The Bradshaw Variations (2 page)

Afterwards he wipes his cheeks and kisses her goodnight, and goes downstairs to wait for Tonie to come home.

II

On the train, Tonie thinks about sex. It’s like some old friend she hasn’t seen in years and then bumped into on the platform. She rides with it in the carriage, her old friend sex, who one way and another she lost touch with, somewhere around the time when Alexa was born, when love seemed like a mathematical problem to which, all of a sudden, she had found the answer.

The other passengers, daylight chorusing in their faces, the mood transitive, a shedding of properties: the train flies through the September morning and Tonie feels it, an element that is all surface, all publicity. She is a little suspicious, almost resentful. It is as though she has blundered uninvited into some event and discovered that everyone she knows is there. So! This is what people are up to, while women care for babies in wholesome rooms, while they push strollers through the slow afternoon, satisfied that they have solved the problem of love. The rest of the world doesn’t care about love at all. The rest of the world is pure self, present tense, neither bad nor good, just flying free through the morning’s instant. And it comes over her in a rush, the memory of what it used to feel like, being alive.

On the way home she bumps into it again.

A month into her new job, the evening train, the mood reflective. There is a rushing darkness at the windows and yellow portraits on the glass, like the steady images a light makes from a black river of film. What has she been doing all this time? This is the question, after an eight-year absence. At intervals, her husband has turned to her in their bed and posed questions with his body: do you still love me? Is everything all right? And she has acceded, as often as she has been able to, not wanting to trouble him with her strange numbness, her indifference. What else? Giving, caring, watching, remembering, feeling, but not – not truly – participating. It’s been like reading a great book, life represented as fully and beautifully as it could be but the commodity itself suspended. All her sympathies have been engaged, and left her body motionless, inert.

At the station she gets a taxi.

Thomas, in the kitchen, slightly tired-looking, the crow’s feet standing in bright starbursts around his eyes. It is nine fifteen. He has made food for her, something heaped on a plate in the oven, keeping warm. He is wearing an apron. She laughs. She reaches around his waist, trying to untie the strings. He looks bashful, a little foolish. He looks shy, embarrassed, like a young girl with someone trying to undo her bra strap.

‘I’ll do it,’ he says.

When they kiss it is fumbling, slightly awkward, and Tonie laughs again, against his teeth. There seem to be folds and folds of blankness between them. She struggles to break through it. He is like a well-packaged object she is trying to get to, tearing away the blank wrapping. It is as though he is resisting her, as though he doesn’t want to be found. Her determination begins to drain away. There is too much reality, too much light in the kitchen, too much visual detail of ordinary things. And she has a sudden fraternal sense of Thomas that is like a bucket of cold water poured over her head. He is over-familiar. They have stood together in this kitchen too many times.

The kissing peters out. They hug, comrades.

‘What’s in there?’ Tonie says, still in his arms but looking out, down, at the humming oven. Usually it is Alexa they look out and down at, the view from themselves, the distraction that has become a necessity. But the oven will do.

‘Fish pie. Do you want some?’

So Tonie eats it, the pale mound of fodder, the creamy potato that sticks to the roof of her mouth, and it is hard to reconcile this filling of herself with the wanting feeling she had earlier. The potato stops her tongue, sits like a boulder in her stomach. It is a kind of imprisonment, to feel so full, when it was something else that she was asking for.

But the next night it’s different.

She comes back even later, ten o’clock, and this time there’s no food and Thomas is more alert, more mysterious. They sit in the sitting room on opposite chairs.

‘It won’t always be like this,’ Tonie says. ‘I’ll get quicker. I have to read everything four times. I have to suck up to everyone.’

‘We’re all right. Do what you need to do.’

He’s wearing a dark blue shirt that makes him look sharper, clearer, less fuzzily familiar. Seen objectively Thomas is good-looking, pale fine-grained skin, fine black hair that falls over his face, something light and boyish about him though he is tall and broad-shouldered. Tonie’s female friends make envious jokes about Thomas. They see him objectively, but Tonie doesn’t. She sees him in pieces, from particular angles. Sometimes, when they are away from the house, she is amazed to see him walking down the street towards her, whole.

In the bedroom she turns away while he undresses. She waits until he switches out the light. She is determined to hang on to this gossamer inspiration, desire. She knows that if her eye falls on the alarm clock with the big ear-like bells, on the toys Alexa has left on the floor of their room, even on Thomas himself, it will break. She needs Thomas to become a stranger again. She needs to reinvent him. Is that wrong? He might think it was, if she told him. But not telling is what will make a stranger of herself.

And it is exactly as she had hoped, in the way that a performance of a play might be, the feeling of a structure, an event, passing through time unharmed. The form was honoured: nobody made a mistake or fluffed a line. It is strange, that transcendence should occur not by abandoning structure but by adhering to it exactly. Thomas turns to her, strokes her hair. In the darkness he is a shape, autonomous. It is a long time since she has felt him to be so distinct from herself. It is from the distinctness that the closeness, the harmony, has arisen.

In the middle of the night she wakes up and he is still there, the shape, draped in shadow. He is as beautifully turned as a musical instrument, as finished, as mute and solitary lying on his side in the darkness. The desire is this: to find him, to use him, to make him respond. It is the only way that she can possess him, as the musician possesses the instrument, and though it feels like youth again it is not, not at all. As a young woman she did not possess the bodies of men. They possessed her. She was the instrument, in those days. And the time in between has been a blank, a silence, because after Alexa was born she was neither instrument nor performer but creator, alone suddenly, her body a slump of giving, all untouchable aftermath. It did not recognise the discipline of performance. It wanted only to be left alone.

She puts out her hand and touches the skin of Thomas’s neck, his back, his taut rounded shoulder. He wakes up. She feels it, the vibration of life under her hand. He turns to her, mouth slightly open, eyes shut. He obeys her.

*

Montague Street runs straight downhill towards the city. It is steep, so that the bottom looks remote from the top, the hazy geometric spill of buildings levelling out below with its light-inflected blocks and angles, its wreath of pollution, its drone of traffic and sense of life as something inalienable and general rather than fragile and particular, though close up this illusion is successively unmasked as the moderate scale of the reality becomes clearer. The town is just a picturesque, convenient, middle-sized town an hour from London. But from the top, where the Bradshaws live, it has an appearance of grandeur and ruination.

Theirs is a region of parks and churches – the former small and crowded, the latter large and empty – and of row after row of red-brick two-storey Victorian terraces that rise and fall across the undulating townscape, and that again conjure up an atmosphere of generality, the image of a contented and solidly unexceptionable bourgeoisie, as opposed to the fretful-looking, badly paid liberal professionals who for the most part live in them: academics like Tonie, teachers, social workers.

In Tonie’s experience, these are people whose capacity for deep, undisclosed suffering and worldly indifference, for extreme feats of virtue or nihilism, for the repression of passions and staunchness in the face of reality, is so violent that it ought to leave some visible mark on their surroundings; and yet the surface of their lives is so bare as to suggest a reluctance to impose themselves on the world that runs deeper still. Time and again she has visited her neighbours’ houses and found them to be lacking both luxuries and necessities, found rooms empty of furniture or ornament, stained walls with no pictures on them, cardboard boxes that have never been unpacked, desolate shelves, and in the face of it all a kind of impregnable vagueness, a dreaminess, that acquaints Tonie with her own alertness, her fathomless determination, and suggests these qualities are not, after all, entirely normal. Take her friend Elsa, for instance: entering Elsa’s house for the first time, Tonie assumed they had only just moved into it, so powerful was its atmosphere of unoccupation, when in fact Elsa and her husband had lived there for years. In the hall there was a strip of wallpaper hanging loose, which Elsa admitted having torn off one day to see what was underneath – blood-coloured flowers and creeping foliage, better not to have known – and which hangs there still. Tonie would have had the whole lot off in an evening, would not have rested until it was all gone and something new and good put in its place; and yet Elsa is a virtuous woman, a woman who teaches disabled children, who would drop everything to help if Tonie was ill or in trouble, who has welcomed time into her face unprotestingly, though it has been brutal to her. When Tonie sees Elsa, sees the torn tongue of paper still lolling from the wall and the sitting room still full of boxes, she wonders what the meaning, what the moral value of her own competence is. She sees that she herself is not virtuous, in spite of the fact that she is driven by what feels like guilt or compunction. She would not rest until the imperfect was excised and the good accomplished, and it would feel like rightness itself was thrashing her and egging her on. But in Elsa’s tattered hall she acknowledges that it is not rightness: it is the desire for success.

The houses in Montague Street are different from the rest, narrow and tall and white, Georgian, impractical. The world always offers a small opportunity for difference, among a large majority of things that are all the same; and equally unfailingly Tonie takes it, only remembering afterwards that being different is not the same as being right. She was besotted with the house at first, so that rationality, calm consideration, common sense could get no hold on her. They manifested themselves as purely hostile, as things that had only and ever sought to frustrate her, which made it right – rightness again – to defy them and cast them off for good.

It’s true that the house is unusual. There is something fantastical about its narrowness and height, its overhanging windows, its quivering appearance of unfeasibility. It is more like a drawing – a sketch – than a building. It takes only a few paces to go from the front of it to the back: you walk through the door and the tiny garden is staring you in the face. When people come in there is always a moment of startled hesitation, a sense of spatial misjudgement, as though they were about to lose their footing on the edge of a cliff. They exclaim, half in wonder, but just as much out of consternation. Tonie does not like it when this happens. For seven years she and Thomas have lived in this house, and the steady disclosure of its shortcomings, its particular flaws, has had something almost sermonising about it. The rooms downstairs are dark; the windows are draughty and the garden too small; the sloping doorframes and uneven boards, most of all the ceaseless going up and down, up and down like a tune in search of a resolution – these things fray Tonie’s nerves and exhaust her. Stuck with her choice, Tonie is being taught a lesson, which is that desire is dangerous, because it is magnetised by its antithesis, actuality. And actuality, no less automatically, is drawn to desire. What are you meant to do with a desire if not act on it? Living in her thin and fantastical house Tonie has been haunted by new desires – for the anonymous, the spacious, the frankly horizontal. She has imagined large suburban lawns and garages, broad avenues, a house low and wide. It appears to her now that it would be easier to distinguish yourself in such a house; that time would stand more still; that the human subject would be picked out, highlighted against the neutrality, so that the glamour of being alive – so ineluctable, so hopelessly entrenched in the province of desire – could finally be actualised.

What happened was that all those years ago, she fell in love with the house: she fell in love with it, and then as she came to know more and more about it the love was divided and subdivided until each piece of knowledge was larger than its allotted share of affection. This is the lesson, the sermon: that facts outlive emotions, and that knowledge is therefore more powerful than love. There are infinite things to know, but the capacity for love is just that, a capacity, a space that can hold so much and no more.

*

Six months ago, the head of the university English department where Tonie teaches retired. It was a strange time, no one rushing forward to replace her, a feeling everywhere of indifference bordering on decline, until someone asked Tonie whether she would consider applying for it. It was out of the question, a big administrative job a whole world away from the part-time lecturing she was used to, a job for someone like Angela Deacon, who had done it for years; an older woman with a wardrobe full of cashmere and earth-tones, a woman with grown-up children and an interest in Etruscan art, a still-married woman who nonetheless wanted to keep the little flame of her wickedness alive, who wanted her well-preserved body out in the world, safe in its armour of bureaucratic procedure. Tonie couldn’t do a job like that, that needed funds of time brought to it like a dowry. Tonie’s time did not seem to belong to her any more. Her work had been shaped around Alexa’s presences and Thomas’s absences for so long that she forgot it had a form and force of its own, a power of its own.