The Bradshaw Variations Read online

  ‘Well, it’s hardly surprising,’ Benjamin says. His voice is a little terse. ‘It’s only been a few months.’

  Thomas turns the pages with their ferocious black peaks and chasms of semiquavers, their turbulent, chord-filled bass clefs. He doesn’t fully understand why he can’t play them. He has learned the adagio, yet the allegro molto e con brio and the grave remain as encrypted to his eyes as ancient Greek. Ignatius looks over his shoulder at the music.

  ‘Lord, who can?’ he says, sotto voce, as though this heresy were in danger of being overheard by the Bengali family who live upstairs and complain constantly to the Environmental Health department about the intolerable levels of noise in the basement. ‘I say go for the big tunes, the big sensations, the highs. I just live for it – I live for that adagio! I’m all over gooseflesh.’ He holds out his thick forearm. ‘Am I flushing?’ he asks Benjamin.

  ‘Slightly,’ Benjamin says stiffly. ‘Your neck looks a bit red.’

  Ignatius tugs at his collar, feeling around his neck. ‘I have a weak skin,’ he says. ‘I am a litmus paper of emotion. Once it gets a hold, it’s all over me. Rashing, blotches, hives – I can feel it spreading insidiously all through those defenceless cells and corpuscles. My mother used to say it was God’s way of making sure I never told a lie.’

  ‘When it was quite obviously a vitamin deficiency,’ Benjamin says, apparently in spite of himself.

  Ignatius tuts. ‘Admittedly I am one hundred per cent trailer trash,’ he says, to Thomas. ‘In our house, the Pop-Tart was considered a health food. That darling faux-fruit centre – it makes my teeth ache just thinking about it.’

  ‘It ought to be regarded as a form of cruelty,’ Benjamin says. He stands and repositions his chair beside Thomas at the piano. Ignatius looks at him with fond vexation.

  ‘Benjamin’s just marbled with vitamins. Look at that hair!’

  Benjamin blushes, touching his glossy dark hair. ‘We ate a normal balanced diet, that’s all. Just normal English food.’

  ‘Shepherd’s pie,’ Ignatius says dreamily. ‘I adore your mother’s shepherd’s pie. I would have followed her around all day like a puppy, hoping she’d drop some of that pie in my mouth. Or one of those tiny potatoes, all crunchy with goose fat.’

  ‘It wasn’t perfect, you know,’ Benjamin says. ‘There are other things children need besides food. I’m simply saying that it was normal.’

  Thomas feels the current of the men’s relationship flowing treacherously around him. It has never occurred to him that two men would make of love something that so resembles its heterosexual equivalent. He wonders whether love is a form, like music, that takes what has no name or being of its own and shapes it.

  ‘I was perfectly well fed,’ he says. ‘But now I think I’d have preferred to have piano lessons.’

  They both look at him inquisitively: a newcomer in their home town. All at once he feels his grasp of music ebbing inexorably away from him, as people forget whole languages in which once they were able to express their feelings. The adagio has become ancient Greek again. If they were to ask him to play it now, he wouldn’t be able to.

  ‘Was there no music in your house?’ Benjamin asks, as though he considers this, too, to be a form of cruelty. ‘That’s quite unusual, I have to say.’

  ‘Oh, my dear!’ Ignatius flaps his hands in the air, distressed. ‘That is just pure, pure fantasy! I hate to disabuse you, but in the world beyond that delicious place where you grew up, music is strictly, strictly for sissies.’

  ‘East Sheen,’ Benjamin says, with dignity. He folds his arms obstinately. ‘I’m afraid I don’t agree with you,’ he adds, in a peevish, quavering voice, as though disagreeing with Ignatius was itself sissyish and hence something in which Benjamin compels himself to take a perverse kind of pride.

  ‘Believe me,’ Ignatius says, ‘where I come from, any boy who asked for piano lessons was a certified fruit.’

  Benjamin instantly reddens.

  ‘That was a terrible place. That place ought to be destroyed.’

  ‘How old were you when you learnt to play?’ Thomas asks, a frail little hope fluttering in his chest.

  ‘Eighteen before I played a note,’ Ignatius says. ‘Though I saw a piano once, in a friend’s garage. It was so tragic and beautiful, sitting there among the power tools and the garbage cans. It was like a beautiful woman, all hemmed in by those ugly factual things. I just burned –’ he wiggles his thick, hairy fingers ‘– burned to touch it, but it was not to be. I carried a torch for that old piano all through my dreary youth.’ He shudders. ‘It still makes me tingle all over to think of it.’

  Benjamin is listening, though he must have heard the story countless times before. His expression is respectful, uncontrolledly interested, and Thomas glimpses it, the ferment of love, surging like a dark river around the roots of his being. But the next minute he seems irritable, officious, plucking back his cuff to look at his watch.

  ‘We’re falling very behind with our lesson,’ he says. ‘We really must get on.’

  Ignatius puts his hand on Thomas’s shoulder, and Thomas realises that he is kind, kinder even than Benjamin, for love has not undermined him as it has his lover; and Thomas feels himself yearning suddenly for the solidity and sincerity of this second man, for his unethereal pungency, so different from Benjamin’s cleanly boyishness. It is as though their relationship has entered him and is enacting itself through his own senses.

  ‘The adagio was divine,’ he says, squeezing with his fingers. ‘You played it well.’

  *

  Another time, a grey turbulent afternoon, shadows falling and rolling heavily through the dim window of Benjamin’s room, the feet of passersby going past on the street above, litter whirling around their ankles. Ignatius is away, on tour in Germany. Benjamin has tidied up. He offers Thomas tea, and when it comes it is filmed with brown scum. Benjamin takes it away and brings back another in a clean cup. The door to the bedroom is ajar. Thomas can see the heavy flank of Ignatius’s grand piano, the lid closed. The room is so small that the bed acts as a piano stool. He wonders, shocked, how they survive like this. With Ignatius away, Benjamin’s atmosphere has already expanded, filling and marking the space. He imagines him tidying and putting things away. He imagines him closing the lid of the grand piano, satisfied.

  ‘I’ve actually managed to get some of my own work done,’ he says, like a housewife ritually oppressed by her husband’s success.

  Yet it is in this lesson that Benjamin changes things for Thomas. They sit together in front of the adagio.

  ‘It’s like a clock,’ Benjamin says. ‘Imagine you are inside a clock. The music is the mechanism.’

  He plays a few bars, fingers going up and down like hammers, head swinging from side to side like a pendulum. He makes ticking noises with his tongue against his teeth. Thomas laughs. Benjamin rewards him by ticking even louder and wagging his head so violently that his whole body rocks in its chair.

  ‘Tick tock tick tock –’

  He pounds the adagio with his hammer-like fingers, and suddenly Thomas understands that what Benjamin is talking about is time.

  When he gets home, he sits down at the piano and plays the adagio again. Alexa is there, standing in the doorway.

  ‘It’s like a clock,’ he tells her, tick-tocking along with the music like Benjamin did, but she doesn’t seem to understand, and when he tries to explain it to her he finds that he can’t.

  XII

  Claudia calls. There’s a party she wants to go to but Howard is ill. She asks Tonie to go with her instead.

  Tonie agrees – she likes the unexpected. And it’s touching, sort of, that Claudia requires a chaperone, that after two decades of marriage she doesn’t quietly seize the chance to experience something on her own. She picks Tonie up in her dog-smelling estate car. It is a black, penetrating night. Claudia is wearing something with a fur collar, like a Russian aristocrat. Her eyelids are bruised-looking, the mascaraed lash
es tarred into spikes. Her hair is untidy, her nails bitten, her earrings expensive. In the yellow street lamps she has a pleasing look of degeneracy.

  ‘They’re such interesting people,’ she says of their hosts.

  ‘What’s wrong with Howard?’

  Claudia makes an exasperated sound, lifting her hands from the steering wheel.

  ‘Don’t even ask! I’ve been beside myself – he hasn’t been to work for three weeks! He just doesn’t seem to get better. He spends all day moping around the house in his dressing gown.’

  Tonie has known Claudia for years, has caught her eye over countless family dinners, has stood beside her, their smart shoes chafing their feet, at christenings and funerals, has held her babies in her arms. She knows the forms her joy and resentment take; she has heard it for most of her adult life, Claudia’s part, like the melody from an other section of the orchestra.

  ‘But what is it?’ she says.

  Claudia looks into the dark distances of the windscreen.

  ‘Something to do with his lung, apparently. He finally went to the hospital two days ago and got it X-rayed. He thought it was flu, but flu doesn’t just stay the same day after day, does it? I’ve been saying, you know, for heaven’s sake go to the doctor and get a diagnosis! Get a diagnosis! Get a diagnosis!’

  She thumps the steering wheel.

  ‘So he did get one,’ Tonie reminds her gently.

  ‘Well, only after he’d laid waste to all my work plans and virtually barred my path to the studio, because he felt I should be looking after him, even though this was my first real chance to do some painting since the children went back to school after the summer –’

  It is now December: the Christmas holidays start next week, as Tonie must suppose Claudia knows. They drive along in silence for a while.

  ‘Anyway, it turns out he’s got a patch,’ Claudia resumes.

  ‘What’s a patch?’

  ‘Just a sort of dark – patch, on the lung. They want to do a whatsit, a biopsy. I suppose sooner or later they’ll tell us what it is.’

  Tonie presses her palms flat against her thighs. The night is as fine as pitch. Outside the trees and railings are already rimed with frost. They are in a suburban area she doesn’t recognise, big houses, their bulky forms dark, smart silvery cars in driveways with white frost on the windows. Everything looks perfected, abandoned. They pull into one of the driveways, ring the bell at a door lit by carriage lights. It is a big, rambling place. The bell sounds deep in the house. Tonie is afraid.

  A large woman, robust and richly dressed as an opera singer, opens the door. At the sight of them she flings out her arms.

  ‘Darlings!’ she exclaims.

  They are in a room full of people. The woman makes a lot of noise. Tonie can’t hear what she’s saying, just the sound she makes saying it. Her name is Dana or Lana. The room is bright, busy, confusing. The walls are painted red. There are African sculptures, primitive masks, a tiger skin nailed above the fireplace. Tonie looks at the other people, middle-aged people with crumpled faces and thinning hair and soft shapeless bodies. They are depleted, exhausted-looking among the giant ebonised phalluses, the carved forms of pregnant savages. Claudia is talking to a documentary film-maker. She asks him questions about himself while Tonie watches. He is pale, moon-faced, with eyes like chips of vacant blue sky: Tonie notes the consideration with which he has dressed himself, his look of battered fashion. He has recently returned from filming in the Galapagos Islands.

  ‘How fascinating,’ Claudia says, so ingratiatingly that Tonie thinks she must be being ironic.

  She asks him one thing after another, like a mother spooning food into a baby’s mouth: when he comes to the end of one question she is ready with the next. They hear about the iguanas, about the turtles coming up the beach to lay their eggs, about the valour of his dedication to vulnerable beasts. Claudia nods and coaxes and smiles, and every time someone offers Tonie a drink she takes it.

  ‘Why do those films always make the world look like it’s perfect?’ Tonie asks him.

  He ponders her, the baby in his chair: is she friend or foe?

  ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I sort of see what you mean. We’re editing out all the mess, aren’t we? People don’t realise that just out of shot there’s a car park and a big line of hotels – not to mention other film crews all going for the same thing and getting in each other’s way. Sometimes it’s a nightmare, getting what you want and keeping out what you don’t.’

  ‘Terribly difficult,’ Claudia agrees.

  ‘But why can’t you show it as it really is?’ Tonie says. ‘What’s the point?’

  He frowns, puts his hands in his pockets. ‘People don’t want that sort of reality. And it isn’t my job to give it to them.’

  ‘Then you’re just a liar,’ Tonie says, but the room is noisy. She isn’t sure he’s heard her.

  ‘Hasn’t your wife had a baby?’ Claudia asks him. She says the word ‘baby’ as though it’s a big treat, something to reward him for having done so well. Tonie is surprised: she didn’t think Claudia knew this man. She is certain he doesn’t know Claudia’s name. He has not asked them one question about themselves: she and Claudia do not exist for him, they are just lines of perspective, ways for him to measure his location in space.

  ‘– six months old,’ he is saying. ‘I’ve barely seen her because of the filming. I think I’ve spent –’ he calculates ‘– one fortnight at home in the whole six months, you know? But that’s what it’s like to have a vocation. It’s hard, really hard. But that’s how it is. You have to make sacrifices.’

  Claudia looks almost tearful with sympathy, as though she were nothing to do with the person Tonie once witnessed screaming out of a top-floor window at Howard that she had bolted the door and wasn’t going to let him into the house, because Howard had promised to be home that night by a certain time to help her with the children, and had either broken the promise or forgotten it. Tonie thinks about Howard, considers him. In her mind he is suddenly very small, like a doll. He is ringed by destiny: he has become representational. Everything he has done and been has been compacted into this tiny figure, emitting the squeak of life. She sees him being moved as though by an invisible hand around a toy kingdom. She sees he could be dashed away in an instant.

  She leaves Claudia and pushes through the room. Later she finds herself talking to a man who makes coffins. He is threadbare, hippy-looking, with long grey hair. He makes the coffins by hand, out of wood from sustainable sources. He arranges natural funerals, in accordance with the wishes of the family. Tonie learns about the diversity of these wishes, their sources and outcomes. By now it is almost sexual, her desire to be penetrated by a question, but nobody asks her one. Instead she learns about the woodlands of Sussex and Kent, the tensile properties of the chestnut tree. There is African music playing, loud. Half of what the man says is blotted out. She watches his mouth moving. He glances at her frequently: he can tell she is untouched, disengaged.

  Suddenly Claudia is at her elbow, listening. She nods her head as the man speaks; she asks questions. He becomes aware of her, turns the stream of information in her direction. She is a more gratifying audience than Tonie. She asks about the coffin made of English oak. She asks about the ultra-sustainable willow model. Her interest is genuine, the man can tell. Tonie watches in consternation. Has Claudia gone mad? She feels suddenly that she was brought here to witness Claudia in an act of betrayal. It is the ineradicable quality of her dependence – on Howard, on men – that is being exposed tonight. Claudia puts a hand on the man’s arm. She is bright, transactional, faintly tragic in her fur collar.

  ‘Do you have a card?’ she asks him.

  ‘As it happens I do,’ the man says, producing one from his back pocket. ‘Are you anticipating a – passing?’

  For an instant Claudia looks both startled and mesmerised, like a snake being charmed out of its basket: her face is lit up, her mascaraed eyes unblinking. She takes the man�
�s card and puts it in her handbag.

  On the way home, there is a feeling of constraint between them. It is clear Tonie did not enjoy the party. And Tonie feels, suddenly, that she does not know Claudia at all. She is aware of Claudia’s body, her hands with their rings on the steering wheel, her atmosphere coming at her across the dark. But her knowledge of this entity – Claudia – has been marginalised. They turn left and right through deserted roads. At Montague Street Tonie gets out, and Claudia drives away.

  XIII

  ‘Do you ever hear anything about Clare?’ Tonie asks Thomas.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Clare. Clare Connelly.’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘No reason. I just think about her sometimes.’

  ‘Do you?’ He seems astonished. He seems to find it astonishing, not that he doesn’t think about Clare but that she does. Yet once they talked about her all the time.

  Tonie laughs. ‘Don’t you ever think about her?’

  They are in the kitchen. It is late at night. Thomas is putting things away. She watches him, the way he holds each object – the pepper pot, the butter dish, the saucepan with the chipped enamel lid – while he establishes where it belongs. There is nothing automatic about it. It is as though male pride forbids him to acquiesce in the order of things. He has to consider the saucepan and then decide himself where it ought to go.

  ‘The honest answer’, he says, ‘is that I haven’t thought about her since the last time I saw her.’

  She realises that he is pleased that he hasn’t thought about Clare. It pleases him, to detect this shallowness in himself, this simplicity. In fact, she can’t exactly say that she herself thinks about Clare. It is more than that: Clare is a place in her mind she touches in passing, sometimes intentionally, sometimes brushing against her by accident. Tonie feels a kind of nostalgia for her, as she might for a particular song that fits like a key into the lock of time and lets the past come rushing out. The intricate Clare-ness of Clare unlocks her memory of the first weeks with Thomas in just the same way. In those days Thomas talked about Clare constantly. He wrestled with the moral problem of her while Tonie watched in wonder and admiration. So it’s strange – isn’t it? – that now he doesn’t think about her, can barely remember who she is.