Rachel Cusk - The Bradshaw Variations

‘I’m not an expert,’ Lottie says. ‘I didn’t say I was.’

‘You didn’t say thank you, either.’

Lottie is silent. She looks to one side of her with downcast eyes.

‘Does anyone else at school get an allowance yet?’ Claudia asks brightly, after a pause.

‘Most people do.’

‘I shouldn’t think it’s most ,’ Claudia says. ‘I should think it’s some .’

A week later, on the first of the month, Claudia hands Lottie thirty pounds in ten-pound notes. During the week she has experienced a kind of regression in her attitude to Lottie. She wonders whether she has spent so much time trying to see what Lottie is becoming that she has failed to notice what she actually is. In the afternoons, when Lottie comes home from school, she goes straight to the kitchen and stands there eating slices of bread lathered so thickly with jam that her teeth leave an impression in it when she takes a bite. Claudia seems fated to enter the kitchen at the decisive moment of this ceremony, to see Lottie hunched over the counter, her hair hanging over her face, her mouth clamping around the red and white slab and coming away engorged. Lottie makes strange little groans as she eats. Her body in its school uniform seems afflicted and uncomfortable. As a baby Lottie seemed uncomfortable, and afflicted by her own helplessness. Yet Claudia can feel no sympathy for her now. To pity Lottie would be to pity herself.

‘Great,’ Lottie says, when Claudia gives her the money.

*

On Saturday, Lottie tells Howard and Claudia that she is spending the day in town with Justine and Emily.

‘What about lunch?’ Claudia says.

‘I don’t know. We might get something there.’

‘Your money will be gone in one day if you start spending it on eating out.’

Immediately Lottie looks evasive. She stares off to the side, at something just above the level of the floor.

‘We’re not giving you an allowance just so you can sit in McDonald’s all afternoon,’ Claudia says.

Lottie rolls her eyes. She makes a little snorting sound, like a pony. She is like one of those short, round, bad-tempered Shetlands who flare their nostrils and toss their matted waterfalls of hair. Lottie has the same spirit of animal vigour about her, the same disproportion of flesh to rationality.

‘Is it just you three girls on your own?’ Howard asks her.

‘There might be some other people.’

‘Oh, good,’ Howard says.

Lottie returns from town at half past four. She did not take her coat. Claudia found it still hanging on its peg in the hall. All afternoon she has been aware of it. Several times, walking past, she has caressed it: she has run her hand down the unresponsive fabric all the way from the shoulder to the hem. She has watched the weather out of the window. It is gusty and grey, and sometimes the wind blows the trees wildly this way and that and then for no reason stops again. Lottie’s coat hanging on its peg is like a version of Lottie herself, a discarded stage in her evolution that Claudia has been allowed to keep. She thinks that she loves this Lottie, the coat Lottie, better than the real one. The coat hangs by its hood: from a distance it looks like a little head.

Howard has spent the day making a bonfire in the garden with Lewis. Martha is upstairs with her friend Sadie. Occasionally Claudia passes the door to Martha’s room and sees the two children sitting together on the carpet surrounded by Martha’s toys. Once when she looks they have made long headdresses for themselves out of sheets, which they have secured on their heads with the braided loops that hold back Martha’s curtains. They sit cross-legged in their white veils, locked in endless low-voiced discussion, like two important delegates from distant, miniature countries. When Claudia goes downstairs she can smell the smoke from the bonfire, which has slowly penetrated the house.

Lottie is in the kitchen. Claudia comes in behind her.

‘How did it go?’ she says brightly.

Lottie looks startled.

‘It was just — normal,’ she says.

‘You forgot to take your coat. I found it hanging in the hall. I worried that you’d be cold.’

‘I wasn’t cold.’

‘You might not have felt cold,’ Claudia says. ‘But if you’re not properly dressed you’re more liable to catch things, and then everyone else in the house gets it as well.’

The kitchen is gloomy and untidy. Claudia switches the lights on. She begins putting everything away. She puts away all the pots and pans that stand on the drainer. She puts away everything lying on the counters. The aluminium pans clatter when she sets them on their shelves. She opens the cupboard doors and bangs them shut again. The glasses chatter against one another; the cups rattle in their saucers. She opens the fridge, sweeps a whole armful of things from inside, kicks it shut behind her. She stamps on the lever that opens the bin and the lid crashes like a pair of cymbals as it hits the wall behind. One after another Claudia flings in empty milk cartons, rotten bits of food, old plastic containers. Thud! thud! thud! they go, disappearing into its rustling depths. Claudia feels possessed by a mad kind of genius. She is filled with sound: she is a composer creating a crazy, dissonant symphony. She bangs the cupboard doors again. She takes out the cutlery drawer and spills its contents over the kitchen table in a bright shrieking cascade of steel. Ting! ting! ting! go the knives and forks and spoons as she drops them back in their proper compartments.

At each sound, Lottie flinches.

‘What’s that smell?’ she says finally.

Claudia stops what she is doing. She stands, alert, in the silence. A feeling of great weariness, almost of despondency, passes over her.

‘It’s a sort of burning smell,’ Lottie said.

It is the bonfire. Claudia can smell it too.

She says, ‘Daddy’s been having a bonfire out in the garden.’

Lottie’s expression brightens.

‘Really?’ she says.

The next time Claudia looks, she sees them all out in the garden in the gathering dusk. She stands at the kitchen window. Howard rakes up leaves and Lewis throws them on the fire in big armfuls. Lottie has a long stick in her hand. She is tending the smouldering heap, forcing the new leaves into its hot centre, compacting the top. With her stick she rounds up stray bits of paper and twigs and rams them back into the fire. Claudia can hear Lottie and Lewis and Howard talking. She can’t hear what they say, just the sound they make saying it. The smoke comes out in big grey rolling waves, one after another. Sometimes they roll towards the window where Claudia stands. Then, suddenly, the smoke changes direction and is drawn helplessly upwards into the sky.

*

In the evening, Howard and Claudia are going out.

Claudia stays upstairs getting ready while the children eat their supper. She puts on black trousers and a black jersey. She puts on the necklace Howard gave her. It is silver, a paper-thin silver leaf on a silver chain. She sits down in front of the mirror and draws her hair back from her face. She is surprised by how finished she looks, how completed. It is as though there is nothing more for her to do. It is as though the mirror has told her that she has come to the end of some long and complicated task, that all is done that needs to be done.

How funny it is not to want anything, not to need! She thinks of the banknotes she gave Lottie. When she imagined this money, it was as the material proof of a developmental stage, like the first spoonfuls of food she put into Lottie’s mouth as a baby. She always does these things a little too soon. She hurries her on. She has wanted to teach Lottie how to want, to need. She supposes it is her way of trying to simplify things between them, for if Lottie needs something, then Claudia has the task of providing it. Lottie would want something and she, Claudia, would be able to give it to her. That is how she has always imagined it, anyway. Lottie never asked for money. It was just that by giving her some, Claudia thought she would align Lottie with herself. They would both be facing the same way, side by side, looking out at the things they wanted. But now it seems that Claudia doesn’t want anything. She doesn’t need anything at all.