The Bradshaw Variations Read online

  *

  He makes things for Alexa to eat, things that she likes. He washes her hair. He polishes her school shoes and sets them on newspaper beside the door. He knows which days she needs to take her gym kit to school. He sits with her while she does her homework, and makes sure she gives it in on time. At night, when she changes into her pyjamas, he observes with an artist’s satisfaction the felicity of the white smocking against her skin, the exactitude of her inky brows and eyelashes, the sculptural rightness of her limbs. And the health of her hair and gums and fingernails, the acuity of her responses, even the sleep she takes, the restorative quality of its pause: it confirms him, reflects him, though she has her own existence. It because she has her own existence that the confirmation comes. He is forming her out of the substance of what she already is. He is guiding her to her own perfection. It would be possible to ruin Alexa, to neglect or destroy her. There is no other person over whom he has this power.

  The house is orderly and clean.

  XVII

  At the beginning of February Tonie’s boss glances up from his desk and says,

  ‘The honeymoon period’s over now.’

  It is a grey lightless afternoon and the darker grey interior of the building is a grid of monochrome squares and rectangles that form strange block-like avenues of perspective leading nowhere. The whole place is a maze of corridors and staircases, of anonymous rooms jigsawed with desks and metal filing cabinets and identical black-upholstered chairs. This cluttered rectilinear gloom signifies thought, intellect, impersonal endeavour. Tonie has noticed how the human form is elided by its geometry: here she seems only to see people in parts, a pair of legs in a stairwell, a back disappearing through a doorway, a profile glimpsed through a shatter-proof glass panel, bent over a desk.

  ‘The honeymoon period’s over now,’ Christopher says, silhouetted by the grey light of the institutional window. ‘At this point we need you to be functioning independently.’

  ‘All right,’ Tonie says, after a long pause.

  Christopher’s office is more home-like than the others. As Head of School he has a slightly larger version of the cubes the rest of them occupy. He has lamps on low tables, cushions, a rug on the floor. Since September she has come here several times each week, assuming herself to be entering the territory of an ally and friend. She likes to sit on Christopher’s dove-grey sofa and consider the view, his orderly bookshelves, his framed Dutch prints. Now she wonders whether it is Christopher’s house that is neutral, impersonal, or whether it exists at all; whether this office in fact is all he is, a man in a room which despite its atmosphere of comfort is still only ten feet wide.

  ‘All right,’ she says.

  ‘I’m always available to answer questions,’ he says, ‘but my time is apportioned to favour the bottom end of the structure. I need to consider those younger, less experienced colleagues who have genuine reasons for requiring my help.’

  Tonie is used to Christopher, used to his voice and appearance, to the reedy sound he makes, to the precision of his bachelor tastes, to the sight of his long, narrow form among other forms she knows. For years she has watched him go off to his lunchtime organ recitals at St John’s, his medieval recorder evenings, his private views. Yet she has never, until now, put all those things together. She has never added him up.

  ‘Fair enough,’ she says.

  ‘There simply isn’t the infrastructure here for members of the department to be carried. We don’t have the resources.’

  ‘I get it,’ she says.

  Tonie has been associated with the English department for eight years. In that time she has seen people argue, flounce out of meetings, cry openly in corridors. She knows that emotion is a possibility here, as it is not elsewhere in the university or, indeed, the world. As a result the departmental discourse relies heavily on its bureaucratic origins. The grey walls pulse with rampant sensibility: only the rules stand in the way of a general outbreak of unconstrainable feeling. Now that Christopher has invoked this discourse, it would be perfectly acceptable for Tonie to shout at him, to weep, to storm back to her own cheerless office with its view of the car park; it is, perhaps, what Christopher expects and requires her to do.

  She looks at his pleated silk lampshades, at his mohair cushion covers.

  ‘Thanks,’ she says. ‘Thanks for the honeymoon. I enjoyed it.’

  She laughs quietly, turns to go.

  He stiffens in his chair, offended. ‘As I say, I’m always reasonably available. And obviously, if any question is urgent I’ll answer it.’

  She laughs again. Once, she was Christopher’s senior in the department, when he was a junior research fellow with a neck so slender his collars gaped around it. And he fawned on Tonie in those days, hungry for scraps of approval. It is this version of himself, she sees, that haunts him. He wants to exorcise it, to gouge it out of her recollection. He doesn’t realise how many things have happened to her in the intervening years, how little she has considered him. He doesn’t know how sad she suddenly finds it, that he should have spent his prime struggling to ascend through the ranks of a second-rate university, with only distracted mothers to impede him.

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ she says.

  Outside, in the corridor, she realises that her arms are full of files. She looks down at them. They are hard, blank-faced, with metallic spines. She is holding them against her chest. For a moment she can’t think what on earth they are.

  XVIII

  Thomas wakes up. He has been dreaming. In the dream he and Tonie and Alexa were in some kind of shopping mall in a foreign city. It had long, grey, sinister concrete walkways as broad as motorways. There were layer after layer of them, travelling downwards into the earth.

  Thomas and Tonie wanted to buy clothes for Alexa. They left her somewhere and found a small shop. The shop was full of light: its walls and ceiling were all glass. Thomas began to look at the clothes. They were very beautiful. He found a dress that was like a meadow of flowers, and another that was made of pieces of white cloud. There was a flowing garment like a Grecian tunic, composed of milk. Tonie had her own ideas, but every time Thomas found something she forgot them. She seemed to know that all of a sudden he had a special power of discovery. She waited to see what he would come up with next. From the rack he pulled a long-sleeved dress made from the original canvas of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. At its cuffs and hem were flames that flickered palely in the daylight. They agreed that this was the supreme find. It was for Alexa: it seemed to contain something of her spirit, some essence of her they recognised but had forgotten, as though it had been present at the moment of her birth but had been obscured or diluted over the years by Thomas and Tonie themselves. Now that they had chosen, Tonie volunteered to go and retrieve Alexa. She left Thomas alone in the shop. She vanished into the vast grey intestine of the shopping mall. He wondered then why they had abandoned Alexa in this strange place. He had no idea where she was or what had become of her. What had he and Tonie been thinking of? The irrationality of it spoke to him through the dream. He strained and strained to understand why they had committed this irresponsible act. At last he realised that it was because this was a dream. The realisation immediately woke him up. It seems that it requires faith to dream. Once you have lost it the dream comes apart in your hands.

  He lies awake in the darkness. It is so thin, so insubstantial: he feels as if he is falling through it, plummeting outwards or downwards. The universe yawns around him. He seems to see its infinite distances, its rashes of stars. The bed is like a tiny precipice on the edge of it. His contact with material things feels thread-like and minimal. It is the irrationality of the dream that has caused him to feel this. His own belief in his life seems in that moment incredible to him. Why doesn’t he cling to the edge of the bed in terror? Why doesn’t everybody? And Alexa, Tonie – what are these people to him? What are these relationships, these convictions, these codes of conduct? This forest of objects, dark now and in
distinct – what is their significance? How can he have chosen them, the armchair, the chest of drawers, the dark ornaments on the mantelpiece in their darker ponds of shadow, when the universe was yawning just to the side of them?

  The clock ticks steadily on the bedside table. After a while, Thomas goes back to sleep.

  XIX

  For the forty-five minutes that the doctor is late for the appointment, Howard thinks he is going to die.

  The nurse is there, moving around the room. The sky at the third-floor hospital window is blank. Her white form glimmers: it creases and unfolds as she bends and straightens, nodding in the light like a white flower.

  ‘Would you like anything?’ she says. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

  Her face comes near. It is painted: her youth is under the paint, as though some great sorrow has compelled her to inter it and don her painted death-mask.

  ‘Yes, please,’ he whispers. ‘Tea would be very nice.’

  She goes away. Then she is there again: he hears the teacup rattling in its saucer. When she puts it in front of him he sees her pale forearm. There is a mark on it the size and shape of a coin. It is dark red, livid, like the mark of a brand on her bland flawless skin.

  ‘You’ve burnt yourself,’ he says.

  ‘I did it with the iron,’ she says. ‘That was silly, wasn’t it?’

  He imagines her ironing, piles of white sheets, her nurse’s uniform. He sees the deadly steel tip nosing its way through the whiteness. It is terrible, the thought of her soft skin.

  ‘Please be careful,’ he says. ‘You must take care of yourself. We should all take more care of ourselves.’

  She moves about, tidying, her eyes gently lowered. There is paint on the lids.

  ‘The doctor won’t be long,’ she says.

  Howard watches the clock on the doctor’s wall. The second hand lurches trembling around the face. Claudia is parking the car. She dropped him at the front, not knowing they would bring him up here. He sees now that they should have stayed together. He sees that it is a trap. He has been lured from his family, his house, his car, his wife, by a trickster who has waited all this time, who waited by his cot and by his childhood bed, waited through the years in doorways and stations and city streets, in fields and on foreign beaches, in hallways and hotels and the passenger seats of cars; and lately, waited in the darkness of the garden, beneath the apple tree, for Howard to be alone. Claudia waved through the glass as she drove away. He remembers how confusing it was to be standing by himself in the grey entrance area. He was born in this hospital. It was as though Claudia had returned him here to be reabsorbed; as though she had driven away with his name, his identity, his actual life, and left his casing, his body, here, from whence it had come, like an empty bottle being returned to the brewery.

  The door opens.

  ‘Mr Bradshaw?’

  A man comes in. He is wearing a suit. There is a silvery sheen on the cloth that makes him seem not entirely real. Howard is afraid. The unreality of this man – he is young, brown-haired, has a harmless face – suddenly terrifies him. The man shakes his hand. He is like a game-show host shaking the hand of the winning contestant. Howard knows that anything could happen, anything at all.

  ‘I’ve got the results of your biopsy here. There was a, ah, dark area on the right lung that was causing some concern, is that right?’

  He frowns, wrinkles his brow. He scrutinises his notes.

  ‘That’s right,’ Howard says.

  ‘Well,’ the man says, ‘I have to say that I don’t quite see what all the fuss was about.’

  ‘Really?’ Howard says.

  ‘There’s obviously been a touch of pneumonia on that side, but that’s not the end of the world, is it?’

  ‘No,’ Howard says.

  ‘Is it?’ the man repeats, widening his eyes and laughing.

  ‘No,’ Howard says, laughing too.

  ‘It’s rather a case of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Isn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose it is,’ Howard says.

  ‘Bed rest, yes,’ the man says, wagging his finger. ‘But a biopsy – whoa there!’

  He slaps his knees and laughs again, and Howard laughs too, though he feels a certain consternation at what he has discovered here at the milled edge of life, the lunatics and incompetents in charge of the machinery.

  ‘Bed rest,’ he says, rising unsteadily from his chair. ‘That’s all?’

  ‘And plenty of fluids. Preferably non-alcoholic, Mr Bradshaw.’

  ‘Whoa there,’ Howard says weakly.

  On the way home, he holds Claudia’s hand across the gearstick.

  ‘We could sue them, darling,’ he says. ‘That buffoon virtually handed it to me on a plate.’

  ‘What a good idea,’ Claudia says. ‘Shall we?’

  He squeezes her fingers. He makes a vow, to be good.

  XX

  She is planting a hydrangea in the shady bed behind the house. It is morning. The village lies stunned in its newborn quiet. The grass is silvered with dew. The soil is black, and riddled with life.

  Just after ten her husband comes out; she hears his feet approaching on the gravel. They stop an arm’s length away.

  ‘I’ll say goodbye now,’ he says.

  She rises, pain in her knees. Her hands are caked in soil. He puts out his own clean hand, palm up like a policeman to stop her.

  ‘No need to get up. I can say goodbye here.’

  But she is already up, as he can see. She chaffs her hands to get the dirt off. Even so he winces, in his brushed blazer and clean shirt.

  ‘Am I not allowed to touch you?’ she says, advancing on him so that he stiffens with discomfort. ‘You do look smart.’

  ‘Best not.’

  ‘But I want to touch you!’

  He smiles coldly. The day stands around him, pale grey, windless. Suddenly she feels a loss of weight, of density; she is being abandoned. She is being sealed up, in a place where there can be no touching.

  ‘I’ll be back at five o’clock,’ he says. After all, he is only going to the Bridge Society annual lunch in Tunbridge Wells.

  She puckers her lips and leans forward, her dirty hands clasped behind her back. She receives his dry kiss. She could never touch her mother’s clothes, nor her father’s. They kissed her thus, across the chasm of departure. There is darkness down there, fathomless. She knows she mustn’t fall in. But the scented, smart atmosphere of people who are leaving tempts her. She wants to hurl herself towards them, dirty fingers clutching and clawing at their clean pressed garments. Yet she knows the chasm is there.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she says.

  ‘Goodbye.’

  He is gone: she kneels down again in the earth. She picks up her trowel and digs a hole, as she used to dig in her sandpit as a child. She watches her fingers moving in the soil. She is surprised to see that her hands are old. She digs a hole for the hydrangea, and plants it, and carefully beds it in.

  *

  A jackdaw has got into the greenhouse and broken two of the panes. She opens the door to let it out but it continues to fly in slow circles above her head, round and round, never alighting anywhere. She goes back to the house and returns with a blanket. The bird has destroyed a whole tray of seedlings. Her plants are lying on their sides in little spills of earth. She is afraid of birds, an old fear: her father, a bad shot, the birds never dead but denatured, roiling in the grass, mad with disorganisation. This one, so black, so evilly circling, is like something she herself has caused. Her fear roams out in the world, causative. It is the loss of identity that she fears. The jackdaw, circling in its captivity, is programmatic. She grips the blanket, and at the right moment she springs up and catches it in the folds, and clasps its hooded form in her arms. It struggles: its beak pecks and pecks at her arm through the wool. She goes out into the garden and releases it.

  Thomas is there, standing on the lawn.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he says.

  She is no
t certain he is real. She gazes at him, confused. Yet she is speaking.

  ‘Oh, you’re here – I wonder why I didn’t hear the car?’

  He walks across the grass towards her. She had forgotten he was so old. She folds the blanket while he kisses her cheek.

  ‘I rang twice but you didn’t answer. I was late leaving the house.’

  ‘Never mind,’ she says. ‘You’re here now.’

  ‘I was worried you’d start moving the boxes without me.’

  ‘I haven’t touched them. I’ve been terribly sensible.’

  She hears her own voice; what it says is perfectly true. She knows that she spoke to her son two days ago about the boxes. He offered to help her bring them down. This morning she cleared the upstairs landing to provide easier access to the attic. She does not doubt the reality of these things; it’s just that she hasn’t, in the strictest sense, experienced them. They have happened to someone she knows well, who is sometimes with her and sometimes not. She has always been aware of this being; even as a child she knew that someone lived in her, someone who wasn’t herself. But more and more often now, this person goes away. She has come to dread her departure, yet when it occurs she doesn’t notice that she’s gone. It is when she returns that the absence is made clear.