The Bradshaw Variations Read online

  ‘Are you?’ Susie says, perplexedly. ‘What – professionally?’

  Susie wouldn’t understand about playing the piano. She doesn’t understand any middle-class hobby. She’s always worked, looked after other people, even as a child she worked, cooking and taking care of the house. Her mother was a cleaning lady. She couldn’t read or write. Susie couldn’t either until she was fourteen and someone at school noticed it.

  ‘Not exactly,’ Thomas says, laughing.

  Leo wants to shield her, to defend her. He wants to hit and hit until she is safe. He loves Thomas, but with a passive love, a background love. It is something he never looks at straight on. He is used to seeing it there out of the corner of his eye. He didn’t choose it, yet it’s always been there. He doesn’t really know what it is.

  ‘You can’t spend a whole year playing the piano,’ he says. He sounds more indignant than he wants to. It’s always the same, the difficulty of being himself with these people, his family, the difficulty of locating his own authenticity. He says things he doesn’t feel, and what he feels most keenly he doesn’t say at all.

  Thomas looks surprised. ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s – it’s a waste, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Thomas says. ‘Anyway, it might be more than a year.’

  ‘You want to be careful,’ Dads says. ‘If you stay out too long, they might not take you back. Things move on, you know. Your experience becomes obsolete.’

  ‘I don’t want to go back,’ Thomas says. ‘I like being at home.’

  Dads chuckles mirthlessly. ‘That may be so,’ he says, ‘but no matter how much you like it the question has to be, is it sustainable?’

  Leo hears it, that tone, the way it goes over everything and mechanically levels it, like a tank. It is benign, ruthless, unvarying. He has never heard his father raise his voice. There has been no need to raise it: it is in the levelling persistence that the violence is accomplished. His voice has talked constantly in Leo’s head about the world and its ways since he can remember.

  Thomas laughs too, slightly combative, shrugs his shoulders. ‘Ask Tonie. Ask Tonie whether it’s sustainable.’

  ‘I’ve always tended to the view’, Dads continues, ‘that work is life for a man, as children are for a woman.’

  A ridge of silence which they all go over together, bump.

  ‘But work wasn’t life for me,’ Thomas says carefully. ‘As children aren’t all of life for Tonie.’

  Suddenly there is something new, an atmosphere. Leo feels it, a shift far down at the bottom of things, like a rumbling of plates on the ocean bed. He feels upheaval, change, far down below.

  ‘Hey,’ Tonie says, in her low, husky voice that always makes the hairs rise on the back of Leo’s neck. ‘Hey, let’s change the subject.’

  She puts her hand with its single silver band over Thomas’s. Leo thinks there is something unreassuring about Tonie’s ring. Susie wears a big emerald in a gold claw on that finger.

  ‘Yes, for heaven’s sake, do let’s,’ exclaims Ma. ‘You’re all sitting round with faces like a wet weekend.’

  As though if it had been left up to her, life would have been different, would have been all frivolity.

  Later, when it’s time to go, Leo is searching around the house for the children and in his father’s study finds a book of crossword puzzles on the desk, all completed and dated in his father’s neat fountain-pen writing. He has to help Susie across the lawn. He holds her firmly by the elbow, but even so she staggers when her heels sink into the turf, and one of her shoes comes off. Ma is weeding the flowerbeds, kneeling on a mat she has laid in the earth. She looks up at them. Sometimes there is something so vague about her pale blue eyes that Leo wants to cry. She makes his existence seem more random than he can bear. When he was a child, she used to go around freely telling people that Leo was a mistake, until he was old enough to ask her to stop.

  ‘Oh, are you going?’ she says. ‘I feel I’ve hardly seen you.’

  ‘Oh well,’ he says. It is all he can say, all he’s been able to say today.

  In the car on the way home, he tells Susie about the crossword puzzles.

  ‘Well, he’s got to fill his time somehow, hasn’t he?’ she says sleepily.

  She’s right, of course, but all the same it has upset him. He can’t quite explain it but he doesn’t have to, because Susie is now snoring lightly, slumped into the seat beside him. There’s nothing particularly wrong with a crossword puzzle. It’s just that it doesn’t go anywhere. It is rigid within itself, but it has no force of extension. It is trivial. The flat motorway landscape is radial, infinite, extending and extending itself into nothingness. A kind of hollowness opens out in Leo’s chest, a feeling of weightlessness.

  A yellow Lamborghini is overtaking them in the fast lane. Leo has no interest in sports cars, but suddenly it cheers him, tickles him, the sight of this pointless bananacoloured contraption. He turns to Justin in the back seat.

  ‘Look at that,’ he says.

  VII

  The plane pitches about in the grey air. People are quiet, strapped to their seats. They ride the cliffs and troughs, the mountains and the sudden dizzying voids. In their tailored clothes, with their books and briefcases and laptop computers, they are like a platoon going forward in the name of civilisation. They hold on to their newspapers, to their gin-and-tonics. Their onward motion seems rational, even when the storm forces them off their path. The plane is thrown this way and that. The engine drones, a wavering line of sound. Tonie is not afraid. She is glad to be on the side of rationality. It is far worse to be the storm, to be tormented and hysterical, to be uncontrolled.

  Amsterdam airport appears, low grey buildings in drifting horizontal veils of rain. There are box-like vehicles parked on the asphalt among shapeless patches of water creased by wind. Its anonymity is almost arousing. It too is rational, impersonal. It seems to lift Tonie out of the brawl of relationships. It seems to relieve her of everything that is private and particular, of emotion itself. By the time she gets a taxi it is dark. The storm drives unchecked across the flat landscape, across the port with its black shapes of cranes and containers, across the choppy waters and concrete isthmuses of the city’s outskirts. Scraps of litter bowl through the darkness; the wind warps the fragile vertical line of the alien streetscape, bending the skeletal trees, rocking the metal posts in their concrete moorings. It appears to come out of the infinity of the low horizon, out of black nothingness. For the first time, looking through the taxi’s rain-streaked windows, Tonie is frightened. It is the force of the horizontal, pouring unrestrained over the lip of the black earth, that frightens her.

  The taxi driver doesn’t know where they are going. He too is from somewhere else. He is dark-skinned, vulnerable in his short-sleeved shirt. He pores over the address of the hotel where she has written it on the back of an envelope – he studies her handwriting, the cryptic, consonant-heavy words. He gets out of the car and shows the envelope to a passerby. They huddle over it in the rain, pointing and discussing. Tonie sits in the back seat, her hands folded in her lap. They are parked in the darkness of an empty street in an industrial-looking area, full of warehouses and unmarked modern buildings with their metal shutters down. The wind makes a plaintive sound as it comes off the sea. The rain spatters against the glass. The rough black water frets at the concrete esplanade. The driver comes back and they set off again slowly. They turn a corner and after a hundred yards or so they creep into the darkness at the side of the road and stop. The driver points. Tonie sees a big, gloomy factory building behind a wall. Suddenly she is exasperated.

  ‘That isn’t a hotel,’ she says. ‘That doesn’t look like a hotel.’

  ‘Yes, hotel!’

  The driver points again. He is insistent. He is as full of certitude as a minute ago he was riven by doubt. He is capable, she sees, of leaving her here whether it is a hotel or not. A feeling of disenchantment passes over her, the feeling that she
has been let down not by what she knows and trusts but by what is new and unfamiliar. She stays where she is on the back seat. She has always been susceptible to ill treatment: she becomes pliant, victimised. It is the driver’s masculinity that paralyses her. She is unable to deliver herself from it. He must release her, as a fisherman roughly releases a fish from his hook. Suddenly she sees people, three or four figures pulling suitcases up the front steps through the gloom to the building’s entrance. The big anonymous door opens and closes again behind them, showing a segment of orange light. The driver exclaims. He is happy. He springs from his seat and opens the car door for her. He gestures again towards the dimly lit entrance, lest she remain in any doubt. She gives him his money. She realises that he wouldn’t have abandoned her after all.

  *

  In her room she sits on the bed and goes through her notes. The room is big and bare and brightly lit, white like a gallery. The wind moans at the windows. The tall white shutters move and knock. She peers through the slats and sees again the flat black distances streaming with rain, the shapes of cranes and beyond them the darkness boiling indistinctly on the low horizon. It seems to be advancing on her across the desolation, to be bent on prising her out. But the room has a force of its own, with its enormous immaculate bareness, its strange long clusters of pendant lights, its futuristic untouched furniture. On the table there is a giant block of glass – a vase – with a sheaf of orchids and blood-coloured gladioli in it. The flowers are odourless, three feet tall with thick, poison-green stalks. They look synthetic, but when she touches them she finds that they are real.

  Tonie is here to speak at a conference. The conference is tomorrow at ten o’clock; after that she will fly home. She forgot, when she left the house this morning, that she would be returning so soon. It was the rift, the departure, that concerned her, as the hurdle concerns the jumper, not the same continuous earth that lies on the other side of it. She remembers that Alexa was wearing a red dress when she stood at the door to say goodbye. Tonie had never seen the dress before: Thomas bought it for her. It made Alexa seem unreal, like a girl in a dream. In it, she seemed to have no further need of Tonie, except to be numbered among her accomplishments. Yet the mark of possession was Thomas’s: in the red dress Alexa was hallmarked, like a silver figurine. This, it struck Tonie, was what someone looked like who was taken care of by Thomas. In a sense it was what Tonie herself ought to look like. When she looked at Alexa she was looking at a version of her relationship with Thomas, at one of several possibilities, in which she was his cherished object, decked out in a dress he had chosen himself.

  There is a restaurant downstairs. Tonie prepares herself in front of the mirror, trying on a different shirt. Who is she? What is she doing here in this room, with its sinister flowers, with its white shutters the wind and darkness seem to be trying to prise open? Her own body, the unit of herself, so sealed and single: it is all she is, and yet she lives in it so little. Away from home, she is only this unit of flesh. What experience can she offer herself? What physical event will justify this form and bring it into knowledge? Alone, she eats a plate of fish and drinks a glass of cold yellow wine. The waiter is young, attentive, so formal that she becomes awkward and strange when he approaches. She has brought her notes down with her and she finds herself looking at them, looking at what she wrote down at the kitchen table last night in Montague Street, when she sat and thought of her trip, imagined the great inviting sea of the unknown and herself plunging bodily into it. Now she doesn’t know what it was she thought she would find here. She notices a stain on one of the pages: it is gravy, from last night’s chicken pie. She looks at other people talking, eating, in the fashionable room.

  Upstairs, she phones Thomas. He is distant-sounding, slightly curt. He doesn’t know that there is anything in her plight he ought to be moved by. And she can never explain it to him, for as a story it revolves around the disclosure of a desire for something that has no name and is itself nameless, that she could arrive at only by a path of negatives that would somewhere along the line have to pass through Thomas himself. But he doesn’t enquire. She is on a business trip, that’s all: he used to go on them himself. Afterwards did he complain of loneliness, of disenchantment? She thinks that perhaps he did. He complained about them as the conscript complains about the discomfort of his standard-issue boots. Perhaps he didn’t tell her everything either.

  She sits on the bed. She both wants and doesn’t want to go home. She remembers this feeling from childhood, when she would go to her room after some family dispute; and lying on her bed would experience the same division of desire, the same choice that now she sees was no choice at all, between returning downstairs and staying where she was. Downstairs was the ongoing story, plot-filled and relentless, of everything she knew; but in her room there was silence, daylight, an absence of structure. By stepping out of the story she had come upon the emptiness that lay all around it. It was so transparent and silent in that place: it seemed to presage the creation of something, though the moment of realisation never occurred. There was only solitude, beautiful but sterile, unpollinated. She never found anything there. In the end, she always went back.

  She goes to bed and is woken all night by the knocking shutters, and by the wind moaning across the Zuider Zee.

  VIII

  What is art?

  It is the opposite of waste, of redundancy. Thomas goes through his cupboards and finds box after box of obsolete junk. Cables, computer parts, a whole case of grey plastic cartridges still sealed in their airtight transparent wrappers. The printer they were designed to fit no longer exists, and there is no other printer compatible with them. Yet they will last forever.

  It comes to him, the physical feeling of his London office, the big steel and perspex building with its wires and blinking screens and shrilling telephones, the bitter smell of plastic and electric light, the hushed grey spaces, the sealed windows muffling the world, the make-up smell of his secretary Samantha and her synthetic clothes, everyone so chemical-smelling and costumed, and the way people spoke, language itself made artificial, so that you found yourself looking at their teeth, their eyes, to remind yourself there was a human being in there. And most of all the feeling of being on board, of living in a never-resolving present, the feeling that all this artificiality could be sustained so long as it was never permitted to slip into the past. He remembers the way reality itself was made unreal. The last thing Thomas did before he left was to restructure a firm of dog food manufacturers. Three or four weeks in, someone produced a tin of dog food in a meeting. Until that moment, dog food had been theoretical. Now here it was, actual. After all that artificiality the actual had been uncovered. Thomas realised it had been there all along. Dog food had been there all along. Dogs, friendly and filthy and mortal, had been there all along.

  He finds three tiny pairs of headsets, unopened, coiled in their little plastic sacks like embryos. They came with a mobile phone that has since been upgraded. The headsets don’t fit the new phone. Yet they will last forever.

  On the train, Thomas used to decide various things. He decided not to let himself fall asleep. He decided not to read newspapers. He decided to keep a diary. He decided to keep a sketchbook and make portraits of the other passengers. It was forty-five minutes each way, sometimes more. That was an hour and a half that he could reclaim from the wastage of every day. He wanted to sink an anchor down into that narrow channel of time. He wanted to stop himself drifting away.

  In the cupboard he finds the diary, three notebooks, the book of watermarked paper where he meant to do his drawings. The diary is completely blank. In the other one there are two pencil sketches that he doesn’t have any memory of making. For that reason they are slightly frightening. One of them is of a woman in glasses, with frazzled hair like a witch.

  The image comes to him of a black dome-shaped thing made of plastic that used to sit on the desk in his office. He has no idea what it was. He looked at it every day. It had a k
ind of fissure in its casing, a scratch four or so inches long that travelled to the left and then straight, with a kink at the end. It seems possible he will not forget this strange and pointless object. It will survive in his mind forever, unchanging. It will, in a sense, outlive him. His recollection of the scratch is so exact that it might be a scar on his own body. Yet the woman whose face he drew, and the act of drawing it, have disappeared.

  He finds a whole file full of instruction manuals for things that are broken or that he no longer owns. It is called progress, the replacing of one thing by another, the making of one thing meaningless by another. The meaningless things do not live, and nor do they die. Most of the people he knows think that progress is good.

  Often, he would arrive at the station to see his train all packed and ready, the doors sealed, would see it begin to pull away from the platform without him. He has never felt more individual, more distinct than in those moments. Yet it was only that he had stopped going forward. For a second, he became the past. What was strange was that there seemed to be more possibilities there. He remembers the way he would automatically think of going to New Zealand, or South America. Never once did this idea occur to him at any other time. Only there, when he’d missed his train, the urge to take flight for distant lands, as though it were something about himself he’d dropped long ago on the platform at Waterloo and stumbled over again every once in a while.

  Art, he thinks, is not progress.

  IX

  Howard, fallen ill, lies and looks out of the window at the grey suburban midday. It is a view of bare forked trees against a blank, light-filled sky, of the gabled upper storey of number thirty-two. He never sees the world like this, in its weekday torpor. Mornings he is gone by eight o’clock and returns twelve hours later; he is always leaving or coming back, plunging in and out like a needle through the cloth. He does not ask how the cloth weaves itself, but here it is, knitting itself out of silence, out of stasis. Howard loves it, knitting itself round him like a cocoon. In this bedroom time has a certain thickness, an opacity: over the hours it seems to form a skin, like a cooling liquid. He hears cars passing outside, sometimes voices. There is a bird that makes a sound like a squeaking bicycle wheel. Ree-ree-ree-ree-ree. The voices come in jigsaw pieces which he fits together to make little broken-edged sections of life. Mother and child. Man walking dog. Postman delivering outsize item next door.