The Bradshaw Variations Page 4

  ‘Well,’ Howard says reproachfully, ‘we’ve got to pay the mortgage somehow.’

  ‘If it were up to me,’ Claudia announces, ‘there wouldn’t be any mortgage.’

  Howard looks bemused, as though, unlike everyone else, he has never heard Claudia say such things before. ‘Claude, it is up to you.’

  Claudia sighs. ‘Why do we need all this? All this – establishment. Other people don’t need so much. Personally I’d be happy to make do with far less.’ Her gaze wanders over the bulky brick-coloured house, the expansive lawn, the trees in their autumn foliage, the numerous children. She appears to be deciding which parts of it she could dispense with. ‘All I really need is my studio. The way things are, I hardly go in there from one month to the next. I don’t have time.’

  Howard looks stricken. ‘We’ll make more time,’ he says. ‘You should have all the time you need. We’ll sort it out.’

  ‘The problem is’, Claudia says to the others, ‘that you don’t make any money out of painting. Other people would have to make sacrifices. And they simply wouldn’t do it.’

  She disappears into the house. Howard’s eyes follow her beseechingly.

  ‘Poor Claude,’ he says. ‘She’s too unselfish. All you women are too unselfish.’ He goes after her to the door and puts his head in. ‘Darling!’ he calls. ‘Is there a drop of wine we could offer our guests? And is there any of that avocado gunk left from last night?’

  He sits, pulls up a chair for Tonie and rubs his hands together, happy again.

  ‘These are good times,’ he says. ‘These are beautiful days, all of us together. Aren’t we lucky to have this?’

  Tonie smiles. She likes Howard in this mood. ‘We are,’ she says.

  ‘And the children – look at them! Look at the lucky little sods. Think what their lives could have been like somewhere else. I was at our factory in Bombay last week. I saw little children, no more than two years old, picking food out of the gutter. Little girls, half the size of Martha.’

  His brow abruptly darkens. He reaches for Tonie’s hand and clutches it between his own.

  ‘They’re probably working in your factory,’ Thomas says drily. ‘You should pay them more.’

  ‘I’ve told Howard I’ll leave him if I find out he’s been using child labour,’ Claudia says, re-emerging with a tray. ‘I’ll just pack a bag and go.’

  ‘We’re not allowed to use child labour in our own house,’ Howard says. ‘Ours don’t even make their own beds.’

  ‘They’re spoilt,’ Claudia says. ‘Selfish and spoilt.’

  Down on the lawn Lewis has got the bike upright again, and is holding it at the front so that Alexa can get on. He turns and looks enquiringly at the adults. Alexa sits herself on the saddle, white-faced and uncertain. Thomas waits for Tonie to intervene, but she does not. Instead she picks up one of Claudia’s antique glass goblets from the tray and revolves it carefully in her hands.

  ‘Where did you get these?’ she says.

  Howard is rising, moving down the steps towards the lawn. Thomas hears him say,

  ‘Actually, it’s got a surprising kick on it, for a toy.’

  He is still saying it as the bike bolts from Lewis’s grasp. Alexa is carried jolting over the grass. Her eyes are screwed shut. She makes no attempt to steer. Almost immediately the bike hits the trunk of Howard’s apple tree, head-on. Alexa is thrown forward. Thomas sees the impact from behind, then her face full of blood on the grass. Howard gets there first, running and wobbling like a bear. He picks Alexa up in his arms. When Thomas comes he surrenders her silently, and then turns to excoriate Lewis, who stands there with downcast eyes, nodding dolefully at every accusation.

  ‘– bloody idiot! Totally irresponsible to let her –’

  Alexa does not cry. Her eyes are wide with shock and blood trickles around the rims. Claudia comes running out with water in a bowl and a cloth. While Thomas holds her she carefully mops away the blood. The other children stand round silently.

  ‘Get ice!’ Claudia commands, pointing towards the house.

  It is Tonie who obeys the order. Thomas glimpses her beside the apple tree, her face startled, aghast, as though Claudia’s pointing finger were accusing her of something. Then she runs inside. The blood is coming from a single cut; presently it stops. In the same way that he wonders how Claudia could have got the water so quickly, so he ruminates blindly, disjointedly, on Tonie’s absence. Finally she comes. She gives the ice to Claudia. Then she stands beside Howard. He hears her say,

  ‘I thought she was dead.’

  He sees Howard put his arm around her. He sees her cover her eyes with her hand.

  *

  In the kitchen Claudia serves out roast lamb. Alexa is lying under a blanket on the sofa, with a glass of lemonade and a plaster on her forehead. There is Lego all over the kitchen floor and piles of paper everywhere. Lottie, the eldest, is at the table, eating an enormous mound of ice cream slathered with chocolate sauce.

  ‘Lottie, put that away now,’ Claudia says. ‘We’re about to have lunch.’

  ‘I don’t want lunch.’

  Lottie is thirteen, sullen and thickset. She has narrow light blue eyes which she looks out of uneasily, uncomfortably, as though they were chinks in the prison of her pale, plump body.

  ‘– gorging yourself on ice cream and then refusing to eat the healthy lunch I’ve provided,’ Claudia is saying, banging the oven door. ‘Howard, will you speak to her?’

  Howard isn’t there: he is in the hall, talking loudly on his phone.

  ‘Anyway, I’m vegetarian. I told you.’

  ‘Vegetarians eat vegetables,’ Lewis says. ‘You’re not a vegetarian. You just eat cake and stuff.’

  ‘She’s a cake-arian,’ Martha says.

  ‘Fatarian,’ Lewis says, laughing. ‘Just some fat for lunch, please, with a side order of, um, fat.’

  Lottie shrieks. She picks up a book from the table and flings it across the room at Lewis.

  ‘Stop it!’ Claudia bellows, enveloped in clouds of steam from the cooker.

  Tonie is getting knives and forks out of a drawer. She gets plates from the wooden dresser. She is reserved, acquiescent, efficient, as she is in the mornings when she goes to work. Thomas sees that she has returned to this mode as a way of managing the day’s disorder.

  ‘I feel we’re completely out of control,’ Claudia says to Howard, when he comes in. She stops what she is doing, leaves the lamb steaming in its dish of fat, the vegetables cooling in their saucepans. She leans against the cooker and folds her arms.

  Howard looks concerned. He puts his hand on her shoulder. ‘We’re all right, aren’t we Claude?’

  ‘How can you say we’re all right!’ Claudia exclaims fiercely. ‘We’ve got one child with a head injury, the rest are fighting like wild animals, and we can’t even get lunch on the table by half past three! It’s bloody selfishness – just utter bloody selfishness!’

  She is tearful. She rubs her eyes with her fists. Howard looks miserable.

  ‘A child only has to come into this house,’ Claudia resumes, ‘and she’s concussed in the first half-hour!’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Howard says, to Tonie. ‘It was my fault, I gave them the bloody thing. I should never have let her go near it.’

  ‘It was an accident,’ Tonie says.

  ‘It should never have happened. Please forgive me.’

  Tonie, in black, is suddenly the priest, the confessor, and Howard and Claudia – red-faced, dishevelled – her penitents. Claudia embraces her, wiping her eyes. Howard, absolved, ranges around the kitchen bellowing orders at the children. Thomas senses that Tonie is relieved: her own conduct has been lost in the general commotion. But in the car on the way home it seems to return to her. She turns around often in her seat to look at Alexa, who is silently gazing through the window. She reaches back for Alexa’s hand and holds it.

  ‘It felt like it was my fault,’ she says.

  ‘It was nobody’s fa
ult,’ Thomas replies, though secretly he agrees with her.

  ‘It felt like it was because I’d lost control of her.’

  Thomas is silent. He thinks they shouldn’t discuss such things, with Alexa there. It used to be Tonie who had the finer sense of what was appropriate, and now, all at once, it is him. It is as though Alexa has become less real to Tonie and more real to himself.

  ‘Claudia seemed on edge,’ she says.

  Thomas smiles coldly, unsympathetic. ‘She’s always like that. All that fuss about lunch – the truth is that she doesn’t want lunch to be on the table by one o’clock,’ he says. ‘She wouldn’t know what to do next.’

  He wonders whether Claudia is good: he has always wondered it. On another day he might have said this to Tonie, but today he does not. He doesn’t want her to think that he is judgemental. In spite of everything, he has a dark sense of advantage over her.

  Tonie laughs. ‘She might have to go to her studio,’ she says.

  At the sound of her laugh, he laughs too. It is the sense of form that makes them laugh, the feeling that in family life they are at once confined and eternal; like music, Thomas thinks, which could be anything and at the same time cannot be other than what it is. He puts his hand on her knee. For the rest of the journey he says nothing more.

  IV

  In Little Wickham people are mowing their lawns. It is a clear Sunday afternoon and the village buzzes like a nest of hornets. Mr Bradshaw pushes his mower around his garden along with the rest. The lawn at the back of the house is undulating: it rises like a woman’s body into two mounds with a soft sloping space between them. The mower moves firmly over its contours, up and down, with Mr Bradshaw’s hands on the bar. His feet tread rhythmically in a shorn passage that is always renewing itself. He has a feeling of domination as he goes over the tender flanks and creases. Afterwards the grass is smooth. He cleans the mower and returns it to its shed.

  It is four o’clock and his wife has not returned from the hospice committee lunch. The sky is flushed with pink; the swallows swoop around the telegraph poles. The rooks are already calling across the fields, above the sound of the last mower. It is Gus Robertson’s, outlasting the rest as though to advertise the size of his domain. Mr Bradshaw can see him through the screen of trees, sitting on his ride-on. It is brilliantly new, as big as a small tractor. He rides it passionlessly, staring straight ahead. Mr Bradshaw has not seen this mower before: it causes him a pang of betrayal to see it, as though he has witnessed Gus in an act of disloyalty. Sometimes it seems that Mr Bradshaw has only to hear of a new gimmick for the Robertsons to own it. It is unsettling, to be among people who are always interfering with what they have, who seem to proclaim their indifference to others by changing what is familiar about themselves.

  Recently the Robertsons installed a pump and waterway feeding into their pond: when you switch the pump on, the waterway becomes a running stream. The Bradshaws were invited to observe this ceremony, and stood on the lawn while Gus dashed about checking the supply and drainage, his white, well-styled eave of hair flopping up and down. He is a handsome man for his age, tall and trim, suntanned, perfectly groomed; and yet watching the electronic stream trickling down into the plastic-lined lily pond, Mr Bradshaw gave birth to the perception that Gus is tragic, not because of his vanity or ostentation but because of his poor taste. It is something Gus will perhaps never know about himself, but it has been an important and liberating realisation for Mr Bradshaw. The new mower, however, is a blow. Brash and ugly though it is, he nonetheless feels, lover-like, that Gus has been unfaithful.

  At a quarter to five she comes, with Flossie at her heels. She comes around the path at the side of the house, where Mr Bradshaw is pulling weeds out of the gravel.

  ‘Oh!’ she cries. ‘I thought I’d never get away! They simply wouldn’t stop talking – have you had tea?’

  ‘No,’ he says, without looking up. ‘You said you’d be back by three, so I waited.’

  ‘Charles, you didn’t!’

  ‘Tea is at four,’ he says. ‘It didn’t seem unreasonable to expect you to be back by then.’

  ‘Oh dear – oh, I am sorry. You must be parched!’

  ‘I started mowing at three in order to be finished by four.’

  ‘And in the hot sun too!’ she wails. ‘I don’t understand why you didn’t just get yourself a cup.’

  ‘You said you’d be here. It seemed sensible to wait.’

  He is parched, and when he straightens up from stooping over the gravel he is slightly dizzy. She stands there with flushed cheeks, her mouth drooping at the corners. Sometimes he forgets that he and she are old, and then the sight of her reminds him.

  ‘Never mind,’ she says. ‘I’ll make it now.’

  ‘I don’t want it now. I don’t like to have tea later than four. It spoils my supper.’

  ‘But you can’t just go without!’

  ‘I’d rather go without now. As I said, it spoils my supper.’

  He bends down again with his trowel. He can see her feet beside him on the gravel path, the ropes of blue veins, the calloused toes bunched in her sandals. He wonders what she will do. The air between them seems to tremble; the atmosphere is a dark bud straining to burst into flower. He wants its offering, of love or violence. He wants to be located in the maze of his own rigidity and offered something. That is the test, as it has always been.

  ‘I don’t see why we can’t just have supper later,’ she says.

  He does not reply. This is not what she ought to have said. It leaves him in the maze; it asks him to find his own way out.

  ‘Well,’ she says presently, ‘well, I suppose I shall have to have mine on my own.’

  He hears her crunch away. She is gone. He feels the presence of a terrible void, advancing on him, coldly enveloping him. It is silence: Gus has turned his mower off. Later he hears her return through the dusk to where he still bends over the gravel, weeding. She places a cup of tea at his feet with two bourbon biscuits in the saucer, and then swiftly she is gone again. The biscuits are his favourite kind. He watches them out of the corner of his eye as he works; he meditates on them darkly. They have, he decides, been spoilt. He has been separated forever from their sweetness. He lets the tea go cold. When it grows dark he returns to the house and pours it down the sink, and places the biscuits back in their tin.

  V

  It was Howard who got the dog. He came back from his mother’s with it tucked into his jacket.

  ‘Flossie had her puppies,’ he said.

  Howard specialises in this sort of thing. He is never more sure-footed than when embarking on what is easy to do and difficult to undo. He specialises in commitment. The dog is a Jack Russell. He is small and firm and vigorous, with a coarse white coat and bright, staring eyes. They call him Skittle.

  Claudia likes having a new life in the house. The puppy has to be fed at night, like a baby, and he leaves little pools of golden urine all over the floor. Her sister Juliet tells her to keep Skittle close to her at this early stage. Claudia carries him around in her arms when the children are at school.

  One day, sitting stroking him on her lap while she reads the paper, Claudia looks down at Skittle’s body. He is prone with pleasure: his hairy muzzle is flung back and his sinuous loins are quivering. Suddenly Claudia is repelled. There is something unsavoury in the dog’s excitement, in his pink trembling groin. She puts him on the floor. He frets at her legs, raking her calves with his sharp little claws.

  ‘No!’ she says, grasping him firmly around the middle. ‘Don’t scratch – no!’

  She places him a few feet away. He writhes in her hands. When she lets him go he scrabbles frantically towards her and gets up on his hind legs again, putting his claws in her flesh. She spanks him with the flat of her hand. He cowers, contorting his narrow body, gazing at her with his orb-like, fanatical eyes.

  It is October, and the garden is gilded with yellow light. The grass is sodden in the mornings. Claudia puts the
covers on the outdoor furniture. She gathers the apples where they lie rotting around the tree. Everything is poised between readiness and decay. She watches the children playing after school in the crisp late afternoon. Their bodies have lost the fluidity of summer, though the weather is fine. They move around the rectangle of lawn in their uniforms, laughing and jostling, throwing sticks for Skittle and crying out when he bounces up to catch them smartly between his jaws. Later, when they have come in and the garden is wrapped in its blue-grey pall of evening, Claudia looks through the window and sees Skittle cavorting alone in the indistinct light. He leaps in the air, his jaws snapping at invisible sticks. She watches his white twisted form, suspended. She can hear the murmur of television from the other room.

  Howard gets home at half past seven. He wears an air of expectation, of excitement, though for him the day is nearing its conclusion – Howard is usually asleep by half past ten. Claudia sometimes wonders what his excitement signifies. He is like someone eagerly awaiting dessert, the main courses behind him. Sweet though they are, these are the rituals of conclusion. He discards his coat and briefcase in the hall, finds the children and roughhouses them with his big bear’s body, drinks two glasses of wine one after the other standing by the kitchen counters; after which he is red-faced, blissful-looking, rubbing his eyes with his shirt tails hanging out.

  ‘It’s been the loveliest weather,’ Claudia says wistfully. ‘I was thinking what a shame it is we can’t go away this weekend.’

  Howard blinks. ‘What are you saying, Claude? You’re telling me something but I don’t know what it is.’

  ‘Just that we could have gone to Scotland, or to that place in Derbyshire your brother told us about. There hasn’t been such a lovely autumn for years.’

  Howard leafs through the letters on the kitchen table, looking at them over the tops of his glasses. ‘Well, I’m going to Scotland,’ he says, abstractedly. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing. I’ll be back last thing Sunday.’