Against all the signs – her terse responses, her yawns, her general inattention – he lingers into the early evening, in hopes, perhaps, of dinner. But my mother is waiting for Claude. At last she drives her husband away by declaring her need to rest. She’ll see him to the door. Who could ignore the sorrow in his voice as he makes his tentative goodbyes. It pains me to think he would endure any humiliation in order to spend some minutes longer in her presence. Nothing, save his nature, prevents him doing what others might do – precede her to the master bedroom, to the room where he and I were conceived, sprawl on the bed or in the tub among bold clouds of steam, then invite his friends round, pour wine, be master of his house. Instead, he hopes to succeed by kindness and self-effacing sensitivity to her needs. I hope to be wrong, but I think he’ll doubly fail, for she’ll go on despising him for being weak, and he’ll suffer even more than he should. His visits don’t end, they fade. He leaves behind in the library a field of resonating sadness, an imagined shape, a disappointed hologram still in possession of his chair.
Now we’re approaching the front door as she sees him off the premises. These various depredations have been much discussed. I know that one hinge of this door has parted with the woodwork. Dry rot has turned the architrave to compacted dust. Some floor tiles have gone, others are cracked – Georgian, in a once colourful diamond pattern, impossible to replace. Concealing those absences and cracks, plastic bags of empty bottles and rotting food. Spilling underfoot, these are the very emblems of household squalor: the detritus of ashtrays, paper plates with loathsome wounds of ketchup, teetering teabags like tiny sacks of grain that mice or elves might hoard. The cleaning lady left in sadness long before my time. Trudy knows it’s not a gravid woman’s lot, to heave garbage to the high-lidded wheelie bins. She could easily ask my father to clean the hall, but she doesn’t. Household duties might confer household rights. And she may be at work on a clever story of his desertion. Claude remains in this respect a visitor, an outsider, but I’ve heard him say that to tidy one corner of the house would be to foreground the chaos in the rest. Despite the heatwave I’m well protected against the stench. My mother complains about it most days, but languidly. It’s only one aspect of domestic decay.
She may think that a blob of curd on his shoe, or the sight of a cobalt-furred orange by the skirting will shorten my father’s goodbyes. She’s wrong. The door is open, he straddles the threshold and she and I are just inside the hall. Claude is due in fifteen minutes. He sometimes comes early. So Trudy is agitated but determined to appear sleepy. She’s standing on eggshells. A square of greasy paper that once wrapped a slab of unsalted butter is caught under her sandal and has oiled her toes. This she will soon relate to Claude in humorous terms.
My father says, ‘Look, we really must talk.’
‘Yes, but not now.’
‘We keep putting it off.’
‘I can’t begin to tell you how tired I am. You’ve no idea what it’s like. I’ve simply got to lie down.’
‘Of course. That’s why I’m thinking of moving back in, so I can—’
‘Please John, not now. We’ve been through this. I need more time. Try to be considerate. I’m bearing your child, remember? This isn’t the time to be thinking of yourself.’
‘I don’t like you being alone here when I could—’
‘John!’
I hear his sigh as he embraces her as closely as she’ll permit. Next, I feel her arm go out to take his wrist, carefully avoiding, I should think, his afflicted hands, turn him and gently propel him towards the street.
‘Darling, please, just go …’
Later, while my mother reclines, angry and exhausted, I recede into primal speculation. What kind of being is this? Is big John Cairncross our envoy to the future, the form of a man to end wars, rapine and enslavement and stand equal and caring with the women of the world? Or will he be trampled into oblivion by brutes? We shall find out.
THREE
WHO IS THIS Claude, this fraud who’s wormed in between my family and my hopes? I heard it once and took note: the dull-brained yokel. My full prospects are dimmed. His existence denies my rightful claims to a happy life in the care of both parents. Unless I devise a plan. He has entranced my mother and banished my father. His interests can’t be mine. He’ll crush me. Unless, unless, unless – a wisp of a word, ghostly token of altered fate, bleating little iamb of hope, it drifts across my thoughts like a floater in the vitreous humour of an eye. Mere hope.
And Claude, like a floater, is barely real. Not even a colourful chancer, no hint of the smiling rogue. Instead, dull to the point of brilliance, vapid beyond invention, his banality as finely wrought as the arabesques of the Blue Mosque. 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 his private parts at the basin where my mother washes her face. Who knows only clothes and cars. And has told us a hundred times that he would never buy or even drive such, or such, or a hybrid or a … or … That he only buys his suits in this, no, that Mayfair street, his shirts in some other, and socks from, he can’t recall … If only … but. No one else ends a sentence on a ‘but’.
That stale, uncertain voice. My entire life I’ve endured the twin torments of his whistling and his speaking. I’ve been spared the sight of him, but that will soon change. In the dim-lit gore of the delivery room (Trudy has decided that he, not my father, will be there), when I emerge to greet him at last, my questions will remain, whatever form he takes: what is my mother doing? What can she want? Has she conjured Claude to illustrate the enigma of the erotic?
Not everyone knows what it is to have your father’s rival’s penis inches from your nose. By this late stage they should be refraining on my behalf. Courtesy, if not clinical judgement, demands it. I close my eyes, I grit my gums, I brace myself against the uterine walls. This turbulence would shake the wings off a Boeing. My mother goads her lover, whips him on with her fairground shrieks. Wall of Death! On each occasion, on every piston stroke, I dread that he’ll break through and shaft my soft-boned skull and 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.