The Bradshaw Variations (8 page)

Tonie is here to speak at a conference. The conference is tomorrow at ten o’clock; after that she will fly home. She forgot, when she left the house this morning, that she would be returning so soon. It was the rift, the departure, that concerned her, as the hurdle concerns the jumper, not the same continuous earth that lies on the other side of it. She remembers that Alexa was wearing a red dress when she stood at the door to say goodbye. Tonie had never seen the dress before: Thomas bought it for her. It made Alexa seem unreal, like a girl in a dream. In it, she seemed to have no further need of Tonie, except to be numbered among her accomplishments. Yet the mark of possession was Thomas’s: in the red dress Alexa was hallmarked, like a silver figurine. This, it struck Tonie, was what someone looked like who was taken care of by Thomas. In a sense it was what Tonie herself ought to look like. When she looked at Alexa she was looking at a version of her relationship with Thomas, at one of several possibilities, in which she was his cherished object, decked out in a dress he had chosen himself.

There is a restaurant downstairs. Tonie prepares herself in front of the mirror, trying on a different shirt. Who is she? What is she doing here in this room, with its sinister flowers, with its white shutters the wind and darkness seem to be trying to prise open? Her own body, the unit of herself, so sealed and single: it is all she is, and yet she lives in it so little. Away from home, she is only this unit of flesh. What experience can she offer herself? What physical event will justify this form and bring it into knowledge? Alone, she eats a plate of fish and drinks a glass of cold yellow wine. The waiter is young, attentive, so formal that she becomes awkward and strange when he approaches. She has brought her notes down with her and she finds herself looking at them, looking at what she wrote down at the kitchen table last night in Montague Street, when she sat and thought of her trip, imagined the great inviting sea of the unknown and herself plunging bodily into it. Now she doesn’t know what it was she thought she would find here. She notices a stain on one of the pages: it is gravy, from last night’s chicken pie. She looks at other people talking, eating, in the fashionable room.

Upstairs, she phones Thomas. He is distant-sounding, slightly curt. He doesn’t know that there is anything in her plight he ought to be moved by. And she can never explain it to him, for as a story it revolves around the disclosure of a desire for something that has no name and is itself nameless, that she could arrive at only by a path of negatives that would somewhere along the line have to pass through Thomas himself. But he doesn’t enquire. She is on a business trip, that’s all: he used to go on them himself. Afterwards did he complain of loneliness, of disenchantment? She thinks that perhaps he did. He complained about them as the conscript complains about the discomfort of his standard-issue boots. Perhaps he didn’t tell her everything either.

She sits on the bed. She both wants and doesn’t want to go home. She remembers this feeling from childhood, when she would go to her room after some family dispute; and lying on her bed would experience the same division of desire, the same choice that now she sees was no choice at all, between returning downstairs and staying where she was. Downstairs was the ongoing story, plot-filled and relentless, of everything she knew; but in her room there was silence, daylight, an absence of structure. By stepping out of the story she had come upon the emptiness that lay all around it. It was so transparent and silent in that place: it seemed to presage the creation of something, though the moment of realisation never occurred. There was only solitude, beautiful but sterile, unpollinated. She never found anything there. In the end, she always went back.

She goes to bed and is woken all night by the knocking shutters, and by the wind moaning across the Zuider Zee.

VIII

What is art?

It is the opposite of waste, of redundancy. Thomas goes through his cupboards and finds box after box of obsolete junk. Cables, computer parts, a whole case of grey plastic cartridges still sealed in their airtight transparent wrappers. The printer they were designed to fit no longer exists, and there is no other printer compatible with them. Yet they will last forever.

It comes to him, the physical feeling of his London office, the big steel and perspex building with its wires and blinking screens and shrilling telephones, the bitter smell of plastic and electric light, the hushed grey spaces, the sealed windows muffling the world, the make-up smell of his secretary Samantha and her synthetic clothes, everyone so chemical-smelling and costumed, and the way people spoke, language itself made artificial, so that you found yourself looking at their teeth, their eyes, to remind yourself there was a human being in there. And most of all the feeling of being on board, of living in a never-resolving present, the feeling that all this artificiality could be sustained so long as it was never permitted to slip into the past. He remembers the way reality itself was made unreal. The last thing Thomas did before he left was to restructure a firm of dog food manufacturers. Three or four weeks in, someone produced a tin of dog food in a meeting. Until that moment, dog food had been theoretical. Now here it was, actual. After all that artificiality the actual had been uncovered. Thomas realised it had been there all along. Dog food had been there all along. Dogs, friendly and filthy and mortal, had been there all along.

He finds three tiny pairs of headsets, unopened, coiled in their little plastic sacks like embryos. They came with a mobile phone that has since been upgraded. The headsets don’t fit the new phone. Yet they will last forever.

On the train, Thomas used to decide various things. He decided not to let himself fall asleep. He decided not to read newspapers. He decided to keep a diary. He decided to keep a sketchbook and make portraits of the other passengers. It was forty-five minutes each way, sometimes more. That was an hour and a half that he could reclaim from the wastage of every day. He wanted to sink an anchor down into that narrow channel of time. He wanted to stop himself drifting away.

In the cupboard he finds the diary, three notebooks, the book of watermarked paper where he meant to do his drawings. The diary is completely blank. In the other one there are two pencil sketches that he doesn’t have any memory of making. For that reason they are slightly frightening. One of them is of a woman in glasses, with frazzled hair like a witch.

The image comes to him of a black dome-shaped thing made of plastic that used to sit on the desk in his office. He has no idea what it was. He looked at it every day. It had a kind of fissure in its casing, a scratch four or so inches long that travelled to the left and then straight, with a kink at the end. It seems possible he will not forget this strange and pointless object. It will survive in his mind forever, unchanging. It will, in a sense, outlive him. His recollection of the scratch is so exact that it might be a scar on his own body. Yet the woman whose face he drew, and the act of drawing it, have disappeared.

He finds a whole file full of instruction manuals for things that are broken or that he no longer owns. It is called progress, the replacing of one thing by another, the making of one thing meaningless by another. The meaningless things do not live, and nor do they die. Most of the people he knows think that progress is good.

Often, he would arrive at the station to see his train all packed and ready, the doors sealed, would see it begin to pull away from the platform without him. He has never felt more individual, more distinct than in those moments. Yet it was only that he had stopped going forward. For a second, he became the past. What was strange was that there seemed to be more possibilities there. He remembers the way he would automatically think of going to New Zealand, or South America. Never once did this idea occur to him at any other time. Only there, when he’d missed his train, the urge to take flight for distant lands, as though it were something about himself he’d dropped long ago on the platform at Waterloo and stumbled over again every once in a while.

Art, he thinks, is not progress.

IX

Howard, fallen ill, lies and looks out of the window at the grey suburban midday. It is a view of bare forked trees against a blank, light-filled sky, of the gabled upper storey of number thirty-two. He never sees the world like this, in its weekday torpor. Mornings he is gone by eight o’clock and returns twelve hours later; he is always leaving or coming back, plunging in and out like a needle through the cloth. He does not ask how the cloth weaves itself, but here it is, knitting itself out of silence, out of stasis. Howard loves it, knitting itself round him like a cocoon. In this bedroom time has a certain thickness, an opacity: over the hours it seems to form a skin, like a cooling liquid. He hears cars passing outside, sometimes voices. There is a bird that makes a sound like a squeaking bicycle wheel.
Ree-ree-ree-ree-ree
. The voices come in jigsaw pieces which he fits together to make little broken-edged sections of life. Mother and child. Man walking dog. Postman delivering outsize item next door.

Claudia visits, sitting on the far edge of the bed. She, too, seems to feel the torpor, the heaviness in the atmosphere. He expects her to be familiar with it, but apparently she is not: she appears to believe it emanates from him.

‘How are you feeling now?’ she asks, brisk and enamel-eyed, scented, fully clothed. A little impatient, he senses, as though he were a piece of machinery that has broken down on her property and that she is keen to mend and move on its way.

He folds back the rumpled covers and pats the sheets.

‘Do you want to come in?’

‘Into bed?’

He touches her wrist. She looks alarmed.

‘There’s nobody here,’ he says.

It is, he now sees, the problem with the day: it lacks the imposition of a human will. It is formless. It is a lump of clay which must be shaped by inspiration and desire. This, he recalls, is what freedom is. At forty-three freedom generally comes to him refined, in small quantities: decisions, directives, intricate opportunities for success. He has forgotten what the raw material feels like. Claudia fingers the silver pendant that hangs around her throat. He has seen it before but never noticed it, never noticed its cold compactness and the way it magnestises and draws her fingers to itself.

‘I can’t.’

‘Come on, Claude. Just for a minute.’

He has irritated her. He has made her angry. The black shapes of birds pass silently across the dun-coloured sky. Claudia lies beside him, somewhat stiffly, on the bed. She does not take off her shoes. But she rests her head in the crook of his arm so that he can stroke her hair, which is dirty-looking today and held back by numerous little silver clips. This is what amazes him, the way people give themselves, the way they create, in the emptiness of the coming moment, another instant of life. He hears it rising from the blankness of the street: the woman so patient with her child, the man whistling for his dog. He thinks how virtuous they are, how good. The winter trees make stark, cross-hatched shapes beyond the window. He doesn’t think people can ever be as good consciously as they are by instinct, on an empty street on a midweek morning in November. As his wife is, in this throwaway bit of the day, lying beside him on the bed.

‘Do you want anything?’ she says, when she is standing in the doorway again, straightening her clothes.

‘Just a little soup,’ he says weakly. ‘Nothing much.’

‘Soup,’ she says. ‘Any particular kind of soup?’

‘Whatever there is. The one you make with leeks is very nice. And perhaps a roll, just one, with some butter.’

‘Right,’ she says.

He sees her look of resignation, of momentary oppression. Perhaps when he is at work she forgets all about him. What does she think about? What is he deflecting her from, stewing here in sheets that smell of himself, in their room that is becoming steeped in his own presence? She should air it, straighten the covers and open the windows, put flowers in a vase. Instead she straightens her own clothes, and looks slightly grim around the mouth when he asks for soup. In the window of the house opposite he can see a figure behind the dark glass. He sees a pale arm, lifting and moving, lifting and moving. He sees a dim fall of hair to a white shoulder. It is a woman ironing. He can see the metallic glint of the object, the pressure and repetition of her movement. Her face is in shadow. She is so steady, so industrious. He watches her, comforted. It is true that life lays a fetter on love: this, he thinks, may be Claudia’s secret. There is virtue in industry, even as it sets its limitations on affection, even as it stints the hand of feeling. It is good that Claudia doesn’t drop everything to lie beside him all day. He remembers the way his mother used to look after him when he was ill. There were always flowers in a glass by the bed, and a tray coming up the stairs. He remembers the feeling of paralysing love, the way she seemed to want to keep him there and he half-wanted to be kept, as though she had stolen him back from the world in order to perfect her care of him.

He sleeps for a while, and when he wakes he can smell the soup from downstairs. The day is unchanged. The bird is calling at the window.
Ree-ree-ree-ree-ree
. The telephone rings and he hears Claudia speaking. She speaks for a long time. Several times she laughs. Later she brings up a tray and puts it beside him on the covers. It is a quarter past two: his mouth is dry and bitter-tasting with hunger. The soup is pale green, thick, flecked with herbs, just as he had imagined it would be.

‘Where’s yours?’ he says. ‘Aren’t you having any?’

She is moving around, picking things up, keeping out of his reach.

‘I had mine earlier downstairs. I was hoping to get into the studio this afternoon. Have you got everything you need?’

He remembers this too, the feeling of his mother’s secret life, and of himself as an interloper, eavesdropping on it; as though home were a trick, an artifice, and his illness the manifestation of his mother’s guilt. After she goes he eats the soup, imagining her sitting alone at the table downstairs, eating hers.