Rachel Cusk - The Bradshaw Variations

It is four o’clock and his wife has not returned from the hospice committee lunch. The sky is flushed with pink; the swallows swoop around the telegraph poles. The rooks are already calling across the fields, above the sound of the last mower. It is Gus Robertson’s, outlasting the rest as though to advertise the size of his domain. Mr Bradshaw can see him through the screen of trees, sitting on his ride-on. It is brilliantly new, as big as a small tractor. He rides it passionlessly, staring straight ahead. Mr Bradshaw has not seen this mower before: it causes him a pang of betrayal to see it, as though he has witnessed Gus in an act of disloyalty. Sometimes it seems that Mr Bradshaw has only to hear of a new gimmick for the Robertsons to own it. It is unsettling, to be among people who are always interfering with what they have, who seem to proclaim their indifference to others by changing what is familiar about themselves.

Recently the Robertsons installed a pump and waterway feeding into their pond: when you switch the pump on, the waterway becomes a running stream. The Bradshaws were invited to observe this ceremony, and stood on the lawn while Gus dashed about checking the supply and drainage, his white, well-styled eave of hair flopping up and down. He is a handsome man for his age, tall and trim, suntanned, perfectly groomed; and yet watching the electronic stream trickling down into the plastic-lined lily pond, Mr Bradshaw gave birth to the perception that Gus is tragic, not because of his vanity or ostentation but because of his poor taste. It is something Gus will perhaps never know about himself, but it has been an important and liberating realisation for Mr Bradshaw. The new mower, however, is a blow. Brash and ugly though it is, he nonetheless feels, lover-like, that Gus has been unfaithful.

At a quarter to five she comes, with Flossie at her heels. She comes around the path at the side of the house, where Mr Bradshaw is pulling weeds out of the gravel.

‘Oh!’ she cries. ‘I thought I’d never get away! They simply wouldn’t stop talking — have you had tea?’

‘No,’ he says, without looking up. ‘You said you’d be back by three, so I waited.’

‘Charles, you didn’t!’

‘Tea is at four,’ he says. ‘It didn’t seem unreasonable to expect you to be back by then.’

‘Oh dear — oh, I am sorry. You must be parched!’

‘I started mowing at three in order to be finished by four.’

‘And in the hot sun too!’ she wails. ‘I don’t understand why you didn’t just get yourself a cup.’

‘You said you’d be here. It seemed sensible to wait.’

He is parched, and when he straightens up from stooping over the gravel he is slightly dizzy. She stands there with flushed cheeks, her mouth drooping at the corners. Sometimes he forgets that he and she are old, and then the sight of her reminds him.

‘Never mind,’ she says. ‘I’ll make it now.’

‘I don’t want it now. I don’t like to have tea later than four. It spoils my supper.’

‘But you can’t just go without!’

‘I’d rather go without now. As I said, it spoils my supper.’

He bends down again with his trowel. He can see her feet beside him on the gravel path, the ropes of blue veins, the calloused toes bunched in her sandals. He wonders what she will do. The air between them seems to tremble; the atmosphere is a dark bud straining to burst into flower. He wants its offering, of love or violence. He wants to be located in the maze of his own rigidity and offered something. That is the test, as it has always been.

‘I don’t see why we can’t just have supper later,’ she says.

He does not reply. This is not what she ought to have said. It leaves him in the maze; it asks him to find his own way out.

‘Well,’ she says presently, ‘well, I suppose I shall have to have mine on my own.’

He hears her crunch away. She is gone. He feels the presence of a terrible void, advancing on him, coldly enveloping him. It is silence: Gus has turned his mower off. Later he hears her return through the dusk to where he still bends over the gravel, weeding. She places a cup of tea at his feet with two bourbon biscuits in the saucer, and then swiftly she is gone again. The biscuits are his favourite kind. He watches them out of the corner of his eye as he works; he meditates on them darkly. They have, he decides, been spoilt. He has been separated forever from their sweetness. He lets the tea go cold. When it grows dark he returns to the house and pours it down the sink, and places the biscuits back in their tin.

It was Howard who got the dog. He came back from his mother’s with it tucked into his jacket.

‘Flossie had her puppies,’ he said.

Howard specialises in this sort of thing. He is never more sure-footed than when embarking on what is easy to do and difficult to undo. He specialises in commitment. The dog is a Jack Russell. He is small and firm and vigorous, with a coarse white coat and bright, staring eyes. They call him Skittle.

Claudia likes having a new life in the house. The puppy has to be fed at night, like a baby, and he leaves little pools of golden urine all over the floor. Her sister Juliet tells her to keep Skittle close to her at this early stage. Claudia carries him around in her arms when the children are at school.

One day, sitting stroking him on her lap while she reads the paper, Claudia looks down at Skittle’s body. He is prone with pleasure: his hairy muzzle is flung back and his sinuous loins are quivering. Suddenly Claudia is repelled. There is something unsavoury in the dog’s excitement, in his pink trembling groin. She puts him on the floor. He frets at her legs, raking her calves with his sharp little claws.

‘No!’ she says, grasping him firmly around the middle. ‘Don’t scratch — no!’

She places him a few feet away. He writhes in her hands. When she lets him go he scrabbles frantically towards her and gets up on his hind legs again, putting his claws in her flesh. She spanks him with the flat of her hand. He cowers, contorting his narrow body, gazing at her with his orb-like, fanatical eyes.

It is October, and the garden is gilded with yellow light. The grass is sodden in the mornings. Claudia puts the covers on the outdoor furniture. She gathers the apples where they lie rotting around the tree. Everything is poised between readiness and decay. She watches the children playing after school in the crisp late afternoon. Their bodies have lost the fluidity of summer, though the weather is fine. They move around the rectangle of lawn in their uniforms, laughing and jostling, throwing sticks for Skittle and crying out when he bounces up to catch them smartly between his jaws. Later, when they have come in and the garden is wrapped in its blue-grey pall of evening, Claudia looks through the window and sees Skittle cavorting alone in the indistinct light. He leaps in the air, his jaws snapping at invisible sticks. She watches his white twisted form, suspended. She can hear the murmur of television from the other room.

Howard gets home at half past seven. He wears an air of expectation, of excitement, though for him the day is nearing its conclusion — Howard is usually asleep by half past ten. Claudia sometimes wonders what his excitement signifies. He is like someone eagerly awaiting dessert, the main courses behind him. Sweet though they are, these are the rituals of conclusion. He discards his coat and briefcase in the hall, finds the children and roughhouses them with his big bear’s body, drinks two glasses of wine one after the other standing by the kitchen counters; after which he is red-faced, blissful-looking, rubbing his eyes with his shirt tails hanging out.