In the voice he uses to talk past Claude, my father says, ‘I saw it calculated once. If sex between the races goes on as now, in five thousand years everyone on earth will be the same pale coffee colour.’
‘I’ll drink to that,’ my mother says.
‘I’m not against it really,’ Claude says. ‘So cheers.’
‘To the end of race,’ my father agreeably proposes. But I don’t think he’s raised his cup. Instead, he turns to the matters in hand. ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll pop round with Elodie on Friday. She wants to measure up for curtains.’
I picture a hayloft, off which a hundred-kilo sack of grain is tossed to the granary floor. Then another, and a third. Such are the thuds of my mother’s heart.
‘That’s fine, of course,’ she says in a reasonable voice. ‘We could give you lunch.’
‘Thanks, but we’ve a crowded day. And now I should be going. The traffic’s heavy.’
The scrape of a chair — and how loud, despite the greasy tiles, they sound down here, like the bark of a dog. John Cairncross rises to his feet. He assumes again a friendly tone. ‘Trudy, it’s been—’
But she’s standing too and thinking fast. I feel it in her sinews, in the stiffening drapes of her omentum. She has one last throw and everything rests on an easiness of manner. She cuts him off in a rush of sincerity. ‘John, before you go I want to tell you this. I know I can be difficult, sometimes even a bitch. More than half the blame for all this is mine. I know that. And I’m sorry the house is a tip. But what you said last night. About Dubrovnik.’
‘Ah,’ my father affirms. ‘Dubrovnik.’ But he’s already several feet away.
‘What you said was right. You brought it all back to me and it pierced my heart. It was a masterpiece, John, what we created. What’s happened since doesn’t lessen it. You were so wise to say that. It was beautiful. Nothing that happens in the future can wash it away. And even though it’s only water in my glass, I want to raise it to you, to us, and thank you for reminding me. It doesn’t matter whether love endures. What matters is that it exists. So. To love. Our love. As it was. And to Elodie.’
Trudy lifts the glass to her lips. The rise and fall of her epiglottis, and her snaky peristalsis briefly deafen me. In all the time I’ve known her, I’ve never heard my mother make a speech. Not her way. But curiously evocative. Of what? A nervous schoolgirl, the new head girl making an impression with defiant tremor, emphatic platitudes, before headmaster, staff and the whole school.
A toast to love and therefore death, to Eros and Thanatos. It appears to be a given of intellectual life, that when two notions are sufficiently far apart or opposed, they are said to be profoundly linked. Since death is opposed to everything in life, various couplings are proposed. Art and death. Nature and death. Worryingly, birth and death. And joyously iterated, love and death. On this last and from where I am, no two notions could be more mutually irrelevant. The dead love no one, nothing. As soon as I’m out and about I might try my hand at a monograph. The world cries out for fresh-faced empiricists.
When my father speaks, he sounds closer. He’s coming back to the table.
‘Well,’ he says, most genially, ‘that’s the spirit.’
I swear the deathly, loving cup is in his hand.
Again, with both heels I kick and kick against his fate.
‘Oh, oh, little mole,’ my mother calls out in a sweet, maternal voice. ‘He’s waking up.’
‘You failed to mention my brother,’ John Cairncross says. It’s in his manly poet’s nature to amplify another’s toast. ‘To our future loves, Claude and Elodie.’
‘To us all then,’ says Claude.
A silence. My mother’s glass is already empty.
Then comes my father’s drawn-out sigh of satisfaction. Exaggerated to a degree, merely out of politeness. ‘More sugary than usual. But not bad at all.’
The styrofoam cup he sets upon the table makes a hollow sound.
It comes back to me, as bright as a cartoon light bulb. A programme on pet care laid out the dangers while Trudy was brushing her teeth one rainy morning after breakfast: unlucky the dog that licks the sweet green liquid off a garage floor. Dead within hours. Just as Claude told it. Chemistry without mercy, purpose or regrets. My mother’s electric toothbrush drowned out the rest. We’re bound by the same rules that dog our pets. The great chain of non-being is round our necks too.
‘Well,’ my father says, meaning more than he can know, ‘I’ll be going.’
Claude and Trudy stand. This is the reckless thrill of the poisoner’s art. The substance ingested, the act not yet complete. Within two miles of here are many hospitals, many stomach pumps. But the line of criminality has been crossed. No calling in the deed. They can only stand back and wait for the antithesis, for the antifreeze to leave him cold.
Claude says, ‘Is this your hat?’
‘Oh yes! I’ll take that.’
Is this the last time I hear my father’s voice?
We’re moving towards the stairs, then up them, the poet leading the way. I have lungs but no air to shout a warning or weep with shame at my impotence. I’m still a creature of the sea, not a human like the others. Now we’re passing through the shambles of the hall. The front door is opening. My father turns to give my mother a peck upon the cheek and throw an affectionate punch at his brother’s shoulder. Perhaps for the first time in his life.
As he goes out he calls over his shoulder, ‘Let’s hope that bloody car starts.’
ELEVEN
A PALE, THIN plant seeded by drunks in the small hours struggles for the remote sunlight of success. Here’s the plan. A man is found lifeless at his steering wheel. On the floor of his car by the rear seat, almost out of sight, is a styrofoam cup bearing the logo of a business in Judd Street, near Camden Town Hall. In the cup, the remains of a pureed fruit drink, laced with glycol. Near the cup, an empty bottle of the same lethal substance. Near the bottle, a discarded receipt for the drink bearing that day’s date. Concealed under the driver’s seat, a few bank statements, some for a small publishing house, others for a personal account. Both show overdrafts in the low tens of thousands. On one of the statements is scrawled, in the handwriting of the deceased, the word ‘Enough!’ (Trudy’s ‘thing’.) By the bank statements, a pair of gloves the dead man wore now and then to conceal his psoriasis. They partly conceal a balled-up newspaper page bearing a hostile review of a recent volume of poems. On the front passenger seat, a black hat.
The Metropolitan Police are understaffed, overstretched. The younger detectives, so the older complain, investigate at their screens, reluctant to waste shoe leather. When there are other, gory cases to pursue, a conclusion in this is conveniently at hand. The means unusual but not rare, easily available, palatable, fatal in large doses, and a well-known resource for crime writers. Enquiries suggest that as well as debts, the marriage was in trouble, the wife now living with the brother of the dead man, who had been depressed for months. Psoriasis undermined his confidence. The gloves he wore to conceal it explains the absence of fingerprints on the cup and the antifreeze bottle. CCTV images show him at Smoothie Heaven wearing his hat. He was on his way to the home in St John’s Wood that morning. Apparently, he couldn’t face becoming a father, or the collapse of his business or his failure as a poet, or his loneliness in Shoreditch, where he was living in rented accommodation. After a row with his wife he left in distress. The wife blames herself. The interview with her had to be suspended a few times. The brother of the dead man was also present and did his best to be helpful.