you say. Where could you have put him? Where did you have him last? You must have put him down somewhere.’

‘Stop it!’

‘Lost! Let me think now. I know what! I’ve just remembered. You left him on the M1, by the edge of the road, lying on the grass with a gut full of poison. Fancy us forgetting that.’

He might have gone on but Trudy swings back her arm and hits him in the face. Not a lady’s slap, but a clenched-fist blow that levers my head from its mooring.

‘You’re full of spite,’ she says with surprising calm. ‘Because you were always jealous.’

‘Well, well,’ says Claude, his voice only a little thickened. ‘The naked truth.’

‘You hated your brother because you could never be the man he was.’

‘While you loved him to the end.’ Claude has reverted to fake wonderment. ‘Now what was that awfully clever thing someone was saying to me, was it last night or the night before? “I want him dead and it has to be tomorrow.” Not the loving wife of my brother, who shaped her life.’

‘You got me drunk. That’s what you mostly do.’

‘And next morning who was that, proposing a toast to love, coaxing the man who shaped her life to raise a cup of venom? Surely not my brother’s loving wife. Oh no, not my own darling mouse.’

I understand my mother, I know her heart. She’s dealing with the facts as she sees them. The crime, once a sequence of plans and their enactment, now in memory resembles an object, unmoveable, accusing, a cold stone statue in a clearing in a wood. A midwinter’s bitter midnight, a waning moon, and Trudy is hurrying away down a frosty woodland path. She turns to look back at the distant figure, partly obscured by bare boughs and skeins of mist, and she sees that the crime, the object of her thoughts, is not a crime at all. It’s a mistake. It always was. She suspected it all along. The further she removes herself, the clearer it becomes. She was merely wrong, not bad, and she’s no criminal. The crime must be elsewhere in the woods, and belong to someone else. No arguing with the facts that lead to Claude’s essential guilt. His sneering tone can’t protect him. It condemns him.

And yet. And yet. And yet she violently wants him. Whenever he calls her his mouse, a curlicue of thrill, a cold contraction lodges in her perineum, an icy hook that tugs her downwards onto a narrow ledge and reminds her of the chasms she’s swooned into before, the Walls of Death she’s survived too often. His mouse! What humiliation. In the palm of his hand. Pet. Powerless. Fearful. Contemptible. Disposable. Oh to be his mouse! When she knows it’s madness. So hard to resist. Can she fight it?

Is she a woman or a mouse?

A SILENCE I can’t read follows Claude’s mockery. He may regret his sarcasm or resent being diverted from his breezy upland of elation. She may be resentful too, or wanting to resume as his mouse. I’m weighing these possibilities as he moves away from her. He sits on the end of the disordered bed, tapping on his phone. She remains at the window, her back to the room, facing her portion of London, its diminishing evening traffic, scattered birdsong, lozenges of summer cloud and chaos of roofs.

When at last she speaks her tone is sulky and flat. ‘I’m not selling this house just so you can get rich.’

His reply is immediate. It’s the same needling voice of derision. ‘No, no. We’ll be rich together. Or, if you like, poor in separate prisons.’

It’s nicely put as a threat. Can she believe him, that he’d take them both down? Negative altruism. Cutting off your nose to spite another’s face. What should be her response? I have time to think because she’s yet to reply. A little shocked at this implied blackmail, I should say. Logically, she should suggest the same. In theory, they have equal power over each other. Leave this house. Never come back. Or I’ll bring the police down on us both . But even I know that love doesn’t steer by logic, nor is power distributed evenly. Lovers arrive at their first kisses with scars as well as longings. They’re not always looking for advantage. Some need shelter, others press only for the hyperreality of ecstasy, for which they’ll tell outrageous lies or make irrational sacrifice. But they rarely ask themselves what they need or want. Memories are poor for past failures. Childhoods shine through adult skin, helpfully or not. So do the laws of inheritance that bind a personality. The lovers don’t know there’s no free will. I haven’t heard enough radio drama to know more than that, though pop songs have taught me that they don’t feel in December what they felt in May, and that to have a womb may be incomprehensible to those who don’t and that the reverse is also true.

Trudy turns to face the room. Her small, faraway voice chills me. ‘I’m frightened.’

She already sees how their plans have gone wrong, despite signs of early success. She’s shivering. Asserting her innocence isn’t viable after all. The prospect of a fight with Claude has shown her how lonely her independence could be. His taste for sarcasm is new to her, it scares her, disorients her. And she wants him, even though his voice, his touch and his kisses are corrupted by what they’ve done. My father’s death won’t be confined, it’s cut loose from its mortuary slab or stainless-steel drawer and drifted in the evening air, across the North Circular, over those same north London roofs. It’s in the room now, in her hair, on her hands, and on Claude’s face — an illuminated mask that gapes without expression at the phone in his hand.