The Bradshaw Variations Read online

  ‘But we can’t!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We can’t take the dog.’

  Claudia notices the smallest hesitation before Howard replies.

  ‘Of course we can take the dog. We just chuck him in the back of the car with a bowl of water.’

  ‘We’re not driving all the way to Scotland, just for the weekend. We’d have to fly, or go by train.’

  ‘We’ll do the other one, then. Derbyshire. Where’s Derbyshire? It can’t be that bloody far away. What’s the name of this place? Let’s phone Tom and ask him. They can come too – we’ll all go together.’ Howard is now standing by the telephone with the receiver in his hand. ‘What’s his number?’

  Claudia finds the number. It is Howard’s speciality – commitment. She has grown accustomed to it, going with Howard into the future like a boat breasting choppy waters, the sensation of uplift just ahead, the momentary resistance and the breaking through. She is dependent on it – she was from the start. Years ago they stood on the beach at Mothecombe, watching a family play cricket on the sand at the end of the summer’s day. Howard was enchanted by the sight, the children calling and laughing in the pink light.

  ‘Let’s get on with it Claude,’ he said, rubbing his hands together, sunset on his face. ‘I don’t want to fuck about. I want the lot. I want a cricket team of our own.’

  They had only known each other three weeks.

  Thomas and Tonie can’t come to Derbyshire. Howard tries Leo, who agrees to meet them there with Susie and the children.

  ‘What about those people in Bath – the Mattisons?’

  ‘The Morrisons,’ Claudia says.

  ‘We haven’t seen them for bloody years.’

  He rings the Morrisons. They too agree to come to Derbyshire. It is nearly ten o’clock. Howard, bleary-eyed, eats his dinner on the phone, shovelling it up with his fork. He rings the hotel. Claudia remembers that she hasn’t put Martha to bed. She hurries upstairs. Lottie and Lewis are watching television. Martha is reading in her room. She looks very small, sitting cross-legged on the floor. Claudia wonders if her growth is being stunted. Someone told her this could happen if a child didn’t get enough sleep.

  Downstairs Howard is still on the phone. He puts his hand over the receiver when he sees Claudia.

  ‘They don’t take dogs,’ he says.

  *

  Skittle gets into the bedroom and savages Claudia’s shoes, her silk dressing gown, the old Gucci handbag she had as an art student in London, before Howard took possession of her with his plans. It is this last piece of vandalism that smites her heart. It is as though there were nothing else left from that time, nothing to hold it off from extinction but the once-familiarity of that object in worn rust-coloured suede. Now it is mauled beyond recognition. She raises it above her head, about to throw it at him. He is cringing beneath the bed, a shred of silk trailing from his jaw. His crazy eyes stare at her out of the shadows. He is delinquent: he is, she sees, beyond the reach of punishment. She puts the bag in the dustbin.

  All day Skittle whines and scratches at the door, begging to be let in or out. She takes him for walks, dragging him by the lead along Laurier Drive. He is maddened by the whirling piles of yellow leaves, by the springing birds, by plastic bags that occasionally swim like phantoms across the pavements in the breeze. He flinches whenever she speaks, emitting nervous squirts of urine. When he runs his body is so bowed and contorted that he goes diagonally, scuttling like a crab. He stands in the middle of the room, barking at nothing. Juliet gives Claudia the name of a pet psychiatrist.

  ‘He hates me,’ Claudia says. ‘Also, I think there’s something wrong with him. He isn’t like a normal dog. I see other people with their dogs. He isn’t like them.’

  ‘A dog is like a child,’ Juliet says. Juliet has no children.

  ‘I just told you, this dog isn’t even like a dog.’

  ‘I did wonder at the wisdom of your taking on something else, when you’ve got so much already. I didn’t like to say anything.’

  ‘Howard brought him home. It wasn’t up to me.’

  ‘Why do you always say that? He wouldn’t do it if you didn’t let him. It’s the same with your painting. It’s always other people stopping you doing it. It’s never you.’

  Claudia has noticed the way a childless woman will defend the man. She will side against the mother, for her sympathies haven’t yet been transformed. Claudia remembers, when Lottie was born, the prospect of self-sacrifice coming into view like a landscape seen from an approaching train; she remembers the steady unfolding of it, a place she had never seen before in her life, and herself inescapably bound for it; and then after a while the realisation, pieced together from numerous clues, that this was where her mother had lived all along.

  The pet psychiatrist phones Claudia several times a day.

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘Outside. In the garden.’

  There is a steady thumping at the back door. It is Skittle hurling himself against it. Claudia has watched him do it, watched him take a little run and then fling himself at the wood. It startles her, for she often has the impulse to pick Skittle up and throw him, dash him against an unyielding surface. The way he looks is exactly as she had imagined it.

  ‘How would you describe his behaviour, Claudia?’

  ‘Angry. He wants to come in.’

  ‘Why don’t you let him in? What would happen?’

  Claudia sighs. ‘He’d be just as desperate to be let out again.’

  The psychiatrist suggests that she leave the door open. This improves things, though it makes the house cold. At the weekend Howard buys a catflap and fits it to the back door. The children sit there all afternoon, teaching Skittle to jump through it. He is small enough to fit, but his sense of its physical impossibility is difficult to overcome. He has proved the door is solid: how can it have changed its properties? Lewis and Martha sit one either side of the flap, passing and re-passing Skittle through the hole.

  ‘I should think that’s quite therapeutic,’ Claudia says to Howard.

  Later she hears a shriek from downstairs.

  ‘Watch this,’ Lewis says calmly, when Claudia appears.

  ‘He did it! He did it!’ Martha cries.

  They put Skittle out in the garden and close the door. Lewis kneels by the flap and then claps his hands twice. There is a pause, before Skittle comes flying through like a torpedo.

  ‘Extraordinary,’ Claudia says, laughing, while Skittle tears wildly around the kitchen, making mad arabesques in the air.

  The feeling of letting go, of surrender: it warms her veins like a tranquiliser, spreading its numb bliss. She has blunted the sharp end of life this way. She fades out, her doubt and pain and anxiety left hollow like a casing, like a shell on a beach. She is used to it, to leaving hollowed-out things behind her. They lie scattered in her past, questions to which the answers were never found. What is the right way to live? What is the value of success? And the most important, the most unanswerable: if love is selfish, can it still be considered to be love?

  VI

  Leo is in the fast lane of the A23 when Susie tells him to pull over, right now. She has her hand over her mouth. In the lay-by she leans out of the car door and retches over the tarmac. Juggernauts thunder past, one after another. The Vauxhall rocks with the vibrations. In the back seat, Justin and Madeleine are silent.

  ‘That’s the worst,’ Susie gasps, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Her long scarlet fingernails flash against her cheek, a blood-coloured bouquet. ‘When nothing comes up.’

  An uprush of air pressure slams into the side of the car and is sucked instantly back. They rock from side to side: for a few seconds they are in the lee of a monster, engulfed in the roaring, churning wheels, the crazily flapping tarpaulins.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ Leo says nervously. ‘Those things come so fucking close.’

  Susie flips down the passenger mirror, reapplies her lips
tick. She turns around in her seat, scanning the road through the back window.

  ‘I’ll tell you when,’ she says.

  They stop twice more before they get there. On the winding B-road Susie groans and clutches her stomach. The cows look up at them from the fields as they pass. A mile from Little Wickham there are crows hopping around a tattered carcass in the middle of the road. Leo stops, blares his horn. They are picking at the bloodied flesh and fur, unheeding. He blares again, revs the engine. He can see it was a rabbit. He can see a torn ear, a crushed fragment of skull.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ he says. He realises he is trembling. ‘Leave the bloody thing alone.’

  Reluctantly they lift themselves away on their black wings and settle on the verge, their beaks engorged. Susie puts her hand on his knee. She is all right now. She keeps her hand there, firm.

  ‘Nearly there,’ she says.

  It is a grey day, gusty, the bare trees twitching and irritable, the countryside lying in unconscious mounds of rough vegetation. Ma is on the front lawn when they pull up the drive. She is wearing a funny hat, a man’s jacket, thick socks that she’s tucked her trousers into.

  ‘Oh, hello!’ she says, through the car window.

  She sounds surprised. Leo and Susie joke about it, the way his parents always seem surprised to see him, despite the fact the visit has been arranged: not a pleasant surprise and not a shock either, just a mild lack of expectation, like when you’ve forgotten something and it turns up again. There’s an imitation Susie does, lifting one eyebrow very slightly, widening her eyes, the hint of a query in the voice. Oh, hello? She gets it exactly.

  His mother’s clothes say it all. She isn’t putting herself out, put it that way.

  ‘Leo,’ she says, when he gets out of the car. She hugs him. He can feel her gnarled vigorous body through the clothes, her eternal unstoppable sufficiency. ‘And Susie.’ Susie gets a hug too. Her high heels are sinking into the grass.

  ‘Get you, darling,’ Susie says, fingering the man’s jacket, the crumpled old hat. ‘Get your fashionable androgynous look.’

  Ma screeches with laughter, delighted. Susie knows how to handle her, has always known. Justin and Madeleine are banging at the car windows.

  ‘Oh dear, shall we let them out?’ Ma says.

  ‘Let’s leave them there,’ Susie says. ‘I could do with a day off. We can toss them in a bag of crisps at lunchtime.’

  Ma screeches again. Susie hams it up, her bad mother act, and Ma soaks up every last drop of it. She wants to be in the club, the gang.

  ‘Don’t!’ she says. ‘I was forever locking mine in the car – I’d go off and forget about them for hours!’

  At home Susie does an imitation of that too. Once I didn’t see Leo for seven years! I completely forgot about him!

  ‘Thomas here?’ Leo says.

  ‘Not yet. I can’t think where they’ve got to – they phoned hours ago to say they were leaving. And the others aren’t coming at all because Howard’s unwell. I’ve got this great big joint of beef and at the moment only us to eat it.’

  It’s another thing, the way after fifteen years she doesn’t seem to know that he and Susie are vegetarians.

  ‘Oh well,’ he says, because she makes it sound as though it isn’t enough to have him there, as though without Howard and Thomas the day might as well be cancelled, because she has so many other things she needs to be getting on with. His father is coming out of the house, peering around like a policeman investigating a disturbance. He sees Leo and Susie, changes his expression to one of recognition. Leo wonders how long he waited inside before coming out. He imagines him pressed against the wall beside the curtains, his eyes screwed up, trying to see through the crack.

  Susie is getting the children out of the car, fussing over them now, straightening their clothes. He shakes his father’s hand.

  ‘Nice to see you,’ his father says.

  Inside the house there is the old darkness, the old smells. Flossie is in her basket. The clock in the hall ticks. The house is cold. The scarred wooden floor, the hunting prints with their unfunny antique humour, the faded William Morris wallpaper full of strange, devouring forms: it is more than familiar, it is thick with subconscious life, like a forest in a fairy tale. The house is haunted, Leo knows it is. Only once, when he was seventeen, he spent the night here alone. Something said his name, sat on the bed. He had been asleep and the feeling of a weight on the bed woke him. It made it worse, to have been asleep. It is worse to go into something unconscious. He shouted at it to go away, went all round the house turning the lights on and shouting. To shout at nothing is to break some contract with yourself, with reality. Thinking about it now, he sees that his life has been punctuated by such incidents. Reality is personal too. He’s had to break it to advance himself, to go forward. It’s the only way he can get to the place where he feels comfortable.

  ‘Work going well?’ his father says. ‘Any new commissions recently?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Leo says. ‘It’s much the same.’

  He doesn’t know where Dads has got hold of this commissions idea. Leo is a copywriter. He writes copy for the same agency he has always written for. Yet every time he sees his father he starts talking about commissions. It sounds like an army word: it isn’t a word Leo has ever applied to himself. He supposes it’s his father’s way of rationalising the troublesome fact that Leo is not an employee. He is freelance, a mercenary, a soldier of fortune. One day he’ll receive his commission and off he’ll go into the sunset.

  ‘How about you?’ he says. ‘How is everything?’

  ‘All right.’

  There is a silence. Leo looks around for Susie, but she isn’t there. He needs her. He doesn’t know what to say. He feels the silence consuming him, swallowing him up.

  ‘How’s the garden?’ he says.

  His father looks mildly at him with his cold eyes. He wears a cravat at his throat. His snow-white hair is plastered into place.

  ‘Not much happening in the garden at this time of year. Just some pruning, cutting back for winter. We’re thinking about thinning out some of those trees over by the garage. The roots are starting to undermine the foundations.’

  ‘Really?’ Leo says.

  ‘The problem is that your mother won’t hear of any of them being cut down. The tree surgeon came out to explain it to her, but he couldn’t seem to make her understand. We rather wasted his afternoon, I’m afraid. I wouldn’t be surprised if he took us off his list, which would be a pity.’

  Justin and Madeleine are petting Flossie in her basket. She snaps her jaws a little, rolls over. They tickle her coarse old belly and she lies back, stiff with pleasure on her filthy blanket. Leo looks at their soft hair, their new fresh skin, feels the tension of love for them, as though in this place his love were illicit.

  ‘Oh well,’ he says.

  At last there is a commotion at the door; the others come in, Susie smelling of cigarettes, Thomas and Tonie close behind with the breath of the world on them, of blessed modernity. They look young and clean and slim. They look eminently, relievingly competent.

  ‘Sorry,’ Thomas says. He puts his arms around Leo, pats his back. ‘We had to take a detour. We got here as quickly as we could.’

  ‘I would have had to have eaten cow,’ Leo says. Now that they are here, he can acknowledge how miserable he feels.

  ‘We need a drink,’ Thomas says. ‘Dads, we could all do with a drink, don’t you think?’

  Madeleine looks up, startled.

  ‘Don’t give Mummy anything to drink,’ she says. ‘She had too much to drink last night. She was sick in the car.’

  Susie rolls her eyes. She’s wearing a lot of make-up and her skin is deathly-looking, grey. She has lipstick on her teeth. Her dress is all creased down the front. Leo feels guilty. He should have let her stay at home, let her sleep it off. He worries that he doesn’t look after her properly. He worries that he’s going to wear her out.

&n
bsp; ‘Mummy had a tummy bug,’ he says sternly, to Madeleine.

  Madeleine creases her forehead, perplexed. ‘No she didn’t. And she was smoking just now. I saw her in the garden.’

  ‘Isn’t she sweet?’ Susie says, through her teeth. ‘Isn’t she everything you’d want in a daughter?’ She catches hold of Alexa, kisses the top of her shining head. ‘Now this is a nice, discreet child. This child is house-trained.’

  Tonie is in the doorway. Leo sees her, sees her watching everything. She looks like she is watching a play.

  ‘Come outside,’ he says in a low voice to Madeleine.

  She opens her mouth in protest, but she doesn’t say anything, just gets up and walks sullenly ahead of him, out into the garden. He lectures her there on the grass, in the windy grey day. When they go back in the others are sitting down, talking, drinking watery gin-and-tonics. Madeleine glances meaningfully at Susie, glass in hand, but Leo has silenced her. She goes and sits on the windowsill and stares out until Ma calls them for lunch.

  Susie drinks a second gin-and-tonic, and then wine, and by three o’clock she is flushed, blowsy, her red hair cascading wildly over her shoulders. The children have left the table. Leo can hear them calling and laughing on the lawn.

  ‘How’s the new job?’ he asks Tonie.

  She smiles mysteriously, distantly. She nods.

  ‘Yeah, it’s good.’

  ‘And the – what’s it called? – the sabbatical. How’s that going?’ Susie says, to Thomas.

  There is, Leo thinks, a hierarchy, an order to these conversations, and he and Susie are at the bottom of it. It is understood that they will ask questions, will find out about the others, as they might find out about somewhere interesting they were visiting, like Paris. He is the youngest, five years younger than Thomas, seven younger than Howard. He is also the biggest, the tallest, taller even than Howard, though he doesn’t feel it, not in this house. Howard used to make him sit under table at mealtimes, when their parents were out. He kicked him if he tried to come out. He used to give him his food on the floor, like a dog.

  ‘I’m learning to play the piano,’ Thomas says.