He waits patiently to present his idea of a picnic. It can’t help, to hear his rival wept for. Or perhaps it concentrates the mind. He drums his fingers lightly on the table, one of the things he does. When standing he rattles his house keys in his trouser pocket, or unproductively clears his throat. These empty gestures, devoid of self-awareness, are sinister. There’s a whiff of sulphur about Claude. But for the moment we’re as one, for I’m waiting too, troubled by a sickly fascination to know his scheme, as one might the ending of a play. He can hardly expound while she’s weeping.
A minute later she blows her nose and says in a croaky voice, ‘Anyway, I hate him now.’
‘He made you very unhappy.’
She nods and blows her nose again. Now we listen while he presents his verbal brochure. His delivery is that of the doorstep evangelist helping her towards a better life. Essential, he tells us, that my mother and I make at least one visit to Shoreditch before the last, fatal call. Hopeless to conceal from forensics that she was ever there. Helpful to establish that she and John were on terms again.
This, he says, must look like suicide, like Cairncross made a cocktail for himself to improve the poison’s taste. Therefore, on her final visit she’ll leave behind the original empty bottles of glycol and shop-bought smoothie. These vessels must show no trace of her fingerprints. She’ll need to wax her fingertips. He has just the stuff. Bloody good too. Before she leaves John’s flat, she’ll put the picnic remains inside the fridge. Any containers or wrapping must also be free of her prints. It should seem as though he ate alone. As beneficiary of his will, she’ll be investigated, a conspiracy suspected. So all traces of Claude, in bedroom and bathroom especially, must be eradicated, cleaned to extinction, every last hair and flake of skin. And, I sense her thinking, every no-longer thrashing tail, every stilled head of every last sperm. That may take some time.
Claude continues. No concealing the phone calls she has made to him. The phone company will have a record.
‘But remember. I’m just a friend.’
It costs him to say these last words, especially when my mother repeats them as in a catechism. Words, as I’m beginning to appreciate, can make things true.
‘You’re just my friend.’
‘Yes. Called round from time to time. For a chat. Brother-in-law. Helping you out. Nothing more.’
His account has been neutrally rendered, as though he daily murders brothers, husbands for a living, an honest high-street butcher by trade whose bloody apron mixes in the family wash with the sheets and towels.
Trudy starts to say, ‘But listen—’ when Claude cuts her off with a sudden remembered thought.
‘Did you see? A house in our street, same side, same size, same condition? On the market for eight million!’
My mother absorbs this in silence. It’s the ‘our’ she’s taking in.
There it is. We’ve made another million by not killing my father sooner. How true it is: we make our own luck. But. (As Claude would say.) I don’t know much yet about murder. Still, his scheme is more baker than butcher. Half-baked. The absence of prints on the glycol bottle will be suspicious. When my father starts to feel ill, what stops him calling the emergency services? They’ll pump his stomach. He’ll be fine. Then what?
‘I don’t care about house prices,’ Trudy says. ‘That’s for later. The bigger question is this. Where’s your risk, what’s your exposure here when you’re wanting a share of the money? If something goes wrong and I go down, where will you be once I’ve scrubbed you out of my bedroom?’
I’m surprised by her bluntness. And then I experience not quite joy, but its expectation, a cool uncoiling in my gut. A falling out among villains, the already useless plot ruined, my father saved.
‘Trudy, I’ll be with you at every step.’
‘You’ll be safe at home. Alibis in place. Perfect deniability.’
She’s been thinking about this. Thinking without my knowing. She’s a tigress.
Claude says. ‘The thing is—’
‘What I want,’ my mother says with a vehemence that hardens the walls around me, ‘is you tied into this, and I mean totally. If I fail, you fail. If I—’
The doorbell rings once, twice, three times, and we freeze. No one, in my experience, has ever come to the front door so late. Claude’s plan is so hopeless it’s failed already, for here are the police. No one else rings a bell with such dogged insistence. The kitchen was bugged long ago, they’ve heard it all. Trudy will have her way – we’ll all go down together. Babies Behind Bars was a too-long radio documentary I listened to one afternoon. Convicted murderers in the States, nursing mothers, were allowed to raise their infants in their cells. This was presented as an enlightened development. But I remember thinking, These babies have done nothing wrong. Set them free! Ah well. Only in America.
‘I’ll go.’
He gets up and crosses the room to the video entryphone on the wall by the kitchen door. He peers at the screen.
‘It’s your husband,’ he says dully.
‘Jesus.’ My mother pauses to think. ‘No use pretending I’m not here. You better hide somewhere. In the laundry room. He never—’
‘There’s someone with him. A woman. A young woman. Rather pretty, I’d say.’
Another silence. The bell rings again. Longer.
My mother’s voice is even, though strained. ‘In that case, go and let them in. But Claude, darling. Kindly put that glycol bottle away.’
SEVEN
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.