The Bradshaw Variations Read online

  ‘They using you much? I did a couple of years of consulting myself. At the time it looked like that was where the real money was, but personally I couldn’t stand it. I didn’t like the lack of structure. I saw other people getting out, working for themselves, and some of them were making serious money, but it all comes unravelled sooner or later. A lot of them went under. Some of them good friends of ours. Meanwhile I’m drawing my share options and my pension. They all said I was too conservative, that I should take more risks, but look who’s had the last laugh.’

  There is a silence. The others drink their tea, but Mrs Swann has been separated from hers.

  ‘The main difficulty’, she says, ‘was that he hated being at home all day. What’s a man doing, hanging around the house? That was the problem. A lot of those marriages’, she adds significantly, ‘ended in divorce. The women simply couldn’t stand it. They lost all respect for their husbands. I think marriage needs an element of mystery,’ she continues, warming to the sound of her own voice. ‘I told them, but they wouldn’t listen. They thought it would all be long lunches and jumping into bed in the afternoon. I said to them, no, don’t let them come home! A man isn’t a man if he’s in the house all day. You need a man, in a marriage. But they wouldn’t listen. And then they’re surprised when their –’ she remembers Alexa is on her lap ‘– their intimate life goes to pot into the bargain!’

  She laughs merrily. She is almost fond of them, these deluded souls she has created. She created them and then she sent them to their doom, for failing to heed her wisdom, her experience.

  Thomas laughs too. ‘Oh, Tonie’s pretty mysterious,’ he says.

  ‘Is she?’ Mrs Swann finds something distasteful in this remark.

  ‘And she’s hardly ever at home these days. So perhaps that proves your theory.’

  Mrs Swann blinks. ‘Why is she not at home?’

  ‘I told you, Mum,’ Antonia says. ‘I’ve gone full-time. They made me Head of Department.’

  Mrs Swann draws herself up. Do they think she suffers from senility? ‘I knew they’d made you a head,’ she says. ‘But I thought it was some kind of – of certificate. I didn’t realise it meant working extra hours. You didn’t tell me that.’

  ‘They’re getting their money’s worth out of you, are they?’ says Mr Swann, with the laugh he uses to express disapproval.

  Mrs Swann clutches Alexa closer. ‘And who looks after little one?’

  ‘Thomas does.’

  ‘But I thought Thomas was working from home! How can he work and look after a child at the same time?’

  Antonia sighs. ‘I’ve told you all this already, Mum.’

  Mrs Swann is trembling. It is the effort of bringing this scene to its just conclusion, of saying what needs to be said: it exhausts her and it invigorates her, both at the same time.

  ‘So they’ve given you unpaid leave, have they?’ Mr Swann asks Thomas.

  ‘No,’ Thomas says. ‘I’ve resigned.’

  ‘Have you now?’ Mr Swann sits back, apparently stunned. ‘You’ve resigned, have you?’

  Thomas stands, begins collecting the teacups. Mrs Swann has always had a strong feeling for Thomas, as a thing of value that lies within her daughter’s possession. Antonia’s other boyfriends were mostly people who could either be pitied or despised, but Thomas has always made Mrs Swann feel strangely alert and aware of herself. It is as though it is she he is attracted to, not Antonia. He has a lean, muscular body she would like to touch, with something tough and tensile inside it like a length of rope. She would like to take him; she would like to have him for herself. And yet she is dimly aware that this desire involves Antonia. It is refracted, somehow, from the maternal root. He acts like a prism, receiving her ambivalence and separating it, separating her hatred from her love. She passes through Thomas and she is liberated of her burden of dark feeling.

  But looking at him now, she feels the sheen coming off him. She feels the first disintegration of the surface. In the end, she wants him to be destroyed. The reality of the root, of its deep and primary confusion, requires it.

  When it is time to go, Mrs Swann draws her daughter aside.

  ‘You’ve got very thin,’ she says. ‘You look tired. I hope you’re looking after yourself.’

  Antonia’s black trousers are tight-fitting, impossibly minute. Mrs Swann remembers, years ago, an afternoon spent in Antonia’s room when she was out; remembers taking clothes from her daughter’s drawers, shirts and trousers and dresses, and forcing her own mottled arms and legs into them. She was so very large, as she still is today. She remembers laughing, at the trousers that wouldn’t go past her knee, at the shirtsleeves her hands could barely worm through.

  Antonia looks surprised. ‘I’m fine,’ she says. ‘I feel good.’

  Suddenly Mr Swann is by her side. If she could have got him there by magic, he couldn’t have appeared at a better time.

  ‘You mustn’t let the responsibility wear you out,’ Mrs Swann says. ‘I’m just saying, Richard, that Antonia looks very tired, very worn.’

  Mr Swann looks stricken, in his rigid, metallic way. She makes a mental note, to encourage him to change his glasses. The steel frames have a touch of the robot about them. She envisages him in tortoiseshell, something more modern and forgiving.

  ‘We should have a talk,’ he says to Antonia. ‘Your mother and I have – well, let’s just call them concerns. We think you and Thomas may be making a serious error. We’ll talk in a few days’ time. Please just hear us out.’

  Mrs Swann couldn’t have put it better herself.

  Antonia looks troubled. ‘All right,’ she says. ‘But I’m fine, honestly.’

  In the car on the way home, the Swanns talk everything over. They pick through every strand of the afternoon. By the time they arrive, they have analysed the situation so thoroughly that no further need to discuss it with Antonia herself remains. In bed, in the dark, Mrs Swann lies awake for a few minutes, putting together the story of their visit to Montague Street. There is a word she needs that is the key to it all, a word she has heard several times lately and not entirely understood. But she feels confident that this story will explain the word, or the other way around, when she comes to tell it. She grasps and grasps and finally lays her hand on it. Househusband. She is satisfied. She closes her eyes, and feels herself grow smaller and smaller until she disappears.

  XV

  At first he doesn’t miss Alexa. One minute she is there, standing at the door in her school uniform, and the next she is gone, non-existent, just as she used to be when Thomas was at work. He barely thinks of her when she is at school. There are two realities, one where she exists and another, unrelated, that he occupies alone. Then, at four o'clock, she reappears at the door, slightly scuffed, estrangement filming her features, and their life together resumes.

  One day, in the middle of the morning, Thomas finds himself searching his mind for the moment of her departure. At breakfast she had complained that her stomach hurt. He dimly recalls her face, wan and drooping, but after that all he can remember is his own determination to send her to school. It is as though his will were a loud sound that has drowned out everything else. Why did he want her to go so much? He doesn’t exactly know. He wonders now what the trouble was. He wishes to reconstruct it, Alexa’s stomach ache, her experience of the hour they spent together, her reluctant passage out of the house, but there is only himself, crashing above everything like a symphony. At half past three he doesn’t wait for Georgina to bring her home. He goes and collects her himself.

  Sometimes, standing in the tarmacked playground, he is enveloped in vague feelings of beneficence and sympathy, almost of sadness. Usually he is early: the children have not yet come out. The bright geometric climbing frames, the empty sandpit, the neat, indestructible shrubs in the flower beds seem so familiar to him. He appears to be remembering them, and yet here they are before his eyes. It is as though he is observing them from a strange afterlife. This, he realises
, is where Alexa spends the majority of her waking hours.

  Other people arrive; he begins to hear the mutter of conversation, babies’ cries, the shouts of small children. He has noticed that the levels of ambient noise in the playground make a virtually unimpeded ascent from piano to fortissimo in the half-hour that he is there. There is always a moment at which he is no longer able to distinguish one sound from another. It is this loss of the power of individuation that makes him feel unreal. He needs Alexa to come out; he needs something he can identify, in order to exist again. Little benches stand around the perimeter and he sits on one. He hums the adagio. He taps his fingers on his thighs.

  XVI

  In a jug on the kitchen table there are yellow roses. Thomas put them there. They catch his eye every time he passes, a yellow sunburst in the shadowy depths of the downstairs room.

  He tries to remember what month it is. The yellow colour of the roses makes him think of summer, but the surrounding light is grey and surrendered, as though it is ready at any moment to give in to darkness. He laughs aloud – it is funny, that he doesn’t know what month it is. He says the names of the months to himself. No one name means more to him than any other. For a second he is not even sure which part of time he is in, whether the incipient darkness is rising or ebbing, whether it is day that is to come or night. He looks at his watch; he remembers that it is Thursday, that it is January. He feels better. He has accomplished a small but necessary task, something to make himself more comfortable. The year is an event he is observing, not participating in, like an audience watching a play. He has made himself comfortable in the audience, comfortable in its lack of ambition, but occasionally he is seized by anxiety, torn unexpectedly out of himself, like a small unwary creature suddenly gripped in the talons of a predator. There is something defenceless about his position. There is a vulnerability that comes with the lack of participation. Anxiety can swoop down on him at any time and bear him away.

  He decides to go running. He sees Alexa to school and then he runs away into the morning, running along the pavements, along the residential roads towards the park. He does this every day. At the end of a week his body feels prouder, more assertive. He is filled with a tension-like expectation that is never acknowledged or resolved, but passes into the expenditure of the next day’s run. He feels the tension, and he feels the relief of its expenditure. The roses turn brown around their yellow hearts.

  *

  One day Tonie returns to the house in the middle of the afternoon. There has been a fire in the computer rooms and the university buildings have been evacuated. She comes in with her bag full of files, charged with a dangerous, unspent energy.

  Thomas is sitting at the piano. He is learning the C major fugue of The Well-Tempered Clavier. The prelude is easy, but the fugue is defeating him. He can play the left hand and he can play the right hand, but when he tries to play them together he encounters an absolute deficiency in himself. The problem is that the hands are equal. In every other piece Thomas has played, the right hand has been dominant: he has come to depend on the leadership of the right hand, to identify with it, as he might identify with the hero of a novel. Usually, the left hand is purely supportive, making no particular sense on its own. But in the fugue the left hand is autonomous.

  ‘What a sight,’ Tonie says, standing at the sitting-room door, laughing. Her laugh is full of hard, concealed shapes, like the files in her bag.

  Thomas looks up. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I just can’t do it.’

  She screws her face up, quizzical. ‘You don’t have to do it.’

  ‘I want to. Other people can.’

  Without taking her jacket off, she begins to tidy up the room. It is true that Thomas is increasingly preoccupied by the mystery of other people’s abilities. He can hardly bring himself to listen any more to his Glenn Gould recordings, to his Clifford Curzon boxed set, to Feinberg’s indistinct, primordial account of Bach, so swamped does he become in the knowledge that these men are vastly more capable than himself. And it isn’t just music, either: the same feeling besieges him when he considers literature or painting, when he leafs through the photographs in his Encyclopedia of World Art, a feeling that is beyond jealousy, that is a sort of sulkiness. All these others, born just as he was, into the same world: they are all better, more capable, more exceptional than he is. Recently he took Alexa to the circus, and even the acrobat in his sordid spangled costume, even the hula-hoop girl in her greasepaint were more exceptional. The acrobat whirled around the half-empty tent on a rope, a force of pure plasticity. All his male stiffness was entirely subjugated: he could make his body do whatever he told it to. Yet Thomas cannot make his hands play the fugue. The gyrating hula-hoop girl span twenty silver rings around her casually outstretched foot, grinning with her painted mouth. She was an artist, in her way. She has something Thomas does not have, an ability.

  How has it eluded him, art, when all these others have grasped it? What has he done wrong? He remembers the afternoons of his childhood, his mother there, his own determination to secure her approval and love, to get to her ahead of his brothers. And he succeeded. He studied the situation and turned it to his own advantage. It wasn’t particularly difficult. His brothers always seemed so distracted, so chaotic, their joys and satisfactions coming randomly, haphazardly, unplanned. Though all the same they came. When his mother cherished Howard or Leo it was for no reason that Thomas could identify. Thomas, thinking about his life, sees himself always grappling with a fixed creation, wrestling with it, turning it to his own advantage. Did he ever look at his mother, really look at her? Did he observe his brothers, people who were just as real as himself? He used to defend Leo against Howard, when they were children: he remembers deciding that this was the behaviour of a successful person, the defence of the weak against the strong, a kind of qualification, like a diploma. He remembers laying it at the feet of an unseen authority, his diploma. It didn’t make him like Howard less, or Leo more. It didn’t involve him personally. And his mother: the shape of her is all he remembers, the shape of what he wanted for himself. He would be unable to describe what she was like.

  This is how art has eluded him, in the struggle to succeed at life. An artist, he supposes, dies to life, dies in that struggle, dies and is reborn. Tonie is moving around the room, bending and straightening. She too, he realises, knows what it is to create. She created Alexa: he remembers the way her old life died, went over the cliff and smashed itself on the rocks, unfinished; Alexa’s birth also the old Tonie’s death. And then something new struggling out of the wreckage, the new Tonie, this woman who stands here now in her work clothes, more alive than ever and full of dangerous energy.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ he says, watching her.

  ‘Someone has to do it,’ she says. ‘The place is a mess.’

  It had occurred to him that they might go to bed, here in the afternoon. But it is clear that this is not a possibility. He sees that she is frustrated. She doesn’t want to be back at home, washed up on the domestic shore before her day has run its course. Her existence relies on the separation of one thing from another. She can never be whole again, having smashed herself on the rocks of creativity. It would drive her mad to find herself in bed with her husband when she would normally be at work. It isn’t that she thinks these things ought to be separate. It’s that they are separate, as the two halves of a broken plate are separate, as his right hand is separate from his left. But neither half can be anything on its own.

  ‘I was going to do it,’ Thomas says. ‘I was going to do it later.’

  He looks at the room and sees its disorder. He sees that Tonie is wondering how he can live like this. She is looking at him as something totally separated from herself. It is possible that Tonie could betray him, betray him without conscience. The broken parts of her could neglect to correspond. They could go their different ways without a word.

  ‘I know,’ she says. She puts her hand to her forehead. ‘It just suddenl
y seems important. I don’t know why, but it does.’

  He rises from the piano stool. He gathers up the music books that lie all around it on the floor and replaces them on their shelf. He collects the cups and plates – he has started having lunch up here, at the piano – and carries them down to the kitchen. There he finds more cups and plates and he gathers them, fetching and carrying, turning on the taps. Tonie appears: she has shed her jacket and rolled up her sleeves. She has an armful of things which she drops into the rubbish, one after another. Thomas finds dirty saucepans, roasting dishes, baking tins, and plunges them clanging into the foaming tumult of the sink. Tonie opens the cupboard and takes out the mop. Later he sees her washing down the shelves and doors. When he has finished the saucepans he cleans the cooker, involving himself more and more deeply in the intricacies of its plates and burners, losing himself in the black cavity of the oven. Presently, Olga returns. She comes down to the kitchen. She stands and stares.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asks.

  The next time Thomas looks, Olga has extracted the Hoover from the bowels of the understairs cupboard and is dismantling it with a screwdriver. She cleans the parts, reassembles it, revs it up. Thomas has moved on to the windows; Tonie is scrubbing the sills. The dishwasher is churning; the tap is dripping rhythmically into the polished sink. The thump and shriek of the Hoover recedes and comes back, recedes and comes back. Tonie dips and rinses her sponge in a bucket by her side, the water raw and slightly obscene-sounding, opening and closing around itself. His ears strain to order the noises. He hears the squeaking sound his cloth makes against the glass and he syncopates it, coming in on the Hoover’s off-beat. He feels the imminence of chaos. He feels it poised on the brink of dispersal, his creation; soon it will atomise into nothingness. There are footsteps, the sifting noise of a broom. The water closes on itself; the Hoover dies into silence. The end is coming – oh, the tension, the spurious tension of control! He understands that to create is to lose control, to become purely receptive. Yet how can he save what he has lost control of? His fingers fumble with the cloth and it falls to the floor. He bends to retrieve it; and it is there, crouching, that he hears Tonie empty the bucket, the suds and dirty water cascading into the drain, a long, low sound, perfectly measured. It gushes in his ear, the torrent; his tension is resolved. And then, coming up from the floorboards, the final vibration, the sound of Olga approaching. She has the withered yellow roses in her hands. Her footsteps grow louder, a last siege on the encroaching silence. She pauses; she waits. Then she thrusts them triumphantly into the bin, and slams shut the lid.