His laugh sounds uncertain. ‘Now there’s the path to perdition!’
I’m recalled to my mission: the sacred, imagined duty of the child of separated parents is to unite them. Perdition. A poet’s word. Lost and damned. I’m a fool to let my hopes rise a point or two, like a futures market after a rout and before the next. My parents are merely playing, tickling each other’s parts. Elodie is mistaken. What stands between the married pair is no more than protective irony.
Here’s Claude bearing a tray, something heavy or sulky in his offer.
‘More coffee?’
‘God, no,’ my father says in the simple, dismissive tone he reserves for his brother.
‘We’ve also got some nice—’
‘Darling, I’ll have another cup. A big one. Your bro,’ my mother says to my uncle, ‘is in the doghouse with Threnody.’
‘A threnody,’ my father defines for her with exaggerated care, ‘is a song for the dead.’
‘Like “Candle in the Wind”,’ says Claude, coming to life.
‘For God’s sake.’
‘Anyway,’ Trudy says, retreating some steps back through their exchange. ‘This is the marital home. I’ll move out when I’m ready and it won’t be this week.’
‘Come on. You know the fumigator was just a tease. But you can’t deny it. The place is a shithole.’
‘Press me too hard, John, and I might decide to stay. See you in court.’
‘Point taken. But you won’t mind if we remove the crap in the hall.’
‘I do mind a bit.’ Then, after a moment’s contemplation, she nods her assent.
I hear Claude pick up the plastic bag. His cheeriness wouldn’t convince the dimmest child. ‘If you’ll excuse me. Stuff to do. No rest for the wicked!’
TEN
THERE WAS A time when Claude’s exit line might have made me smile. But lately, don’t ask why, I’ve no taste for comedy, no inclination to exercise, even if I had the space, no delight in fire or earth, in words that once revealed a golden world of majestical stars, the beauty of poetic apprehension, the infinite joy of reason. These admirable radio talks and bulletins, the excellent podcasts that moved me, seem at best hot air, at worst a vaporous stench. The brave polity I’m soon to join, the noble congregation of humanity, its customs, gods and angels, its fiery ideas and brilliant ferment, no longer thrill me. A weight bears down heavily on the canopy that wraps my little frame. There’s hardly enough of me to form one small animal, still less to express a man. My disposition is to stillborn sterility, then to dust.
These lowering, high-flown thoughts, which I long to declaim alone somewhere, return to oppress me as Claude disappears up the stairs and my parents sit in silence. We hear the front door open and close. I strain without success for the sound of Claude opening the door of his brother’s car. Trudy leans forward again and John takes her hand. The faintest rise in our blood pressure suggests a squeeze of his psoriatic fingers against her palm. She says his name quietly, with a falling tone of fond reproach. He says nothing, but my best guess is he’s shaking his head, compressing his lips into a thin smile, as if to say, Well, well. Look what’s come of us.
She says warmly, ‘You were right, it’s the end. But we can do this gently.’
‘Yes, it’s best,’ my father agrees in his pleasant, rumbling voice. ‘But Trudy. Just for old times. Shall I say a poem for you?’
Her emphatic, childlike shake of the head gently rocks me on my bearings, but I know as well as she does that, for John Cairncross, in poetry no means yes.
‘Please John, for heaven’s sake don’t.’
But he’s already drawing breath. I’ve heard this one, but it meant less then.
‘Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part …’
Unnecessary, I think, for him to be speaking certain phrases with such relish. ‘You get no more of me’, ‘so cleanly I myself can free’, not ‘one jot of former love retain’. And at the end, when Passion is on his deathbed, and there’s a chance against the odds he might recover if only Trudy wished it, my father denies it all with a clever, sarcastic lilt.
But she doesn’t wish it either and talks over the last few words. ‘I don’t want to hear another poem for the rest of my life.’
‘You won’t,’ my father says affably. ‘Not with Claude.’
In this sensible exchange between the parties, no provision is made for me. Another man’s suspicions would be stirred by his ex-wife’s failure to negotiate the monthly payments that must be due to the mother of his child. Another woman, if she didn’t have schemes in hand, would surely demand it. But I’m old enough to take responsibility for myself and try to be the master of my fate. Like the miser’s cat, I retain a secret scrap of sustenance, my one morsel of agency. I’ve used it in the small hours to inflict insomnia and summon a radio talk. Two sharp, well-spaced blows against the wall, using my heel rather than my near-boneless toes. I feel it as a lonely pulse of longing, just to hear myself referred to.
‘Ah,’ my mother sighs. ‘He’s kicking.’
‘Then I should be going,’ my father murmurs. ‘Shall we say two weeks for you to clear out?’
I wave to him, as it were, and what do I get? Then, therefore, in which case, and so – he’s going.
‘Two months. But hang on a minute till Claude gets back.’
‘Only if he’s quick.’
An airplane a few thousand feet above our heads makes an airy downward glissando towards Heathrow, a threatening sound, I always think. John Cairncross may be considering one last poem. He could wheel out, as he used to before journeys, ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’. Those soothing tetrameters, that mature, comforting tone, would make me nostalgic for the sad old days of his visits. But instead he drums his fingers on the table, clears his throat, and simply waits.
Trudy says, ‘We had smoothies this morning from Judd Street. But I don’t think we left you any.’
With these words the affair begins at last.
A toneless voice, that comes as though from the wings of a theatre, in a doomed production of a terrible play, says from the head of the stairs, ‘No, I put aside a cup for him. He was the one who told us about that place. Remember?’
He descends as he speaks. Hard to believe that this too-well-timed entrance, these clumsy, improbable lines were rehearsed in the small hours by drunks.
The styrofoam container with its plastic lid and straw is in the fridge, which opens and closes now. Claude sets it down before my father with a breathy, maternal, ‘There.’
‘Thanks. But I’m not sure I can face it.’
An early mistake. Why let the contemptible brother rather than the sensuous wife bring the man his drink? They’ll need to keep him talking and then let’s hope he’ll change his mind. Let’s? This is how it is, how stories work, when we know of murders from their inception. We can’t help siding with the perpetrators and their schemes, we wave from the quayside as their little ship of bad intent departs. Bon voyage! It’s not easy, it’s an achievement, to kill someone and go free. The datum of success is ‘the perfect murder’. And perfection is hardly human. On board, things will go wrong, someone will trip on an uncoiled rope, the vessel will drift too far west of south. Hard work, and all at sea.
Claude takes a seat at the table, draws a busy breath, plays his best card. Small talk. Or what he considers small talk to be.
‘These migrants, eh? What a business. And don’t they envy us from Calais! The Jungle! Thank God for the English Channel.’
My father can’t resist. ‘Ah, England, bound in with the triumphant sea, whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege.’
These words raise his mood. I think I hear him draw the cup towards him. Then he says, ‘But I say, invite ’em all in. Come on! An Afghan restaurant in St John’s Wood.’