Nutshell by Ian McEwan Read Free Book Online Page A

white I’ll like it.”
    She’s forgotten. The restaurant where the waiter was slow to light the candle. She loved it then, and I loved it even more. Now, the withdrawn cork, the chink of glasses—I hope they’re clean—and Claude is pouring. I can’t say no.
    “Cheers!” Her tone has quickly softened.
    A top-up, then he says, “Tell me what it was.”
    When she starts to speak her throat constricts. “I was thinking of our cat. I was fifteen. His name was Hector, a sweet old thing, the family’s darling, two years older than me. Black, with white socks and bib. I came home from school one day in a filthy mood. He was on the kitchen table where he wasn’t supposed to be. Looking for food. I gave him a whack that knocked him flying. His old bones landed with a crunch. After that he went missing for days. We put posters on trees and lamp posts. Then someone found him lying by a wall on a heap of leaves where he’d crept away to die. Poor, poor Hector, stiff as bone. I never said, I never dared, but I know it was me who killed him.”
    Not her wicked undertaking then, not lost innocence, not the child she’ll give away. She begins to cry again, harder than before.
    “His time was almost up,” Claude says. “You can’t know it was you.”
    Sobbing now. “It was, it was. It was me! Oh God!”
    I know, I know. Where did I hear it?—
He kills his mother but he can’t wear grey trousers
. But let’s be generous. A young woman, gut and breasts swollen to breaking, God-mandated pain looming, milk and shit to follow and sleepless trek through a newfound land of unenchanting duties, where brutal love will steal her life—and the ghost of an old cat softly stalks her in its socks, demanding revenge for its own stolen life.
    Even so. The woman who’s coldly scheming to…in tears over…Let’s not spell it out.
    “Cats can be a bloody nuisance,” Claude says with an air of helpfulness. “Sharpening their claws on the furniture. But.”
    He has nothing antithetical to add. We wait until she’s cried herself dry. Then, time for a refill. Why not? A couple of slugs, a neutralising pause, then he rustles in his bag again, and a different vintage is in his hands. A gentler sound as he sets it down. The bottle is plastic.
    This time Trudy reads the label but not aloud. “In summer?”
    “Antifreeze contains ethylene glycol, rather good stuff. I treated a neighbour’s dog with it once, oversized Alsatian, drove me mad, barking night and day. Anyway. No colour, no smell, pleasant taste, rather sweet, just the thing in a smoothie. Erm. Wrecks the kidneys, excruciating pain. Tiny sharp crystals slice the cells apart. He’ll stagger and slur like a drunk, but no smell of alcohol. Nausea, vomiting, hyperventilation, seizures, heart attack, coma, kidney failure. Curtains. Takes a while, as long as someone doesn’t mess things up with treatment.”
    “Leaves a trace?”
    “Everything leaves a trace. You have to consider the advantages. Easy to get hold of, even in summer. Carpet cleaner does the job but doesn’t taste as nice. A joy to administer. Goes down a treat. We just need to disassociate you from the moment when it does.”
    “Me? What about you?”
    “Don’t you worry. I’ll be disassociated.”
    That wasn’t what my mother meant, but she lets it pass.

SIX
    Trudy and I are getting drunk again and feeling better, while Claude, starting later with greater body mass, has ground to cover. She and I share two glasses of the Sancerre, he drinks the rest, then returns to his plastic bag for a burgundy. The grey plastic bottle of glycol stands next to the empty, sentinel to our revels. Or memento mori. After a piercing white, a Pinot Noir is a mother’s soothing hand. Oh, to be alive while such a grape exists! A blossom, a bouquet of peace and reason. 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