The Bradshaws are going away. Ma and Dads are taking the dog.
It is always an ordeal, going on their summer holiday: it is the same every year. All the Bradshaws’ problems seem to rise up and confront them, almost to surround them, like a menacing crowd they have to pass through before they can be on their way. There is a strange feeling of the dust sheets being taken off the furniture, when of course it should be the other way around. As if life itself – or their living of it – were a set of blinkers, a blind: that is how it always feels, in the days before they leave for France or Spain, with the three children stuffed into the back seat and the bags crammed so tightly in the boot that the laden car seems about to explode for either fury or joy.
Yes, it is an ordeal: not just the cleaning and packing, the organising and arranging, but also the unpicking of a kind of estrangement that seems to have knitted itself among them over the course of the year. There is a stiffness at the start of their preparations, a constriction to their relationships. Usually, by the time they leave, it has gone: by the time Howard and Claudia have argued about the state of the house and the children, about the fact that there is less money and more things that need to be done with it than they’d thought, about the fact that Howard has worked too much and Claudia too little – let alone started on the grievances, the real injustices that have remained outstanding not just for a week or month but for years, some dating back to the time before the children were born, even to the very first evening Howard and Claudia spent together almost twenty years earlier. Though they don’t always get to that. Those are in a sense the leap years of their marriage, the times when, mysteriously gifted with an extra reach into the past, they can, as they pack, quarrel over the fact that Howard spent their first important hours in The Freemason’s Arms in Camberwell talking about how much he loved Angelina Croft, who had recently abandoned him. Some years he flatly denies it. Others he claims that this was a tactic by which he hoped to demonstrate his sincerity, for Claudia’s benefit. One, awful year he was suddenly unrepentant. So what? Who cared what he’d said? Why was Claudia always trying to get her claws into everything?
Sometimes it is more than a clearing of the air, this business of going away. It is a death and rebirth for them all. The problem is that the holiday, when it comes, sometimes feels like it is happening to someone else.
The morning sun shines down on Laurier Drive, presses itself, as if through a latticework or grille, through its countless details of human habitation: through the syncopated absences in fancy brickwork and Spanish-style wrought-iron balustrades, through spear-topped ranks of electronic security gates and pergolas of tannalised pine. Here and there the planted borders cast lacy shadows on the pavements, and all along the roadside the breeze moves the heavy summer boughs of the chestnut trees, so that they seem almost to be stiffly dancing in swirling skirts of light and shade.
‘Howard’s making a meal of that roof rack,’ Dads observes, standing at the kitchen window with folded arms. ‘He’ll mark the paintwork if he isn’t careful.’
Ma sits in a chair at the table, yawning. Howard’s mother goes in for dramatic displays of exhaustion whenever she visits. There she sits, with her grey frizzy hair and her drooping face, releasing larger and larger yawns until it seems that she might deflate entirely. Often she goes to sleep in her chair, a faint snore whistling in her filigree elderly nose. It is strange: in her own house she is alert and beady-eyed, moving briskly around her chilly domain. It is as though she cannot tolerate the warmer climate of Howard and Claudia’s world, the humidity of its passions and its tolerance, its lush atmosphere of emotion. Out of her element, she grows soporific; she is plunged into the torpor of deracination.
Skittle is scratching at the door with his hard little claws. Now and then he lets out a high, piercing yelp.
‘He’s forgotten that he’s still got to reverse it out of the garage,’ Dads remarks. ‘It would have been more sensible to get the car out first, then attach the roof rack.’
‘I suppose I really ought to help.’ Ma comes to her senses and looks around blankly. ‘Isn’t there something I can do to help?’
Claudia, cleaning inside the fridge, withdraws for a second and shouts:
‘Skittle! Quiet!’
Skittle hesitates. A look of torment passes across his bulging yellow eyes. The catflap is broken: the door is no longer permeable. His troubled narrow face and asymmetric ears tremble. His hindquarters writhe. His small sausage-shaped body is beset by the strange contortions whose cause the Bradshaws have been unable to fathom.
‘Yes, what’s that awful noise?’ says Ma. ‘I hope we aren’t going to have our hands full with you this week.’
The dog flings himself once more against the door and rebounds sprawling on the tiled floor, where he scrabbles frantically to his feet, emitting nervous little squirts of golden urine. This is the first time they have left Skittle. Ma and Dads are taking him home with them to Little Wickham. Sometimes Claudia perceives that the spirit of delinquency has entered their house in the body of this animal. It has come as it were by the back door, on four legs.
‘Do you know,’ yawns Ma, ‘I don’t think I even know where it is you’re going.’
‘Oh, it’s just France,’ Claudia says. She can hear Howard calling her from outside. ‘The usual thing. Sorry, do you think you could let the dog out?’
Yes, it has got in, disaffection, discontent – she doesn’t really know what to call it. She knows only that she has always made great efforts to ward it off: with the birth of each child, the passing of each year, the passing, even, of every night she spends with Howard – she has stayed vigilant through it all, through the turning of one day to another, has adhered to her belief, which is in the importance of wanting what you have. It is this belief that makes her life real to her: more than that, it is, in a mysterious sense, what gives it its worth.
‘Oh!’ Ma flings back her head rhapsodically, as though Claudia has said they are going to the South Pacific. ‘France! I had no idea! Did you know they were going to France?’ she enquires of her husband.
‘I don’t recall their making a particular secret of it,’ Dads replies.
‘I would so love to go to France!’ she says disconsolately, so that Claudia feels they are directly preventing her from doing so, by the fact of going there themselves.
‘Why don’t you go, then?’ she says from inside the fridge. She has been up since six o’clock and has not yet started on the upstairs rooms. ‘It’s not very far. It’s not as though it’s Timbuktu.’
Howard’s faint, infuriating shouts of, ‘Claude!’ are like a pair of spurs applied to her sides as she works. It was Howard who brought Skittle home in the first place. Skittle was his idea. That is the trouble: she has not found a way to want him herself. If she had only concentrated, taken the time – if she had only remembered the point, the central tenet of her belief, which was the avoidance of not wanting what you had!
‘Your father-in-law would sooner go to Timbuktu than cross the Channel,’ Ma says. Her expression is morose.
Dads, smiling menacingly, continues his scrutiny of Howard from the window.
‘Why should I go and spend my money there?’ he says presently. ‘They don’t come here.’
‘I don’t think you can say they don’t come here! That’s an utter generalisation!’
‘It doesn’t matter what you call it.’ Dads continues to smile. ‘It’s a fact, that’s all.’
Yes, it is a terrible thing, not to want what you have. Claudia would suffer – has, she felt, suffered – every abasement to avoid it. One after another she takes things out of the fridge. Inside, a mythic struggle has apparently taken place. The collapsed, decomposing forms of old vegetables and waxy remains of butter and bacon and hard rinds of cheese like pieces of dead sin, seem to Claudia to be a kind of representation, a portrait, of the passage of time. With what brutality these things have been made to surrender their shape and essence – how coldly and mechanically they have been broken down, curdled, liquidised!
‘You say it’s a fact –’ Ma blinks. ‘But where did you actually get it from? You’re always saying things are facts, but I sometimes think you’re a little guilty of confusing a fact with an opinion.’
‘That’s an illogical statement,’ Dads replies. Behind him Skittle is still scratching at the door, then crouching and shrinking in an attitude of persecution. ‘A fact and an opinion are not mutually contradictory. At least, not in the minds of most of us. You might find them so because you aren’t observant. You don’t notice things.’
Claudia, rising to her feet, sees her father-in-law, gilded in the light of the bay window. His bank of white hair is as smooth as a snowdrift, and he wears a spotted cravat tucked into the neck of his shirt. Sometimes Claudia is unable to believe that Howard is the offspring of this man. He is so opaque to her, and Howard so transparent. Yet when they are together, it is Howard who doesn’t entirely make sense. He seems less real, more self-constructed. She finds herself beginning to doubt him, as though his father’s presence proves that Howard is in some way artificial.
‘I suppose I’d better go and see what Howard wants,’ she says.
She opens the door and Skittle bolts out of the kitchen. He shoots into the hall and goes careering off down the corridor, banging crazily against the skirting boards and stumbling every now and then over his own frantic little legs. Claudia goes out after him.
‘Lottie!’ she shouts at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Lottie! Lewis! Martha!’
Only Martha replies, a faint squeak in the distances of the house. Claudia goes out of the front door and round to the side, where Howard is standing in the open mouth of the garage doing something to the roof rack with a screwdriver clenched between his teeth. His balding head is dark red and streaked with perspiration. Skittle runs in neurotic circles around his feet.
‘Your father thinks you won’t be able to get the car out of the garage,’ Claudia says.
‘Let him watch,’ says Howard gamely, around the screwdriver.
‘I suppose there’s no real reason to put it on in here, though, is there?’ Claudia persists. ‘You might just as well do it outside, like you usually do.’
Howard does not reply. His head grows redder. He tightens the straps of the roof rack so vigorously that the thick muscled flesh of his arms shakes and the car rocks from side to side.
‘Is there?’ Claudia says.
Finally Howard takes the screwdriver out of his mouth.
‘It’s just how I decided to do it, Claude,’ he says reproachfully.
Claudia folds her arms and faces away from him, towards the dappled spectacle of Laurier Drive. She notices that number twenty-two have put a pair of white plaster unicorns on their pillared porch.
‘I don’t see why I should be the one having to manage your parents, on top of everything else,’ she observes.
‘You’re very good,’ says Howard.
‘It’s horrible, the way they’re at each other’s throats. And the children just sit in their rooms like ministers of the doge.’
‘I’ll speak to them,’ says Howard. ‘Send them to me.’
‘I’m a sort of slave,’ says Claudia disgustedly. Every year it is the same. ‘There I am, cleaning on my hands and knees, with your mother thinking I’m the idle rich because I’m going camping for two weeks in the Auvergne, when the only thing I’m looking forward to is getting away from the dog!’ Really, it makes her want to cry. ‘And to think I could be in my – in my …’
Howard has already abandoned the roof rack. Never has Claudia’s mention of her studio failed to summon his immediate attention. Yet all at once she understands that this attention is a pallid substitute for the satisfaction she might have got from actually painting something there. It was once a derelict shed, full of spiders and evilly rusted old tools. When they arrived in Laurier Drive, fourteen years ago, with Lottie a babe in arms and Claudia already pregnant again, she set eyes on the tumbledown place at the bottom of the garden and saw in it the reflection of a part of herself. It seemed to stand poised between existence and annihilation, just as she in that moment felt herself to hover, a dissolving image, at the very brink of identity. In its abandonment it had become theoretical, like the mysterious region of herself that life could seem to find no use for, the series of urges to which she gave the name of creativity. And the work was done, the heat and light installed, the walls replastered, the roof repaired. The fading image was brought back into focus, hauled back from the edge of dissolution. But Claudia’s baby miscarried. After all, the structure is powerless to hold it, the mystery of creation. Claudia willed the baby not to come out, but though her body housed it, it seemed she could not dictate its comings and goings. It had an ultimate freedom.
And in much the same way her studio has stood at the bottom of the garden, year after year, completed. It no longer bears any relationship to her theoretical urges. Though she hasn’t told anyone of it, they too have slipped away.
‘Poor Claude,’ he says, gripping the tops of her arms and looking beseechingly at her with his small round eyes. ‘Poor thing. Poor Claude.’ He waits for a few moments, searching her face, then he says: ‘Do you think you could just help me with something? There’s a thing with the strap that it takes two to do. I tried to do it earlier, but I couldn’t seem to find you. It’ll only take a minute, I promise.’
On her way back through the house she passes the kitchen door with Skittle at her heels, and hears her parents-in-law’s excited voices.
‘That’s simply not true!’ Ma shrieks.
‘So you say.’
‘But it’s not!’
‘So you say. So you say.’
Claudia puts her hands over her ears. His voice is so stiff and repetitive. It sweeps hers out of the way, like a stiff broom sweeping random brittle fallen leaves out of its path. Upstairs, the children are sitting in Lottie’s room beside their suitcases in pensive attitudes. Lewis has headphones on. Only Martha looks up when Claudia comes in. She has noticed before how they stay upstairs when Ma and Dads come. It is the coldness that drives them up here, the coldness of these people with their snowy hair and eyes like chips of ice. The sight of them makes her pity her husband. She feels she is looking down a strange tunnel of time towards Howard and his brothers, is seeing the whole arc and motion of their lives, their struggle to migrate to where it is warm.
‘Are you all right?’ Martha asks.
Martha is only six, and knows better than the others what her mother wants. Lewis, the headphones clamped around his ears, is making big eyes at Claudia and dramatically semaphoring. Finally he takes the headphones off.
‘Look!’ he shouts, pointing at the floor behind her. ‘Skittle’s being sick!’
They all look at Skittle, who with trembling haunches is disgorging a stiff pile of vomit on to the carpet.
‘That’s it!’ cries Claudia tearfully. ‘That’s it! I’ve had enough! Your father can clear it up! He was the one who wanted a dog in the first place! I never did – never! And who’s done everything? Where was he, when the work had to be done? Who’s fed him and taken him for walks, taken him out in wind and rain because there was nobody else here, not a soul, and he wouldn’t stop scratching at the bloody door –’
‘Mum,’ Lottie shudders. ‘Look! He’s eating it.’
It is true. Quivering all over as though in an ecstacy of perversion, Skittle bends above the steaming pile, his jaws moving wolfishly. They all watch, fascinated, as every trace of the vomit disappears back down the dog’s throat.
Lottie screams. Lewis rolls around on the bed in disgust. Martha says:
‘Well, at least now you don’t have to clean it up.’
With trembling legs, Claudia stands in the doorway.
‘Bring your cases down, all of you,’ she says in a shrivelled whisper. ‘We’re leaving.’
The car is still in the garage when they get outside with their bags. Howard has half-filled the boot. Luggage bulges between the straps of the roof rack.
‘You’ll never get it out,’ Claudia says, with bleak finality. ‘We’re going to miss the boat.’
Howard comes out into the sunlight and stands beside her with narrowed eyes, measuring up the car and the doorway it has to reverse through.
‘I think it’ll go,’ he says.
‘Never,’ says Claudia.
‘If everyone gets in it will.’
Claudia sees her parents-in-law come out of the house. Dads is walking ahead along the path, and Ma is coming like a fury behind him. While he seems to plant each step with agonising precision and care, she appears to fly, her skirts billowing out after her, her arm curiously upraised, as though she were giving the signal to advance. It takes Claudia a moment to realise what it is she is witnessing. She sees Ma gaining ground on the path, sees Dads walking on, unaware even as her raised arm comes down and lands a blow on the top of his head. He sinks a little at the knees, his expression momentarily shattered by surprise. Then he walks on.
‘Everyone in!’ Claudia shouts, startled, so that the children run to Howard, who is once more in the garage. They open the back doors of the car and pile in.
‘All fatties welcome!’ Howard calls. ‘All elephants cordially invited!’
None of them have seen, except Claudia; and she finds she cannot go after them and get in the car, even though Howard needs her weight to reverse it under the frame. She has to stay where she is, a child immobilised by the breakdown of authority; by the recognition of authority itself as childlike. It is only in this recognition that her own authority becomes apparent to her, so that she can’t cast Howard’s parents off. They are too infantile, too helpless: is this what Howard feels? Is this what explains the feeling she has, that he never really gives himself to her and the children? That though he wants more and more he is never really there, there at the root; but rather, like next-door’s cherry tree, whose boughs reach over into the Bradshaws’ garden while its trunk stands on the other side of fence, maintains a perpetual presence among them from which the fundamental comfort of belonging is forever denied? When the cherries fall on the Bradshaws’ lawn, the Bradshaws are never sure who they actually belong to – perhaps after all it is nice for Howard, to be so ambiguous, so free; to feel that he is not entirely owned by anyone. He starts the engine and at once a black plume of smoke streams from the exhaust.
‘Claude!’ he calls. ‘Are you there, Claude?’
‘Yes!’ she shouts back.
Howard’s parents stand a short distance away. The sound of the engine has caught their attention. Their faces are perfectly composed. She realises that they are used to it, used to whatever it was she witnessed on the path. It was not, as she thought, an emergency. What she saw was much worse: it was intimacy.
‘Claude! I need you to guide me out!’
Lewis rolls down the window and puts his head out. ‘Dad’s let the air out of the tyres!’ he cries, delirious with excitement.
Slowly the car begins to reverse out of the garage. Claudia watches as it clears the doorjamb by the slenderest of margins. She feels it, its impossible passage, as she seems to have felt so many things in her life with Howard. It is all, very nearly, impossible. She shakes helplessly with strange, silent laughter.
‘Careful!’ she calls in a strangled voice, when the lamed wheels meet the slight rise of the concrete floor where it gives out on to the driveway.
The car judders a little and rolls back. Howard puts his foot harder on the accelerator. On the periphery of her vision Claudia sees the white darting shape of Skittle. He tears down the path towards the car, his body making its strange contortions as he runs. In an instant he is there behind the wheels. While she watches, he plunges his nose into the exhaust pipe and shudders ecstatically, inhaling the black fumes.
‘Howard!’ Claudia shrieks.
She sees the dog fall unconscious on to his side. A moment later, the revving engine forces the wheels over the concrete rise and the car comes in one movement out of the garage, thudding over Skittle and rolling him stiffly into the darkness beneath its belly. There is a pause, and then another thud as the front wheel goes over the body.
‘Oh, mind the dog!’ calls Ma. ‘Do mind the dog, Howard!’
The car shakes to a halt. Howard leaps out. He runs around to the front and kneels over Skittle’s body where it lies in the dirt, a thread of blood at the corner of the mouth.
‘Poor boy,’ Howard says, shaking his head. ‘Poor old fellow.’
One by one the children emerge from the back of the car. Lottie is crying. Lewis looks white and stricken.
‘There were two bumps,’ Martha says significantly to her mother. ‘First there was one bump. Then, a little while later, there was another bump.’
‘Is he dead?’ Lewis says.
‘I’m afraid so,’ says Howard tenderly.
‘Two bumps,’ Martha repeats, to herself. ‘First one bump, then the other.’
Howard grips Claudia’s hand. She sees that his eyes are red with tears. Ma and Dads approach the family where they stand in a circle.
‘Oh dear,’ Dads says, looking down at the small body. ‘That was a shame.’
‘It’ll make life easier for you, at least, over the next couple of weeks,’ Howard says grimly.
‘I suppose it will,’ Dads says.
‘I was looking forward to him coming!’ Ma says. ‘You make it sound as if it were nothing but a nuisance! But I was looking forward to it!’
Lottie starts to cry again.
‘Well,’ Dads says presently. ‘If there’s nothing else we can do, we may as well be on our way.’
Howard stands and faces his parents. The dog lies on the ground between them. His body imparts a finality to it, to Howard as he faces them in their coldness. It is as though, with this offering of death, he is freeing himself of his obligation to them, freeing himself from the curse of their sterility.
‘Goodbye,’ he says, embracing first his father, then his mother. ‘See you soon, I expect. Goodbye.’
Howard and Claudia bury Skittle in the back garden. They agree the dog was too much for them. They agree that they were, in this case, overstretching the mark. For all the work of a dog, Claudia observes, they might as well have had another baby.
Then they get the children in the car and drive like the wind, hoping to make the boat.