Rachel Cusk - The Bradshaw Variations

‘Dieter,’ Lawrence says, ‘come on, I must introduce you to our hostess. The fabulous Janine.’

Tonie is left alone again. Then she spends a long time talking to a junior lecturer whose name she can’t remember. The sky is black and smoky and starless overhead, and the commotion on the terrace remains formless and indistinct. She can’t seem to make a connection anywhere. She can’t seem to see people’s faces, to understand their motives, to penetrate their reality. She sees her boss Christopher and for a while she watches him, watches the way he talks and listens and laughs, watches his Adam’s apple moving in his narrow throat. He is not questioning the reality of Janine’s party. He is absolutely concrete, just as Lawrence Metcalf is concrete. She realises that most of the people here are men. In her life before, she was almost always in the company of women and children; she remembers the feeling of perennial afternoon and of something growing, growing and growing unimpeded, her unopposed sense of self expanding into empty space. She did not resent men, in those days. She forgot, quite simply, that they existed. It was as though she had become a child again herself, her knowledge of the male obliterated and replaced by a perennial female afternoon. When Thomas came home in the evenings, he seemed to have risen straight out of the swamp of creation, a recent invention, or else an obsolete one. It was his masculinity she could never remember. He seemed to stand at the door with it in his hands, an implement whose uses she couldn’t quite determine.

But then, slowly, over the years, she came to crave something else. She began to remember how variegated life used to be, how full of contrast: it would come over her suddenly, the realisation that existence was not single-stranded, univalent, but dual. Each thing had its necessary opposite — this is what she had forgotten, in the torpor of unending afternoon. She had forgotten that she would die. And suddenly she craved it, her opposite, masculinity. She craved it not of Thomas nor of any other man, but of herself. She wanted her own duality. She did not want to grow and grow, a branching tree of femininity: she wanted her own conflict of female and male, her own synthesis.

But now, this evening, she wonders whether she has failed to find what she wanted. And the world of men, perhaps, will not satisfy her after all. They, too, lack the knowledge of contrast; they too have lapsed away into a single-stranded existence, in which the feminine has been utterly forgotten. Did she come all this way merely to bump up against their stiffness and self-importance, their barren fantasies? It is passion she wants, the passion of synthesis. But she isn’t going to find it here.

She notices that Christopher has gone. It is the behaviour of a professional: she, too, should go, and get home while it is still early. Except that when she thinks about it, she realises that she doesn’t want to be at home.

She feels a hand on her arm and she turns. It is the small man, Lawrence’s friend. Though now that he isn’t standing next to Lawrence, she sees that he isn’t small after all.

‘We were interrupted,’ he says. ‘I was sorry.’

‘The fabulous Janine,’ Tonie says.

‘The perfectly nice Janine,’ he says.

Tonie laughs. He presses his fingers lightly on her sleeve.

‘Would you like me to take you somewhere else?’ he says.

*

He is German, not Swedish, though he has lived in Stockholm all his life. He is a doctor. He is here on a three-month secondment to a London hospital. At dinner he takes off his glasses and folds them into his pocket.

‘Tell me about your home,’ he says.

She tells him about Thomas and Alexa, explains the events of the past year, going over its conflicts and difficulties, touching even on the green shoot of feeling that has struggled up through it all, her own desire to experience life, to live fully in her own body. She cannot believe she has told him so much, so quickly; and just as she thinks it, she sees him close his eyes. She laughs, troubled.

‘I’m boring you,’ she says.

He shakes his head slowly. He smiles. He doesn’t open his eyes.

‘I just want to hear you speak,’ he says. ‘It’s better with my eyes shut.’

And in fact it is what she needs, though it feels a little strange; this witnessing of her voice, which leaves her body innocent and unimplicated. He is older than her, perhaps fifty. She watches his face while she talks. It is a small, strong, highly modelled face, with narrow cheeks and a prominent brow and mouth, like a face from profoundest antiquity. It is not a face she has any previous knowledge of. Yet she seems to recognise it.

When she has finished he opens his eyes again. She is intensely moved by their warm brown colour.

‘I want attention,’ she says. ‘I don’t know why.’

‘That is the tragedy of most people,’ he says.

‘What about you? Is it your tragedy?’

‘I had a good mother.’

She smiles. ‘Does it have to be the mother?’

‘No. But mine was what was available.’

‘What about your father?’

‘My father was what you call standard issue. Cold and critical.’

She thinks about Thomas, who has given his attention to Alexa. In a way, then, he has liberated Tonie. But here she is, giving her attention to another man.

‘There isn’t enough attention to go around,’ she says, laughing.

She sees that she will go home after all, that she will abandon her quest for attention, for passion. This man is too old, too unfamiliar. He is too formed in himself: she can’t see what his intentions are.

‘That sounds like the end of the conversation,’ he says softly.

‘This is a tragedy, remember,’ she says.

He reaches across the table and grasps her fingers.

Outside in the street Tonie waits beside him while he looks for a taxi to take her to the station. In the darkness the traffic seems full of abstract patterns and strange revolving lights. She has surrendered to his authority: she is not required to make sense of what she sees or does. Yet she knows that this authority is ephemeral, in so far as it relates to him. Rather, it is a place in herself, a kind of hollow. A complete stranger can come and fit the shape of his authority into that hollow. He can cause her to succumb, to obey him. In a few minutes she will be alone in a taxi, on her way to the station. It is fortunate that there are such things as taxis and trains and places she needs to be at particular times. Otherwise he could make her do anything, anything at all.

But there are no taxis. Exasperated, he turns and rests his hands on her shoulders. She is beginning to understand that this man has power. When he touches her she is paralysed by his authority. It is fortunate that there are practicalities to bear her away.

‘We’re not going to find one here,’ he says. ‘But I live very close. We can get my car and I’ll drive you.’

‘That seems ridiculous,’ Tonie says. ‘I’ll wait. Something will come along.’

‘Please,’ he says. ‘It would make me unhappy to leave you here.’

They walk away from the main road, into the deserted quiet of residential streets. Tonie begins to feel uneasy, moving away from the general into the sordidness of the specific. She imagines a spartan rented flat, strewn with the sad detritus of solitary living. She imagines herself confronted not by power but by failure. In fact he lives in a house, not a flat. It would have shamed her, somehow, to go up to a flat. But the door is there on the street, correct.

‘Come in,’ he says. ‘I need to find my car keys.’

Inside it is home-like, beautiful. There are books and paintings. He goes around switching on the lamps.