The Bradshaw Variations (3 page)

There was a conversation in the kitchen, late at night. Thomas’s eyes were watering. He said he had hay fever. Every few minutes he would produce a handkerchief and sneeze into it, and Tonie couldn’t keep her fingers still. Sitting at the table she shredded stray bits of paper, orange peel, pieces of wax from the candle on the table, prising off the rivulets that had run down its sides. They looked so soft, so liquid, but they came away as stiff as branches, beaded with hard drops. She and Thomas talked about their life the way they might have talked about a film they had just seen, or a book they’d both read. They analysed it, their situation; they discussed it, and by discussing it seemed to emerge from it and set off somewhere, the two of them heading out over dark waters in the vessel of their companionship. It was as though all this time they’d been acting, playing parts, and now could finally be themselves again. In this atmosphere careers seemed trivial, interchangeable, to be picked up and put down again at will. Tonie snapped the petrified branches of wax into smaller and smaller pieces: they lay on the table like a heap of little bones. Every time she looked at Thomas he had water running from the corners of his eyes, like a saint in a religious painting. She remembers noticing that he was talking about his job in the past tense. He got a bottle of whisky out of the cupboard and poured an enormous measure for each of them. He said,

‘I seem to have experienced a revelation.’

But it is true that Thomas has never been quite that sure again, that he became more doubtful as Tonie’s promotion became more of a certainty, that even now he appears to be going through a process, an adjustment, as though life has simply hardened around him again in its new forms and the revelation that set it in motion is nowhere to be found. It has no concrete existence, this revelation. It has no reality. It merely changed, for an instant, reality’s properties, as the flame changed the candle and sent it running over the edge of itself, running and running into new paths as though it sought to be free of what it was, of what it became once more as soon as it reached the air and stiffened in its tracks.

*

On the train, she looks at men. Some of them are whole-some-looking, attractive, but most of them aren’t. She sits opposite a large, sandy-coloured man with thick white freckled arms protruding from the sleeves of his T-shirt. His hair is flattened in places and shock-straight in others, like a patch of long grass an animal has lain down in. He is fat, thighs melting over the serge seat, stomach lying in pleats over his trousers, white fingers as thick as sausages. It is eight o’clock in the morning. He has tiny speakers in his ears. He sits opposite her and eats an Aero. He stands a can of Coke on the table between them and cracks it open, his finger squeezed through the metal ring.

Compared with him Tonie is disciplined, almost professionally physical. She has entered the phase of atemporality that lies between childbearing and visible decay. And yet she feels taut with expectation, as though now that it has finished its biological work the real life of her body is about to begin. In three months’ time she will turn forty, but she was more frightened of getting older when she was younger, when she was thirty-five and seemed all husk, Alexa at three or four the eager unripe kernel, shedding Tonie by degrees. But now it is Alexa who grows older: Tonie stays the same. And she roams around this sameness, excited and anxious, as though there is something in it she fears she won’t find.

It is raining when she gets off the train. She takes the bus the rest of the way, pressed up against the other passengers, the windows blank with condensation. The wet smells of skin and hair and cosmetics and shoe leather make a pattern in the silence, an extension into non-language, as though everyone here is trying to describe themselves in a way that words have never accounted for and never will. The bus sways. A grey view of wet pavements and shopfronts flows and stops and flows again past the fogged-up windows. The university buildings – low, concrete, municipal-looking – make their sluggish approach through the middle distance. It is surprising, how many people are picking up their bags and coats and umbrellas, preparing to get off. It’s like religion, people rising out of their anonymity, thronging and moving, all in the name of higher education. She sees Janine, shuffling in the crowd towards the doors.

‘Hey,’ Tonie says.

Janine makes a face, strangulation. ‘I’m starting to feel antipathy towards certain social groups,’ she says when she’s close enough. ‘It’s the weak I can’t stand. Old people, mothers, children in prams.’

Tonie laughs. They get off, go together over the road and through the big glass doors.

‘You want coffee?’ Janine hesitates by the entrance to the staff cafeteria and they go in, join the queue. She scans the room obliquely, out of the sides of her fronded eyes. She puts a warning hand on Tonie’s arm. ‘Martin Carson at three o’clock,’ she says.

Tonie turns, sees Martin hunched at one of the far-off Formica tables, spectacled and waistcoated like a character out of
The Wind in the Willows
. He has a slim volume open in front of him, on which his eyes are fixed. His eyebrows are raised. He wears an expression of faint surprise.

‘He’s
reading
,’ Janine hisses.

‘Hey Martin, this is, like, the twenty-first century.’

Janine guffaws, bats her eyelashes at the boy behind the serving hatch, orders black no sugar. ‘I’ve realised that I actually find the sight of a man reading effeminate,’ she says to Tonie. ‘Do you know what I mean?’

Janine looks breathless, blowsy: she looks as though she’s been out until dawn, and then rushed straight from the party here. She’s wearing old-fashioned film-star clothes, a mauve chiffon dress and high-heeled silver sandals with pointed toes. Her long brown fraying hair looks windblown. She is big-boned and bosomy, frail around the wrists and ankles, the skin of her face and clavicle riven with friendly creases. She is motherly, in a way: Tonie can imagine a male desire that takes this form. Though in fact she has only one child, like Tonie, whom she brings up alone. They sit at a table with their cups.

‘God, I feel like shit,’ she says, half-closing her eyes. The lids are bruised with make-up. She opens them again. ‘Greg and I had a fight last night.’

‘What about?’

She swats the air, shakes her head.

‘I don’t know what exactly. We were just – fighting.’

Tonie wonders how this occurs: Janine’s small flat, her daughter there, two adults trying to kindle something in the ashes of everything that has been, and either failing or succeeding in full view of it all. In certain lights she has considered Janine’s life and envied it, envied its open-endedness, its lack of structure. She imagines possibilities for Janine that she cannot imagine for herself: the possibility of changing, moving, experiencing the unknown.

‘Francesca was at the Bastard’s,’ Janine says, reading her thoughts. ‘Greg came over to spend the night.’

‘Is that how it works? She goes and he comes.’

Janine nods. ‘Right,’ she says. ‘Like a French farce.’

‘I imagine it less – scheduled.’

‘Darling,’ Janine says jadedly, ‘it’s a bloody rota. There’s Greg’s three from marriage one at the weekends, one from marriage two twice a month, a stepchild who has to fit in somewhere, a dog that needs walking, a cat that has to go to the vet. I’m off-peak nights only.’

‘And you spent it fighting. Your night.’

Janine yawns, stretches her mottled arms, shows a crumpled glimpse of speckled armpit. Tonie feels it again, the mother, the taxed body, lapsing into imperfection.

‘Well, you’re sort of asking for it, aren’t you?’ Janine says. ‘You get home, stash the child, clean up, light the candles, shave your legs, open the wine – you’re really asking for your poor plans to be undone. Though in fact, that part was fine. It was later.’ She yawns again. ‘Three o’clock in the morning, I wake up and he’s standing there by the bed.’

‘Getting in?’

‘Getting out. Apparently I said something in my sleep.’

‘What sort of thing?’

‘Apparently I said –’ Janine laughs ‘–
Roger
.’

Tonie snorts, slaps the table top.

‘So he puts all his clothes back on and he storms out of the room. I thought he’d gone home, and I was so sleepy I thought, you know, fine. I didn’t care. I just wanted to go back to sleep. Has that ever happened to you?’

Tonie half-assents, silently.

‘I think this is the real disenchantment of later life,’ Janine says, pushing away her coffee cup. ‘The inability to care. Having cared so much.’

Tonie shudders. ‘Stop it.’

‘Anyway, after a while I hear noises and I realise he’s still here. So I drag myself out of bed and I go into the kitchen and there he is, sitting at the table with all the lights on and his laptop out. Working.’

They laugh: the apparent ridiculousness of male behaviour.

‘How are you, anyway?’ Janine says. She puts her spoon in the sugar bowl, takes it out and carefully licks it.

‘All right.’

Tonie doesn’t want to explain: language takes her further away from it, the mystery of her expectation. She remembers travelling somewhere with Thomas once, driving through miles and miles of empty wilderness, the map open on her knees; she remembers the way it looked on the page, the road threading through the emptiness, specifying itself while everything else remained unknown and untouched. They would have to stop, get out, walk. To know what was there they would have to enter it physically.

‘I’m just – here,’ she says, meaning this place, this concrete building on the roadside.

‘Is it what you wanted?’ Janine says, bright, matter-of-fact, as though they were discussing a present Tonie had received, both knowing that at their age there was no point masking your disappointment.

‘I don’t
not
want it. It depends. It depends how it works out.’

She can tell Janine doesn’t understand: in Janine’s eyes Tonie has done something irrational, has strayed from their particular female church with its ceaseless interpolations of the personal and the practical, its reverence for emotion, its believers-only humour where the punchline is always that you get away with whatever you can. Janine would not understand Tonie’s desire for the harsh, the literal, the coldly imposing. She would not understand her decision to set down the sack of emotion.

‘I’d miss the teaching,’ is all she says, looking over Tonie’s shoulder.

She is not the first person to say this to Tonie: here, teaching is equivalent to emotion. The women Tonie knows at home say they would miss the children, in exactly the same way.

‘You can’t teach if you’re sick of books,’ Tonie says softly.

She sees it in Janine’s eyes, a flash of fear, a spark of genuine teacher’s disapproval. There’s a second of hesitation, then Janine laughs. She has decided that Tonie is being iconoclastic.

‘Books make you sick,’ she agrees. ‘Literature. A virus.’ She screws up her eyes, looks at Tonie through the lashes. ‘Though spreadsheets can’t be all that interesting.’

Tonie shrugs. She isn’t going to defend herself.

‘I hope it works out,’ Janine says, all at once slightly formal, as though Tonie is going away somewhere and never coming back. Tonie looks up. Martin Carson is standing by their table.

‘Oops –’ Janine looks at her watch ‘– I’ve got to go and teach Hart Crane.’

‘Really?’ he says, significantly, as though Hart Crane were an opinion, not a poet. He turns to Tonie, bores into her through his thick pebbly lenses. ‘How are
you?
’ he says.

‘Okay,’ she says. She looks at her watch too. ‘Late.’

‘I like what you’ve done with your hair,’ Martin says. He has a transatlantic accent, difficult to place. It makes everything he says sound ironic. Tonie has seen him lash out at his students, has seen him mortify big ropey-limbed boys in baseball caps, silent overweight girls with round cheeks encrusted with make-up and acne. He strikes at them with this ironic-sounding drawl: he makes them seem unfortunate and stupid.

‘Thanks.’

‘I’ll walk with you,’ he says.

Janine rolls her eyes, waves her hand, makes a run for it in her silver shoes.

‘I have the feeling I interrupted something important there,’ Martin says, with professorial satisfaction. ‘I was watching your face. You looked – wistful. Sort of sad, but thoughtful.’

He does an imitation of it, there in the crowded corridor. He rests his fingers under his chin and gazes into the middle distance.

‘Thanks,’ she says again.

They go left and right and left along the grey-walled passages with their littered noticeboards and chipped paint, and Martin sticks to her as they push through the field of bodies, saying, ‘Hello,’ and, ‘How are
you?
’ to those students who raise their eyes to him. Instantly they look troubled, slightly guilty, as though their individuality was something they were meant to be concealing. She sees no blaze of youth in these faces, these bodies: they have bad skin, piercings, stiff, artificial-looking hair. They look pensive, irresolute, like people who have got off a train in the wrong town. They look like people to whom nothing has ever been explained.

‘Hello,
Jamie
,’ Martin says in the lift, to a chalk-white boy with a petrified fan of hair like a cockatoo’s. ‘I’m glad that you found the time to come
in
today. Really, I’m glad.’

They get out, leave Jamie gaping and solitary in the steel cubicle, pass through the double doors to their offices.

‘We should have coffee some time,’ Martin says, leaning against the door frame where Tonie turns off.

Tonie wants to be in her office, tucked up alone in the grey rectangle with its view of the car park, but instead she says: ‘Do you think they’re enjoying themselves?’

Martin looks nonplussed. ‘Who?’

‘The students. Do you think they’re having a good time?’

Martin looks at the floor, focuses hard, as though he were being asked to guess at the feelings of a domestic pet.

‘You’re meaning in the mythological sense, right? Are they self-consciously inhabiting the myth of their own life? Does it mean to them what it meant to you? Right?’ He adjusts his glasses, rubs his pale chin. ‘The answer’s no.’