Ian McEwan - Nutshell

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.

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.

But lately, as I track my mother’s shifting relation to her crime, I’ve remembered rumours of a new dispensation in the matter of blue and pink. Be careful what you wish for. Here’s a new politics in university life. This digression may seem unimportant, but I intend to apply as soon as I can. Physics, Gaelic, anything. So I’m bound to take an interest. A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. They’re on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority’s blessing, its validation of their chosen identities . The decline of the West in new guise perhaps. Or the exaltation and liberation of the self. A social-media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options — neutrois, two spirit, bigender … any colour you like, Mr Ford. Biology is not destiny after all, and there’s cause for celebration. A shrimp is neither limiting nor stable. I declare my undeniable feeling for who I am. If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black. And vice versa. I may announce myself as disabled, or disabled in context. If my identity is that of a believer, I’m easily wounded, my flesh torn to bleeding by any questioning of my faith. Offended, I enter a state of grace. Should inconvenient opinions hover near me like fallen angels or evil djinn (a mile being too near), I’ll be in need of the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies. Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing on my face, my brain, like unwholesome dogs.

I’ll feel, therefore I’ll be. Let poverty go begging and climate change braise in hell. Social justice can drown in ink. I’ll be an activist of the emotions, a loud, campaigning spirit fighting with tears and sighs to shape institutions around my vulnerable self. My identity will be my precious, my only true possession, my access to the only truth. The world must love, nourish and protect it as I do. If my college does not bless me, validate me and give me what I clearly need, I’ll press my face into the vice chancellor’s lapels and weep. Then demand his resignation.

The womb, or this womb, isn’t such a bad place, a little like the grave, ‘fine and private’ in one of my father’s favourite poems. I’ll make a version of a womb for my student days, set aside the Enlightenments of Rosbifs, Jocks and Frogs. Away with the real, with dull facts and hated pretence of objectivity. Feeling is queen. Unless she identifies as king.

I know. Sarcasm ill suits the unborn. And why digress? Because my mother is in step with new times. She may not know it, but she marches with a movement. Her status as a murderer is a fact, an item in the world outside herself. But that’s old thinking. She affirms, she identifies as innocent. Even as she strains to clean up traces in the kitchen, she feels blameless and therefore is — almost. Her grief, her tears, are proof of probity. She’s beginning to convince herself with her story of depression and suicide. She can almost believe the sham evidence in the car. Only persuade herself and she’ll deceive with ease and consistency. Lies will be her truth. But her construction is new and frail. My father’s ghastly smile could upend it, that knowing grin coldly stretched across a corpse’s face. That’s why it’s needed, Elodie’s validation of my mother’s innocent self. And why she leans forward now, taking me with her, listening tenderly to the poet’s halting words. For Elodie will soon be in interview with the police. Her beliefs, which will direct her memory and order her account, must be properly shaped.

Claude, unlike Trudy, owns his crime. This is a Renaissance man, a Machiavel, an old-school villain who believes he can get away with murder. The world doesn’t come to him through a haze of the subjective; it comes refracted by stupidity and greed, bent as through glass or water, but etched on a screen before the inner eye, a lie as sharp and bright as truth. Claude doesn’t know he’s stupid. If you’re stupid, how can you tell? He may blunder through an undergrowth of clichés, but he understands what he did and why. He’ll flourish, without a backward glance, unless caught and punished, and then he’ll never blame himself, only his bad luck among random events. He can claim his inheritance, his tenure among the rational. Enemies of the Enlightenment will say he’s the embodiment of its spirit. Nonsense!

But I know what they mean.