Nutshell

by Ian McEwan

The beginning of conscious life was the end of illusion, the illusion of non-being, and the eruption of the real.

On shaking hands with a stranger—I’ve heard this twice—he’ll say, “Claude, as in Debussy.” How wrong he is. This is Claude as in property developer who composes nothing, invents nothing. He enjoys a thought, speaks it aloud, then later has it again, and—why not?—says it again. Vibrating the air a second time with this thought is integral to his pleasure. He knows you know he’s repeating himself. What he can’t know is that you don’t enjoy it the way he does.

Whenever she and I listen, I sense in her slowing heart a retinal crust of boredom that blinds her to the pathos of the scene—a large, large-hearted man pleading his cause without hope, in the unmodish form of a sonnet.

Who would not wish to have written Candied apple, quince, and plum and gourd, or The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall?

gravid

rapine

arabesques

Here is a man who whistles continually, not songs but TV jingles, ringtones, who brightens a morning with Nokia’s mockery of Tárrega. Whose repeated remarks are a witless, thrustless dribble, whose impoverished sentences die like motherless chicks, cheaply fading. Who washes

This turbulence would shake the wings off a Boeing.

seed my thoughts with his essence, with the teeming cream of his banality. Then, brain-damaged, I’ll think and speak like him. I’ll be the son of Claude.

ablution,

clever and dark and calculating is hiding in there. As a man he’s a piece of work, a self-constructed device, a tool for hard deception, scheming against Trudy even as he schemes beside her. The second, he’s as he appears, the cockle has no morsel, he’s as honest a schemer as she, only dimmer. For her part, she’d rather not doubt a man who hurls her over the gates of paradise in under three minutes. Whereas I keep an open mind.

aubade.

Its nervous population obese, fearful, tormented by inarticulate anger, contemptuous of governance, murdering sleep with every new handgun.

aubade.

penumbral

cantilevered

We’re sharing a glass, perhaps a bottle, of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc. Not my first choice, and for the same grape and a less grassy taste, I would have gone for a Sancerre, preferably from Chavignol. A degree of flinty mineral definition would have mitigated the blunt assault of direct sunlight and oven blast of heat reflected off the cracked facade of our house.

I’d like to think that her purpose out here is to generate vitamin D for my bone growth, that she has turned down the radio the better to contemplate my existence, that the hand caressing the place where she believes my head to be is an expression of tenderness. But she may be working on her tan and too hot to listen to the radio drama about the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, and is merely soothing with her fingertips the bloated discomfort of late pregnancy. In short, I am uncertain of her love.

supine

Between his weakness and her deceit was the fetid crack that spontaneously generated a maggot-uncle.

adamantine.

Adversity forced awareness on us, and it works, it bites us when we go too near the fire, when we love too hard. Those felt sensations are the beginning of the invention of the self. And if that works, why not feeling disgust for shit, fearing the cliff edge and strangers, remembering insults and favours, liking sex and food? God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually.

a hung-over groan, the elective malady’s melody.

envelopes. I try to see her and love her as I must, then imagine her burdens: the villain she’s taken for a lover, the saint she’s leaving behind, the deed

she’s spoken for, the darling child she’ll abandon to

strangers. Still love her? If not, then you never did. But ...

kith

antithetical

No one seems to want to read aloud the label so I’m forced to make a guess, and hazard an Échezeaux Grand Cru. Put Claude’s penis or, less stressful, a gun to my head to name the domaine, I would blurt out la Romanée-Conti, for the spicy cassis and black cherry alone. The hint of violets and fine tannins suggests that lazy, clement summer of 2005, untainted

by heatwaves, though a teasing, next-room aroma of mocha, as well as more proximal black-skinned banana, summon Jean Grivot’s domaine in 2009. But I’ll never know. As the brooding ensemble of flavours, formed at civilisation’s summit, makes its way to me, through me, I find myself, in the midst of horror, in reflective mood.

uncoiling

small talk, or would ever want to. It’s an adult device, a covenant with boredom and deceit.

She’s staking a claim. I like the sound of her voice, the human approximation, I would say, of the oboe, slightly cracked, with a quack on the vowels. And towards the end of her phrases, she speaks through a gargling, growling sound that American linguists have dubbed “vocal fry.” Spreading through the Western world, much discussed on the radio, of unknown aetiology, signifying, it’s thought, sophistication, found mostly in young,

educated women. A pleasing puzzle.

copse

“Trudy, Claude, Elodie, I might be brief, I might not. Who cares? I want to say this. When love dies and a

marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It’s the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation. So, against that headwind of forgetfulness I want to place my little candle of truth and see how far it throws its light. Almost ten years ago, on the Dalmatian coast, in a cheap hotel without sight of the Adriatic, in a room an eighth the size of this, in a bed barely three feet across, Trudy and I tumbled into love, into ecstasy

and trust, joy and peace without horizon, without time, beyond words. We turned our backs on the world to invent and build our own. We thrilled each other with pretended violence, and we cosseted and babied each other too, gave each other nicknames, had a private language. We were beyond embarrassment. We gave and received and permitted everything. We were heroic. We believed we stood on a summit no...

us a universal principle. It was a system of ethics, a means of relating to others that was so fundamental that the world had overlooked it somehow. When we lay on the narrow bed face to face, looked deep into each other’s eyes and talked, we brought our selves into being. She took my hands and kissed them and for the first time in my life I wasn’t ashamed of them. Our families, which we described to each other in detail, at l...

important friends. We could redeem everyone we knew. Our love was for the good of the world. Trudy and I had never talked or listened with such attention. Our lovemaking was an extension of our talking, our talking of our lovemaking. “When that week was over and we came back and set up together here in my house, the love went on, months then years. It seemed that nothing could ever get in its way. So before I go any further, I’m raising my glass to th...

peroration?

Just think: nothing to do but be and grow, where growing is hardly a conscious act. The joy of pure existence, the tedium of undifferentiated days. Extended bliss is boredom of the existential

kind. This confinement shouldn’t be a prison. In here I’m owed the privilege and luxury of solitude. I speak as an innocent, but I conjure an orgasm prolonged into eternity—

aubade.

curlicue

Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves, Confucius said.