The Bradshaw Variations (9 page)

X

The house is empty. Olga moves through the rooms, looking at things. She is back early today, with a headache that sends big shivers all through her body. They let her go home. All the way on the bus the headache beat her, like a stick beating a drum. And then the driver shouted at her because she pressed the button too late, and he put the brakes on hard so that she was thrown against the rail. It hurt her: she has a red welt on her arm. Why did he do that to her? If she ever meets him again she will ask him. She has no friends here, no family, no language to express herself in. Why was it her he chose to hurt?

She stands in the room with the velvet sofa, where she is never invited, where they sit in the evenings and talk. There are chairs, a leather one and another one with an old-fashioned flowery cover. There is a table all piled up with newspapers and magazines and two dirty glasses. There is a piano, old, brown-coloured. The curtains in this room are green. She likes the material, raw silk, and she likes the gold mirror above the fireplace and the things that stand on the mantelpiece, a little gold clock with tiny engraved pillars like a temple, a paperweight with a blood-coloured peony engulfed in the glass, a sky-blue china vase with a narrow neck. There are little white figures engraved on its sides. They are dressed in tunic-like clothes, like gods and goddesses. They are dancing and talking and feasting all the way around. She looks at the books, leaning higgledy-piggledy on the shelves. They are dusty, as the piano is. But the chairs and the sofa look friendly, like people talking, and the curtains make her think of the ball gowns actresses wear in old films. It is a good room, a warm room, but they never ask her to come in and sit down.

She goes upstairs to their bedroom, dusty too, clothes everywhere, the bed unmade. One night she heard them shouting in here. She does not like people who shout. But in the morning they were normal again, as though nothing had happened. The bed is like a rat’s nest with the covers all tangled. It is strange, that two people would agree to leave it in that state. It is mysterious. She herself would refuse to get into that bed. She doesn’t understand why they don’t make their room nice. It is disgusting, to live like this. She opens a drawer, glances in. Men’s underclothes, neatly folded. She is surprised. He is so untidy, so lazy, and yet in his own drawer where no one can see, everything is in order. She has come home at three or four in the afternoon and found him lying on the sofa, reading a book, while downstairs the kitchen is full of terrible sights and smells, flies buzzing around the dirty plates, the unswept floor crunching underfoot, pans with burnt food at the bottom left sitting there for days. She would never have guessed that he folded his underpants.

In her own room everything is clean and orderly. The white winter sun is coming through the window. There is a bluebottle swimming noisily at the glass. She swats it dead with a rolled-up magazine. The headache has left a hollow behind it. She touches the red mark on her arm with her fingertips. She feels lonely. She sits on her bed and dials her mother’s number.

XI

The piano teacher lives with his boyfriend in a basement flat on the other side of town. Ignatius is a pianist too: his grand is wedged into the cramped bedroom while Benjamin’s upright occupies the living area, where brown damp stains spot the low, sagging ceiling, and the window looks out onto a small concrete courtyard and a flight of mildewed steps up to the street.

Even before he arrives, Thomas feels the atmosphere begin to act on his attitude to culture like astringent on a raw wound: the rows of run-down houses, the pavements piled with broken furniture and bloated sacks of rubbish, the rusted railings and bright venomous green of Benjamin’s stairway, even the chipped front door, low like the door to a dungeon – it is all bracing, corrective, so that when the door opens and Benjamin appears, Thomas feels a confusing, lover-like rush of sensation towards him. Benjamin is not especially beautiful: it is just that in the squalor of his own hallway, his clean humanity is momentarily overwhelming. Thomas is slightly ashamed of the pleasure it gives him to look at Benjamin’s milk-coloured skin, so restful to the eyes; at his hair, which is black and glossy, and at his pink mouth, with its choirboy’s expression of faint astonishment. His body suggests itself through his unexceptional cardigan and corduroys like a statue through a dust sheet. Lately Thomas has come to realise, as they face each other in the doorway, that Benjamin is pleased to see him too. A feeling of warmth, almost of excitement, is shed in the space between their irreconcilable bodies.

Thomas offers his hand – ‘Hello again’ – and after a brief hesitation Benjamin takes it, so that he wonders whether, in fact, Benjamin finds something awkward in the male handshake, something quaintly heterosexual. It occurs to him that gay men perhaps do not shake hands, that they hug or kiss each other’s cheeks like women do. He wonders whether, next time, he will offer to hug Benjamin.

‘Nice to see you,’ Benjamin says, pressing his fingers and then releasing them.

They enter the hall, where torn pieces of brown vinyl skid underfoot and a single electric bulb hangs from a length of dirty flex. Benjamin has to duck his head to avoid hitting it. He rounds the corner, ducks again at the door to the lavishly untidy sitting room. Thomas follows him in, so closely that the pile of Benjamin’s fawn cardigan is only inches from his eyes, for there is no possibility of distance in the cramped, warren-like flat and as a consequence the human form seems more significant, more textured, denser with association. Along with its squalor, it is this that causes Thomas to identify Benjamin’s flat with youth. When he comes here he is reminded of a closer and more sensually vivid experience of the body that he did not realise, until now, he had forsaken. Sitting with Benjamin at the piano, their knees nearly touching, their hands crossing and recrossing as they explore the keys, Thomas is more physically proximate than he has been for years to anyone but his wife and child. Benjamin’s chair is a wooden schoolroom chair that creaks whenever he leans forward to turn the pages or to demonstrate something on the keys. His limbs graze Thomas’s field of vision, the legs and arms so rod-like and mathematical on their big knuckle-like hinges, the expert, spacious hands with their broad, clean nails, the firm male wrists and the vigorous brown hair of his forearm that is disclosed when he reaches up for the metronome: this is intimacy, this nearness that is always renewing itself through movement. It is hard to impress someone who is sitting so close. It has taken Thomas time to get used to the fact that it is through his hands and not his face that the impression must be produced.

Benjamin observes him unblinking behind his glasses.

‘How has it been this week?’

‘Good, I think. Fine.’

The first time, Thomas was flustered by this question, which seemed to press at some unexposed part of himself – to be somehow clinical, like a doctor’s examination of hidden regions of the body. He sought to cover himself up; he tried to re-establish in words the sense of distance he could not accomplish physically. But now he is used to the exposure. He looks forward to the acknowledgement of it, this patch cleared of shame where now, week by week, he cultivates himself.

‘You’ve kept on with the two-part invention.’

‘Actually,’ Thomas says nonchalantly, ‘I’ve started looking at the
adagio
.’

Benjamin arches his narrow brows. ‘The Beethoven?’

Thomas nods. He can see that Benjamin is surprised, a surprise that is faintly sceptical, so that Thomas’s heart is made to thud against his breastbone. He knows what is coming next. The fact is that unlike nearly every other aspect of his adult life, there is no getting around a claim to have learnt to play the
adagio.
It cannot be explained, or deferred, or talked away. He has to show that he can do it.

‘Do you have the music with you?’

‘Yes.’

‘All right, then.’

Benjamin rises, picks up his chair. He wades through the sheaves of manuscript paper that litter the filthy carpet and establishes himself three or four feet away, hands clasped attentively in his lap. His scepticism has evaporated: his brow is once more unclouded and eager. This is, after all, no place for scepticism. What would be the point of it? Thomas, when he watches Alexa carry her plate precariously to the sink, or observes Tonie reversing the car into a parking space, feels scepticism, doubt; he feels the world teetering just beyond his reach, like some toppling object he wants to grasp firmly and set squarely on its feet again. But Benjamin, apparently, will feel no such unease watching Thomas. Does he think it isn’t important, how Thomas plays the
adagio?
Has he decided that since Thomas’s performance represents no practical gain or loss to himself he may as well be indifferent to it? Benjamin inclines his head towards the piano. It is a courtly gesture: Thomas imagines himself inclining his head to Alexa, to Tonie, as they teeter on the brink of disaster. It signifies that Benjamin has left the field, the keyboard that sometimes seems to grin like a set of teeth and sometimes to glimmer like a far-off frozen landscape, a place as beautiful as it is inhuman, whose silence is occasionally interrupted by the sounds of struggle before swallowing them up again.

Benjamin clears his throat: ‘When you’re ready.’

The truth is that for the past week Thomas has worked on the
adagio
like a solitary prisoner tunnelling under the fortress walls. He is slightly ashamed of it, his secret determination, the rigidity of his methods, the insistent, repetitive labour he has put into it, for this is how he has always got the things he wanted in life, and how he has got the better of what he didn’t want too. It has felt like cheating, just as it did when he studied all night to pass an exam, or got through the tedium of meetings by knowing more than anyone else, or planned down to the last detail his strategy for attracting the attention of a woman he liked. It has always seemed that work occupied the place where something more natural ought to have been, something instinctive and innate, something he associates with honesty, though he doesn’t know exactly why. Sitting at the piano, he has felt sure that there is a more honest way of learning the
adagio
than to play each bar until its sanity has been broken down and become a rattling box of madness, but he has been unable to think of what it might be. He has felt a fleeting, bitter discouragement, even as his fingers were fumbling with and then tentatively mastering the music, for his decision to learn an instrument contains a nameless hope that seems to be being confounded before his eyes. He imagined, secretly, a kind of abandon awaiting him somewhere within its discipline; imagined himself freed, untethered by it to wander in great white fields of self-expression. But all that has happened is that ever-larger distances of method and minutiae have been disclosed that have turned the screws of his personality even tighter.

‘As I say, I’ve barely even scratched the surface,’ he says to Benjamin. ‘It’s hard to find the time. You know how it is.’

Benjamin inclines his head again, smiling.

‘Well, here goes,’ Thomas says.

For an instant his mind is filled with the white light of performance, the strange featureless lucidity left behind by the knowledge that he mustn’t think, that his brain must be vacated, that instead he must act; and the next time he checks, he sees that he is already halfway down the first page, and the thinking makes him falter so he quickly vacates his brain again and returns to his hands. There is an awful passage that is like inching along a narrow ledge, and then a period when he seems to be safe in miles of firm level ground; then suddenly it is a cataract, a rushing to the edge, to disaster, and over he goes, swept down through the complexity and out the other side, where there is stillness and daylight and the untidy room with Benjamin sitting in his chair.

‘Bravo!’ Benjamin says, very flushed and astonished-looking.

The bedroom door flies open. It is Ignatius, as ruddy and squat and prodigiously hairy as Benjamin is slender and marmoreal. He stands in the doorway, applauding and exclaiming loudly, in his plush American that makes everything sound pleasanter and less sincere than usual. Then he advances into the room, cheerful and cocky-looking in his tight T-shirt, chest hair foaming at his throat, trousers straining around his haunches, a little reddish-blond tuft of beard sprouting from his chin. Benjamin is looking slightly pinched around the mouth.

‘That
adagio
is just divine – I had no
idea
you’d got so important! I had my ear to the door, thinking who can that possibly be in there?’

‘I can’t play the other movements,’ Thomas says apologetically, though his face is red with pleasure. Ignatius is a real pianist, not a teacher but a performer, whose name can be seen on flyers for lunchtime recitals at the Wigmore Hall. He is ashamed of his disloyalty to Benjamin: vaguely he understands that it is their intimacy that causes him to feel ashamed. Usually, only Tonie can constrain him in this way, web him finely with the knowledge of herself, so that he feels clumsy, tearing the gossamer threads.

‘Well, it’s hardly surprising,’ Benjamin says. His voice is a little terse. ‘It’s only been a few months.’

Thomas turns the pages with their ferocious black peaks and chasms of semiquavers, their turbulent, chord-filled bass clefs. He doesn’t fully understand why he can’t play them. He has learned the
adagio
, yet the
allegro molto e con brio
and the
grave
remain as encrypted to his eyes as ancient Greek. Ignatius looks over his shoulder at the music.

‘Lord, who can?’ he says, sotto voce, as though this heresy were in danger of being overheard by the Bengali family who live upstairs and complain constantly to the Environmental Health department about the intolerable levels of noise in the basement. ‘I say go for the big tunes, the big sensations, the highs. I just live for it – I live for that
adagio
! I’m all over gooseflesh.’ He holds out his thick forearm. ‘Am I flushing?’ he asks Benjamin.