Rachel Cusk - The Bradshaw Variations

‘Oh well,’ he says.

At last there is a commotion at the door; the others come in, Susie smelling of cigarettes, Thomas and Tonie close behind with the breath of the world on them, of blessed modernity. They look young and clean and slim. They look eminently, relievingly competent.

‘Sorry,’ Thomas says. He puts his arms around Leo, pats his back. ‘We had to take a detour. We got here as quickly as we could.’

‘I would have had to have eaten cow,’ Leo says. Now that they are here, he can acknowledge how miserable he feels.

‘We need a drink,’ Thomas says. ‘Dads, we could all do with a drink, don’t you think?’

Madeleine looks up, startled.

‘Don’t give Mummy anything to drink,’ she says. ‘She had too much to drink last night. She was sick in the car.’

Susie rolls her eyes. She’s wearing a lot of make-up and her skin is deathly-looking, grey. She has lipstick on her teeth. Her dress is all creased down the front. Leo feels guilty. He should have let her stay at home, let her sleep it off. He worries that he doesn’t look after her properly. He worries that he’s going to wear her out.

‘Mummy had a tummy bug,’ he says sternly, to Madeleine.

Madeleine creases her forehead, perplexed. ‘No she didn’t. And she was smoking just now. I saw her in the garden.’

‘Isn’t she sweet?’ Susie says, through her teeth. ‘Isn’t she everything you’d want in a daughter?’ She catches hold of Alexa, kisses the top of her shining head. ‘Now this is a nice, discreet child. This child is house-trained.’

Tonie is in the doorway. Leo sees her, sees her watching everything. She looks like she is watching a play.

‘Come outside,’ he says in a low voice to Madeleine.

She opens her mouth in protest, but she doesn’t say anything, just gets up and walks sullenly ahead of him, out into the garden. He lectures her there on the grass, in the windy grey day. When they go back in the others are sitting down, talking, drinking watery gin-and-tonics. Madeleine glances meaningfully at Susie, glass in hand, but Leo has silenced her. She goes and sits on the windowsill and stares out until Ma calls them for lunch.

Susie drinks a second gin-and-tonic, and then wine, and by three o’clock she is flushed, blowsy, her red hair cascading wildly over her shoulders. The children have left the table. Leo can hear them calling and laughing on the lawn.

‘How’s the new job?’ he asks Tonie.

She smiles mysteriously, distantly. She nods.

‘Yeah, it’s good.’

‘And the — what’s it called? — the sabbatical. How’s that going?’ Susie says, to Thomas.

There is, Leo thinks, a hierarchy, an order to these conversations, and he and Susie are at the bottom of it. It is understood that they will ask questions, will find out about the others, as they might find out about somewhere interesting they were visiting, like Paris. He is the youngest, five years younger than Thomas, seven younger than Howard. He is also the biggest, the tallest, taller even than Howard, though he doesn’t feel it, not in this house. Howard used to make him sit under table at mealtimes, when their parents were out. He kicked him if he tried to come out. He used to give him his food on the floor, like a dog.

‘I’m learning to play the piano,’ Thomas says.

‘Are you?’ Susie says, perplexedly. ‘What — professionally?’

Susie wouldn’t understand about playing the piano. She doesn’t understand any middle-class hobby. She’s always worked, looked after other people, even as a child she worked, cooking and taking care of the house. Her mother was a cleaning lady. She couldn’t read or write. Susie couldn’t either until she was fourteen and someone at school noticed it.

‘Not exactly,’ Thomas says, laughing.

Leo wants to shield her, to defend her. He wants to hit and hit until she is safe. He loves Thomas, but with a passive love, a background love. It is something he never looks at straight on. He is used to seeing it there out of the corner of his eye. He didn’t choose it, yet it’s always been there. He doesn’t really know what it is.

‘You can’t spend a whole year playing the piano,’ he says. He sounds more indignant than he wants to. It’s always the same, the difficulty of being himself with these people, his family, the difficulty of locating his own authenticity. He says things he doesn’t feel, and what he feels most keenly he doesn’t say at all.

Thomas looks surprised. ‘Why not?’

‘It’s — it’s a waste, isn’t it?’

‘ I don’t think so,’ Thomas says. ‘Anyway, it might be more than a year.’

‘You want to be careful,’ Dads says. ‘If you stay out too long, they might not take you back. Things move on, you know. Your experience becomes obsolete.’

‘I don’t want to go back,’ Thomas says. ‘I like being at home.’

Dads chuckles mirthlessly. ‘That may be so,’ he says, ‘but no matter how much you like it the question has to be, is it sustainable?’

Leo hears it, that tone, the way it goes over everything and mechanically levels it, like a tank. It is benign, ruthless, unvarying. He has never heard his father raise his voice. There has been no need to raise it: it is in the levelling persistence that the violence is accomplished. His voice has talked constantly in Leo’s head about the world and its ways since he can remember.

Thomas laughs too, slightly combative, shrugs his shoulders. ‘Ask Tonie. Ask Tonie whether it’s sustainable.’

‘I’ve always tended to the view’, Dads continues, ‘that work is life for a man, as children are for a woman.’

A ridge of silence which they all go over together, bump.

‘But work wasn’t life for me,’ Thomas says carefully. ‘As children aren’t all of life for Tonie.’

Suddenly there is something new, an atmosphere. Leo feels it, a shift far down at the bottom of things, like a rumbling of plates on the ocean bed. He feels upheaval, change, far down below.

‘Hey,’ Tonie says, in her low, husky voice that always makes the hairs rise on the back of Leo’s neck. ‘Hey, let’s change the subject.’

She puts her hand with its single silver band over Thomas’s. Leo thinks there is something unreassuring about Tonie’s ring. Susie wears a big emerald in a gold claw on that finger.

‘Yes, for heaven’s sake, do let’s,’ exclaims Ma. ‘You’re all sitting round with faces like a wet weekend.’

As though if it had been left up to her, life would have been different, would have been all frivolity.

Later, when it’s time to go, Leo is searching around the house for the children and in his father’s study finds a book of crossword puzzles on the desk, all completed and dated in his father’s neat fountain-pen writing. He has to help Susie across the lawn. He holds her firmly by the elbow, but even so she staggers when her heels sink into the turf, and one of her shoes comes off. Ma is weeding the flowerbeds, kneeling on a mat she has laid in the earth. She looks up at them. Sometimes there is something so vague about her pale blue eyes that Leo wants to cry. She makes his existence seem more random than he can bear. When he was a child, she used to go around freely telling people that Leo was a mistake, until he was old enough to ask her to stop.

‘Oh, are you going?’ she says. ‘I feel I’ve hardly seen you.’

‘Oh well,’ he says. It is all he can say, all he’s been able to say today.

In the car on the way home, he tells Susie about the crossword puzzles.

‘Well, he’s got to fill his time somehow, hasn’t he?’ she says sleepily.

She’s right, of course, but all the same it has upset him. He can’t quite explain it but he doesn’t have to, because Susie is now snoring lightly, slumped into the seat beside him. There’s nothing particularly wrong with a crossword puzzle. It’s just that it doesn’t go anywhere. It is rigid within itself, but it has no force of extension. It is trivial. The flat motorway landscape is radial, infinite, extending and extending itself into nothingness. A kind of hollowness opens out in Leo’s chest, a feeling of weightlessness.