The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk Read Free Book Online

as though Alexa has become less real to Tonie and more real to himself.
    ‘Claudia seemed on edge,’ she says.
    Thomas smiles coldly, unsympathetic. ‘She’s always like that. All that fuss about lunch – the truth is that she doesn’t want lunch to be on the table by one o’clock,’ he says. ‘She wouldn’t know what to do next.’
    He wonders whether Claudia is good: he has always wondered it. On another day he might have said this to Tonie, but today he does not. He doesn’t want her to think that he is judgemental. In spite of everything, he has a dark sense of advantage over her.
    Tonie laughs. ‘She might have to go to her studio,’ she says.
    At the sound of her laugh, he laughs too. It is the sense of form that makes them laugh, the feeling that in family life they are at once confined and eternal; like music, Thomas thinks, which could be anything and at the same time cannot be other than what it is. He puts his hand on her knee. For the rest of the journey he says nothing more.

IV
    In Little Wickham people are mowing their lawns. It is a clear Sunday afternoon and the village buzzes like a nest of hornets. Mr Bradshaw pushes his mower around his garden along with the rest. The lawn at the back of the house is undulating: it rises like a woman’s body into two mounds with a soft sloping space between them. The mower moves firmly over its contours, up and down, with Mr Bradshaw’s hands on the bar. His feet tread rhythmically in a shorn passage that is always renewing itself. He has a feeling of domination as he goes over the tender flanks and creases. Afterwards the grass is smooth. He cleans the mower and returns it to its shed.
    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