The Bradshaw Variations Read online

  Thomas takes her arm and they walk around the herbaceous borders.

  ‘Look, the oak tree’s got a face,’ she says gaily, pointing.

  It’s strange that she hasn’t noticed it before, a long face with a big chin and sad eyes. It looks like a monk’s face, in its cowl of bark. She knows most of the other faces in the garden. But this one she hasn’t seen before. It stares at her from its prison in the trunk.

  ‘So it has,’ Thomas says. He stops to examine it. He is always a little too eager, too responsive; when he was a child she wondered whether he might not be something of a simpleton. Her dogs were the same, quivering like compasses around her, so that her husband could never get them to do a thing. She notices that Thomas has put on weight. He has pouches under his chin. His hand is hurting her arm. There are red marks on the skin where the jackdaw pecked her. She shudders at the recollection of what she did. She makes a note to tell her father, though he is dead, and the world he lived in is dead too.

  ‘Shall we go in?’ she says. ‘We may as well get these silly boxes over and done with.’

  They turn towards the house. It is Charles who says the boxes have to go. He has them in his sights, though they have sat discreetly beneath the roof for years. Something gave him the idea of them and now he wants them gone. They are the last hidden part of her and he has found them out.

  ‘What’s in them, anyway?’ Thomas says.

  ‘Oh, just a lot of old rubbish really. Daddy says they ought to go, and I expect he’s right.’

  In fact she has fought him over the boxes, and this struggle has been so bitter that it has invoked her deepest capacity for submission. He has made her see them, see them clear as day: thirty or so large boxes with her name written on, that she hasn’t opened – he forced her to admit it – since the day they first went up to the attic, where they occupy so much space that there is no longer any room to store necessities. And in the end she agreed that the situation could not continue. Truly, she felt that it couldn’t. She wept and was grateful to him. So she is surprised to see that when Thomas has brought down the boxes and retracted the ladder into the roof, there are only six of them.

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘That’s all. I double-checked.’

  She remembers Charles leaving the house. Was it only this morning? He has gone to Tunbridge Wells and won’t be back until teatime.

  ‘I thought there were dozens,’ she says, helplessly. She sits down on the landing carpet.

  Thomas opens one of the boxes and looks inside. He takes out her crumpled christening gown, her old almanac, a doll with a tartan tam-o’-shanter who she recalls – oh, the dreadful surge of memory! – is named Clarissa.

  ‘Daddy wants it all to go to a charity shop!’ she bursts out. ‘I can’t bear it! Don’t let him send my things away!’

  Thomas looks stricken. He kneels down beside her.

  ‘Of course he can’t give them away,’ he says. ‘They’re your things. It’s up to you what happens to them.’

  ‘But I promised – I promised that by the time he came back they’d be gone!’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ Thomas mutters.

  He is angry. But not with her. He picks up Clarissa, turns her stiff body in his hands.

  ‘I suppose Alexa might like to look at some of these things,’ he says.

  Her voice is meek. ‘I dare say she might.’

  He sighs. ‘What else is there?’

  ‘Not much – some books, a few mementoes. It’s a silly thing: they mean so much to me, but they’d mean nothing to a complete stranger.’

  The truth is that she can’t remember what is inside the boxes. He is silent.

  ‘We’ve got less space than you do, you know,’ he says presently. ‘It seems ridiculous.’

  She pouts and looks at the carpet. ‘Then I suppose Daddy’s right. It’ll all have to go.’

  He sighs again, tormented. This is an old alliance, older than Thomas himself, for its source is her own first loneliness, when her dolls – Clarissa, she recalls, was one such – befriended her and offered her their pliant hearts. Thomas, as a baby, had something of this pliancy, this bright expectant blankness; and after Howard – greedy little brute, always thumping her with his fat fists – she rather doted on Thomas, whose round eyes followed her with such astonished love. He used to cry whenever she moved out of his line of vision.

  ‘All right, then,’ he says finally. ‘We’ll fit them in somewhere. Though God knows what Tonie’s going to say.’

  At the mention of Tonie’s name she feels the shiver of compunction that normally only her husband can elicit. She recalls taking Tonie blackberrying once in the hedges along the road outside the village; recalls the way Tonie persisted at each bush until she had stripped it of every last one of its fruits. Her own method is to cover more ground, grazing whatever falls to her hand.

  ‘Oh dear – I don’t want to cause any trouble.’

  ‘No, it’s all right. It’s fine.’

  She beams at him. She finds that she wants him to go, now that he has taken her burden of submission from her. In the end his availability grates on her. It was sweet in a child, but people cannot be children all their lives. These days she finds that after all she prefers Howard.

  ‘Oh, you are kind,’ she says. ‘Shall we take them down to the car? I expect you have to rush off.’

  He smiles, a peculiar smile she hasn’t seen before.

  ‘I thought I might stay for lunch,’ he says.

  ‘Oh!’ she says. ‘Well, of course, you’re very welcome, if you haven’t anything else to do.’

  But even after lunch he doesn’t seem inclined to go.

  ‘Doesn’t someone have to fetch Alexa from school?’ she asks.

  He smiles again. ‘She’s going to a friend’s.’

  ‘Well, I was only going to take the dog for a walk. Don’t feel you have to come.’

  He says, ‘Would you like me to come?’

  It strikes her as a very impolite thing to say.

  ‘Yes,’ she says coldly. ‘Of course. That would be very nice.’

  They take Flossie up the lane, and in a ditch full of reeds and brambles they find a tiny deer, dead.

  ‘How sad!’ she says. ‘A car must have hit it.’

  She gazes at the little shrivelled muzzle buzzing with flies, the closed eyes, the tangled infant legs in their cold bed of winter grasses. It can only have happened a day or two ago. She looks up and to her surprise sees the doe, standing motionless in the shadowy lane ahead of them. She grips Thomas’s arm.

  ‘Look – it’s the mother. See how unafraid she is. She’s looking for her child. She knows it’s here somewhere and she’s waiting for it to come back. Oh, how sad!’

  The doe lifts her head. Her large almond-shaped eyes are pools of blackness. They wear a frightful expression. Flossie barks. For a while the doe doesn’t move, but at last she goes heavily back into the trees.

  ‘Oh, how touching.’ She unclips Flossie’s lead. Beside her Thomas gives a sort of gasp. She turns and sees to her astonishment that he is crying.

  ‘Whatever’s the matter?’ she says.

  XXI

  Something has changed. Or not changed: been lost. Tonie realises it with a jump, a start, the way she might feel around her throat for a necklace and realise it was no longer there.

  They are walking with Alexa to Beacon Park, where there are swings, where they have taken her a hundred times since she was born, and not one of those times has Tonie felt that something was missing in the way that she feels it now. It is Saturday. Alexa is wearing new shoes, red, the leather plump and glossy and unmarked. Thomas bought them for her. They were very expensive. Tonie would never have bought Alexa such expensive shoes, beautiful Italian shoes with white kid insoles. She can’t decide whether it is the beauty or the expense that troubles her more.

  The day is cold, bright, a diamond-hard February day, and Tonie walks ahead of the others on the pavement with her
hands stuffed into her pockets. At the gate she stands silently back, to let them pass through. Alexa goes first, then Thomas. Tonie notices her daughter’s small, delicate shoulders as she passes, the head turning like a flower on the fragile neck, the dark, glossy ponytail tumbling down her back. She would like to touch it. Just then, Thomas puts his own hand out and touches the ponytail, fingering its ends. That’s when Tonie realises that something has been lost. She has lost his attention.

  In the afternoon she decides to make spaghetti Bolognese. She gets out the saucepans, clanging and clattering. She fills the kitchen with the fumes of cooking onions and meat. She chops things and hurls them into the pot. She is frenzied, transfixed; she is engulfed in the preparation of this red sauce which bubbles, thick and volcanic, at her fingertips. She doesn’t know what will happen when the sauce is finished. She doesn’t know what she’ll do.

  Occasionally Thomas comes into the kitchen, searches around, leaves again. Tonie, at her cauldron, brews up her red anger, her face damp with steam. She wants to scream, to throw things. Every time Thomas appears, blank-faced and diffident, searching for something, she has the desire to shock him with violence. She wants him to be brought into line. She wants him to be punished. For the first time, she wishes he were back at work. She wants him held and constricted, fenced round with regulations; she wants him corrected. Now he has the look of someone who has got away with something. He can withdraw his attention, with no fear of reprisal.

  ‘What are you actually looking for?’ she says coldly, when he has come in for the third or fourth time.

  ‘What?’ He looks up, notices her. ‘Oh, nothing.’

  When she goes upstairs she finds Thomas and Alexa, all quiet and companionable, in the sitting room. She stands in the doorway but neither of them looks up. She doesn’t go back to her red sauce, which is still bubbling on the cooker. She leaves it, abandons it, goes to her bedroom. She lies on the bed. Later, Thomas puts his head in.

  ‘I think your sauce is done,’ he says. ‘Shall I turn it off?’

  ‘If you want,’ Tonie says.

  He goes away again. The house is full of the red rich smell of what she has created. The room is getting dark. She can hear music playing downstairs. She lies still. She doesn’t turn on the lights.

  XXII

  Claudia suggests giving Lottie an allowance. Now that Lottie is fourteen, Claudia says, she should have some money of her own. She says this to Howard, who is a little remote and businesslike, as though he were being informed of some minor by-law that is about to come into force. He stands there in his suit and goes through the post.

  ‘She ought to open a bank account,’ he says. ‘We should open bank accounts for all of them.’

  Claudia looks astonished.

  ‘Why does Martha need a bank account? She’s only six.’

  ‘Everyone should have a bank account.’

  ‘What, a six-year-old child should have a chequebook and pay bank charges, and get letters pouring through the door about personal loans!’

  Howard opens an envelope and reads what is inside. Claudia watches his eyes moving from left to right. When he has finished he says,

  ‘I’m only saying that if Lottie’s going to have an allowance we should pay the money into a bank account.’

  Claudia is silent: she wants to give the impression that she is thinking this proposal through. It isn’t that Howard is wrong exactly. It is that the idea of opening a bank account takes away what is pleasurable in the prospect of giving Lottie money.

  ‘It’s too complicated,’ she says, after a while. ‘All Lottie actually needs is some spending money of her own.’

  ‘It’s not as complicated as all that,’ Howard says.

  ‘I think it’s too soon. She’s too young.’

  ‘It’s the easiest thing in the world, Claude. Then she can begin to save.’

  ‘What does she need to save for?’

  ‘All of them should learn to save,’ Howard says sententiously.

  Claudia feels that Howard is missing the point. What she wants to know is how much he thinks they should give her. That is what she imagined them discussing. She has already decided that Lottie’s allowance should be twenty-five pounds a month.

  ‘What do you think we should start her on?’ she says.

  Howard muses, considering the ceiling.

  ‘Fifty?’ he says.

  ‘A month? You must be joking.’

  ‘Too little?’

  ‘Too much – I thought twenty-five.’

  Howard seems surprised. He is wearing his reading glasses and he looks at her over the top of them.

  ‘She won’t get far on twenty-five pounds,’ he says. ‘That’s only six or seven pounds a week, Claude. Hardly enough for a stick of gum.’

  ‘It’s plenty for a fourteen-year-old girl.’

  Claudia doesn’t remember anyone ever giving her money, though they presumably did.

  ‘And that’s to cover clothes too? Shoes?’

  Claudia reconsiders. ‘All right, thirty. And I’ll buy her shoes.’

  Claudia informs Lottie that, effective from the first day of the coming month, she is to receive a regular personal allowance of thirty pounds.

  ‘Okay then,’ Lottie says.

  ‘Not “okay then”,’ Claudia corrects her. ‘“Okay then” is for when I ask you to do something for me.’ Lottie looks at her dumbly. ‘It isn’t for when I offer to give you something.’

  Lottie is silent. Claudia says,

  ‘I’ll still pay for your shoes, and anything you need for school.’

  ‘Oka – all right.’

  ‘Your allowance is for you to do what you want with. It’s your money. If you want to save it, you can. If you blow the whole lot in the first week, then you’ll have to manage till the end of the month without any more.’

  ‘I know,’ Lottie says.

  ‘There’s no point coming to me halfway through the month and saying you haven’t got any money. The purpose of the exercise is to teach you how to budget.’

  ‘I know.’ Lottie looks bored.

  ‘You’re obviously an expert,’ Claudia says. She recalls that she expected to enjoy this conversation. When she thought about it earlier in the day, it was with a warm feeling of pressure in her chest, as though there were something in there, something waiting to be lifted out and given, like a bouquet of flowers.

  ‘I’m not an expert,’ Lottie says. ‘I didn’t say I was.’

  ‘You didn’t say thank you, either.’

  Lottie is silent. She looks to one side of her with downcast eyes.

  ‘Does anyone else at school get an allowance yet?’ Claudia asks brightly, after a pause.

  ‘Most people do.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think it’s most,’ Claudia says. ‘I should think it’s some.’

  A week later, on the first of the month, Claudia hands Lottie thirty pounds in ten-pound notes. During the week she has experienced a kind of regression in her attitude to Lottie. She wonders whether she has spent so much time trying to see what Lottie is becoming that she has failed to notice what she actually is. In the afternoons, when Lottie comes home from school, she goes straight to the kitchen and stands there eating slices of bread lathered so thickly with jam that her teeth leave an impression in it when she takes a bite. Claudia seems fated to enter the kitchen at the decisive moment of this ceremony, to see Lottie hunched over the counter, her hair hanging over her face, her mouth clamping around the red and white slab and coming away engorged. Lottie makes strange little groans as she eats. Her body in its school uniform seems afflicted and uncomfortable. As a baby Lottie seemed uncomfortable, and afflicted by her own helplessness. Yet Claudia can feel no sympathy for her now. To pity Lottie would be to pity herself.

  ‘Great,’ Lottie says, when Claudia gives her the money.

  *

  On Saturday, Lottie tells Howard and Claudia that she is spending the day in town with Justine and Emily.

 
; ‘What about lunch?’ Claudia says.

  ‘I don’t know. We might get something there.’

  ‘Your money will be gone in one day if you start spending it on eating out.’

  Immediately Lottie looks evasive. She stares off to the side, at something just above the level of the floor.

  ‘We’re not giving you an allowance just so you can sit in McDonald’s all afternoon,’ Claudia says.

  Lottie rolls her eyes. She makes a little snorting sound, like a pony. She is like one of those short, round, bad-tempered Shetlands who flare their nostrils and toss their matted waterfalls of hair. Lottie has the same spirit of animal vigour about her, the same disproportion of flesh to rationality.

  ‘Is it just you three girls on your own?’ Howard asks her.

  ‘There might be some other people.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ Howard says.

  Lottie returns from town at half past four. She did not take her coat. Claudia found it still hanging on its peg in the hall. All afternoon she has been aware of it. Several times, walking past, she has caressed it: she has run her hand down the unresponsive fabric all the way from the shoulder to the hem. She has watched the weather out of the window. It is gusty and grey, and sometimes the wind blows the trees wildly this way and that and then for no reason stops again. Lottie’s coat hanging on its peg is like a version of Lottie herself, a discarded stage in her evolution that Claudia has been allowed to keep. She thinks that she loves this Lottie, the coat Lottie, better than the real one. The coat hangs by its hood: from a distance it looks like a little head.

  Howard has spent the day making a bonfire in the garden with Lewis. Martha is upstairs with her friend Sadie. Occasionally Claudia passes the door to Martha’s room and sees the two children sitting together on the carpet surrounded by Martha’s toys. Once when she looks they have made long headdresses for themselves out of sheets, which they have secured on their heads with the braided loops that hold back Martha’s curtains. They sit cross-legged in their white veils, locked in endless low-voiced discussion, like two important delegates from distant, miniature countries. When Claudia goes downstairs she can smell the smoke from the bonfire, which has slowly penetrated the house.