The Bradshaw Variations (4 page)

Tonie can hear her phone ringing inside the room. She rests her fingers on the door handle.

‘Oh look,’ Martin says. ‘They’ve put up your tombstone.’

She looks. There’s a new plaque fixed to the door: Dr A. Swann, Head of Department. Martin shakes his head.

‘You seem much too young for that,’ he says.

She laughs. ‘Well, I’m not.’

He looks, shakes his head again. ‘I just can’t see it,’ he says. ‘It isn’t you at all. I had you down as the faculty rebel. Obviously,’ he fixes her, microscope-eyed, ‘I was wrong.’

She smiles, unlocks the door, closes it gently behind her. The phone has stopped ringing. The room is silent. She sees the black swivel chair, the ledger diary, the stacks of files. She sees the car park with its grid of cars, three floors below. People are coming and going there, heads down, staring at the ground. The phone starts to ring again.

Martin Carson is unperceptive. This is the most rebellious thing she has ever done, by far.

III

The other Bradshaws – Thomas’s brother Howard, his wife Claudia, their three children – live a mile or so away, on Laurier Drive, in the suburb of Laurier Park. Howard is a person whose jesting nature, which seemed when he was young to connote a disregard for convention in all its forms, has suffused his adult life with an atmosphere of irony in which his more-than-average conservatism wears the vague disguise of a joke. Thomas sometimes wonders whether his belief that Howard is different from other people is nourished solely by the backgrounds against which he sees him; whether, in a different setting, he might perceive that Howard is, after all, ordinary, and not just pretending to be. The snaking suburban avenues of Laurier Park, with their electronic security gates and floodlit gravel driveways, their smart cars and suggestive topiary and strange atmosphere of cluttered desertion, are the metaphor for Howard’s placement of himself in the world. Howard and Claudia like to regale their visitors with stories of the new heights of tastelessness – the outdoor jacuzzis, the obscene statuary, the Hawaiianthemed cocktail bar that has recently been erected in next-door’s garden – to which each month their neighbourhood ascends, but Howard’s BMW stays parked on his front drive like the others. There are horse chestnut trees there, with big, rustling skirts that shed their cargo of leaves and rinds and nuts inconveniently over the tidy pavements. Occasionally a petition is circulated to have them cut down, and Howard and Claudia are outraged, genuinely so, for it is in the nature of irony to cherish something unironic at its core.

‘I
must
paint them,’ Claudia says, as though this activity, if she could ever get around to it, would guarantee once and for all their immortality.

Thomas has always regarded Howard as the most successful member of the family. At twenty-five Howard was already rich and losing his hair, two things that seemed to go together, though he has never become as rich as Thomas expected him to be, nor as bald either. It is just that Howard’s successes are more real to Thomas than his failures; whereas the opposite is true of his younger brother Leo, whose perfectly comfortable life Thomas perceives through a mist of doubt, so that nothing Leo does ever seems entirely convincing. He understands that these are prejudices and therefore not rational, but sometimes they seem to be more than that, to have come from outside of himself: to be actual forces that govern behaviour and have governed it from the start, as the key signature governs the terms of the melody. From the beginning, it seems to Thomas, Howard was set in a major key and Leo in a minor, and though their lives are their own, to Thomas they will always seem to be resolving their harmonic destiny, as he himself, he supposes, will to them.

Howard has done things over the years that Thomas cannot reconcile with his version of his character, has taken up golf, Christianity, windsurfing, men’s groups; has experienced doubt, depression, fanaticism, indifference, and whole seasons of opinion and belief; yet in all these inconsistencies he has demonstrated a fundamental consistency, has passed through discord back to harmony, to himself. Watching Howard live, Thomas has come to realise that it is impossible to fully understand another human being. But there is something else that enables him to anticipate Howard, a profounder divination that tells him what his brother is. Howard’s phases intermittently fill him, like passengers filling a train. His behaviour is descriptive: whenever he takes something up, Thomas begins to notice that other people have taken it up too. It is as though Howard is describing the world he lives in. They pass through him, fads and fashions, general beliefs, emotional trends, yet his outward shape, his form, is not altered. It is this, the form, that constitutes Thomas’s deeper knowledge of Howard. He does not have this knowledge of other people. Other people he has to learn. They are pure content, information. It is, in a way, a talent, the faculty he has in relation to Howard. He can see the stream and story of life pass through the vessel of his brother: some mysterious gift enables him to.

But sometimes, equally, it is Howard who teaches Thomas, by maintaining a relationship with reality that is more surprising, less predictable, than the life Thomas would have imagined for him. His wealth, for instance: in his early twenties, when he was still a student, Howard went to America and returned with a container-load of strange-looking bicycles, which he had bought with a whole term’s grant money and claimed he intended to sell. Thomas remembers his own consternation, his dismay, the headachey feeling it gave him to think of these burdensome, ineradicable bicycles and their shocking impoverishment of Howard, who was forced to borrow money from their father; money he repaid, with interest, before the term was out, having sold every last bicycle and taken orders for more. These days, everyone has bicycles like the ones Howard brought over: Thomas has one himself. The same is true of the skateboards and scooters that, a few years ago, Howard remortgaged the house on Laurier Drive to import. Howard owns his own company: he is successful enough by most standards. It is just that the pattern he established early on has never changed. He risks everything and he profits, but the scale has not, fundamentally, enlarged. This is Howard’s tutelary function: his enduring reality provides what Thomas thinks of as structure. The episode with the bicycles gave rise to a fantasy-Howard, a person who does not exist outside Thomas’s imagination. Thomas can see him still, an unstoppable entrepreneur rolling in wealth and excess, a man with yachts and investments and a taste for esoteric luxuries, but the real Howard isn’t like that at all.

Often, on Sundays, Thomas and Tonie find themselves on their way to Laurier Drive, for in spite of the topiary and the Union Jacks drooping on their polished flagpoles, Howard and Claudia’s domain has the magnetism of cultural centrality. Usually, in the car, Tonie complains: she would like their own house to draw and pull the world to itself, or so she thinks. But she is often uneasy and out of sorts when they have visitors. It is this, Thomas supposes, that she is complaining about. She would like to be different, while not understanding precisely what the difference is.

Today, though, she is quiet in the passenger seat. It is late September, a brilliant, brittle day. He glances at her frequently: she seems to revolve in banks of sunlight that fall across her through the windscreen. She puts on her dark glasses, stares out of the window. Since she started her new job, he has noticed that she is more self-contained. The change has revealed her, as a room is revealed by things being tidied up and put away. But her new air of completion is enigmatic in itself: now that he can see her, he finds himself wondering what she truly is.

‘All right?’ he says.

‘Ecstatic,’ she replies, huskily.

When they arrive Alexa leaps from the car and vanishes around the side of the house to the garden, from where they can hear the sound of children’s voices. Thomas and Tonie go the other way, to the front door, and ring the bell.

‘Those are nice,’ Tonie says. She touches the chipped stone urn brimming with geraniums that is standing on the doorstep in the autumn sun. She fingers their brash crimson heads. ‘Those are so typical.’

She is reflecting on Claudia, on her knack of careless homemaking that pleases Tonie in the same instant that it seems to make her mysteriously unhappy. Tonie’s methods are more purgative: she has fits of ruthless cleanliness in which the whole familiar surface of domestic life disappears, as though she were hoping to arrive at beauty by the route of annihilation. In Claudia’s house beauty is approached – no less assiduously, Thomas thinks – along the path of randomness. When Tonie comes here she wishes she could be more like Claudia, could be released from her own driving sense of order, could remember certain things and forget others, as Claudia has remembered to plant the geraniums and then forgotten them sufficiently to let them grow. Tonie fingers the geraniums as though they were things she in her madness would have been compelled to tidy away. Howard opens the door. He engulfs Tonie in his slab-like arms and his face appears over her shoulder, round and grinning like a Halloween pumpkin.

‘Come and see what we’ve got,’ he says.

He beckons them through the dark core of the house, towards the big open glass doors and the bright garden that stands beyond them. Thomas observes the sweat-stain on the back of his brother’s shirt, the redness of his balding scalp. In middle age Howard has become all surface. His emotions sweep over his large body like weather systems over a prairie. Outside, the children are running across the grass. There is a buzzing noise, incessant, like the sound of a lawnmower. As Thomas comes out, Howard’s son Lewis bursts from the greenery at the bottom of the garden, astride a tiny motorbike. He races the others up the lawn and when he reaches the end he turns and drives in a crazy circle around them, before collapsing on his side in the grass, wheels spinning, while they shriek with laughter.

Claudia is standing on the veranda, shielding her eyes from the sun.

‘Isn’t it
awful?
’ she says. ‘Howard just imported them from Japan.’

‘I’ve got five thousand of them sitting in a warehouse off the M25,’ Howard confirms, delightedly.

Thomas looks at the thing. He tries not to seem aloof, though it disgusts him, disappoints him, this latest proof of Howard’s indiscriminateness. By Christmas, a miniature electric motorbike will have made its inevitable way into the province of childhood desire. He feels, suddenly, that it is Howard’s fault, that he could stop it, if he chose to.

‘What does it run off?’

‘You charge them from a unit that feeds straight out of a domestic plug,’ Howard says. ‘They do twenty miles an hour on the flat.’

‘Can you imagine anything more repulsive?’ Claudia says. ‘The noise alone is enough to drive you out of your senses. And you won’t believe what they cost –’

‘Five hundred, online price,’ Howard says, nudging Thomas in the ribs.

‘You’d have to be
sick
,’ Claudia says. ‘Don’t you think?’

Tonie is standing with her hands on the rail, looking down at the lawn. She has put her dark glasses on again. Today she is dressed all in black, black trousers and shirt, a black leather jacket.

‘Oh, come on,’ she says, smiling. ‘It looks fun.’

Claudia draws to Tonie’s side, fingers the lapel of her jacket. She does not, Thomas thinks, like to be thought of as anti-fun.

‘Darling, you’re
très rock
today,’ she says, admiringly. ‘I felt sure you were a disapproving liberal, but now I can see how wrong I was.’

She herself wears old clogs, a poncho, flared corduroy trousers. When Howard met Claudia she was still a student at art college. It is part of the mythology of Claudia and Howard’s life that he carried her off before she could finish her degree. The myth makes it difficult to remember exactly what happened. Claudia has a painting studio at the bottom of the garden, a kind of memorial to her forsaken career. To Thomas her clothes are symbolic too, commemorative, like the uniforms veterans wear on Remembrance Day to remind people of their sacrifices.

‘I approve of everything now,’ Tonie says.

‘What a pleasing thought,’ Claudia says brightly. ‘I grow increasingly bitter. I’m turning to vinegar, like corked wine.’

‘Oh,
darling
,’ Howard says.

‘The thing is,’ she continues, ‘I just don’t want to believe people will buy them. I don’t want to believe they’re that stupid.’

Howard puts his arm around her, red-faced, smiling beatifically.

‘Let’s bloody hope they are,’ he says.

‘You see?’ Claudia says triumphantly, though it is unclear what they are meant to be seeing.

‘Well,’ Howard says reproachfully, ‘we’ve got to pay the mortgage somehow.’

‘If it were up to me,’ Claudia announces, ‘there wouldn’t
be
any mortgage.’

Howard looks bemused, as though, unlike everyone else, he has never heard Claudia say such things before. ‘Claude, it is up to you.’

Claudia sighs. ‘Why do we
need
all this? All this – establishment. Other people don’t need so much. Personally I’d be happy to make do with far less.’ Her gaze wanders over the bulky brick-coloured house, the expansive lawn, the trees in their autumn foliage, the numerous children. She appears to be deciding which parts of it she could dispense with. ‘All
I
really need is my studio. The way things are, I hardly go in there from one month to the next. I don’t have time.’

Howard looks stricken. ‘We’ll make more time,’ he says. ‘You should have all the time you need. We’ll sort it out.’

‘The problem is’, Claudia says to the others, ‘that you don’t make any money out of painting. Other people would have to make sacrifices. And they simply wouldn’t do it.’

She disappears into the house. Howard’s eyes follow her beseechingly.

‘Poor Claude,’ he says. ‘She’s too unselfish. All you women are too unselfish.’ He goes after her to the door and puts his head in. ‘Darling!’ he calls. ‘Is there a drop of wine we could offer our guests? And is there any of that avocado gunk left from last night?’