Nutshell (5 page)

Certain artists in print or paint flourish, like babies-to-be, in confined spaces. Their narrow subjects may confound or disappoint some. Courtship among the eighteenth-century gentry, life beneath the sail, talking rabbits, sculpted hares, fat people in oils, dog portraits, horse portraits, portraits of aristocrats, reclining nudes, Nativities by the million, and Crucifixions, Assumptions, bowls of fruit, flowers in vases. And Dutch bread and cheese with or without a knife on the side. Some give themselves in prose merely to the self. In science too, one dedicates his life to an Albanian snail, another to a virus. Darwin gave eight years to barnacles. And in wise later life, to earthworms. The Higgs boson, a tiny thing, perhaps not even a thing, was the lifetime's pursuit of thousands. To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavour, is just a speck in the universe of possible things. And even this universe may be a speck in a multitude of actual and possible universes.

So why not be an owl poet?

I know them by their footfalls. First down the open stairs to the kitchen comes Claude, then my father, followed by his newly signed-up friend, in high heels, boots perhaps, not ideal for stalking through woodland habitats. By nocturnal association I dress her in tight-fitting black leather jacket and jeans, let her be young, pale, pretty, her own woman. My placenta, like branching radio antennae, finely attuned, is receiving signals that my mother instantly detests her. Unreasonable thoughts are disrupting Trudy's pulse, a new and ominous drumbeat rising as though from a distant jungle village speaks of possession, anger, jealousy. There could be trouble ahead.

I feel obliged for my father's sake to defend our visitor: her subject is not so limited, owls being larger than bosons or barnacles, with two hundred species and wide folklorique resonance. Mostly of ill-omen. Unlike Trudy, with her visceral certainties, I quiver with doubts. Either my father, being neither sap nor saint, has come to present his lover, put my mother in her place (which is in his past) and show indifference to his brother's infamy. Or he's even more the sap, too much the saint, dropping in chastely with one of his authors as a form of social protection, in hopes of being in Trudy's presence for as long as she'll tolerate him. Or something beyond both, too opaque to determine. Simpler, for now at least, to follow my mother's lead and assume that this friend is my father's mistress.

No child, still less a foetus, has ever mastered the art of small talk, or would ever want to. It's an adult device, a covenant with boredom and deceit. In this case mostly the latter. After a tentative scrape of chairs, the offer of wine, the pull of a cork, a comment from Claude about the heat draws my father's neutral hum of assent. A fitful exchange between the brothers projects the lie that our visitors happened to be passing. Trudy remains silent, even when the poet is introduced as Elodie. No one comments on the elegant social geometry of a married couple and their lovers around a table, raising a glass, a
tableau vivant
of brittle modern life.

My father appears unfazed to find his brother in his kitchen, opening the wine, playing the host. So John Cairncross was never the dupe, the unknowing cuckold. My underestimated father blandly sips and asks Trudy how she's feeling. Not too tired, he hopes. Which may or may not be a gentle dig, a sexual allusion. That plaintive tone of his has vanished. Distance or irony has replaced it. Only satisfied desire could have freed him. Trudy and Claude must wonder why their murderee is here, what he wants, but it wouldn't be right to ask.

Instead, Claude asks Elodie if she lives nearby. No, she doesn't. She lives in Devon, in a studio, on a farm, near a river, by which she might be letting Trudy know that here in London she'll be overnighting between John's Shoreditch sheets. She's staking a claim. I like the sound of her voice, the human approximation, I would say, of the oboe, slightly cracked, with a quack on the vowels. And towards the end of her phrases, she speaks through a gargling, growling sound that American linguists have dubbed “vocal fry.” Spreading through the Western world, much discussed on the radio, of unknown aetiology, signifying, it's thought, sophistication, found mostly in young, educated women. A pleasing puzzle. With such a voice she might hold her own against my mother.

Nothing in my father's manner suggests that only this afternoon his brother fronted him five thousand pounds in cash. No gratitude, same old fraternal contempt. That must stir Claude's ancient hatred. And in me, something more hypothetical, a
potential
grudge. Even as I cast my father as a lovelorn fool, I always assumed that if matters became intolerable with Claude, and if I failed to unite my parents, I might live with my father, at least for a while. Until I got on my feet. But I don't think this poet would take me on—tight black jeans and leather jacket is not maternity wear. That's part of her allure. In my narrow view, my father would be better single. Pale beauty and an assured duck's voice are not my allies. But there may be nothing between them, and I like her.

Claude has just said, “A studio? On a farm? How marvellous.” Elodie is describing in her urban growl an A-frame cabin on the banks of a dark and rushing river that foams round granite boulders, a dodgy footbridge to the other side, a copse of beeches and birch, a bright clearing spangled with anemones and celandines, bluebells and spurge.

“Perfect for a nature poet,” Claude says.

So true and dull is this that Elodie falters. He presses in. “How far is it all from London?”

By “all” he refers to the pointless river and rocks and trees and flowers. Deflated, she can barely fry her words. “About two hundred miles.”

She's guessed that he'll ask her about the nearest railway station and how long the journey takes, information he'll soon forget. But he asks, she answers, and we three listen, not stupefied or even mildly bored. Each of us, from each different point of view, is gripped by what's not being said. The lovers, if Elodie is one, the two parties external to the marriage, are the dual charge that will blast this household apart. And blow me upwards, hellwards, to my thirteenth floor.

In a gentle tone of rescue, John Cairncross mentions that he likes the wine, a prompt to Claude to refill the glasses. While he obliges there settles over us a silence. I conjure a taut piano wire waiting for its sudden felt hammer. Trudy is about to speak. I know from the syncopated trip of her heartbeat, just before her first word.

“These owls. Are they real or do they, like, stand for something?”

“Oh no,” Elodie says in a rush. “They're real. I write from life. But the reader, you know,
imports
the symbols, the associations. I can't keep them out. That's how poetry works.”

“I always think of owls,” says Claude, “as wise.”

The poet pauses, tasting the air for sarcasm. She's getting his measure and says evenly, “There you are then. Nothing I can do about that.”

“Owls are vicious,” Trudy says.

Elodie: “Like robins are. Like nature is.”

Trudy: “Inedible, apparently.”

Elodie: “And the broody owl is poisonous.”

Trudy: “Yes, the broody one can kill you.”

Elodie: “I don't think so. She just makes you sick.”

Trudy: “I mean, if she gets her claws into your face.”

Elodie: “Never happens. She's too shy.”

Trudy: “Not when provoked.”

The exchange is relaxed, the tone inconsequential. Small talk or a trade in threat and insult—I lack the social experience to know. If I'm drunk then Trudy must be too, but there's nothing in her manner to suggest it. Loathing for Elodie, now framed as a rival, may be an elixir of sobriety.

John Cairncross seems content to pass his wife on to Claude Cairncross. This puts the steel in my mother, who believes the discarding and passing on is
hers
to decide. She may deny my father Elodie. She may deny him life itself. But I may be wrong. My father reciting in the library, appearing to prize every second in my mother's presence, allowing her to shove him into the street. (
Just go!
) I can't trust my judgement. Nothing fits.

But no time to think now. He's on his feet, looming over us, wine in hand, swaying barely at all, ready to make a speech. Quiet, everyone.

“Trudy, Claude, Elodie, I might be brief, I might not. Who cares? I want to say this. When love dies and a marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It's the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation. So, against that headwind of forgetfulness I want to place my little candle of truth and see how far it throws its light. Almost ten years ago, on the Dalmatian coast, in a cheap hotel without sight of the Adriatic, in a room an eighth the size of this, in a bed barely three feet across, Trudy and I tumbled into love, into ecstasy and trust, joy and peace without horizon, without time, beyond words. We turned our backs on the world to invent and build our own. We thrilled each other with pretended violence, and we cosseted and babied each other too, gave each other nicknames, had a private language. We were beyond embarrassment. We gave and received and permitted everything. We were heroic. We believed we stood on a summit no one else, not in life, not in all poetry, had ever climbed. Our love was so fine and grand, it seemed to us a universal principle. It was a system of ethics, a means of relating to others that was so fundamental that the world had overlooked it somehow. When we lay on the narrow bed face to face, looked deep into each other's eyes and talked, we brought our selves into being. She took my hands and kissed them and for the first time in my life I wasn't ashamed of them. Our families, which we described to each other in detail, at last made sense to us. We loved them urgently, despite all the difficulties of the past. Same with our best, most important friends. We could redeem everyone we knew. Our love was for the good of the world. Trudy and I had never talked or listened with such attention. Our lovemaking was an extension of our talking, our talking of our lovemaking.

“When that week was over and we came back and set up together here in my house, the love went on, months then years. It seemed that nothing could ever get in its way. So before I go any further, I'm raising my glass to that love. May it never be denied, forgotten, distorted or rejected as illusion. To our love. It happened. It was true.”

I hear a shuffle and murmur of reluctant accord and, closer by, I hear my mother swallow hard before she pretends to drink the toast. I think she's taken against “my house.”

“Now,” my father continues, lowering his voice, as though entering a funeral parlour, “that love has run its course. It never collapsed into mere routine or a hedge against old age. It died quickly, tragically, as love on a grand scale must. The curtain's come down. It's over, and I'm glad. Trudy's glad. Everyone who knows us is glad and relieved. We trusted each other, now we don't. We loved each other, now I detest her as much as she detests me. Trudy, my sweet, I can hardly stand the sight of you. There have been times when I could have strangled you. I've had dreams, happy dreams, in which I see my thumbs tightening against your carotid arteries. I know you feel the same about me. But that's no cause for regret. Let's rejoice instead. These are just the dark feelings we need to set ourselves free, to be reborn into new life and new love. Elodie and I have found that love and we are bound by it for the rest of our lives.”

“Wait,” Elodie says. I think she fears my father's taste for indiscretion.

But he won't take an interruption. “Trudy and Claude, I'm happy for you. You came together at the perfect moment. No one will deny it, you truly deserve each other.”

This is a curse, though my father sounds impenetrably sincere. To be tied to a man as vapid but sexually vigorous as Claude is a complex fate. His brother knows it. But shush. He's still talking.

“There are arrangements to make. There'll be arguments and stress. But the overall scheme is simple, and for that we're blessed. Claude, you have your nice big place in Primrose Hill, and Trudy, you can move there. I'll be moving some stuff back in here tomorrow. As soon as you've gone and the decorators have done their work, Elodie will move in with me. I suggest we don't see each other for a year or so, and then think again. The divorce should be straightforward. The important thing to remember at all times is to be rational and civil and to remember how lucky we are to have found love again. OK? Good. No, no, don't get up. We'll see ourselves out. Trudy, if you're here, I'll see you tomorrow around ten. I won't stay long—I've got to get straight up to St. Albans. And by the way, I've found my key.”

There's the sound of a chair as Elodie stands. “Wait, I mean, may I say something now?”

My father is genial and firm. “Not remotely appropriate.”

“But—”

“C'mon. Time to go. Thanks for the wine.”

A moment of throat-clearing, then their footsteps recede across the kitchen and up the stairs.

My mother and her lover sit in silence as we listen to them go. We hear the front door close upstairs with a punctuating, final sound. A full stop. Trudy and Claude are stunned. I'm in turmoil. What was I in my father's peroration? Dead. Head-first in a burial mound within his hated ex-wife's gut. Not even a mention, not in an aside, not even dismissed as an irrelevance. A year “or so” must pass before my saviour sees me. He paid tribute to honest memory and he forgot me. In a rush towards his own rebirth, he discarded mine. Fathers and sons. I heard it once and won't forget.
What links them in nature? An instant of blind rut.

Try this. He moved to Shoreditch to sample a tryst with Elodie. He vacated the Terrace so Claude could move in and give John good cause to throw Trudy out. The anxious visits, the earnest poetry, even the lost key were feints, lulling her into greater security with Claude, drawing them together.