Is reality so easily, so minutely arranged in advance? My mother, Claude and I are waiting tensely at the open front door. Between the conception of a deed and its acting out lies a tangle of hideous contingencies. At the first touch, the engine turns but does not start. No surprise. This vehicle belongs to a dreaming sonneteer. On the second attempt, the same wheezing failure, and so too on the third. The starter motor is sounding like an old man grown too feeble to clear his throat. If John Cairncross dies on our hands, we’ll all go down. Likewise if he survives on our hands. He pauses before trying again, gathering his luck. The fourth is weaker than the third. I conjure a view of him through the car’s windscreen, mimicking for us a quizzical shrug, his form almost obliterated by reflections of summer clouds.
‘Oh dear,’ says Claude, a man of the world. ‘He’s going to flood the carb.’
My mother’s viscera orchestrate her desperate hopes. But on the fifth, a transformation. With slow heaving and comical popping sounds, the engine internally combusts. Trudy and Claude’s straggling plant grows a hopeful bud. As the car reverses into the road my mother has a fit of coughing from what I take to be a cloud of blue exhaust blowing our way. We come inside, and the door is slammed shut.
We’re not returning to the kitchen, but climbing the stairs. Nothing is said, but the quality of silence — creamily thick — suggests that more than fatigue and drink are drawing us towards the bedroom. Misery on misery. This is savage injustice.
Five minutes later. This is the bedroom and it’s already started. Claude crouches by my mother and might already be naked. I hear his breath on her neck. He’s undressing her, to date a peak of sensual generosity unscaled by him.
‘Careful,’ Trudy says. ‘Those buttons are pearls.’
He grunts in reply. His fingers are inexpert, working solely for his own needs. Something of his or hers lands on the bedroom floor. A shoe, or trousers with heavy belt. She’s writhing strangely. Impatience. He issues a command in the form of a second grunt. I’m cowering. This is ugly, sure to go wrong, too late in my term. I’ve been saying this for weeks. I’ll suffer.
Obediently, Trudy’s on all fours. It’s a posteriori, doggy style, but not for my sake. Like a mating toad, he clasps himself against her back. On her, now in her, and deep. So little of my treacherous mother separates me from the would-be murderer of my father. Nothing is the same this Saturday noon in St John’s Wood. This is not the usual brief and frantic encounter that might threaten the integrity of a brand-new skull. Rather, a glutinous drowning, like something pedantic crawling through a swamp. Mucous membranes slide past each other with a faint creak on the turn. Hours of scheming have accidentally delivered the conspirators into the art of deliberative lovemaking. But nothing passes between them. Mechanically they churn in slow motion, a blind industrial process at half power. All they want is release, to clock out, taste a few seconds’ respite from themselves. When it comes, in close succession, my mother gasps in horror. At what she must return to, and might yet see. Her lover emits his third grunt of the shift. They fall apart to lie on their backs on the sheets. Then we all sleep.
On and on through the afternoon, and it’s on this long flat stretch of time that I have my first dream, in full colour and rich visual depth. The line, the stated border, between dreaming and waking is vague. No fences or fire break in the trees. Only vacant sentry huts mark the crossing. I begin indistinctly in this new land, as a tyro must, with a formless mass or mess of wavering, ill-lit shapes, people and places dissolving, indistinct voices in vaulted spaces singing or speaking. As I pass through, I feel the pain of unnamed, unreachable remorse, a sense of having left someone or something behind in a betrayal of duty or love. Then it comes beautifully clear. A cold mist on the day of my desertion, a three-day journey on horseback, long rows of the sullen English poor in the rutted lanes, giant elms looming over flooded meadows by the Thames, and at last the familiar thrill and din of the city. In the streets the odour of human waste as solid as house walls, yielding around a narrow corner to the aroma of roasted meat and rosemary and a drab entranceway I pass through to see a young man of my age in the dark-beamed gloom at a table pouring wine from an earthenware jug, a handsome man, leaning in across a smeared oak table, holding me with a tale he has in mind, something he has written or I have, and wants an opinion, or to give one, a correction, a point of fact. Or he wants me to tell him how to go on. This blurring of identity is one aspect of the love I feel for him, which almost smothers the guilt I want to leave behind. Outside in the street a bell tolls. We crowd outside to wait for the funeral cortège. We know this is an important death. The procession doesn’t appear, but the bell keeps ringing.
* * *
It’s my mother who hears the doorbell. Before I’ve drifted upwards from the novelty of dream-logic, she’s in her dressing gown and we’re descending the stairs. As we reach the last run, she gives a cry of surprise. I would guess the midden has been cleared while we slept. The bell sounds again, loud, hard, angry. Trudy is opening the door as she shouts, ‘For God’s sake! Are you drunk? I’m going as fast as—’
She falters. If she has faith in herself she shouldn’t be astonished to see what dread has already let me see: a policeman, no, two, removing their hats.
A kind, fatherly voice says, ‘Are you Mrs Cairncross, wife of John?’
She nods.
‘Sergeant Crowley. I’m afraid we have some very bad news. May we come in?’
‘Oh God,’ my mother remembers to say.
They follow us into the sitting room, rarely used and almost clean. If the hallway hadn’t been cleared, I think my mother would have been an immediate suspect. Police work is intuitive. What remains, possibly, is a lingering smell, easily confused with exotic cooking.
A second voice, younger, with brotherly solicitude, says, ‘We’d like you to be sitting down.’
The sergeant breaks the news. Mr Cairncross’s car was reported on the hard shoulder of the M1 north-bound, twenty miles from London. His door was open, and not far off, on a grassy embankment, he lay face down. An ambulance came, resuscitation was attempted during the race to hospital, but he died along the way.
A sob, like an air bubble in deep water, rises through my mother’s body, rises through me, to burst into the faces of the attentive police.
‘Oh God!’ she shouts. ‘We had the most awful row this morning.’ She hunches forward. I feel her put her hands to her face and start to shiver.
‘I should tell you this,’ the same policeman continues. He pauses delicately, mindful of the double respect owed to the heavily pregnant bereaved. ‘We tried to contact you this afternoon. A friend of his identified the body. I’m afraid our first impression is suicide.’
When my mother straightens her spine and lets out a cry, I’m overcome by love for her, for all that’s lost — Dubrovnik, poetry, daily life. She loved him once, as he her. Summoning this fact, erasing others, lifts her performance.
‘I should have … I should have kept him here. Oh my God, it’s all my fault.’
How clever, hiding in plain sight, behind the truth.
The sergeant says, ‘People often say that. But you mustn’t, you shouldn’t. It’s wrong to go blaming yourself.’
A deep inhalation and sigh. She seems about to speak, stops, sighs again, gathers herself. ‘I ought to explain. Things weren’t going well between us. He was seeing someone, he moved out. And I started a … His brother moved in with me. John took it badly. That’s why I’m saying …’
She’s got in first with Claude, told them what they were bound to discover. If, in flagrant mood, she were to say now, ‘I killed him,’ she’d be safe.