The Bradshaw Variations (6 page)

It is October, and the garden is gilded with yellow light. The grass is sodden in the mornings. Claudia puts the covers on the outdoor furniture. She gathers the apples where they lie rotting around the tree. Everything is poised between readiness and decay. She watches the children playing after school in the crisp late afternoon. Their bodies have lost the fluidity of summer, though the weather is fine. They move around the rectangle of lawn in their uniforms, laughing and jostling, throwing sticks for Skittle and crying out when he bounces up to catch them smartly between his jaws. Later, when they have come in and the garden is wrapped in its blue-grey pall of evening, Claudia looks through the window and sees Skittle cavorting alone in the indistinct light. He leaps in the air, his jaws snapping at invisible sticks. She watches his white twisted form, suspended. She can hear the murmur of television from the other room.

Howard gets home at half past seven. He wears an air of expectation, of excitement, though for him the day is nearing its conclusion – Howard is usually asleep by half past ten. Claudia sometimes wonders what his excitement signifies. He is like someone eagerly awaiting dessert, the main courses behind him. Sweet though they are, these are the rituals of conclusion. He discards his coat and briefcase in the hall, finds the children and roughhouses them with his big bear’s body, drinks two glasses of wine one after the other standing by the kitchen counters; after which he is red-faced, blissful-looking, rubbing his eyes with his shirt tails hanging out.

‘It’s been the loveliest weather,’ Claudia says wistfully. ‘I was thinking what a shame it is we can’t go away this weekend.’

Howard blinks. ‘What are you saying, Claude? You’re telling me something but I don’t know what it is.’

‘Just that we could have gone to Scotland, or to that place in Derbyshire your brother told us about. There hasn’t been such a lovely autumn for years.’

Howard leafs through the letters on the kitchen table, looking at them over the tops of his glasses. ‘Well,
I’m
going to Scotland,’ he says, abstractedly. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing. I’ll be back last thing Sunday.’

‘But we can’t!’

‘Why not?’

‘We can’t take the dog.’

Claudia notices the smallest hesitation before Howard replies.

‘Of course we can take the dog. We just chuck him in the back of the car with a bowl of water.’

‘We’re not
driving
all the way to Scotland, just for the weekend. We’d have to fly, or go by train.’

‘We’ll do the other one, then. Derbyshire. Where’s Derbyshire? It can’t be that bloody far away. What’s the name of this place? Let’s phone Tom and ask him. They can come too – we’ll all go together.’ Howard is now standing by the telephone with the receiver in his hand. ‘What’s his number?’

Claudia finds the number. It is Howard’s speciality – commitment. She has grown accustomed to it, going with Howard into the future like a boat breasting choppy waters, the sensation of uplift just ahead, the momentary resistance and the breaking through. She is dependent on it – she was from the start. Years ago they stood on the beach at Mothecombe, watching a family play cricket on the sand at the end of the summer’s day. Howard was enchanted by the sight, the children calling and laughing in the pink light.

‘Let’s get on with it Claude,’ he said, rubbing his hands together, sunset on his face. ‘I don’t want to fuck about. I want the lot. I want a cricket team of our own.’

They had only known each other three weeks.

Thomas and Tonie can’t come to Derbyshire. Howard tries Leo, who agrees to meet them there with Susie and the children.

‘What about those people in Bath – the Mattisons?’

‘The Morrisons,’ Claudia says.

‘We haven’t seen them for bloody years.’

He rings the Morrisons. They too agree to come to Derbyshire. It is nearly ten o’clock. Howard, bleary-eyed, eats his dinner on the phone, shovelling it up with his fork. He rings the hotel. Claudia remembers that she hasn’t put Martha to bed. She hurries upstairs. Lottie and Lewis are watching television. Martha is reading in her room. She looks very small, sitting cross-legged on the floor. Claudia wonders if her growth is being stunted. Someone told her this could happen if a child didn’t get enough sleep.

Downstairs Howard is still on the phone. He puts his hand over the receiver when he sees Claudia.

‘They don’t take dogs,’ he says.

*

Skittle gets into the bedroom and savages Claudia’s shoes, her silk dressing gown, the old Gucci handbag she had as an art student in London, before Howard took possession of her with his plans. It is this last piece of vandalism that smites her heart. It is as though there were nothing else left from that time, nothing to hold it off from extinction but the once-familiarity of that object in worn rust-coloured suede. Now it is mauled beyond recognition. She raises it above her head, about to throw it at him. He is cringing beneath the bed, a shred of silk trailing from his jaw. His crazy eyes stare at her out of the shadows. He is delinquent: he is, she sees, beyond the reach of punishment. She puts the bag in the dustbin.

All day Skittle whines and scratches at the door, begging to be let in or out. She takes him for walks, dragging him by the lead along Laurier Drive. He is maddened by the whirling piles of yellow leaves, by the springing birds, by plastic bags that occasionally swim like phantoms across the pavements in the breeze. He flinches whenever she speaks, emitting nervous squirts of urine. When he runs his body is so bowed and contorted that he goes diagonally, scuttling like a crab. He stands in the middle of the room, barking at nothing. Juliet gives Claudia the name of a pet psychiatrist.

‘He hates me,’ Claudia says. ‘Also, I think there’s something wrong with him. He isn’t like a normal dog. I see other people with their dogs. He isn’t like them.’

‘A dog is like a child,’ Juliet says. Juliet has no children.

‘I just told you, this dog isn’t even like a dog.’

‘I did wonder at the wisdom of your taking on something else, when you’ve got so much already. I didn’t like to say anything.’

‘Howard brought him home. It wasn’t up to me.’

‘Why do you always say that? He wouldn’t do it if you didn’t let him. It’s the same with your painting. It’s always other people stopping you doing it. It’s never you.’

Claudia has noticed the way a childless woman will defend the man. She will side against the mother, for her sympathies haven’t yet been transformed. Claudia remembers, when Lottie was born, the prospect of self-sacrifice coming into view like a landscape seen from an approaching train; she remembers the steady unfolding of it, a place she had never seen before in her life, and herself inescapably bound for it; and then after a while the realisation, pieced together from numerous clues, that this was where her mother had lived all along.

The pet psychiatrist phones Claudia several times a day.

‘Where is he now?’

‘Outside. In the garden.’

There is a steady thumping at the back door. It is Skittle hurling himself against it. Claudia has watched him do it, watched him take a little run and then fling himself at the wood. It startles her, for she often has the impulse to pick Skittle up and throw him, dash him against an unyielding surface. The way he looks is exactly as she had imagined it.

‘How would you describe his behaviour, Claudia?’

‘Angry. He wants to come in.’

‘Why don’t you let him in? What would happen?’

Claudia sighs. ‘He’d be just as desperate to be let out again.’

The psychiatrist suggests that she leave the door open. This improves things, though it makes the house cold. At the weekend Howard buys a catflap and fits it to the back door. The children sit there all afternoon, teaching Skittle to jump through it. He is small enough to fit, but his sense of its physical impossibility is difficult to overcome. He has proved the door is solid: how can it have changed its properties? Lewis and Martha sit one either side of the flap, passing and re-passing Skittle through the hole.

‘I should think that’s quite therapeutic,’ Claudia says to Howard.

Later she hears a shriek from downstairs.

‘Watch this,’ Lewis says calmly, when Claudia appears.

‘He did it! He did it!’ Martha cries.

They put Skittle out in the garden and close the door. Lewis kneels by the flap and then claps his hands twice. There is a pause, before Skittle comes flying through like a torpedo.

‘Extraordinary,’ Claudia says, laughing, while Skittle tears wildly around the kitchen, making mad arabesques in the air.

The feeling of letting go, of surrender: it warms her veins like a tranquiliser, spreading its numb bliss. She has blunted the sharp end of life this way. She fades out, her doubt and pain and anxiety left hollow like a casing, like a shell on a beach. She is used to it, to leaving hollowed-out things behind her. They lie scattered in her past, questions to which the answers were never found. What is the right way to live? What is the value of success? And the most important, the most unanswerable: if love is selfish, can it still be considered to be love?

VI

Leo is in the fast lane of the A23 when Susie tells him to pull over, right now. She has her hand over her mouth. In the lay-by she leans out of the car door and retches over the tarmac. Juggernauts thunder past, one after another. The Vauxhall rocks with the vibrations. In the back seat, Justin and Madeleine are silent.

‘That’s the worst,’ Susie gasps, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Her long scarlet fingernails flash against her cheek, a blood-coloured bouquet. ‘When nothing comes up.’

An uprush of air pressure slams into the side of the car and is sucked instantly back. They rock from side to side: for a few seconds they are in the lee of a monster, engulfed in the roaring, churning wheels, the crazily flapping tarpaulins.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Leo says nervously. ‘Those things come so fucking close.’

Susie flips down the passenger mirror, reapplies her lipstick. She turns around in her seat, scanning the road through the back window.

‘I’ll tell you when,’ she says.

They stop twice more before they get there. On the winding B-road Susie groans and clutches her stomach. The cows look up at them from the fields as they pass. A mile from Little Wickham there are crows hopping around a tattered carcass in the middle of the road. Leo stops, blares his horn. They are picking at the bloodied flesh and fur, unheeding. He blares again, revs the engine. He can see it was a rabbit. He can see a torn ear, a crushed fragment of skull.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ he says. He realises he is trembling. ‘Leave the bloody thing alone.’

Reluctantly they lift themselves away on their black wings and settle on the verge, their beaks engorged. Susie puts her hand on his knee. She is all right now. She keeps her hand there, firm.

‘Nearly there,’ she says.

It is a grey day, gusty, the bare trees twitching and irritable, the countryside lying in unconscious mounds of rough vegetation. Ma is on the front lawn when they pull up the drive. She is wearing a funny hat, a man’s jacket, thick socks that she’s tucked her trousers into.

‘Oh, hello!’ she says, through the car window.

She sounds surprised. Leo and Susie joke about it, the way his parents always seem surprised to see him, despite the fact the visit has been arranged: not a pleasant surprise and not a shock either, just a mild lack of expectation, like when you’ve forgotten something and it turns up again. There’s an imitation Susie does, lifting one eyebrow very slightly, widening her eyes, the hint of a query in the voice. Oh,
hello?
She gets it exactly.

His mother’s clothes say it all. She isn’t putting herself out, put it that way.

‘Leo,’ she says, when he gets out of the car. She hugs him. He can feel her gnarled vigorous body through the clothes, her eternal unstoppable sufficiency. ‘And Susie.’ Susie gets a hug too. Her high heels are sinking into the grass.

‘Get you, darling,’ Susie says, fingering the man’s jacket, the crumpled old hat. ‘Get your fashionable androgynous look.’

Ma screeches with laughter, delighted. Susie knows how to handle her, has always known. Justin and Madeleine are banging at the car windows.

‘Oh dear, shall we let them out?’ Ma says.

‘Let’s leave them there,’ Susie says. ‘I could do with a day off. We can toss them in a bag of crisps at lunchtime.’

Ma screeches again. Susie hams it up, her bad mother act, and Ma soaks up every last drop of it. She wants to be in the club, the gang.

‘Don’t!’ she says. ‘I was
forever
locking mine in the car – I’d go off and forget about them for hours!’

At home Susie does an imitation of that too.
Once I didn’t see Leo for seven years! I completely forgot about him!

‘Thomas here?’ Leo says.

‘Not yet. I can’t think where they’ve got to – they phoned hours ago to say they were leaving. And the others aren’t coming at all because Howard’s unwell. I’ve got this great big joint of beef and at the moment only us to eat it.’

It’s another thing, the way after fifteen years she doesn’t seem to know that he and Susie are vegetarians.

‘Oh well,’ he says, because she makes it sound as though it isn’t enough to have him there, as though without Howard and Thomas the day might as well be cancelled, because she has so many other things she needs to be getting on with. His father is coming out of the house, peering around like a policeman investigating a disturbance. He sees Leo and Susie, changes his expression to one of recognition. Leo wonders how long he waited inside before coming out. He imagines him pressed against the wall beside the curtains, his eyes screwed up, trying to see through the crack.

Susie is getting the children out of the car, fussing over them now, straightening their clothes. He shakes his father’s hand.

‘Nice to see you,’ his father says.

Inside the house there is the old darkness, the old smells. Flossie is in her basket. The clock in the hall ticks. The house is cold. The scarred wooden floor, the hunting prints with their unfunny antique humour, the faded William Morris wallpaper full of strange, devouring forms: it is more than familiar, it is thick with subconscious life, like a forest in a fairy tale. The house is haunted, Leo knows it is. Only once, when he was seventeen, he spent the night here alone. Something said his name, sat on the bed. He had been asleep and the feeling of a weight on the bed woke him. It made it worse, to have been asleep. It is worse to go into something unconscious. He shouted at it to go away, went all round the house turning the lights on and shouting. To shout at nothing is to break some contract with yourself, with reality. Thinking about it now, he sees that his life has been punctuated by such incidents. Reality is personal too. He’s had to break it to advance himself, to go forward. It’s the only way he can get to the place where he feels comfortable.