‘Lost! Let me think now. I know what! I’ve just remembered. You left him on the M1, by the edge of the road, lying on the grass with a gut full of poison. Fancy us forgetting that.’
He might have gone on but Trudy swings back her arm and hits him in the face. Not a lady’s slap, but a clenched-fist blow that levers my head from its mooring.
‘You’re full of spite,’ she says with surprising calm. ‘Because you were always jealous.’
‘Well, well,’ says Claude, his voice only a little thickened. ‘The naked truth.’
‘You hated your brother because you could never be the man he was.’
‘While you loved him to the end.’ Claude has reverted to fake wonderment. ‘Now what was that awfully clever thing someone was saying to me, was it last night or the night before? “I want him dead and it has to be tomorrow.” Not the loving wife of my brother, who shaped her life.’
‘You got me drunk. That’s what you mostly do.’
‘And next morning who was that, proposing a toast to love, coaxing the man who shaped her life to raise a cup of venom? Surely not my brother’s loving wife. Oh no, not my own darling mouse.’
I understand my mother, I know her heart. She’s dealing with the facts as she sees them. The crime, once a sequence of plans and their enactment, now in memory resembles an object, unmoveable, accusing, a cold stone statue in a clearing in a wood. A midwinter’s bitter midnight, a waning moon, and Trudy is hurrying away down a frosty woodland path. She turns to look back at the distant figure, partly obscured by bare boughs and skeins of mist, and she sees that the crime, the object of her thoughts, is not a crime at all. It’s a mistake. It always was. She suspected it all along. The further she removes herself, the clearer it becomes. She was merely wrong, not bad, and she’s no criminal. The crime must be elsewhere in the woods, and belong to someone else. No arguing with the facts that lead to Claude’s essential guilt. His sneering tone can’t protect him. It condemns him.
And yet. And yet. And yet she violently wants him. Whenever he calls her his mouse, a curlicue of thrill, a cold contraction lodges in her perineum, an icy hook that tugs her downwards onto a narrow ledge and reminds her of the chasms she’s swooned into before, the Walls of Death she’s survived too often. His mouse! What humiliation. In the palm of his hand. Pet. Powerless. Fearful. Contemptible. Disposable. Oh to be his mouse! When she knows it’s madness. So hard to resist. Can she fight it?
Is she a woman or a mouse?
THIRTEEN
A SILENCE I can’t read follows Claude’s mockery. He may regret his sarcasm or resent being diverted from his breezy upland of elation. She may be resentful too, or wanting to resume as his mouse. I’m weighing these possibilities as he moves away from her. He sits on the end of the disordered bed, tapping on his phone. She remains at the window, her back to the room, facing her portion of London, its diminishing evening traffic, scattered birdsong, lozenges of summer cloud and chaos of roofs.
When at last she speaks her tone is sulky and flat. ‘I’m not selling this house just so you can get rich.’
His reply is immediate. It’s the same needling voice of derision. ‘No, no. We’ll be rich together. Or, if you like, poor in separate prisons.’
It’s nicely put as a threat. Can she believe him, that he’d take them both down? Negative altruism. Cutting off your nose to spite another’s face. What should be her response? I have time to think because she’s yet to reply. A little shocked at this implied blackmail, I should say. Logically, she should suggest the same. In theory, they have equal power over each other. Leave this house. Never come back. Or I’ll bring the police down on us both. But even I know that love doesn’t steer by logic, nor is power distributed evenly. Lovers arrive at their first kisses with scars as well as longings. They’re not always looking for advantage. Some need shelter, others press only for the hyperreality of ecstasy, for which they’ll tell outrageous lies or make irrational sacrifice. But they rarely ask themselves what they need or want. Memories are poor for past failures. Childhoods shine through adult skin, helpfully or not. So do the laws of inheritance that bind a personality. The lovers don’t know there’s no free will. I haven’t heard enough radio drama to know more than that, though pop songs have taught me that they don’t feel in December what they felt in May, and that to have a womb may be incomprehensible to those who don’t and that the reverse is also true.
Trudy turns to face the room. Her small, faraway voice chills me. ‘I’m frightened.’
She already sees how their plans have gone wrong, despite signs of early success. She’s shivering. Asserting her innocence isn’t viable after all. The prospect of a fight with Claude has shown her how lonely her independence could be. His taste for sarcasm is new to her, it scares her, disorients her. And she wants him, even though his voice, his touch and his kisses are corrupted by what they’ve done. My father’s death won’t be confined, it’s cut loose from its mortuary slab or stainless-steel drawer and drifted in the evening air, across the North Circular, over those same north London roofs. It’s in the room now, in her hair, on her hands, and on Claude’s face – an illuminated mask that gapes without expression at the phone in his hand.
‘Listen to this,’ he says in a Sunday-breakfast sort of way. ‘From a local paper. Tomorrow’s. Body of a man seen by hard shoulder of M1 between junctions et cetera and et cetera. Twelve hundred calls from passing motorists to emergency services et cetera. Man pronounced dead on arrival at hospital, confirms police spokeswoman et cetera. Not yet named … And here’s the thing. “Police are not treating the death as a criminal matter at this stage.”’
‘At this stage,’ she murmurs. Then her voice picks up. ‘But you don’t understand what I’m trying to—’
‘Which is?’
‘He’s dead. Dead! It’s so … And …’ Now she’s starting to cry. ‘And it hurts.’
Claude is merely reasonable. ‘What I understand is you wanted him dead and now—’
‘Oh John!’ she cries.
‘So we’ll stick our courage to the screwing whatever. And get on with—’
‘We’ve … done a … terrible thing,’ she says, oblivious to the break she’s making with innocence.
‘Ordinary people wouldn’t have the guts to do what we’ve done. So, here’s another one. Luton Herald and Post. “Yesterday morning—”’
‘Don’t! Please don’t.’
‘All right, all right. Same stuff anyway.’
Now she’s indignant. ‘They write “dead man” and it’s nothing to them. Just words. Typing. They’ve no idea what it means.’
‘But they’re right. I happen to know this. Around the world a hundred and five people die every minute. Not far off two a second. Just to give you some perspective.’
Two seconds’ pause as she takes this in. Then she begins to laugh, an unwanted, mirthless laugh that turns to sobbing, through which she manages to say at last, ‘I hate you.’
He’s come close, his hand is on her arm, he murmurs into her ear. ‘Hate? Don’t get me excited all over again.’
But she has. Through his kisses and her tears she says, ‘Please. No. Claude.’
She doesn’t turn or push him away. His fingers are below my head, moving slowly.
‘Oh no,’ she whispers, moving closer to him. ‘Oh no.’
Grief and sex? I can only theorise. Defences weak, soft tissues gone softer, emotional resilience yielding to childish trust in salty abandonment. I hope never to find out.