Rachel Cusk - The Bradshaw Variations

‘It’s just how I decided to do it, Claude,’ he says reproachfully.

Claudia folds her arms and faces away from him, towards the dappled spectacle of Laurier Drive. She notices that number twenty-two have put a pair of white plaster unicorns on their pillared porch.

‘I don’t see why I should be the one having to manage your parents, on top of everything else,’ she observes.

‘You’re very good,’ says Howard.

‘It’s horrible, the way they’re at each other’s throats. And the children just sit in their rooms like ministers of the doge.’

‘I’ll speak to them,’ says Howard. ‘Send them to me.’

‘I’m a sort of slave ,’ says Claudia disgustedly. Every year it is the same. ‘There I am, cleaning on my hands and knees, with your mother thinking I’m the idle rich because I’m going camping for two weeks in the Auvergne, when the only thing I’m looking forward to is getting away from the dog!’ Really, it makes her want to cry. ‘And to think I could be in my — in my …’

Howard has already abandoned the roof rack. Never has Claudia’s mention of her studio failed to summon his immediate attention. Yet all at once she understands that this attention is a pallid substitute for the satisfaction she might have got from actually painting something there. It was once a derelict shed, full of spiders and evilly rusted old tools. When they arrived in Laurier Drive, fourteen years ago, with Lottie a babe in arms and Claudia already pregnant again, she set eyes on the tumbledown place at the bottom of the garden and saw in it the reflection of a part of herself. It seemed to stand poised between existence and annihilation, just as she in that moment felt herself to hover, a dissolving image, at the very brink of identity. In its abandonment it had become theoretical, like the mysterious region of herself that life could seem to find no use for, the series of urges to which she gave the name of creativity. And the work was done, the heat and light installed, the walls replastered, the roof repaired. The fading image was brought back into focus, hauled back from the edge of dissolution. But Claudia’s baby miscarried. After all, the structure is powerless to hold it, the mystery of creation. Claudia willed the baby not to come out, but though her body housed it, it seemed she could not dictate its comings and goings. It had an ultimate freedom.

And in much the same way her studio has stood at the bottom of the garden, year after year, completed. It no longer bears any relationship to her theoretical urges. Though she hasn’t told anyone of it, they too have slipped away.

‘Poor Claude,’ he says, gripping the tops of her arms and looking beseechingly at her with his small round eyes. ‘Poor thing. Poor Claude.’ He waits for a few moments, searching her face, then he says: ‘Do you think you could just help me with something? There’s a thing with the strap that it takes two to do. I tried to do it earlier, but I couldn’t seem to find you. It’ll only take a minute, I promise.’

On her way back through the house she passes the kitchen door with Skittle at her heels, and hears her parents-in-law’s excited voices.

‘That’s simply not true!’ Ma shrieks.

‘So you say.’

‘But it’s not!’

‘So you say. So you say.’

Claudia puts her hands over her ears. His voice is so stiff and repetitive. It sweeps hers out of the way, like a stiff broom sweeping random brittle fallen leaves out of its path. Upstairs, the children are sitting in Lottie’s room beside their suitcases in pensive attitudes. Lewis has headphones on. Only Martha looks up when Claudia comes in. She has noticed before how they stay upstairs when Ma and Dads come. It is the coldness that drives them up here, the coldness of these people with their snowy hair and eyes like chips of ice. The sight of them makes her pity her husband. She feels she is looking down a strange tunnel of time towards Howard and his brothers, is seeing the whole arc and motion of their lives, their struggle to migrate to where it is warm.

‘Are you all right?’ Martha asks.

Martha is only six, and knows better than the others what her mother wants. Lewis, the headphones clamped around his ears, is making big eyes at Claudia and dramatically semaphoring. Finally he takes the headphones off.

‘Look!’ he shouts, pointing at the floor behind her. ‘Skittle’s being sick!’

They all look at Skittle, who with trembling haunches is disgorging a stiff pile of vomit on to the carpet.

‘That’s it!’ cries Claudia tearfully. ‘That’s it! I’ve had enough! Your father can clear it up! He was the one who wanted a dog in the first place! I never did — never! And who’s done everything? Where was he, when the work had to be done? Who’s fed him and taken him for walks, taken him out in wind and rain because there was nobody else here, not a soul, and he wouldn’t stop scratching at the bloody door —’

‘ Mum ,’ Lottie shudders. ‘Look! He’s eating it.’

It is true. Quivering all over as though in an ecstacy of perversion, Skittle bends above the steaming pile, his jaws moving wolfishly. They all watch, fascinated, as every trace of the vomit disappears back down the dog’s throat.

Lottie screams. Lewis rolls around on the bed in disgust. Martha says:

‘Well, at least now you don’t have to clean it up.’

With trembling legs, Claudia stands in the doorway.

‘Bring your cases down, all of you,’ she says in a shrivelled whisper. ‘We’re leaving.’

The car is still in the garage when they get outside with their bags. Howard has half-filled the boot. Luggage bulges between the straps of the roof rack.

‘You’ll never get it out,’ Claudia says, with bleak finality. ‘We’re going to miss the boat.’

Howard comes out into the sunlight and stands beside her with narrowed eyes, measuring up the car and the doorway it has to reverse through.

‘I think it’ll go,’ he says.

‘Never,’ says Claudia.

‘If everyone gets in it will.’

Claudia sees her parents-in-law come out of the house. Dads is walking ahead along the path, and Ma is coming like a fury behind him. While he seems to plant each step with agonising precision and care, she appears to fly, her skirts billowing out after her, her arm curiously upraised, as though she were giving the signal to advance. It takes Claudia a moment to realise what it is she is witnessing. She sees Ma gaining ground on the path, sees Dads walking on, unaware even as her raised arm comes down and lands a blow on the top of his head. He sinks a little at the knees, his expression momentarily shattered by surprise. Then he walks on.

‘Everyone in!’ Claudia shouts, startled, so that the children run to Howard, who is once more in the garage. They open the back doors of the car and pile in.

‘All fatties welcome!’ Howard calls. ‘All elephants cordially invited!’

None of them have seen, except Claudia; and she finds she cannot go after them and get in the car, even though Howard needs her weight to reverse it under the frame. She has to stay where she is, a child immobilised by the breakdown of authority; by the recognition of authority itself as childlike. It is only in this recognition that her own authority becomes apparent to her, so that she can’t cast Howard’s parents off. They are too infantile, too helpless: is this what Howard feels? Is this what explains the feeling she has, that he never really gives himself to her and the children? That though he wants more and more he is never really there, there at the root; but rather, like next-door’s cherry tree, whose boughs reach over into the Bradshaws’ garden while its trunk stands on the other side of fence, maintains a perpetual presence among them from which the fundamental comfort of belonging is forever denied? When the cherries fall on the Bradshaws’ lawn, the Bradshaws are never sure who they actually belong to — perhaps after all it is nice for Howard, to be so ambiguous, so free; to feel that he is not entirely owned by anyone. He starts the engine and at once a black plume of smoke streams from the exhaust.