Rachel Cusk - The Bradshaw Variations

Ma sits in a chair at the table, yawning. Howard’s mother goes in for dramatic displays of exhaustion whenever she visits. There she sits, with her grey frizzy hair and her drooping face, releasing larger and larger yawns until it seems that she might deflate entirely. Often she goes to sleep in her chair, a faint snore whistling in her filigree elderly nose. It is strange: in her own house she is alert and beady-eyed, moving briskly around her chilly domain. It is as though she cannot tolerate the warmer climate of Howard and Claudia’s world, the humidity of its passions and its tolerance, its lush atmosphere of emotion. Out of her element, she grows soporific; she is plunged into the torpor of deracination.

Skittle is scratching at the door with his hard little claws. Now and then he lets out a high, piercing yelp.

‘He’s forgotten that he’s still got to reverse it out of the garage,’ Dads remarks. ‘It would have been more sensible to get the car out first, then attach the roof rack.’

‘I suppose I really ought to help.’ Ma comes to her senses and looks around blankly. ‘Isn’t there something I can do to help?’

Claudia, cleaning inside the fridge, withdraws for a second and shouts:

‘Skittle! Quiet!’

Skittle hesitates. A look of torment passes across his bulging yellow eyes. The catflap is broken: the door is no longer permeable. His troubled narrow face and asymmetric ears tremble. His hindquarters writhe. His small sausage-shaped body is beset by the strange contortions whose cause the Bradshaws have been unable to fathom.

‘Yes, what ’s that awful noise?’ says Ma. ‘I hope we aren’t going to have our hands full with you this week.’

The dog flings himself once more against the door and rebounds sprawling on the tiled floor, where he scrabbles frantically to his feet, emitting nervous little squirts of golden urine. This is the first time they have left Skittle. Ma and Dads are taking him home with them to Little Wickham. Sometimes Claudia perceives that the spirit of delinquency has entered their house in the body of this animal. It has come as it were by the back door, on four legs.

‘Do you know,’ yawns Ma, ‘I don’t think I even know where it is you’re going.’

‘Oh, it’s just France,’ Claudia says. She can hear Howard calling her from outside. ‘The usual thing. Sorry, do you think you could let the dog out?’

Yes, it has got in, disaffection, discontent — she doesn’t really know what to call it. She knows only that she has always made great efforts to ward it off: with the birth of each child, the passing of each year, the passing, even, of every night she spends with Howard — she has stayed vigilant through it all, through the turning of one day to another, has adhered to her belief, which is in the importance of wanting what you have. It is this belief that makes her life real to her: more than that, it is, in a mysterious sense, what gives it its worth.

‘Oh!’ Ma flings back her head rhapsodically, as though Claudia has said they are going to the South Pacific. ‘France! I had no idea! Did you know they were going to France?’ she enquires of her husband.

‘I don’t recall their making a particular secret of it,’ Dads replies.

‘I would so love to go to France!’ she says disconsolately, so that Claudia feels they are directly preventing her from doing so, by the fact of going there themselves.

‘Why don’t you go, then?’ she says from inside the fridge. She has been up since six o’clock and has not yet started on the upstairs rooms. ‘It’s not very far. It’s not as though it’s Timbuktu.’

Howard’s faint, infuriating shouts of, ‘Claude!’ are like a pair of spurs applied to her sides as she works. It was Howard who brought Skittle home in the first place. Skittle was his idea. That is the trouble: she has not found a way to want him herself. If she had only concentrated, taken the time — if she had only remembered the point, the central tenet of her belief, which was the avoidance of not wanting what you had!

‘Your father-in-law would sooner go to Timbuktu than cross the Channel,’ Ma says. Her expression is morose.

Dads, smiling menacingly, continues his scrutiny of Howard from the window.

‘Why should I go and spend my money there?’ he says presently. ‘ They don’t come here .’

‘I don’t think you can say they don’t come here! That’s an utter generalisation!’

‘It doesn’t matter what you call it.’ Dads continues to smile. ‘It’s a fact, that’s all.’

Yes, it is a terrible thing, not to want what you have. Claudia would suffer — has, she felt, suffered — every abasement to avoid it. One after another she takes things out of the fridge. Inside, a mythic struggle has apparently taken place. The collapsed, decomposing forms of old vegetables and waxy remains of butter and bacon and hard rinds of cheese like pieces of dead sin, seem to Claudia to be a kind of representation, a portrait, of the passage of time. With what brutality these things have been made to surrender their shape and essence — how coldly and mechanically they have been broken down, curdled, liquidised!

‘You say it’s a fact —’ Ma blinks. ‘But where did you actually get it from? You’re always saying things are facts, but I sometimes think you’re a little guilty of confusing a fact with an opinion.’

‘That’s an illogical statement,’ Dads replies. Behind him Skittle is still scratching at the door, then crouching and shrinking in an attitude of persecution. ‘A fact and an opinion are not mutually contradictory. At least, not in the minds of most of us. You might find them so because you aren’t observant. You don’t notice things.’

Claudia, rising to her feet, sees her father-in-law, gilded in the light of the bay window. His bank of white hair is as smooth as a snowdrift, and he wears a spotted cravat tucked into the neck of his shirt. Sometimes Claudia is unable to believe that Howard is the offspring of this man. He is so opaque to her, and Howard so transparent. Yet when they are together, it is Howard who doesn’t entirely make sense. He seems less real, more self-constructed. She finds herself beginning to doubt him, as though his father’s presence proves that Howard is in some way artificial.

‘I suppose I’d better go and see what Howard wants,’ she says.

She opens the door and Skittle bolts out of the kitchen. He shoots into the hall and goes careering off down the corridor, banging crazily against the skirting boards and stumbling every now and then over his own frantic little legs. Claudia goes out after him.

‘Lottie!’ she shouts at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Lottie! Lewis! Martha!’

Only Martha replies, a faint squeak in the distances of the house. Claudia goes out of the front door and round to the side, where Howard is standing in the open mouth of the garage doing something to the roof rack with a screwdriver clenched between his teeth. His balding head is dark red and streaked with perspiration. Skittle runs in neurotic circles around his feet.

‘Your father thinks you won’t be able to get the car out of the garage,’ Claudia says.

‘Let him watch,’ says Howard gamely, around the screwdriver.

‘I suppose there’s no real reason to put it on in here, though, is there?’ Claudia persists. ‘You might just as well do it outside, like you usually do.’

Howard does not reply. His head grows redder. He tightens the straps of the roof rack so vigorously that the thick muscled flesh of his arms shakes and the car rocks from side to side.

‘Is there?’ Claudia says.

Finally Howard takes the screwdriver out of his mouth.