The Bradshaw Variations (7 page)

‘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.

‘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.

‘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.