The Bradshaw Variations (11 page)

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.

‘That’s so – weird,’ Tonie says.

During that winter he would meet Tonie clandestinely by the river in Putney, where he lived at the time, and they went for long walks in the dark. Camouflaged in shadow they walked and walked beside Richmond and Kew, beside the silent swift-running water, passing and re-passing the riverside bars and restaurants without ever going in, though secretly Tonie wanted to. She wanted to sit with Thomas in the warmth, at a candlelit table. She wanted his full attention, which on the muddy towpath in the dark she was not sure she ever got. But she never suggested it: she realised he would find it inappropriate. Instead they walked for miles in the cold, talking all the time. When they talked Tonie had the sense of something big and bounteous nearby, as the sea can be sensed when it is still just out of sight. Sometimes, overcome by excitement and emotion, she would turn to Thomas and try to kiss him, and her lips would bump against his chin or his ear as he averted his face. He would not kiss her, because of Clare. He would not be unfaithful. Tonie believed that she had never in her life seen someone behave honourably. She could barely breathe with the exacting thrill of it. She was electrified: she was driven out of her wits, as with other men she had been by passion. Except that to see passion subjugated to honour was a thousand times more tormenting. After three weeks of this, Thomas had a conversation with Clare and moved his possessions out of her flat. For a while she phoned, her voice high-pitched and distant-sounding in the receiver when Tonie answered it, and Thomas sometimes met her for lunch. Then one day he said that Clare had decided to put an end to the conversations and the lunches. She did not want to talk to Thomas any more. She found it too painful.

Tonie wasn’t really concentrating, during Clare’s final chapter. She saw Clare on the periphery of her vision: she registered her gradual disappearance as she might have registered a city passing and ebbing and falling behind through the windows of a train, without really looking. If the train had stopped, if the city had never given way to suburbs and green fields, she might have looked up and noticed, but as it was Clare’s diminishing presence did nothing to alert Tonie or arouse her suspicions. By degrees she vanished, that was all, while Tonie and Thomas went forward into a future that seemed as full and fluid as the past was desiccated and fixed.

Clare came to the house once, with a parcel for Thomas that had been delivered to her address. She was just passing, she said; she left her car in the middle of the street, the engine running, the door wide open. She was tall and statuesque: Tonie was amazed by the solidity of her body, its grandeur, the clean healthy look of her, her breasts bouncing in a tight white jersey as she ran up the steps, her fair, well-shampooed hair in its ponytail bouncing too. Thomas always insisted that Clare’s blondeness was natural. Tonie remembers the energy she expended disabusing him of this quaint notion, but now she wonders whether she was wrong, whether everything about Clare that at the time seemed so fictitious was in fact real. It is because she was real that Tonie has not forgotten her. Nor has she been able, though ten years have passed, to forget the way that Thomas, during those night-time walks by the river, averted his face and imposed something penitential, something almost punitive on his first encounters with Tonie. Increasingly, she feels that her life has been marked by a lack of pre-eminence. She feels that the only person who has ever loved her first-hand is Alexa. Perhaps it is this authentic love that has shown her how incomplete the others were.

It strikes her now that life is not linear, a journey, a passage, but a static process of irreversible accretion. It is perspective that moves, passing over it all like the sun, now illuminating, now casting into shadow. The angle changes, the relation of one thing to another, the proportion of dark to light; but experience itself is block-like, is cumulative and fixed. That is why it surprises her, troubles her, that Thomas does not think of Clare. For Clare has not vanished. On the contrary, ten years on she casts a longer shadow than she did before. And those nights by the river, when Tonie looked at the lit-up places and yearned to be inside one of them, sitting opposite Thomas, the object of his gaze and full attention: they, too, have grown more significant, not less. The more she thinks about them, the more symbolic they become. They symbolise the impossibility of perfection, of true and perfect love. She wanted to go in and yet she pretended for Thomas’s sake that she did not. It is the extension of want and pretence into the sufficiency of love that is symbolic. While he gave unfettered expression to his guilt, his anxiety, his conception of honour, she suppressed the small, indignant voice that told her she was entitled, while taking the risk of love, to his full attention.

She thinks now about Clare’s final act of renunciation: again, she barely noticed it at the time, but it reminds Tonie that she herself could have renounced Thomas, that she could have lived the other life, the non-Thomas life, as Clare even now is presumably doing. She wonders which life has turned out to be better. She wonders why she wanted one so much more than the other, when in fact, in a way, they are the same. She realises that of the three of them, she, Tonie, is the only one who did not act decisively.

‘It’s so weird that you don’t think about her,’ she says.

He is still holding the saucepan. He is wondering what she means. She sees that for him, too, not thinking about Clare has become the same as thinking about her. All the same he is offering it to her, to Tonie, as a tribute, a gift; the latest incarnation of his sense of honour. But she wants to remind him of all that caution and concern he went in for by the river. She wants to draw his attention to the fact that once, when it mattered, he stinted Tonie’s share. He ought to know that Tonie has felt hungry ever since, that she worries about this hunger, worries that she will be driven one day to placate it.

‘I wouldn’t like that, if it were me,’ she says.

It’s true, she wouldn’t.

‘But it isn’t you,’ he says.

‘It could just as well be.’

He looks at her, puzzled. He sighs, shakes his head, puts the saucepan in the cupboard.

‘Would it be better if I said I thought about her all the time?’ he says.

XIV

The house is such an odd little house, tall and thin and spindly as a doll’s house. The Swanns joke to their friends that when they visit Antonia’s house they have to breathe in.

Recently, their elder daughter Elizabeth moved with her family to an eighteenth-century manor house with five acres, a swimming pool and superb transport links to London for James: there can be no jokes about that. Mrs Swann has encountered unexpected difficulties in describing Elizabeth’s house to her friends. She doesn’t know what tone to strike. She has always ridden Elizabeth well, like an expert jockey rides a racehorse, but lately she has felt herself to be clinging on as the pace gets faster and faster. She finds that she has little to say on the subject: she is simply trying to maintain a foothold.

So there has, unusually, been some relief to be had in the contemplation of Antonia, whose affairs Mrs Swann can encompass in conversation without effort, in the way that a novelist encompasses a minor character. It is achieved by means of repetition: when Antonia appears, it is to enact the qualities of contradiction and eccentricity that already define her to her audience. She is never developed, merely confirmed. Currently, it is far easier for Mrs Swann to revert to stock than to consider how the story of Elizabeth’s unstoppable rise, with all its dark tumult of jealousy and fear, could be told without publicly diminishing its narrator.

But as her husband turns the car up Montague Street, Mrs Swann remembers that it isn’t like that at all. Her sense of Antonia as a set of quirks, like a set of piano keys awaiting her touch, vanishes entirely. Instead there is a dense atmosphere of bitterness and failure that has not enveloped her since the last time she was here, and that tells her better than any road map that her youngest daughter’s house is nearby.

Her husband feels it too. He eyes the street. They linger, not wanting to leave the safe harbour of their fourlitre Mercedes.

‘Will the car be safe out here, do you think?’ he says.

It is Thomas who opens the door. Antonia is standing just behind, in the narrow hall. Mrs Swann sees her eyes, wide and unblinking, sees their expression of wonderment. From the street the hall looks dark, filled with shadows, and Antonia’s eyes are floating among them, gazing at Mrs Swann as though they can see into her soul.

‘Mind your head,’ she says to her husband, as he passes ahead of her beneath the door frame.

He waits for her on the threshold.

‘Be careful you don’t trip,’ he says. ‘There’s a loose board in the floor there.’

Once inside Mrs Swann immediately produces the bag of Christmas presents that is the occasion for their visit. They are lavishly wrapped, the paper glossy and unmarked, the gold ribbon twirled into perfect ringlets. Her husband wrapped them. He is generous with the paper, as only a man can be, for he barely knows what it is he is wrapping. Mrs Swann bought the presents, alone. She left it to her husband to be generous with the paper: her own involvement is with what is inside.

Thomas tries to take the presents, and Mrs Swann discovers that she is reluctant to part with them. Her hands will not let go of the bag.

‘Where’s little one?’ she says, looking around her for Alexa.

‘She’s at a birthday party,’ Thomas says.

‘Oh no!’ cries Mrs Swann. She is astonished. Not once has she imagined this scene occurring without the presence of a child. It is like Mass occurring without a priest at the altar. It casts a dreadful, civilian greyness over everything. ‘Couldn’t she have missed it, just this once?’

Her husband puts a cautionary hand on her arm.

‘Selina,’ he says, ‘don’t get involved. The child has her own life to lead.’

She understands him: he is speaking to her in a language that underlies even her own consciousness, that is the more private and profound for the fact that over the years it has blotted out her native tongue, solitude.

‘Well,’ Thomas says, ‘only until four o’clock.’ He looks at his watch. ‘She should be back any minute.’

‘Oh,’ says Mrs Swann. She doesn’t care when Alexa is coming back. What she wanted was to have her here when she arrived. ‘Hello, Antonia,’ she adds, so that it sounds like an afterthought.

Antonia steps forward, receives a cool kiss on the cheek.

‘Hey, Mum,’ she says.

Her daughter is wearing black trousers, a black T-shirt, black shoes – all negative, like those things in space that can swallow you whole while taking up no room at all. She wears no make-up or jewellery. Her full, fleshcoloured mouth is provocative in its nakedness. Even as a teenager Antonia wore black. The daughters of Mrs Swann’s friends wore Laura Ashley prints with frilled collars, smart little pumps, mohair jerseys in pastel shades, while Antonia went around like a Greek widow in black. Someone once called her that to Mrs Swann’s face – your daughter, the Greek Widow – and there in the supermarket Mrs Swann felt the hot uprush of rage all fenced around with powerlessness, so that she went home bursting with it, with a boiling anger whose urgent need for discharge seemed to threaten a public indignity of the kind Mrs Swann had not experienced since childhood. She remembers it now, the feeling that she might be about to disgrace herself, a feeling so violent, so overpowering, that it led Mrs Swann to pity herself, to pity herself profoundly. And even afterwards, when she had found Antonia in her room and unleashed herself on her daughter’s black-clad form, when she had said and done things that seemed to mirror the disgrace and even, in moments, to become it, she could not feel other than a victim, hitting out in whatever way she could at her attacker.