The Bradshaw Variations (18 page)

He starts putting his books and papers back in his briefcase. They stand, hover uncertainly, trail towards the doors. They don’t want to leave: they want to be looked after. He has made them feel secure, and now they want to surrender responsibility for themselves.

Tonie remains behind, to see him out.

‘Is there somewhere near here we can get a drink?’ he says.

They go to the pub that is the traditional refuge of the English department, where Tonie half-hopes she’ll meet someone she knows. She doesn’t know what she’ll find to say to him. She watches him while he gets the drinks. Now that it is over, she isn’t sure what his talk really amounted to.

‘It was nice, hearing them read,’ she says, when he returns.

He puts the drinks on the table. His is something clear, gin or vodka.

‘Was it?’ He drinks from his glass, apparently indifferent.

‘Generally they don’t talk all that much.’

‘Talk is a snare,’ he says.

She glances at him, surprised. He is looking at her steadily. He smiles, a smile that is much less polite than the rest of him.

‘I wanted to hear
you
read,’ he says.

She holds his eyes for a second. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘you did.’

He says, ‘I hate to tell you, but your voice gives you away.’

She reminds herself of his name. Max Desch.

‘I thought talk was a snare,’ she says brightly.

He tilts his head, strums his fingers against his glass. ‘There are different kinds of snare,’ he says. ‘This is quite a pleasant one. It reeled me in firmly but gently.’

There is a silence. Tonie does not want silence. To be silent suggests that she is willing for him to take control of things.

‘You seem very young to be a professor,’ she says.

He looks surprised. ‘I’m thirty-three.’

Tonie laughs, relieved, and vaguely disappointed. He is even younger than she thought. She had imagined he was flirting with her. It is a bad sign, to believe that young men are flirting with you.

‘That’s young,’ she says. Yet she cannot quite believe that she is so much older, almost a different generation. She has clung to youth, she realises. She has no idea what she will do when it is entirely gone.

‘Is it?’ he says.

‘To me it is. I just turned forty.’

He waves this away with his hand. ‘What does that matter?’

‘I don’t know what it matters. It just does.’

He leans forward, rests his elbows on the table. She sees his cufflinks, little polished silver discs in the stiff cloth. She imagines him putting them in. His fingers are broad and pale and clean.

‘Why? You’re still young. And beautiful,’ he adds, lifting his glass to his lips.

Tonie laughs. ‘Stop it.’

‘I’d like to go to bed with you, that’s all,’ says Max Desch.

Tonie’s cheeks grow red. How strange, that when she was younger and more free, she reserved all her scorn for a remark such as that; and yet now it has all the mystery for her that the idea of love had for her then.

‘You can’t say that,’ she says.

‘Can’t I?’ He swirls his drink around. ‘Why not?’

She wonders whether he is going all the way back to York tonight, whether he will sit on the train and feel the particular weight of his visit, as the fisherman returning home feels the particular bodies of the fish he has caught. There is no reason, in fact, why he can’t say whatever he wants to her. It is too late – isn’t it? – for loyalty, for compunction, for guilt. The time for these things is past. There is only any point in saying what is true.

‘No reason,’ she says. She composes herself. ‘So what’s your interest in Wilfred Owen? Where does that come from?’

‘I was in the army.’

She smiles. Vaguely, she doesn’t believe him. ‘That too.’

‘I joined when I was still at school. It was a way of getting sent to university.’

She is surprised. He has fooled her. She mistook him for a typical eccentric, of the academic type. But in fact, none of the academics she knows are anything like him at all.

‘And then – what – you didn’t go back?’

‘I had to go back for a while. I was sent to the Middle East. After that I was discharged.’

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘And what was it like? The army.’

He looks at her coolly. ‘It was all right.’

She images him with other men, a male-only place, something clarifying about it; a disentangling from women that might bring with it a capacity to see them whole.

‘Did you like the other men?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you learn how to shoot a gun?’

He smiles his slow, mocking smile. ‘Of course. Do you find that exciting?’

She smiles back. ‘Not particularly.’

They sit and look at each other. After a while he reaches out his hand and touches the rim of her glass.

‘Would you like another?’

She shakes her head, slowly. ‘I have to get home.’

He looks so disappointed that she almost laughs. His sincerity is a kind of event. She wants to tell someone about it, but he is the only person there.

‘What a pity,’ he says. ‘Do you really?’

It is clear that he is completely unfamiliar with the idea of home as a set of responsibilities, a scheduled place, like work. Yet there is something about him that makes her feel secure. She is reluctant to leave, as the students were reluctant to leave the lecture hall. He appears to have no other ties. He seems to exist only for her. She has his full attention.

‘I do,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry.’

Outside in the dark street he stops and turns to her. He puts out his large white hand and rests it flat against her clavicle.

‘You’re very delicate,’ he says. ‘I want to know what it would be like to overpower you.’

‘I’m not easily overpowered,’ she says.

‘Aren’t you?’

He presses with his hand. With his other hand he covers her eyes. He walks her backwards across the pavement until she feels a wall behind her. His hands are very warm. Through the slits in his fingers she can see him. He bends and kisses her throat.

‘I can’t do this,’ she says. ‘Someone might see me.’

He kisses her mouth, the skin beneath her ear, her throat again. She laughs. His hand is firm on her chest, fixing her to the wall.

‘Just a minute more,’ he says. She feels his teeth biting gently at her neck.

‘Don’t you dare,’ she says, laughing, blindfolded.

She feels him smile. His lips brush hers, moth-like. She takes his wrist and moves his hand from her eyes. She frees herself from him, moving out into the pavement.

‘I have to go home,’ she says.

A taxi rounds corner and she hails it. It swerves to the kerb and he opens the door for her and she gets in.

‘I’m going to the station,’ she says. ‘Do you want a lift?’

He shakes his head. He raises his hand to her in farewell. She looks back at him through the window. He is striding away down the pavement. She glimpses his face under a street light, chiselled, eternal, like a face in a church, a face on a silver coin.

*

The house smells of decay. Tonie goes through the rooms, sniffing. It is stale-sweet, nauseating, like the smell of the care home her grandmother lives in, like the smell of the dead men’s suits that hang in the charity shops on the High Street. She only smells it when she isn’t expecting to. It confronts her among her possessions and then it vanishes, nowhere to be found.

Lately she has been troubled by horrible dreams. They soil her all day with the feeling of dirtiness and unease. They are the dreams of a lunatic. What is it, this black river that runs like a sewer through her sleep? Mostly she dreams about animals. She probes their dumb panic, their cheapness of life and death. Last night she dreamt of a man spearing birds with a garden fork. He wore a parkkeeper’s uniform. He was putting twigs and debris into a municipal wheelbarrow. He was so lumbering and methodical, walking around the silent park. He speared an owl that was sitting on the grass, then a bird with a long neck and beak like a cormorant. He carried each one to his wheelbarrow on the tines of his fork while they looked around with bright, bewildered eyes.

In the mornings she stands at the window, looks into the street. She wants to see concrete things, continuation, people getting in their cars to go to work, the blue or grey of today’s sky. She sees a man at the window opposite, bare-chested, leaning his tattooed arms on the sill to smoke a cigarette into the new day. Down below, the big, distracted lady bursts out of her front door, as she always does at this time, and charges off up the pavement with her arms full of bags. One after another her children come out behind her, following in her wake like ducklings following their mother upstream.

Tonie opens and closes her drawers, looking for clothes. The smell comes out of the third drawer. Formaldehyde, hospitals, rotting bandages. Years ago, the smell of the dirty-grey plaster cast when they took it off her arm. She remembers it, the dead-looking arm underneath, both her and not-her; the realisation that her body was separate from herself, that it could die. And afterwards the faltering sense of space, a rift in the air, something not there that had been there before.

She dresses, like an actor assembling a costume. Head of Department: tailoring for responsibility, black for rebelliousness. She gives thought to this, to her appearance, her part. Today she wears unconventional shoes, a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt under her jacket. She lets her hair go frizzy and wild. She puts things into her satchel, looks at her watch. At this hour of the day each minute is an entity, solid. They cross her consciousness like stepping stones cross a river. She has to be careful not to lose her footing. Upstairs she creeps into Alexa’s darkened room to kiss her sleeping form goodbye. When she does this, it is as though her parents are watching her. They observe her movements with the same upright bafflement as they might watch a foreign art-house film. The smell rises from Alexa’s bed. Later, when Tonie opens the airing cupboard, it billows out at her from the clean sheets and pillowcases. She smells it on her coat; sometimes she smells it on her food. She tries to give it a name: futility, mortality, meaninglessness. It represents the loss of illusion. Down in the kitchen she says to Thomas,

‘Have you noticed a strange smell?’

He thinks about it. ‘What of?’

Death, she thinks. Wasted time. Rotting beliefs, sending out their stench.

He is reading
Kobbe’s Complete Opera
. He turns one of its thousand pages, wafer-thin, like the pages of the Bible. ‘There
was
a smell, but I traced it.’

She lifts her brows in amazement. She imagines him alone here during the day, moving stealthily through the rooms like an Indian in a western. She imagines him kneeling, his nose to the floor.

‘Where to?’ she asks.

‘The cupboard in the hall. It smelt awful. It was full of old shoes.’

‘Oh.’

She is in charge here now. She is alone, at the head of her life, subject only to craziness like a king in Shakespeare. It is what she has wanted, to free herself from authority. She has put so much behind her that she is a little frightened of what is to come. She will go to work each day, that’s all. She will do her job. What else is there for kings to do?

XXV

All sorts of things were forecast: weather systems with long, lashing tails spiked with blue or red, winds bearing ferocious hails of arrows, rods of sunlight showing like lances around a shield of cloud that shed blue droplets in the shape of tears.

Leo needs a coat. He looks in the shops on West Hill Road, where big dirty buses thunder past the lit-up window displays, and the pavements are crowded, even on a Tuesday morning. West Hill Road is where the big chains are, and the pound shops, and the junk-food places you can smell from a hundred yards away. It is where people who spend money go, as opposed to people who make it.

‘What happened to the coat you wore last year?’ Susie said, when he told her that morning where he was going.

Leo shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

‘What coat
did
you wear last year?’

She seemed confused, as though it was not just the coat but the year itself that had been mislaid.

‘I don’t know.’

‘No, really,’ she pleaded, touching his arm. ‘What was it like?’

But Leo couldn’t remember either. He and Susie clutched each other shakily and laughed, glancing in each other’s red-rimmed eyes. Justin and Madeleine sat stiffly at the breakfast table watching their parents.

‘You must remember your own
coat,
’ Madeleine said, disbelieving.

‘I don’t!’ Leo protested. ‘I must have lost it.’

‘He probably left it somewhere,’ said Justin. ‘He probably got drunk at some party and forgot it.’

Leo has not gone to Temple Street, as Susie advised him to – Temple Street with its faux-Victorian street lamps and planters full of shrubs, its little boutiques like silvered webs with a black-clad assistant waiting inside like a charming spider. A saxophonist plays atmospheric jazz on the swept pavements in Temple Street. But he has not gone there. He has come to West Hill Road, where men and women with colourless hair and shapeless bodies carry giant bags stuffed full of clothes and shoes from China or Taiwan, as cheap and unflattering as the ones they already have on. From the top of the bus Leo watches them coming and going through the big electric doors. They come out and stand for a moment in the ferment of the threshold, where the shop’s air conditioning meets the gusty grey air of outside. The turbulence ruffles their hair and makes their clothes balloon and shrink against their bodies. It is as though they are being momentarily handled by some careless god. He sees the way they brace themselves against the frisking wind, their look of determination. They cling on to their purchases, glancing to left and right.

There is a coat Leo wants. It is a long coat in a dark colour. He looks for it in the men’s departments as impatiently as if it is an actual coat he possesses and has mistakenly left somewhere. And it does appear to him as a sort of soulmate, this coat: as something home-like and familiar, like Susie. It is strange, to be searching these huge stores, in which all the world’s randomness seems constantly to be being incarnated in these millions of orphaned garments, for a piece of home, a piece of his soul. It is as though he is looking for himself. And the longer he looks, and fails to find something he recognises, the more strange he feels himself to be: yes, this is what distinguishes him from the others, who rake through rail after rail of jackets and jeans and sweatshirts with a thoroughness that he would almost call professional, were it not so obsessive and so debased.