The Bradshaw Variations (17 page)

‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ he says.

There is a silence. Thomas wants to go away. He wants to go home and play Bach. He is not enjoying this conversation after all.

‘Daddy, can Clara come back to our house?’ Alexa is still gripping the other child’s hand. ‘Please can she?’

‘Not today,’ he says. ‘Another time.’

Alexa persists. ‘Tomorrow?’

He glances at the woman. She smiles again and he grimaces awkwardly in return.

‘We’ll see,’ he says. ‘We’ll talk about it when we get home.’

He takes Alexa’s arm and leads her firmly out of the playground and into the street. All the way home he has a sour sense of disappointment, but in the evening, when Tonie is there, he finds himself thinking about the brown-haired woman again. Her image is once more in its frame. Tonie is moving around the kitchen, pale-faced, distracted. For a moment he forgets the nature of their bond: she has a kind of detailed neutrality about her, a compendiousness, as though he could ask her anything, this sturdy friend of his life.

‘Do you know the mother of a child named Clara?’ he says.

‘Who?’

‘Clara.’

She pauses beside the sink. He sees her mind ticking over, locating the details. She is wearing a mauve-coloured sweater that looks thick and itchy. Vaguely it appears to him as a symbol of affliction, this garment with its heavy knitted cables and constricting neck, its impenetrable fastnesses of wool. It is as though she has put it on as a warning to the world, to keep away from her.

‘I think the mother’s called Helen,’ she says presently.

‘I met her in the playground today. She said she knew you.’

‘Did she?’

‘Alexa seems pretty keen on the daughter.’

‘On Clara?’ Tonie turns on the taps. ‘That’s new. She and Clara have never had all that much to say to each other.’

She speaks with a certain finality. She is telling Thomas that whatever his impressions of the situation might be, her own knowledge is superior. She is reminding him that in the world he now inhabits there is nothing new for him to discover. There is nothing to know that she has not known already.

‘Well, they seemed pretty friendly today.’

‘Did they? These things come and go. Alexa probably fell out with Maisie and brought in Clara as a sop.’

Thomas laughs, though he finds her remark faintly irritating.

‘I wouldn’t have suspected her of that degree of cynicism,’ he says.

Tonie raises her eyebrows. She does not reply.

‘Actually,’ he persists, ‘I thought it was rather touching, the way they were holding hands together. It all seemed perfectly innocent to me.’

Her expression is inscrutable. ‘That’s fine,’ she says, as though he’d asked her permission for something. After a pause, she adds: ‘You should make friends with Helen. She’s nice. It would do you good to have a friend at the school.’

‘Thanks,’ he says flatly.

‘Oh, you know what I mean,’ she says. ‘I just think you’d get on well with her, that’s all. She’s a musician, you know.’

‘Is she?’

‘She plays the violin. You should ask her about it.’

Thomas goes upstairs to say goodnight to Alexa. He feels enveloped, vaguely suffocated, as though Tonie has spun another mauve-coloured sweater around him to match her own. Before he turns out the light, he says:

‘Shall we see if Clara wants to come round tomorrow?’

Alexa’s face is blank. She shrugs. ‘All right,’ she says.

He is vexed. ‘Don’t you want her to come?’

She thinks about it. ‘I don’t mind. I suppose so.’

But he doesn’t see her the next day, nor the next. Alexa says that Clara is ill.

‘What’s wrong with her?’

‘I don’t know. She’s always ill,’ Alexa says, balefully.

Then, one day, the mother is there again, sitting on her bench. He realises that he has forgotten her. She was a habit his mind had formed, that’s all. He can’t remember now what the particulars of the habit were.

‘Hello,’ he says.

His shadow falls across her. She looks up. She seems pleased.

‘Oh, hello,’ she says.

‘I haven’t seen you here for a while.’

It becomes apparent that she is not going to stand, and nor does she make any accommodating gesture for him to sit. This is the adult physicality of the playground, this non-directive bodily stance. She can neither welcome him nor send him away. He sits anyway, beside her on the bench.

‘It’s spring,’ he says, for he has only in that moment realised it. It is March. The sun is lapping weakly at his white face and hands, and there are hard green buds on the naked branches of the trees that stand here and there in their concrete moorings. He wonders how it can possibly be enough, this timid force, to renew all that has to be renewed. He hums a few phrases from the ‘Spring’ Sonata.

‘I don’t know your name,’ she says.

His eyes are closed, feeling the sun. ‘Thomas,’ he says.

‘I’m Ellen.’

‘
E
llen?’

He opens his eyes. She is offering her hand. He is coldly amused by Tonie’s mistake. It makes him like the woman better. After all, there
is
something for him to find out.

‘You’re a musician,’ he says.

She is surprised. ‘How did you know that?’

He considers tormenting her. ‘I thought everybody knew. You’re famous, aren’t you?’

‘No, not at all.’ She isn’t upset. She looks confused.

He closes his eyes again. ‘My wife told me that you played the violin.’

‘Actually,’ she says, ‘it’s the viola.’

He smiles to himself. He does not think that Tonie would care for the difference between a violin and a viola.

‘I’d like to have been a musician,’ he says.

The bell shrills; the children come out. The playground fills. Suddenly Clara is there, clambering on to her mother’s lap. The woman kisses the top of her head, and it is then that Thomas realises that she is beautiful, as though her daughter’s arrival has unveiled her. He thinks of the woman-shaped viola, tawny and glimmering, the child like a bow in her lap. He realises that he cannot look at something beautiful without wanting to comprehend it completely. He looks around for Alexa, suddenly embarrassed to be sitting so close to them, as though these thoughts were public acts he might be made to stand by for life. He remembers the way he used to look at her from far off, the sense of ownership he had over her form. He doesn’t understand himself. He rises, pushes forwards into the crowd.

*

One day Clara comes to the house. She is a mute and fragile child, tremulous as a bead of water, so insubstantial as to be exhausting. Thomas was expecting a child like a prelude, a flowing, melodious thing; he realises that it is from her mother that this expectation has come. But without her, Clara is formless. Or at least, he has failed to decipher what her form might be. He finds himself looking frequently at his watch. Again and again Alexa leads her upstairs to her bedroom and each time, after a few minutes, Clara reappears alone, descending the stairs slowly one by one, seeking him out. He finds himself becoming irritated by her small, hovering form. He knows that it is not him she really wants.

At five o’clock he opens a bottle of wine.

‘Would
you
like something to drink?’ he asks Clara, who is standing silently at his heels, an orphaned expression on her face.

She nods. He gives her orange squash in a plastic cup. It is strange, serving this unfamiliar child. He experiences a kind of intimacy with her mother, inhabiting the vacuum where Ellen ought to be. Forgetting how small she is he sets the cup slightly out of her reach, and when she tries to grasp it she knocks it over and the orange liquid pours across the table and down the front of her white shirt. She looks down at the orange stain silently.

‘Oh dear,’ Thomas says.

He takes her upstairs to Alexa’s room to get a clean shirt, holding her by her tiny hand. Alexa is lying on her bed, reading.

‘Yuk,’ she says, when she sees the stain. She reminds him, in that instant, of Tonie. It is as though the two of them are lying on the bed, spectating on the curious mess Thomas has got himself into, on this strange little child he has been determined to acquire and is caring for so badly.

He sits Clara on the end of the bed and tentatively removes her shirt. She is entirely passive, letting him undo the buttons with her arms hanging limp at her sides. He opens the front, and though his heart stalls momentarily at the sight of the raw red surgical scars that score the length and breadth of her quail’s chest his demeanour remains perfectly calm. He finds a clean shirt and does up the buttons with feather-like fingers.

XXIV

A professor comes to give a talk on the poets of the First World War.

The department advertised the talk, but in the lecture hall only a few of the front seats are occupied. Tonie is embarrassed. She had half-hoped to get out of coming herself, but everyone else is ill or away, and the professor is on her hands. She waits in Reception. He arrives, coming through the glass doors out of the dark street, where the traffic stands end to end in the rain. He is much younger than she expected. She glances at the printed flyer, to remind herself of his name.

They walk briskly along the grey neon-lit corridors to the lecture hall. Tonie tries to slow him down: she doesn’t want him in a mood of urgency. She tries to impart the attitude of casual acceptance that is the hallmark of her English department. She hopes that by the time they get there more people will have arrived.

‘Don’t expect a crowd,’ she says at the door. ‘They’re not very good at evenings. They go back to their burrows once darkness falls.’

He laughs politely. She sees that he is very smartly dressed. He is wearing a suit and tie, cufflinks, polished shoes.

‘Never mind,’ he says.

She opens the doors. If anything, there are fewer people inside than there were before. She introduces him – his name is Max Desch, from the University of York – and there is a faint sound of clapping as she leaves the podium. She sits a few rows back, alone. She watches him adjust the microphone, lay out his notes. For a long time he doesn’t speak. He gets various books out of his briefcase and lays them out too. Then he shakes his head, puts some of them back and gets out others. People start to turn around in their seats, looking back at her. They sense that something is wrong. They expect her to act, but what can she do? In a way, she admires him. She admires people who don’t do what they’re supposed to.

He is silent for so long that when he finally speaks into the microphone, everybody jumps.

‘Why don’t you all come up here?’ he says.

Everyone troops up on to the podium. They don’t even complain about it: they’re too unnerved. Tonie comes last. There are a few chairs up there and she sits on one. Other people sit on the floor. The professor sits on a chair.

‘The best thing about poetry’, he says, ‘is reading it. Don’t you think? I’ll just read one now.’

He reads a poem by Wilfred Owen. Everyone listens. He has an unusual style of reading. He declares each line flatly and leaves long pauses between the lines. He is not at all self-conscious, in his impeccable suit. One or two of the students laugh. But after a while everyone is quiet.

‘Who wants to go next?’ he says, when he is finished.

To Tonie’s surprise, a few hands go up. He points to a girl and passes her the book. It is Julie Bowes: Tonie often sees her on the bus, whispering into her phone and staring wanly out of the dirty window. She reads a poem by Rupert Brooke, the famous one. It is hard to think of something less associated with Julie Bowes than this poem. She reads it softly, falteringly, with her south London accent. Tonie’s neck and shoulders begin to ache. When Julie Bowes asks, ‘And is there honey still for tea?’ Tonie’s whole being cringes. She feels angry with the professor, with his suit and his cut-glass accent. She herself makes every exception for these students, who look so exhausted by life before they’ve even begun. She is angry that they should be made to read the patriotic words of public schoolboys. Yet they don’t seem particularly to mind.

The professor motions Julie to pass the book along. She gives it to Nile, a big silent boy in tracksuit and gold chains, trainers like showboats, his muscled legs uncomfortably crossed in front of him. He leafs slowly through the pages. Then he starts to read, Siegfried Sassoon. His voice is strong and beautiful, simple as a beam. It is as though he has never used it before; as though the poem has hewn it out of the substance of what he is. Slowly, Tonie gives in. She listens to the sound of them saying what they do not normally say. She sees how innocent they are, how unformed, how transitive. They pass easily into the vessel of the poem. For an instant, they become it. Her consternation and embarrassment fade. She is amused, impressed, and in the end she forgets to be anything at all. The hour passes easily. A feeling of comfort, almost of love envelops her. For the first time in a long time, she loves this place.

‘What about you?’ he says. ‘Will you read something?’

They are all looking at her. They want her to become human, like them. They want her to emerge from her authority, her fixed life, a small figure emerging from a large building. They want to see what she really is.

‘All right,’ she says.

Suddenly the book is in her hands. She reads where the page is open, Wilfred Owen again, ‘Insensibility’; a poem she remembers, though she hasn’t read it in years, hasn’t even thought about it. His voice speaking through hers surprises her. Like the others, she does not often say beautiful things. Yet the words seem to be her own – they feel like what she would have invented, if only she knew how to. They seem to delineate an unlived passion, a dark form, like a second, nameless body inside her own. When she reads the lines,

     ….. whatever moans in man

Before the last sea and the hapless stars

her voice trembles. The book is old, with yellowed pages. It is older than her, and Wilfred Owen is dead. She feels sad, sorry, as though he represented a missed opportunity; as though he has left her to go on alone, full of stillborn passion. When she has finished, she returns the book to the professor. Their eyes meet. ‘Goodbye, then,’ he says to the students.