The Bradshaw Variations (24 page)

‘You don’t want to be saddled at your age with a girl who’s a nervous wreck,’ she said.

Yes, it was Emily’s grief, her extraordinary distress, that was Thomas’s formative experience, far more than the handful of times they had shared a bed. They talked and laughed while they made love: who was to know that these were the fatal moments? Ever since, Thomas has recognised that he could be undone by an unhappy woman. And yet thinking about it now, he wonders whether the unhappiness is precisely what he has looked for; whether it is there that his interest picks up and his feelings are engaged. Emily unhappy seemed far more real to him than Emily happy. Watching her, he felt in himself the male inexorability he had always witnessed in his father, lashing his mother into storms of emotion. For years he had allied himself with his mother, defended her, suffered on her behalf. But looking at Emily he realised that he, too, was a man.

It is half past eight in the morning. Breakfast is all laid out on the table. He looks up from his book: Alexa is nowhere to be seen.

He climbs the stairs, calling her. There is no reply. When he pushes open the door he sees that the curtains are still closed. She is lying in her bed.

‘What’s the matter?’ he says. ‘Are you ill?’

She looks at him. She nods her head.

‘All right, then,’ he says. ‘Stay where you are. You can have the day off school today. And no, I won’t forget to ring them and tell them.’

He walks around the room, picking things up off the floor. When he looks at her again he sees that she has gone to sleep.

At half past ten, Tonie calls.

‘Did you remember that I’m going to Janine’s tonight? I forgot to remind you this morning.’

‘Oh,’ he says. He is disappointed. ‘No, I didn’t remember.’

‘Do you mind?’

‘No.’

‘You sound like you mind,’ she says.

He is silent. ‘No, I was just thinking maybe I’d see if I could get a babysitter and come too.’

‘Really?’ she says. She appears to find this proposal somewhat outlandish.

‘Actually,’ he says, ‘on second thoughts I’d better not. Alexa’s ill.’

He realises that he has completely forgotten about Alexa. She has been so silent. He has forgotten that she is not at school.

‘What’s wrong with her?’ Tonie says, with the hard sound in her voice that she uses to lever him out of the way and get at certain information.

‘I don’t know. She’s asleep. She’s been asleep all morning.’

‘Oh. Oh well. She’s probably just tired.’

‘Probably.’

‘But yes, I suppose we’d better not risk a babysitter.’

He can tell she is relieved.

When he goes upstairs, Alexa is still asleep. He sits on the landing outside her room with his book. He feels lonely. He wants her to wake up. He thinks that this is so that he can comfort her, but in fact it is the other way around. He wants her to console him for his conversation with Tonie. He wouldn’t actually tell her about the conversation; he wouldn’t mention Tonie at all. He would merely soothe himself with her acceptance of him. She is so innocent, so small; she trusts him so completely, more than he trusts himself. It is this that makes him feel lonely. When she is present, he realises how little he can ask of her. In the end, there can be no equality between them. He has to conceal himself so that her feelings for him can be revealed. He can never ask her for them directly. Yet he knows, at least, that they are there.

At midday he goes in. She is still asleep. He smiles, as though at her eccentricity. He remembers coming home once from work and Tonie telling him that Alexa had slept all day. She was ill, and had slept off her illness, a miracle of self-correction. In fact it is quite pleasant, he thinks, to have her here and not-here, correcting herself, making herself well. He wonders whether Tonie enjoyed such days, whether these were part of her secret; the life he doesn’t seem to have heard enough about, now that he is living it himself. He goes downstairs and eats a sandwich. At two o’clock he goes back up. This time he is surprised to find her still asleep. He sits beside her on the bed. He lays his hand across her forehead. Instantly she screams, a horrible, maniacal scream. For a second he is more irritated than shocked. He thinks she must be pretending, screaming like that just to frighten him. He thinks he has brought it on himself. He has spent his day revering her for her sweetness and sympathy, and she has been lying up here plotting to upset him.

‘What is it?’ he says. ‘Tell me what the matter is.’

Her eyes are still closed. She does not reply. He cannot get it out of his head that she is deceiving him. He is aware of a great deal of heat in the room, and slowly he realises that its source is Alexa. He touches her arms, her chest, her neck. She is burning. He goes and gets a thermometer.

‘Try to sit up,’ he says. ‘I need to take your temperature.’

He lifts her up by her arms and her head lolls forward. He sees that there is vomit on her pillow. He removes the pillow and lays her down again. He gets a wet cloth and wipes the traces of vomit from around her mouth. He sits beside her on the bed. He wonders what to do. After a while he rises and goes downstairs, but when he gets there he can’t remember what his intention was. He goes back up. She is lying in just the same place. A strand of her long hair is webbed across her face. He tries to lift her up again by her arms but she is so limp that he can’t hold her. He puts her down, and then scoops her up from underneath. Her head rolls on his arm and she opens her eyes briefly. The whites are completely yellow. He is frightened. All at once, she has become a stranger.

Downstairs he staggers around, holding her, looking for his keys. Her head bangs against his shoulder and she screams again. He edges her through the front door. Outside the day is grey and warm. He has got her out. It seemed important, to get her out, but now that he has done it he isn’t sure it was right. Surely she should be indoors, in bed? She moans and puts her hands over her eyes, like a prophetess. He struggles with her to the car and lays her clumsily across the back seat. He spends a long time trying to secure her with the seat belt. The car is untidy and dirty-smelling. It doesn’t seem right that she should be there. Finally he gets in and starts the engine. He was planning on driving her to the doctor’s surgery, but when he gets there he can’t find anywhere to park, so he goes on, the car strangely gliding, the people on the pavements looking alienating and unreal. Alexa moans and cries on the back seat. He talks to her as he drives, staring straight ahead.

‘It’s all right, my love,’ he says. ‘It’s all right, my pet.’

He drives to the hospital. When he opens the back door of the car, he sees that Alexa has vomited again. She is lying sprawled across the seat. He wants to cry out, to surrender her. He imagines how angry Tonie would be, if she saw what he had done. He is certain she would have done something else, would have called on some knowledge he doesn’t possess. He picks Alexa up and carries her into Casualty. Her head is jolting up and down on his arm. There is vomit on her face, in her hair. He goes to the woman, sitting behind her glass screen.

‘I think she’s got a bit of a temperature,’ he says.

He expects her to castigate him and send him home, but instead she picks up the telephone beside her and dials a number, her eyes holding his. Her eyes are brown. She inclines her head towards him, never looking away. She speaks, and then she holds her hand over the receiver.

‘The doctor’s coming,’ she says.

*

Some hours pass, five o’clock, six o’clock, seven. Alexa has meningitis. They have put her in a room on her own. Thomas sits beside her, while the doctors come and go, while the nurses put a drip in her arm and secure it with a white bandage. At six o’clock he goes out into the car park and calls Tonie.

He has been told that Alexa might die. He should have brought her in earlier. They don’t say it, but he knows. They give him information, printed brochures, like brochures for an evening class, or a holiday. He reads them, reads about his situation, its special features and perils. It is stupid to be given these brochures after the event. The brochures all agree that early detection, though difficult, is paramount. They disclose his failure, his failure in this difficult test. Yet he cannot see precisely where the difficulty lay. There was never any possibility of his bringing Alexa here, this morning, when she was asleep. To have passed this test he would have to have been a different person.

‘Is there anyone you can call?’ the nurse asks him.

She is suspicious of him, he can tell. She is wondering where Alexa’s mother is.

‘I can’t get through at the moment,’ he says.

Apparently there is nothing anyone can do. There is only waiting. Thomas, in the car park, rings Tonie again. There is a boulder of guilt in his chest. His fingers shake as he presses the numbers. He expects the terror of her voice at any moment. But as the hours pass he grows accustomed to her silence, her absence. His guilt transfers itself, becomes anger, is transformed yet again into peace, the pure peace of responsibility. He remembers waiting in this hospital for Alexa to be born. His concern was all for Tonie then, for her pain. Now, in a sense, the pain is his. He is being broken, broken at last. He does not believe that Alexa will die. But for her to live he has to be broken, as Tonie was once broken. He has to offer it up, finally: the way he was, the way he will never again be.

Towards midnight the door to the little white room opens. It is Olga.

‘Hello, Olga,’ Thomas says. He is only moderately surprised. He has forgotten that he is not in the kitchen at home.

‘I am here,’ Olga says.

‘Yes,’ Thomas says. ‘Thank you for coming.’

She sits down beside him, her hands clasped in her lap.

‘This is a terrible thing,’ she says.

Thomas nods. The doctor has told him there is a possibility that Alexa’s hearing will be damaged. And a silence has descended on him, thick and blank, like snow. He sits shaking in his chair, enveloped in suffocating silence. There is no thread of sound to pull him out. He finds himself thinking about ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’. He visualises the words on the page, like black little armies marching across the whiteness. The book is still in his pocket.

‘I forgot’, Thomas says, ‘that you work here.’

‘Yes,’ Olga says. ‘Tonight, for no reason, they put me on this ward. It was lucky.’

The silence comes again, so heavy and blank.

‘I was reading a book earlier today,’ Thomas says, ‘about a man who kills his wife for playing the piano.’

His voice is scratchy and faint. He can barely force it out of his throat. Alexa’s eyes are open. She is looking at him out of her ghastly face, as though she is listening. But he can see she doesn’t recognise him.

‘The man blames it all on the music,’ he continues. ‘He says that under the influence of music, people feel things that are not their true feelings. They think they understand something when in fact they don’t understand it at all. It’s all a sort of illusion, like love.’

Olga stares at him.

‘That is a bad book,’ she says finally.

‘Yes,’ he says. If he hadn’t been reading it, he might have taken more notice of Alexa. He might have been aware that he was being tested. Suddenly he can’t bear to have the book in his pocket any longer. He takes it out and throws it into the bin. Then he sits down again.

‘You should read happy books,’ says Olga. ‘Why make life more difficult?’

‘I don’t know,’ he says.

What is art? It is, perhaps, a distillation of the difficulty, like the hospital brochure – a kind of knowledge after the fact, a description of what cannot be known until it is lived, by which time it is too late to know it. When he plays the piano he is not living. He is describing what it lies beyond his own capacity to redeem.

‘I don’t know why,’ he says. ‘I’ve never really thought about it. Do you read happy books?’

It is midnight. There is total blackness at the windows. He sees his own reflection in the glass. It is fractured, splintered, a composition of a million separate lines.

‘I read magazines,’ Olga says.

XXXI

The Bradshaws are going away. Ma and Dads are taking the dog.

It is always an ordeal, going on their summer holiday: it is the same every year. All the Bradshaws’ problems seem to rise up and confront them, almost to surround them, like a menacing crowd they have to pass through before they can be on their way. There is a strange feeling of the dust sheets being taken off the furniture, when of course it should be the other way around. As if life itself – or their living of it – were a set of blinkers, a blind: that is how it always feels, in the days before they leave for France or Spain, with the three children stuffed into the back seat and the bags crammed so tightly in the boot that the laden car seems about to explode for either fury or joy.

Yes, it is an ordeal: not just the cleaning and packing, the organising and arranging, but also the unpicking of a kind of estrangement that seems to have knitted itself among them over the course of the year. There is a stiffness at the start of their preparations, a constriction to their relationships. Usually, by the time they leave, it has gone: by the time Howard and Claudia have argued about the state of the house and the children, about the fact that there is less money and more things that need to be done with it than they’d thought, about the fact that Howard has worked too much and Claudia too little – let alone started on the grievances, the real injustices that have remained outstanding not just for a week or month but for years, some dating back to the time before the children were born, even to the very first evening Howard and Claudia spent together almost twenty years earlier. Though they don’t always get to that. Those are in a sense the leap years of their marriage, the times when, mysteriously gifted with an extra reach into the past, they can, as they pack, quarrel over the fact that Howard spent their first important hours in The Freemason’s Arms in Camberwell talking about how much he loved Angelina Croft, who had recently abandoned him. Some years he flatly denies it. Others he claims that this was a tactic by which he hoped to demonstrate his sincerity, for Claudia’s benefit. One, awful year he was suddenly unrepentant. So what? Who cared what he’d said? Why was Claudia always trying to get her claws into everything?