Ian McEwan - Nutshell

She’s recovered by the time we hear her lover in the hall, cursing as he disturbs the garbage with the outsized brogues she likes him to wear. (He has his own key. It’s my father who has to ring the bell.) Claude descends to the basement kitchen. The rustling sound is a plastic bag containing groceries or tools of death or both.

He notices at once her altered condition and says, ‘You’ve been crying.’

Not solicitude so much as a point of fact, or order. She shrugs and looks away. He takes from his bag a bottle, sets it down heavily where she can see the label.

‘A 201 °Cuvée le Charnay Menetou-Salon Jean-Max Roger. Remember? His father died in a plane crash.’

He speaks of the death of fathers.

‘If it’s cold and white I’ll like it.’

She’s forgotten. The restaurant where the waiter was slow to light the candle. She loved it then, and I loved it even more. Now, the withdrawn cork, the chink of glasses — I hope they’re clean — and Claude is pouring. I can’t say no.

‘Cheers!’ Her tone has quickly softened.

A top-up, then he says, ‘Tell me what it was.’

When she starts to speak her throat constricts. ‘I was thinking of our cat. I was fifteen. His name was Hector, a sweet old thing, the family’s darling, two years older than me. Black, with white socks and bib. I came home from school one day in a filthy mood. He was on the kitchen table where he wasn’t supposed to be. Looking for food. I gave him a whack that knocked him flying. His old bones landed with a crunch. After that he went missing for days. We put posters on trees and lamp posts. Then someone found him lying by a wall on a heap of leaves where he’d crept away to die. Poor, poor Hector, stiff as bone. I never said, I never dared, but I know it was me who killed him.’

Not her wicked undertaking then, not lost innocence, not the child she’ll give away. She begins to cry again, harder than before.

‘His time was almost up,’ Claude says. ‘You can’t know it was you.’

Sobbing now. ‘It was, it was. It was me! Oh God!’

I know, I know. Where did I hear it? — He kills his mother but he can’t wear grey trousers . But let’s be generous. A young woman, gut and breasts swollen to breaking, God-mandated pain looming, milk and shit to follow and sleepless trek through a new-found land of unenchanting duties, where brutal love will steal her life — and the ghost of an old cat softly stalks her in its socks, demanding revenge for its own stolen life.

Even so. The woman who’s coldly scheming to … in tears over … Let’s not spell it out.

‘Cats can be a bloody nuisance,’ Claude says with an air of helpfulness. ‘Sharpening their claws on the furniture. But.’

He has nothing antithetical to add. We wait until she’s cried herself dry. Then, time for a refill. Why not? A couple of slugs, a neutralising pause, then he rustles in his bag again, and a different vintage is in his hands. A gentler sound as he sets it down. The bottle is plastic.

This time Trudy reads the label but not aloud. ‘In summer?’

‘Antifreeze contains ethylene glycol, rather good stuff. I treated a neighbour’s dog with it once, oversized Alsatian, drove me mad, barking night and day. Anyway. No colour, no smell, pleasant taste, rather sweet, just the thing in a smoothie. Erm. Wrecks the kidneys, excruciating pain. Tiny sharp crystals slice the cells apart. He’ll stagger and slur like a drunk, but no smell of alcohol. Nausea, vomiting, hyperventilation, seizures, heart attack, coma, kidney failure. Curtains. Takes a while, as long as someone doesn’t mess things up with treatment.’

‘Leaves a trace?’

‘Everything leaves a trace. You have to consider the advantages. Easy to get hold of, even in summer. Carpet cleaner does the job but doesn’t taste as nice. A joy to administer. Goes down a treat. We just need to disassociate you from the moment when it does.’

‘Me? What about you?’

‘Don’t you worry. I’ll be disassociated.’

That wasn’t what my mother meant, but she lets it pass.

TRUDY AND I are getting drunk again and feeling better, while Claude, starting later with greater body mass, has ground to cover. She and I share two glasses of the Sancerre, he drinks the rest, then returns to his plastic bag for a burgundy. The grey plastic bottle of glycol stands next to the empty, sentinel to our revels. Or memento mori. After a piercing white, a Pinot Noir is a mother’s soothing hand. Oh, to be alive while such a grape exists! A blossom, a bouquet of peace and reason. No one seems to want to read aloud the label so I’m forced to make a guess, and hazard an Échézeaux Grand Cru. Put Claude’s penis or, less stressful, a gun to my head to name the domaine, I would blurt out la Romanée-Conti, for the spicy cassis and black cherry alone. The hint of violets and fine tannins suggest that lazy, clement summer of 2005, untainted by heatwaves, though a teasing, next-room aroma of mocha, as well as more proximal black-skinned banana, summon Jean Grivot’s domaine in 2009. But I’ll never know. As the brooding ensemble of flavours, formed at civilisation’s summit, makes its way to me, through me, I find myself, in the midst of horror, in reflective mood.

I begin to suspect that my helplessness is not transient. Grant me all the agency the human frame can bear, retrieve my young panther-self of sculpted muscle and long cold stare, direct him to the most extreme measure — killing his uncle to save his father. Put a weapon in his hand, a tyre wrench, a frozen leg of lamb, have him stand behind his uncle’s chair, where he can see the antifreeze and be hotly incited. Ask yourself, could he — could I — do it, smash that hairy knob of bone and spill its grey contents across the squalor of the table? Then murder his mother as sole witness, dispose of two bodies in a basement kitchen, a task only achieved in dreams? And later, clean up that kitchen — another impossible task? Add the prospect of prison, of crazed boredom and the hell of other people, and not the best people. Your even stronger cellmate wants daytime TV all day for thirty years. Care to disoblige him? Then watch him fill a yellowed pillowcase with rocks and slowly turn his gaze your way, towards your own knob of bone.

Or assume the worst, the deed is done — my father’s last kidney cells are sheared by a crystal of poison. He’s thrown up his lungs and heart into his lap. Agony then coma then death. How about revenge? My avatar shrugs and reaches for his coat, murmuring on his way out that honour killing has no place in the modern polis. Let him speak for himself.

‘Seizing the law into your own hands — it’s old hat, reserved for elderly feuding Albanians and subsections of tribal Islam. Revenge is dead. Hobbes was right, my young friend. The state must have a monopoly of violence, a common power to keep us all in awe.’

‘Then, kind avatar, phone Leviathan now, call the police, make them investigate.’

‘What exactly? Claude and Trudy’s black humour?’

Constable: ‘And this glycol on the table, madam?’

‘A plumber suggested it, officer, to keep our ancient radiators unfrozen in winter.’

‘Then, dear future best self, get yourself to Shoreditch, warn my father, tell him everything you know.’

‘The woman he loves and reveres planning to murder him? How did I come by such information? Was I party to pillow talk, was I under the bed?’

Thus the ideal form of powerful, competent being. What then are my chances, a blind, dumb invert, an almost-child, still living at home, secured by apron strings of arterial and venous blood to the would-be murderess?

But shush! The conspirators are talking.

‘It’s no bad thing,’ says Claude, ‘that he’s keen to move back here. Put up a show of resistance, then let him come.’