Rachel Cusk - The Bradshaw Variations

Howard comes in. He puts his face into the crook of her neck where she sprayed her perfume.

‘Do you think Lottie enjoyed herself today?’ Claudia asks him.

He raises his head and they look at themselves in the mirror.

‘I don’t suppose it matters one way or the other, does it?’ he says.

Downstairs, the two younger children are watching television. Claudia goes into the kitchen to see if Lottie is there, and then stands at the bottom of the stairs and calls her to come down. Lottie is babysitting. Claudia sits at the kitchen table and writes down the telephone number and address of the place they are going. She hears someone coming down the stairs.

‘I’m in here!’ she calls.

After a while, she goes out and looks in the hall. Then she looks in the sitting room. Lottie is sitting there with Lewis and Martha. The television feels her motionless face with its blue lights. Claudia sees she is wearing a new skirt.

‘Lottie!’ she says softly. ‘Can you just come out for a minute? I want to give you some numbers and things.’

She turns and goes back to the kitchen. There is a pause, and then Lottie comes in.

‘We’re only going to the Carters’,’ Claudia says. The Carters live on the other side of Laurier Drive.

She gives Lottie her instructions. Claudia can hear herself speaking, but she can barely concentrate on what she is saying. She tries to keep her eyes on Lottie’s face but they keep straying — magnetised, astonished — down to her skirt.

‘Did you get that today?’ she says finally.

Lottie looks down at herself, as though to check they are talking about the same thing.

‘Yes,’ she says.

‘Where did you get it?’

‘A shop.’

It is a pink skirt with a ruffle around the hem. It comes down to Lottie’s knees. The pink is a candyfloss pink. The ruffle has been badly stitched. It is both too big for Lottie and too small, sagging around the hips and straining at the stomach. The material is so cheap that Claudia can see Lottie’s underwear through it. It is a child’s skirt, the kind of skirt Claudia might have bought a version of for Martha, but on Lottie it is without doubt the least flattering item of clothing Claudia has ever seen. She wears it with her usual hooded sweatshirt.

‘It’s lovely,’ Claudia says. ‘Well done.’

Lottie seems pleased. ‘I thought you’d like it,’ she says.

*

Later, one Saturday, Claudia has to go into town. She leaves Howard and the children and goes on her own. The streets are thick with people. They roam the pavements like unquiet souls, like hundreds of homeless spirits come to find all the things they have lost. They carry bags, boxes, great plastic sacks wrapped around bulky objects. Some of them can barely hold the quantity of things they have bought. She sees a man carrying a pair of garden shears, a man carrying a plastic lounger, a woman with a child’s bicycle in a giant plastic bag. Its handlebars stick out, each one tied with a tinselly tassel that trembles like a little girl’s ponytails as the woman walks along.

The day is bright and windy. Overhead the sky streams blue. Claudia picks up speed. She strides along the littered pavement, glancing in the windows, glancing at the faces as they pass her. She begins to forget herself, to feel a kind of exhilaration. It is good, after all, to be away from what is yours: from home, where everything either belongs to you or speaks of you or reflects you, until it becomes a kind of consuming sickness, the need to exist, to dominate. Yet here she is, free! Why does she care what people buy, where they go, how they spend their time? What does it have to do with her? She isn’t responsible for them — they are free, like her. It is responsibility that sets its pins and screws in your nature, that warps and gnarls you and makes you ugly to yourself. She strides along, the wind whipping in her hair. Ahead of her she sees a group of teenaged girls coming out of a shop. They come up the pavement, all clutching each other and laughing. They are like a laughing, many-tentacled creature, their arms and their legs and their smiles all jumbled together. They have bags and bangles and earrings, and hair that the wind blows all around them in ribbons, so that you can’t see which hair is connected to which head. One of them catches her attention. She looks at this girl for a long time before realising that it is Lottie.

There is a woman Thomas sees in the school playground. She is often early, like him. She sits on a bench at the edge of the tarmac, reading a book.

He doesn’t really know why he has noticed her, but now that it’s happened he finds himself forming an ethereal kind of relationship with her. When he arrives he searches the playground for her brown-haired form, bent over its book. It comforts him to see her, as it comforts him to see lights on at the windows of strangers’ houses, knowing someone is there. Once he notices her in town, crossing the road towards him. She is with another woman, talking, and when she happens to glance his way he smiles. Momentarily her eyes widen, confused, and then she is gone. Occasionally she isn’t there in the playground and he feels irritable. He imagines himself leaving this place, taking action: he has the urge to do something that will rinse this passivity from his brain. He feels formless, like a lump of dough in which anyone who chooses can leave an impression. But then, the next day, there she is again, and the dent she has created is filled in.

One afternoon Alexa comes out clutching the hand of another girl. She is the brown-haired woman’s daughter. Thomas knows: he has seen them together.

‘This is my friend Clara,’ she says.

‘Hello, Clara.’ He smiles. He thinks of Clara Schumann. He wants to ask the child whether she is named after her. He considers how he could put the question. ‘That’s a lovely name,’ he says.

Suddenly the woman is there. Close up she is smaller than he expected. Everything about her is brown, her large eyes, her coat, the hair that falls in flossy-seeming wisps over her shoulders. He is embarrassed. He realises that he has carried this woman’s image around with him, as people used to carry around little painted miniatures. He feels as though he has stolen something from her without her knowing.

‘I was just saying what a lovely name your daughter has.’

She smiles, slightly surprised. ‘Thank you.’

‘I don’t think we’ve met before.’

She cocks her brown head, quizzical. ‘Haven’t we? I do know your — is she your wife?’

‘Yes. Yes, she is.’

‘I was thinking the other day that I hadn’t seen her for a while.’

He is already used to this discourse of the playground, with its strange elisions and old-world delicacies, its sudden, startling thrusts of frankness. This is not the first time he has had to explain Tonie’s disappearance to an imperative female audience. At least now he doesn’t mistake their curiosity for friendliness towards himself.

‘She’s working full-time now,’ he says.

She nods philosophically. ‘I thought it might be that,’ she says, as though it might equally well have been something else, death perhaps, or imprisonment.

‘Yes, they offered her a promotion and she just couldn’t turn it down.’

‘That’s wonderful,’ the woman says. She does, genuinely, seem to find it wonderful. She is smiling, her cheeks lifted, the skin crinkling beneath her large chocolate-coloured eyes. He notices that her lips have little fluting curves in the corners, like quavers.

‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ he says.

There is a silence. Thomas wants to go away. He wants to go home and play Bach. He is not enjoying this conversation after all.