The other Bradshaws – Thomas’s brother Howard, his wife Claudia, their three children – live a mile or so away, on Laurier Drive, in the suburb of Laurier Park. Howard is a person whose jesting nature, which seemed when he was young to connote a disregard for convention in all its forms, has suffused his adult life with an atmosphere of irony in which his more-than-average conservatism wears the vague disguise of a joke. Thomas sometimes wonders whether his belief that Howard is different from other people is nourished solely by the backgrounds against which he sees him; whether, in a different setting, he might perceive that Howard is, after all, ordinary, and not just pretending to be. The snaking suburban avenues of Laurier Park, with their electronic security gates and floodlit gravel driveways, their smart cars and suggestive topiary and strange atmosphere of cluttered desertion, are the metaphor for Howard’s placement of himself in the world. Howard and Claudia like to regale their visitors with stories of the new heights of tastelessness – the outdoor jacuzzis, the obscene statuary, the Hawaiianthemed cocktail bar that has recently been erected in next-door’s garden – to which each month their neighbourhood ascends, but Howard’s BMW stays parked on his front drive like the others. There are horse chestnut trees there, with big, rustling skirts that shed their cargo of leaves and rinds and nuts inconveniently over the tidy pavements. Occasionally a petition is circulated to have them cut down, and Howard and Claudia are outraged, genuinely so, for it is in the nature of irony to cherish something unironic at its core.
‘I must paint them,’ Claudia says, as though this activity, if she could ever get around to it, would guarantee once and for all their immortality.
Thomas has always regarded Howard as the most successful member of the family. At twenty-five Howard was already rich and losing his hair, two things that seemed to go together, though he has never become as rich as Thomas expected him to be, nor as bald either. It is just that Howard’s successes are more real to Thomas than his failures; whereas the opposite is true of his younger brother Leo, whose perfectly comfortable life Thomas perceives through a mist of doubt, so that nothing Leo does ever seems entirely convincing. He understands that these are prejudices and therefore not rational, but sometimes they seem to be more than that, to have come from outside of himself: to be actual forces that govern behaviour and have governed it from the start, as the key signature governs the terms of the melody. From the beginning, it seems to Thomas, Howard was set in a major key and Leo in a minor, and though their lives are their own, to Thomas they will always seem to be resolving their harmonic destiny, as he himself, he supposes, will to them.
Howard has done things over the years that Thomas cannot reconcile with his version of his character, has taken up golf, Christianity, windsurfing, men’s groups; has experienced doubt, depression, fanaticism, indifference, and whole seasons of opinion and belief; yet in all these inconsistencies he has demonstrated a fundamental consistency, has passed through discord back to harmony, to himself. Watching Howard live, Thomas has come to realise that it is impossible to fully understand another human being. But there is something else that enables him to anticipate Howard, a profounder divination that tells him what his brother is. Howard’s phases intermittently fill him, like passengers filling a train. His behaviour is descriptive: whenever he takes something up, Thomas begins to notice that other people have taken it up too. It is as though Howard is describing the world he lives in. They pass through him, fads and fashions, general beliefs, emotional trends, yet his outward shape, his form, is not altered. It is this, the form, that constitutes Thomas’s deeper knowledge of Howard. He does not have this knowledge of other people. Other people he has to learn. They are pure content, information. It is, in a way, a talent, the faculty he has in relation to Howard. He can see the stream and story of life pass through the vessel of his brother: some mysterious gift enables him to.
But sometimes, equally, it is Howard who teaches Thomas, by maintaining a relationship with reality that is more surprising, less predictable, than the life Thomas would have imagined for him. His wealth, for instance: in his early twenties, when he was still a student, Howard went to America and returned with a container-load of strange-looking bicycles, which he had bought with a whole term’s grant money and claimed he intended to sell. Thomas remembers his own consternation, his dismay, the headachey feeling it gave him to think of these burdensome, ineradicable bicycles and their shocking impoverishment of Howard, who was forced to borrow money from their father; money he repaid, with interest, before the term was out, having sold every last bicycle and taken orders for more. These days, everyone has bicycles like the ones Howard brought over: Thomas has one himself. The same is true of the skateboards and scooters that, a few years ago, Howard remortgaged the house on Laurier Drive to import. Howard owns his own company: he is successful enough by most standards. It is just that the pattern he established early on has never changed. He risks everything and he profits, but the scale has not, fundamentally, enlarged. This is Howard’s tutelary function: his enduring reality provides what Thomas thinks of as structure. The episode with the bicycles gave rise to a fantasy-Howard, a person who does not exist outside Thomas’s imagination. Thomas can see him still, an unstoppable entrepreneur rolling in wealth and excess, a man with yachts and investments and a taste for esoteric luxuries, but the real Howard isn’t like that at all.
Often, on Sundays, Thomas and Tonie find themselves on their way to Laurier Drive, for in spite of the topiary and the Union Jacks drooping on their polished flagpoles, Howard and Claudia’s domain has the magnetism of cultural centrality. Usually, in the car, Tonie complains: she would like their own house to draw and pull the world to itself, or so she thinks. But she is often uneasy and out of sorts when they have visitors. It is this, Thomas supposes, that she is complaining about. She would like to be different, while not understanding precisely what the difference is.
Today, though, she is quiet in the passenger seat. It is late September, a brilliant, brittle day. He glances at her frequently: she seems to revolve in banks of sunlight that fall across her through the windscreen. She puts on her dark glasses, stares out of the window. Since she started her new job, he has noticed that she is more self-contained. The change has revealed her, as a room is revealed by things being tidied up and put away. But her new air of completion is enigmatic in itself: now that he can see her, he finds himself wondering what she truly is.
‘All right?’ he says.
‘Ecstatic,’ she replies, huskily.
When they arrive Alexa leaps from the car and vanishes around the side of the house to the garden, from where they can hear the sound of children’s voices. Thomas and Tonie go the other way, to the front door, and ring the bell.
‘Those are nice,’ Tonie says. She touches the chipped stone urn brimming with geraniums that is standing on the doorstep in the autumn sun. She fingers their brash crimson heads. ‘Those are so typical.’
She is reflecting on Claudia, on her knack of careless homemaking that pleases Tonie in the same instant that it seems to make her mysteriously unhappy. Tonie’s methods are more purgative: she has fits of ruthless cleanliness in which the whole familiar surface of domestic life disappears, as though she were hoping to arrive at beauty by the route of annihilation. In Claudia’s house beauty is approached – no less assiduously, Thomas thinks – along the path of randomness. When Tonie comes here she wishes she could be more like Claudia, could be released from her own driving sense of order, could remember certain things and forget others, as Claudia has remembered to plant the geraniums and then forgotten them sufficiently to let them grow. Tonie fingers the geraniums as though they were things she in her madness would have been compelled to tidy away. Howard opens the door. He engulfs Tonie in his slab-like arms and his face appears over her shoulder, round and grinning like a Halloween pumpkin.
‘Come and see what we’ve got,’ he says.
He beckons them through the dark core of the house, towards the big open glass doors and the bright garden that stands beyond them. Thomas observes the sweat-stain on the back of his brother’s shirt, the redness of his balding scalp. In middle age Howard has become all surface. His emotions sweep over his large body like weather systems over a prairie. Outside, the children are running across the grass. There is a buzzing noise, incessant, like the sound of a lawnmower. As Thomas comes out, Howard’s son Lewis bursts from the greenery at the bottom of the garden, astride a tiny motorbike. He races the others up the lawn and when he reaches the end he turns and drives in a crazy circle around them, before collapsing on his side in the grass, wheels spinning, while they shriek with laughter.
Claudia is standing on the veranda, shielding her eyes from the sun.
‘Isn’t it awful?’ she says. ‘Howard just imported them from Japan.’
‘I’ve got five thousand of them sitting in a warehouse off the M25,’ Howard confirms, delightedly.
Thomas looks at the thing. He tries not to seem aloof, though it disgusts him, disappoints him, this latest proof of Howard’s indiscriminateness. By Christmas, a miniature electric motorbike will have made its inevitable way into the province of childhood desire. He feels, suddenly, that it is Howard’s fault, that he could stop it, if he chose to.
‘What does it run off?’
‘You charge them from a unit that feeds straight out of a domestic plug,’ Howard says. ‘They do twenty miles an hour on the flat.’
‘Can you imagine anything more repulsive?’ Claudia says. ‘The noise alone is enough to drive you out of your senses. And you won’t believe what they cost –’
‘Five hundred, online price,’ Howard says, nudging Thomas in the ribs.
‘You’d have to be sick,’ Claudia says. ‘Don’t you think?’
Tonie is standing with her hands on the rail, looking down at the lawn. She has put her dark glasses on again. Today she is dressed all in black, black trousers and shirt, a black leather jacket.
‘Oh, come on,’ she says, smiling. ‘It looks fun.’
Claudia draws to Tonie’s side, fingers the lapel of her jacket. She does not, Thomas thinks, like to be thought of as anti-fun.
‘Darling, you’re très rock today,’ she says, admiringly. ‘I felt sure you were a disapproving liberal, but now I can see how wrong I was.’
She herself wears old clogs, a poncho, flared corduroy trousers. When Howard met Claudia she was still a student at art college. It is part of the mythology of Claudia and Howard’s life that he carried her off before she could finish her degree. The myth makes it difficult to remember exactly what happened. Claudia has a painting studio at the bottom of the garden, a kind of memorial to her forsaken career. To Thomas her clothes are symbolic too, commemorative, like the uniforms veterans wear on Remembrance Day to remind people of their sacrifices.
‘I approve of everything now,’ Tonie says.
‘What a pleasing thought,’ Claudia says brightly. ‘I grow increasingly bitter. I’m turning to vinegar, like corked wine.’
‘Oh, darling,’ Howard says.
‘The thing is,’ she continues, ‘I just don’t want to believe people will buy them. I don’t want to believe they’re that stupid.’
Howard puts his arm around her, red-faced, smiling beatifically.
‘Let’s bloody hope they are,’ he says.
‘You see?’ Claudia says triumphantly, though it is unclear what they are meant to be seeing.
‘Well,’ Howard says reproachfully, ‘we’ve got to pay the mortgage somehow.’
‘If it were up to me,’ Claudia announces, ‘there wouldn’t be any mortgage.’
Howard looks bemused, as though, unlike everyone else, he has never heard Claudia say such things before. ‘Claude, it is up to you.’
Claudia sighs. ‘Why do we need all this? All this – establishment. Other people don’t need so much. Personally I’d be happy to make do with far less.’ Her gaze wanders over the bulky brick-coloured house, the expansive lawn, the trees in their autumn foliage, the numerous children. She appears to be deciding which parts of it she could dispense with. ‘All I really need is my studio. The way things are, I hardly go in there from one month to the next. I don’t have time.’
Howard looks stricken. ‘We’ll make more time,’ he says. ‘You should have all the time you need. We’ll sort it out.’
‘The problem is’, Claudia says to the others, ‘that you don’t make any money out of painting. Other people would have to make sacrifices. And they simply wouldn’t do it.’
She disappears into the house. Howard’s eyes follow her beseechingly.
‘Poor Claude,’ he says. ‘She’s too unselfish. All you women are too unselfish.’ He goes after her to the door and puts his head in. ‘Darling!’ he calls. ‘Is there a drop of wine we could offer our guests? And is there any of that avocado gunk left from last night?’
He sits, pulls up a chair for Tonie and rubs his hands together, happy again.
‘These are good times,’ he says. ‘These are beautiful days, all of us together. Aren’t we lucky to have this?’
Tonie smiles. She likes Howard in this mood. ‘We are,’ she says.
‘And the children – look at them! Look at the lucky little sods. Think what their lives could have been like somewhere else. I was at our factory in Bombay last week. I saw little children, no more than two years old, picking food out of the gutter. Little girls, half the size of Martha.’
His brow abruptly darkens. He reaches for Tonie’s hand and clutches it between his own.
‘They’re probably working in your factory,’ Thomas says drily. ‘You should pay them more.’
‘I’ve told Howard I’ll leave him if I find out he’s been using child labour,’ Claudia says, re-emerging with a tray. ‘I’ll just pack a bag and go.’
‘We’re not allowed to use child labour in our own house,’ Howard says. ‘Ours don’t even make their own beds.’
‘They’re spoilt,’ Claudia says. ‘Selfish and spoilt.’
Down on the lawn Lewis has got the bike upright again, and is holding it at the front so that Alexa can get on. He turns and looks enquiringly at the adults. Alexa sits herself on the saddle, white-faced and uncertain. Thomas waits for Tonie to intervene, but she does not. Instead she picks up one of Claudia’s antique glass goblets from the tray and revolves it carefully in her hands.
‘Where did you get these?’ she says.
Howard is rising, moving down the steps towards the lawn. Thomas hears him say,
‘Actually, it’s got a surprising kick on it, for a toy.’
He is still saying it as the bike bolts from Lewis’s grasp. Alexa is carried jolting over the grass. Her eyes are screwed shut. She makes no attempt to steer. Almost immediately the bike hits the trunk of Howard’s apple tree, head-on. Alexa is thrown forward. Thomas sees the impact from behind, then her face full of blood on the grass. Howard gets there first, running and wobbling like a bear. He picks Alexa up in his arms. When Thomas comes he surrenders her silently, and then turns to excoriate Lewis, who stands there with downcast eyes, nodding dolefully at every accusation.
‘– bloody idiot! Totally irresponsible to let her –’
Alexa does not cry. Her eyes are wide with shock and blood trickles around the rims. Claudia comes running out with water in a bowl and a cloth. While Thomas holds her she carefully mops away the blood. The other children stand round silently.
‘Get ice!’ Claudia commands, pointing towards the house.
It is Tonie who obeys the order. Thomas glimpses her beside the apple tree, her face startled, aghast, as though Claudia’s pointing finger were accusing her of something. Then she runs inside. The blood is coming from a single cut; presently it stops. In the same way that he wonders how Claudia could have got the water so quickly, so he ruminates blindly, disjointedly, on Tonie’s absence. Finally she comes. She gives the ice to Claudia. Then she stands beside Howard. He hears her say,
‘I thought she was dead.’
He sees Howard put his arm around her. He sees her cover her eyes with her hand.
*
In the kitchen Claudia serves out roast lamb. Alexa is lying under a blanket on the sofa, with a glass of lemonade and a plaster on her forehead. There is Lego all over the kitchen floor and piles of paper everywhere. Lottie, the eldest, is at the table, eating an enormous mound of ice cream slathered with chocolate sauce.
‘Lottie, put that away now,’ Claudia says. ‘We’re about to have lunch.’
‘I don’t want lunch.’
Lottie is thirteen, sullen and thickset. She has narrow light blue eyes which she looks out of uneasily, uncomfortably, as though they were chinks in the prison of her pale, plump body.
‘– gorging yourself on ice cream and then refusing to eat the healthy lunch I’ve provided,’ Claudia is saying, banging the oven door. ‘Howard, will you speak to her?’
Howard isn’t there: he is in the hall, talking loudly on his phone.
‘Anyway, I’m vegetarian. I told you.’
‘Vegetarians eat vegetables,’ Lewis says. ‘You’re not a vegetarian. You just eat cake and stuff.’
‘She’s a cake-arian,’ Martha says.
‘Fatarian,’ Lewis says, laughing. ‘Just some fat for lunch, please, with a side order of, um, fat.’
Lottie shrieks. She picks up a book from the table and flings it across the room at Lewis.
‘Stop it!’ Claudia bellows, enveloped in clouds of steam from the cooker.
Tonie is getting knives and forks out of a drawer. She gets plates from the wooden dresser. She is reserved, acquiescent, efficient, as she is in the mornings when she goes to work. Thomas sees that she has returned to this mode as a way of managing the day’s disorder.
‘I feel we’re completely out of control,’ Claudia says to Howard, when he comes in. She stops what she is doing, leaves the lamb steaming in its dish of fat, the vegetables cooling in their saucepans. She leans against the cooker and folds her arms.
Howard looks concerned. He puts his hand on her shoulder. ‘We’re all right, aren’t we Claude?’
‘How can you say we’re all right!’ Claudia exclaims fiercely. ‘We’ve got one child with a head injury, the rest are fighting like wild animals, and we can’t even get lunch on the table by half past three! It’s bloody selfishness – just utter bloody selfishness!’
She is tearful. She rubs her eyes with her fists. Howard looks miserable.
‘A child only has to come into this house,’ Claudia resumes, ‘and she’s concussed in the first half-hour!’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Howard says, to Tonie. ‘It was my fault, I gave them the bloody thing. I should never have let her go near it.’
‘It was an accident,’ Tonie says.
‘It should never have happened. Please forgive me.’
Tonie, in black, is suddenly the priest, the confessor, and Howard and Claudia – red-faced, dishevelled – her penitents. Claudia embraces her, wiping her eyes. Howard, absolved, ranges around the kitchen bellowing orders at the children. Thomas senses that Tonie is relieved: her own conduct has been lost in the general commotion. But in the car on the way home it seems to return to her. She turns around often in her seat to look at Alexa, who is silently gazing through the window. She reaches back for Alexa’s hand and holds it.
‘It felt like it was my fault,’ she says.
‘It was nobody’s fault,’ Thomas replies, though secretly he agrees with her.
‘It felt like it was because I’d lost control of her.’
Thomas is silent. He thinks they shouldn’t discuss such things, with Alexa there. It used to be Tonie who had the finer sense of what was appropriate, and now, all at once, it is him. It is 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.