There is a woman Thomas sees in the school playground. She is often early, like him. She sits on a bench at the edge of the tarmac, reading a book.
He doesn’t really know why he has noticed her, but now that it’s happened he finds himself forming an ethereal kind of relationship with her. When he arrives he searches the playground for her brown-haired form, bent over its book. It comforts him to see her, as it comforts him to see lights on at the windows of strangers’ houses, knowing someone is there. Once he notices her in town, crossing the road towards him. She is with another woman, talking, and when she happens to glance his way he smiles. Momentarily her eyes widen, confused, and then she is gone. Occasionally she isn’t there in the playground and he feels irritable. He imagines himself leaving this place, taking action: he has the urge to do something that will rinse this passivity from his brain. He feels formless, like a lump of dough in which anyone who chooses can leave an impression. But then, the next day, there she is again, and the dent she has created is filled in.
One afternoon Alexa comes out clutching the hand of another girl. She is the brown-haired woman’s daughter. Thomas knows: he has seen them together.
‘This is my friend Clara,’ she says.
‘Hello, Clara.’ He smiles. He thinks of Clara Schumann. He wants to ask the child whether she is named after her. He considers how he could put the question. ‘That’s a lovely name,’ he says.
Suddenly the woman is there. Close up she is smaller than he expected. Everything about her is brown, her large eyes, her coat, the hair that falls in flossy-seeming wisps over her shoulders. He is embarrassed. He realises that he has carried this woman’s image around with him, as people used to carry around little painted miniatures. He feels as though he has stolen something from her without her knowing.
‘I was just saying what a lovely name your daughter has.’
She smiles, slightly surprised. ‘Thank you.’
‘I don’t think we’ve met before.’
She cocks her brown head, quizzical. ‘Haven’t we? I do know your – is she your wife?’
‘Yes. Yes, she is.’
‘I was thinking the other day that I hadn’t seen her for a while.’
He is already used to this discourse of the playground, with its strange elisions and old-world delicacies, its sudden, startling thrusts of frankness. This is not the first time he has had to explain Tonie’s disappearance to an imperative female audience. At least now he doesn’t mistake their curiosity for friendliness towards himself.
‘She’s working full-time now,’ he says.
She nods philosophically. ‘I thought it might be that,’ she says, as though it might equally well have been something else, death perhaps, or imprisonment.
‘Yes, they offered her a promotion and she just couldn’t turn it down.’
‘That’s wonderful,’ the woman says. She does, genuinely, seem to find it wonderful. She is smiling, her cheeks lifted, the skin crinkling beneath her large chocolate-coloured eyes. He notices that her lips have little fluting curves in the corners, like quavers.
‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ he says.
There is a silence. Thomas wants to go away. He wants to go home and play Bach. He is not enjoying this conversation after all.
‘Daddy, can Clara come back to our house?’ Alexa is still gripping the other child’s hand. ‘Please can she?’
‘Not today,’ he says. ‘Another time.’
Alexa persists. ‘Tomorrow?’
He glances at the woman. She smiles again and he grimaces awkwardly in return.
‘We’ll see,’ he says. ‘We’ll talk about it when we get home.’
He takes Alexa’s arm and leads her firmly out of the playground and into the street. All the way home he has a sour sense of disappointment, but in the evening, when Tonie is there, he finds himself thinking about the brown-haired woman again. Her image is once more in its frame. Tonie is moving around the kitchen, pale-faced, distracted. For a moment he forgets the nature of their bond: she has a kind of detailed neutrality about her, a compendiousness, as though he could ask her anything, this sturdy friend of his life.
‘Do you know the mother of a child named Clara?’ he says.
‘Who?’
‘Clara.’
She pauses beside the sink. He sees her mind ticking over, locating the details. She is wearing a mauve-coloured sweater that looks thick and itchy. Vaguely it appears to him as a symbol of affliction, this garment with its heavy knitted cables and constricting neck, its impenetrable fastnesses of wool. It is as though she has put it on as a warning to the world, to keep away from her.
‘I think the mother’s called Helen,’ she says presently.
‘I met her in the playground today. She said she knew you.’
‘Did she?’
‘Alexa seems pretty keen on the daughter.’
‘On Clara?’ Tonie turns on the taps. ‘That’s new. She and Clara have never had all that much to say to each other.’
She speaks with a certain finality. She is telling Thomas that whatever his impressions of the situation might be, her own knowledge is superior. She is reminding him that in the world he now inhabits there is nothing new for him to discover. There is nothing to know that she has not known already.
‘Well, they seemed pretty friendly today.’
‘Did they? These things come and go. Alexa probably fell out with Maisie and brought in Clara as a sop.’
Thomas laughs, though he finds her remark faintly irritating.
‘I wouldn’t have suspected her of that degree of cynicism,’ he says.
Tonie raises her eyebrows. She does not reply.
‘Actually,’ he persists, ‘I thought it was rather touching, the way they were holding hands together. It all seemed perfectly innocent to me.’
Her expression is inscrutable. ‘That’s fine,’ she says, as though he’d asked her permission for something. After a pause, she adds: ‘You should make friends with Helen. She’s nice. It would do you good to have a friend at the school.’
‘Thanks,’ he says flatly.
‘Oh, you know what I mean,’ she says. ‘I just think you’d get on well with her, that’s all. She’s a musician, you know.’
‘Is she?’
‘She plays the violin. You should ask her about it.’
Thomas goes upstairs to say goodnight to Alexa. He feels enveloped, vaguely suffocated, as though Tonie has spun another mauve-coloured sweater around him to match her own. Before he turns out the light, he says:
‘Shall we see if Clara wants to come round tomorrow?’
Alexa’s face is blank. She shrugs. ‘All right,’ she says.
He is vexed. ‘Don’t you want her to come?’
She thinks about it. ‘I don’t mind. I suppose so.’
But he doesn’t see her the next day, nor the next. Alexa says that Clara is ill.
‘What’s wrong with her?’
‘I don’t know. She’s always ill,’ Alexa says, balefully.
Then, one day, the mother is there again, sitting on her bench. He realises that he has forgotten her. She was a habit his mind had formed, that’s all. He can’t remember now what the particulars of the habit were.
‘Hello,’ he says.
His shadow falls across her. She looks up. She seems pleased.
‘Oh, hello,’ she says.
‘I haven’t seen you here for a while.’
It becomes apparent that she is not going to stand, and nor does she make any accommodating gesture for him to sit. This is the adult physicality of the playground, this non-directive bodily stance. She can neither welcome him nor send him away. He sits anyway, beside her on the bench.
‘It’s spring,’ he says, for he has only in that moment realised it. It is March. The sun is lapping weakly at his white face and hands, and there are hard green buds on the naked branches of the trees that stand here and there in their concrete moorings. He wonders how it can possibly be enough, this timid force, to renew all that has to be renewed. He hums a few phrases from the ‘Spring’ Sonata.
‘I don’t know your name,’ she says.
His eyes are closed, feeling the sun. ‘Thomas,’ he says.
‘I’m Ellen.’
‘Ellen?’
He opens his eyes. She is offering her hand. He is coldly amused by Tonie’s mistake. It makes him like the woman better. After all, there is something for him to find out.
‘You’re a musician,’ he says.
She is surprised. ‘How did you know that?’
He considers tormenting her. ‘I thought everybody knew. You’re famous, aren’t you?’
‘No, not at all.’ She isn’t upset. She looks confused.
He closes his eyes again. ‘My wife told me that you played the violin.’
‘Actually,’ she says, ‘it’s the viola.’
He smiles to himself. He does not think that Tonie would care for the difference between a violin and a viola.
‘I’d like to have been a musician,’ he says.
The bell shrills; the children come out. The playground fills. Suddenly Clara is there, clambering on to her mother’s lap. The woman kisses the top of her head, and it is then that Thomas realises that she is beautiful, as though her daughter’s arrival has unveiled her. He thinks of the woman-shaped viola, tawny and glimmering, the child like a bow in her lap. He realises that he cannot look at something beautiful without wanting to comprehend it completely. He looks around for Alexa, suddenly embarrassed to be sitting so close to them, as though these thoughts were public acts he might be made to stand by for life. He remembers the way he used to look at her from far off, the sense of ownership he had over her form. He doesn’t understand himself. He rises, pushes forwards into the crowd.
*
One day Clara comes to the house. She is a mute and fragile child, tremulous as a bead of water, so insubstantial as to be exhausting. Thomas was expecting a child like a prelude, a flowing, melodious thing; he realises that it is from her mother that this expectation has come. But without her, Clara is formless. Or at least, he has failed to decipher what her form might be. He finds himself looking frequently at his watch. Again and again Alexa leads her upstairs to her bedroom and each time, after a few minutes, Clara reappears alone, descending the stairs slowly one by one, seeking him out. He finds himself becoming irritated by her small, hovering form. He knows that it is not him she really wants.
At five o’clock he opens a bottle of wine.
‘Would you like something to drink?’ he asks Clara, who is standing silently at his heels, an orphaned expression on her face.
She nods. He gives her orange squash in a plastic cup. It is strange, serving this unfamiliar child. He experiences a kind of intimacy with her mother, inhabiting the vacuum where Ellen ought to be. Forgetting how small she is he sets the cup slightly out of her reach, and when she tries to grasp it she knocks it over and the orange liquid pours across the table and down the front of her white shirt. She looks down at the orange stain silently.
‘Oh dear,’ Thomas says.
He takes her upstairs to Alexa’s room to get a clean shirt, holding her by her tiny hand. Alexa is lying on her bed, reading.
‘Yuk,’ she says, when she sees the stain. She reminds him, in that instant, of Tonie. It is as though the two of them are lying on the bed, spectating on the curious mess Thomas has got himself into, on this strange little child he has been determined to acquire and is caring for so badly.
He sits Clara on the end of the bed and tentatively removes her shirt. She is entirely passive, letting him undo the buttons with her arms hanging limp at her sides. He opens the front, and though his heart stalls momentarily at the sight of the raw red surgical scars that score the length and breadth of her quail’s chest his demeanour remains perfectly calm. He finds a clean shirt and does up the buttons with feather-like fingers.